Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

From worshiping his mother, he veered overnight into resenting her. Why? He had no idea. He didn’t even know it was resentment. He thought it was a matter of cultivation, her lack of it and his Roxbury Latinized depth of it. He was unable to face the truth, which was that he didn’t want to believe that it was an intellectual and social nullity like this, his mom, his embarrassing, ill-spoken cipher of a mom, who had created Destiny’s Adam Gellin. That would have made his grand ego seem like a fraud. (Nor was his the first case of Shrunken Mommy complex among those who regard themselves as intellectuals.)

“—or was that before you got here?”

With a start, Adam realized Greg was looking straight at him and asking him a question, probably containing a barb about his being late for the meeting, but he hadn’t a clue as to what the question actually was. His mind churned for a moment, and then he said, “Sorry about being late”—he made a point of looking at the others when he said it, to avoid the appearance of apologizing to Greg—“but I’ve just come across something like totally incredible but totally true.”

Greg sighed in an impatient I-don’t-have-time-for-

this manner. “Okay, like what?”

Adam now realized this was the wrong moment to pitch his story, but the drive known as information compulsion overrode common sense. “Well, the speaker at commencement last spring is the leading contender for the Republican nomination for president, right?”

Greg nodded even more impatiently.

“Well, one night two days before commencement last spring, the guy’s already on campus, and two frat boys—two Saint Rays, in fact—catch him getting a blow job out in the Grove from this girl, a junior—and I know her name, although I guess we can’t run it—and there’s a brawl with the guy’s bodyguard—”

Greg broke in. “This is something that’s supposed to have happened two days before commencement?”

“Exactly,” said Adam.

“That was what—one, two…four months ago? That’s really awesome, Adam, but we’ve got to go to press three hours from now, okay? And the story I got to deal with right now happened this morning, okay?”

“I know that,” said Adam, “but I’m talking about one of the most important politicians in America here, and—”

Greg broke in again, sarcastically. “That’s bangin’, Adam, but—”

Camille broke in on Greg: “Did it ever occur to you, Adam, that all your story ideas are like designed to make women look pathetic? Or is the problem that it does occur to you?”

Oh you pathetic skank. But what he said was, “Whattaya mean, all my story ideas?”

“I mean like this Predatory Professor thing you want to do. You want to make women look like—”

“Whattaya talking about, Camille? That’s not a story about women; it’s a story about male faculty members.”

Greg said, “Can we please get back to—”

“What am I talking about?” said Camille. “The question is, what are you talking about? You know very well that the subtext is, Oh, wow, nothing has changed, has it. Female students are still little sexual lambs who need protecting against all-powerful males who want to seduce them. We can’t just let them go around having affairs with whoever they feel like, can we. Your narrative is the same old story, the same as”—she paused, her mouth slightly open, obviously searching for some historical or possibly literary analogy—“the same story it’s always been,” she concluded lamely. “The subtext makes sure female undergraduates remain the stereotypical Little Red Riding Hoods.”

“Oh, fuck, Camille, subtext me no subtexts. Let’s talk about the text. The text is—”

“THE TEXT IS WE GOTTA COME TO A CONCLUSION ABOUT THE FIST AND THE ‘WE’RE QUEER’ SHIT! IT’S ONLY TWO HOURS TO DEADLINE!” Greg’s voice had become shrill.

“Why is ‘We’re Queer’ shit?” said Randy.

Greg sighed, rolled his eyes, looked away, and tamped the side of his head with the heel of his hand. Softly, his gaze panning from Randy to Camille to Adam, he said, “We—haven’t—got—time—for—semantics. We haven’t got time for deconstructing texts, we haven’t got time for four-month-old blow jobs, we haven’t got time for horny professors. We only have time for—”

Adam tuned out. He knew exactly what poor Greg would do, as did everybody in the room who stopped and thought about it. Not only would Greg be afraid to touch THE GOVERNOR, THE BLOW JOB AND THE BRAWL, he would run a completely straight-faced account of today’s WE’RE QUEER fiasco, even though the whole thing was comical, and he would write one of his nevertheless editorials, assuming he had the nerve to run any editorial at all. In his nevertheless editorials, Greg always said something like, “While the administration is probably not being evasive in referring to the erasure as an honest mistake, nevertheless the Gay and Lesbian Fist has every right to hold the administration to the strictest standards of yackety yackety yak…” And Greg would see to it that he never had time for THE BLOW JOB. The very mention of it had scared poor Greg to death.

Greg was arguing with Camille and Randy and looking at his watch, as if the sheer logic of the deadline would make them willing to acquiesce. Greg didn’t have the balls to just assert his authority and say—as he, Adam, would have—“Look, it’s getting late, and here’s what we’re going to do…”

Adam looked at his own watch and realized, resentfully, that he wouldn’t have the luxury of hanging around long enough to see his prediction come to pass. He had fifteen minutes to get over to his night job. Destiny’s Adam Gellin would spend the next four hours in a little Bitsosushi hatchback delivering slices of anchovy-and-olive, pastrami-mozzarella-and-tomato, prosciutto-Parmesan-red-pepper-and-egg, sausage-artichoke-and-mushroom, smoked-salmon-stracchino-and-

dill, and eggplant-bresaola-arugula-pesto-pignoli-

fontina-Gorgonzola-bollito-misto-capers-basil-crème-

fraîche-and-garlic cheese pizza to every indolent belly-stuffing time-squandering oaf on or off the Dupont campus who picked up the phone and called PowerPizza.

Adam couldn’t stand pizza, but tonight, as he stood at the stainless-steel take-out counter inside the alley entrance to PowerPizza, the sound of the Mexicans dicing all the onions and red peppers and the smell of sausages cooking in their cheese lava cut right into his stomach and made him painfully hungry. He hadn’t eaten since noon and wouldn’t be able to eat for four more hours, and here he was staring into a hot maw, the PowerPizza kitchen, where a motley hive of people were furiously shoveling food in gross quantities. The counter girls up front were yelling at the cooks, the cooks were yelling at the Mexicans, the Mexicans were yelling at each other, in Spanish, and Denny, the owner, was yelling at the whole lot of them in what passed for English.

“ ’Eyyyyy, whattayou do standin’eh?” He had spotted Adam. He threw both hands up in the gesture that said “Useless!”

“I’ve only got seven orders!” said Adam, indicating the stack of pizza flats beside him on the counter. “I’m supposed to have eight!”

“Okay. You get a you eight, you get a you ess moving.”

Denny, whose actual first name was Demetrio, was like a caricature of a pizza parlor proprietor, an immigrant from Naples, too fat, bald, hotheaded, and harried, and he couldn’t even yell at you without using his hands. In the evenings his entire business depended on speed—speed at the front counter, in the kitchen, and above all in the take-out deliveries, which were supposed to go out fast and arrive hot. To ensure that, Denny had devised a shrewd form of bottom-dog capitalist motivation. Delivery boys like Adam got no wages, only tips. Adam’s take each night depended solely on how fast he could get the orders to their destination. Volume was what counted, because students were not the greatest tippers in the world. He wished he could arrive at every door with a sign around his neck that said I DON’T GET PAID TO DO THIS, I ONLY GET YOUR TIPS.