Wallace cast around for someone to go with him, asking Costello, Charlie and Victoria Harris, and in the end chose their daughter, whom he then barely knew. In August, in the sweltering Midwest summer heat, he and Kymberley drove to Springfield, the state capital. At the fair, they visited the Horse Complex and the Swine Barn, and then went on to the amusement ride section. Harris took a ride called the Zipper, a steel cage that spun at the end of a long elevated arm. Wallace was not thrilled to watch his new friend get lifted away, and was thoroughly mortified when the ride operators — he called them “carnies”—kept flipping the cage around to make Harris’s skirt fall up. When they finally brought her back to earth, Wallace was furious. He wanted to press charges. Harris told him it was no big deal, but Wallace remained upset. Harris went home the next day, and Wallace continued his reporting. He chatted with the local evangelists and watched a car race without interest (“Certain cars pass other cars, and some people cheer when they do”). A dance competition touched him more deeply, when he saw how sincere was the pleasure the ordinary midwestern couples took in it, a moment worthy of Sullivan’s Travels.
Back home in Bloomington, surrounded by his Infinite Jest research material, he sat down to try to organize his notes. He put a layer of myth over his experience. In Wallace’s telling, the Illinois fair grew increasingly Boschian as the days went on. Drawing on his gift for comic exaggeration and not particularly worried by veracity, by the end, bald men farted as they arm-wrestled, vomit spewed from the mouths of patrons being spun in the Ring of Fire, and, at the “Illinois State Jr. Baton-Twirling Finals,” the insanity reaches a kind of climax as
a dad standing up near the top of the stands with a Toshiba video camera to his eye takes a tomahawking baton directly in the groin and falls over on somebody eating a funnel cake, and they take out good bits of several rows below them.
Harris became an old heartthrob, someone who “worked detasseling summer corn with me in high school.” She was in real life neither “a Native Companion,” as Wallace called her in the article, nor a graduate of Urbana High — that was more Susie Perkins or his sister. And when it was time for Native Companion to speak, Wallace gave Harris the voice of the woman whose star still twinkled over his head. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Native Companion reproofs the upset Wallace after being exposed during the Zipper ride, “it was fun — son of a bitch spun that car sixteen times…. Buy me some pork skins, you dipshit.”
Wallace took pleasure in writing the piece. For him, the challenge in nonfiction was always what to leave out, but the state fair was a subject with natural boundaries and one that invited a light style that moved to bigger, more serious questions: What made Americans so obsessed with entertainment? Could whatever void they were trying to plug ever be filled? It helped that at the fair the people were gluttons and the animals miserable. It was another chance to assert the thesis of Infinite Jest, to anatomize the unending American quest for distraction, the failure of his countryman, as Remy Marathe, the Quebecois terrorist agent,2 says in Infinite Jest, “Choose with care. You are what you love. No?”3
Shortly after, Wallace sent in his long draft, several times the possible length of the piece. Colin Harrison, the editor, set to work cutting with Wallace. The process reminded Harrison of a game of tennis, the prospective edits turning into “here’s-what-I-think, what-do-you-think rallies that sometimes went on for many minutes,” as he wrote in a remembrance, and ended with a cut accepted or partially accepted or traded off for a cut somewhere else. Wallace was strategic and aggressive, but when he lost a point, he moved on. Together they shortened the piece almost by half. Harrison, an experienced editor, was aware that Wallace sometimes embellished. At one point, he asked Wallace if a vial of crack that Wallace reported had fallen out of the pocket of a young man on the Zipper had really “direct-hit a state trooper alertly eating a Lemon Push-Up on the midway below.” Wallace was coy. “I’m going to give you this one,” Harrison remembers saying. He wanted Wallace to pursue his comic vision. “I drank the Kool-Aid,” he recalls. So if Wallace wrote it, it aided the narrative energy, and could not be disproven when the piece was fact-checked, it could run.4, 5
The article, which came out the next July, also unveiled a new Wallace to readers, neither the creator of elaborate fictional worlds nor the Cavellian essayist but someone more of a piece with the characters in his fiction. At one point, Wallace describes being too afraid to go into the Poultry Building, explaining that as a child he had once been attacked by a chicken “without provocation, flown at and pecked by a renegade fowl, savagely, just under the right eye.” The story was likely made up, but its exaggerated stance toward the traumas of childhood captured something readers began to want from him. They, too, this affluent and confused generation, had felt the large reverberations inherent in small events. That Wallace was a slightly more neurotic version of his reader helped forge a bond, a bond that would carry over when he published his very big novel.
For the fall 1993 semester, Wallace was assigned a fiction workshop for undergraduates and another for more advanced writers, mostly graduate students. He taught around thirty pupils in all. He gave his classes in Stevenson Hall, a midcentury building that hummed with overhead lights. Claiming that his time as a security guard at Lotus had made fluorescent lighting unbearable for him, he asked his students to bring in lamps, creating a cocktail lounge atmosphere in the classroom. Then, with the excuse that there were not enough plugs for them, he moved the class to his home, where the students made themselves comfortable amid The Compendium of Drug Therapy and Psychiatric Nursing and wondered at the junior circuit tennis championship chart on his wall. In his bandana and untied work boots, a cup at hand to spit into, he was like no professor they had ever met. During smoking breaks, he would go to the bathroom and brush his teeth.
Wallace’s informal, rule-bending appearance was misleading. He had revived as a teacher since Emerson, just as he had revived as a writer, and ran his class tightly, a pedagogic hardass. He penalized for lateness and for absence and grammar and spelling errors, trying to wean a lazy generation from dangling participles and subject/verb disagreements. “Don’t give your talent the finger,” he would tell the students. For tricky grammar questions, he would step out of his office and call his mother — even when they were supposedly not speaking, they could speak about this.
In his undergraduate class, Wallace was kind to the clueless but cruel to anyone with pretensions. When a student claimed that her sentences were “pretty,” he scribbled lines from her manuscript on the blackboard and challenged, “Which of you thinks this is pretty? Is this pretty? And this?” He continued to battle any young man who reminded him of his younger self. When one student wowed his classmates with a voicy, ironic short story, he took him outside the classroom and told him he had “never witnessed a collective dick-sucking like that before.” Wallace promised to prevent the “erection of an ego-machine” and strafed the student with criticism for the rest of the semester. The young man, Ben Slotky, found it odd that Wallace kept inviting him to play tennis though he did not know how. Wallace took pleasure in telling undergraduates who expected creative writing to be a gut that they should get out before they learned they were wrong. No one could call themselves a writer, he added, until he or she had written at least fifty stories.