David Lipsky - Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

Also by David Lipsky:

Three Thousand Dollars
The Art Fair
Absolutely American

For Lydia and Sally James
And for their mother and grandparents

If writing had a logo, itd be the anchor, the quicksand easy chair, but from the minute I shook Davids hand we didnt stop. We hit his class, then rolled into the car keys, sodas, strangers, and hotel rooms of a road-trip movie. Airports and taxis and the eerie sensation of knowing your feet have stood in different cities in the morning and afternoon.

This introduction is the Commentary trackwhich nobody goes in for until theyve loved the DVDso Id recommend a quick select back to Main Menu and Play Movie. The road trip was the end of David Foster Wallaces Infinite Jest book tour, when, as a reporter, I asked and he told me the story of his life. David had a caffeine social gift: He was charmingly, vividly, overwhelmingly awakehe acted on other people like a slug of coffeeso theyre the five most sleepless days I ever spent with anyone. (The last day, we crossed three states by air, shot down another 140 miles of highway, and I thought it was still midnight. Thats what your watch says? David snorted. Its two twenty, dickbrain.) Then it was over, and we were standing still again, and it was hard and sad to leave. And youll see me trying to cook up reporting jobs in order to hang around.

It has the feel of a highway conversation. Late at night, the only car in the world, on icy morning roads, yelling at the other drivers. It has the rhythms of the road: grouchiness, indefensible meals, and the sudden, front-seat connectionsreciting high points from movies, the right song and a good view sending the radio into soundtrack, a statement that gives you the bright, runway lift of knowing that another person has experienced life the way you dothat are the stuff you go on trips for.

When you skip ahead, you should know its early afternoon, March 5, 1996. The air has the gray, erased-blackboard quality of weather tightening itself for a storm. David has just stepped out of his little brick one-story house. He has his hands in his jean pockets, his two black dogs are running thrilled tours of greet and patrol. Hes wearing round glasses. The look beneath them says two more or less clear words: now this. Ive got some treasured beliefs about my own emotional tone. Id like to think its grittily complex, penetrating, understanding, and deeply individual. Its pretty obviously: please be impressed by me. At our first big conversationour first stunning meal: Chicago-style pizza, the cheese mound and topping landslidehell tell me he wants to do a profile of the reporters whove come stamping through, doing profiles about him. Itd be a way for me to get some of the control back, hell say. Because if you wantedI mean, youre gonna be able to shape this essentially how you want. And that to me is extremely disturbing. It would have been one of the deluxe internal surveys he specialized inthe unedited camera, the feed before the director in the van starts making cuts and choices. The comedy of a brain so big, careful, and kind it keeps tripping over its own lumps. Thats what this book would like to be. Its the one way of writing about him I dont think David would have hated.

So its two in the afternoon. Ive just dropped my bag on his living room carpet, which is a mess, but the mess feels hospital cornered, curated. (Whatever reassurance and encouragement the decorations give him is going to be tagged and sifted, for what it might explain publicly.) Weve addressed the two womens magazines on his counter. (David is a Cosmopolitan subscriber; he says reading Ive CheatedShould I Tell? a bunch of times a year is fundamentally soothing to the nervous system.) Ive also been surprised to find the towel of Barney, the purple dinosaur and befriender of children, subbing as a curtain in his bedroom, and the big poster of complaint singer Alanis Morissette on his wall. Ive just unpeeled and loaded a Maxell cassette into my recorder. Always a pleasant, blameless moment to the journalist; a round in the chamber, boots polished, reporting for duty. I got up at five this morning, hailed a cab at the New York hour when the city is still drifting through sleep, the streets rolling over and steam drizzling upward out of the manholes. Then I flew two hours to Chicago, signed and initialed for the rental car, drove another two here: If you were putting us in a comic book panel, youd draw motion lines coming off my body. And thered be black scrunches over Davids head. Hes been touring for two weeks, reading, signing, promoting. Hes walking toward me over the clumps and vines of unsorted travel memories, signaling from behind the hurricane fence of someone whos become bewilderingly famous.

Im thirty years old, hes thirty-four. We both have long hair. Ive just placed the tape recorder on top of his magazines. Hes made a request. What with all the travel, hed like the right to retract anything that might come off awkward or nasty. (Hes about to say a hundred unbelievably honest, personal things. The one place hell get cold feet is where he feels hes been a little uncharitable to poetry. The form will touch readers again once it focuses on nine-to-five and couples who spend a marriage in the same bed. The verb he used was meatier.) Otherwise, this book runs from the minute I turn on the recorder, through five days of diners, arguments, on-ramps, friends, a reading, a faraway mall, his dogs, up to the last word David said to me. Its a word that meant a great, complicated amount to him. After he died, I read through this week again. I was surprised and movedit seemed very much like himto see that he used it in the context of a dance.

Because Id like to clear the set as quickly as possible, the rest of what I have to say about David Ive put in the afterwordimportant stuff: what he looked like, how he died, how his friends saw him, the people we both were when we met. Hed just come off a success so giant-sized it was going to shade and determine the rest of his life, and were going to talk a lot about that. (Four years later, after reporting on the 2000 election, hed ask his agent to send the piece to his editor, to show that Im still capable of good work [my own insecurities, I know].) Ive published two books, am about to publish another, but Ive never had a success (the experience has been all near misses, standing in a crowd while people around me are pegged by golden bullets), and that professional position has led to an interesting social approach: I believe that if I cant impress people by how much Ive accomplished, I can maybe be impressive with how practical my ambitions are, how little I expect. So Im always reminding Davidwhile he jumps ahead to big and speculative thingsabout the small reliable pleasures. A good night of TV, a closed deal, a morning coffee. Thats one of our arguments: He wants something better than he has. I want precisely what he has already, and also for him to see how unimprovable his situation is. Thats all in the afterword. David will make a funny remark about how books work toward the end of our time together. Re Infinite Jest, hell say, Its divided into chunks, there are sort of obvious closures or last linesthat make it pretty clear that youre supposed to go have a cigar or something, come back later. When you hit one of those cigar breaks, read the afterword. Because I love Davids work, what I like best about these five days is that it sounds like Davids writing. He was such a natural writer he could talk in prose; for me, this has the magic of watching a guy in a business suit, big headphones, step into a gym and sink fifty foul shots in a row. This is what David was like at thirty-fourwhat he calls all the French curls and crazy circlesat one of the moments when the world opens up to you.