David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

I’m not sure I even know what to say. To be honest, a good bit of it I don’t remember. I don’t think my memory works in quite the way it used to. It may be that this kind of work changes you. Even just rote exams. It might actually change your brain. For the most part, it’s now almost as if I’m trapped in the present. If I drank, for instance, some Tang, it wouldn’t remind me of anything — I’d just taste the Tang.

From what I understand, I’m supposed to explain how I arrived at this career. Where I came from, so to speak, and what the Service means to me.

I think the truth is that I was the worst kind of nihilist — the kind who isn’t even aware he’s a nihilist. I was like a piece of paper on the street in the wind, thinking, ‘Now I think I’ll blow this way, now I think I’ll blow that way.’ My essential response to everything was ‘Whatever.’

This was especially after high school, when I drifted for several years, in and out of three different colleges, one of them two different times, and four or five different majors. One of these might have been a minor. I was pretty much of a wastoid. Essentially, I had no motivation, which my father referred to as ‘initiative.’ Also, I remember that everything at that time was very fuzzy and abstract. I took a lot of psychology and political science, literature. Classes where everything was fuzzy and abstract and open to interpretation and then those interpretations were open to still more interpretations. I used to write my class papers on the typewriter the day they were due, and usually I got some type of B with ‘Interesting in places’ or ‘Not too bad!’ written underneath the grade as an instructional comment. The whole thing was just going through the motions; it didn’t mean anything — even the whole point of the classes themselves was that nothing meant anything, that everything was abstract and endlessly interpretable. Except, of course, there was no argument about the fact that you had to turn in the papers, you had to go through the motions themselves, although nobody ever explained just why, what your ultimate motivation was supposed to be. I’m 99 percent sure that I took just one Intro Accounting class during all this time, and did all right in it until we hit depreciation schedules, as in the straight-line method vs. accelerated depreciation, and the combination of difficulty and sheer boredom of the depreciation schedules broke my initiative, especially after I’d missed a couple of the classes and fallen behind, which with depreciation is fatal — and I ended up dropping that class and taking an incomplete. This was at Lindenhurst College — the later Intro class at DePaul had the same title but a somewhat different emphasis. I also remember that incompletes peeved my father quite a bit more than a low grade, understandably.

I know three separate times during this unmotivated period I withdrew from college and tried working so-called real jobs. One was that I was a security guard for a parking garage on North Michigan, or taking tickets for events at the Liberty Arena, or briefly on the production line at a Cheese Nabs plant working the cheese product injector, or working for a company which made and installed gymnasium floors. Then, after a while, I couldn’t handle the boredom of the jobs, which were all unbelievably boring and meaningless, and I’d quit and enroll someplace else and essentially try to start college over again. My transcript looked like collage art. Understandably, this routine wore thin with my father, who was a cost systems supervisor for the City of Chicago — although during this time he lived in Libertyville, which is describable as an upper-bourgeois northern suburb. He used to say, dryly and with a perfectly straight face, that I was shaping up to be an outstanding twenty-yard-dash man. This was his way of squeezing my shoes. He read a great deal and was into dry, sardonic expressions. Although on one other occasion, after taking an incomplete or withdrawing somewhere and coming back home, I remember I was in the kitchen getting something to eat and heard him arguing with my mother and Joyce, telling them I couldn’t find my ass with both hands. That was the angriest I think I ever saw him get during this unfocused period. I don’t remember the exact context, but knowing how dignified and essentially reserved my father usually was, I’m sure I must have just done something especially feckless or pathetic to provoke him. I don’t remember my mother’s response or exactly how I came to overhear the remark, as eavesdropping on your parents seems like something that only a much smaller child would do.

My mother was more sympathetic, and whenever my father started squeezing my shoes about the lack-of-direction thing, my mother would stick up for me to some extent and say I was trying to find my path in life, and that not every path is outlined in neon lights like an airport runway, and that I owed it to myself to find my path and let things unfold in their own way. From what I understand of basic psychology, this is a fairly typical dynamic — son is feckless and lacks direction, mother is sympathetic and believes in son’s potential and sticks up for him, father is peeved and endlessly criticizes and squeezes son’s shoes but still, when push comes to shove, always ponies up the check for the next college. I can remember my father referring to money as ‘that universal solvent of ambivalence’ in connection with these tuition checks. I should mention that my mother and father were amicably divorced by this time, which was also somewhat typical of that era, so there were all those typical divorce dynamics in play as well, psychologically. The same sort of dynamics were probably being played out in homes all over America — the child trying to sort of passively rebel while still financially tied to the parent, and all the typical psychological business that goes along with that.

Anyhow, all this was in the Chicagoland area in the 1970s, a period that now seems as abstract and unfocused as I was myself. Maybe the Service and I have this in common — that the past decade seems much longer ago than it really was, because of what’s happened in the intervening time. As for myself, I had trouble just paying attention, and the things I can remember now seem mostly pointless. I mean really remember, not just have a general impression of. I remember having fairly long hair, meaning long on all four sides, but nevertheless it was also always parted on the left side and held in place with spray from a dark red can. I remember the color of this can. I can’t think of this period’s hair without almost wincing. I can remember things I wore — a lot of burnt orange and brown, red-intensive paisley, bell-bottom cords, acetate and nylon, flared collars, dungaree vests. I had a metal peace-sign pendant that weighed half a pound. Docksiders and yellow Timberlands and a pair of shiny low brown leather dress boots which zipped up the sides and only the sharp toes showed under bell-bottoms. The little sensitive leather thong around the neck. The commercial psychedelia. The obligatory buckskin jacket. The dungarees whose cuffs dragged on the ground and dissolved into white thread. Wide belts, tube socks, track shoes from Japan. The standard getup. I remember the round, puffy winter coats of nylon and down that made us all look like parade balloons. The scratchy white painter’s pants with loops for supposed tools down the side of the thigh. I remember everyone despising Gerald Ford, not so much for pardoning Nixon but for constantly falling down. Everyone had contempt for him. Very blue designer jeans. I remember the feminist tennis player Billie Jean King beating what seemed like an old and feeble man player on television and my mother and her friends all being very excited by this. ‘Male chauvinist pig,’ ‘women’s lib,’ and ‘stagflation’ all seemed vague and indistinct to me during this time, like listening to background noise with half an ear. I don’t remember what I did with all my real attention, what-all it was going towards. I never did anything, but at the same time I could normally never sit still and become aware of what was really going on. It’s hard to explain. I somewhat remember a younger Cronkite, Barbara Walters, and Harry Reasoner — I don’t think I watched much news. Again, I suspect this was more typical than I thought at the time. One thing you learn in Rote Exams is how disorganized and inattentive most people are and how little they pay attention to what’s going on outside of their sphere. Somebody named Howard K. Smith was also big in news, I remember. You almost never hear the word ghetto anymore, now. I remember Acapulco Gold versus Colombia Gold, Ritalin versus Ritadex, Cylert and Obetrol, Laverne and Shirley, Carnation Instant Breakfast, John Travolta, disco fever, and children’s tee shirts with the ‘Fonz’ on them. And ‘Keep On Truckin’ ’ shirts, which my mother loved, where walking people’s shoes and soles looked abnormally large. Actually preferring, like most children my age, Tang to real orange juice. Mark Spitz and Johnny Carson, the celebration in 1976 with fleets of antique ships coming into a harbor on TV. Smoking pot after school in high school and then watching TV and eating Tang out of the jar with a finger, wetting my finger and sticking it in, over and over, until I’d look down and couldn’t believe how much of the jar was gone. Sitting there with my wastoid friends, and so on and so forth — and none of it meant anything. It’s like I was dead or asleep without even being aware of it, as in the Wisconsin expression ‘didn’t know enough to lay down.’