Editor’s note: In 1987, David Foster Wallace published his first novel, The Broom of the System, which the New York Times limned as, “Daring, hilarious...a zany picaresque adventure of contemporary America run amok.” The following year, in the June 1988 issue, Playboy published Late Night, his first piece of fiction in a major magazine. In the magazine’s Playbill section the editors described it as “a haunting short story featuring a certain gap-toothed talk-show host.” Wallace, whom the Associated Press eulogized as “an author of seemingly unstoppable curiosity, imagination and ambition,” died of an apparent suicide on September 12, 2008. He was 46 years old.
I am a woman who appeared in public on Late Night with David Letterman on March 22, 1989.
In the words of my husband, Rudy, I am a woman whose face and attitudes are known to something over half of the measurable population of the United States, whose name is on lips and covers and screens. Whose heart's heart is invisible to the world and unapproachably hidden. Which is what Rudy thought could save me from all this appearance implied.
The week of March 19, 1989, was the week David Letterman's variety-and-talk show featured a series of taped skits on the private activities and pastimes of executives at NBC. My husband and I sacrificed sleep and stayed up late, watching. My husband, whose name in the entertainment industry is better known than his face, had claimed at first to be neutrally excited about the call I'd gotten from Late Night, though by the time he'd been driven home, he was beginning to worry that this particular public appearance could present problems. He knew and feared Letterman; he claimed to know that Letterman loved to savage female guests. It was on a Sunday that Rudy told me we would need to formulate strategies for my appearance on Late Night. March 22nd was to be a Wednesday.
On Monday, viewers accompanied David Letterman as he went deep-sea fishing with the president of NBC's news division. The executive, whom my husband had known and who had a pappus of hair sprouting from each red ear, owned a state-of-the-art boat and rod and reel, and apparently deep-sea fished without hooks. He and Letterman fastened bait to their lines with rubber bands.
“He's waiting for the bastard to even think about saying holy mackerel," my husband said, smoking.
On Tuesday, Letterman perused NBC's chief of creative development's huge collection of refrigerator magnets. He said, “Is this entertainment, ladies and gentlemen? Or what?"
I had the bitterness of a Xanax on my tongue.
We had Ramon haul out some video tapes of old Late Night episodes, and watched them.
“How do you feel?" my husband asked.
In slow motion, Letterman let drop from a roof 20 floors above a cement lot several bottles of champagne, some suit, a plate-glass window and what looked, for only a moment, like a piglet.
“The hokeyness is vital," my husband said as Letterman dropped a squealing piglet off what was obviously only a pretend roof in the studio; we saw something fall a long way from the original roof to hit cement and reveal itself to be a stuffed piglet. “But that doesn't make him benign." My husband got a glimpse of himself in our viewing room's black window. “I don't want you to think the hokeyness is real."
“I thought hokeyness was pretty much by definition not real."
He directed me to the screen, where Paul Shaffer, David Letterman's musical side-kick and friend, was doing a go-figure with his shoulders and his hands.
We had both taken Xanaxes before Ramon set up the video tapes. I also had a glass of Chablis. I was very tired by the time the magnets were perused and discussed.
My husband, watching, said, "This could be very serious."
