Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

This pointless risk of her entire moral self…and she was standing before the Man. He was not as young as she had first thought. The pupils of his eyes were BBs deep within lids thick and wrinkled as walnut shells. His head was no bigger than a cantaloupe. The turtleneck of his sweater seemed about to swallow the head whole. But above all there was his mustache, a bushy thing curled upward at either end. There was a minute orange crumb—nachos?—lodged in it. He looked up from “Charlotte’s” driver’s license with an insinuating twist of his lips that caused the mustache and its tiny orange crumb to swing an inch or so. He held the laminated card in one hand and gave it a contemptuous flick with the other.

“This your driver’s license?”

Her throat had gone dry. She was afraid to try speaking. So she nodded yes. Unspoken—but nevertheless a lie.

“Where’s home for you, ‘Carla’?”

She was sure the way he had pronounced Carla was sarcastic and as much as said, “You liar.” She croaked out, “I’m from New York City?” Fear had thrown her right back into Down Home locution. The question-mark rise at the end made it sound like this lie was one she had tried to swallow but couldn’t keep down.

“I can’t make out this address, Carla.”

Thank God she had memorized it, but she was so hoarse. “Five hundred West End Avenue.”

The little inquisitor gave her a hideous wink and said, “That’s a helluva Brooklyn accent you got there, ‘Carla.’”

“We just moved to New York?” A lie, uttered so faintly it was obvious she was just lobbing it and ducking.

“Hey, Carla, I know you. You’re Hoyt’s friend, right? Remember me?”

It was the big Saint Ray bouncer. He had an oddly high-pitched voice. Smiling like this, he looked like a different person, not rough and tough at all.

Charlotte said, “Sure do”—sher do—jumping at a chance to ingratiate herself. “You were—” She didn’t know how quite to put it. “—at the Saint Ray house?”

“Awright!” the bouncer said, as if he had just been paid a great compliment. Then he leaned over and whispered something to his colleague.

The little hawk let a big sigh out through his teeth, which gave it a whistling sound, and looked into the distance. “Okay, Miss New York, go on in.” He motioned toward the plate-glass door. Sardonically: “If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere.”

Charlotte hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about. She hurried toward the door for fear he’d change his mind.

The front door of the I.M. led into a small vestibule with a plate-glass inner door, through which Charlotte could make out a nightclub dusk with just enough light to reflect off the white faces of a mob of students. She could hear a low, numb thundering of sound and the muted percussion of drums and an electric bass. She pushed the door open, and—bang!—squalls of noise and waves of noxious odors engulfed her, the sweet, rotting smell of beer, huge tides of it faintly laced with the putrid smell of vomit amid a bilious nightclubbed gloom, the bangs and wails of a band, and the victorious roar of students ecstatic over having made it into the right place. The mob of students looked like a single drunken beast with a thousand heads and two thousand arms, scratching and itching and itching and scratching at the pustules of a fiery pox, which turned out to be the tips of all the cigarettes. The whole place looked…itchy…filthy…infested…the floor, the walls, which were covered in wide, rough planks painted purplish black, even the splintery rip-cut edges. Deep within the gloom, two gashes of light, two long, glowing troughs, were just bright enough to reveal all the smoke in the air and throw the beast into silhouette. The nearer one must be a bar; the one in the back the bandstand. As Charlotte’s eyes adjusted, the beast began to resolve into individuals packed shank to flank, from here to all the way back…there. One of the first fine details she noticed was the perfect white crescents of the teeth of girls in jeans—prayers answered by the goddess Orthodontia—as they looked up into the faces of boys in jeans, eyes glistening, lips smiling, as if never in their lives had they heard such mesmerizing wit or wisdom.

Charlotte’s eyes were darting about, looking for Mimi and Bettina. They were standing off to one side, near the door. Charlotte hurried over to them, and they put their heads together and began laughing, all three of them.

“What happened?” said Mimi.

“You know the man with the face like a hawk? He didn’t believe me!”

Great sieges of laughter, giddiness upon giddiness, as Charlotte regaled them with the story. She had seldom been so elated in her life. She had succeeded in a subterfuge! Cool! (No longer lying and cheating.) She had proved she was among the worldly ones who know how to handle things! (No longer committing an illegal act.) She had risked and dared…pour le sport! (No longer the shameless waste of spirit of a Regina Cox.) She was the brave girl who had gone into battle, been shot at—and survived! (Without the bother of dwelling on the purpose.) She laughed and chattered more animatedly than at any time since she arrived at Dupont.

Mimi indicated that she wanted to go to the bar and get a drink. The roar, the shrieks, the wailing, pounding music were so overwhelming that if you weren’t within a foot of one another you couldn’t make yourself heard. The three girls slithered and squeezed through the crush of students. Charlotte brought up the rear. She had no intention of getting a drink, which might cost a dollar or more, but it seemed terribly important to stay in her little freshman herd and keep moving…

Nearing the bar, she became separated from them by an impenetrable knot of boys and girls. The girls were shrieking—the usual shrieks to indicate excitement over the presence of guys. Charlotte couldn’t get by them.

She felt a tug on her arm. It was Bettina, who had a bottle of beer in her hand. She motioned toward Mimi, who had a big glass of something. They headed toward the band, in the back. Charlotte followed as they made their way through a bewilderingly excited crowd. The odors—rotting malt, vomitus, cigarette smoke, bodies—became worse and worse. The sheer mass of bodies—it was so hot in here! Reminded her of the Saint Ray house that night…the heat, the smoky nocturnal gloom, the yowling drunks, the music that never stopped, the putrid air, the drunken cries of the male animal on all sides.

“Kiss muh bigguh-fwy booty!” Kiss my biggie-fry booty!

“Luke, I am your father!”

“Sucka sucka! Who the fucka’s gonna steal a Sonicare toothbrush?”

“They can take away our lives, but they can’t take away our freedom!”

In the back, five musicians, glistening with sweat, were an apparition of highlights that were too bright and shadows that disappeared into a black wall behind the bandstand. They looked not so much like three-dimensional forms as twitching slicks of light. The drummer was fat and bald as a Buddha, banging away at an extraordinary battery of drums, cymbals, bells, blocks of wood, triangles. In front of the bandstand was a small dance floor. It was as itchy and beat-up as the bar area. Jammed in around the floor, in virtual darkness, was a gridlock of cocktail tables—small, round, cheap, painted black, mobbed with white faces bawling as they sucked smoke down into their lungs. A young singer, caramel colored, fragile as a stalk, head shaved except for a pair of enormous sideburns, which created a poodle effect, was singing to a leisurely reggae beat.

A dank gloom…cigarette smoke invaded Charlotte’s nose to the point where she could have sworn it was also burning her corneas.

Bettina and Mimi were making hurry-up gestures. They had spotted a guy and three girls—upperclassmen, apparently, since they actually looked twenty-one—getting up from a cocktail table not too far from the dance floor. Already Mimi and Bettina were rushing pell-mell to claim the table, jimmying their thighs between back-to-back chairs and sprinkling ’scuse me’s over the cross faces of the students they jostled. Charlotte did her best to keep up. As soon as they sat down, Mimi lit up a cigarette to show that…she belonged! Bettina began moving her torso languidly to the reggae beat to show that…she belonged! Cigarette in one hand, Mimi brought her bottle of beer near her lips, looked at Charlotte, and arched her eyebrows, pantomiming, “Don’t you want something to drink?” which really meant, “Don’t you want to belong?” Charlotte shook her head no, and leaned forward with her forearms braced on the edge of the table, and looked right past Mimi at all the young bodies clumped together. Why? Belonging to—what? What was the point of this clump of humanity eagerly pressed against one another in a beaten-up place like the I.M. on a Friday night? She immediately answered her own question with another. What if I were in my room alone right now? She could feel it…sitting at her desk, staring out the window at the uplit library tower while loneliness scoured out all semblance of hope, ambition, or simple planning. Charlotte Simmons!—removed from all family, all friends, every familiar terrain, every worn and homely object…Did a single other student at Dupont feel as lonely as she had felt?