Hustling by Evan Wright

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In the mid-1990's when I was an editor at Hustler magazine I served as guide to David Foster Wallace for an article he wrote about the porn industry. (Wallace's article was originally published in Premier magazine under the title "Neither Adult nor Entertainment." It was reprinted in somewhat different form in his essay collection Consider the Lobster, with the title "Big Red Son.") It was Wallace who inadvertantly taught me a new way to write notes when researching a story.

My meeting with Wallace was set up by Glenn Kenny, an editor at Premier (now with a website t/k), who wanted me to help show Wallace around the porn industry's annual convention and awards show in Las Vegas. My main job at Hustler where I served as Entertainment Editor was to cover the porn industry and review XXX-videos. Because of my lofty position--Hustler's "Fully Erect" film rating, which I had the power to bestow, was one of most sought after ratings in the raunch-film industry--I knew all the players and sketchy characters (of whom I was one) in the business.

But when Kenny originally called to ask me to help out with Wallace I was deeply annoyed. I had hoped someone from a mainstream publication would ask me to write this article. Wallace was at the height of his fame, the recent recipient of a MacArthur "genius" Award, featured in Time magazine as the great new hope for American letters. Why did this guy need my help? I was the one trapped in the porn ghetto hoping desperately to escape it.

I was infuriated when Kenny called with the request, but of course given my low self-esteem (fueled in part by my job at Hustler) and timidity-bordering-on-stark-terror when dealing with magazine editors, I passive-aggressively feigned happiness over the phone and said something like, "Wow. Sounds like a lot of fun. I love Wallace."

That evening I had dinner with a friend who happened to be reading Wallace's, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. My friend raved about Wallace, with that glazed-eye look stalkery literary fans have when discussing their favorite Greatest Author in the Universe. "Who is this clown?" I wondered. I grabbed a copy of Wallace's book, and read nearly all of it in the next 24 hours. It was worse than I had imagined. Not only was he am insanely good writer, I enjoyed his company--his presence in the pieces--as I read them.

When I met Wallace things went from bad to worse. He was super nice, but shy, almost vulnerable in a way that was all the more endearing given his celebrity-writer status. How could I resist the guy? He laughed at my jokes. To my disgust, I found myself liking him.

Then, I began to pity Wallace. As I took him around the convention, got him into parties, introduced him to the luminaries of the business--Max Hardcore, gang-bang queen Jasmin St. Claire--Wallace seemed overwhelmed with shyness. Often, I would find him sitting by himself on the floor, back against the wall, writing in a legal pad.

"What are you doing?" I finally asked him.

"Um, I sort of write out pieces of the story as I go," he replied (as I remember this many years later). I looked down on his pad and saw that in fact it was filled with dense blocks of handwriting.

How can you get a story, sitting on the floor, in your own weird genius-boy bubble, not really talking to people, just looking lost and maybe a little freaked-out in your bandana (always wrapped around Wallace's head in those days)?

I knew his story would blow. You just can't get a story like that. At least, that was my belief. You have to live in the story first, immerse yourself in the subjects, fill your notepad with short quotes, brief observations, then write it later on, after you have left.

Wallace had reversed the whole process. He seemed to be writing it from the moment he arrived. He never seemed to immerse himself in it. I chalked this up to a failure of nerve, or maybe he was so set in his prejudices, he knew what he was going to write before he arrived.

I dreaded reading the piece. When it came out, I was stunned. It was as if the guy who had sat on the floor, hiding beneath his bandana-hat, had astral-projected himself across the convention, listening to every conversation that mattered, absorbing every detail, capturing the essences of all whom he met. Though I had been there with him, and lived in the business for years, his article (in which I was included as the character Wallace named "Harold Hecuba") made me see the industry differently. It captured truths about the people in it I had never considered before, though I knew them far better than Wallace.

I spent several days trying to analyze how Wallace did what he did. I called him up and asked him about his writing process. Aside from his freakish talent, I began to suspect that Wallace's manner of taking notes figured in the outcome of his work. As I reconstructed my observations of him, it seemed to me that Wallace had simultaneously reported on the events unfolding around him and reported on his own reactions to them. It was this second part that I had never considered.

Of course, any time you write a piece, even if there is no first-person in it, you end up filtering it through your own reactions to the people and events your are covering. But I had always saved this filtering process for the writing of the piece, days or weeks later. It seemed to me that by pulling himself back occasionally from the scenes he was reporting on and recording his thoughts in detail on his legal pad, Wallace arrived at a fresher more original take on the material. I began to understand that, reporting a story is as much about capturing the immediacy of your subjects as well as the immediacy of your reactions to them.

I've never run this by Wallace. I don't know if he feels it's accurate. But based on my observations of him at work, I concluded that the soul of the story first comes to life in your notebook. For this reason, you have to really respect the note-taking process.

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