Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Charles did nothing at first except raise his nose from his books and look straight ahead. Then, deliberately, coolly, in the Charles Bousquet fashion, still without turning around, he reached back and scraped the mush off the base of his skull with his hand and inspected it. Then he felt the neck of his T-shirt where the slimy pulp had soaked it. Only then did he twist about and look back.

The first person he saw was Jojo, who, transfixed, was looking him right in the face. Charles eyed him for an instant and then, apparently concluding that Jojo was a highly unlikely suspect, lasered in on Congers, who now had his head way down, practically buried in his loose-leaf binder, scribbling away with a ballpoint as if he were taking notes.

In a deep voice Charles yelled out, “Yo!”

Naturally, everybody in the room craned about to see what was going on, everybody except Congers, who still had his head down and his ballpoint squiggling like mad.

“Yo!” Charles yelled again. “Yeah, I mean you, ni—you moronic motherfuckin’ shitfa brains!”

Charles had started to say “nigger,” but he checked himself because Jojo and Mike were right there. The black players never uttered the n-word, not even in jest, if he, Mike, Coach, a swimmie, or any other white person was within earshot.

Congers had no choice now. There was no way he could pretend he hadn’t noticed. He stood up, shoving his chair over backward with a thwack, and took a deep breath. His tight T-shirt was more like a film than a fabric, and his mighty pecs, delts, traps, lats seemed to pump up before your very eyes. Seething, he stared at Charles and said in a strained, constricted, strangely high-pitched voice, “Who the fuck you think—” He broke off the sentence and then said, “Motherfucker.”

Whereupon he stepped out into the aisle and began walking slowly toward Charles. No professional wrestler ever looked bigger or meaner. Charles stood up and stepped out into the aisle, too. He faced Congers, took a spread-legged stance, folded his arms across his chest, cocked his head, and put his tongue in his cheek. Congers was now barely four feet from Charles. For a moment that seemed interminable to Jojo, the two of them confronted each other stock-still in a stare-down.

Then Congers pointed his forefinger at Charles, one, two, three times, not uttering a sound, before saying in the same strained, constricted voice, “Open your mouth one more time, motherfucker, and—” Once more, he didn’t finish the sentence.

“And what, Shitfa Brains?” said Charles. He sounded gloriously bored. He didn’t move a muscle. He just stood there with his arms folded across his chest and his head cocked skeptically to one side.

Congers glowered for a moment and said portentously, “You heard me.” With which, he turned, muttering, “Motherfucker,” and returned to his desk.

Not a sound in the room, not a laugh, not a chuckle, not even an unhh unhh unhh under the breath. Everybody, even Jojo, was too embarrassed for the big freshman, pitied him too much, to call any more attention whatsoever to the way he had tried to start something with Charles the Coolest and then backed down like a pussy.

Jojo and Mike remained aroused by the incident after they returned to their suite. The suite’s common-room casement windows were open, but it was so dark outside, you couldn’t even make out the library tower or the smokestacks of the power plant. Jojo sat down in an easy chair and got comfortable, but Mike began pacing back and forth. A lungful of the mere atmosphere of male physical combat can start a young man’s adrenaline pumping that hard.

Mike was saying, “It was the ‘moronic’ and ‘shitfa brains’ that got him. He couldna gotten any madder over ‘nigga’ than he did over that. When he got up from that desk and started heading for Charles, I thought he was gonna—”

Jojo interrupted. “You know something, Mike? That fucking study hall is a farce. Studying in there is a fucking impossibility. Somebody’s always horsing around or cracking jokes or making fart noises…and we sit there for two fucking hours doing nothing.”

“Seriously,” said Mike.

“And what the fuck’s Charles doing in there in the first place? Coach dud’n make the swimmies go to study hall, and everybody knows Charles’s grades are as good as theirs. Why make him sit there for two hours while a buncha guys throw mushballs and do fuck-all?”

“Oh ho ho.” Mike chuckled ironically. “Don’t you get it, Jojo? Coach don’t care what the swimmies do at night, because they’re not gonna be playing. They’re not really part of the program. But us? Us—he wants to fill up the day so we’re totally into the program and nothing else. He dud’n want Charles or anybody else just rattling around the campus at night…thinking…or anything counterproductive like that.”

Jojo nodded pensively. Maybe Mike had a point. They got up in the dark, had breakfast in their own dining room, went over to the weight room and pumped some iron, or else went running. The only time they saw anybody else was when they went to class, and even then, who did they actually talk to? Maybe some hoochie groupie who would come over later and provide you some ass.

Into his head blipped the girl with the long brown hair, the one in the French class…But she was no hoochie, not that girl, and certainly no groupie. She had frozen him out from word one. Pure! The purity—that was what made her beauty unique, that and the fact that she was unobtainable. His loins stirred so, he could feel the tumescence against the fly of his jeans. Oh God…he wanted some of that…He had never laid eyes on her since then. True to her word, she had never turned up in Whatsisname’s French class again.

“…practice for three and a half fucking hours, and then where do we go? Back to the dining room where we see the same fucking faces—”

Jojo had become so absorbed in his sublime vision he had lost track of what Mike was talking about.

“—or maybe spending time in the fucking library writing his own papers, getting all interested in something besides basketball—”

“Oh shit!” said Jojo, thrusting his hands up, fingers spread, as if he were holding a big physioball over his head. “I totally fucking forgot. I got a paper due tomorrow.”

“What in?”

“American history, that fucking guy Quat. I don’t know where they ever got the idea he’s an athlete-friendly professor. If he’s athlete friendly, then I’m…I’m…I don’t know what. What time is it?”

“About twelve.”

“Shit…he’s really gonna be pissed if I beep him now.”

“Who is?”

“My history tutor, kid named Adam. But I don’t see that I got any choice. Shit, I hate to do this to him. He’s a nice kid…Thank God he’s a nerdy little guy. He’ll take it without breaking my fucking balls.”

So he got on the telephone and beeped the nerdy little guy, and in due course the guy called back, and Jojo said he needed to see him right away.

Meantime, Mike had turned on the TV set, some sitcom, but he was already bored with it, so he prevailed upon Jojo to play a video game while he was waiting for the tutor. Jojo didn’t take much persuading. Mike had a new PlayStation 3 set, and it was awesome. The images had depth and fluid motion; the sounds rose and fell just the way they should, and they had a wraparound effect, and you felt like you really were competing—football, baseball, basketball, boxing, judo, whatever—before cheering fans in some huge stadium. It was all eerily realistic. How the hell did they come up with these things? So Jojo and Mike sat down and picked up the handsets for their current favorite, which was called Stunt Biker. You were on a bicycle on a huge half-pipe, doing double, triple flips in the air and full gainers and everything else, while thousands cheered. What they both liked best about Stunt Biker were the wipeouts. If you miscalculated on your flips and crashed, you usually landed on your neck. In real life, although not on PlayStation 3, you’d be dead. Gales of laughter when your opponent broke his neck on the concrete surface of the half-pipe…