ChipsAhoy! and star[es] very intently at the television’s network PGA event…. The adolescent pot-smoker is struck with the ghastly possibility that, e.g., what he sees as the color green and what other people call “the color green” may in fact not be the same color experiences at all….[T]he whole line of thinking gets so vexed and exhausting that the a.p.-s ends up slumped crumb-strewn and paralyzed in his chair.
The beginning of high school was a good time academically for Wallace. The work was easy; he got all his reading and papers done within a few weeks of the start of classes, which left him time for hanging out and tennis. His intelligence stood out more with each year — one English teacher remembers him as the brightest student she ever had. Other kids tried to cheat off him and he developed a peculiar tiny uppercase script to foil them, or so he would later say. One day he asked his father to explain what philosophy was about. Jim Wallace had his son read the Phaedo, Plato’s argument for an afterlife. Wallace grasped the philosophical reasoning of the dialogue immediately. It was the first time his father realized how brilliant his son was, his mind faster, his father remembers, than that “of any undergraduate I have ever taught.” His mother remembers realizing around this time that David would just “hoover everything.” His grades put him near the top of his class. He was also on the debate team and won a prize for best student writing.
But there was a brittleness to this surge too. Within, Wallace was growing less and less happy. His childhood anxiety was back. He could be obsessive, unwilling or unable to leave whatever impinged on his world unexplored. Mostly it seemed funny more than anything else to those who knew him, character rather than disease. “My particular neurological makeup [is] extremely sensitive: carsick, airsick, heightsick; my sister likes to say I’m ‘lifesick,’” he wrote in a later essay. But by the end of high school his problems were hard to ignore. On his sister’s fifteenth birthday, Wallace refused to go out with his family. “Why would I want to celebrate that?” he asked pointedly. The family was confused and chalked it up to his always simmering competitiveness with Amy, but in fact — as they realized years later — he was having an anxiety attack. They went without him. He talked about painting his bedroom walls black and added a newspaper picture of Kafka to the wall of tennis stars on the corkboard in his room with the caption: The disease was life itself. By the end of his junior year, remembers Amy, he was often too upset to go to class, and by senior year, with college nearing, the anxiety that had been shimmering just below the surface of his life grew into full-blown panic attacks. He was not sure what set them off, but he saw that they quickly became endless loops, where he worried that people would notice he was panicking, and that in turn would make him panic more. This was a crucial moment for Wallace’s mental life and one he would never forget — he saw clearly the danger of a mind unhinged, of the danger of thinking responsive only to itself. From these experiences he would derive a lifelong fear of the consequences of mental and, eventually, emotional isolation.
To cover his attacks, Wallace walked around school with his tennis racket and a towel. He was sweating because he was just off the court — that was the idea he was trying to convey. He took extra showers. He was nauseated often before going to class. He thought maybe he was just upset. In a culture and a place still less than comfortable with mental illness, he likely tried to diagnose himself (“ruminative obsession, hyperhydrosis, and parasympathetic nervous system arousal loop” are some of the diagnoses the phobic David Cusk comes up with in The Pale King.) His mother thought of his anxiety, she would later tell an interviewer, as the “black hole with teeth,”3 but neither she nor her husband knew what to do about it, beyond letting their son stay home from school when he had to. Perhaps they hoped the problem would go away when he went to college. Clearly biological changes were going on in Wallace — depression often first appears in puberty — but the young man may also have been responding to the environment he had grown up in, to the wide-open spaces and unstructured world of late-1970s midwestern America. If he was furtive or anxious, perhaps it was in part because he had a hard time figuring out what the rules were.
Though Wallace was growing sicker during the end of his high school years, no one saw it clearly, least of all Wallace. He was a top achiever and outwardly very functional. He got to school often enough. The intensity of his flashes of anger never quite called attention to themselves as symptoms. As a senior in high school, Wallace became interested in another Urbana High student, Susan Perkins. Perkins was dating another young man, Brian Spano, whom they were all friends with, but at a party that Wallace threw one night, Spano left early and something went on between Perkins and Wallace. He smashed his hand into the refrigerator. He appeared the next day in school with a cast on it.
Going to a prestigious private college was one of the ways the Wallaces differed from some of their midwestern peers. Wallace told friends he was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps to Amherst, inventing a layer of pressure he hardly needed, but in fact, as Jim Wallace remembers, he thought Oberlin College might be a good match for his son and drove him east to Ohio to visit it first. Wallace dreaded interviews. Life for him had the quality of a performance, and being called on to perform within that performance was too much. At the admissions interview Wallace grew anxious. He would one day transform the scene into Hal’s breakdown at the opening of Infinite Jest:
My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it. I compose what I project will be seen as a smile. I turn this way and that, slightly, sort of directing the expression to everyone in the room…I hold tight to the sides of my chair.
When the interview was over, Wallace went back to his hotel and threw up in the ice bucket. Later in the fall, he traveled to his father’s alma mater. The longtime head of admissions at Amherst ran the process himself. He liked to admit promising candidates right at the interview — it was how he kept the school competitive with Harvard and Yale. Wallace had tremendous grades, a good tennis game, and a family connection. He was in before he had to say anything. Back home, he told his parents, “If I agree to go, does that mean I don’t have to go to another college interview?” Jim Wallace said yes. “Sold!” Wallace said.
During his last summer at home he taught tennis for the fifth summer in a row with Maehr and Flygare. What had gone on in the past year wasn’t clear to him; mostly he must have hoped it wouldn’t happen again, that he could leave his problems behind when he went east. He was eager to be a part of the larger intellectual world and equally eager to show that he was his father’s equal academically. So, as the summer ended, he packed his suitcase, put in his favorite bathrobe, a suit and tie for dress-up occasions, and headed east. Before leaving, he spent the last couple of days wandering around the neighboring cornfields saying goodbye.