David Foster Wallace Ruined My Suicide - D.D. Miller - E-Book

David Foster Wallace Ruined My Suicide E-Book

D.D. Miller

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Beschreibung

Filled with burning parade floats, bear attacks and roller derby leagues, D.D. Miller’s short stories present us with a comical collection of slacker heroes who get what they deserve in startling ways. These men are survivors, but they fail to appreciate how fortunate they are, and they watch helplessly as their lives unravel, if only because they fail to act.

Miller’s deft sentences and sharp characterization bring these stories to life, pulling readers into the lives of his cast of self-centred underdogs. Readers will find themselves sympathizing with these characters while laughing at the calamities Miller has artfully scattered in their paths.

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ABOUT THIS BOOK

Filled with burning parade floats, bear attacks and roller derby leagues, D.D. Miller’s short stories present us with a comical collection of slacker heroes who get what they deserve in unexpected ways. These men are survivors who fail to see how fortunate they are, and who watch helplessly as their lives unravel, if only because they fail to act.

Miller’s deft sentences and sharp characterization bring these stories to life, pulling us into the lives of his cast of self-centred underdogs. Readers will find themselves sympathizing with these characters while laughing at the calamities Miller has artfully scattered in their paths?

To three amazing women:

Barbara Sheffield, Judy Miller and Jan Dawson

CONTENTS

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE RUINED MY SUICIDE

THE ILLUSION OF FLIGHT

SEEING YOUR OWN

BE PREPARED

MY SUMMER WITH SETH

FOOL’S PARADISE

THE TUTOR

THE WRONG NUMBERS

DINOSAURPORN.COM

THE KILL-IT-AND-FILL-IT GUY

SON OF SON OF FLYING PIG

THE LADIES’ ROOM AT THE VALLEYVIEW TRUCK STOP

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1. August 2008

had a problem with endings. I couldn’t finish anything. And I’m convinced that it all started with my name: Gregor Postma. I go by Greg, which is even less complete, but the only people who ever called me Gregor were my Dutch father and grandmother. My grandmother died long ago and, at that point, I hadn’t seen my father in a decade, so sometimes, when I saw “Gregor” printed on a bill or when a telemarketer called and asked for me by that name, I was surprised by how incomplete it sounded.

Subways, I’d discovered, offered false endings. They get to an end only to turn around and continue. Riding the subway was as close to a hobby as I had back then. I liked that feeling of always going somewhere. I’d ride in the front car sometimes all the way to the final station, then get out and walk to the other end of the train so I would still be in the front. I’d sit in the very front seat by the grimy window with the driver hidden away in the cockpit to my right, looking for the end of the line. It’s awkward to stare out the front window of the subway because the seats face the wrong way, and the movements of the train are much more deliberate in that car – the shifts in speed, the bumps and jumps are all exaggerated – but I’d been riding that way for a long time, almost daily since I’d been relieved of my duties from my job with the Chindigo bookstore chain.

Rumours were that there were plenty of jumpers in Toronto. With all my riding of the subway, I thought I would have seen at least a few. But I hadn’t yet. The closest I’d come was seeing a man try to jump.

I saw him as soon as the light of the station appeared during the train’s approach through the tunnel. He was standing very close to the end of the platform, too close to the edge, leaning out over the track and staring into the tunnel. Seeing the approaching train, he turned and walked toward the wall and then quickly paced back to the edge of the platform as the light of the station poured into the train. My heart raced. I couldn’t swallow. I gripped the back of the seat as we approached the end of the tunnel, and I wondered if the jumper would hit the front of the car, exploding the glass of the window, or if he’d just fall to the tracks and be torn apart by the moving train.

And then, at the last possible moment, he turned around, and the train passed him by before coming to a rumbling stop.

I closed my eyes for the duration of the station stop. Had to take deep breaths to calm myself, to slow my beating heart.

I don’t know what led me to look at that particular shelf, but one morning, I noticed a gaping hole in my book collection: a David Foster Wallace book. Immediately, I remembered lending it to Brie, a girl I’d been kind of dating a year before. As with many things that disappeared from my apartment during that time, the book ended up in her blue MEC backpack. Her backpack had a cartoonish capacity, and she took it with her always, to the numerous lessons her stereotypically overbearing Asian immigrant parents made her attend or just to meet up with friends. It was her “home away from the home I hate,” she always said.

The last time I saw Brie was at the lake in Sunnyside Park by the western beaches. She was skating with a pack of roller derby girls, wearing what looked to be brand new roller skates.

I was sitting in the grass near the path when she skated by, and she didn’t notice me. She was holding the hands of another skater and looking straight into her eyes as they skated. I didn’t recognize the look completely, but sort of. I’d almost seen it before, only a few months previous. She’d almost looked at me like that. But not quite.

In early spring of 2008, a new bookstore, Zed’s, opened up a few subway stops away from my apartment. It seemed strange. New bookstores just weren’t appearing, and even franchises like Chindigo didn’t seem too concerned with selling books anymore. Trash still sold: ultra-violent detective books, pseudo-porn for middle-aged women, cartoonishly gory sci-fi or fantasy series for young adults. But more and more sales were of perfumy soap, French presses, throw rugs, kids’ toys.

Next to Zed’s there was a building that had been badly damaged by fire and was boarded up. On the plywood where the front door would have been, someone had hastily spray-painted “dont die” in drippy black lettering.

The bookstore was tiny, just a single room with bins full of paperbacks in the middle. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with shelves of neatly packed hardcovers and trade paperbacks. There were very few sections: fiction, non-fiction and comics/graphic novels. No subdivisions within. The owner was a fifty-something man with thinning, saltnpeppery hair. He was so thin he was almost gaunt and always dressed in fading, tight black denim and T-shirts that were mostly plain and dark. He smiled upon arrival and departure, but in all the visits I’d made to the store, I’d never spoken to him and had never found anything to buy. Not because there wasn’t anything I didn’t like, but because I rarely found anything I didn’t already own.

I entered the store and walked slowly along the fiction wall, lazily scanning the names until I got to W. There were four Wallace works on the shelf: The Broom of the System, Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion: Stories. The same four sitting on the shelf in my apartment.

I approached the desk. The man’s eyes trailed as he finished reading a line.

“I’m wondering if you have any other David Foster Wallace books tucked away other than what’s on the shelf?” I shrugged back toward fiction.

“It should be there, in fiction. We should have them all.”

I glanced over my shoulder back toward the section. “I was just over there.”

“I’m pretty sure,” he said. “I’d be surprised. Which one?”

“Girl with Curious Hair,” I said.

His eyebrows dipped inward; he shifted off his stool and closed his book. It was an old paperback version of John Barth’s The Floating Opera. I’d never read it.

The man hurried over to the fiction wall and stood in front of the Ws as I had only a few moments before. He returned.

“You’re right,” he said, settling back on his stool behind the counter. “I could have sworn we had a copy of it. Sworn. I’m really sorry.” He shook his head and slouched sadly.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Honestly. It must be hard to keep his books in. Perhaps you sold it,” I said, feeling as if I were comforting him. He just shook his head, staring down at the counter.

I told him “thank you” and exited, heading back across the street and into the subway. When I got there, I walked all the way down the platform to where I knew the front of the train would stop.

Mi-young was eighteen years old, lived in Mississauga and was saving money to go to university. That was all I’d ever learned about her life.

I sat down at my computer desk and typed in the URL: http://www.camtogether.com/private-group/mi-young

The screen faded up on Mi-young. She sat in a big comfy chair. The camera didn’t show much else behind her: the top of a bookshelf up against a white wall, the books just far enough away that the titles were illegible. She was sitting with her long legs wrapped under her in the comfortable, contortioned pose of the young. She was in pale blue running shorts and a white tank top.

I had to share Mi-young with others. Anyone who kept their CamTogether account up to date could join in with any of the girls. I tried to ignore them, pretend that they weren’t there, but she often said our usernames when one of us typed something she found amusing. She had regulars, like me, but I tried not to remember their names.

Mi-young was Korean-Canadian. She was tall, thin, but athletic. Her skin was a lovely shade of olive. Her breasts were small but seemed to be the perfect size for her frame and her nipples were long and surprisingly pale.

She’d already started touching herself by the time I’d logged in. The arm of her tank top was tugged aside to expose her left breast. Her fingers slid down her inner thigh and flicked along the edges of her underwear. She spread her knees and she blew me a kiss, winking slowly. I could swear she was looking right at me. I felt as if I could see my reflection in her open eye.

I eventually broke down and bought a new copy of the Wallace book. The independent bookstore in the Annex didn’t have Girl with Curious Hair, so I was forced to go to Chindigo. The location I had worked at was a large, multi-storey location in a fairly upscale mall on Bloor Street at Bay. I shuddered when I entered, literally, and got the tinge of a headache from the overwhelming scent of the soaps and candles that had begun to take up more and more of the store’s retail space.

I recognized a few of the staff members, but there was a constant rotation of “booksellers” and they all had a tendency to look the same: thick-rimmed glasses, slim corduroys, some kind of ironic and/or band T-shirt under the company-issue blue vest. One person I knew I would recognize was my nemesis, Karen Sears, the floor manager, and a dedicated Chindigo lifer. She’d always hated me, hated my obsession with David Foster Wallace and the whole postmodern experiment. She was the person who fired me, and she seemed to take great pleasure in telling me that I didn’t have “the Chindigo attitude.” I didn’t interact well with customers, she told me. I was rude. Sarcastic.

I quickly made my way to the fiction section. The edition of Girl with Curious Hair on the shelf was a reprint edition; an ugly, piss-yellow version with what looked like an image of splattered molasses on it. The copy I’d lost was the 1989 trade version with the black and white image of a woman on it with her head thrown back. I grabbed the book and headed for the cash registers.

Only metres away, I spotted Karen Sears coming up the stairs directly in front of me. I quickly slid to the ground in the Home Repair section. It reminded me of the times Brie would come to visit, and we’d make a game of trying to kill my entire shift without being seen by Karen. We’d hide out in obscure corners of the store (like the poetry corner), and Brie would ask me endless questions about university, though none of her questions seemed particularly important: What did English professors wear? Did we just sit around tables and argue about stuff? Were there bells like in high school to tell you when your class ended?

I turned my head and noticed I was next to a small section of books on knots. I grabbed one called Book of the Knot. I sprung the book open at about the middle to a section on nooses. While the hangman’s knot was central, there was an array of styles displayed that I hadn’t been aware of: the slip knot, the tarbuck, the bowline. I studied the images, enthralled by the slight variations, the extra loops, the tricks. I sat transfixed at the tangled beauty of them. I’m not sure how long I sat there, but when I remembered to stand up and look for Karen, she was nowhere to be seen.

I replaced the Book of the Knot and scurried to the cash registers.

The beginning of the end of Brie and me came on a blazing hot day early in the August of the summer we spent together. Brie and I decided to meet up in the Annex, close to her place. I’d just met up with her, and she was on her roller skates gliding comfortably next to me on the Bloor Street sidewalk. Brie wore a pair of her mother’s old blue roller skates that she’d found buried deep in a closet. They were worn and tattered and had chipped wheels, but she never went anywhere without them and was comfortable enough on them to scoot around people, transition quickly and expertly, and then skate backwards in front of me at times.

We could hear them coming before we saw them. Ahead of us, the crowds parted on the wide sidewalks. There was the sound of many wheels grinding on pavement, and a din of voices as well. Suddenly the sidewalk ahead of us was emptied of walkers, and they were directly in front of us: a pack of five women on roller skates, but as different from Brie’s old-school quads as they could get; theirs were slick-looking and modernized, black leather low-cut boots on gleaming metal trucks. The girls were upon us quickly, shoving fliers into our hands before isolating and circling Brie.

“Holy shit! Those are so cool!” said a skater in jean shorts and a tight tank top with a skull logo on the chest. She even bent down to touch Brie’s old skates. “I can’t believe you can still skate in those things.”

“You’re a total derby girl,” another said definitively. They were a mix of women: black, white, tall, short, skinny, shapely. They all looked very confident on their skates and they seemed very disinterested in me. Brie looked shocked.

Finally one of the girls stepped forward and pointed at the fliers they’d given us. “You need to come check out a bout.” The flier was an advertisement for a game in the Toronto Roller Derby League. “Maybe you could even get some new skates,” she said before skating away with the others and leaving us alone on the sidewalk.

After a few seconds of odd silence, people began to filter around us again. Brie just stood there, so tall on her skates, staring down at the flier and the women pictured on it: two women in full gear, hair flailing from under stickered helmets, fishnets and tights torn and ragged, skating into each other shoulder to shoulder, looks of violent determination etched onto their faces. She held the flier in both hands and just stared.

2. September 2008

I just happened to be walking by Zed’s and decided to head in on the off chance that he had actually acquired something I didn’t already own.

“Excuse me,” the owner said as I entered. “Were you in a few weeks’ back looking for the David Foster Wallace collection?”

I was surprised that he remembered.

“Well, wouldn’t you know that a few days later someone traded in a copy.” He turned quickly and headed toward the Ws and pulled the copy out from the shelf. It was the same ugly yellow edition I’d recently bought at Chindigo. “Here it is,” he said proudly.

“I’m so sorry,” I explained. “I found a copy elsewhere.”

He stared down at the book, his smile waning. “Well, that’s fine. Then I would be without a copy again, wouldn’t I?”

I thanked him and exited the store, finally accepting that I would never, ever find anything at Zed’s that I didn’t already own.

As I passed the burned-out building on the way back to the subway, I noticed that someone had spray-painted over the original “dont die” with red spray paint. In even larger, drippier letters it now read “dont PANIC!!!”

I rode in my usual spot in the front car on the subway home. As we approached the station, and I saw people lingering near the edge of the platform, I couldn’t help but hope that this time, one of them might actually jump.

Brie was much younger than I was and had just graduated from high school when I met her. She was with a bunch of other high-schoolers one night in High Park near the massive wooden children’s playground at the south end of the park. I’d stumbled upon them, about ten or so young adults illuminated by cigarette butts and the odd flashlight. I just happened to have a pocketful of weed, which was all I needed to grab their interest.

Brie stood out from the freaks and geeks who made up the group. She was the only Asian; she was tall, muscular and had deep brown eyes that peeked into mine with their glittery interest, impossible to look away from. She was also extremely bright, but a little flaky and talkative because of that. She had her backpack with her that night, of course, and that pair of her mother’s old roller skates slung over her shoulder. Her backpack was overflowing with clothes, books, and various other practical and impractical items, like a flute – I would later learn – and a tiny cooler that held snacks, which usually consisted of some kind of cheese. Even in that summer after her senior year of high school, she was expected to attend music lessons twice a week, on top of soccer practice and summer tutoring.

“I don’t get along with my parents so much,” she said when I asked her about it. We were sitting a little ways away from the main group, sharing a joint. She sucked the joint hard and then let the thick, uninhaled smoke ooze out from between her lips and slip up over her face like a veil. “They are, like, super strict.” She handed it back to me and coughed. The smoke burst out of her mouth. I learned that the roller skates were so that she could move around the city quickly: get to her various lessons and sports practices, but also get home by her curfew. She told me that her parents had forced her into figure skating at a young age.

It was such a different story from my own that I was taken in by it. I hadn’t seen my father in years at that point and, while my mother still physically existed, the woman I knew as a child – as fragile and distant as she’d seemed even then – was completely gone now.

So much about Brie seemed young. She was enthralled by the fact that I’d (until very recently) been in grad school at U of T. I didn’t tell her how much I’d hated it, how much the accumulated loans were ruining my life. She’d received a scholarship to attend there the following fall. “But I don’t think I want to go,” she said. We’d been sitting away from her friends for quite a while and a few had begun to disperse.

“Why not?” I asked.

“I don’t know what I want to do.” She rolled her eyes. “Okay, I’ve got some ideas about what I want to do, but there is no way my parents will let me. It’s so typical, right? I’ve got to be a doctor or something. As long as it’s got something to do with science.” She sat back, her arms extended behind her and stared straight ahead. “My parents are such stereotypes that it’s almost racist.”

I laughed and managed to ask her what she wanted to do.

“Philosophy. Fine Arts. English. Something that will make me think about stuff.”

I’d done an English undergrad because I liked to read and lacked the desire to do anything else. Pretty flimsy reasoning.

“Science will make you think,” I said, remembering the wonder of Grade 10 Biology, of cutting open a frog and seeing innards that looked remarkably like miniature human innards and how that awakened in me an awareness of the interconnectedness of things.

“Oh shit!” She checked her watch and began to scramble. “Curfew.” She kicked off the pair of flats she’d had on and crammed them into her backpack. “Gotta get home in like fifteen minutes.”

“What’s your name?” I asked. She had long, slender toes that were active in the grass: they stretched and grasped as though they were just unbound from some tight wrapping. Her toenails were unpainted and the pale whites glowed in the night.

“Brie,” she said, sliding her foot into one of her roller skates.

“Bri, like Brianna?”

“No. Brie, like the cheese.” With her skates secured, she pulled a small notebook and pen out of her bag. She tore out a piece of paper and scrawled her real name on it.

“Find me on Facebook,” she said, scampering across the grass as if she didn’t have eight wheels strapped to her feet. When she finally hit the paved path, she leapt once into the air for momentum and, with smooth crossovers and long deep strides, was very quickly gone.

There’d been a delay on the subway that had left the train stranded in a dark tunnel and made me late for Mi-young’s session. It almost didn’t matter anymore; I could summon her image at will. There wasn’t a centimetre of her body that I didn’t feel I knew. An orifice that I hadn’t peered into. I got home ten minutes into the session.

Mi-young was fondling herself with a tiny, buzzing machine that slid over her finger. She got an almost goofy smile on her face when she was pleasuring herself, almost like she was on the verge of laughing. Then I saw her look off-screen and smile.

“It looks like our special guest has arrived,” she said.

And then the body of some guy entered the screen. His head was above the shot, cut off from view, but his body was not. He was young, also, and naked. He stood next to Mi-young.

I was baffled.

She rested her cheek against the guy’s thigh and flitted her long, thin fingers over his penis. Horrified, I reached for the mouse to close the window. I tried not to, but glanced at the screen long enough to see her take him into her mouth.

Even if it was just for one summer, it’s almost inexplicable that Brie and I had managed to get along for as long as we did.

I didn’t have any friends and hadn’t had a girlfriend since high school. We spent a lot of time together, mostly in High Park, sitting under trees smoking pot while she rambled. She was young, healthy and excited; had just finished high school and felt like she could take over the planet. While we did fool around – in the park, on the saggy couch in my musty basement apartment – it seemed forced. She was exceptionally pretty – certainly more so than any other girl I’d ever spent time with – but was young and awkward. She had a thrilling body from a lifetime of sports that she didn’t seem to know what to do with. She lacked confidence about her looks, seemed clueless about her sexuality. She’d been a gangly, awkward, tomboyish kid who’d sprouted up in her late teens and had filled out into an attractive young woman.

Usually, after she went home, I’d lie in my bed masturbating and thinking about her. Thinking about the things we hadn’t done.

But after meeting those roller girls, Brie went to a roller derby bout, purchased brand new roller skates, and I didn’t see her much anymore. I tried texting her a few times, but she’d always text back much later, apologetic. She’d tell me that we’d get together soon, but we never did, and eventually the texts stopped. On Facebook, I saw that she’d started to train. Pictures started to pop up of her in derby gear, skating around a track in an old military hangar north of the city; then, eventually, photos of her in a team uniform and playing in games. It was hard to put these images of her next to those I had in my memory. There was a gap there somewhere.

The first thing I did on the morning I decided to kill myself was turn on the TV. There was just something about the silence in the room. I didn’t check the channel. I don’t even remember caring. It was just noise.

With the TV in the background I took about fifteen minutes to screw the bike hook into the ceiling. The package said it was good for ninety kilograms or two hundred pounds. Then I tied a fresh noose. I had to untie the one I’d tied the day before. I’d been practicing for a week at that point, every morning without even thinking why.

I attached the rope to the hooks, dragged over the chair from my computer desk and stood on it. It was in the kitchen, the only part of my apartment tall enough to allow for this. I poked my head through the noose. My left hand was over the top of my head. There was a moment there, when I paused.

I wasn’t thinking anything. Nothing. Nothing at all. But I paused. The whole thing had taken about one hour. It was Saturday. I’d woken up at seven. I’d made coffee and taken about five minutes to drink a cup while I reminded myself of everything I’d planned to do. I pissed, and then I started. The hook, the noose. Ready. I was ready.

I don’t know why I paused. But I did. And for the first time, I heard the TV. It was on one of the news channels.

“Some sad news this morning,” the female anchor said. “Noted novelist, essayist and humourist David Foster Wallace was found dead last night at his home.” A pause. “The forty-six-year-old writer, best known for his 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, reportedly hanged himself during the evening. He was found by his wife at 9:30 p.m.”

I pulled my head out of the noose, stepped down from the chair. My heart wasn’t necessarily racing, but it was beating very hard. It was only the second time I’d been aware of my body the whole morning. The first time was after the coffee, when I’d had to piss.

David Foster Wallace.

Dead.

Hanged himself.

From where I was standing – in the kitchen next to the chair I’d dragged from my computer desk – I could see my fiction bookshelves. There were two of them. Side by side. About six feet tall, made of that faux-oak Ikea “wood” with books stacked on top that touched the ceiling. On the bottom shelf of the second were the books by David Foster Wallace, including the ugly piss-yellow edition of Girl With Curious Hair.

I knew it couldn’t happen like this.

“You hear that Greg Postma killed himself the other night?” I could hear the people I’d met at grad school saying. “Remember, the drop out,” they’d say. And Karen Sears. I could hear her too. She’d be the one who’d make the connection if and when she ever heard the news. She’d be the first one to call me tacky. A copycat.

I looked back up at the rope hanging from the ceiling. Getting the rope down wouldn’t be a problem. The hook, though, might.

I slumped down on the floor, feeling oddly hollow. Not particularly disappointed, just empty. Just something else I wouldn’t be able to finish.

For days afterwards, I kept myself in motion by riding the subway for hours at a time. Sometimes from early in the morning until the sun went down.

Exiting the subway one day, I walked by Zed’s Books and the burned-out building next to it. It still sat there, virtually untouched in the months since the fire. The plywood that covered the door and had been spray-painted with “dont PANIC!!!” was now covered in posters. I almost walked by without even giving the posters a thought until I noticed the roller skates.

On the poster, two stylized female cartoon characters glared at each other: one was decked out in leopard print, the other in a green, sailor-style uniform. The Toronto Roller Derby Championship was happening that weekend.