Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

ah-everyboh-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ody…”

Relentless tears. Adam wondered who Miss Pennington was. “Come on! Pull yourself together! Everybody feels that way after a tough exam! I can guarantee you’ve done better than you think you have.”

“Ohgod, it was bad enough as it was! Mr. Starling won’t even look my way anymore! He thinks I’ve turned into he doesn’t know wha-uh-uh-uh-uh-uht…”

“Stop it! Stop it!” Adam barked it out like an order, surprising even himself. “I won’t have it!”

Charlotte abruptly stopped crying and stared up at Adam with her mouth slightly open and her tearful eyes shining…with respect bordering oddly on pleasure, as women sometimes do when a man claims the high ground and rebukes them.

The team pulled up to the CircumGlobal Lexington in a brand-new Mercedes SuperLuxe charter bus, white with stylized blue speed lines on the sides. Jojo was sitting halfway back, next to Mike. The seats were like first-class seats on a Boeing 767. The windows were tinted dark as sunglasses, so that at first he couldn’t make out anything. But then he saw them. Like the other players, he never consciously admitted to himself how satisfying the sheer presence of the gawkers and the groupies was. Quite a crowd outside the entrance to the hotel…He was surprised that Lexington, which he had always thought of as a Kentucky college town, was big and big-time enough for a CircumGlobal…A lot of well-to-do white Necktie types he was looking at…probably waiting for cabs to go out to dinner or whatever, and…there they were, six, eight, maybe ten groupies…white. The groupies were always white, although at least 85 percent of the stars of big-time college basketball were black. Strange business, the groupies.

Jojo rose with alacrity, or rose insofar as a man six-foot-ten could rise up in a bus. No matter what his troubles were, no matter if a freshman hot dog had taken his starting position, no matter if an athlete-hating history professor had sworn to have him expelled from Dupont, no matter what—the ten minutes it took them to enter some grand hotel and stand around the lobby waiting for the student managers to sort out their luggage for them and check them in at the desk were ten minutes of Heaven on Earth. He knew damned well that every member of the team, including the swimmies, got the same rush, even though nobody, including him, was ever going to be fool enough to say so out loud. For those ten minutes, they were giants be-striding the earth.

The moment they, the players, emerged from the bus, descending the steps, ducking way down to avoid hitting their heads on the doorframe—

The onlookers held their breaths, lest these giants crack their skulls. They let out their breaths as the giants cleared the door and stood up straight, like gigantic jackknives unfolding.

The groupies pranced forward, pretty white girls whose faces, had they chosen to leave them unpainted, could have been those of the sweetest, most dedicated day-care-center volunteers. As it was, their eyes shone from way down in Night Life black occipital craters. Their eyelids bore cantilevered store-bought lashes, their lips gleamed with an astonishing range of hues, the waists of their jeans were below the tops of their hip joints, and the jeans were so tight, their belly buttons so conspicuously pierced with silver rings from which hung a short string or two of pearls…that they looked like hookers. They obviously looked that way to the adult hotel guests, who had never seen such a troupe in their lives. But they weren’t. They were volunteers. They were offering their bodies for nothing more than the honor of having these famous giants use the fissures in their loins and faces howsoever they chose. They were like the temple harlots in Buddhism—or was it Hinduism—or what the hell was it? The name Left-handed Shakti blipped through Jojo’s brain…The course had been called The History of Religion in Asia and Africa, but all Jojo could remember were the temple harlots. The idea had made him feel perversely concupiscent at the time. But in his current mood Jojo felt sorry for the groupies. Whose little girls were they? Did their parents have so much as the faintest knowledge of all this? Jojo had had enough of these volunteer hardwood harlots. Such an empty, decadent pleasure, devoid of any emotion higher than an animal’s, unless you counted smug satisfaction as an emotion.

“Treyshawn!” piped up one of the groupies, a little blonde whose breasts looked like a pair of small round gym balls that could be removed or reattached at a moment’s notice.

“Hey, sugar,” said Treyshawn out the side of his mouth, in a gloriously bored fashion.

“Hi, Jojo! Remember me?” Jojo took a look out the corner of his eye. Not bad, actually. A tall white girl, brunette, delicate features, great legs revealed by a skirt hiked all the way up to…there. Jojo not only didn’t “remember” but also was not going to lower himself by responding. On the other hand, he was the second one to be solicited, preceded only by Treyshawn. So they hadn’t forgotten him!—despite the fact that he never started on the road anymore. He was just beginning to savor that little boost in status when—

“Vernon!”

“Vernon!”

Two of them, two juicy little groupies crying out for…the man who had cost him his starting position on the team of the national champions.

As the boys went through the revolving doors and into the lobby of the CircumGlobal Lexington, it started all over again, the awe, the ahhhs, the unabashed gawking. They towered above the hooples in the hotel lobby. They were like an entirely new and advanced order of humanity. Buster Roth required his boys to wear jackets and ties on road trips. The white players—Mike, the swimmies, and himself—all wore navy blazers with khaki pants, except for one of the swimmies, who wore a pair of gray flannels. But the black players were into styling, voguing. Styling and voguing this year meant three- and four-button single-breasted suits. Treyshawn wore a five-button, custom-made. The top button buttoned way up high. The bottom button seemed to be about six feet lower. The suit made Treyshawn look like a chimney. Coach knew what he was doing. When the team came walking into a blingy hotel lobby like the CircumGlobal’s, they weren’t mere giants. They were ready to…rule. That much you could read in the gawking faces of all the swells staying at the hotel.

Jojo had exulted in that feeling many times. Tonight, however, too many problems were converging at once. He was no longer a starter. The humiliation of it right now was bad enough. But what about the long-term meaning, his dream—no, more than his dream…his assumption, the basic assumption of his life, that he would play…in the League…the League! The elevation that would give his whole life meaning! It was merely that, a baseless assumption. There was still a chance of his changing all that. But he wasn’t going to change anything if he got thrown out of Dupont. It had taken a long time for the truth to sink in concerning this history teacher who was bringing him up on a charge of plagiarism, Mr. Jerome Quat. He had never for a moment allowed for the possibility that Coach couldn’t take care of the situation. Why, Coach was a Dupont legend; but it now developed that not even Coach plus the president of the university could budge this prick Quat. The fucker knew very well Jojo Johanssen could have never written a paper like that, and sooner or later he would find a way to prove it. Eventually, if it dragged on long enough, that wuss Adam—was it Tellin?—or Kellin—what the fuck was his name?—whatever it was, he’d cave. The guy wasn’t built for hanging tough under pressure. No, Go go Jojo was fucked. The mildest penalty would be suspension for one semester—the one in which most of the basketball season and the NCAA tournament, the March Madness, occurred.