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TORNADOES a Midwestern Boyhood by David Foster Wallace

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TORNADOES a Midwestern Boyhood by David Foster Wallace M E M 0 R TENNIS, TRIGONOMETR~ TORNADOES A Midwestern boyhood By David Foster Wallace . '~en I left the boxed township of Between the ages of twelve and fif- truer than most girls my age. What I Illinoisfarmland where I grew up to at- teen I was a near great junior tennis could do-in the words of my town- tend my dad's alma mater in the lurid, player. I cut my competitive teeth ship's juniors' coach, a thin guy who jutting Berkshires of western Mas- beating up on lawyers' and dentists' chewed Red Man and spat into a Fol- sachusetts, I right away developed a kids at little Champaign and Urbana gers can-was "Play the Whole jones for mathematics. I'm starting to country club events, and was soon Court." This was a tennis cliche that see why this was so. College math killing whole summers being driven could mean any number of things. In evokes a Midwesterner's sickness for through dawns to tournaments all over my case, it meant I knew my limita- home. I'd grown up inside vectors, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa. At four- tions and the limitations of the courts lines and lines athwart lines, grids- teen I was ranked seventeenth in the I played on, and adjusted thusly. I was and, on the scale of horizons, broad United States Tennis Association's at my best in bad conditions. curving lines of geographic force, the Western Section ("Western" being Now, conditions in Central Illinois weird topographical drain-swirl of a the creakily ancient USTA's designa- are from a mathematical perspective whole lotof ice-ironed flatland that tion for the Midwest;farther west were interesting and from a tennis point of sits and spins atop plates. I could plot the Southwest, Northwest, and Pa- view bad: summer heat and wet-mit- by eye the area behind and below cific Northwest sections), fourth in ten humidity; moths and crap gnats these broad curves at the seam of land the state of Illinois, and around one forming an asteroid belt around each and sky way before I came to know hundredth in the nation, having flown tall lamp at night, the whole lit court anything as formal as integralsor rates in 1976, at the regional association's surface aflutter with spastic little shad- of change. Calculus was, expense, to the U.S. National Junior ows; mosquitoes that spawn in the quite literally, child's play. Hardcourt Championships in Kala- fields' furrows and in the conferva- mazoo,Michigan,'where in the second chocked ditches that box each field; In late childhood I learned how to round I got my rural ass handed to me and, most of all, wind. play tennis on the blacktop courts of by a California kid named Scott Davis, The people I know from outside it a small public park carved from farm- who's now a marginal figure on the distill the Midwest into blank flat- ness, black land and fields of green land. This was in my home of Philo, pro circuit. My flirtation with tennis excellence fronds or five o'clock stubble, gentle Illinois, a tiny collection of corn silos had way more to do with a weird pro- swells and declivities that make the and war-era Levittown homes whose clivity for intuitive math, and with topology a sadistic exercise in plot- . native residents did little but sell crop the township where I learned and ting quadrics, highway vistas so same insurance and nitrogen fertilizer and trained, than with athletic talent. and dead they drive motorists mad. herbicide, and collect property taxes Even by the standards ~f junior com- Those from Indiana, Wisconsin, and from the young academics at nearby petition, in which everybody's a tight northern Illinois think of their Mid- Champaign-Urbana's university, bud of pure potential, Iwas a pretty west as agronomics and commodities . whose ranks swelled enough in the untalented tennis player. My hand- futures and corn-detasseling and bean- flush late 1960s to make an outlying eye was okay, but I was neither large walking and seed-company caps, ap- oxymoron like "farm and bedroom nor quick, had a near concave chest ple-cheeked Nordic types, cider and community" lucid. and wrists so thin I could bracelet slaughter and football games with David Foster \Vallace is afiction writer living them with a thumb and pinkie, and white fog banks of breath exiting hel- in Boston. could hit a tennis ball no harder or mets. But in the odd central pocket 68 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 1991 that is Champaign-Urbana, Rantoul, nesses. Because the land seems so always sweated so much that I stayed Philo, Mahomet-Seymour, Mattoon, even, designers of clubs and parks fairly well ventilated in all weathers. and Tolono, Midwestern life is in- rarely bother to roll it flat before lay- Oversweating seems an ambivalent formed and deformed by wind. To the ing the asphalt for tennis courts. The blessing, and it didn't exactly do won- west, between us and the Rockies, result is usually a slight list that only ders for my social life in high school, there is basically nothing tall, and a player who spends a lot of time on but it meant I could play for hours on weird zephyrs and stirs join breezes the courts will notice. Since tennis a Turkish-bath July day and not flag a and gusts and thermals and down- courts are for sun-and-eye reasons al- bit so long as I drank water and ate drafts and whatever out over Nebras- wayslaid lengthwise north-south, and salty stuff between matches. I always ka and Kansas, and move east like since the land in Central Illinois ris- looked like a drowned man by about streams into rivers and jets and mili- es very gently as one moves east to- game four, but I didn't cramp, vomit, tary fronts that gather like avalanch- ward Indiana, the court's forehand or pass out, unlike the gleaming Peo- es and roar in reverse ria kids whose hair never down pioneer ox trails to- even lost its part right up ward our own unsheltered until their eyesrolled up in asses. Nobody I knew in their heads and they Philo combed his hair be- pitched forward onto the cause why bother. shimmering concrete. The worst was spring, A bigger asset still was boys' high school tennis that I felt extremely com- season, when the nets fortable inside straight would stand out stiff as lines. This was environ- proud flags and an errant mental. Philo is a cock- ball would blow clear to eyed grid: nine north- the easternmost fence, south streets against six interrupting play on the nort h east-sout hwest, next several courts. dozens and dozens of gor- Summers were manic geous slanted-cruciform and gusty, then often, corners (the east and west around August, deadly intersection-angles' tan- calm. The wind would gents could be evaluated just die, some days, in integrally in terms of their August, and it was no re- secantsl) around a three- lief at all; the cessation intersection central town drove us nuts. We real- common, Most of my ized afresh how much memories of childhood, the wind had become whether of furrowed part of the soundtrack . acreage or a' harvester's to life in Philo. The sentry duty along R.R. sound of wind had be- l04W or the play of sharp come, for me, silence. shadows against the Le- When it went away, I gion Hall softball field's was left with the squeak of the half, for a rightie facing north, always dusk, I could now reconstruct on de- blood in my head and the aural seems physically uphill from the back- mand with an edge and protractor. glitter of all those little eardrum hand. The same soil that's so full of I liked the sharp intercourse of hairs quivering like a humus farmers have to be bought off straight lines more than the other kids T drunk in withdrawal. to keep markets unflooded splits as- I grew up with. I think this is because phalt courts open with the upward they were natives, whereas I wasan in- .0 your average 'outsider, Central pressure of broadleaves whose pio- fantile transplant from Ithaca, New Illinois looks ideal for sports. The neer-stock seeds are unthwarted by a York, where my dad had Ph.Di'd. So' ground, seen from the air, strongly half-inch cover of sealant and stone. I'd known, even as a baby, horizon- suggests a board game: anally precise So all but the very best maintained tally and semiconsciously, something squares of dun or khaki cropland all courts in the most affluent Illinois dis- different, the tall hills and serpentine cut and divided by plumb-straight tar tricts are their own little rural land- one-ways of upstate New York. I'm roads. From ground level, the arrayed' scapes, with tufts and cracks and pretty sure I kept the amorphous mush fields of feed corn and soybeans look underground-seepage puddles being of curves and swells as a contrasting laned like sprint tracks or Olympic part of the lay that one plays. backlight somewhere down in the pools, replete with the angles and al- Tennis-wise, I had three preternat- lizardy part of my brain, because the leys of serious tennis. ural gifts to compensate for not much Philo children I fought and played The terrain's strengths are its weak- physical talent. The first was that I with, kids who knew and had known Illustration by Cary Bartholomew MEMOIR 69 nothing else, saw nothing stark or totiller, a rented, wheelbarrow-shaped, basement.
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