I Am Charlotte Simmons (9 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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Had to stop thinking about it. He looked around the Great Yard. The afternoon sun, the summer light, brought out the warm undertones in the gray stone of the Gothic buildings. Glints of yellow, ocher, brown, and purple made it all look richer and somehow even more massive and imposing. The library tower … it was like a cathedral … He'd seldom been inside it, except with a tutor. Actually, there were a couple of times after midnight he had gone in there to hook up with this girl he knew studied in there late at night …
A man was walking toward him. He recognized the guy, but who the hell was he? In his early forties, probably, wearing a polo shirt, a pair of khaki cargo shorts, and sneakers … terrible posture … completely undeveloped muscles … a little paunch bulging out over his belt … scrawny legs. Jojo knew he was a body snob, but he couldn't help it. How could a man let himself go like that? The man was carrying one of these hoople attache cases. He was coming closer … Who the hell was he? The guy started smiling. Jojo gave him a befuddled smile in return. Just before they passed each other, the guy looked him right in the face and said, “Hello, Mr. Johanssen.” Jojo gave him an embarrassingly unconvincing, “Hey—how are you?” Each walked on. Mr.
Johanssen
? That wasn't a fan talking. Now, too late, it dawned on him: that was his sociology professor from first semester last year. Like a lot of athletes, Jojo was majoring in sociology, which was known as an athlete-friendly department. But what was the guy's name? … Pearlstein, that was it … Mr. Pearlstein. Nice guy, Mr. Pearlstein … He had given him a break on a paper he
knew
he couldn't have written. More doubts … Had he
detected a note of irony in the man's voice? Hello, Mr. Johanssen, you dumb jock?
Jojo walked around some more, putting a slight roll into his shoulders, hoping to be noticed. The T-shirt he had on certainly wasn't meant to hide the fact that he was not only very tall but very buff. Damn! … Nobody! … Maybe they were looking at him out of windows. He scanned the buildings … Nobody … but wait a minute. A pair of casement windows were open on the ground floor of Payson College—and what was that he saw on the wall? He walked closer. He was
right
! It was
himself
! A huge poster, at least four feet high, of Jojo Johanssen, triumphant, springing above a whole cluster of black players—and kicking their asses. He walked still closer, as close as he could without seeming to take an abnormal interest in some student's room. He was transfixed … couldn't take his eyes off it … Whoever it was …
worshiped
Jojo Johanssen. He just stood there staring, as long as he possibly could without seeming weird. Finally he turned away, suffused with an exhilaration indescribable, but as real, as corporeal, in fact, as any of the five senses …
He scanned the Great Yard again … nobody. Bereft of an audience, he now felt very tired. He must have really pushed himself in that endless scrimmage. He began to think of the big TV screen and the easy chairs that awaited him in the suite he and Mike shared. Suddenly it seemed like the most delightful prospect in the world, and absolutely
necessary
, to be sinking into one of those chairs and turning on the TV and emptying his mind of … all the stuff that had gone on this afternoon and all the stuff he'd been brooding about …
So he walked back to Gillette Way, got back in the Annihilator, and headed on to Crowninshield College. Under NCAA regulations, you could no longer have special dorms for athletes. They had to be housed with the general student population. So the basketball players were all put at one end of a big hallway on the fifth floor of Crowninshield. For the basketball players, they had knocked down the walls between the two bedrooms on either side of the suite's common room, so that each player had one large bedroom, with a private bath and an outsize bed. To make up for the space lost by doubling the size of the athletes' rooms, they had converted some storerooms and unused kitchens into a bunch of pretty wretched singles for the leftover ordinary students. On top of all that, the basketball players' suites, and theirs alone, were centrally air-conditioned.
As Jojo walked along the hall to the suite, his very hide anticipated the
luxury of that ever so nicely conditioned air, of his big, tired body sinking back into an easy chair, of the TV irrigating the interior of his parched skull. He opened the door—
—two young white people were lying stark-naked on the floor of the common room amid a litter of T-shirts, jeans, underpants, and sneakers, their arms and legs intertwined, right there on the carpet in front of the TV—fucking. In and out, in and out, and the girl was going,
“Unhh unhh unhh.”
Their legs were toward him. They were lying on their sides. The view was mainly the fleshy, meaty swells of buttocks and thighs and the storm of curly blond hair that concealed Mike's face. Idly, Jojo wondered if this girl had shaved her crotch. Last spring and so far this year he had been seeing more and more of them completely shaved—although this girl he had hooked up with a couple of days ago said she'd had a “Brazilian wax job.” But what he really wondered about was how the fashion spread from one girl to another. As a basketball player, you could easily keep tabs on girls' grooming down there, but how did the
girls
themselves stay au courant? Did they actually discuss such things—or what? “That you, Jojo?” Mike didn't so much as lift his head.
“Yeah.”
“Whew. I was afraid it might be the maid.” Mike didn't stop what he was doing for an instant or change the rhythm. “Say hello to Jojo.”
But the girl, evidently preferring to remain in the passionate mode, kept her face turned to Mike's and continued to go
“Unhh unhh unhh.”
“Jojo, say hello to—what's your name?”
“
Unhh unhh unhh
Ashley
unhh unhh unhh
.”
“Say hello to Ashley, Jojo.”
“I need the remote,” said Jojo. “Skooz.”
So saying, he stepped over the couple, looking down to make sure he didn't step
on
them. The girl had her eyes squeezed shut. Mike cut an annoyed glance up at Jojo.
Fuck, thought Jojo. He had begun
thinking
in the Fuck Patois, too. He picked up the remote from the TV table and—“Skooz”—stepped back over the couple. In two strides he reached one of the big easy chairs, started to sink back into it—and froze before his bottom hit the cushion. It was too fucking gross. Mike and what's her name, Ashley, remained on the floor in front of the TV, making noises and doing the in-and-out.
And Mike had given
him
an annoyed look. Ordinarily Mike used good judgment, but sometimes … What was so special about this particular
piece of ass that he couldn't make it ten more feet to his bedroom? Anybody on the basketball team could point at any girl on campus and have her in his room in ten minutes or close to it—so what was the big deal? One time when there had been
four
of them at once … all four completely shaved … The memory of it aroused him a bit … but annoyance quickly overcame the stirring in his loins. Mike could be so goddamned thoughtless. He, Jojo, had had a rough afternoon. For the past ten minutes he had been thinking about only one thing in the world: coming back to this suite, sitting in this easy chair, and zoning out on a little TV. And now, on the floor right in front of the TV, was a two-backed beast slogging away and going
unhh unhh unhh.
With an accusing sigh, Jojo tossed the remote onto the seat of the easy chair and went into his room and shut the door. He could see them in his mind's eye, and for a moment, despite himself, he felt the old tingle again. He focused on his resentment and fought it off.
D
addy, at the wheel of the pickup truck, Momma, over by the passenger-side door, and Charlotte, sandwiched in between, were driving down Dupont University's showiest approach, Astor Way, an avenue flanked by sycamores whose branches arched over from either side in the summer months until they met to form a lush, cool green tunnel with a thousand little places where the sun peeked through. The sycamore trees were so evenly spaced they made Charlotte think of the columns she had seen in Washington when she was there with Miss Pennington.
“Well, I'll be switched,” said Momma. “I never in my life—”
Instead of finishing the sentence, she lifted her hands and made a tunnel shape like the arch of trees and looked at Charlotte with a wide-eyed smile. It was about two p.m. Ever since four-thirty this morning, when they left Sparta in the dark, Momma had been primed to be impressed by Dupont.
Daddy turned into a tree-shaded parking lot marked LITTLE YARD, and their old pickup became part of a busy swarm of cars, vans, SUVs, and at least one yellow Ryder rental truck, disgorging freshmen, parents, duffel bags, wheelie suitcases, lamps, chairs, TV sets, stereos, boxes … and boxes … box after box … boxes of every conceivable size, or every size Charlotte
could think of. What on earth were her new classmates bringing in all those boxes—and what did
she
lack? But that was a fleeting concern.
Young men wearing khaki shorts and mauve T-shirts with DUPONT in yellow letters across the chest were helping people unload their cargo, piling it on heavy-duty dollies, and pushing the immense loads out of the lot and toward the building. Charlotte had been assigned to Edgerton House, “house” being the term Dupont used instead of such unclassy, bureaucratic State U. terminology as “Section E, freshman dormitory.” It wasn't part of any “dorm,” either. It was a house on Little Yard. Little Yard would be home to all sixteen hundred incoming freshmen. It was the first dormitory ever built at Dupont. A hundred years ago it had housed every student in the university.
The parking lot was so busy and the trees had such dense foliage, Charlotte barely saw the building itself at first. In fact, it was gigantic and seemed even more so thanks to its heavy, brownish rusticated stone walls. The wall she was looking at extended the entire length of the long block it was built on. No fortress ever looked more formidable, but only intangible matters concerning that huge structure were on Charlotte Simmons's mind. They had obsessed her thoughts throughout the ten-hour drive from Sparta: namely, what her roommate would be like and just what the ominous term “coed dorm” actually meant.
All spring and all summer Dupont had been a wondrous abstraction, the prize of a lifetime, the trophy of all trophies for a little girl from the mountains; in short, a castle in the air. Now it was right in front of her at ground level, and this was where she would be living for the next nine months, and dealing with—what? Her roommate was a girl named Beverly Amory, from a town in Massachusetts called Sherborn, whose population was 1,440, and that was really all she knew about Beverly Amory. Well, at least she was a small-town girl, too. They had that much in common … As to what coed dorm life really was, she knew even less. Whatever it was, the concept, now that the time had come, was alarming.
Charlotte, Momma, and Daddy had gotten out of the pickup, and Daddy was heading toward the rear to open the fiberglass camper top and the tailgate, when one of the young men approached, pushing a dolly, and said, “Welcome! Moving in?”
“Yeah,” said Daddy in a wary tone.
“Can I give you folks a hand?”
He was smiling, but Daddy wasn't. “No thanks.”
“You sure?”
“Yep.”
“Okay. If you change your mind, let one of us know.” Whereupon he went off, pushing the dolly toward another vehicle.
Daddy turned to Momma and said, “He'd want a tip.”
Momma nodded sagely over this insight into the wiles of life here on the other side of the Blue Ridge.
“I don't think so, Daddy,” said Charlotte. “They look like students to me.”
“That don't matter,” said Daddy. “You'll see. When we git in'ere, you're gonna see those ‘students' standin'ere waiting and folks digging into their pockets. 'Sides, what we got, h'it won't take much to tote it.”
So Daddy opened the fiberglass camper top and lowered the tailgate. Charlotte really hadn't brought a whole lot, just a big duffel bag, two suitcases, and a box of books. Daddy had gone to the trouble of putting the camper top over the bed of the pickup, not so much to protect her things from the weather, which the TV said would be fine all over the East, as to provide some privacy in case he and Momma had to spend the night here for some reason. They had their sleeping bags rolled up on the truck bed and an Igloo cooler with enough sandwiches and water to get by.
True to his word, Daddy toted the two heaviest things himself. He put the duffel bag up on his shoulder and somehow carried that whole box of books under his other arm. Goodness knows how he did it, except that he was strong as a bull from all the hard work he'd done in his life. The literature from Dupont had said to come dressed ready for “moving in,” and so Daddy had on an old short-sleeved plaid sport shirt that hung out over a pair of the thorn-proof gray twill pants he wore when he went hunting. Charlotte immediately monitored the parking lot and was relieved to see that most of the other fathers were dressed more or less the same as Daddy: casual shirts and pants and, in some cases, shorts … although there was something different about theirs. Naturally, she checked out the other female freshmen with that same swift sweep of the eyes, and that was a relief, too. She was afraid they might be all dressed up, although she didn't really think they would be. Practically all of them were wearing shorts, just the way she was. Hers were high-waisted denims with her sleeveless cotton print blouse tucked in—“blouse” was the word Momma used—an ensemble designed to show off not only her trim athletic legs but also her small waist. She saw immediately that most of the other girls were wearing flip-flops or running
shoes, but she figured her white Keds fit in fine with the running shoes. She didn't see any other mothers dressed quite like Momma, who had on a T-shirt and a denim jumper that came down below her knees. A pair of athletic socks rose up from out of her striped sneakers as if to meet the hem of the jumper. Never in her life had Charlotte possessed the strength to entertain … Doubts … about Momma's taste, any more than her authority. Momma was Momma, which was all there was to say about Momma.
Momma carried the bigger suitcase and Charlotte the other one, and they were heavy enough, but Daddy's feat was really something. People were staring at him, probably because they wondered how one man could carry such a load, which made Charlotte proud, or marginally proud; but then she noticed that the way Daddy had his arm around the box made his forearm look huge, which in turn made the tattoo of the mermaid look huge … and reddish from the strain … which in turn made the mermaid look as if she were blushing. Was that what they were all actually staring at? Despite herself, Charlotte felt shamed, for she did entertain doubts about Daddy's taste and the tattoo in particular.
Amid a rumbling caravan of dollies, they went through the Little Yard's great arched entryway and its fifteen-foot-high stone corridor and out into a courtyard … the Little Yard, which turned out to be a quadrangle the length of a football field, with ancient trees on a lush green lawn bordered by boxwood hedges and big red-orange poppies blazing amid beds of lavenderish blue nepeta and crisscrossed by worn walkways that looked as if they had been there forever. The entire yard was enclosed by the rows of houses, which, by the looks of them, had been built in different stages and in slightly different styles. The place conjured up a picture of a fortress whose interior drill ground has been magically transformed into an idealized, arboreal, floribunda landscape. The rumbling, the rattling, the aluminum clanking, the creaking, the squeaking, the jerking, the jouncing of the dollies ricocheted off the walls. What colossal heaps of
things
the young men in the mauve T-shirts were pushing and pulling and humping to the houses! At Edgerton, they, the boys in mauve, were carting everybody else's belongings onto the elevator, but Daddy was having none of that. He marched right on with his prodigious load. He was sweating, and the mermaid was really blushing now.
Charlotte caught two of the boys in the mauve shirts sneaking glances at it. One said to the other in a low voice: “Nice ink.” The other tried to suppress a snigger. Charlotte was mortified.
Charlotte's room, 516, was up on the fifth of the building's six floors. When she got off the elevator, she found herself looking down a long, gloomy old corridor in which frowning adults were popping in and out of doorways, pointing this way and that, yammering about God knows what, amid a tumbled clutter, extending as far as the eye could see, of empty boxes, some gigantic, lying every which way from one end of the corridor to the other, with so much in the way of lurid lettering and illustrations and so many closure flaps thrust out it looked like an explosion. Boys and girls stood by phlegmatically, secretly appalled in varying degrees that their parents insisted on walking the face of the earth in plain view of their new classmates.
The young men in the mauve T-shirts were pushing their heavy dollies through this cardboard chaos like icebreakers. On the landing of a stairwell near the elevator, there was a huge garbage can the color of drained veal with boxes, bubble paper, lacerated shrink-wrapping, Styrofoam peanuts, and other detritus gushing out of it. On the floor of the hallway, what you could see of it, were … dust balls … more dust balls than Charlotte had ever seen in her life … everywhere, dust balls. Toward the far end of the corridor Charlotte spied two barefoot boys. One was clad in only a polo shirt and the towel he had wrapped about his waist. The other wore a longsleeved shirt with the tail hanging out over a pair of boxer shorts, and he had a towel slung across his shoulders. Boxer shorts? Both boys were scampering across the corridor into the men's bathroom, judging by the towels and the toilet kits they were carrying. But no pants? Charlotte was shocked. She glanced at Momma—and was relieved to see that she hadn't noticed. Momma would have been more than shocked. Knowing Momma … she would have brought God's lightning down on somebody's head. Charlotte hurried her into the room, 516, which was fortunately just ahead of them.
Given the grandeur that was Dupont, the room seemed terribly bare and, like the hallway, worn and exhausted. A pair of tall double-hung windows, side by side, equipped with yellowish shades but no curtains, looked out onto the courtyard. The courtyard appeared rather grand from up here, and the windows let in plenty of light. That much you could say for the room. But the rest of it was gloomy and tired: a pair of single beds with cheap metal frames and mattresses rather the worse for wear, a pair of plain wooden bureaus that had seen better days, a pair of small wooden tables that couldn't properly be called desks, a pair of straight-backed wooden chairs, yellow ocher walls that could have stood a coat of paint, small dark wood
baseboards and ceiling cornices that might have been handsome once, a wooden floor gone gray with use … and crawling with dust balls.
Daddy unzipped the big duffel bag and allowed as how they might as well take out the bedclothes and get started making up the bed, but Charlotte thought she ought to wait for her roommate and not just arbitrarily decide which side of the room would be hers, and Momma agreed. Then Momma went to the windows and said you could see the top of the library tower from here and a couple of smokestacks. Daddy was of the opinion that the smokestacks meant that Dupont had its own power plant, it was so big. And they waited.
They could hear the dollies rolling out in the hallway and the young men in the mauve DUPONT T-shirts grunting and occasionally swearing under their breath as they bulled their loads through the sprawling dump of boxes. At one point, there was the unmistakable shriek of two girls thrilled by the fact that they had run into each other. That gave Charlotte a hollow feeling. It hadn't occurred to her that there might be entering freshmen who already … had friends. From somewhere down near the elevator a boy exclaimed, “Gotcha! Who's your daddy?” Came the reply: “Oh, man, ‘Who's your daddy.' How completely douche-baggy is that?” Then a woman's mannered voice: “Kindly spare us your … ‘colorful' terminology, Aaron.” Charlotte could tell by the boys' stressed voices that they were trying to assert themselves as manly and cool purely out of a nervous fear that the other males in this dorm might think they weren't.
By and by, she heard a girl talking out in the hall near the door, apparently to herself: “Edgerton. We just got here. Eeeeeeyew, there's like trash all over the place, and they've got this like big plastic garbage can—are they all like this? This one's beat up and busted, if you ask me …” The voice was coming closer. “Ummmm, we
did
… He's cute … Ken, I think, but it could've been Kim. Would they name a boy Kim? … I can't just walk up and say, ‘So, what's your name?' … Ummmm, I don't really think so …” Now the voice was just outside the door. “Fresh
mea
t?”

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