Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Here, now, at Dupont, when she came “home,” she wasn’t getting away from it all—right here was where she had to wallow in it all. Right here, in her “own” room, which was supposed to be a place of peace, sleep, and refuge—right here was where she got her nose shoved in the filth. It wasn’t so much a thought as an instinct: what she needed was somebody wise who also knew and who would assure her that yes, her situation was unjust, and yes, it was her duty to hold firm and remain independent, a rock amid the decadence all around her. That person, in the Dupont catalog, would be the R.A. Ha ha, a joke. Her R.A., Ashley, had immediately taken her for a hopelessly innocent little country girl and told her a sentimental lie about “dormcest.” She could just see Ashley’s “sincere” face and her flyaway tangles of blond hair—

Bango!

—the blond hair, the blond hair and the freckles: Laurie. Only a freshman herself, at North Carolina State, but Laurie was levelheaded and mature, at least compared to other girls at Alleghany High, and she was religious—New River Baptist Church, the Better Sort of Baptists, the in-town Baptists, as opposed to the foot-washing Baptists out in the countryside, even though the Better Sort also baptized people with full immersion in the New River at Easter when the water was still ice-cold. Laurie had convictions!

Charlotte got up from the chair and picked up the “room” telephone, a white portable. The instrument itself belonged to Beverly, but Charlotte could use it, entering her own code when she made a call. It was hardly ever used. Beverly lived on her cell phone, and Charlotte, like her folks, would do almost anything to avoid “calling long distance.” She felt reckless and oddly exhilarated. She punched in Information in Raleigh, North Carolina, for North Carolina State, hung up, and then punched in General Information at State. All this was going to cost money, but with giddy abandon she refused to think about that now. A recorded voice answered and instructed her to press this if she wanted this, or this for this, or this for this or…It was bewildering. She had to hang up and dial again…flinging money out the window. This time she concentrated on the disembodied instructions and pressed this for this…and this referred her to this or this or this, and this instructed her to punch in the first four letters of the last name, which she did, MCDO, which led her to a series of automated voices that went through the McDodds, McDolans, McDonoughs, and McDoovers before finally reaching the McDowells, whereupon another voice took over and ran A. J., Arthur, Edith, F., George, H. H., and Ian McDowell by her before reaching L. McDowell. Charlotte was frantic. She had never been in phone-mail jail before. She took a wild stab and responded yes to L. A squad of patched-together digital voices gave her L. McDowell’s number.

God knows what the Information calls alone cost. But now she’s drunk on her own heedlessness. She punches in the number, stretches the coiled cord, and sits back down in her chair. Seven rings, eight rings—not there, even if L. is Laurie—

“Hello?” Loud rap music in the background.

Terribly embarrassed: “May I speak to Laurie McDowell?”

Hesitation…“This is Laurie…”

Charlotte is elated! Laurie! Why hadn’t she called her in the first place? Laurie will know! Laurie will understand! Shivers of delight. She wants to laugh, she’s so happy. Almost a shriek: “Laurie! You know who this is?”

“No-o-o-o …”

Carried away by joy, she giggled, “Regina Cox.”

“Regina?—Charlotte!”

Shrieks, laughter, interjections, I-can’t-believe-its, more shrieks and laughs. The rap music is banging away. “Knock it on some fox’s box, my cock”—blip: Doctor Dis. Since when was Laurie interested in rap?

“Regina…Charlotte, you are like totally—Ohmygod, I mean the day Regina—where are you?”

“In my room in the dorm.”

“At Dupont?”

“Yeah…at Dupont…”

“I can’t say you sound very excited. What’s it like? I can’t believe this! Like a hundred times I’ve been on the verge of calling you! I totally have!”

“Me, too—same thing.”

“The Dupont girl!” said Laurie. “Tell me everything! I’ve been like totally dying to know. Wait a minute, let me turn down this music. I can hardly hear you.”

Laurie and…all these totally s? The rap band banging in the background began to digit down, and the last thing Charlotte heard distinctly was Doctor Dis making one of those crude rap half rhymes, “…take my testi-culls, suck ’em like a popsi-cull…” For a moment she worried that the distraction would make Laurie forget what they were about to discuss, namely, Dupont. At the same time she didn’t want to pounce right back onto the subject herself, for fear of revealing how eager she was to talk about it.

Laurie returned to the telephone. “Sorry, I didn’t know I had it on so loud. You know who that was, the singer?”

“Doctor Dis,” said Charlotte. She left it at that. She didn’t want things to go off on a tangent about some stupid illiterate singer, if you could call rap singing. At the same time, she had a terrible itch of curiosity. “I didn’t know you liked rap.”

A bit defensive: “I like some of it.”

Dead air. Silence. It was as if the conversation had leaked out a hole. Charlotte ransacked her brain. Finally, “Is it like here? All anybody plays at Dupont is rap and reggae, except for the ones who like classical music and all that. There are a lot of musicians in my class.”

“Rap and reggae are really popular here, too,” said Laurie, “but there are a lot of kids, guys especially, who listen to country and bluegrass? I got enough of that in Sparta. But other’n’at, N.C. State’s like totally cool. It’s big! The first two weeks it liked to drive me crazy, it’s so big.” Liiiiked—sounded almost like locked. It was a relief to Charlotte to know that somebody else was in college with the Sparta accent, the Sparta diction, the Sparta “other’n’at,” the Sparta “liked to” for “almost,” the Sparta declarative sentence that modestly questions itself at the very end. Laurie would understand, if she could ever get her back on the subject. “At Dupont,” Laurie was saying, “do you have to do everything online?”

“Well, a lot of—”

Laurie talked right over the top of her. “Here you register for classes online, you turn in assignments online, if you need to ask a T.A. something about homework, you do it online—but I don’t mind.” With great enthusiasm she proceeded to tell Charlotte about the endless number of things that made N.C. State cool. “Everybody’s always talking about how State is an aggie college and all that? Well, there are a lot of really cool kids here. I’ve made so many friends?” Free-uns. “I’m glad I came here.”

Charlotte didn’t know what to say. Laurie liked it there. Since misery loves company, that was a disappointment.

Laurie said, “Well—what’s up with you? You’ve got to tell me all about Dupont!”

“Oh, it’s great, or I guess it’s great,” said Charlotte. “They sure tell you enough it’s great.”

“What do you mean?”

Charlotte told her about the speech by the dean of Dupont College at the “frosh” convocation, the medieval banners, the flags of forty-three nations, the name-dropping, the Nobel-dropping—

“That’s what they say, and what do you say?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Charlotte. “It probably is that great, but I don’t know what difference it makes.”

“Oh wow,” said Laurie. “You’re sure jumping for joy.”

Charlotte said, “Do you live in a coed dorm?”

“Do I live in a coed dorm? Yeah. Practically everybody does. Do you?”