A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace Read Free Book Online Page B

unsheltered asses. The worst was spring, boys’ high school tennis season, when the
     nets would stand out stiff as proud flags and an errant ball would blow clear to the easternmost fence, interrupting play
     on the next several courts. During a bad blow some of us would get rope out and tell Rob Lord, who was our fifth man in singles
     and spectrally thin, that we were going to have to tie him down to keep him from becoming a projectile. Autumn, usually about
     half as bad as spring, was a low constant roar and the massive clicking sound of continents of dry leaves being arranged into
     force-curves—I’d heard no sound remotely like this megaclicking until I heard, at nineteen, on New Brunswick’s Bay of Fundy,
     my first high-tide wave break and get sucked back out over a shore of polished pebbles. Summers were manic and gusty, then
     often around August deadly calm. The wind would just die some August days, and it was no relief at all; the cessation drove
     us nuts. Each August, we realized afresh how much the sound of wind had become part of the soundtrack to life in Philo. The
     sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural
     glitter of all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal. It was months after I moved to western MA
     before I could really sleep in the pussified whisper of New England’s wind-sound.
    To your average outsider, Central Illinois looks ideal for sports. The ground, seen from the air, strongly suggests a board
     game: anally precise squares of dun or khaki cropland all cut and divided by plumb-straight tar roads (in all farmland, roads
     still seem more like impediments than avenues). In winter, the terrain always looks like Mannington bathroom tile, white quadrangles
     where bare (snow), black where trees and scrub have shaken free in the wind. From planes, it always looks to me like Monopoly
     or Life, or a lab maze for rats; then, from ground level, the arrayed fields of feed corn or soybeans, fields furrowed into
     lines as straight as only an Allis Chalmers and sextant can cut them, look laned like sprint tracks or Olympic pools, hashmarked
     for serious ball, replete with the angles and alleys of serious tennis. My part of the Midwest always looks laid down special,
     as if planned.
    The terrain’s strengths are also its weaknesses. Because the land seems so even, designers of clubs and parks rarely bother
     to roll it flat before laying the asphalt for tennis courts. The result is usually a slight list that only a player who spends
     a lot of time on the courts will notice. Because tennis courts are for sun- and eye-reasons always laid lengthwise north-south,
     and because the land in Central Illinois rises very gently as one moves east toward Indiana and the subtle geologic summit
     that sends rivers doubled back against their own feeders somewhere in the east of that state, the court’s forehand half, for
     a rightie facing north, always seems physically uphill from the backhand—at a tournament in Richmond IN, just over the Ohio
     line, I noticed the tilt was reversed. The same soil that’s so full of humus farmers have to be bought off to keep markets
     unflooded keeps clay courts chocked with jimson and thistle and volunteer corn, and it splits asphalt courts open with the
     upward pressure of broadleaf weeds whose pioneer-stock seeds are unthwarted by a half-inch cover of sealant and stone. So
     that all but the very best maintained courts in the most affluent Illinois districts are their own little rural landscapes,
     with tufts and cracks and underground-seepage puddles being part of the lay that one plays. A court’s cracks always seem to
     start off to the side of the service box and meander in and back toward the service line. Foliated in pockets, the black cracks,
     especially against the forest green that contrasts with the barn red of the space outside the lines to