Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

“Hey! Curtis!” It just came blurting out.

Jones, who had begun walking toward Treyshawn Diggs, stopped, turned his shoulders slightly, and looked back.

“What about my tip!” The trigger had been pulled now, and there was no holding back.

The big black man merely tilted his head, raised one eyebrow, narrowed his eyes, and gave Adam a certain look of male challenge that as much as said, “Okay, what about it?” Adam was speechless. Jones turned his back and started toward the center of the room.

“THEY DON’T PAY ME TO DELIVER THIS STUFF! ALL I GET IS THE TIPS!”

The room grew quiet except for C. C. Good Jookin’s synthesizer beat, which in the sudden silence seemed swollen with amplification. The odor of weed seemed somehow stronger. The lurid flashes of ESPN SportsCenter hurt Adam’s eyes. He knew his face was a burning red.

Without even looking at him, Curtis Jones said, “Hey, the man says he wants a tip.” He sounded gloriously bored. Sniggers, chuckles, and the deep rumble—hegghhh hegghhh heggghhhh—of somebody’s belly laugh. “One a you guys wanna give the man a tip?”

A few more low, restrained hegghhh hegghhh heggghhhhs, but nobody said a word, and nobody reached into his pocket, either. Adam was acutely conscious of a roomful of black faces, all turned toward him.

And one white face: Jojo’s. Adam opened his eyes wide, imploringly, and fixed them upon Jojo. Jojo! You know these guys—don’t let them do this to me!

Jojo stood there like a building. Finally he screwed his lips up to one side, shrugged his shoulders, and rolled his head in the direction of Curtis Jones, as if to say, “Hey, it’s his party.”

The others were already tired of the spectacle of the whining delivery boy. Conversation resumed, and C. C. Good Jookin’s “Elliptical Rider” sank into the general hubbub. Jojo turned back to Charles Bousquet as if his tutor had never existed. Out in the middle of the room, silhouetted against the garish rectangle of the big television screen, some black guy was nudging the great hulk of Treyshawn Diggs. Adam couldn’t see their faces very well, but he was sure they were having themselves a good laugh at his expense: the little white boy, his face contorted into a wretched plea, standing there atremble, begging a room full of black males for his tip…

Aghast at his own abasement, Adam slunk out through the door. Why even bother slamming it? It would only make his humiliation complete, if by any remote chance it wasn’t already. They—and Jojo—had treated him like the lowest form of servant and, worse, as the lowest form of male, a bitch who didn’t dare do anything more than bleat for his tip.

As he shitkicked his way along the hallway’s steel-wool–colored carpet toward the elevator, his chin hooked down over his clavicle, Adam tried to console himself. After all, what could he have possibly done about it? He had been on alien terrain in a room full of young males of a different race, half of them giant pumped-up trained athletes. Was he supposed to loathe himself for not confronting the alpha-male challenge in Curtis Jones’s eyes and fighting him? But that hadn’t been his only choice, had it. He could have told him off. He could have told them all off. He could have informed them of what vulgar, illiterate, childish, ego-inflated, brain-stunted, reverse-racist bastards they actually were. Except for Jojo, of course—and you’re worse, you towering buzz-cut blockhead! You’re so terrified of looking uncool in front of the other players, you’re afraid to show even the most minimal common courtesy to someone who just rescued you from disaster, you nine-hundred-SAT, ninety-IQ, PlayStation 3 cretin! You didn’t even want to be caught knowing me, you craven snob!

But he hadn’t uttered a word of all that, had he. He had been the craven one. He had just stood there pleading for a tip, too much of a coward to do anything else. He could rationalize it all he wanted, but there was no getting around the simple fact of the matter. He had caved in at the first sign of male challenge.

He had almost reached the elevator when the belly laughs began in earnest. They came rolling out from behind the door of Jones 3A. The bastards had given him a few moments’ grace, and now they were letting it all out. Hegghhh heggghhh heggggghhhhh!…His public unmanning was now complete.

Adam left the building and looked this way and that in the morbid darkness without actually taking in anything he saw. He got back into the Bitsosushi and just sat there, even though he had seven more orders to deliver, seven more orders that would soon grow cold.

All at once something stirred within him. It was Frankie Horowitz’s His Majesty the Child coming out of his coma.

The Child blinked, stretched, and gulped some fresh air. As Adam sat there in an exhausted eight-year-old small-size hatchback, Frankie’s prince’s crown popped up magically on his curly head.

Destiny’s Adam Gellin. In that very moment, he made himself a promise, the sweetest promise the human beast can make to himself: vengeance is mine, and I shall be repaid.

The next morning, shortly after ten o’clock, Charlotte had just come down from Mr. Crone’s classroom on the third floor of Fiske, where she had spent the past hour in the blessed company of about ninety others taking the medieval history test. Two students she recognized from the class, a guy and a girl, juniors or seniors it looked like to her, were standing by the magnificent spiral finial of a brass balustrade that ornamented the wide swath of steps that swept from the Great Yard up to the Fiske entryway.

The girl was saying to the guy, “How’d you feel about the test?”

“How’d I feel?” He put his head back, rolled his eyes up until the irises almost disappeared, and expelled a noisy jet of air between his teeth. “I felt like I was getting ass-raped by a very large animal.”

The girl laughed and laughed, as if that were the wittiest thing she had ever heard in her life. Then she said, “What was that second essay question all about? ‘Compare the Dublin and Baghdad slave markets of the eleventh century and’—what was it?—‘the differing nature of the chattel trade in northern Europe and the Middle East’?”

“I had to wing it with that fucker,” said the guy. “Do you think he’ll give me a few points for truly inspired bullshit?”

The girl laughed and laughed, as before. Nevertheless—blessed company!

Charlotte only wished she were still in the middle of the test! At least for that hour she was part of a group of human beings all doing the same thing. At least she had been completely engrossed in a task that made it impossible to think of…how lonesome she was.

Loneliness wasn’t just a state of mind, was it? It was tactile. She could feel it. It was a sixth sense, not in some fanciful play of words, but physically. It hurt…it hurt like phagocytes devouring the white matter of her brain. It wasn’t merely that she had no friends. She didn’t even have a sanctuary in which she could be simply alone. She had a roommate who froze her out in order to remind her daily what an invisible nonentity Charlotte Simmons, the erstwhile mountain prodigy, really was—and to underscore it by throwing her out when she felt like it in the dead of the night. Out to where? To a public lounge…which also burned with lust and sexual fear…in the dead of the night.

Charlotte scanned the Great Yard and all the scurrying bodies, all the happy heads atilt as they bonded with their friends over their cell phones, on the odd chance that somehow she might spot Bettina. Bettina might become a friend. Sexiled? Bettina seemed to regard sexiling as a perfectly normal part of college life. Charlotte was willing to make allowances—if only she could have a friend! Oh, how steadily the phagocytes devoured devoured devoured devoured…