Fighting to write: a short reminiscence of D.F. Wallace.

Between April Fool's Day and the Fourth of July, 1989, I wrote a small book with David Foster Wallace.

Wallace and I were splitting a two-bedroom flop in the soot-path of the Monsignor McGrath Highway, Boston. Wallace studied philosophy at Harvard. I practiced something not dissimilar at a securities firm downtown. Bush was president, TV sucked, and the natives were restless.

When you live in squalor, everybody gets the same flu. Our germ arrived, as most germs do, from New York City. An old beatnik buddy of mine, freeloading over the weekend, carried the infection in his luggage. I remember shooting hoops a raw Saturday at Saint Anthony of Padua's, wiping our runny noses on an increasingly slimy, rocklike basketball. Back at our tenement, the freeloader blasted an unmarked tape: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by something called Public Enemy.

That was the summer Tone Loc's "Funky Cold Medina" hit number one, the fastest-selling single ever, going triple platinum in August. There was live rap at the Middle East in Central Square. College radio stations, playing chicken with the FCC, aired incitements named "911 Is a Joke" and "Fuck tha Police." Whole afternoons were spoken for among racks of new and used EPs and LPs at Sam Goody's and Underground Sound and four other record stores that no longer exist. Boston was waking up to a nasty little gang war and the BPD was seizing N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton, as if the tape were wanted for murder.

Wallace thought rap the assassin of language, culture, order. He said this as if he were rather fond of the trio, and would miss them when they were dead. But his was an engrossed, doting hatred. He listened to rap five times more intensely than anybody else. Maybe Wallace was rooting for language and culture. Then again, maybe not.

Don't be misled. I wrote a book with David Foster Wallace, but was never his collaborator. Our co-authorship was more like chess by mail. Wallace was up to his butt in Girl with Curious Hair publicity and research for a massive nonfiction piece about porn actors, while more or less getting a Ph.D. in aesthetics. I'd write a thousand words about Dr. King or the Fresh Prince or whatever seemed burningest then, and give my work to Wallace. He would disappear, inhale Pop Tarts, exhale cigarettes, curse his keyboard, and emerge three hours later with an urgent twenty-page reply.

There was no shortage of chaos around 35 Houghton Street, apartment 2. Lost bills went unpaid. The phone rang at 3:00 A.M. and women banged on the back door two hours later. The big books were Vollmann's Rainbow Stories, Bangs's Psychotic Reactions, Didion's Slouching towards Jerusalem, all of which sat stacked, bindings broken, atop ...