Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Congers was on his feet but motionless, holding a pressed and folded yellow shirt absentmindedly and staring at Coach, not with hostility or even bafflement but with yearning, as if begging Coach to say, “Wait a minute, what are you doing with a yellow shirt?” But Coach was already leaving the room with Skyhook Frye. Marty Smalls was now busy distributing yellow shirts to the three swimmies—Holmes Pearson, Dave Potter, and Sam Bemis—and mauve shirts to Treyshawn, André, Dashorn, Curtis—and, without so much as a comment or a change of expression…to him. He still couldn’t believe there was no catch to what was taking place.

By now most of the others had put on the shirts and were leaving the room. Oh, fuck! If he didn’t get a move on, there would just be him and Congers in the locker room. That would truly be embarrassing. Jojo slipped the mauve shirt over his head and his torso as fast as he could. Congers’s back was turned. He was facing his locker, looking straight ahead, and still holding the yellow shirt. Holy shit, the guy had some build. The muscles of his broad brown back seemed sculpted by light and shadow. His upper back was as wide as a door. Congers could annihilate Charles—or Jojo Johanssen—if he ever found the courage to do it. Jojo slipped out of the locker room. Congers hadn’t turned around once.

When Jojo reached the floor of the Buster Bowl, the mauve shirts and the yellow shirts had already begun warming up. The sound of basketballs bouncing or rattling off hoops in a huge empty arena like this always stirred Jojo. The only lights were the fields of LumeNex floods at the bottom of the bowl.

Out of nowhere came Buster Roth, who motioned to Jojo to follow him to a shadowy stretch near the stands, directly behind the great goosenecked stanchion of one of the backboards.

He clapped Jojo on the upper arm and said, “Jojo, I’ve been riding you pretty hard for the past couple of weeks, haven’t I?” Jojo didn’t know what to say, but Coach didn’t seem to expect an answer. “I wouldna done it without a reason.” Buster Roth was in his stern but fatherly mode. “Jojo…you’ve been…tentative out there, preoccupied…worried about something. You don’t have to tell me. That part don’t matter. What matters is, I had to do something to get that”—he clenched his teeth and brought his right fist up in front of his heart and tightened it until it shook from the hyper-contraction of the muscles—“back into your solar plexus. You can’t just tell a player he’s gotta get his juice back. You gotta put him in a position where he either gets it back or he don’t. Nobody’s good enough—nobody—to be complacent at this level or so distracted that he loses that—” He did the shaking-fist semaphore again. “Okay. Don’t think about it anymore. Just keep on showing me you got it. Now, go get ’em.”

Jojo knew he should say thanks, Coach, but he couldn’t get those words out. Thankful wasn’t what he felt—not thankful, not victorious, not elated, not relieved, nor anything else he could put a name to. Messed with came close, but that wasn’t quite it, either. This shirt he had on seemed in some way counterfeit.

He and his tainted shirt headed on out to the court. Thanks to the precision of the LumeNex lighting systems, the transition from the gloom to the court, with its futuristic backboard stanchions at either end, was like stepping out of the wings onto a stage on which awaited a glory the whole world could see. Or the whole TV-watching world, anyway. This is the only place I’m happy, he said to himself, and the weight of the past two weeks began to slide from his shoulders. If Congers himself came up to him right now, it wouldn’t faze him for a second. Down at this end, the starters were warming up; at the other end, “Cincinnati.” The percussion of innumerable basketballs bouncing became the only sound in the universe. Treyshawn was doing his Kareemas, as he called them in the name of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, hook shots and fadeaways from just outside the lane. André was pumping in three-pointers from down in the left corner. Dashorn was indulging in the typical point guard’s fantasy, pump faking a jump shot from beyond the three-point line and then slashing down the lane through all the giants and vaporizing them with a layup. The court was raining basketballs.

Without saying a word to the other mauve shirts or even looking at them, Jojo began practicing short jumpers. One clanged off the front of the rim. Jojo leapt up, took the rebound from below the level of the rim, kept ascending, and dunked it, stuffed it, all in a single fluid motion. He had just landed on his feet when he happened to look over and see…Coach…over there in the shadows…same place he had taken him aside…arm around a big man in a yellow practice shirt. Congers, of course.

The court was Jojo’s refuge from all that was impure. There were rules, there were lines, and they couldn’t be moved, twisted, cajoled, or flattered. He had never before felt suspicious or cynical here on the holy golden stage. But at this moment he just knew what Coach was saying to his freshman phenom: “Look, Vernon, I can’t humiliate old Jojo by not letting him start in the first game of his last season here, especially since it’s at home. But don’t worry, you’ll be on the bench in name only. I’ve had you playing with the other starters for two weeks now, right? You already fit in better with them after two weeks than old Jojo does after two years. You’re gonna get so many minutes, the only player who’s gonna maybe get more is the Tower. And next year—hey, it’s all yours. So don’t worry about Jojo. You have to be gentle with a faithful old horse.”

Jojo was standing stock-still on the golden stage holding the ball with both hands, the blond mesa atop his noggin a-dazzle in the LumeNex lights, when the word he was looking for came to him: manipulated.

STATIC::::::::::: STATIC:::::::::: STATIC:::::::::: STATIC :::::::::: STATIC:::::::::: STATIC:::::::::: STATIC:::::::::: STATIC:::::::::: STATIC:::::::::: STATIC:::::::::: STATIC :::::::::: STATIC:::::::::: STATIC:::::::::: STATIC:::::::::: STATIC:::::::::: STATIC choked the Buster Bowl, choked it here on the LumeNex-floodlit polyurethaned blond wood floor of the court, choked it up up on and up the cliffs of seats, choked it all the way to the dome—choked it—but Jojo could hear every word the black giant, Jamal Perkins, said as Perkins and his 250 or so pounds bellied him from behind.

“Yo, Token—yo’ white ass better hope the man don’t th’ow it to you, ’cause yo’ token white ass gon’ fuck up, Token! Yo’ fucking fingers made a china, and you shaking like a fucking cup, Token—”

So Jojo backed his own 250 pounds even harder into Perkins’s midsection, all the while watching the orange ball, which was now the center of the world, as Dashorn, the point guard, was dribbling it way out beyond the three-point line, looking for an opening in the Cincinnati defense…and the crowd, the full fourteen thousand, sold-out, was roaring, but Jojo no longer heard it as a human sound. The roars ricocheted off the cliff until they somehow fused and became sheer

::::::::::STATIC:::::::::: in Jojo’s ears, and the ::::::::::STATIC:::::::::: enveloped Jojo and the other nine players on the court and shut out everything else in the world—George III, resentful professors, smart but weak tutors, Sleeping Beauties who wouldn’t give him the time of day, brothers barreling down the track to parent-approved success as lawyers and investment bankers ::::::::::STATIC:::::::::: Only when enveloped by the ::::::::::STATIC did Jojo feel alive and in his realm and fulfilled in the ::::::::::STATIC:::::::::: of battle, where the boundaries are clearly the boundaries and the rules are clearly the rules and the tally of battle is up on an electric board and is clearly the tally and smart mouths and the insidious strategies of weaklings mean nothing. Jojo’s greatest dread was the sound of the horn, the horn, whose bray would signal a time-out, a substitution, the end of a quarter—and the play would stop, the static would turn back into human voices, and just like that he, Jojo the Athlete, would be back in the world where small people with shrewd purposes would once again have the power to humiliate him.