There was a moment in many of his fellow students’ lives when they realized Wallace was not just smart but stunningly smart, as smart as anyone they had ever met. One friend remembers looking over his shoulder in a class on twentieth-century British poetry after the professor returned their essays on Philip Larkin and seeing on Wallace’s, “A+—One of the finest pieces of writing I have ever read.” In epistemology, he was dominant, peppering the professor with so many advanced questions he had to ask Wallace to keep them for his office hours. “I don’t want to say he was scary but he made me work harder than any other student I ever had,” remembers Willem DeVries.2 For his freshman roommate Desai, the moment of awareness came one morning second semester around one a.m. when Wallace returned to their suite, likely stoned, and asked to borrow his paper on Henry V. Wallace, Desai remembers, had earlier glanced at the play for the freshman Shakespeare seminar they both were taking. Now he quickly scanned his roommate’s paper, put it down, went away, and worked for several hours, producing an essay that would earn him an A in the class. “I thought I was smarter,” Desai remembers thinking. “Now I was getting a glimpse of how much he could accomplish.” So were others at Amherst. The first semester Wallace got two other As and an A-minus. Second semester he won the prize for the freshman with the best grade point average. “Un veritable bijou,” his teacher wrote on reading his last paper for a class in the gothic.
Responses like these made Wallace happy, happier than he later felt they should have. And despite his shyness, over time he was piecing together the social puzzle and starting to make friends. Late first semester, he met another freshman, Mark Costello, a bright, mischievous boy who, like Wallace, lived in Stearns and spent every waking hour in the library. Both young men, from large public high schools, felt the gulf between their background and that of many undergraduates at a school that touted the well-rounded over the brilliant. (Costello had sent a photo of the star of his school track team to the freshman face-book in place of his own.) Neither was going to be invited to the DKE champagne party or the Psi U beach party, and both made it a point not to care. Costello had his own throwing-up-at-the-college-interview story: he had gotten sick on Route 9 on the way to the Amherst admission’s director’s office. Wallace responded by claiming he had thrown up in the bushes outside the Lord Jeff Inn en route to his own Amherst interview (and perhaps he had). There were differences, though. Wallace smoked pot; Costello didn’t even drink. Costello, from a large Irish-Catholic family, was considering becoming a priest; Wallace was desperate to get laid. All the same, a close friendship developed. Soon Wallace was letting Costello in on the locations of secret places where he liked to study. Wallace asked Costello to room with him the following year, and his new friend agreed.
When the summer came, Wallace was relieved. Paradoxically, the home that had made him anxious in high school now felt like the place he could go to decompress. It was off the stage that college was to him, safe from observation. Most of his old friends were still there, including Flygare and Maehr. He spent the summer teaching for a sixth time in Blair Park, reading, and getting high. One of his new freshman friends, Fred Brooke, an aspiring writer who had lived in Stearns too, visited him at home, and the two went out late at night to play tennis in the park. They hit balls back and forth amid the mosquitoes and drank beer in the Illinois heat.
Sophomore year Wallace and Costello were assigned one of the worst rooms on campus, a tiny double next to the TV pit in Moore Hall. Once a week at 3 a.m. a truck came and emptied the dining-hall Dumpster outside their window. All the same, Wallace found he was happier than as a freshman. He had his routines down and a growing sense of himself as competent. He no longer worried about disappointing his parents or wasting their money. To have Costello at his side — to have near him another person whose behavior he could rely on — was a huge help. A happier Wallace began to emerge. In the mornings he wore his tattered bathrobe from home — he worried that the smears from Clearasil looked like semen stains — a Parkland College Cobras hoodie, and untied boots to stomp off to shower. “Dave, why don’t you ever tie the belt, walking around like this?” Costello would ask him. “You think I wanna look like a nerd or a jerk?” Wallace would answer. He always gargled and brushed for forty-five minutes, and then there came the microscopic examination and treatment of his acne. Back in the room, he would spread out his towels to dry, hanging them from shelves, chair backs, and bedposts. (Wallace’s fear of germs was typical of his phobic mind. It was at once real and exaggerated, with an overlay of self-deprecating comedy to both underscore and hide the hurt.) His collection of stoner tapes came out: Pink Floyd, Switched-On Bach, REO Speedwagon, Frank Zappa’s “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow.” Wallace had watched little or no television his freshman year, but with the TV pit right next door he could time his indulgences for when it was empty. He enjoyed Hawaii Five-O reruns and a new show, Hill Street Blues, on Thursday nights. Soap operas, though — another favorite with their exaggerated plots and larger-than-life personalities — he was too embarrassed to turn on. In general he did not like being watched watching, and if others were there he’d pass by. Yet it was a welcome bit of routine, a nice refuge from the excess of interactions that communal living brought.
Costello and Wallace sat down at 5:15 at the same table most nights in the Valentine Dining Hall, united in their need to study. During exam periods, Wallace added a second tea bag to his cup of coffee. He’d down the caffeinated drink and go off to the library. (On Sundays he’d be waiting on the steps for the librarians to open after brunch.) Then after the library closed, he and Costello would calm down with a shot of scotch. “I think this is a two-shot night,” Wallace would sometimes say. At various times, he gave up pot, saying it was bad for his lungs. He caught some of Costello’s enthusiasm for political history. He already knew trivia about Illinois politics, about Big Jim Thompson and the Stevenson dynasty that produced the two-time presidential candidate Adlai. Now he set his eye on interning for his congressman, Ed Madigan. With Costello, another friend, Nat Larson, and a fifteen-year-old freshman name Corey Washington, he joined the school debate team. Wallace was afraid of public speaking — his voice was reedy and got stuttery when he was nervous — but he participated because being on the team would look good on his transcript if he applied to law school. They traveled up and down the East Coast competing. Chris Coons, another member of team, remembers Wallace as brilliant and funny in competition, with “literally the worst delivery I have ever heard — mumbling and awkward and turned away from the judges and audience.” Wallace in turn denigrated him as the “Coonsgah” and amused his friends with a mean imitation of the future senator from Delaware.
The first semester Wallace again aced everything, with an A-plus in introduction to philosophy. He also got an A in his English class, his mother’s field. He told friends he wanted to please both parents.