Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Now Coach was looking straight at Jojo. “So okay,” Buster Roth was saying, “you bulked up over the summer. Fine. But if all it is, is fucking dead weight, then we might as well give the job to the fucking Safe. He can stand still bigger than you can.”

Jojo detected sniggers and stifled chuckles on the sidelines and among a couple of players on the court. The Safe was a 345-pound offensive tackle on the football team named Reuben Sayford. Jojo’s breathing accelerated. Coach was Coach, but this was pushing the outside of the envelope.

Buster Roth stopped talking but continued to stare at Jojo in a certain way. Then he crooked a forefinger and wiggled it and said, “Come here.”

Jojo was sweating terribly as he walked toward him. Sweat had soaked through the upper part of his sleeveless mauve basketball shirt to the point where it seemed to have a dark bib. Coach turned toward Vernon Congers, who had been in on the battle for the rebound and was no more than four feet from Jojo.

“Congers,” he said with another beckoning crook of the finger, “you come here, too.”

The two of them now stood before Coach. Congers was sweating also, and the sweat gave his brown skin a glossy sheen. His strength-coached muscles stood out in high relief, especially his deltoids, which popped out from his shoulders like two big apples.

In a perfectly ordinary voice Coach said, “You two trade shirts.”

All the ramifications of those four words hit Jojo at once. He was stunned, dumbstruck, paralyzed. Demoted to the second team. Six days before the opening game—which was here at Dupont! Against a pushover, Cincinnati—but the first game of the season! Students, alumni, the Charlies’ Club donors! The press!—scouts from the League!—they’ll all see Jojo Johanssen sitting on the bench! What team in the League was even going to consider a demoted has-been power forward! The very people who had looked at him as if they were looking at a god—the students, ordinary fans, sports junkies in front of the TV sets, all those hooples who wanted a little piece of Go go Jojo, an autograph, a smile, a wave, or just the chance of being in the same place he was, breathing the same air he breathed—even they would avert their eyes! Jojo Johanssen, object of pity!—assuming anybody bothered thinking of him at all…Congers was already taking off his yellow shirt, revealing his abdominals, which stood out like cobblestones, and his obliques, which surmounted his pelvic saddle like plates of armor.

Jojo just stood there staring at Coach, as if any second he was going to say, “Just kidding. Only wanted to get your attention.” But Coach was not the just-kidding type. His eyes were not dancing with merriment. The moment stretched out…stretched out…stretched out…stretched out…until finally Jojo had no choice but to start taking off his mauve shirt. A dishonored knight surrendering his sword and suit of mail. Every eye was pinned on him as the LumeNex lights beamed down on the blond wood stage…It might as well have been the whole world, because the whole world would soon know, anyway. Dead silence…not a sound…but what was there to say when you were watching a man being broken? The final indignity was putting on the yellow shirt and feeling the sweat left over from Congers’s magnificent, exhilarated, triumphant black body chill his own deflated pale white, bled-white, dead-white carcass.

The scrimmage resumed, and in a sheerly intellectual sense, Jojo knew that this was the time to show what he was made of, to dog Congers on defense in a way no power forward had ever been dogged before, to outrun him, outjump him, outmuscle him, fake him out, shoot him out of the water, crush the sonofabitch. Oh, yes; that he knew intellectually. But his spirit was in ruins, and that was all his body knew. It was Congers who did the out-dogging, outrunning, -jumping, -muscling, -faking, -shooting—and the crushing. Within fifteen minutes it couldn’t have been more obvious that once more, Buster Roth, lord and wizard of the Buster Bowl, had shown himself to be an unerring judge of horseflesh. Jojo left the floor feeling as humiliated as any athlete on earth had ever felt.

Sure enough, the rest of them were diligently not looking at him, not even Mike. Mike was making a big point of keeping himself wrapped up in conversation with Charles. On the edge of Jojo’s peripheral vision, however, one big pair of eyes was fixed right on him. He turned his head. It was Delores, the student manager with the Indian face and the big bottom. She was the only person still sitting on the bench.

“Hang in there, Jojo,” she said.

If she had said it out of sincere concern, it would have been bad enough. All he needed at this point was some pity poured on him by a “student manager.” As it was, a smile seemed to be playing at the corners of her mouth.

A red mist formed in front of Jojo’s eyes. He squared his stance toward her and said, “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

Abashed, she shrugged her shoulders and her eyebrows. She never took her eyes off him, however, and kept on giving him a what—ironic?—stare. “I was just trying—” She didn’t finish the sentence.

“You were just trying bullshit, is what you were just trying,” said Jojo.

“Well, you don’t have to take it out on me.” The calmness of her voice somehow made it worse.

“Take what out?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. He thrust his chin forward and gestured toward her. “Why do you do this? Tell me that.”

“Do what?”

“This ‘job’ you got, this student manager”—he started to say shit but thought better of it—“thing?”

“Well—”

“Nobody respects you for it. You know that, don’t you?”

The girl shrugged nonchalantly, which made Jojo furious.

He stepped closer. “Everybody laughs at you, if you wanna know the truth! Everybody wonders how you can get yourself down low enough to take this shit! Student manager…Student manager, my ass! Student slave is more like it! Student urinal puck supplier!” He stepped still closer. “The whole team spits on you people!”

Jojo was now the very picture of looking down at somebody. The six-foot-ten hulk of him towered over the little ball of Indian hair and nappy gray cotton rag down below him on the bench.

She looked frightened, but she didn’t budge. In a tiny voice she said, “That’s not true, and I’m sorry about what happened out there—but I didn’t do it.”

Of course she was right—which made it that much worse.

“You think it’s not true! How about a little experiment? If I spit on the floor, you’re the one who’s got to get down on all fours and wipe it up!”

She looked up at his huge white blond-tipped head, which was now florid with anger. She was afraid to attempt any reply at all. The giant was at the point of detonation.

Jojo swelled up his chest, lifted his head upward as high as it would go, and snuffled, scouring his sinuses, nasal pathways, and lungs so furiously it was as if he wanted to suck the bench, the girl, the entire Buster Bowl and half of southeastern Pennsylvania up into his nostrils. He grimaced until his neck widened, striated by muscles, tendons, and veins, swelled up his chest to the last milliliter of its capacity—and spat. The girl stared at the edge of the court where it landed: a prodigious, runny, yellowy pus-laced gob of phlegm.

“Clean it up,” said Jojo, halfway between a hiss and a snarl, whereupon he started walking away.

The girl, Delores, didn’t move or make a sound. At that moment, Buster Roth, heading off the court and back to his suite of offices, walked past, did a double take, stopped, and stared at the virulent mess on the floor.

He turned toward Delores. “Jesus Christ, what the hell is that? Clean it up!”