I Am Charlotte Simmons (101 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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“Look,” said Hoyt. “There's one very specific reason I had to see you. Your father must know somebody in this fucking area, some lawyer, somebody who knows how to sue their fucking asses off if they try to pull shit like this. How about talking to your father?”
“I don't know,” said Vance. “Maybe there's such a person. But one thing I do know. My father doesn't even want to
think
about this whole thing. If he could, he'd get a fucking injunction barring the press from using my name in the fucking story. You know his reaction when he first heard about it? His reaction was (A) why hadn't I told him about it last spring and (B) what kind of a moron had he raised who didn't know enough to go straight to the police when it happened and file charges for assault against the state trooper, Whatsisname. Hoyt—I can't even fucking go
there
where my father's concerned.”
Hoyt looked off toward the scruffy black raw-edged “paneling” of the I.M.'s walls and expelled a great sigh of resignation. Then he turned back to Vance.
“What am I going to do, Vance? What am I going to do on June the fucking first? I don't have a job, and you know how much I got to fall back on? Zero! My mother's blown whatever she had, which was like next to nothing, just keeping me going at this fucking place. What am I fucking going to do! Your transcript's a passport.
Mine
—you have no
idea
how bad my grades are. My transcript's going to look like a police crime site with fucking yellow tape all over the place to keep people away. You think maybe the Charles' Society might give me a lifelong pension for being the coolest guy who ever bestrode the soil of the forty-eight contiguous United States and a legend for all time and forever after? Vance—I am fucking
fucked
!”
He hung his head. Then he looked up at Vance. “One thing I still can't figure out. How the fuck did the little shit get all that shit about Pierce and Pierce? They'd be the last people in the fucking world to give it to him. And those conversations between you and me in the house. I mean, he didn't have direct quotes, but he didn't have direct quotes, but he might as fucking
well
…” He hung his head again and shook it slowly. “Fucked, fucked, fucked, and fucked.”
A
month had passed, and by now Coach Buster Roth's basketball team had won twenty-one games and lost none here on the verge of the NCAA national basketball tournament, nicknamed March Madness, which Dupont was highly favored to win again. All home games at the Buster Bowl had been sellouts for several years now, but the jockeying, conniving, favor-promising, favor-cashing in, the flattering, the pandering, the name-dropping, string-pulling, and sheer spending—scalpers were said to be getting a thousand dollars per ticket—to get into tonight's game with the University of Connecticut had reached uproar proportions. Fights—not physical but via telephone, e-mail, fax, FedEx, and U.S. mail—had broken out among musical alumni for the privilege of playing in the Charlies' Children's Alumni Band, which performed courtside in a block of four rows of a section near one end of the court—Children, as in sons and daughters of the alma mater, Mother Dupont.
At this moment, a full hour before game time, these devoted sons and daughters, attired in mauve blazers with yellow piping—they happily paid for this raiment themselves—were playing “The Charlies' Swing” with unequaled kinetic energy and brio, not to mention volume. The “Swing,” written by famous Dupont alumnus/composer Slim Adkins, had become a staple of jazz bands all over the world.
The two teams were yet to emerge from the dressing rooms for the warm-ups. At the moment the court was congested with entertainers—the cheerleaders shaking their fannies, the Chazzies dance troupe shaking their fannies, the gymnasts hurling their twirling girls into the air and catching them, and the Zulj Brothers—twin sophomores from Slovenia majoring in clonotic biology (the study of undifferentiated stem cells) who also happened to be jugglers—juggling alarming things such as serially lit cherrybomb firecrackers. Even after almost a month of it, Charlotte was agog at this zany show that seemed to pop up from out of the floor to the überexuberant accompaniment of the Charlies' Children's Alumni Band whenever the players were not on the floor. It was the closest thing to an authentic circus she had ever seen in her life.
To tell the truth—had she dared tell the truth—which she hadn't and wouldn't, not even to Jojo—Charlotte felt like part of the pregame show herself. Here she was, a freshman, eighteen years old, sitting directly behind the Dupont bench at mid-court. The only better seats in the arena were those reserved for the Cottontops (namely, the university's most important donors, most of whom were old men with white hair), who sat in the courtside section immediately below. Their wives were called the Pineapples, because most of them had white hair dyed a pale pineapple blond. Many students grumbled about the Cottontops and the Pineapples and their seats, on the grounds that these prize vantage points should go to themselves, the real fans, as opposed to these golden-agers with money who merely wanted to be seen breathing the most precious air there was wherever their sense of privilege told them they ought to be.
Charlotte had no money at all, but she, like them, enjoyed the knowledge that her position was just about the best there was. That much any of her fellow students would realize, and they would wonder who this pretty girl was, if not already aware that she was Jojo Johanssen's girlfriend, Charlotte Simmons. Once that had become known, the world had begun to turn rapidly for Charlotte. She now knew Buster Roth as “Coach,” and he knew her as “Char,” pronounced
Shar
, short for Charlotte, and just last week he had said to her, “You know, Char, you're the best thing that ever happened to Jojo.” “Coach” seemed to credit her—seemed to … he had never said that in so many words—with Jojo's sudden turnabout on the court. Over the past month he had become a new player, or perhaps come back as the Jojo of old. He was suddenly so hot at scoring, as well as rebounding, setting picks, and “altering the behavior” of other big men on defense, that he had
won back his starting position—as opposed to starting home games as the token white boy replaced before the end of the first quarter by Vernon Congers. Charlotte still hadn't the vaguest idea of what “setting picks” was. “Altering behavior,” one of Coach's favorite phrases, seemed to refer to physical punishment. Charlotte never noticed Jojo pushing, elbowing, or whacking opponents with his forearms, but he was said to be devastatingly good at these things and at “sumo-tizing” them, which seemed to mean shoving and battering them around with the muscular bulk of his body. One thing she was able to see for herself was how high he was now jumping. Seeing somebody 250 pounds and almost seven feet tall launch himself to that altitude was amazing.
Not only Coach but also Jojo's roommate, Mike, and his friend Charles seemed to realize that she was no ordinary girlfriend. This little slip of a girl from the mountains—Charlotte enjoyed imagining how they perceived her—was for Jojo, in addition to whatever else she might be, a mentor, a teacher, and a nanny. It was something—once more she put herself inside their heads—to see the extent to which the little girl had the giant whipped. As far as she herself saw it, Jojo regarded her as the catalyst of the new him—he seemed to enjoy using (and overusing) this word “catalyst”—the student-athlete who was actually a student and who had resolved to lead a life cleaner than that of the playa-athlete he used to be. Charlotte had laid down a few laws on that score herself, and Jojo, like many another convert in the early stages of devotion, clearly found a blissful blessedness in his new asceticism and the bliss of the born-again in obeying her law number one that said they could be boyfriend and girlfriend and go everywhere together but that he would have to
win
her affections in the fullness of time.
Seated on the aisle, as she was, Charlotte was aware of people descending and climbing up the stairs of this particular cliff of the Buster Bowl, but she had long since ceased focusing on them as individuals. They were simply there … until she became aware of a figure rather more smartly dressed than the general run of basketball fans—a blue-green tweed suit, a white shirt with a fine blue windowpane check, a black silk knit tie—
An inexplicable sinking feeling came over her—it was Mr. Starling, climbing up the stairs in her direction. It seemed so improbable. She couldn't think of a less likely person to see at a basketball game. On the other hand, this was one of the few college basketball games she had ever been to, and she really had no idea what sort of people were or were not basketball fans. In the next instant Mr. Starling saw her, too. She knew he did, because
their eyes locked and he compressed his lips in a grim manner and averted his eyes. Her heart sank—he couldn't, he wouldn't, do that to her—but then, still climbing the stairs, he looked at her again. As he drew close, he smiled. And she smiled, feeling that a … catastrophe … had just been averted. As Mr. Starling drew abreast of her in his climb, he looked at her imploring face in a tender way, as Charlotte saw it, and said, “Hello, Miss Simmons.”
“Mr. Starling! Hi!”
He slowed to almost a halt, still looking at her—
Oh, speak to me
,
I implore you
!
—and then smiled again—
in that way?—in that way?—Don't worry
, I
hold nothing against you for squandering your gifts?
—and resumed his climb up the cliff of the Buster Bowl.
Charlotte twisted about in her seat—
No! I need to tell you everything that happened!
—but she didn't leap up from her seat, and she didn't call out after him … for what was there left to tell him that he couldn't have already easily surmised?
In that instant the band members rose to their feet and launched into a delirious, almost violent reprise of “The Swing.” The Chazzies, the cheerleaders, the acrobats, the Brothers Zulj seemed to sink into the floor as quickly as they had popped up. The Dupont team was coming onto the court in their mauve-and-yellow warm-up suits, dribbling what appeared to be a multitude of orange balls. In the warm-up suits—it was astonishing—all the players looked a foot taller than they already were. It was the long pants, mauve with broad yellow stripes down the sides. They brought out the tremendous length of their legs in a way that was lost when they peeled down to their uniforms with the sloppy, droopy shorts that were the current fashion for combat. At this moment they looked like an entirely other order of human beings, like the giants of the species they truly were.
There was no problem picking out Jojo, of course. With the mighty LumeNex lights making his warm-up suit, his mesa of blond hair, and his big white face fairly gleam, Jojo appeared nine feet tall at the very least, and a dense, powerful nine feet, too. When he reached mid-court, he looked up toward Charlotte, as he had taken to doing lately, and spun off a quick comical salute in which he twirled the first two fingers of his right hand up off his brow. The first time he did it had embarrassed her, but by now she felt as if there were a spotlight picking her out of the crowd like a star. Of all the female freshman at Dupont, how many were truly better known than Charlotte
Simmons? In a way, the notoriety of her getting her dust knocked off at a Saint Ray formal—which everyone but her had seemed to know was a euphemism for bacchanal—had only made her rise, from social death to the eminence she now enjoyed as girlfriend of the superstar Jojo Johanssen, yet more dramatic, yet more of a feat.
There had come a day a couple of weeks before when two girls in a very sleek white, new European convertible had seen Jojo driving his SUV, the Annihilator, across campus and had pulled up beside him and blown the horn to attract his attention. They waved. Charlotte, in the passenger seat, had craned her neck to see who it was—and she could scarcely believe her eyes. It was Nicole, the magnificent Douche, and another girl who proved to be a Douche herself. Both were yelling and waving flirtatiously to Jojo. When they saw Charlotte's head pop up, they did a double take—and Nicole cried out, in the merriest way, “Hi, Charlotte!”—as if they were great chums! The next day, Nicole came up to her at Mr. Rayon and said Charlotte really should come by the Douche house during the impending spring rush. In fact, she should consider herself formally invited. Charlotte thanked her but said she didn't dare think about sororities, because she couldn't begin to afford to. Nicole said, “Oh, come on, anyway. You never know how things might work out in the end.”
So the little country girl from the Lost Province had become quite a campus presence, of sorts, in a remarkably short time, a mere six months …
Just then a cheer rose up from the crowd as Jojo, in a warm-up drill, made such an incredible leap that when he dunked the ball,
slammed
it, stuffed it, it was as if he had flown up and attacked the net from three feet above. A regular chorus of
Go go Jojos
followed.
Charlotte felt a hand on her forearm and turned. It was Treyshawn Diggs's mom, Eugenia, who was sitting next to her. In that big, hearty voice of hers, she said, “Honey, what kind a diet you got that boy on? He is some kind a
loa-ded—for—bear
!”
Ripples of laughter and chuckles ran all through the immediate vicinity. Eugenia's voice was too much for even the racket and the
Go go Jojos
of the fans.
Treyshawn's twenty-seven-year-old sister, Clare, sitting on her mother's other side, leaned forward laughing and said, “Yeah, Charlotte, don't put so much go-go in the Jojo! That boy's getting out of control!” More laughs and chuckles.
Charlotte smiled and blushed and blushed some more in an appropriate
Little Me manner. She noticed heads turning about in her direction. She made a modest point of averting her eyes from them, but she couldn't help but notice a head almost directly in front of her two rows below, a head with a thick stand of silver-gray hair combed straight back and trimmed to just above a crisp white collar, as it turned her way. It was the Dean of Dupont College, Mr. Lowdermilk, and his head was now twisted about, and his ruddy face was smiling at her rosy one, even though she had never even met him. Then, still smiling, he turned back and said something into the ear of a woman next to him, probably his wife, something no doubt along the lines of, “Don't turn around, but two rows directly behind us is Jojo Johanssen's girlfriend. They say she's the reason he's become the hottest athlete at Dupoint” … or words to that effect, Charlotte felt sure.
Honey, what kind a diet you got that boy on?
Charlotte loved that, because it said not one but three things. It said, “You're Jojo Johanssen's girlfriend, you've got him so spellbound he'll do whatever you say—and everybody knows that! Everybody knows who you are!”
And sure enough, barely a minute went by before Mrs. Lowdermilk, if that's who she was, turned all the way around, pretending she was actually looking at something way up the cliff.
Charlotte allowed herself a quick panoramic survey of the stands … She wished they were here, although it was supremely unlikely—Bettina and Mimi. Next home game, she'd like for Jojo or Coach himself to get some tickets to them without their knowing where they came from. Charlotte no longer spoke to either one of them. If she happened to run into them in Edgerton, she—cut—them—dead. She would never forgive them, never, not even if the three of them should happen to live together in Edgerton for the next hundred years—for the way they betrayed her, the ghoulish glee she overheard in their conversation when they were sure her life had been destroyed. You snide, insidious—please, my two little snakes, kindly come take a look at me now …

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