Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

—wait a second. Charlotte had to clinch her teeth to suppress a smile. When you thought about it, all three of them, Beverly, Mimi, and Bettina, had paid her an involuntary compliment, which was of course the only reliable kind among girls. In the six weeks she had roomed with Beverly, she had treated her as a person—as opposed to a rural alien who had somehow been billeted to her space—exactly twice. The first time was the night Beverly had come in drunk and had begged, cajoled, wheedled, pressured her into sexile with many utterly insincere cooings of “Charlotte” this and “Charlotte” that. From that night to this morning, Beverly hadn’t even so much as addressed her by name. But this morning she had become “Charlotte” again, and not because Beverly wanted anything—except personal information about this suddenly interesting roommate of hers, Charlotte Simmons. Mimi was no longer the California sophisticate rolling her eyes and sighing over the naïveté of this clueless mountain girl. Mimi was suddenly…jealous—jealous! It was so obvious now! As for Bettina, the most forthright and good-hearted of the three, she was openly impressed.

Charlotte turned back to Mimi. She found herself smiling with an unaccustomed aplomb. “Wow. How do you know all this, Mimi?”

Glumly: “Everybody knows it.”

“Oh, one thing I didn’t tell you,” said Charlotte, feeling a surge of confidence. “When I got back, there were all these girls sitting in the hall on our floor? Right on the floor they were sitting, backs against the wall and their legs sticking out, and you couldn’t get by unless they moved their legs? They did, but they all stared at me and wanted to know where I’d been. They were like…so weird.”

“Oh, they’re the Trolls,” said Bettina. “That’s what I call them. They sit there every weekend, and all they do is watch other people go out and come in and then gossip about them. Talk about losers…” She laughed to herself. “We’re far superior. We’re the Lounge Committee.”

The three of them, the whole Lounge Committee, laughed and laughed.

Charlotte gazed off again, grinning as if still amused by the “Trolls” and “the Lounge Committee.” What she was actually grinning about was the rankings. She wasn’t at the bottom like the Trolls. But neither was she stuck in the ever-hopeful middle class, the Lounge Committee.

And she had been mortified by the thought that she had disgraced herself in front of people she knew! Instead, she had become a new person in their eyes, an interesting person, a person to be reckoned with—and jealous of—a pretty girl very much on the scene…all because some hot guy had gone to the trouble of chasing her, no matter how perfidious his motives.

She rocked back in her chair and tilted her chin up and invited the whole world—all those boys and girls in their ludicrous Active Life outfits milling about in the big, slick supergraphic box that was Mr. Rayon—to get an eyeful of Charlotte Simmons. Idly she thought of the cleft chin, the ironic grin, the exotic hazel eyes, the preppy thatch of brown hair…which didn’t make him any less vile, of course.

“Hold it! Hold it! Jesus H. Christ, Socrates! You fucking—” He didn’t complete the impending insult.

The players froze in their tracks. They froze every time they heard one of Coach’s fucking s. Vernon Congers, who had just outdueled Treyshawn and Jojo for a rebound, stood frozen with the ball up near his right shoulder, his elbows sticking out at cockeyed angles, exactly the way they had been when Coach yelled Hold it! Fucking was Buster Roth’s all-purpose, universal term of disapproval. Charles once told Jojo, “After practice it’s two hours before I realize my name isn’t U. Fucking Bousquet.”

Here the man came, walking onto the court with a slow, menacing, rocking, straddling gait, as if his thighs were so dense with muscle he couldn’t get them any closer together if he tried, and his face was compressed into the full, furrowed Buster Roth scowl. Jojo hated it when Coach was like this. Jojo saw…Doom. He felt trapped on Doom’s domain, the court, its blond wood brilliantly lit by the LumeNex lights up above. The court was a little rectangle at the very bottom of Doom’s hellishly black bowl. Cliffs of seats rose up all around in the darkness like walls of an infinite height.

When Coach was ten feet away, he scowled at Vernon Congers as if he had just done something terribly wrong and said in a seething, low voice, “Give me the fucking ball.”

Zombielike, Congers tossed him the ball in a gentle arc. Buster Roth caught it and rested it on his right palm. Then he began tossing it up three or four inches and catching it, three or four inches and catching it, three or four inches and catching it, while he glowered at Jojo. Without another word he pivoted, reared back, and threw the ball about twelve rows up into the Buster Bowl’s seats, where it glanced off the top of a backrest and ricocheted crazily among the seats and the concrete tiers higher up.

He turned back toward Jojo, looking more furious than ever. “Well, well, old Socrates,” he said in a normal, if sarcastic, tone of voice. “You’re a famous thinker. So whyn’t you tell me what you think you’re doing here, Socrates…ONE A YOUR FUCKING PERIPATETIC DIALOGUES? YOU FUCKING GREEK PHILOSOPHERS TOO DIGNIFIED TO JUMP UP IN THE AIR FOR A BALL? WHY CAN’T YOU PRETEND YOU’RE STILL ALIVE INSTEAD OF A FUCKING GREEK STATUE? WHO THE FUCK YOU THINK’S YOUR COACH NOW, PROFESSOR NATHAN MARGOLIES? YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE COVERING THE FUCKING BOARDS, NOT STANDING THERE LIKE A SEVENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD GEEZER CHUGALUGGING HEMLOCK! IF YOU WANNA ACT LIKE A FUCKING DEAD MAN, WHYN’TCHOO GET A PART IN A GREEK PLAY! I HEAR FUCKING SOPHOCLES IS AUDITIONING! FUCKING GUY’S NINETY YEARS OLD, AND HE DON’T LIKE JUMPING UP AND DOWN, EITHER! YOU TWO FUCKING GUYS’LL HIT IT OFF FAMOUSLY, YOU AND SOPHOCLES! HE’S FUCKING NINETY AND YOU’RE FUCKING SEVENTY-ONE AND O-DEEING ON HEMLOCK! WHYN’TCHOO—”

Jojo knew you had to just stand here and let him finish his rant. Everybody had been through it at one time or another, so there was no need to feel humiliated…Still—there was something about…this rant. It was like Coach had been planning it or something. He’d been reading up on a lot of stuff like peripatetic dialogues and Socrates dying at seventy-one and Sophocles writing plays when he was ninety. Reading up! Coach resented the fact that one of his players had ignored his instructions and gone ahead and enrolled in a 300-level course in philosophy. He truly resented it. There was something weird, something poisonous about this particular tirade.

Now Coach was turning toward the rest of the players. He was speaking in his “normal” voice, which in this case meant his most insidious and sarcastic voice. “Oh, I forgot. Maybe some a you ain’t been reintroduced yet to the hoopster formerly known as Jojo. So please give a big hello to a real philosopher’s philosopher, a real thinker, Professor Socrates Johanssen—”

Out of the corner of his eyes Jojo could see three student managers at courtside drinking this all in, feasting their eyes, gobbling it up. The student managers were students who willingly served as the team’s slaves, doing all the dirty work you couldn’t get a starving Mexican to do, cleaning up after the players, picking up their jockstraps and sweaty practice jerseys and putting them in the laundry, mopping up the vomit when they got drunk on the road. One of them was a fat-hipped, sullen little girl named Delores. She had long dark hair parted down the middle, which made her look like an Indian, and she wore heavy mealy-gray sweatpants, which made her look like an Indian in the shape of a bowling pin. She was the one who disturbed Jojo. Maybe he was being paranoid, but in practice, every time he did something wrong, he would catch her snickering into the ear of one of the other managers. She never smiled at him, only at his expense. One time after he passed by, he distinctly heard her say “the big stoop”; and another time, “not the sharpest knife in the drawer.” If she was such a genius, what was she doing working for free as a glorified men’s-room attendant?