Two Degrees of Separation from David Foster Wallace

I’d completely forgotten it was Halloween weekend and therefore was completely unprepared for the costumes and the chaos in Grand Central Station when I got into the city yesterday. Many of the costumes were bizarre and unsettling. Is this the channeling of some kind of collective unrest because it’s an election year?

The subway into Brooklyn took me past the stop I used to get off at to visit Alice Turner.

Alice turns up a lot in the David Foster Wallace bio. A prominent secondary character. DFW broke up his first engagement by sleeping with her, and she served as his literary mentor for many years, writing him chastising letters when the dialogue in a story he sold to Playboy turned out to include large chunks of dialogue he’d plagiarized from the David Letterman Show.

Since Alice was also my literary mentor – she bought the very first story I ever wrote at Clarion for what seemed to me at the time to be an ungodly amount of money – and was always incredibly generous to me, putting me up in her beautiful apartment on numerous occasions, I supposed that gives me a kind of two degrees of separation relationship with DFW.

It’s very odd to think of the always soignée and impeccably groomed Alice naked with her arms around a thrusting DFW. Alice was so fastidious; DFW was notorious for sweating a lot and in all his photographs, he just kinda looks like he smelled funny.

I wonder about that excessive sweating thing.

DFW was one of the very few humans that I might agree suffered from some endogenous biochemical form of depression. With most people, I think depression is situational – an extremely unpopular theory, I know, I know! But I truly believe that if these people were able to remove themselves from the situations that make them unhappy, they’d be asymptomatic. For various reasons, most of them are stuck, so big pharma becomes richer and richer.

DFW’s excessive sweating, though, might seem to indicate that something was off in his hypothalamus. And that would throw the rest of his endocrines off, too. And endocrines are brain chemicals; they control moods.

Anyhoo, if Alice boffed DFW, she almost certainly boffed Lucius, too.

As well as I knew Lucius, that thought actually creeps me out.

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Arrived at R____’s apartment. When R____ and I talked a week ago, we debated the history of the building she lives in with its oddly apportioned rooms.

But standing in front of the building this time, I could see very clearly that it was an old brownstone that someone had slapped really hideous siding on to. There’s a massive, unusable fireplace in the living room that looks to have been hewn from some exotic hardwood and has those pineapple carvings that were so very popular in the early 20th century. That seems to bear out my theory. Also a strange little skylight with old-fashioned, triangular glass panes. So, yes: an old brownstone. That might explain the gnarled old apple tree I saw last week, too. So very Tom’s Midnight Garden!

R____ also left me money. Which really floored me. As if getting to occupy a lovely little nest in NYC for a week and hang out with a most sweet-tempered cat was not reward enough. It’s exactly the amount of money that I overspent on my care package to Max, so I’m looking at it as a gift from the universe.

“Hello, Opal!” I told the kitty when I brought in my suitcase. “Your two great fearsome feline allies, Meezer the Pouncer and Sir Rutger L’Orange, send you greetings from the North!”

Opal immediately meowed and jumped on to my lap.