What didn’t make it into ‘Infinite Jest’ (via Forever DFW)

Bodies bodies everywhere. A tennis ball is the ultimate body, kid. We’re coming to the crux of what I have to try to impart to you before we get out there and start actuating this fearsome potential of yours. Jim, a tennis ball is the ultimate body. Perfectly round. Even distribution of mass. But empty inside, utterly, a vacuum. Susceptible to whim, spin, to force—used well or poorly. It will reflect your own character. Characterless itself. Pure potential. Have a look at a ball. Get a ball from the cheap green plastic laundry basket of old used balls I keep there by the propane torches and use to practice the occasional serve, Jimbo. Attaboy. Now look at the ball. Heft it. Feel the weight. Here, I’ll … tear the ball … open. Whew. See? Nothing in there but evacuated air that smells like a kind of rubber hell. Empty. Pure potential. Notice I tore it open along the seam. It’s a body. You’ll learn to treat it with consideration, son, some might say a kind of love, and it will open for you, do your bidding, be at your beck and soft lover’s call. The thing truly great players with hale bodies who overshadow all others have is a way with the ball that’s called, and keep in mind the garage door and broiler, touch. Touch the ball. Now that’s … that’s the touch of a player right there. And as with the ball so with that big thin slumped overtall body, sir Jimbo. I’m predicting it right now. I see the way you’ll apply the lessons of today to yourself as a physical body. No more carrying your head at the level of your chest under round slumped shoulders. No more tripping up. No more overshot reaches, shattered plates, tilted lampshades, slumped shoulders and caved-in chest, the simplest objects twisting and resistant in your big thin hands, boy. Imagine what it feels like to be this ball, Jim. Total physicality. No revving head. Complete presence. Absolute potential, sitting there potentially absolute in your big pale slender girlish hand so young its thumb’s unwrinkled at the joint. My thumb’s wrinkled at the joint, Jim, some might say gnarled. Have a look at this thumb right here. But I still treat it as my own. I give it its due. You want a drink of this, son? I think you’re ready for a drink of this. No? Nein? Today, Lesson One out there, you become, for better or worse, Jim, a man. A player. A body in commerce with bodies. A helmsman at your own vessel’s tiller. A machine in the ghost, to quote a phrase. Ah. A ten-year-old freakishly tall bow-tied and thick-spectacled citizen of the…. I drink this, sometimes, when I’m not actively working, to help me accept the same painful things it’s now time for me to tell you, son. Jim. Are you ready? I’m telling you this now because you have to know what I’m about to tell you if you’re going to be the more than near-great top-level tennis player I know you’re going to be eventually very soon. Brace yourself. Son, get ready. It’s glo … gloriously painful. Have just maybe a taste, here. This flask is silver. Treat it with due care. Feel its shape. The near-soft feel of the warm silver and the calfskin sheath that covers only half its flat rounded silver length. An object that rewards a considered touch. Feel the slippery heat? That’s the oil from my fingers. My oil, Jim,

Infinite Jest, p. 159

Image from the David Foster Wallace Archive at the Harry Ransom Center (Inside cover of David Foster Wallace’s annotated copy of The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead.)

Related: Infinite Jest, page 159, Infinite Jest, page 158, Infinite Jest, page 157

know you know. I know you’ve looked at it before, many times. Now … now see it, Jim. See it as body. The dull-colored handle, the clockwise latch, the bits of bug trapped when the paint was wet and now still protruding. The cracks from this merciless sunlight out here. Original color anyone’s guess, boyo. The concave inlaid squares, how many, bevelled at how many levels at the borders, that pass for decoration. Count the squares, maybe … let’s see you treat this door like a lady, son. Twisting the latch clockwise with one hand that’s right and…. I guess you’ll have to pull harder, Jim. Maybe even harder than that. Let me … that’s the way she wants doing, Jim. Have a look. Jim, this is where we keep this 1956 Mercury Montclair you know so well. This Montclair weights 3,900 pounds, give or take. It has eight cylinders and a canted windshield and aerodynamic fins, Jim, and has a maximum flat-out road-speed of 95 m.p.h. per. I described the shade of the paint job of this Montclair to the dealer when I first saw it as bit-lip red. Jim, it’s a machine. It will do what it’s made for and do it perfectly, but only when stimulated by someone who’s made it his business to know its tricks and seams, as a body. The stimulator of this car must know the car, Jim, feel it, be inside much more than just the … the compartment. It’s an object, Jim, a body, but don’t let it fool you, sitting here, mute. It will respond. If given its due. With artful care. It’s a body and will respond with a well-oiled purr once I get some decent oil in her and all Mercuryish at up to 95 big ones per for just that driver who treats its body like his own, who feels the big steel body he’s inside, who quietly and unnoticed feels the nubbly plastic of the grip of the shift up next to the wheel when he shifts just as he feels the skin and flesh, the muscle and sinew and bone wrapped in gray spiderwebs of nerves in the blood-fed hand just as he feels the plastic and metal and flange and teeth, the pistons and rubber and rods of the amber-fueled Montclair, when he shifts. The bodily red of a well-bit lip, parping along at a silky 80-plus per. Jim, a toast to our knowledge of bodies. To high-level tennis on the road of life. Ah. Oh.

Son, you’re ten, and this is hard news for somebody ten, even if you’re almost five-eleven, a possible pituitary freak. Son, you’re a body, son. That quick little scientific-prodigy’s mind she’s so proud of and won’t quit twittering about: son, it’s just neural spasms, those thoughts in your mind are just the sound of your head revving, and head is still just body, Jim. Commit this to memory. Head is body. Jim, brace yourself against my shoulders here for this hard news, at ten: you’re a machine a body an object, Jim, no less than this rutilant Montclair, this coil of hose here or that rake there for the front yard’s gravel or sweet Jesus this nasty fat spider flexing in its web over there up next to the rake-handle, see it? See it? Latrodectus mactans, Jim. Widow. Grab this racquet and move gracefully and feelingly over there and kill that widow for me, young sir Jim. Go on. Make it say ‘K.’ Take no names. There’s a lad. Here’s to a spiderless section of communal garage. Ah.

Infinite Jest, p. 159

Image from the David Foster Wallace Archive at the Harry Ransom Center (Inside cover of David Foster Wallace’s annotated copy of Ratner’s Star by Don DeLillo.)

Related: Infinite Jest, page 158, Infinite Jest, page 157

roared by. Jim, she never intuited the gentle and cunning economy behind this man’s quote harsh sloppy unstudied approach to objects. The way he’d oh so clearly practiced a chair’s back-leg tilt over and over. The way he’d studied objects with a welder’s eye for those strongest centered seams which when pressured by the swinishest slouch still support. She never . . . never sees that Marlon Brando felt himself as body so keenly he’d no need for manner. She never sees that in his quote careless way he actually really touched whatever he touched as if it were part of him. Of his own body. The world he only seemed to manhandle was for him sentient, feeling. And no one . . . and she never understood that. Sour sodding grapes indeed. You can’t envy someone who can be that way. Respect, maybe. Maybe wistful respect, at the very outside. She never saw that Brando was playing the equivalent of high-level quality tennis across sound stages all over both coasts, Jim, is what he was really doing. Jim, he moved like a careless fingerling, one big muscle, muscularly naïve, but always, notice, a fingerling at the center of a clear current. That kind of animal grace. The bastard wasted no motion, is what made it art, this brutish no-care. His was a tennis player’s dictum: touch things with consideration and they will be yours; you will own them; they will move or stay still or move for you; they will lie back and part their legs and yield up their innermost seams to you. Teach you all their tricks. He knew what the Beats know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what’s around you. I know you don’t understand. Yet. I know that goggle-eyed stare. I know what it means all too well, son. It’s no matter. You will. Jim, I know what I know.

I’m predicting it right here, young sir Jim. You are going to be a great tennis player. I was near-great. You will be truly great. You will be the real thing. I know I haven’t taught you to play yet, I know this is your first time, Jim, Jesus, relax, I know. It doesn’t affect my predictive sense. You will overshadow and obliterate me. Today you are starting, and within a very few years I know all too well you will be able to beat me out there, and on the day you first beat me I may well weep. It’ll be out of a sort of selfless pride, an obliterated father’s terrible joy. I feel it, Jim, even here, standing on hot gravel and looking: in your eyes I see the appreciation of angle, a prescience re spin, the way you already adjust your overlarge and apparently clumsy child’s body in the chair so it’s at the line of best force against dish, spoon, lens-grinding appliance, a big book’s stiff bend. You do it unconsciously. You have no idea. But I watch, very closely. Don’t ever think I don’t, son.

You will be poetry in motion, Jim, size and posture and all. Don’t let the posture-problem fool you about your true potential out there. Take it from me, for a change. The trick will be transcending that overlarge head, son. Learning to move just the way you already sit still. Living in your body.

This is the communal garage, son. And this is our door in the garage. I

Infinite Jest, p. 158

Image from the David Foster Wallace Archive at the Harry Ransom Center (Inside cover of David Foster Wallace’s annotated copy of Don DeLillo’s Players.)

Related: Infinite Jest, page 157

Jim not that way Jim. That’s no way to treat a garage door, bending stiffly down at the waist and yanking at the handle so the door jerks up and out jerky and hard and you crack your shins and my ruined knees, son. Let’s see you bend at the healthy knees. Let’s see you hook a soft hand lightly over the handle feeling its subtle grain and pull just as exactly gently as will make it come to you. Experiment, Jim. See just how much force you need to start the door easy, let it roll up out open on its hidden greasy rollers and pulleys in the ceiling’s set of spiderwebbed beams. Think of all garage doors as the well-oiled open-out door of a broiler with hot meat in, heat roiling out, hot. Needless and dangerous ever to yank, pull, shove, thrust. Your mother is a shover and thruster, son. She treats bodies outside herself without respect or due care. She’s never learned that treating things in the gentlest most relaxed way is also treating them and your own body in the most efficient way. It’s Marlon Brando’s fault, Jim. Your mother back in California before you were born, before she became a devoted mother and long-suffering wife and breadwinner, son, your mother had a bit part in a Marlon Brando movie. Her big moment. Had to stand there in saddle shoes and bobby sox and ponytail and put her hands over her ears as really loud motorbikes roared by. A major thespian moment, believe you me. She was in love from afar with this fellow Marlon Brando, son. Who? Who. Jim, Marlon Brando was the archetypal new-type actor who ruined it looks like two whole generations’ relations with there own bodies and the everyday objects and bodies around them. No? Well it was because of Brando you were opening that garage door like that, Jimbo. The disrespect gets learned and passed on. Passed down. You’ll know Brando when you watch him, and you’ll have learned to fear him. Brando, Jim, Jesus, B-r-a-n-d-o. Brando the new archetypal tough-guy rebel and slob type, leaning back on his chair’s rear legs, coming crooked through doorways, slouching against everything in sight, trying to dominate objects, showing no artful respect or care, yanking things toward him like a moody child and using them up and tossing them crudely aside so they miss the wastebasket and lie there, ill-used. With the over-clumsy impetuous movements and postures of a moody infant. Your mother is of that new generation that moves against life’s grain, across its warp and baffles. She may have loved Marlon Brando, Jim, but she didn’t understand him, is what’s ruined her for everyday arts like broilers and garage doors and even low-level public-park knock-around tennis. Ever see your mother with a broiler door? It’s carnage, Jim, it’s to cringe to see it, and the poor dumb thing thinks it’s tribute to this slouching slob-type she loved as he

Infinite Jest, p. 157

Image from the David Foster Wallace Archive at the Harry Ransom Center (Inside cover of David Foster Wallace’s annotated copy of Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life.)