Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

“I never saw any figures for here,” said Adam, eager to stay in the discussion in hopes of impressing Charlotte, “but nationally there are thirty-five hundred Division One college basketball players, and they all think they’re gonna play in the NBA, and you know how many will actually make it? Less than one percent.”

“Right!” said Edgar. Nobody had ever seen Edgar riding higher. “And the rest of them, they’ve spent four years at Dupont University doing alley-oops or sacking quarterbacks or whatever it is they do, and they’ll leave here and they’ll be…oh…”

“Sacking my mother and hijacking her car in the parking lot at the mall, is what they’ll be doing,” said Roger.

“Very funny, Roger,” said Camille. “Why don’t we be a little racist while we’re at it?”

“Oh, racist my ass. Stop breaking my balls, Camille.”

“You’re telling me that remark wasn’t based on a racist assumption?”

“Okay, I’m a racist,” said Roger. “Let’s have closure and put that behind us and move on. I’ve got a question that’s so obvious nobody ever asks it. What is it with this sports mania in the first place? Why does anybody get excited because Dupont is gonna play Indiana in basketball? Either our hired mercenaries will beat their hired mercenaries, or vice versa. Why does anybody care? It’s a game between two groups of guys who have no connection with our lives whatsoever, and even if they did, it’s only a game! Why does a game get students so emotionally involved? Or anybody else for that matter. What does it mean to them? I don’t see how it could mean anything, but obviously it does. It’s a mystery. It’s completely irrational.”

Camille muttered, “I still say it was racist.”

Charlotte was fascinated by Roger’s transformation from just a few minutes ago. Up on this plane Roger Kuby was a different person, no longer the chronically off-key would-be wit, now an intellectual determined to get to the core of a psychological mystery. The serious Roger Kuby even looked better in her eyes. All at once she could see the handsome features hitherto hidden by his coat of fat.

“Irrational is right,” Adam was saying. “It’s a primitive ritual of masculinity, and girls just go along with it because that’s where the boys are.”

Oh, the Millennial Mutants were soaring now. Charlotte was enthralled. Maybe this was the group of students she had been looking for, the cénacle, students who, above all else, had a life of the mind, la vie intellectuelle she had envisioned back in Sparta as she looked out, at Miss Pennington’s urging, across the mountains toward the distant, shimmering Dupont…

She was so enthralled, in fact, that she, like the others, had scarcely noticed the four students who had emerged from Briggs and were settling in on the other side of the steps, slightly above them. Like the Mutants, they wore the usual, the T-shirts, the shorts, the sneakers, the flip-flops. But their…aura…was entirely different. All four were lean and on the tall side, and even though their loose T-shirts and shorts obscured everything but their extremities, they were obviously “diesels,” to use the Dupont word for boys who pumped up their muscles through weight lifting. The one in the foreground, about twelve feet from the Mutants, sat on one step with his feet on the step below. His legs were so long his knees came up practically to his shoulders, and his shoulders were this wide. His head, crowned by a baseball cap worn backward, and his angular face, beset here and there by acne scars, rested atop a preternaturally long, thick neck, with an Adam’s apple that stuck out like a rock formation. He kept pumping his heel up and down while his eyes roamed all over the place, as if he thought something or other was about to happen, God knew what. The other three were not quite so big, but they were big enough, and they had the same look of lounging on the steps while trying to figure out where the action was.

The contrast with the four male Mutants struck Charlotte immediately, although she couldn’t have put a name to it. She cast a glance at Adam. He was built in the proper proportions and had a nice symmetrical face with a fine nose and nice lips—sensual, in fact—but now he seemed…slight. Greg was so sketchily put together, not even his height did anything for him. His mop of dark brown curls made his head look enormous and misshapen, stuck as it was atop that little pencil neck of his.

The newcomers turned their heads from time to time to check out the Mutants, turned back to their cohorts and twisted their eyebrows. Pretty soon all four were pulling dubious, ironic faces for one another’s benefit, talking in low voices, chuckling, and then sizing up the Mutants again.

“…no mystery to it,” Adam was saying. “I can tell you why. Lacrosse is one of the only two sports where white boys are the ones with the machismo. The other one’s ice hockey. Basketball is totally a black sport, and football is mostly a black sport. It’s just not as obvious in football, because the uniforms cover up their bodies and they wear face masks. Lacrosse would be all black, too, like that”—he snapped his fingers—“if black teenagers ever started playing it. They’d make the white players they’ve got out there now look like…like…like I don’t know what…wusses, pussies…It wouldn’t even be close. Same thing with hockey. A few body checks by the sort of black athletes who play basketball and football, and the toughest Canadian in the NHL would be a basket case. He’d be mush.”

Oh yes, they were soaring, the Mutants were, soaring! And it was Adam who led the way. He was ramming home whatever he wanted to ram home. How could anyone even compete with him on this subject? He knew the athletes at Dupont, he tutored them, he had seen them up close. He could rip all mystery away because he had been inside their feeble heads. So absorbed was he in revealing all, he was the last to notice that trouble was nearby and staring at him.

The guy with the pumping flip-flop had risen to his feet. Sure enough, hewas…tall…in fact, gigantic, as if from another species—rangy, lean, perhaps six-five or -six…and big. He rolled his immense shoulders and then started coming down the steps, his flip-flops slapping, toward Adam. The first thing Adam detected was Edgar, Roger, Camille, and Charlotte looking up. So Adam looked up. Leaning over him was a giant, or so he seemed from down here on the steps where Adam was sitting, a giant with immense forearms, a huge chin, an enormous Adam’s apple, and acne on a face that now bore a look of such exaggerated seriousness—accompanied by such contortions of the forehead and eyebrows—that it oozed with irony and mockery of the hambone variety. And in that instant Adam knew, as surely as he knew anything in this world, that whatever happened next, it would not be pleasant. Then he caught a glimpse of the giant’s three cohorts in the background, smirking, each an only slightly smaller edition of the giant himself. One had a brawler’s grizzle stretching from the dome of his head, down his jaws, above his upper lip, over his chin, and under his chin to the itchy skin below, and Adam now knew that this was going to be unpleasant in a particular way.

“Don’t mean to interrupt,” said the giant with a ham actor’s solicitude. “You guys having a seminar out here?”

Adam ransacked his brain for something…cool…to say, something to show that he got it, the big hambone’s game, and that he, too, was into irony and could parry any such thrust. But all he came up with was, “No.”

As soon as he said it, he realized he should just leave it at that, a curt, flat no. But what if the hulking guy took that as disrespectful? That way lay disaster—in an as yet unknown form, but inevitably, disaster! He heard himself adding, “We’re just chilling, just hanging out.”