Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Charlotte went, “Hoyt—Hoyt—” She was horrified.

“Ecch,” said Hoyt. “Nothing to worry about. Girl’s crazy. She takes muscle relaxants.”

In due course, Hoyt came back from the bar with two cups, one for her and one for himself. He raised his, as if making a toast. Still terribly embarrassed and convinced that the entire room was waiting to see what she would do, she raised her container, and Hoyt tapped it with his. Not knowing what else to do, she put hers to her lips and took a sip. It wasn’t all that horrible—but she felt a jolt of shame. The only reason she was holding this drink in her hand was to keep from looking uncool in front of a bunch of drunks she didn’t even know. But she took another sip, a bigger one, and then another, bigger still. Only then did she notice Hoyt hadn’t even brought his drink to his lips.

He kept sneaking glances down into her cup. Spreading the warmest and sincerest smile imaginable across his face, he looked deep into her eyes. Then he motioned toward the metal door. “I told you we wouldn’t stay down here very long,” said the man you could always trust. “Let me show you what’s upstairs.”

Charlotte nodded and took another gulp.

Charlotte hadn’t felt this relaxed—or trustful—all evening. Instead of the chill of anxiety that had gripped her ever since she first stepped into this house, something warm and mellow now coursed through her veins. This good-looking boy, Hoyt, who had excited and frightened her at the same time, had proved to be a gentleman, albeit an extremely “hot” gentleman, to use Mimi’s word. The look on her face!—and Bettina’s! That was what she could see as she looked into Hoyt’s eyes. She didn’t mind at all when he took her by the hand as he led her back up the winding stairs.

At the top he turned the handle of the secret door, but it wouldn’t open. No doubt the bouncer had locked it, he told Charlotte. The guy must have spotted a monitor, or somebody who might be a monitor. It seemed that the university sent snoopers around to report underage drinking—meaning serving alcohol where people under twenty-one were present—and it was hard to keep them out. That was why both the alcohol at the secret bar downstairs and the soft drinks at the bar on the main floor were served in identical white containers. That way the monitors couldn’t tell a container of beer from a container of Sprite. The administration had begun enforcing the drinking rule with a vengeance. The vengeance was directed at the very system itself: fraternities. The administration was looking for any way possible to force them off the campus and eliminate them, and—

Charlotte didn’t hear anything after underage drinking. She was at this very moment doing something illegal. It had never occurred to her! But the jolt of panic soon passed. She took another swallow of wine. While delivering his exegesis, Hoyt put his arm around her again. This time it wasn’t at all disturbing. Somehow he had become her protector.

Hoyt tried the door again, and now it opened. They emerged into the full onslaught of the music. The bouncer turned around in his seat at the desk, smiled wryly, and said something to Hoyt. It sounded like, “All clear, Hoyto.”

The crowd in the great hall had swollen. Boys and girls, practically all of them white, were crammed together from one end to the other. The heat was worse than ever. The girls grinned with their mouths open and laughed at anything and nothing at all. The music was a never-ending chain-reaction freeway pileup with slivers of human cries and shrieks.

She hadn’t wanted anybody seeing him touch her in any way, least of all Mimi and Bettina, but now a thrill of sudden social ascension—she had a hot guy hovering over her!—was overriding everything else. And what if they did see her with his arm around her? What was actually wrong with that? Was there a better-looking boy in the whole place? Take a good look, Mimi! Mimi’s condescending attitude would never survive seeing her with this boy in tow…Charlotte looked about, halfway expecting to see them. But there were so many bodies, so much noise, such a delirious humid haze…and the strobe lights kept throbbing…

Hoyt was steering her toward the grand staircase. It was just ahead, its banister sweeping upstairs in a luxurious curve. She stiffened with a twinge of the Doubts…Was it really wise to go “upstairs,” whatever that might possibly mean? But there were already boys and girls going up the staircase and coming down the staircase, a regular stream of them. It wasn’t as if she and this boy would be up there by themselves.

Getting through the crowd wasn’t easy. Boys kept trying to get over to Hoyt. “Hey, Hoyt!” “Yo, Hoyto!” Charlotte Simmons—magically beamed up into the very center of things!

Boys and girls, pelvises locked together, were grinding away as before, except that now they were sweating so much their arms and faces looked luminous—and frenzied—when the strobe flashes hit them.

Up close, the staircase wasn’t quite so grand. Coats of paint had dulled the great curved banister. The steps, which must have been four feet wide, had patches of practically bare wood in the center.

“Yo, Hoyt! Where you going?” Whuh yuh gon’? “Crawl the hall—or sump’m else?”

It was a fat boy yelling in a slurred voice from below. He was leering. An egregious pair of black eyebrows ran together over his nose. Wait a minute. Hadn’t she seen him before? He held a white drink container at a perilous angle in one hand. His shirtfront was sopping wet.

Hoyt ignored him.

“Who’s that?” said Charlotte. “What’s he mean, crawl the hall?”

Hoyt shrugged in a Who knows? sort of way and said, “That’s I.P. He’s one of our mistakes.”

At the top of the stairs was a landing three times the size of Charlotte’s living room in Sparta. She never saw such a high ceiling upstairs in a house. In the center, where there had no doubt once been a chandelier, was a fluorescent fixture that gave off a harsh, gaseous blue light. Down a wide hallway Charlotte could see students crowded in front of open doorways, convulsing with laughter, erupting with cheers, whoops, and applause of obviously mock approval, and groans and boos of mock disappointment, all the while drinking from their big cups.

“What are they doing?” said Charlotte.

Hoyt didn’t even pause. He never let up on the pressure of his arm on her back as he steered her toward the staircase that went up. “I don’t know,” he sighed, shaking his head as if to say that whatever it was, it was something pointless, wearisome, and juvenile, not even worth investigating. “Come on, I’ll show you the rooms. They’ll blow your mind.”

Leading off the third-floor landing was a hall as wide as the one below, but the doors seemed to be closed, and there was nobody hanging out in the corridor. Hoyt steered her along it, his arm ever more tight around her. From behind the doors came random muffled laughter, real and from TV laugh tracks, drunken male yawps, the burble of conversations, the deep unghhs of animated brutes getting pulverized in video games…

Hoyt stopped in front of a door, paused to see if he could hear anything, then opened it. It was a large bedroom packed with boys and girls sitting on the edges of the beds and on the floor in a cloud of funky, sweetish smoke, not saying a word. They stared at Hoyt and Charlotte with the wary, wide-eyed look of raccoons caught out back by the trash bin at night—except for a girl who held a wrinkled cigarette up to her lips between her thumb and forefinger and inhaled deeply with her eyes shut.

“Peace,” said Hoyt as he closed the door and withdrew.

He opened another. It was dark except for the light from the hall, which was enough to reveal a double-decker bunk bed on either side. Hoyt clicked a wall switch on. A sandy-colored blanket with American Indian designs on it was tucked beneath the upper mattress, pulled straight down, and tucked beneath the lower mattress, creating a sort of tent. Charlotte heard a male voice whisper, “Who the fuck’s that?”