Wallace was particularly allergic to those who dreamt of fame instead of achievement. He took every opportunity to point out to young writers the snares of the sort of early success he had had. He wrote Washington that whenever younger people asked him how to become an author his reaction was to be “polite and banal.” He pointed out, “The obvious fact that the kids don’t Want to Write so much as Want to Be Writers makes their letters so depressing.” To one such inquirer, a young man in his early twenties, he gave some unbending advice: “Take this time to learn to be your own toughest critic and best friend…. I wish I had…. Concentrate on the work, loving it and hating it and making it the best and truest expression of yourself it can be; the publishing stuff will come.” He added, “I’m mostly saying this to myself at 22, 23.” When Washington asked him if he himself had a swelled head, Wallace demurred: “Even a marginal soap-opera actor receives exponentially more mail than Bellow, I’m sure. And I’m no Bellow,” adding by hand “(yet!),” then a trademark smiley face to deflate his own boast. He went on:
I did, very briefly, at an artist colony called Yaddo in 1987, meeting McInerney and some of the other celebs, get a big head and believe for a few months that I was destined for celebrity, Letterman appearances. Etc. The rather brutal intervening years have taught me that, though there’s nothing de facto wrong with that stuff, it’s not for me, simply because it’s low-calorie and unstimulating and also highly narcotic. McInerney’s big job now is acting as a custodian for the statue of himself that celebrity has constructed.
Alone in the summer heat of the Illinois flatlands, Wallace tried to make life as much like Syracuse as he could. He found tennis courts, a gym, a therapist, and a substance abuse recovery group. The group Wallace liked met in a church on Oakland Avenue at noon. It was made up mostly of working-class people. He was a surprise to them. When he walked in for the first time, in his torn T-shirt, work boots, and bandana, several members took him for homeless. Soon he had become a literal fixture there — he took the same seat at every meeting. The members loved the way he talked — for many he was the most articulate person they had ever met — and felt his elaborate, run-on narratives of the daily battle to maintain the equanimity that kept him sober expressed what they were thinking, only better. As ever, it fell to them to tell him not to live so much in his head. They made fun of him for being too analytical and offered him slogans like “Keep It Simple” and “Be Nice to Myself” and “Stop Trying to Figure Everything Out.” For God, they’d suggest, he should just substitute “Good Orderly Direction.” “A grateful heart will never drink,” they might add. The banality of the responses maddened Wallace, but here he was drug- and alcohol-free after almost four years, thanks to people like them. “It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers,” he would write in Infinite Jest. “I don’t know how recovery works,” he would tell friends, “but it works.” He was always available to help other members with both spiritual and practical questions, rewriting their job applications or professional correspondence. He attended a second recovery meeting at the Lighthouse Institute, where he sponsored addicts who had been ordered by courts to attend a recovery program. It came under the rubric of “pay it forward” that he had learned at Granada House: if you help someone, when you need help someone will be there for you too.
The other members began looking after him in turn. They saw him — and he played to this — as a sort of holy fool. A former judge started giving Wallace his cast-off clothes. The daughter of another recovery member brushed Wallace’s long, unruly hair (he refused her offer of conditioner). If his computer crashed, someone from recovery came and rescued his files. Familyless, he was adoptable — one couple hung a stocking for him every Christmas. Wallace went through a number of sponsors until he found one he liked, a man who had entered the program after falling out of a tree while high. The accident had broken his back, made it necessary for him to use two metal canes. He was incontinent and had to go to the “john,” Wallace wrote a friend in a later letter, “like every fifteen minutes.” But Wallace used him to tamp down his own self-absorption. “He’s extremely helpful,” he explained, “as just a plain nonverbal model of what Real problems are when I think I’ve got Problems.”
Since junior year of college, Wallace had never been without a girlfriend for very long. These women filled an important gap in his life. They were the clock by which he noted time’s passing and the mirror in which he examined his character. When he was having problems with Karr back in Syracuse, for instance, he had written to Franzen, “I’m having to countenance the fact that I just may be constitutionally unable to sustain an intimate connection with a girl, which means I’m either terribly shallow or mentally ill or both.”
As the summer wore on, Wallace was still getting his ex out of his system. His male friends in Syracuse had been enormously relieved when ISU had offered him a job; to them the Karr relationship seemed wholly dysfunctional. “Run for your life,” his sponsor, John F., remembers telling him. He now affected to have left Karr behind in letters to friends. “Unpacking, trying to write, chasing tail,” he boasted to Morrow, summarizing his activities his first summer in Illinois. But in fact several months after arriving many of his thoughts were still of Karr; he bought her expensive lingerie and perfume and mailed it anonymously. He even bought the right to name a star after her. He wrote in a notebook, “Now she’s in the sky and a little bit of her will always be overhead.” He sent her the box with the certificate. Around the same time, he wrote a Syracuse friend that he was “off sex” and promised himself he would never be in such a poisonous relationship again. “I won’t sleep with anybody who lives far away anymore,” he wrote her, “whom I can’t be with — I hope — from now on.”
Fortunately, his department head, Charlie Harris, and Harris’s wife, Victoria, also a professor of English at ISU, stepped in. Victoria had their twenty-four-year-old daughter Kymberly in mind for Wallace. Kymberly was an actress and aspiring playwright who lived in Chicago. On Wallace’s first visit Victoria had shown him her picture. “Isn’t she beautiful?” she’d said. “You should marry her.” The two began corresponding, and soon Harris, leaving behind personal problems in Chicago, had moved home. Wallace and her mother invited her out the next day to a movie. He chose Jurassic Park. The three went to downtown Normal’s theater to watch the blockbuster. Wallace was, as ever, also doing research. Steven Spielberg, the movie’s director, was someone Wallace had always been interested in. Though he’d seen the movie twice before in Syracuse, he enjoyed it again, getting, as he would say, his “dose.” Kymberly, on the other hand, had been so bored she’d walked out. Afterward, they went to the Gallery, a club where Wallace refused to join her on the dance floor. Despite their differences the two began hanging out; Wallace gave her sections of Infinite Jest to woo her, and soon they were a couple. In the empty Midwest, she felt, he was the most interesting man she knew; Wallace enjoyed her vibrancy and physicality.