In January of 1998, I set out from New York to Las Vegas to meet up with three other colleagues to work on an article for Premiere about the Adult Video News (AVN) Awards, said awards being the putative, especially as far as the AVN itself was concerned, Oscars of porn. The writer of the piece was the novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace, with whom I had enjoyed a generally positive and indeed collegial working relationship as the line editor on the piece entitled “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” which had appeared in the October 1996 issue of Premiere and again in slightly different form in Dave’s much acclaimed essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. 
It was during the editing process of the former piece wherein Dave had expressed an interest in doing something about porn in general, and something about the AVN awards in particular, and we had had a few conversations about it. In the summer of ’97 Dave was approached by Spin to do a piece, and he mentioned the AVN idea, but also stipulated that he’d made a vow not to do any magazine work for a period of time, and didn’t want certain people to believe him a “douche bag” for going back on his word on this; hence, he would not do the piece under his own name. Shortly thereafter he felt a little bad about pitching to Spin an article that he had developed with an editor for Premiere, and gave me a call; we agreed on the not-using-his-real-name stipulation (it was only when he handed in the manuscript of the piece that I discovered he was going to use a dual pseudonym and write in the first person plural) and we also offered him roughly half of what Spin would have coughed up for the piece.
I’m not going to go into the sad tale of what happened after Dave handed in the manuscript that he had titled “Big Red Son,” as that’s another story. (The piece, in a final form that differs from both Dave's original manuscript and the bowdlerized version that appeared [under the title "Neither Adult Nor Entertainment'] in the September 1998 issue of Premiere, can be found in the collection Consider The Lobster.) I only bring up this minutea because, well, one reads a lot of guff in which people speculate about how David Foster Wallace might be this or that or some other thing that he is completely not. Hence, I cite these peculiar negotiations to point up what a staggeringly stand-up guy Wallace is...and how he makes his equally stand-up agent kind of miserable.
But Dave doesn’t really figure in this particular sad tale too much, as he really needed some rest after the 1998 AVN Awards ceremony had wound up. Our table, all the way in the back of one of the big ballrooms of Caesar’s Palace, featured myself (left), 
who had been feeding Dave, for research purposes, porn that Premiere and I had purchased straight from the fleapits of 8th Ave. all summer (his Midwest residence at the time had very little comfortable access to adult entertainment); my friend Evan Wright (left again), 
who at the time was an editor at Hustler magazine (I was trying to get his work into Premiere, and of course fans of great reporting now know that Evan was able to make quite a name for himself without my intervention); and Nathaniel Welch (guess) , 
who our photo editor had assigned to shoot the event. It was a happy coincidence that Nat and Evan were in fact old pals and had driven out to Vegas from L.A. together. All day and into the ceremony itself we had a nice kinda Musketeers vibe going, captured by Dave in his subsequent essay in the form of somewhat more curdled banter, courtesy of adult industry “guides and docents” Richard “Dick” Filth and Harold Hecuba, the fictionalized personae Dave had created to represent pretty much Evan and myself, just as his dual pseudonyms Willem deGroot and Matt Rundlet stood in for him.
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