As a treat to myself for finishing David Wallace’s difficult book I bought another difficult book, JR by William Gaddis, 760 pages of pure dialogue, a book that influenced Wallace. I’d tried reading Gaddis’s first book but gave up and got angry. Now here I was buying another. But I wanted to peel back Wallace’s influences, limb by limb.

First I took myself out to dinner, back to the Caribbean place Paseo. They put pineapple and onions and peppers in their dishes, a lot of fish and sausage, and make it blazing hot. I sit in the same spot in the corner looking out at the shit strip mall but I’m transported by the island music, the Spanish-speaking staff, the food. Wiping my nose from the heat. That rust orange chili oil coating everything. As more people file in to the small lobby I cradle my bowl, bent over it like a dog. I love big spicy dishes with a lot of bright colors like the paella my friend Laurent made in France in a pan so big a toddler could swim in it. It’s almost cold for May but when I leave I’m heated from the inside, cool sweat on my brow.

It literally sounded like a cricket in the air conditioner of my car. They’d explained the problem at the dealership but it cost several hundred dollars to fix and I said forget it I can deal with the sound. Whenever they explain car problems I immediately glaze over. They use complex parts names and explain the interrelationships between things but I will never understand.

Sometimes the cricket sound distracts, other times it blends in with the car stereo. It was the same song I heard on the radio at like 4:30 in the morning. Which wouldn’t be weird except this song was one of about 16,000 I’m playing on my iPod in alphabetical order by song title and it’s not what you’d call a popular song. It’s by three rappers named Madvillain, Madlib, and MF DOOM and it came out in 2004, “Rainbows.” Heard it? Probably not. I think that’s weird, the same song was on the radio earlier. Stuff like that used to happen to me more but doesn’t now, the cosmic coincidences. It’s actually not coincidence, it’s just the way the world really is though we rarely notice. We’re the ones out of sync.

The book was so heavy I almost needed both hands to carry it to the counter but as I did I tried to look the part of someone who would read something important like that, cranky and unsmiling. Gaddis did the all-dialogue thing at times in his other book too. You have to really pay attention without any cues or navigation. And often he doesn’t indicate who’s talking so there’s that, too. I hadn’t written dialogue in a long time so maybe reading 760 pages would help.

Both the pets have a little welcome home routine they do when I return: the dog runs to me panting and fawning, the cat scampers out on the rug then kneads. The motion of him kneading looks like he’s knitting. It’s like their little interstitial for what’s to come next. The age conversion chart at the vet’s office put Ginger at about 80. So the dog has that elderly, forgetful quality and the cat, a pre-pubescent boy energy. And yes they spar.

I went back to the pharmacy to get the foam stuff for my scalp and as I was using the self-scan to pay I overheard a conversation no one should have to hear but everyone did, a store management discussion between a guy and a woman, the two either peers or upper management judging by their dialogue (the store’s poor sales performance, where it ranked out of thousands of west coast locations, how much they were losing, etc.). All from a corner office that said PHOTO SERVICE, the kind of instant photo side gig most drug stores offered before people stopped caring about printing their photos. They were behind a thin facade but because there was no ceiling over the office their dialogue was projected like a TV. You couldn’t see them, but by their voices I formed an instant image and the two became fictional characters in a heated scene.

The man sounded thick around the middle and balding. The woman was Indian and sounded like she’d had too much caffeine. I normally like the Indian lilting intonations but hers was shrill, too high and too fast. She was in problem-solving mode, talking over him, trying to assert herself. He’d counter with lurid details of how bad things really were. She must have been new. I thought about getting my phone out to record it, dwelling by the self-scan listening after I’d paid. It would have made for good fictional dialogue though it was not fiction, nor was it any good.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, David Foster Wallace, journal writing, Memoir, William Gaddis