Venus and Pot Smoking

And but so (a DFWism), I’ve made it through 27 pages (2.5% of the novel), which includes two chapters — one with Hal, and another with a guy named Erdedy sitting in his apartment, waiting for his pot-delivery girl. The second chapter includes a single five-page paragraph, and then another four-page paragraph. Whew!

Hal is interviewing at the University of Arizona for a tennis scholarship. It's a short chapter, but the most interesting part to me, is that at one point Hal mentions that he hopes Venus Williams comes to watch a tennis tournament he's supposed to play in. It’s clearly not the “real” Venus Williams, because this one "owns a ranch," - it's just a character with the same name. But I'm sure it's not a coincidence - DFW was a highly ranked junior tennis player in his youth, and though Venus was only in her early teens (born in 1980) in the early 1990s when the novel was written, DFW must've still been an avid enough tennis fan that he knew about her even then.

Nextly: Erdedy has tried unsuccessfully to quit pot “70 to 80” times before, but he’s so determined to make this his last time, that his plan is to smoke all 200 grams ($1,250 worth) of “unusually good” marijuana he’s about to purchase over a four-day stretch. He’s counting on the fact that when he’s finished, the memory and shame of such debauchery will be enough to scare him off ever doing pot again. I loved this scene because I’ve actually tried this strategy. In college, four friends and I smoked an entire pack of Marlboro Reds in one sitting to try to disgust ourselves into quitting. Sadly, our resolve lasted only a few days. The first to crack was a portly Korean fellow named Nam, and his punishment for breaking our support-system agreement was…a dorm-room swirlie. That’s one punishment that probably didn’t fit the crime. Ah, memories….