by Adam Plunkett
Wednesday evening, early May, Claremont, California. Sunset, the last day of classes. My friend, Sara, drove the two of us on College Ave. toward campus with the six-pack we’d bought for our last class, an end-of-semester party that would have beer and wine and cookies and a sweet dark sangria with citrus in the pitcher, but no drugs, for obvious reasons, and no hard alcohol because some former student had thrown up the whiskey he’d drunk in his last class. I thought about making and bringing a beer bong, but when a friend told me that it would be in poor taste because our teacher was a recovered alcoholic, I reluctantly gave in. 
Our teacher made small talk before class. Say, how did we do acid these days? Did we put it on scraps of paper and put the scraps under our eyelids, as he used to? The few of us who heard him laughed, nervous, narcotically conservative, and in the presence of a cool kid roundly out-embarrassed despite the beer and sangria we brandished. If only I’d had the beer bong.He was an embarrassing man when he wanted to be, our teacher, deeply, deliberately, playfully so. He feigned lewd interest a week later in the lurid details of the pre-graduation party-trip the seniors had taken. They had set rules against sex in the shower, or so he let me know. (He had no ribald stories from his own pre-graduation week, since he “and some other terminally nerdy guys just drove up to Maine and discussed Reaganomics and ate lobster.”) It took a student a few seconds to answer when called on “Michael Watson, light of my life, fire of my loins.”
My own soft underbelly was spoken (if not written) politeness, a Midwestern habit of deference and sorrys and if-you-don’t-minds my Midwestern teacher invariably mentioned or mocked or prodded in a mild recursive torment, recursive because politeness tends to be polite about itself. After my tenth sorry he’d bar me from any more apologies or self-qualification or self-deprecation, which I’d apologize for making him do. He told me once that he worried that I dissembled with my politeness, so I promised him that I really would let him know if something he said bothered me, and he told me that he’d made nearly the same promise to his mother a few years before.
His polite moments, which were frequent if often implausible (he denied reading quickly, being widely read, being “an especially fluid writer”), were all the more absurd given how caustic he could be. Once, I offended some of the class with a not-too-polite satire of the misogyny of the then-emerging male-sex-help genre, and our teacher advocated for the Devil by asking whether anyone besides him thought that I’d shown some “balls.” After that he paused and solemnly told us, “I deeply regret saying that,” but I have my suspicions.
He lambasted an essay’s “methane,” at one point, and praised another for its “sheer sphincter-shattering beauty.” Writing a short essay to render something you loved endlessly was “trying to blow a watermelon through a straw.” Most writing was “written half-asleep and read half-asleep,” whereas his every sentence spoken or written confirmed his alertness and his comprehensive comprehension and his care. He was immaculately alive, which made you terribly eager to show that you were all there as well.
He was of course David Foster Wallace, whom I knew as Dave during the spring of my junior year at Pomona College, where he worked until his death that September. The class he taught that semester was The Literary Essay. The class was exciting and productively creative, and fostered abject terror. Wallace knew that he could drive us as hard as he could, and he did, even as he endured a mental hell we learned about only after his death. I knew nothing, suspected nothing. Perhaps we could’ve noticed his pain if the class had been less painful for us.
Half of the class brought up our anxiety to him, separately, myself included. Wallace himself hadn’t noticed the “ambient anxiety”; he praised our “esprit de corps.” He wondered whether there was something terrible on his face and invisible to him (this was a real, deep fear of his, he assured us: his acute social-anxiety disorder had been clinically diagnosed). “Dave,” I asked in his office, “how do you deal with anxiety?” He laughed, a little bemused. He told me not to keep all my problems in my head as he had in his youth. Yoga, he suggested. Meditation. He said he really wasn’t the person to ask.
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