A Brief Interview
Inspired by David Foster Wallace
I wrote this short piece in college for a creative writing course. We had to emulate the style of one of our favorite fiction writers, so I chose David Foster Wallace. I’d recently read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and had been inspired by its innovative conversational format—where the interviewer is both present and absent. I haven’t revised this story since I first wrote it so there are certainly changes I’d make now, but I wanted to post the original piece here for now. Perhaps I’ll post a revised version sometime in the future.
‘So it all started because my former college roommate told me not to hitchhike. He told me this awful story about some girl he knew who got thrown in the trunk of a car in Tucson and only got out because she was able to kick out one of the taillights and pry the trunk open. Never hitchhike, he says to me.’
‘I mean, people did it all the time in the sixties and seventies, right? I wasn’t really worried about it before then.’
‘I’m getting to that. So a couple of years after college I thought I was in love with this girl, fireworks and all of that, and she asked me to move out to San Francisco with her. She got a job in finance or something out there, some big opportunity, and I wasn’t particularly happy in my job at the time so I figured, why not? If I love this girl I might as well see how it goes. Get out of St. Louis and all.’
‘It’s not important, really, but I work in web design. Exciting, I know.’
‘Yeah, so before I commit to moving out there I go to see her. It’s my first time in San Francisco, right, and I don’t know the city at all. I mean, I recognize the Golden Gate Bridge when the plane’s coming in to land and all, I can see it out the window, but the Bay is all tiny boxes and reflective pools of water from up there. It’s a small city though, right, so I’m not worried at the time.’
‘You’re telling me this know. That’s what I’m getting at. So my plane gets in to SFO and it’s almost midnight, and since I’m not from there I don’t realize that BART—their public transport—doesn’t run past about midnight. I have just a few minutes until it’s supposed to arrive, right? I thought about just hitchhiking but I couldn’t get that awful story out of my head that my friend told me. So I book it to the BART station.’
‘Oh yeah, I totally overreacted. I had about ten minutes once I got there. It was fine. So I sit down on a bench with my suitcase next to me and everything. I’m just starting to get excited about seeing this girl and having great catch-up sex when something wet drops on my shoulder. It’s kind of yellow. A second later, another one drops on my lap. Also yellow. So I look up, which was the wrong decision.’
‘There’s a girl, drunk as shit, leaning over the balcony, directly above me. And just as I look up, she vomits. Huge yellow chunks flying towards me. I didn’t have time to react—I mean, who would in that kind of situation—I mean, the last thing you expect is to be vomited on after a long plane ride.’
‘It was all over my clothes, in my mouth, everywhere. I almost threw up myself but fortunately I had a bottle of water from the plane so I rinsed out my mouth real quick and saved myself the further embarrassment. I kind of want to vomit just thinking about it now. I look up and this drunk girl and her friends are gone—probably booked it in case I decided to retaliate or something.’
‘That’s the funny part. No one did anything. A bunch of people on the platform just stared, a couple crowded together and laughed to each other, whispering. I said, pretty upset, “So am I the only one here who saw that?” And people just kind of, like, turned away. Not a tissue or an apologetic smile or anything.’
‘Yeah, maybe that kind of humiliation is too much for people. When something kind of stupid happens to you—you trip and drop your nonfat Starbucks caramel macchiato or something, and it spills on your shirt—people feel bad, because they’ve been there. Everyone’s had a nonfat Starbucks caramel macchiato spilled on them at some point. Or a 2%-milk Starbucks hazelnut latte. Or some shit. Anyway, that’s not the point. People will feel bad for you if it’s within their grasp of understanding. If it’s happened to them and they can make it a little better, then sure, they’ll help. And maybe they’ll even feel okay gloating a little because it didn’t happen to them. Getting vomited on after a five-hour plane ride? That’s not a common form of humiliation. That goes so far beyond that people don’t want to acknowledge it. Like, they feel so bad that they want to ignore it. By not helping, it’s like it didn’t happen. Or something. I don’t know, am I even making sense?’
‘I guess you have a point there. So anyway, I run to the BART bathroom to try and clean up a little bit, seeing as no one else helped me out there, and when I come back the train is pulling out of the station. And it takes me to realize that this is the last train of the night, and that I’m pretty much fucked.’
‘I tried to call her after that, yeah. I called her twice—I would have called three times but I’m not the kind of guy who wants to seem needy. It’s not like I couldn’t figure it out on my own. Plus I feel pretty fucking stupid coming to see her after two months apart and I smell like rotting food and booze and I’m covered in yellow sick. Not exactly the romantic picture that I was hoping to paint. So anyway, she doesn’t pick up. I decide that, while I’m waiting for her to call me back, I’ll go to the diner across the street from the station, clean up, and call her back.’
‘They didn’t want to let me in at first. I reeked, after all, and looked like a homeless alcoholic, what with the vomit on my face and the suitcase. But I told the waiter my situation and I think he could tell that I wasn’t drunk. I’m sure the look on my face told him pretty much everything. Then he felt bad for me, and directed me to the bathroom, and I cleaned up a bit—I still smelled pretty awful, but I covered my hands and arms with the lavender soap that they had in the bathroom so that kind of helped. I come out and this waiter guy has a grilled cheese sandwich for me—on the house, he says.’
‘Yeah, I was feeling kind of better at this point. Definitely more optimistic. So I call my girl up, right, and this time she picks up. She forgot I was coming that day, or so she says, and was stuck at work late, or so she says, some work party that she couldn’t get out of. She says I can stay at her apartment, if I want or I can find a hotel. It sounds like she wants me to get a hotel but is just trying to be polite, so I go with the hotel..’
‘I figured a cab was too expensive, so I sucked it up and decided to hitchhike. And it turned out to be this really nice guy who picked me up, an Asian guy from Chicago who was working for Sony and living in the Castro. Painting in his free time. He felt bad for me and told me I could just stay at his place, that I didn’t seem like the kind of creepy hitchhiker you hear about in horror stories. I wasn’t about to throw him in the back of a truck and drive into a river or something.’
‘No yeah, he was actually a really nice guy. Named Angus. Had a German shepherd and kept real plants in his apartment. A really good painter, actually.’
‘When I saw my girl the next day, she told me she’d been seeing someone she met at work. Some guy name from Moscow named Lev who drives a Benz and wears pocket squares. A lawyer, not a web designer. It’s at this point I tell her about the vomit, and I can tell she feels awful and almost wants to take me back or at least pretend for a couple of days like she does, but I tell her to forget it and I leave her for good. Getting vomited on once is enough humiliation for one week.’
‘I stayed with Angus for a few days, and he showed me the city. San Francisco’s a beautiful city, you know, with the cable cars and the smell of the sea and the tangy sourdough bread. And the people there aren’t so bad.’
‘No, I’m in St. Louis for now. Angus’ sister moved in with me a month ago, but we’re thinking of moving out to San Francisco. Better than this land-locked state. We’re thinking of hitchhiking our way out there, seeing the country on the way.’
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