I Am Charlotte Simmons (5 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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Charlotte's eyes misted over. She wanted to throw her arms around this big, gruff woman's neck, but she didn't. What if Momma happened to come back around the corner and see her?
 
 
Daddy, Momma, Charlotte, Buddy, and Sam, just the five of them, had supper at the picnic table, which Daddy and Doogie had managed to move back into the house. It weighed a ton. It was a pretty morose suppertime, since Daddy, Momma, and Charlotte couldn't forget what had happened earlier, and the boys sensed their mood.
As soon as they finished eating, while they were all still sitting on the picnic table's plank benches, Daddy turned on the TV. The evening news was on, and so Buddy and Sam ran off to play outside. Some correspondent or other wearing a safari jacket had a microphone in his hand out in front of a hut, talking about something that was going on in the Sudan. Charlotte was too depressed to care, and she got up and went back to her room, which was in fact nothing but a five-foot-wide enclosure that had been partitioned off from one of the house's two bedrooms when Buddy was born. She propped herself up on the bed and started reading about Florence Nightingale in a book called
Eminent Victorians
she had taken out from the library on Miss Pennington's recommendation, but she couldn't get interested in Florence Nightingale, either, and she began aimlessly studying the dust dancing in a shaft of light from the sun, which was so low in the sky it hurt her eyes to look out the window. Out there, about now, all over the county, people would be talking about what happened at Charlotte Simmons's this afternoon. She just knew it. A rush of panic. All they would have heard would be Channing Reeves's version. He and Matt and Randall and Dave went over to visit Charlotte after commencement, and it turned out the Simmonses were having a party and didn't want them there, and so they sicced the sheriff on them, and Charlotte's daddy threatened Channing with a big grill fork and said he'd castrate him if he ever tried to have anything to do with his precious genius daughter—
Just then Daddy called from the front room, “Hey, Charlotte, come here. You wanna see this?”
With a groan Charlotte got herself up off the bed and returned to the front room.
Daddy, still sitting at the picnic table, gestured toward the TV set. “Dupont,” he said, smiling at her in a way that was obviously intended to dispel the gloom.
So Charlotte stood by the picnic table and looked at the TV. Yes, it was Dupont, a fact she noted with an empty feeling. A long shot of the Great Yard with the breathtaking library tower at one end and a mass of people in
the center. Charlotte had been there only once, for the official tour during the application process, but it wasn't hard to recognize the famous Yard and the stupendous Gothic buildings around it.
“ … in his appearance today at his alma mater amid the pomp and ceremony of the university's one hundred and fifteenth commencement,” the voice on the TV was saying. A much closer shot of a vast audience. Up a broad center aisle a procession of mauve robes and mauve velvet academic hats was marching toward a stage erected in front of the Charles Dupont Memorial Library, a structure as grand as a cathedral, with a soaring tower and a three-story-high compound arch over its main entrance. At the head of the procession a figure in mauve carried a large golden mace. The pageantry of it made Charlotte blink with wonder, despite her conviction that all was surely ruined. A closer shot … the stage … mauve robes from one side to the other against a backdrop of gaudy medieval banners. In the center, a podium made of a rich-looking polished wood with an intricately carved cornice, bristling with microphones, and at the podium, also in mauve robes, a tall, powerful-looking man with square jaws, an intense gaze, and thick white hair. He's orating … You can see his lips moving and his arms gesturing and his voluminous mauve sleeves billowing, but you can hear only the voice-over of a broadcaster: “The California governor struck what is likely to be the keynote of his all but certain bid for the Republican presidential nomination next year—what he calls ‘re-valuation,' and what his harsher opponents call ‘reactionary social conservatism.'” A closeup of the Governor as he says, “Over the next hundred years, new sets of values will inevitably replace the skeletons of the old, and it will be up to you to define them.” The face of the broadcaster filled the screen: “He called upon the current generation of college students to create a new moral climate for themselves and for the nation. The governor arrived in Chester two days ago in order to spend time with students before speaking at today's commencement.”
The evening news switched to the accidental beheading of two workers in a sheet metal factory in Akron, but Charlotte was still forty miles southeast of Philadelphia, in Chester, Pennsylvania, at Dupont … That wasn't the local news, that was the national network news, and that wasn't just any commencement speaker, it was a famous politician the whole country was talking about, and he was a Dupont alumnus speaking there, in the Great Yard!—robed in Dupont mauve!—calling for a new moral order to be created by
this
generation of college students—
her
generation! A surge of optimism
revived her depleted spirits. Sparta, Alleghany High, cliques, hookups, drinking, resentments, tarantulas—Miss Pennington was right. All that was something happening up-hollow in the mountains at dusk as the shadows closed in, something already over and done with, whereas she …
“Just think, Charlotte,” said Momma with a smile as earnestly encouraging as Daddy's, “Dupont University. Three months from now, that's where you'll be.”
“I know, Momma. I was thinking the exact same thing. I can hardly believe it.”
She was smiling, too. To everybody's relief, including her own, the face she had on was genuine.
T
hree men in polo shirts and khakis were sitting high up in the cliffs of seats, so high that from down here on the court their faces looked like three white tennis balls. Below them sat thousands—
thousands
—of people who had somehow—but
how
?—heard about what was going on and were fast filling the first twenty or thirty rows—off-season in a vast half-lit basketball arena—on a sunny Wednesday afternoon in August.
Only a few were students. The fall semester didn't officially begin for another two weeks. Biggie-fried fatties wearing baseball caps and mustaches that drooped down below their lip lines at the corners and work shirts with their first names in script on the breast pockets were making themselves at home in seats that cost $30,000 apiece for Dupont's fifteen home games during the season. They could scarcely believe their good fortune … dream seats in the Buster Bowl … and you could come walking right on in.
On the court, lit up by the LumeNex floodlights right above it, all that was going on was nothing but ten young men, eight of them black and two white, playing a “Shirts and Skins” pickup basketball game. All five Shirts were wearing shorts and T-shirts, but no two shirts or shorts were identical. The only thing uniform about this bunch was their size. They were all well over six feet tall, and two, one black and one white, were seven feet tall or
close to it. Anybody could see that. The upper arms and shoulders of all ten players were pumped up bodybuilder-style. The trapezius muscles running from their necks to their shoulders bulged like cantaloupes. They were sweating, these bodybuilt young men, and the mighty LumeNex lights brought out their traps, lats, delts, pecs, abs, and obliques in glossy high definition, especially when it came to the black players.
During an out of bounds in which the ball got away and had to be retrieved, one of the white players on the court, a Shirt, came over to the other white player, a Skin, and said: “Hey, Jojo, what's going on? Maybe I'm blind, but it looks like that kid's pounding the shit outta you.”
He said it in a pretty loud voice, too, causing the one called Jojo to look this way and that, for fear the black players had heard it. Satisfied that they hadn't, he twisted his mouth to one side and nodded his head in sad assent. His head was practically shaved on the sides and in back and had a little mesa of a crew cut of blond hair on the dome. It sat atop a thick torso without an ounce of fat visible, supported by a pair of extremely long legs. He was six feet ten, 250 pounds.
Once he got through nodding, he said in a low voice, “If you really wanna know the truth, it's worse than that. The fucking guy's talking shit, Mike.”
“Like what?”
“He's like, ‘What the fuck are you, man, a fucking tree? You can't move for shit, yo.' Shit like that. And he's a fucking freshman.”
“
What the fuck are you, man, a fucking tree
? He said that?” Mike began to chuckle. “You gotta admit, Jojo, that's pretty funny.”
“Yeah, it's cracking me up.
And
he's hacking and shoving and whacking me with his fucking elbows. A fucking freshman! He just got here!”
Without even realizing what it was, Jojo spoke in this year's prevailing college creole: Fuck Patois. In Fuck Patois, the word
fuck
was used as an interjection (“What the fuck” or plain “Fuck,” with or without an exclamation point) expressing unhappy surprise; as a participial adjective (“fucking guy,” “fucking tree,” “fucking elbows”) expressing disparagement or discontent; as an adverb modifying and intensifying an adjective (“pretty fucking obvious”) or a verb (“I'm gonna fucking kick his ass”); as a noun (“That stupid fuck,” “don't give a good fuck”); as a verb meaning Go
away
(“Fuck off”),
beat
— physically, financially, or politically (“really fucked him over”) or
beaten
(“I'm fucked”),
botch
(“really fucked that up”),
drunk
(“You are so fucked up”); as an imperative expressing contempt (“Fuck you,” “Fuck that”). Rarely—the
usage had become somewhat archaic—but every now and then it referred to sexual intercourse (“He fucked her on the carpet in front of the TV”).
The fucking freshman in question was standing about twenty fucking feet away. He had a boyish face, but his hair was done in cornrows on top and hung down the back in dreadlocks, a style designed to make him look “bad-ass,” after the fashion of bad-boy black professional stars such as Latrell Sprewell and Allen Iverson. He was almost as big and tall as Jojo and probably still growing, and his chocolate brown skin bulged with muscle on top of muscle. No one was likely to fail to notice those muscles. The kid had cut the sleeves off his T-shirt so aggressively that what was left looked like some mad snickersnacker's homemade wrestler's strap top.
The Shirt named Mike said to Jojo, “So whatta
you
say to
him
?”
Jojo hesitated. “Nothing.” Pause … mind churning … “I'm just gonna fucking kick his ass all over the fucking court.”
“Yeah? How?”
“I don't know yet. It's the first time I've ever been on the court with the fucking guy.”
“So what? Seems to me you're the one who told me how you grew up taking no shit from—” Mike gestured in the general direction of the black players who were standing around. Mike had a swarthier complexion than Jojo and short, curly black hair. At six-four, he was the second shortest man on the court.
Jojo twisted his mouth again and nodded some more. “I'll think of something.”
“When? Seems to me you're also the one who told me how you can't dick around. You gotta give'em an instant message.”
Jojo managed half a smile. “Fuck.
I'm
bright. Why do I ever tell you these things?”
He looked away at approximately nothing. Jojo had big hands and long arms, which were considerably bulked up through the biceps and triceps. Proportionately, he wasn't all that big through the chest and shoulders, but he was certainly big enough to intimidate any ordinary male, especially in view of his height. At this moment, however, he looked whipped.
He turned back toward Mike and said, “
Every
year I gotta lock assholes with one a these sneaker-camp hot dogs?”
“I don't know.
This
year you gotta.”
The two of them didn't have to dilate on the subject. They already knew the theme and the plot. Jojo was a power forward and the only white starter
on the Dupont team. That was why he was a Skin in this game. The Skins were the starting five, and the five Shirts were backups who had only one thing on their minds: cracking the starting team themselves. The Shirt guarding Jojo—and punishing him physically—and talking shit—was a highly touted freshman named Vernon Congers, the usual case of the high school sensation who arrives at college brash, aggressive, and accustomed to VIP treatment, obsequious praise, and houri little cupcakes with open loins. Other grovelers were the most famous basketball coaches in America, including Dupont's legendary—on the sports pages he was always “the legendary”—Buster Roth. Typically, coaches discovered these young deities at AAU summer games or at summer basketball camps. Both the games and the camps were run expressly for college recruiters. Only hot high school prospects were invited to either. The big sneaker companies, Nike, And 1, Adidas, ran three of the major ones. Vernon Congers had been The Man at last summer's Camp And 1, where flashy play—“hotdogging”—was encouraged; also cornrows and dreads, if Congers was any example. Jojo understood the breed, since one Joseph J. Johanssen had been The Man himself a few summers ago at Camp Nike. In fact, being white, he had gotten even more “pub”—publicity, of which most youngsters invited to the sneaker camps had been keenly, greedily aware since junior high—than Vernon Congers last summer. Every coach, every agent, every pro scout was looking for the Great White Hope, another Larry Bird, another Jerry West, another Pistol Pete Maravich, who could play at the level of the black players who so completely dominated the game. After all, most of the fans were white. It was unbelievable, the wooing and the cooing and the donging, as it was called, lavished upon big Jojo Johanssen that summer; so much so that he just naturally assumed Dupont would be mainly a warm-up, a tune-up, a little stretch of minor-league ball on the way to the final triumph in the League, as players at Jojo's level referred to the National Basketball Association. After all, Jojo had set what was probably the all-time sneaker-camp record for donging. At the camps, the college coaches, who were there in droves, were forbidden by NCAA recruiting rules to talk to a player unless the player initiated the conversation. So how could a coach get close enough to a player to make him want to initiate a conversation? Buster Roth—and plenty of others—tagged along whenever Jojo went to the men's room during the camp's all-day sessions. Coach Roth was fast. Jojo couldn't even remember all the times Coach had wound up at the urinal next to his, with
his
dong out, too, waiting for Jojo to say something. One afternoon there had
been seven nationally known coaches standing with dongs unsheathed and unfurled at the urinals flanking Jojo's, four to his left and three to his right, with Buster Roth at his usual post, at the urinal to Jojo's immediate right. It turned out Coach could hear better with his left ear. Had there been more urinals, there might have been still more NCAA Division I coach dongs rampant for Jojo Johanssen that afternoon. Jojo never said a word to Coach or any others. But he knew who Coach was—after all, this was the Legendary Buster Roth—and he was nattered and gratified, even moved, by how many times Coach had taken his aging dong out of his pants that summer in homage to The Man of Camp Nike, all nineteen years of him. Of course, once he wooed and won and had your signature on the scholarship contract, which was legally binding, Coach turned into a holy terror. It was the holy terror who was the Legend. It was the holy terror thanks to whom this 14,000-seat basketball hippodrome—officially named Faircloth Arena—was universally known as the Buster Bowl. Even the players called it the Buster Bowl. Ordinarily players called a basketball arena a “box.” But this one had a circular façade and a steep funnel of stands inside. It looked just like an enormous bowl with a basketball court at the bottom.
Jojo and Mike were the only white players, or bona fide players who were white, on the team this season. The three swimmies were white, making the squad five whites and nine blacks on paper, but they didn't count. Mike's real name was Frank Riotto. Mike was short for “Microwave.” One of the black players, Charles Bousquet, had come up with that nickname. By now it was hard to remember he had ever been called Frank.
The game was about to resume, and it was the Skins' ball. Jojo was down inside, along with the center, Treyshawn Diggs. On the Dupont basketball team, Treyshawn was The Man. Everything on offense revolved around Treyshawn Diggs. Jojo glanced over at him to make sure of his position. Treyshawn was seven feet tall, agile, well coordinated, and nothing
but
muscles, a chocolate brown giant with a shaved head. A white player could be just as jacked as Treyshawn, but his light skin would make it all look flat. Not only was Jojo white, but he had very fair skin, and to make things worse, he was blond. That was why he had his hair cut so close on the sides and in back, practically shaved, leaving just that little blond flattop. He wished he could shave his whole head, the way Treyshawn, Charles, and practically all the black players did—excluding Congers—in imitation of the great Michael Jordan. It was an awesome look, an intimidating look, the look of
not only Jordan but also one of those wrestlers who has built himself up into a brute of sheer muscle and testosterone—the shaved head, the powerful neck, the bulging shrink-wrapped traps, delts, pecs, lats, and the rest of it. But according to the unspoken protocol of basketball, it was a black thing, the shaved head was, and if you tried to imitate the black players, they lost respect for you, fast. So he had to keep the mesa of unfortunately blond hair on top.
The ball was back in play. Despite the noise of the crowd, Jojo could hear every shrill screech of the boys' sneakers as they started, stopped, pivoted, changed direction. The point guard, Dashorn Tippet, fed the ball to the shooting guard, André Walker. The Shirts double-teamed André, so he bounced a pass inside to Jojo—and Congers was all over him again, practically lying on his back, pushing, elbowing, hacking, bumping him with his midsection, and going, “Now what the fuck you gon' do, Tree? Caint jump, caint shoot, caint move, caint do shit, Tree.”
The sonofabitch wouldn't stop! A freshman! Just got here! Made Jojo
feel
like a tree, rooted to the spot …
Cantrell Gwathmey and Charles, the Shirts guarding Walker, were pulling back toward Jojo, and he knew he should feed the ball back to Walker, who was open for one of his patented three-pointers, or to Treyshawn, who had muscled his way around Alan Robinson, the Shirt guarding him, but he wasn't about to, not this time. At the Division I level, basketball players were like dogs. They could smell fear or nervousness, and Jojo knew that his young nemesis had picked up the scent. He steeled himself for what he had to do.

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