David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

I remember in high school getting Dexedrine from a kid whose mother had them prescribed for her for pep, and the weird way they tasted, and the remarkable way they made the thing of counting while reading or speaking disappear — they were called black beauties — but the way after a while they made your lower back ache and gave you terrible, terrible breath. Your mouth tasted like a long-dead frog in a cloudy jar in Biology when you first opened the jar. It’s still sickening just to think about. There was also the period when my mother was so upset when Richard Nixon got reelected so easily, which I remember because it was around then that I tried Ritalin, which I bought from a guy in World Cultures class whose little brother in primary school was supposedly on Ritalin from a doctor who didn’t keep track of his prescriptions very well, and which some people didn’t think were anything special compared to black beauties, Ritalin, but I liked them very much, at first because it made sitting and studying for long periods of time possible and even interesting, and which I really, really liked, but it was hard to get much of — Ritalin was — especially after evidently the little brother wigged out one day at primary school from not taking his Ritalin and the parents and doctor discovered the irregularities with the prescriptions and suddenly there was no pimply guy in pink sunglasses selling four-dollar Ritalin pills out of his locker in junior hall.

I seem to remember in 1976 my father openly predicting a Ronald Reagan presidency and even sending their campaign a donation — although in retrospect I don’t think Reagan even really ran in ’76. This was my life before the sudden change in direction and eventually entering the Service. Girls wore caps or dungaree hats, but most guys were essentially uncool if they wore a hat. Hats were things to make fun of. Baseball caps were for the rednecks downstate. Older men of any seriousness still sometimes wore business-type hats outside, though. I can remember my father’s hat now almost better than his face under it. I used to spend time imagining what my father’s face looked like when he was alone — I mean his facial expression and eyes — when he was by himself in his office at work at the City Hall annex downtown and there was no one to shape a certain expression for. I remember my father wearing madras shorts on weekends, and black socks, and mowing the lawn like that, and sometimes looking out of the window at what he looked like in that getup and feeling actual pain at being related to him. I remember everyone pretending to be a samurai or saying, ‘Excuse me! ’ in all sorts of different contexts — this was cool. To show approval or excitement, we said, ‘Excellent.’ In college, you could hear the word excellent five thousand times a day. I remember some of my attempts to grow sideburns at DePaul and always ending up shaving them off, because at a certain point they got to where they looked just like pubic hair. The smell of Brylcreem in my father’s hatband, Deep Throat, Howard Cosell, my mother’s throat showing ligaments on either side when she and Joyce laughed. Throwing her hands around or bending over. Mom was always a very physical laugher — her whole body gets involved.

There was also the word mellow that was used constantly, although even early on in its use this word bugged me; I just didn’t like it. I still probably used it sometimes, though, without being aware I was doing it.

My mother’s the sort of somewhat lanky type of older woman who seems to become almost skinny and tough with age instead of ballooning out, becoming ropy and sharp-jointed and her cheekbones even more pronounced. I remember sometimes thinking of beef jerky when I would first see her, and then feeling terrible that I had that association. She was quite good-looking in her day, though, and some of the later weight-loss was also nerve-related, because after the thing with my father her nerves got worse and worse. Admittedly, too, one other factor in her sticking up for me with my father as to drifting in and out of school was the past trouble I’d had with reading in primary school when we’d lived in Rockford and my father had worked for the City of Rockford. This was in the mid-1960s, at Machesney Elementary. I went through a sudden period where I couldn’t read. I mean that I actually could read — my mother knew I could read from when we’d read children’s books together. But for almost two years at Machesney, instead of reading something I’d count the words in it, as though reading was the same as just counting the words. For example, ‘Here came Old Yeller, to save me from the hogs’ would equate to ten words which I would count off from one to ten instead of its being a sentence that made you love Old Yeller in the book even more. It was a strange problem in my developmental wiring at the time which caused a lot of trouble and embarrassment and was one reason why we ended up moving to the Chicagoland area, because for a while it looked as though I would have to attend a special school in Lake Forest. I have very little memory of this time except for the feeling of not especially wanting to count words or intending to but just not being able to help it — it was frustrating and strange. It got worse under pressure or nervousness, which is typical of things like that. Anyhow, part of my mother’s fierce defense of letting me experience and learn things in my own way dates from that time, when the Rockford School District reacted to the reading problem in all sorts of ways that she didn’t think were helpful or fair. Some of her consciousness-raising and entry into the women’s lib movement of the 1970s probably also dates from that time of fighting the bureaucracy of the school district. I still sometimes lapse into counting words, or rather usually the counting goes on when I’m reading or talking, as a sort of background noise or unconscious process, a little like breathing.

For instance, I’ve said 2,752 words right now since I started. Meaning 2,752 words as of just before I said, ‘I’ve said,’ versus 2,754 if you count ‘I’ve said’ —which I do, still. I count numbers as one word no matter how large a given number is. Not that it actually means anything — it’s more like a mental tic. I don’t remember exactly when it started. I know I had no trouble learning to read or reading the Sam and Ann books they teach you to read with, so it must have been after second grade. I know that my mother, as a child in Beloit WI, where she grew up, had an aunt who had a thing of washing her hands over and over without being able to stop, which eventually got so bad she had to go to a rest home. I seem to remember thinking of my mother as in some way associating the counting thing more with that aunt at the sink and not seeing it as a form of retardation or inability to just sit there and read as instructed, which is how Rockford school authorities seemed to see it. Anyhow, hence her hatred of traditional institutions and authority, which was another thing that helped gradually alienate her from my father and imperil their marriage, and so on and so forth.

I remember once, in I think 1975 or ’76, shaving off just one sideburn and going around like that for a period of time, believing the one sideburn made me a nonconformist — I’m not kidding — and getting into long, serious conversations with girls at parties who would ask me what the lone sideburn ‘meant.’ A lot of the things I remember saying and believing during this period make me literally wince now, to think of it. I remember KISS, REO Speedwagon, Cheap Trick, Styx, Jethro Tull, Rush, Deep Purple, and, of course, good old Pink Floyd. I remember BASIC and COBOL. COBOL was what my father’s cost systems hardware ran at his office. He was incredibly knowledgeable about the era’s computers. I remember Sony’s wide pocket transistors and the way that many of the city’s blacks held their radios up to their ear whereas white kids from the suburbs used the optional little earplug, like a CID earbud, which had to be cleaned almost daily or else it got really foul. There was the energy crisis and recession and stagflation, though I cannot remember the order in which these occurred — although I do know the main energy crisis must have happened when I was living back at home after the Lindenhurst College thing, because I got my mother’s tank siphoned out while out partying late at night with old high school friends, which my father was not thrilled about, understandably. I think New York City actually went bankrupt for a while during this period. There was also the 1977 disaster of the State of Illinois’s experiment with making the state sales tax a progressive tax, which I know upset my father a lot but which I neither understood nor cared about at the time. Later, of course, I would understand why making a sales tax progressive is such a terrible idea, and why the resulting chaos more or less cost the governor at the time his job. At the time, though, I don’t remember noticing anything except the unusually terrible crowds and hassle of shopping for the holidays in late ’77. I don’t know if that’s relevant. I doubt anyone outside the state cares very much about this, though there are still some jokes about it among the older wigglers at the REC.