Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

And then the dreaded horn sounded. No longer inside the STATIC pearl…back into the world, where all was politics, judgment, and abrasion. The dreaded horn had sounded! The noise had not really died down all that much, but now the crowd was no longer dematerialized in an atomic fog. Jojo could see individual faces, even though he went to some pains not to look into them. He was conscious of the Cottontop Box at midcourt, the Pineapple Grove.

“Yo! Jojo!” A young voice from a section of the stands above the rich old people. “Which way’d he go? You’re money, Jojo! Maybe a nickel!” Followed by a round of laughter.

Against his better judgment, Jojo looked up. There, in an aisle, was a clump of four guys—students by the looks of them—staring at him with smirks and crooked, slightly wary grins, waiting for him to respond.

Jojo looked away and headed on toward the bench. Only then did he look up at the scoreboard. He knew they were behind, but he didn’t know it was that bad: 12–2. Jamal Perkins had scored eight of Cincinnati’s twelve—all of them in man-to-man duels with Jojo Johanssen…the white boy…

He could already hear what awaited him at the bench. Coach was into full Fuck Patois. He wasn’t even going to let the starters sit down…Fucking this and fucking that. He was letting Dashorn, Treyshawn, Curtis, and André have it…Even Treyshawn…

Just like that, the band, always installed throughout the game in the first eight rows of the stands at one corner of the court, broke out in a blast of brass and drums…the theme song from Rocky rendered in an insane arrangement…a convulsion of jazzy optimism. Lines of cheerleaders in clinging sleeveless V-necked mauve jerseys and pleated yellow miniskirts lined both sides of the court, wagging their fannies, making the music seem even fluffier. They were on the court before Jojo could even return to the bench. Where did they come from? It was as if they had flown down from the upper reaches of the Buster Bowl dome. Scampering right by Jojo came the dancers, the Charlies’ Angels (Chazzies), in golden Lycra tights, cut almost as low as the top of the cleft in the rear declivity. The swath of flesh between their golden Lycra athletic bras and the low-cut golden tights was a twenty-first-century Venus bellyscape of winking navels and high-definition abdominals. Many was the time Jojo had found it arousing—this juxtaposition of the sharpness of the taut, ripped, shredded abdominals…and the soft, mysterious swells…But lust was completely foreign to him at this moment. Just like that, the dancers hurled themselves into modern dance choreography that turned the theme music from the movie Rocky, an anthem of martial determination, into a belly or, rather, abdominals, dance. At every corner of the court were acrobats and tumblers and gymnasts. Young men—with arms of steel, and mauve-and-yellow striped tights that clung to immensely muscular upper thighs—worked in pairs, launching lovely little cupcake gymnasts into the air above them, where the little lovelies did somersaults, half gainers, and back flips with yawning twists before they fell back into the young men’s arms. The band, the cheerleaders, the dancers, the acrobats—an instant circus covering the court!—and this was nothing more than a time-out! The band exploded with giddily merry music, not stirring but…giddy, inexplicably joyous, aimlessly ecstatic. And hadn’t the players, these giant men on campus, taken note of this hardwood platter of lithe and crazy little cupcakes? Oh yes, they had. To be sure. Some had gone through them serially. By now it seemed like a natural reward for the eminent warrior. Jojo had had his flings like the rest. It meant about as much as a nice cold beer…having a romp with one of these little cupcakes who bucked and humped and swiveled and swagged and worked so hard, shaking their bottoms from cliff to cliff.

The pandemonium was such that as Jojo neared the bench, he could no longer hear Coach raging in Fuck Patois. But it wasn’t something that required hearing. Seeing it was quite enough…the way his upper teeth overbit his lower lip in order to spit out a fucking at maximum strength. All was uproar, and the band was playing “Love for Sale” at a tickled-pink tempo that longed for a drum major and six majorettes.

Out of the corner of his eye Jojo saw Dashorn and Treyshawn bending over at the waist to hear Coach better and, presumably, more privately, and Curtis and André were just joining them. Obviously Coach was gathering the five of them, as usual, for instructions before they returned to the court. He steeled himself. He knew he himself would get an earful, no doubt. He took a deep breath, joined the huddle—Congers—a visceral chill before his mind could fasten upon the logic—

Owing to Treyshawn’s huge bulk, Jojo hadn’t realized until this instant that sandwiched in between Treyshawn and Coach was Vernon Congers. He had bent over, his hands on his knees, like the rest of them…to get the word before play resumed. Jojo started to do likewise—but the logic kicked in, and he remained erect, his shoulders slumped and his lips parted.

Coach looked up at him with an expression that seemed to say, “Oh, hi, I didn’t expect to see you here.” To make it worse, his voice was kindly…

“Jojo, I want you to take a break.” He motioned in a vague direction with his head…in a vague direction…but not so vague that Dashorn, Treyshawn, André, Curtis, and least of all Vernon Congers could fail to realize that it was toward the bench.

All except Coach turned their faces away from him, and Jojo looked away from them. Desperate to fix upon some thing, any thing, his eyes found the scoreboard. Four minutes and forty seconds of the first quarter had elapsed.

It was as Jamal Perkins had predicted. His tenure as a starter for Dupont had lasted less than five minutes of the first game of the season—the season that would make or put an end to his career as an athlete, which is to say, the only career open, the only role imaginable, to Jojo Johanssen in this world.

He became acutely conscious of the band. Now the trumpets, the trombones, the clarinets, the French horns, the mighty drums, were playing “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” with the unremittingly bubbly beat of “On the Sunny Side of the Street.”

Two students who could care less about what was happening in the Buster Bowl were walking along in the rusky, dusky Monday night quiet of Ladding Walk. The Walk’s ornamental streetlamps—feeble, all too feeble—cast the old buildings and trees on either side into grotesque shadow. One could feel it, the presence of so many architectural and arboreal hulks, stone-dead, dead still, in the dark.

“It does weird you out a little,” said Adam, hoping to sound nonchalant. “Come to think of it, I don’t even remember being on Ladding Walk at night before. But I also don’t remember anything ever happening on Ladding Walk at night…or in the daytime, for that matter. Whatta you think there is to be scared of?”

“I’m not talking about…scared exactly,” said Charlotte. “I just didn’t want to walk all the way over here in the dark by myself…and then all the way to the end down there?”

Far ahead, the two edges of the Walk appeared to converge in total darkness, with only glimmering globes of light to mark the way.

“It’s spooky, is what I mean,” Charlotte was saying. “I was here one night with Mimi and Bettina. I don’t remember why, I just remember how spooky itwas…All right, I’m a plain-long scaredy cat! I’ll admit it. I’m being silly—but I really do ’preciate you doing this.”

She gave him a smile that made him want to throw his arms around her, lift her off the ground—pop. He just kept on walking. He was glad the light was too weak for her to see him blush. He felt noble; and more than noble, brave, or mildly so; and more than noble and brave, admired by the girl who was the answer to his prayers and, more than that, his virginity. It dawned on him that he had never seen her wearing jeans before. He motioned toward them. “Those new?”