Read Online A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace - Free Book Online
Authors: David Foster Wallace
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Antitoi’s mood and level day to day),
he and I had great matches, real marathon wind-suckers. Of eleven finals we played in 1974, I won two.
Midwest junior tennis was also my initiation into true adult sadness. I had developed a sort of hubris about my Taoistic ability
to control via noncontrol. I’d established a private religion of wind. I even liked to bike. Awfully few people in Philo bike,
for obvious wind reasons, but I’d found a way to sort of tack back and forth against a stiff current, holding some wide book
out at my side at about 120° to my angle of thrust—Bayne and Pugh’s
The Art of the Engineer
and Cheiro’s
Language of the Hand
proved to be the best airfoils—so that through imagination and verve and stoic cheer I could not just neutralize but use
an in-your-face gale for biking. Similarly, by thirteen I’d found a way not just to accommodate but to
employ
the heavy summer winds in matches. No longer just mooning the ball down the center to allow plenty of margin for error and
swerve, I was now able to use the currents kind of the way a pitcher uses spit. I could hit curves way out into cross-breezes
that’d drop the ball just fair; I had a special wind-serve that had so much spin the ball turned oval in the air and curved
left to right like a smart slider and then reversed its arc on the bounce. I’d developed the same sort of autonomie feel for
what the wind would do to the ball that a standard-trans driver has for how to shift. As a junior tennis player, I was for
a time a citizen of the concrete physical world in a way the other boys weren’t, I felt. And I felt betrayed at around fourteen
when so many of these single-minded flailing boys became abruptly mannish and tall, with sudden sprays of hair on their thighs
and wisps on their lips and ropy arteries on their forearms. My fifteenth summer, kids I’d been beating easily the year before
all of a sudden seemed overpowering. I lost in two semifinals, at Pekin and Springfield in’77, of events I’d beaten Antitoi
in the finals of in ’76. My dad just about brought me to my knees after the Springfield loss to some kid from the Quad Cities
when he said, trying to console me, that it had looked like a boy playing a man out there. And the other boys sensed something
up with me, too, smelled some breakdown in the odd détente I’d had with the elements: my ability to accommodate and fashion
the exterior was being undercut by the malfunction of some internal alarm clock I didn’t understand.
I mention this mostly because so much of my Midwest’s communal psychic energy was informed by growth and fertility. The agronomic
angle was obvious, what with my whole township dependent for tax base on seed, dispersion, height, and yield. Something about
the adults’ obsessive weighing and measuring and projecting, this special calculus of thrust and growth, leaked inside us
children’s capped and bandanna’d little heads out on the fields, diamonds, and courts of our special interests. By 1977 I
was the only one of my group of jock friends with virginity intact. (I know this for a fact, and only because these guys are
now schoolteachers and commoditists and insurers with families and standings to protect will I not share with you just how
I know it.) I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body,
but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I’d come to see as my coconspirator. I knew, somehow, that the call to height
and hair came from outside, from whatever apart from Monsanto and Dow made the corn grow, the hogs rut, the wind soften every
spring and hang with the scent of manure from the plain of beanfields north between us and Champaign. My vocation ebbed. I
felt uncalled. I began to experience the same resentment toward whatever children abstract as nature that I knew Steve Cassil
felt when a soundly considered approach
he and I had great matches, real marathon wind-suckers. Of eleven finals we played in 1974, I won two.
Midwest junior tennis was also my initiation into true adult sadness. I had developed a sort of hubris about my Taoistic ability
to control via noncontrol. I’d established a private religion of wind. I even liked to bike. Awfully few people in Philo bike,
for obvious wind reasons, but I’d found a way to sort of tack back and forth against a stiff current, holding some wide book
out at my side at about 120° to my angle of thrust—Bayne and Pugh’s
The Art of the Engineer
and Cheiro’s
Language of the Hand
proved to be the best airfoils—so that through imagination and verve and stoic cheer I could not just neutralize but use
an in-your-face gale for biking. Similarly, by thirteen I’d found a way not just to accommodate but to
employ
the heavy summer winds in matches. No longer just mooning the ball down the center to allow plenty of margin for error and
swerve, I was now able to use the currents kind of the way a pitcher uses spit. I could hit curves way out into cross-breezes
that’d drop the ball just fair; I had a special wind-serve that had so much spin the ball turned oval in the air and curved
left to right like a smart slider and then reversed its arc on the bounce. I’d developed the same sort of autonomie feel for
what the wind would do to the ball that a standard-trans driver has for how to shift. As a junior tennis player, I was for
a time a citizen of the concrete physical world in a way the other boys weren’t, I felt. And I felt betrayed at around fourteen
when so many of these single-minded flailing boys became abruptly mannish and tall, with sudden sprays of hair on their thighs
and wisps on their lips and ropy arteries on their forearms. My fifteenth summer, kids I’d been beating easily the year before
all of a sudden seemed overpowering. I lost in two semifinals, at Pekin and Springfield in’77, of events I’d beaten Antitoi
in the finals of in ’76. My dad just about brought me to my knees after the Springfield loss to some kid from the Quad Cities
when he said, trying to console me, that it had looked like a boy playing a man out there. And the other boys sensed something
up with me, too, smelled some breakdown in the odd détente I’d had with the elements: my ability to accommodate and fashion
the exterior was being undercut by the malfunction of some internal alarm clock I didn’t understand.
I mention this mostly because so much of my Midwest’s communal psychic energy was informed by growth and fertility. The agronomic
angle was obvious, what with my whole township dependent for tax base on seed, dispersion, height, and yield. Something about
the adults’ obsessive weighing and measuring and projecting, this special calculus of thrust and growth, leaked inside us
children’s capped and bandanna’d little heads out on the fields, diamonds, and courts of our special interests. By 1977 I
was the only one of my group of jock friends with virginity intact. (I know this for a fact, and only because these guys are
now schoolteachers and commoditists and insurers with families and standings to protect will I not share with you just how
I know it.) I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body,
but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I’d come to see as my coconspirator. I knew, somehow, that the call to height
and hair came from outside, from whatever apart from Monsanto and Dow made the corn grow, the hogs rut, the wind soften every
spring and hang with the scent of manure from the plain of beanfields north between us and Champaign. My vocation ebbed. I
felt uncalled. I began to experience the same resentment toward whatever children abstract as nature that I knew Steve Cassil
felt when a soundly considered approach
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