Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

“Let me see the fucking guy’s card,” said Vance.

As he handed it to him, Hoyt flicked a glance at it himself. Adam Gellin.

“Never heard of him,” said Vance, handing it back.

Hoyt shrugged in as bored a fashion as he could. But he wasn’t bored. He jotted the name down in his mind. Adam Gellin was the little shit’s name.

Fuck! Why the fuck did that make him think of his fucking grades? He could be a legend in his own time—one of the very greatest. But what the fuck was he going to do next June?

Where is the poet who has sung of that most lacerating of all human emotions, the cut that never heals—male humiliation? Oh, the bards, the balladeers have stirred us with epics of the humiliated male’s obsession with revenge…but that is letting the poor devil off easy. After all, the very urge, Vengeance is mine, gives him back a portion of his manhood, retaliation being manly stuff. But the feeling itself, male humiliation, is unspeakable. No man can bring himself to describe it. The same man who will confess with relish and in lavish ghostwritten detail to every sort of debauchery and atrocity will not utter one peep about the humiliations that, in Orwell’s phrase, “make up seventy-five percent of life.” For confessing to humiliation means confessing that he has cringed, caved in, surrendered his honor without a fight to another man who has intimidated him—that he has been unsexed and has plunged into a misery worse than the prospect of imminent death. Eternally, the sheer fear of physical confrontation—even now—in the twenty-first century!—when life’s major victories are won not by knights in armor on the field of battle but by sedentary men in central-heating-weight worsted suits inside glass-walled electronic chambers. Nor will a man ever free himself from that sickening moment of capitulation. A word, an image, a smell, a face will bring it flashing back, and he will experience the very feeling, every neural sensation of that moment, and he will drown all over again in the shame of lying still for his own unsexing.

Fortunately, Adam Gellin was not flashing back to that moment as he walked across the Great Yard at sunset, even though his destination, the new Farquhar Fitness Center, had everything to do with it. Indian summer was fading, the days had become noticeably shorter and chillier, and Adam had put on his quilted forest-green Patagonia jacket, the kind that extends all the way down to the hips and has a drawstring enabling one to tighten it at the waist for greater snugness. Random souls went in and out of the great arch-ways of the library, but there was hardly a soul in the Yard itself. As the sun sank, bands of soft purples and pinks rimmed the horizon, and the low light did something wondrous to the Gothic buildings. Adam no longer saw them as individual structures, each with its distinctive details, but rather as a single, vast gray Gothic abstraction of stone tinged with pink, purple, and the sun’s last faint gold. The elms that rose to towering heights here were gray, but backlit by a soft golden mauve. He had never seen Dupont in quite this light before…solid, deep-rooted, unassailable, aglow…Fortunes fluctuated, but not Dupont…

Adam Gellin was high on the rush of optimism a young man enjoys when he first decides to transform his body by pumping iron.

He had begun working out on the Cybex machines at Farquhar. Not that he thought he would ever bulk up enough to overcome giants such as Curtis Jones and Jojo with his bare hands. He wasn’t crazy. All he wanted was a certain look that said, “Don’t even think about fucking with me. Don’t even try to make me your patsy. Save your patronizing cracks—You the man, Adam!—for wusses. You can’t play me like that.”

Adam ruminated upon some of the terminology of his new quest—pecs, abs, delts, traps, lats, tri’s, bi’s, obliques—as he approached the crossing of the Great Yard’s two big interior walkways. In the center of the intersection was the Saint Christopher fountain, featuring a huge, heroic granite sculpture of the saint himself in a toga, carrying the infant Jesus across a turbulent stream created by the rushing water of the fountain. The late-nineteenth-century French sculptor Jules Dalou had done the figures, which were now cast into the deep shadows of the verging twilight. What pecs Dalou had given Saint Christopher! What bulging delts! As he walked, Adam straightened his left arm and raised it to shoulder level, then felt the deltoid muscle with his right hand. Not much there yet, but—

Down in the locker room, Adam changed into an extra-large T-shirt and extra-long shorts, then headed up to the weight-training floor. Powerful overhead lights gave a slick look to the floor’s black-trimmed beige expanse and its regiment after regiment, rank after rank, of Cybex machines with white frames, black iron arms, and stainless-steel weight axles, all doubled in number by the mirrored walls. On his first day up here Adam had taken a look at the other weight lifters and decided that he needed a shirt with sleeves that came down to the elbows, so serious were his shortcomings in the upper arm, chest, and thigh departments. And these young brutes weren’t even athletes! Real athletes, the recruits who played on the football and basketball teams, never went near Farquhar. They had their own gyms, weight rooms, and training rooms. The muscular students here at Farquhar were merely subscribing to the new male body fashion—the jacked, ripped, buff look. They were all over the place here on the weight-lifting floor! Ordinary guys with such big arms, big shoulders, big necks, big chests, they could wear sleeveless T-shirts and strap-style I’m-Buff shirts to show off in! What were they going to do with all these amazing muscles?…Nothing, that’s what. They weren’t going to be athletes, and they weren’t going to fight anybody. It was a fashion, these muscles, just like anything else you put on your body…cargo shorts, jeans, the preppies’ pink button-down shirts and lime-green shorts, Oakley sunglasses, black rubber L. L. Bean boots with the leather tops…whatever. Pure fashion! Nevertheless, Adam wanted in.

Look at these fucking guys checking themselves out in the mirror…Practically every wall is a vast sheet of mirror. The cover story, you understand, is that the mirrors are here so you can see if you’re doing your exercises correctly. Pure bullshit, of course…They’re here so you can drink in and drool over the beauty of your fashionable body! Between exercises, our dense fashion plates sneak looks at themselves. They can’t even wait for the next exercise. Look at that one over there…casually straightening his arm down by his side…so he can sneak a look at the way his triceps pop out…and that one…he’s pretending he’s just stretching…so he can make his latissimi dorsi fan out like a giant stingray…and that one, over there…pretending to rub his hands together at waist level…when he’s really pressing them together with all his might so he can watch the mighty pectoral muscles pop out…Behold! The fashionable brutes! The diesels, they called them! Every thirty seconds—you could count on it—some brute-in-embryo would straighten an arm and sneak a look in the ubiquitous mirrors at his burgeoning triceps. Muscles were very much in fashion.

Adam stood there in his droopy clothes, panning his head this way and that, searching for—there! Up on the balcony he spotted it: a shoulder-shrug machine, designed expressly for bulking up the trapezius. Once he laid eyes on it, he yearned for it. Nobody had ever yearned more for a drug. Nothing could make you look tougher faster than a big neck merging with a trapezius bulging, swollen from shoulder to shoulder…But there was an unspoken piece of protocol that said only heavy lifters used the apparatus on the balcony. Adam agonized; the very thought of the diesels he would find up there made his arms and legs feel like noodles…but he couldn’t help that, could he? He all but ran up the treaded metal stairs, fearful that somebody else, some bona fide brute, would get to the shoulder-shrug machine before he did.