Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Hoyt stared off toward nowhere and said, “She was good sump’m sump’m, man. She really fucking was. But she’s given me the big fuck-you. She won’t even fucking talk to me on the phone anymore. Ungrateful—she claims I’m nothing but another frat playa—her words.”

Vance and Julian howled. “A playa!” said Julian. “Fuck! You shouldn’t even associate with a girl who’s no better judge of character than that!”

“Julian’s right!” said Vance. “You don’t go bringing an imbecile like that to a Saint Ray formal! I mean, shit!”

They had a good time with that for a while, but they finally ran out of wit, and Hoyt said, “The fact remains, how the fuck can I even go to the formal with no date? I can’t just call up some girl right on the verge of the thing and say, ‘Hey, gorgeous, how about coming with me to the Saint Ray formal, so I can have some sump’m sump’m like everybody else?’”

“You can always hijack I.P.’s date once you get there,” said Julian.

“What are you talking about?” said Hoyt.

“You know this girl Gloria—she’s a Psi Phi? She’s bangin’! She’s awesome. I’d give my left nut for some a that. How fucking I.P. ever talked her into being his date, I don’t fucking know.”

“Well…shit,” said Hoyt. Pause. “Nawwww…I’m gonna take a chance and invite Charlotte.”

“Hey, dude!” said Vance. “You know her fucking name! This must be love!”

You keep saying ‘cool,’ ” said Edgar, “but what does that mean, somebody’s cool?”

“If you have to ask,” said Roger Kuby, “you’re clearly not cool.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Edgar, “but what does it mean? If somebody came up to you and said, ‘What’s the definition of cool?’ what would you say? I’ve never heard anybody even try.”

Edgar only took charge like this when the Mutants met in his apartment. They loved to meet here. For all of his mild manner, Edgar lived a good eight blocks deep into the City of God in a small 1950s apartment building. Most of the other tenants were Hispanic or Chinese. The elevator was loud, rickety, and mysteriously dented. Edgar’s hallway was drab to the verge of decrepit. It had eight identical metal-clad flush doors, all with more than one lock. But when Edgar’s door opened—magic!—inside was a wonderworld of taste…and expense, at least by Dupont undergraduate standards. None of the rest of the Mutants’ living quarters rated any classification more exalted than “bohemian.” Edgar, by contrast, was more like “cutting edge.” He had modern leather and stainless-steel furniture, brass lamps from some place in Nebraska, and a rug—a huge, real woven rug in a rich camel’s-hair color, woven God knows how many tufts to the square inch so that it looked as smooth and luxurious as cashmere. Edgar himself was holding court—in an authentic Ruhlmann “elephant chair” from the 1920s. His father, a distinguished biologist, was CEO of Clovis Genetics, an heir to the Remington munitions fortune, and an art collector and patron.

Camille said, “Well, I can tell you one thing. ‘Cool’s’ got nothing to do with women. Nobody ever calls a woman cool.”

“That’s ’cause guys like you’n’me, Camille, we like ’em hot,” said Roger. That got a laugh. Thus encouraged, Roger looked at Randy, he who had come out of the closet, and said, “Right, Randy?”—and gave him a mock grin and two fast-pumping thumbs-ups.

Randy’s face turned red. He was speechless. Adam felt terribly embarrassed for him. He glanced at Charlotte. She was engrossed, smiling slightly.

Camille shot Roger a scorching look, but not, Adam realized, because of what Roger had said to Randy. It was because he was interrupting her point, her insight. Any Mutant would feel the same way.

Adam jumped in so that Charlotte wouldn’t think he was out of it. “That’s not really true, Camille. I’ve heard girls called cool. Think of—”

“Yeah, if they’re the frat-hag, buddy-girl type,” said Camille, breaking back in, fire in her eyes. “It’s a male thing. Not that I give a good fuck. The guys they call cool are all a bunch of fratty dickheads, if you really think about it. They’re guys who demonstrate their ignorance in some approved way.”

Greg jumped in. “Actually, I think Camille’s right.”

“Oh, wow, thank you,” said Camille. “Actually…you think.”

Adam could tell by the way Edgar was leaning forward over the table, swollen with a lungful of air, that he was primed to begin the discourse he no doubt had in mind when he first introduced the subject. But no-oh-oh, old Greg wasn’t about to let that happen, was he. He was also leaning forward. He had his torso twisted until it was vertical to the table, as if he were a knife primed to thrust.

Edgar began, “When you think—”

Sure enough, Greg cut him off. “I like Camille’s idea.” His eyes swiftly panned the table—no doubt, thought Adam, to indicate that he himself the leader was running the show and that his remarks were for the illumination of one and all. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say cool equals stupid, but being a dim bulb doesn’t disqualify you, either. Treyshawn Diggs is cool, right? Nobody’s gonna say the Tower ain’t cool, and he’s got like the mental faculties of that…that…”—his eyes darted about, trying to find something brainless enough.

Randy Grossman and Camille gasped simultaneously. “Why don’t we be a little racist about it!” said Camille.

“Racist?” said Greg. “What’s racist about somebody being a fucking moron?” Smart comeback, Adam thought with gloomy envy. They weren’t about to contradict him on that. “All you’re saying is, you were never in a class with Treyshawn Diggs. I was. I was in his seminar section of Economics 106, and we’re learning about how you measure the GNP. The T.A.’s talking about how you arrive at a gross sum for wholesale transactions and how you divide that into two sums and subtract each sum from the sum of gross manufacturing output on the one hand, the sum of gross service costs on the other, and you take the resulting sums and divide them by this and that, and I mean it’s a beast, and hands are going up all over the place, and one of them’s Treyshawn Diggs’s. The T.A. can’t believe it. I mean, Treyshawn hasn’t raised his hand for any thing the entire semester, and so the T.A. calls on Treyshawn, and you know what the Tower says? He says, ‘What’s a sum?’”

Greg himself was already laughing by the time he got to What’s a sum? And then some vivid memory of the actual scene must have bubbled up into his brain, because the laugh turned into a manic cackle, an uncontrollable yawp, and Greg began beating his fists on the arms of his chair with his head down and his eyes shut, and he tried to repeat the words What’s a sum? but tidal waves of mirth came rolling up from his innards and slammed the words against the roof of his mouth. Adam glanced at Charlotte. She was smiling, shaking with chuckles, practically laughing out loud, Greg’s hysterical seizure was so infectious. She was absorbed with Greg.

Head still down, eyes still squeezed shut, Greg brought his hands up in front of his face, palms toward Camille, in a defensive gesture—“I know…I know”—before giving way to new paroxysms of laughter. Adam’s envy turned to resentment, and resentment reached the threshold of anger. The basketball team was his terrain! Treyshawn Diggs and company were his exclusive conversational nuggets. The sonofabitch was poaching on his preserve! One of the few compensations for the hours and hours he had to waste on these imbeciles was his status among the Mutants as the reigning expert on big-time collegiate sports, and here was Greg, right in front of Charlotte, using his material and captivating her with some shamelessly purloined spiel about Treyshawn Diggs!