The David Foster Wallace Reader

  “Thing about Biff,” Wang-Dang Lang shouts over the pounding to Clarice and Mindy Metalman, “beer does not entirely agree with him because he is, we’ve found, for some reason physically incapable of… um… emptying his stomach in crisis. As they say. Just can’t do it, ’matter how much he drinks, which is often more than can be explained by known physical laws. It’s dangerous, right Digger?” Wang-Dang shouts over to the pounding Biff. “So instead of booting, the big fella here finds himself having recourse to…”

  “… Pounding his head against the wall,” Clarice finishes for him with a little mouth-smile, she obviously remembers Creamer and Geralamo and company, Lenore can tell. Lang nods at Clarice with an engaging grin. Biff finally stops and turns back around, resting his back against the door, beaming, with a red forehead, a little cross-eyed. The muscles in his big neck are corded. He closes his eyes and leans back and breathes heavily.

  “Well if we could just stay and rest up and catch our breaths for just a couple of seconds for the second half of the big luau, down there, we’ll be more than obliged to you,” says Lang. “And I’ll be giving old Doug the bad and from what I can see most unfortchinit news about your not remembering him, Melinda-Sue. He’ll be hurt, I’ll just tell you right now, in advance. He is a shy and sinsitive person.”

  “Seems like a common problem over there at Amherst,” says Clarice. Lenore smiles at her.

  Meanwhile Mindy has gone over to the ashtray to see about the corpse of the joint. Lenore can tell Mindy’s decided not to be intimidated, all of a sudden. Mindy’s shiny legs through the robe are now right by Wang-Dang Lang’s face, he’s still sitting in the chair, his nose about even with her waist. Lang looks down at his shoes, with the white soles, he’s shy, almost, Mindy makes even him shy, Lenore sees. Mindy resuscitates the joint with a big plastic lighter that says “When God Made Man She Was Only Joking.” She pauses, watches it. It glows, she takes it back with her to the edge of Sue Shaw’s bed, sits down, faces Lang off the end of the bunk. The room’s all quiet, except for party noise, underneath. Mindy concentrates on the j-bird, then pauses again, then looks at Lang and holds the joint out to him.

  “Well now aren’t you kind,” Lang says softly. He takes a bit of a polite puff, smiles at Mindy.

  “Who are you guys, anyway?” Mindy asks. Clarice and Sue are glaring at her.

  Lang stops and smiles broadly, taken aback. Holds out his hand. “I personally am Andrew Sealander ‘Wang-Dang’ Lang, class of ’83, from Nugget Bluff, Texas, residing now at 666 Psi Phi fraternity, Amherst College, Massachusetts, U.S.A.”

  “A sophomore.”

  “Affirmative. As is Bernard Werner ‘Biff’ Diggerence, of Shillington, Pennsylvania.” A pause, all pregnant. Lang looks up at Biff, who seems still to be sleeping at the door.

  “We’ve actually, I’ll tell you ladies in confidence, been sent out,” Wang-Dang leans all conspiratorially toward Mindy and Lenore. “We’ve actually been sent out for what could be termed our ’nitiation.”

  “Oh, shit,” Clarice says, her arms crossed, leaning against the wall. Biff Diggerence is now showing signs of life; he’s to be seen stroking Sue Shaw’s hair with a hot-dog finger, and winking down at her, making clicking noises with the corner of his mouth, as Sue whimpers and gets set to cry.

  “Initiation?” Mindy says.

  “Affirmative. The High Demiurge and Poobah of the Psi Phi fraternal order of brothers himself has sent us out on a…,” a burp, here, “… a sort of quest, you might say. We find ourselves in search of personal decoration.”

  “Decoration.”

  “Auto… graphs,” Biff laughs ogg and gives a little pound on the wall with the back of his head, for emphasis.

  “Autographs?”

  “We need you girls to sign our asses,” says Biff, coming to the point, smiling down at Sue Shaw.

  “Sign your asses?” says Mindy Metalman.

  “That is unfortunately affirmative,” Lang says, flashing a smile full of bright teeth over at Lenore. “We are required…,” fishing for a piece of paper in the pocket of his blazer, perusing, “… we are requahred to secure the signatures of no fewer than fahv of Mount Holyoke’s loveliest before sunrise tomorrow. We figger of course we can sign each other, being friends and all, but that’s just one each.” He looks around significantly at each of the girls, gives Lenore a bit of a wink. “Means we need, according to my figures, four more.”

  Lenore notices Sue Shaw sitting there all quiet, looking at her leather shoes with the white soles. Biff’s hands are in Sue’s bright red hair.

  “So wait,” says Clarice. “You mean you want us to sign your bottoms?”

  “Please.”

  “Bare?”

  “Well, clearly yes, that’s the whole—”

  “Sweet shrieking mother of Christ what nerve.” Clarice says in amazement, staring at Lang. “And it just never occurred to you geniuses that we might say no? I’m saying no.”

  “Your prerogative entirely,” says Wang-Dang Lang. “ ’Course we very regrettably will find ourselves unable to leave until you do.” He now has his hand lightly on Mindy’s bare leg, Lenore notices. Lenore shivers a bit. Clarice makes a sudden move for the door, Biff moves in front of the knob, Clarice stops, Biff pounds the door with the back of his head again, a few times, emphasizing the general state of affairs.

  Clarice stops, clearly now for a second just so mad she can’t really say or do anything at all. “You shiny bastards,” she finally gets out. “You Amherst guys, U-Mass too, all of you. Just because you’re bigger, physically just take up more space, you think—do you think?—think you can rule everything, make women do whatever stupid rotten disgusting stuff you say you want just because you’re drunk? Well up yours, sideways.” She looks from Lang to Biff. “You come over to our parties, grinning like apes on the bus no doubt, you get smeared in about two minutes, trash us, act like we’re meat, or furniture, think you can just…,” looking around, “invade us, our room, for no other reason than that you’re just stronger, that you can block the door and pound your big greasy stupid heads on it? Screw you. Screw you.”

  Lang laughs. “Regrettably an invitation extended in anger, I’m afraid.” He laughs again. Mindy smiles a bit, too. Lang’s hand is still on her leg.

  But Biff is miffed, here, suddenly. “Well screw you right back Miss Rodeo Shirt,” he says to Clarice, obviously now in one of those alcoholically articulate periods. “Just come off it. This place is just the biggest…,” looking around, “the biggest giant joke!” He looks to Lang for support; Lang is whispering something to Mindy Metalman.

  But Biff is pissed. “You have these parties that you advertise out our ears, all this cute teasing bullshit, ‘Come to the Comonawannaleiya party, get lei’d at the door,’ ha. ‘Win a trip to the hot tubs for two,’ blah-blah-blah. You’re just teases of the cockular sort, is what you are. So we come, like you ask and advertise for, and we put on ties, and we come over, and then we find you got security guards at the doors, with freaking guns, and we gotta have our hands stamped like fifth-graders for beer, and all the girls look at us like we’re rapists, and plus, besides, all the girls down there look like Richard Nixon, while all the real babes lock themselves up up here—”

  “Like you lovely ladies, you must admit,” Wang-Dang Lang says with a smile.

  Biff Diggerence whirls and whomps the door with his forehead a few times, really hard. He stays facing the door, his sails apparently windless, for a moment.

  “I’m afraid he’s quite inebriated,” says Lang.

  Lenore stands up, in her dress. “Please let me out.”

  Lang and Mindy stand. Sue stands. Everyone’s standing with Lenore. Lang smiles and nods his head. “So if you’d just be kind enough to put your… Jocelyn Hancock on… my…,” struggling with the belt of his chinos. Mindy looks away. Biff, still breathing at the door, does his belt too. He even brought a pen; Lenore can see it sticking out of his pocket.

  “No,
I’m not going to touch you, much less sign you,” says Lenore.

  Wang-Dang Lang looks at her, vaguely puzzled. “Well then we’re real unfortunately not going to be able to leave.”

  “That’s fortunately of very little concern to me because I’m not going to be here because I’m leaving,” Lenore says.

  “I’ll sign,” Sue Shaw says quietly.

  Clarice stares at Sue. “What?”

  “I want them out. I’ll sign.” She doesn’t look up. She looks at her shoes. Biff’s pants drop with a heavy sound, he’s still facing the door. His bottom is big, broad, white, largely hairless. A vulnerable bottom, really. Lenore evaluates it calmly.

  “Whuboutchoo, Melinda-Sue?” Lang asks Mindy. Lang’s in his underpants.

  Mindy really looks at Lang, looks him in the eye. There’s no expression on her. After a moment she says, “Sure, why not.”

  “You can sign the front if you want,” laughs Wang-Dang.

  “This is disgusting. I’m leaving, let me leave, please,” says Lenore. She turns. “You’re a coward,” she says to Sue Shaw. “You have ugly feet,” she says to Mindy Metalman. “Look at her feet, Andy, before you do anything rash.” She turns to the door. “Get out of the way, Boof, or whatever your name is.”

  Biff turns, the first time Lenore’s ever seen a man naked. “No.”

  Lenore throws one of her spiky white high-heeled dress shoes, the kind with the metal straps, at Biff Diggerence’s head. It misses his head and hits the door above him and makes a loud sound and the heel sticks in the wood of the door. The white shoe hangs there. As if the noise of the shoe’s hitting the door were just the last straw, Sue Shaw gives a yelp and begins to cry a little, although she’s still a bit dry from being recently stoned. She has Biff’s pen in her hand.

  “Let me leave or I’ll put out your eye with my shoe,” Lenore says to Biff, hefting her other shoe. Wang-Dang Lang is holding Mindy Metalman’s hand.

  “Let her out, she doesn’t even go here,” says Clarice. “I’ll sign too, you drips.”

  “Let me out,” says Lenore.

  Biff finally gets away from the door, still holding his empty Comonawannaleiya cup. He has to go over anyway, obviously, to present his bottom to Sue Shaw, there in the corner. He takes little comic steps because his pants are down around his ankles, and Lenore sees his genitals bob and waggle as he takes his tiny shuffles over to Sue. Lenore runs past in bare feet, gets her shoe out of the door. Pulls it out, the heel, looks back. Lang is kissing Mindy’s creamy cheek, with a faraway, laughing expression, in his underwear. Sue is kneeling, signing Biff. Clarice has her arms crossed. Tapping her fingers on her arms.

  Lenore runs out into the tiled hall, away. Outside there will be air, Lenore wants out of Rumpus Hall very much, and gets out, finally she does, but only after negotiating a hall door, a stair door, a hall door, and a front door, all locked tight from the inside. Out in the crusty March lawn, by the wash of the well-lit street, amid crowds of boys in blue blazers going up the walk, putting Certs in their mouths, she enjoys a brief nosebleed.

  5

  1990

  /a/

  SUPPOSE SOMEONE HAD said to me, ten years ago, in Scarsdale, or on the commuter train, suppose the person had been my next-door neighbor, Rex Metalman, the corporate accountant with the unbelievable undulating daughter, suppose this was back in the days before his lawn mania took truly serious hold and his nightly paramilitary sentry-duty with the illuminated riding mower and the weekly planeloads of DDT dropping from the sky in search of perhaps one sod webworm nest and his complete intransigence in the face of the reasonable and in the beginning polite requests of one or even all of the neighbors that hostilities against the range of potential lawn enemies that obsessed him be toned down, at least in scale, before all this drove a wedge the size of a bag of Scott’s into our tennis friendship, suppose Rex Metalman had speculated in my presence, then, that ten years later, which is to say now, I, Rick Vigorous, would be living in Cleveland, Ohio, between a biologically dead and completely offensive-smelling lake and a billion-dollar man-made desert, that I would be divorced from my wife and physically distanced from the growth of my son, that I would be operating a firm in partnership with an invisible person, little more, it seems clear now, than a corporate entity interested in failure for tax purposes, the firm publishing things perhaps even slightly more laughable than nothing at all, and that perched high atop this mountain of the unthinkable would be the fact that I was in love, grossly and pathetically and fiercely and completely in love with a person eighteen count them eighteen years younger than I, a woman from one of Cleveland’s first families, who lives in a city owned by her father but who works answering telephones for something like four dollars an hour, a woman whose uniform of white cotton dress and black Converse hightop sneakers is an unanalyzable and troubling constant, who takes somewhere, I suspect, between five and eight showers a day, who works in neurosis like a whaler in scrim-shaw, who lives with a schizophrenically narcissistic bird and an almost certainly nymphomaniacal bitch of a roommate, and who finds in me, somewhere, who knows where, the complete lover… suppose all this were said to me by Rex Metalman, leaning conversationally with his flamethrower over the fence between our properties as I stood with a rake in my hand, suppose Rex had said all this to me, then I almost certainly would have replied that the likelihood of all that was roughly equal to the probability of young Vance Vigorous, then eight and at eight in certain respects already more of a man than I, that young Vance, even as we stood there to be seen kicking a football up into the cold autumn sky and down through a window, his laughter echoing forever off the closed colored suburban trees, of strapping Vance’s eventually turning out to be a… a homosexual, or something equally unlikely or preposterous or totally out of the question.

  Now the heavens resound with unkind giggles. Now that it’s become undeniably apparent even to me that I have a son who lends to the expression “fruit of my loins” whole new vistas of meaning, that I am here and do do what I do when there is anything to do, when I feel an empty draft and look down and find a hole in my chest and spy, in the open polyurethane purse of Lenore Beadsman, among the aspirins and bars of hotel soap and lottery tickets and the ridiculous books that mean nothing at all, the clenched purple fist of my own particular heart, what am I to say to Rex Metalman and Scarsdale and the sod webworms and the past, except that it does not exist, that it has been obliterated, that footballs never climbed into crisp skies, that my support checks disappear into a black void, that a man can be and is and must be reborn, at some point, perhaps points? Rex would be confused and would, as whenever confused, hide his discomfort by dynamiting an area of his lawn. I would stand, cold rake in white hand, knowing what I know, in a rain of dirt and grass and worms, and shake my head at all around me.

  Then who is this girl who owns me, whom I love? I refuse to ask or answer who she is. What is she? This is a thin-shouldered, thin-armed, big-breasted girl, a long-legged girl with feet larger than average, feet that tend to point out a bit when she walks… in her black basketball sneakers. Did I say troubling? These are shoes that I love. I will confess that I once in a moment of admittedly irresponsible degeneracy tried to make love to one of the shoes, a 1989 All-Star hightop, when Lenore was in the shower, but failed to be able to bring the thing off, for familiar reasons.

  But what of Lenore, of Lenore’s hair? Here is hair that is clearly within and of itself every color—blond and red and jet-black-blue and honeynut—but which effects an outward optical compromise with possibility that consists of appearing simply dull brown, save for brief teasing glimpses out of the corner of one’s eye. The hair hangs in bangs, and the sides curve down past Lenore’s cheeks and nearly meet in points below her chin, like the brittle jaws of an insect of prey. Oh, the hair can bite. I’ve been bitten by the hair.

  And her eyes. I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.

  T
hey are blue. Her lips are full and red and tend to wetness and do not ask but rather demand, in a pout of liquid silk, to be kissed. I kiss them often, I admit it, it is what I do, I am a kisser, and a kiss with Lenore is, if I may indulge a bit for a moment here, not so much a kiss as it is a dislocation, a removal and rude transportation of essence from self to lip, so that it is not so much two human bodies coming together and doing the usual things with their lips as it is two sets of lips spawned together and joined in kind from the beginning of post-Scarsdale time, achieving full ontological status only in subsequent union and trailing behind and below them, as they join and become whole, two now utterly superfluous fleshly bodies, drooping outward and downward from the kiss like the tired stems of overblossomed flora, trailing shoes on the ground, husks. A kiss with Lenore is a scenario in which I skate with buttered soles over the moist rink of lower lip, sheltered from weathers by the wet warm overhang of upper, finally to crawl between lip and gum and pull the lip to me like a child’s blanket and stare over it with beady, unfriendly eyes out at the world external to Lenore, of which I no longer wish to be part.

  That I must in the final analysis remain part of the world that is external to and other from Lenore Beadsman is to me a source of profound grief. That others may dwell deep, deep within the ones they love, drink from the soft cup at the creamy lake at the center of the Object of Passion, while I am fated forever only to intuit the presence of deep recesses while I poke my nose, as it were, merely into the foyer of the Great House of Love, agitate briefly, and make a small mess on the doormat, pisses me off to no small degree. But that Lenore finds such tiny frenzies, such conversations just inside the Screen Door of Union, to be not only pleasant and briefly diverting but somehow apparently right, fulfilling, significant, in some sense wonderful, quite simply and not at all surprisingly makes me feel the same way, enlarges my sense of it and me, sends me hurrying up the walk to that Screen Door in my best sportjacket and flower in lapel as excited as any schoolboy, time after time, brings me charging to the cave entrance in leopardskin shirt, avec club, bellowing for admittance and promising general kickings of ass if I am impeded in any way.