What Wallace knew about Southern California came mostly from books, including The Crying of Lot 49, where the fictional city of San Narciso is described as “a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth.” But Wallace was in an upbeat mood and loved the area. “A real blast,” he wrote Washington. Even better was the coastal city of Newport Beach, a “revoltingly tacky and ritzy Venice-like town.” In his gloomier moments, this was the sort of environment he couldn’t tolerate, but the world appeared cheerful and well to him now. The couple went to a party where a small boat took them out and putt-putted around the bay past John Wayne’s house. They spent a night at the Hotel Laguna in Laguna Beach too, and Wallace overcame his fear of sharks enough to go in the ocean for only the second time in his life. This again may have been a tribute to the confidence and the sense of wellness the successful drug treatment was giving him. Justus’s mother was generous and indulgent, not unlike his own. When he did not want to be sociable, he passed the time in his friend’s bedroom, the lights off and the shades down, listening to Squeeze and INXS. He was still adjusting to the antidepressant, which tended to bring him morning highs and afternoon tiredness. (Justus’s father, a physician, was unsurprised to find Wallace asleep in the car while they were touring Los Angeles.) That summer wildfires burned in the region, sending up huge plumes of smoke, and Wallace wrote to Costello how amazed he was to see rich Angelenos walking on the beach admiring the sunset, as the world burned.
After his visit, Wallace drove the eight hours to Tucson with Justus, ready to move into his graduate housing. She had friends in the city and they were having so much fun she thought about moving there too, a proposition that set off warning bells for Wallace. “I’m not ready or able for anything as serious as a Susie situation,” he wrote Washington, “and couldn’t have the obligation of [Andrea’s] being in town because of me.” There were other considerations too. “Most of the girls here are just incredibly beautiful, like a 10,000 member class of ’88,” he wrote. Happily, it turned out Justus was no more serious than he was. “She’s breathtakingly level-headed (Salingerian trope),” Wallace reported, “and so having her here on the sort of level we’ve established would be terrific for me.”
Justus was intrigued by her friend’s impracticality. She helped him to take the money he routinely kept in his sock drawer and open a bank account with it. They visited his future apartment, which he was supposed to share with a student in optical sciences, and found the walls painted “a kind of urine-yellow” and the whole smelling, as Wallace told his friends in his audio letter, of, “in descending order, Lysol, another kind of air freshener, very, very, very old semen and again, urine.” Justus urged him to find someplace else, reminding him he was an adult now. (Wallace to Washington: “Perhaps only half true.”) With the deposit he got back, the two went house hunting. Soon Wallace found a small apartment on North Cherry Avenue, a shabby district a few blocks from the campus. The complex looked like an overgrown Motel-6 and was mostly parking lot, an unattractive part of an unattractive city, “replete with poisonous spiders and dead grass, gravel, violent crime,” as he later wrote Professor Kennick at Amherst.
But Wallace was content. He had a young woman near but not too near and a place to write. His apartment consisted of two rooms and a kitchen and, as when he lived with Costello sophomore year, a view of a Dumpster. “It’s a good dumpster,” he reported to his friends. “It’s painted white. It’s about as large as a small truck. It gives off a fairly powerful odor when the wind is from the north.”2 He set himself up, Smith-Corona on the desk, towels spread out everywhere. Outside was a pool and lots of palm trees. “Their trunks,” he told his friends, “tend to be kind of meaty. And their fronds — they’re not called leaves; if you call them leaves people cock their eyebrows at you — the fronds tend to occupy angles that are sort of Lovecraftian. They don’t quite match up to any known laws.” The black widow spiders everywhere in Tucson excited his imagination too. “You use a propane torch to fry them in their webs and hope their grieving mates don’t fall on your head from the palm trees above,” he claimed.3
What made the room best of all was that he was soon writing in it. He could work hours without breaks, smoking heavily — he began the habit senior year of college — writing longhand on sheets of yellow paper or in notebooks. The notebooks also functioned, as he wrote in a story from that period, for “trapping little inspirations before they could get away.” He found that he could write not just in his little apartment but anywhere — in the smoking room of the library, on a bench, in a café. And he did not need fiction workshops or input from teachers to get him going; he was just exploding with words. One story he focused on was “Forever Overhead,” the tale of a thirteen-year-old boy who stands atop a high-dive board on his birthday and contemplates his imminent leap into maturity. The boy wants both to turn back and to get in the pool. Frozen atop the tower, he certainly experiences anxieties familiar to Wallace. “You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking,” the narrator notes. Wallace uses the boy’s moment of doubt to encapsulate the ambivalence he felt about his own passage from childhood to his teen years (or perhaps the perils of writing). In the end the boy will dive, as he must. “The board will nod and you will go,” the narrator intones, “and eyes of skin can cross blind into a cloud-botched sky that is forever, punctured light emptying behind sharp skin that is forever. Step into the skin and disappear.” The story was not typical of the writing Wallace was becoming interested in — it would soon seem to him sentimental and overblown — but in his early days in Arizona he was happy with how easily everything came to him.4
School began soon after he arrived. Among the seven thousand graduate enrollees at the University of Arizona, the students in the writing program were a miniscule contingent, comparable to Wallace’s small band of friends at Amherst. They rented houses together, ate together, drank together, dated each other, and read and commented on one another’s stories. The symbolic hub of their world was a pretty adobe building called the Poetry Center, but most of the work was done in the ugly, newish Modern Languages Building. The program was run by Carter, a novelist of uncertain age.5 She had been famous for standing at her office desk, writing and smoking, but by the time Wallace arrived she had given up smoking — and so stopped writing. Competitiveness and not a little jealousy laced the air of the program, though Wallace at first either did not notice or did not care. “I love it here, Corey,” he wrote his friend Washington shortly after arriving. “The place, the weather, the school, the girls, the students in the program, the girls, the professors, etc. I will be here for the next three years at least.”
Most MFA students looked on writing as a calling unto itself. They took a few literature classes to satisfy the requirement for their degree. But Wallace was still interested in the ideas behind fiction, so he signed up his first semester for a class on the history of the English language, which prompted an attempt to write a story in Old English, and another class on literary theory that focused on Derrida’s Of Grammatology. The course was a cinch for Wallace, who was familiar with much of the reading list from Amherst, if not from before. He wrote his old theory professor and friend Andrew Parker about how much he enjoyed grappling with difficult texts again and asked his Arizona literary theory professor if he should reread Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, a book that criticized attempts to turn the study of literature into a science. The professor assured him once was enough. He wasn’t sure if the question had been serious or not or a bit of both. All he knew for sure was that Wallace was far and away his best student.