An English class
Today: Rax King, the author of essay collections Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer and the recently published Sloppy.
Issue No. 507
On Rereading “Big Red Son”
Rax King
On Rereading “Big Red Son”
by Rax King
In my senior year of high school, I had one of those great English teachers about whom professional writers are forever rhapsodizing. Though he was strict, Jason (known to us only by his first name) was cheerful and mild-mannered, not irritable like our other teachers. This made obeying his rules feel like pleasing Daddy, and yes, I know how that sounds, but please believe none of us had a crush on him—it wasn’t that kind of daddy energy, he wasn’t that kind of guy. I can remember him betraying his true feelings only once, and that would have been September 15th, 2008, the first school day after David Foster Wallace’s suicide.
We arrived that day to find printouts of Wallace’s essay “The View From Mrs. Thompson’s” on our tables. Jason looked quietly angry, which we’d assumed must have been because of something we did. But no: he explained that a great writer had killed himself and now the world was poorer for it. I’m not sure any of us understood this as a legitimate source of anger; we understood only that our homework was no longer due, because we would now spend the class reading Wallace’s essay out loud.
Is this an appropriate time to mention that we were a passel of little shits? Or that the school was known primarily as a haven for rich burnouts? We were selfish and sociopathic in the way of insecure children everywhere, and the “good work” we did in Jason’s class was mostly performance: we wanted to show off what we could do for this teacher we liked. But that early morning class was charged in a way I’d never felt before. Wallace’s virtuosity, the pain clinging to his every word like so much condensation, electrified us. Our teacher’s printouts included the first page of the following essay in Consider the Lobster, “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” and we ribbed him for including only that first page. “How did Tracy Austin break this guy’s heart?!” said one of my classmates, a good-natured basketball star, in his pungent Maryland accent. He’d never shown much interest in our readings before, but today his excitement was palpable. “You can’t just leave us hanging!”
Keep us breathing fire!
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