Free Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D. T. Max

appraising them in a way he had not dared before. One, he told his friends, “applied make-up skillfully.” Another—pretty to him—had “puke-white skin.” His comment about the pale blue-green eyes of Washington’s first girlfriend was that they “needed some food coloring.” His extreme self-consciousness about his own body was turning outward, into sustained erotic—a favorite word of his—focus. He remembered that his sister’s best friend in high school was a pretty girl with really ugly feet and made the observation into a truth universally acknowledged in the novel he was starting for his thesis. He had relationships, avidly and with guilt. He began what he called his “body count.” “Smell that, Core?” he said to his friend one day in April as they walked on the green in front of the Valentine Dining Hall. “It’s springtime. The smell of cunt in the air.” He took up clove cigarettes, got headaches, took Advil, quit the cigarettes, and the headaches went away. He joked that he was responsible for most of Bayer’s profits. He would try to quit pot, then start it again, never quite admitting that he had. After getting high, he would dig up Washington and persuade him to go to the convenience store to calm his munchies. “Core,” he’d ask his friend, “don’t you want chips?” and get him to buy them for him. He had a work-study job as a telephone operator, working the 1970s-era contraption with its big square buttons. He enjoyed the jumble of voices pouring in, callers asking for directions, the campus police, or information they should already have had—he refused to give out the delivery number for the most popular pizzeria. During quiet times, he would write scenes from the novel.
    Wallace also watched TV in Moore, in a common room that he toldWashington smelled of the women students who worked out in it each morning. He watched his usual programs and added
Late Night with David Letterman
and religious programs on weekends, the latter useful for sections of the novel he had started. Mostly, though, with Costello gone and the novel moving fast, he wrote. As a senior, he was entitled to his own room and the privacy he had little of since high school. The towels came out to be spread over everything. On the wall over the desk of his single, he put the famous photograph of Thomas Pynchon as a bucktoothed undergraduate at Cornell. Most evenings Wallace could be found either at his desk or in Frost Library writing. He had gotten to know Dale Peterson, an English professor who taught a class on the literature of madness. 10 Peterson—Wallace nicknamed him “Whale”—was gentle and supportive. He understood Wallace’s enormous gifts and wanted to encourage them. He became Wallace’s thesis adviser and simply let Wallace do as he wished. Wallace could feel the words pouring out, and superstitiously he tried to follow the same routines day after day to keep them coming. He had bought a motorcycle jacket from Charlie McLagan and wore it whenever he was working on the thesis, listening at one point, for example, to U2’s “MLK” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” over and over as he worked. He composed with cheap Bic pens. If he lost one that he had written well with, he would retrace his steps until he found it, then keep using it until it ran out of ink. He referred to these luck-filled pens as his “orgasm pens.”
    After he had finished his first draft, he’d type it up on his Smith-Corona, making changes as he went, into the early morning. His typing was so relentless that the student in the next-door dorm room in Moore moved his bed away from their shared wall. Wallace asked Professor Kennick if he could borrow his office, to spare his neighbor the noise of his “Blob-like” and “out of control” English thesis. When McLagan asked him how things were going, Wallace told him the book was coming so fast it was like a scroll unwinding in his head; he wasn’t the