There is another thread that weaves in and out of Wallace’s childhood. He believed in later years that the mental disease that would in many ways define his life began at this time. “Summer, 71 or 72”—Wallace was nine or ten—“First occasion of ‘Depressive, clinically anxious feelings,’” he wrote in a medical history summary toward the end of his life. He became excessively afraid of mosquitoes, especially of their buzzing. His parents say they did not notice problems this early, nor did his sister. “It’s a lot easier to fix something if you can see it,” a character comments in Infinite Jest. But in a family that prided itself on openness, Wallace never felt safe disclosing himself. He worried, then as he always would later, that to know him too well would be to dislike him. Or at least dislike him as much as he disliked himself. He felt a fake, a victim, as he would later write, of “imposter syndrome.” He believed his parents expected great things from him and worried he was not capable. The one member of the family he felt truly comfortable with was Roger, the family dog. Roger lived year-round in a doghouse in the family’s backyard, because David was allergic, and he would regularly go out to keep the dog company or to break the ice on his water bowl. He had, his sister remembers, “an incredibly keen sense of empathy” for the beagle-pointer-terrier mix.
Wallace made two important discoveries in his early teen years: tennis and marijuana. These were the twin helpers that carried him through high school. Because Brookens didn’t offer tennis, Wallace took lessons at the local park. He was the first among his peers to play the sport. He immediately took to it and found that calculating angles and adjusting for wind velocity gave him an advantage over other players. He could excel at the game even though he was not strong for his age. It wasn’t a cool sport; in fact for most midwesterners at the time, it existed only on television. “It wouldn’t have been any stranger if he had been good at jai alai,” one friend remembers. “No one else played tennis.” But Wallace loved it and brought his focus to the game — the $50 he made from his Boneyard Creek essay went to a summer stint at John Newcombe’s tennis camp in Texas. The Urbana high school had a team, and when Wallace was in ninth grade, he joined. The group was among the best in the public schools of the region. They fashioned an outsider image for themselves, in cutoff T-shirts, bandanas, and colored shoelaces in an era when tennis players were still expected to wear white — they were the tennis-playing toughs from a big public high school even if at that school they were the sissies who played tennis. Wallace, who was the best among his friends before high school, continued to be one of the top players.
But biology cannot be outrun forever. Wallace was late entering puberty, and the others began getting bigger than he was. His game peaked early in high school. His habit of rationalizing every hit had its downside; his teammates played more by instinct and so were faster. If no longer as good as his peers, Wallace remained very good — his boast in a memoir in Harper’s more than a decade later that he was “near great” being only a slight overstatement. After senior year, he was still number eleven in the Middle Illinois Tennis Association, although his close friends John Flygare and Martin Maehr, who had started tennis after he did, were number five and number seven respectively. And he understood where things were headed. Flygare remembers their winning the finals of the eighteen-and-under doubles competition of the Central Illinois Open that summer of 1980 and Wallace’s comment afterward that it was the last tournament he would ever win. And so it was.
The three friends taught tennis beginning in the summer of 1976, Wallace then fourteen, in the same Urbana public parks where they had learned. As an instructor, Wallace let his pleasure in words play out. Noticing that in tennis manuals overheads were usually abbreviated OH, he started calling them “hydroxides.” And he would name his teams after sections of Ulysses: the Wandering Rocks and Oxen of the Sun. Another year he ran drills and any player who botched one had to listen to a section of Wallace’s life story (made up).
The tennis team was Wallace’s social life too. The sport drew a particular kind of kid, one for whom Wallace was more congenial than he was to many of the others in their large urban high school. He was odd to them but not unfathomable. When their children were freshmen, parents would drive the players to tournaments around the state, but soon the older kids got their licenses and the group could go anywhere they wanted. They drove the circuit of tournaments, staying in hotels, eating in hamburger joints, and killing time playing mini-golf. One time they went to a Van Halen concert; another time the others all ditched Wallace, who was in the hotel room taking one of the long showers he was famous for. They slept two to a motel bed and did “woody checks.” Bonded into a team, no one was permanently in or out, blows were taken and given; if you weren’t careful your bed would be peed in. Wallace, with his teasing sense of humor and energy, was always in the scrum. He was not the leader but he was not the last either. These boys — his pals from the place he called Shampoo-Banana — would stay Wallace’s friends his whole life, able to approach him when he was famous the way few others could. His teammates were more successful with girls than Wallace, and, frustrated, he would try to solve the complexity of attraction the way he solved the trajectory of a tennis shot: “How do you know when you can ask a girl out?” “How do you know when you can kiss her?” His teammates told him not to think so hard; he would just know.
Marijuana — the other great find of his youth — helped Wallace with his self-consciousness and calmed a growing anxiety. Pot in the late 1970s was everywhere in the Midwest. Not quite legal, it was all the same barely hidden, a companion to beer as a recreational drug. One friend remembers the tennis team doing one-hitters in the back of the bus as they rode home from a match in Danville, the coach in the front pretending not to notice. Pot also deepened the consciousness of beauty — or at least they thought so. High, they listened to the stoner bands of the time:
I remember KISS, REO Speedwagon, Cheap Trick, Styx, Jethro Tull, Rush, Deep Purple, and, of course, good old Pink Floyd.
The words are from Chris Fogle, a “wastoid” character in The Pale King, but they might as well be Wallace’s. He liked to get high at home before he studied. His parents tolerated the behavior. All the same, Wallace preferred to smoke standing on a chair in an upstairs bathroom blowing the smoke out with an exhaust fan so no one would notice. He may have had himself in mind when he wrote of Hal in Infinite Jest, another pothead, that he was “as attached to the secrecy as he was to getting high.” His sister remembers his father looking up from his newspaper to ask his son, who was on the way out the door, not to smoke marijuana in the car. A fellow high school student introduced him to acid, and he tried tripping one weekend when his parents were away. But he felt sick to his stomach and went to bed for the next twenty-four hours. Afterward he told his sister he thought he was going to die. Pot was what worked, allowing Wallace both calm and emotional privacy. But he also knew it could cause its own anxiety, marooning him in a private, claustrophobic consciousnesss. In such moments nothing was clear or stable and thoughts circled in on themselves in a way that called unassailable truths — the meaning of words, the structure of reality — into question. In a later essay, he would remember the problem with getting high, recalling how under the drug’s influence one eats