APRIL 1997
Matt Briggs
Talking about My Demographic
by Matt Briggs
The David Foster Wallace reading on March 6, 1996 at the Eliott Bay Book Company sold out (the tickets were free) to a rabid core of people who had read at least the first hundred pages of his thousand page novel. Almost all the people in the room still had college on them except for the really young people who were either still in school or about to go to college. A lanky Andrew McCArthy sat in the front, his Reeboks actually on the stage where David Foster Wallace was going to be. He sat on his hand and looked around the room trying to catch a glimpse of the aging wunderkind.
I felt alienated
by this crowd of identical same year and make models who laughed in unison
at the same cryptic media references that I thought were particular to me.
It's something of a shock to find that other people owned Kenner Luke Skywalker
action figures. Secretly I think, I played with Luke better than these people
did. My games were brilliant. And at this reading, the author displayed
an entire book of evidence that he could play with Luke Skywalker well enough
that people would line up to watch him. If I couldn't have the same recognition
by climbing up onto the podium, than I at least wanted to engage David Foster
Wallace with a question of such obvious quality that he would pause and
loosen his bandanna and recognize that I didn't just read his book, but
that I connected with his book.
All the
women at the reading had my wife Lisa's lack of processed hair. There was
a woman in the audience who was my wife's doppleganger. She wore my wife's
black - ankle - length - skirt - under - an - untucked - denim - shirt outfit.
She scowled as she read her book and chewed on the inner edge of her index
finger. Lisa kept nudging me and asking what The Doppleganger was doing.
The Doppleganger just curled the left portion of her upper lip and nodded
at something her male friend sitting to her left had just said. "Do
you think she's pretty?" Lisa asked about her twin. I was more interested
in her boyfriend who I saw as my equal, my doppleganger stand-in since he
had been spared any physical resemblance to me. I felt as though see him
the way strangers looked at me. I only saw myself through the lens of anxiety
fueled by my hair and laundry problems. He wore a very clean shirt, an impossibly
spotless button-down dress shirt. I was three chairs away so maybe there
was something, a blue smudge from a Bic ball point pen, a speck of red Kool-Aid,
something. Doppleganger girl's male friend wore his white shirt with the
kind of paisley necktie that department stores stocked five years ago, back
when I used to worry about my inability to tie a half-Windsor much less
a full Windsor knot or even lace shoes securely enough that they wouldn't
unravel on the ride up an escalator. With such orderliness, I figured he
must work as a manager somewhere because his shirt was just too white and
his tie was just too fully Windsored. He was obviously someone in charge.
Even though I follow all of the directions on the tag, heed the instructions
my mother drilled into me, adhere to the laundry commandments my wife has
written down for my reference on the back of a stray joker card, I still
get splatters of pale red coffee stains and long grey streaks where the
shirt draws tight against the basketball round edge of my stomach. A greasy
off-grey paste permanently rings my collar. I have missing buttons that
gape open whenever I don't wear my permanently grey white undershirts.
He couldn't
possibly have connected with the book like I connected with the book. "That
guy didn't finish the book," I said.
"As
if you can read more than a hundred pages," Lisa told me.
Finally
Rick Simonson, himself, mounted the stage to introduce Mr. Wallace. In his
introduction, he stuttered and mentioned what a pleasure it was having Mr.
Wallace, how brilliant his novels were, citing the hyperbole of the reviews.
He said his last book surprised a lot of critics who hadn't known that people
his age read novels of this size much less wrote them. (Really he had it
backwards; people this age pour out long wordproccessed novels, even buy
long paper ream thick novels, but do not read them.) He joked that a few
of you may still be working through the novel yourself.
"He
didn't finish the book," I said.
"Neither
did you," Lisa said.
I haven't
met anyone who has actually read the entire novel. I petered out in the
late two hundreds after the seventh brilliantly executed scene in the cafeteria,
the fifteenth deftly handled locker room exchange, the fortieth stunning
account of sneaking off to smoke hemp and, while I'm still technically reading
Infinite Jest, the book sits
on the shelf for the stack - of - books - I - am - reading - please - do
- not - shelve. I've read the following books while mountain climbing through
David Foster Wallace's Wallacian prose: A House For Mr. Biswas, Tabloid
Dreams, Indian Killer, The Accordion Crimes, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly,
Mrs. Vargas and the Death of the Naturalist, The Painted Word by Tom
Wolf, and I'm now reading the Old Testament by God, which is three
hundred pages longer than Infinite Jest but does have far smaller pages. I'm taking a vain and conceited
pride in reading the Bible and often remind myself of how Allen Ginsberg
read the Koran and how the act of reading is referred to in glossaries about
the Beats as an historic intellectual moment. And while living in San Francisco,
Ginsberg read the Koran. And while camping in the desert, Moses climbed
the mountain. And during his lunchbreak, the wordprocessing atheist plowed
through Leviticus and followed the precise instructions to build
a graham cracker model of the Ark of the Testament in less time than it
took him to sort through the conspiracy in Infinite Jest. I will finish this book, but then I'm also going
to learn German, the guitar, and hike the Pacific Crest Trail from Canada
to Mexico. I will not buy another David Foster Wallace book until I do.
In the meantime, Mr. Wallace has already released another book, a collection
of essays called A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again -- the
cause of his current book tour where he will spend most of his time talking
about two books that no one has read but many people have bought, making
certain that their friends see it, bookmarked, and serious sans dust jacket
on their coffee table with a coffee cup on top of it, like they were in
the middle of reading before you showed up and interrupted them. But please,
that doesn't mean you have to go.
Dopplegangergirl's
male friend shifted in his chair as we all waited for Mr. Wallace to appear.
Rick Simonson ended his introduction saying he would referee the questions
and answers section, again citing how pleasurable it was to have David Foster
Wallace and that the author was so kind in submitting himself to this grueling
ritual.
I had my
perfect question poised. It was simple and cryptic and I would share with
David Foster Wallace a moment of intimacy in front of all of these people
and they would be none the wiser. I would ask him, "Do you write with
your shoes on or off?"
I expected
Mr. Wallace to run out onto the podium like a boxer into the ring or something
equally moronic and kitschy but instead he shuffled out somewhat clumsily,
feigning embarrassment and staring over the audience like he had just been
bagged by a mothership and shot into an intergalactic fauna collection chamber.
He wore his bandanna like an action figure of David Foster Wallace outfitted
in the most popular costume. He apologized for his general presence and
warned us that he tended to read as quickly as possible in order to end
his suffering, as if he would rather be at home siphoning a stream of uninterrupted
idiot-savant prose from his computer screen. He instructed us to just tell
him to slow down if he read too fast as if this wasn't a packed reading
at Eliott Bay and he was just a shy guy, just reading his stuff. No one
would interrupt him, though, because everyone was supposed to be familiar
with his writing already and anyway we didn't want to acknowledge that his
thoughts weren't our own thoughts by raising our hand and asking him to
read slower than he wants to read.
"I'll
read from my novel and then read a little from my book of essays in order
to pretend that this isn't really a paperback tour," he said. He then
read a selection from Infinite Jest
about an NA meeting (which stands, he said, for Narcotics Anonymous for
those of you pretending you don't know what it means) which featured a hugging
black man who had a passing resemblance to a tv black man of the Mr. T brand
name variety, that is one of those mythological men who no one actually
knows by name and lives somewhere other than where anyone lives, some movie
studio back lot, Republic of Ghetto. But then not having anything
to do with reality that's the point, ain't it?
The Andrew
McCarthy in the front now sat still under David Foster Wallace's mumbling
speed, ready to pay attention, but his eyes glazed after three minutes.
His attention span broken into easily assimilated Rock Blocks and these
sections broken down further into the required verse chorus verse repetition
of two second soundbites. McCarthy fidgeted with the grenade pin loop on
the zipper to his terry cloth jumper and shifted in his seat because David
Foster Wallace, even reading at an auctioneer's clip, hadn't cleared his
first parenthetical aside in his first sentence.
David Foster
Wallace then read from his book of essays, from the title essay about being
pampered to death on the MC Niad, a fictional but all too real cruise liner
with the contemporary zeal for authentic minutiae (which feels now like
the fictional equivalent of feedback in songs from a couple of years ago.
He paused only once to reflect on the lack of experience in the experience
itself. And then he reluctantly opened the field to questions without Mr.
Silmonson's protection.
And that's
when the true fun started. Before I could even formulate the question that
would immediately couple my presence to David Foster Wallace, right here,
in Eliott Bay, in front of an audience, a curly headed man, who obviously
took the Jedi very seriously, launched into a five minute tirade about "the
societal game of drug abuse and artistic posturing and how David Foster
Wallace was successful at this game and how this was all a game we needed
to play because we were divorced from the issues of survival, everything
important (like food, I'm guessing) was taken care of (if he had been throwing
in a couple of "mans" he could have been delivering a whisky-fueled
Janis Joplin speech). An audible groan began to emit from the audience after
three minutes, and this just caused him to pick up speed. Finally David
Foster Wallace stood back from the podium and said, "There's room up
here." Finally he answered at the end of the man's long monologue,
"no," since the question had opened with, "Do you think?"
And now I wasn't about to say anything.
This must
be something of an Eliott Bay tradition, to glaze over like an old fashioned
donut during the reading and the come back with rancid coffee house fueled
interrogation during the questions and answering period. I saw Thom Jones
read in 1993 to a packed house and the audience threw out questions like,
"How did you get a story into the New
Yorker? Who did you know?"
Answer: "I didn't know anyone. I don't really know how I got into the
magazine. I kept getting rejected by them and then a friend said write a
story they can't reject. The results was the 'Pugilist At Rest'; at the
time they told me that they probably wouldn't accept anything else by me
but they've accepted my next couple of stories. So I don't know." Tobias
Wolf on his tour for The Night in Question had a similar question lobbed at him. "You
are obviously a respected man," one of the rabid audience members asked,
"How did you get up there?" I suppose the implication being, how
did you get up there onto that podium and how come I'm down here?
I've found
myself initiating this nasty frenzy when faced with a friendly and respectful
audience and an author who enjoys genuine worship. I don't know what it
is, maybe the contrast from the muggy warmth of the upper Eliott Bay stacks
to the chill, moldy vault of second-hand titles no one has ever heard of
causes mass hormonal hostility. The room of dead books seems like an ominous
place to hold a reading, like the moment in Dead
Poets Society when Robin Williams
leads his class into the prep school hall of graduated heroes full of old
black and white photographs from the turn of the century -- and the books
surrounding the Eliott Bay reader are a reminder that even though the rabid
audience wants more than anything to pretend to be the lauded writer up
on the podium, that even these pundits will eventually find their books
on dollar shelves of second hand book stores. I've found myself wanting
to pry one of the bricks out of the wall and bludgeon the author. My mother
and I went to see Alice Adams read and the room had fifteen devout Alice
Adams fans, with bobbed hair and sensible wool sweaters and cunningly-crafted
folk craft art hanging out of their ears and they held piles of Penguin
Edition Alice Adams books and before she made her appearance they paged
quickly through her new book like I used to do with a new Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators Murder Mystery to get a quick layout of what treasures the narrative
would reveal. Ms. Adams read a chapter from her book for maybe fifteen minutes
and then immediately opened the field to questioning. Instead of the usual
double questions opening with the elaborate, "Do you think. . . "
her followers made statements like "I love your books." And she
would politely nod thank you. Or "In your new story in the New Yorker--"
Another cultist interrupted her -- "She has a new story, in the New Yorker? My
magazine hasn't come yet. When do you get yours? I think my mailman borrows
them." And Alice Adams paused the general proceedings to talk about
a review of her current book, Carolina's
Daughter, where a black critic
had called her work racist. "Am I a racist?" Ms. Adams surveyed
the room of white, middle classed, I'm - not - racist - I listen - to -
world music - women (and me a I'm - not - a - racist - I - like- James Brown
male) and asked them if she was a racist. "Of course not. How could
anyone say something like that?" And I found myself clearing my throat
and my mother visibly shifted away from me. "Why are you asking us?
You've published your books. Isn't criticism an occupational hazard."
"I
suppose it is. But that's a very hard way of looking at it." And the
cultists glanced up and down me -- coffee stained khakis, belt fastened
to the last eye hole, shredded Keds, but I didn't care, there shall never
be a tranquil audience at Eliott Bay.
The curly
haired man had let his verbal fart rip and the odor settled over everything
else everyone else said. David Foster Wallace talked about how he felt that
we (qualifying white middle class) had it better off than any generation
in the past, how we have it so easy and yet we are so unhappy.
In response
to the question about drug use in his book, about how all the characters
had problems with drug use, someone asked isn't that sort of like toeing
the party line? Mr. Wallace answered that well maybe he should've thrown
in a character that maybe snorted a couple of lines a week and was a successful
business man. "99% of the people who've tried drugs don't have a problem with it,
he said. But it's the problem that I found interesting. Maybe you're right."
Wait a minute.
I am not unconcerned with my survival, even if this is my demographic. Maybe
this is the missing key to the fickle Generation
X market. A Reality
Bites does not have to happen again.
I am not just blandly satisfied with the goods and services available to
me. I am deeply concerned that not only will I not be able to afford the
latest block buster movie or the latest Weezer CD but that I'll lose my job -- my only source of
funds -- for some inane reason like incompetence and become black-balled
from the wordprocessing community and spend the rest of my days dumpster
diving and drinking rubbing alcohol to keep warm.
I find the
old clichés the catchiest, Mozart, and "It's a small wolrd after
all" and "I'm just one paycheck from the street." Maybe I'm
extremely neurotic, but I am often thinking about homelessness and I'm always
on the lookout for a good place to sleep if I become homeless.
Running
out of money is really bad because if I don't have money I can't go to Cost
Co and if I can't get my food in bulk, I don't eat. I won't even be able
to buy gas for my decrepit '78 Nova and get out of Ballard on the weekend. And
I definitely won't be able to afford nice, hard bound books that I'll never
read. In going to college, I felt I needed to work sixteen scams to just
get by. I went three years without buying new shoes. I learned that Top
Ramen and water provided all of the nutrients one needed to be a growing
English major, provided I ate vitamin C tablets so that I didn't acquire
scurvy and lose my teeth.
I'm concerned
with these basic issues of survival because I, personally, know people who've
crashed and burned and haven't been able to survive in this society where
everything is handed to them. I have trouble buying David Foster Wallace's
ratio of 99%
of the people not having trouble with drugs. I don't know anyone who is
bored because they don't have to work sixteen hours in the grain fields.
Perhaps
I grew up in a bad crowd of this 1% of people with extreme problems with drugs and
alcohol. But I don't believe that these are substances people abuse because
they're bored. Bored people find something to do. Clinically depressed people
or bi-polar people or schizophrenic people or whatever brand of seratonin
leakage they have, these people are damaged people who can't help but become
busy being damaged or recovering people. They don't need to invent addiction,
even if they can't help acquiring it. And alcoholics and addicts aren't
at a particular loss at how they're going to spend their time. Hey, I'm
conscious, I'll have to score some smack now.
While I
mused, I hadn't noticed that David Foster Wallace had swiveled over to begin
asking questions from this side of the room. Dopplegangergirl's male friend
caught his glance with a slightly lifted pointer finger. "Mr. Wallace.
I've always been fascinated by the habits of writers, while writing. Do
you write with your shoes on?"
"I
wear Hayes Athletic socks and no other footwear while writing," Mr.
Wallace answered and gave the male friend a nod and ended the reading by
thanking everyone and dismounting from the podium.
As we shuffled
out of Eliott Bay's dead book vault and up the stairs I grabbed Lisa's hand.
"You are Lisa aren't you?"
"How
do you know my twins name isn't Lisa."
"Who
am I?"
"How
do you know your twin's name isn't Matt? It's not like Matt and Lisa aren't
common names."
"I
don't care. So I have a clone? It's not like he missed an episode of Three's Company."
- Matt Briggs
© The Raven Chronicles 1997