Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

That did it. The next morning, one of the bullies approached Hoyt and began taunting him. Hoyt croaked out his usual nervous response—and then, with no preamble whatsoever, lunged at the astonished kid and gave him a good whack on the beak with his forearm. Blood gushed out all over the place. Everything his father predicted had ensued. This was one sixth-grader nobody was going to mess with. Furthermore, never again did he run into a situation he couldn’t handle with an unblinking stare and a few superior give-a-shit comments.

But that was sweet little Greenwich Country Day. Now he had to go to a public school, Greenwich High. Greenwich High had a not-bad academic reputation, as public schools went, but it drew a certain element…The third day Hoyt was there, a group of four Hispanic-looking guys blocked his way in the hall between classes. The group’s spokesman had a week’s worth of stubble on his face and a tight T-shirt with sleeves so negligible you could see the tubelike pumping-iron veins on his biceps as well as his forearms. He wanted to know Hoyt’s name.

“Hoyt, hunh? That suppose a be a name—or wot? A fart?”

The thought of going through all the preliminaries, all the stupid words, all the moronic sneers, all the ritual challenges, depressed Hoyt tremendously. So without a word or the slightest change in expression, he smashed the guy in the nose with his forearm. Something cracked, and blood poured out of his nose like Niagara Falls. The bigmouth, the group wit, fell back with half a whimper and half a cry and brought both hands tenderly to his hemorrhaging nose as if it were his child. Blood poured through the crevices between his fingers and down his arms. The other three piled on Hoyt and would have probably given him a pretty good drubbing except that a couple of teachers happened along and broke up the melee. The four tough guys vowed several types of crippling foggin’ revenge upon the white mottafogga, but in fact that was the end of it, and Hoyt spent four years at Greenwich High as one white mottafogga you didn’t mess with.

After that, he was regarded as cool by all factions. As he began to fill out and his cleft chin took on manly contours, he was regarded as hot by all the girls. He was fourteen when he first scored, as the expression went. It was one night on the couch in the den in the girl’s own house, while her parents were directly overhead in their bedroom. The girl didn’t go to Greenwich High, however, but to Greenwich Country Day. Without consciously planning it, Hoyt kept himself insinuated into the student social circles of Greenwich Country Day. He dressed in the marginally preppier, neater Greenwich Country Day boys’ clothes, and he wore his thatchy hair in their longish, but not truly rebellious, style. That only made him hotter in the eyes of girls at Greenwich High—“hot” being the comparative degree of “cool” in teenage grammar. Hoyt didn’t altogether neglect the Greenwich High girls by any means. In fact, it was they who, in short order, got him through the usual teenage male sexual trials, such as premature ejaculation and “how to do it.”

Thanks to his comparatively rigorous preparation at Greenwich Country Day, Hoyt was a good year ahead of most of his classmates at Greenwich High. He was diligent about maintaining that advantage, not because of any true interest in academic excellence, but rather because good grades were a sign that you were part of the better element. At the beginning of his junior year at Greenwich High, his Greenwich Country Day friends began to talk about how good grades alone weren’t enough to get you into the top colleges. You needed a “hook,” sometimes called a “spike,” some area of remarkable achievement outside the academic curriculum, whether it be athletics, the oboe, summer internships at a biotech lab—something. Hoyt had nothing. He thought and thought. One night on television he saw a brief segment about a charity in New York City called City Harvest, which sent trucks with refrigeration units around to restaurant kitchens at night and collected unused food that would have otherwise been discarded and brought it to soup kitchens for the homeless. A lightbulb went on over Hoyt’s head. He talked a nerdy classmate who had access to his parents’ Chrysler Pacifica minivan into joining him in a venture called the Greenwich Protein Patrol. Thus read the professional-looking posters taped to the front doors of the minivan. Hoyt had prevailed upon the new blond twenty-three-year-old art teacher, who was a real number—she obviously had a thing for Hoyt but restrained herself—to do the graphics, which included two white sweatshirts with THE GREENWICH PROTEIN PATROL appliquéd in dark green. In fact, the Protein Patrol gathered no protein—only carbohydrates in the form of leftover bread at two bakeries—since they had no refrigeration for meat, leafy greens, or other protein-heavy food. This the two eleemosynary youths dropped off at the First Presbyterian Church, which had a soup line for the homeless. Hoyt laid eyes on the ultimate recipients of his generosity only once. That was when an idea-starved feature writer for the Greenwich Times named Clara Klein heard about the Patrol from the church’s Reverend Mr. Burrus and wrote a story about it, accompanied by a three-column photo of Hoyt in his white sweatshirt with his arm around a little old soup-line regular who provided a striking contrast. There was Hoyt, the knight in white; and there was the poor little man, all in dark tones of brown and gray: dirty gray hair, sickly grayish brown skin, the turd-brown thirty-nine-gallon vinyl garbage bag he had converted into a poncho, the blue jeans that by now had turned soot gray, as had his Lugz sneakers, lurid stripes and all.

Attached to Hoyt’s Dupont application, the photo was dynamite as far as the admissions office was concerned. Here was a good-looking young man who was not only sympathetic to the downtrodden but also imaginative and enterprising. He had created and organized a mobile food-collecting service, complete with uniforms, to provide the needy with nutritious food from the best restaurants in a wealthy town, an implication that Hoyt let stand. It didn’t hurt that he himself was from a broken home and his mother had been reduced to drudgery at a place called Stanley Tool. These days such things were a definite plus at college admissions offices.

Hoyt had to emphasize his “deserving poor” credentials in order to get a partial scholarship, which was essential. Putting himself in this light galled him, however, and he had never revealed it to a soul at Dupont. If anybody asked, he said he had gone to a “day school” in Greenwich. Anybody who knew anything about Greenwich took this to be an unpretentious way of referring to Greenwich Country Day—even people who didn’t assumed that “day school” referred to a private school. He said that his parents were divorced and his dad was an investment banker who operated internationally (the fleeced little Estonian morsel at the bank). Stanley Tool and its accounting department he took care not to mention.

It never occurred to Hoyt that here was another tendency he shared with his father: blithely covering up his past and manufacturing a pedigree. In short, he was a second-generation snob. He looked so great, had such confidence, projected such an aura, had cultivated such a New York Honk, it never occurred to anyone to question his autobiography. He had no trouble getting into what everybody knew was the most socially upscale fraternity at Dupont, Saint Ray—far from it. Four fraternities had vied for him. None was quite what Saint Ray was, however. Saint Ray was the natural home of the ideal-typical socially superior student, who would be someone like Vance, whose father, Sterling Phipps, a golf nut, had retired at fifty after running a wildly successful hedge fund called Short Iron and had villas in Cap Ferrat and Carmel, California (on the beach), Southampton, New York (with memberships at both the Shinnecock and National Links golf clubs), as well as a twenty-room apartment at 820 Fifth Avenue in New York, which Vance called home. One of Vance’s uncles had put up most of the money for the Phipps Opera House. That the Vance Phippses of Dupont looked up to him and were in awe of his aristocratic daring meant the world to Hoyt. As he looked at Vance’s anxious face here in the billiard room, Hoyt’s blood alcohol level was not far from perfection. He became more convinced than ever that his role in life was to be a knight riding through throngs of students trapped by their own slave mentality—but that made him think of next June. The Knight was going to need a job at an i-bank…It was the only way…but his fucking grades! Stop thinking about it! Don’t get a long face in front of Vance—