Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Harrison confronted Bolka in a crouch, his body heaving in search of oxygen. His eyes were glassy. He looked as if at any moment he would black out and collapse from sheer exhaustion. Bolka edged closer. With a cry barely louder than a whimper, Harrison charged, throwing his hands upward as if to force Bolka’s arms apart and get a clean shot at him. In the next moment they were rolling in the dirt, and Harrison wound up on all fours with Bolka on his back. Bolka forced the smaller man’s head onto the ground so that the left side of his face was mashed into the pavement. With some sort of wrestler’s hold he clasped his huge hands behind Harrison’s neck. The neck was bent at a frightening angle. Bango!—the very life seemed to depart Harrison. He was an inert piece of meat. Sure that his adversary was now, indeed, finished, Bolka rose upright on his knees in a fumidbeer slick, his legs still straddling his adversary’s body. He threw his shoulders back and looked about at the crowd and lifted his fists to chest level. Hoyt expected him at any moment to start pounding his chest and cut loose with a yodel. Still lying on his side between Bolka’s legs, Harrison slowly rolled onto his back. His eyes were closed. His chest rose up and down in fast, shallow breaths. Bolka had a serious, almost sad look on his face, as if to say, “I didn’t want to have to hurt him, but he insisted on picking a fight.” Here at the perfect point on the graph of intoxication, Hoyt treated himself to a wave of sheer malignant hatred. He loathed the dumb fuck. Who was he? What was this Balkan mongrel diversoid doing at Dupont in the first place? The gale was blowing nicely. It was exhilarating. Just perfect. He was a Dupont man and a Saint Ray, and he knew. Loathing became something loftier and more refined: contempt.

Now the contemptible subhuman was rising to its feet. Bolka looked down at Harrison and shook his head as if he was sorry it had had to happen. Then he turned his back on the vanquished foe and began surveying the crowd. He had such a black scowl on his face, it seemed that at any moment he was likely to pick out someone else to slaughter. He stood stock-still and stared at someone. The scowl dissolved into a faint smile. “There’s my girl…” He said it with a slow, sugary, cretinish drawl. Theh’s muh gul…He began to move forward. It was her, the little freshman…He was heading straight for her.

He started to say it again: “Theh’s muh gul—”

“Stay away from me!” It was a shout, a command, rather than a cry.

“Uhh—”

“I SAID STAY AWAY FROM ME!”

She was furious! Her face was stricken with fear and twisted with a flood of tears—but she was furious! She stood her ground!

Bolka, looking bigger and more gorged with muscle than ever, was now but a few steps away from her. He looked more rank, more frothy with sweat, more of a big ugly bear, more contemptible than ever. The gawkers were dumbstruck, paralyzed…tiny worthless creatures—

At that moment Hoyt felt it. That point! That point on the graph—the two lines met at that moment. The limbic and the rational were perfectly poised, in equilibrium. He loved himself as he watched himself detach himself from the ring of useless gawkers and enter the arena, a fellow warrior come to save and avenge a Saint Ray. And in that same moment a strategy came to him.

“Hey, dickhead!” Both hims loved himself as they heard the challenge, the note of unremitting contempt in his voice.

The giant turned about incredulously.

“Stay away from her, dickhead! She’s my sister!”

Bolka cocked his head and produced a small sneer of a smile and said, “And who the fuck do you think you are?”

“If she’s my sister, then I’m her brother, is what the fuck even a moron like you should be able to figure out, and what I’m telling you is, stay away from my sister!”

You could see the giant’s scorn and fury dim down all at once, as if it were on a rheostat. Obviously he was beginning to process the implications in terms of public opinion, gawker opinion, if this was in fact the girl’s brother. Hoyt and the giant were barely four feet apart. The graph! The point! He was there!

“I said…stay…away…from my sister!”

Hoyt could see the giant’s rheostat dim a little further still. “How do I know she’s your sister?”

Bolka had reduced things from the level of primal combat to the level of credibility. Hoyt knew he had him. With the steel of authority in his voice he said, “How do you know? Because it’s documented. I have it right here.”

With that, he lowered his gaze and dug into the left cargo pocket of his shorts and walked to within two feet of the giant. He produced a piece of paper from his pocket—in fact, a receipt for a DVD he’d rented at Mehr & Bohm Music Video—and said, “Here.”

The giant took it in his hand and looked down at it.

Hoyt smashed him in the nose with his right forearm. Blood fairly exploded out of the big man’s nostrils, but he didn’t fall back. He scarcely budged. Amid the red flood down his face, his lips formed a savage leer. Before Hoyt knew what was happening—since he had no backup strategy—had never needed one—the giant had his arm around his neck and was squeezing with all his might. Hoyt became eminently aware of the fact that he could no longer breathe. Yet that wasn’t as terrifying as the fact that he had now run into—this was—the dreaded hundredth man his dad had warned him about. He was all at once at the mercy of one of those babies. He felt no terror, not yet, only remorse over his own bad judgment, over his failure as a Dupont man and a Saint Ray.

Cries of rage! Shitfire! Flailing limbs! An avalanche! An incredible massive weight drove his whole body into the asphalt. He was buried beneath meat and rage. The other lacrosse players had come pummeling down from the flatbed. He was aware of the blows and the horrible pressure and the way the skin tore off his elbow and the horrible weight and smothering darkness of it all—but the pain hadn’t registered. All he knew—felt—was that the giant’s grip on his neck was gone. He might get beaten to death, but he could die breathing. He tried to curl up in a ball. He still couldn’t feel the blows. He merely knew he was being hit. He didn’t feel his left arm. He merely knew it was being bent the wrong way. He didn’t feel the elbow that came smashing down on his skull. He merely thought it was lights-out. But in fact it wasn’t. He could feel the beer all over his head because he could smell it. He could hear an old voice, a crude voice:

“Yo, laddy-buck, ’at’s enough a that, you dumb shit!” Laddy-buck. That meant Bruce and the campus police had arrived. Bruce was a big old fat man who called guys “laddy-buck.” It was as good as over. Hoyt didn’t feel pain yet, not at this moment, not yet. He felt failure. He was a warrior cut down in the prime of youth. Hadn’t done a thing wrong. Smashed the beast flush on the beak with his forearm, in the classic way. Shit! One of those babies: the hundredth man.

“Videotape the white apes with the badges and the blackjacks whacking a blood my blood yo’ blood it’s time you niggas get up off yo’ ghetto asses shove the blackjacks up the Mister Brown back alleys of the po-lice thugs videotape the bloods my blood yo’ blood the brothers getting bigger crack some white apes upside they own haids videotape the suckers laid out daid eliminated by the bloods my blood yo’ blood videotape it motherfuckers”—until Jojo wanted to climb the locker-room walls and demolish the speakers and then crawl through the wires until he found Doctor Dis and twisted his head off for him. Why had Charles inflicted this rap so-called music on the entire team? All it was was ghetto noise. Why did he, Jojo, have to have Doctor Dis hammering his skull every second of every minute while he got dressed for practice?