Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Turning toward Debby in hopes of getting some good old times going, Archer said, “Mommy, did I ever tell you? We used to bring our dates over here the night before the game for a little…what you might call…nocturnal tailgating.”

“Yo, Dad!” said Tyson. “What kind of tail?”

It genuinely annoyed Archer when Tyson acted as if he were now old enough to share off-color double entendres with adults. Of course, he himself had walked right into that one with his choice of words.

“Oh, fudge!” said Debby, who had not been listening to either one of them. Sweating, several wisps of hair pasted to her forehead, she was inspecting a tawny peach fingernail she had just broken trying to drag a wicker picnic basket out of the Navigator’s cargo area and onto the tailgate.

“You can say the real word,” said Tyson. “Everybody’s heard it before, even the Hulk.”

Tyson had taken to calling his brother, Porter, the Hulk, since he was skinny, reedy, small for his age, and wouldn’t take his shirt off because his ribs showed. With a look of patient disdain, Porter changed the subject. In the best of whines—and, as opposed to looking bored, the human ability to whine peaks at thirteen—Porter said, “If the game starts at one o’clock, why are we here at eleven-fifteen?”

“Because I spent four hours stuffing these baskets full of food,” said Mommy, “and you’re going to have lunch right here. While Dad has his drinks and dreams about the old days, you can come back here and help me drag these things out there instead of standing around whining and complaining. Okay?”

“Yuckamamie,” whined Porter. “I wasn’t complaining, I was asking a question. I mean, yuck—a—mamie.”

“What’s ‘his drinks’ supposed to mean?” said Archer.

“You’ve got enough bottles back here,” said Debby. “You must think you’re nineteen again.”

“And what’s so terrible about that? Or dreaming, for that matter.”

“Nothing—”

“Oh, this is just great, all of you,” said Tyson with the sort of arch sarcasm boys acquire in northeastern boarding schools. “I can see why we got up at five-thirty and drove all the way from Connecticut for a tailgate at old Dupont. I mean like it’s so cool and everything, and everybody’s having such a good time.”

Archer wanted to strangle him…or at least punish him with some withering sarcastic comeback…but he didn’t. He looked down at the asphalt and made himself cool off. It was maddening when children were sarcastic to adults, but it could be crushing when adults were sarcastic to children.

A sudden blast of music from a car radio. He looked up—

Tyson was no longer interested in him at all. His head was turned, his eyes were as big as saucers, and his mouth was agape and grinning at the same time.

“Oh wow!” he exclaimed. “Look at those guys! You see them?”

In the row of vehicles just ahead of them, some great, strapping young men were up on the truck bed of a pickup, engaged in a beer fight. There was no missing their “ripped” bodies, that being Tyson’s term for lean, highly defined muscular builds, since practically all were naked except for the shorts that hung from way down on their hips. Barks of anger, cries of laughter, thrashing arms. One of them produces a punctured can of beer and sprays another in the face from two feet away. “Die, asshole!” the victim yells in a macho voice, whereupon he throws himself upon his assailant and they go crashing to the truck-bed floor. Knees, feet, legs, shoulders, grimaces, bloodred faces pop up and crash as they grapple. Over the pickup’s radio, a throaty young woman wails in the pell-mell cadence of the new pop music craze, crunk: “—spears her haunches Dirty Sanchez dude what wants her nude and slutty pseudo-ruts her butt so rudely taunts her…” Others, including a regular young giant, maybe six feet six, rangy but with muscles everywhere, stand over the combatants, cheering ironically and egging them on. Behind the giant, another boy sneaks up, holding a jumbo plastic cup of beer in the air as if he were about to throw a baseball. “Hey, Mac!” he says. The giant turns about, and the boy hurls his beer bomb, cup and all, at his midsection. The beer goes all over Mac. It soaks his shorts clear down to the crotch. “Oh you dick!” roars Mac as he goes at him, but the boy dodges and vaults over the side of the truck bed and down to the asphalt. “Come on back up here, you wuss, and fight like a wuss!” And on it goes, as the crunk singer wails, “Gots the curse her pad her madder hearse her cold cunt cash her outta odor…”

Tyson was enjoying it immensely. Maybe this tailgate stuff wasn’t as lame as he’d thought. Archer was trying to work it out in his mind that, after all, tailgate parties had always been about sheer exuberant fun, and this was different only in style, except that the next thing he knew, two of the great strapping lads were leaning out over the tailgate and hoisting a girl up by her arms. She was a big blonde, a bit heavy but good and chesty, wearing tight bootleg jeans and a lacy whisper of a camisole unbuttoned way down to there. She shrieked a shriek that wavered between protest and giddiness. As she twisted her torso this way and that, as if to escape, more and more breast bulged out of her flimsy top. They had just hoisted her, twisting and straggling, up to the truck bed itself when—bango!—the flimsy camisole popped open completely. She wore no bra. There were her breasts, her areolae, her nipples, big as life.

“Woooooooooo!” came the ironic but excited cry of the boys up on the truck bed and the others standing around the tailgate.

With a gasp of mortification, the girl stuffed them back inside her shirt and hopped off the truck’s tailgate, smiling, but with eyes cast down, and going, “Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod…”

From out of nowhere sprang a boy with a long but well-defined wrestler’s gut, clad in low-slung plaid boxer undershorts—out of the fly of which protruded a two-foot-long plastic novelty penis with a clownishly large glans. A grizzle ran from the dome of this boy’s head, down his jaws, under his nose, over his chin, and down under where it met a tangle of hair sprouting up from his chest.

“Where’d she go?” he howled drunkenly. He turned about in slow circles, his toy penis swaying in a variable lag.

Archer was stunned. What were Tyson and Porter supposed to come away with? Jesus Christ, collegiate was collegiate, but this was…indecent—immoral was the term that crossed his mind, but the very word had become obsolete. It had vanished from sophisticated conversation.

He cut a glance at Tyson and Porter. They were utterly absorbed.

The rich, sour odor rose up from the asphalt. Oh, it was beer, all right, four acres of sloshed beer. And those big white scraps littering even the sycamore islands? Mashed beer cups. And that bubbling panorama of bobbing heads, shoulders, elbows—four acres of America’s college elite, Dupont students, pumping thousands, thousands of gallons of beer and hosing it down their gullets, and it comes out…where? And the result was—what?—piss, piss, great fluffy fumes of piss, four acres of it.

“I haven’t seen a single freshman here,” said Mimi. She motioned her head toward the group of guys clustered about the rear end of a black Expedition, jumbo cups in their hands, intently watching another guy trying to do something with the joint where the hose was attached to an aluminum keg of beer. The onlookers were being witty.

“Guess what, Griff. In America, things screw on clockwise!…Just a tip!” General laughter.

“Yeah, Griff, you SPED!”

“What the fuck’s a sped? Not that I can figure out why the fuck I’m asking.”