I Am Charlotte Simmons (102 page)

Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons

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Hoytâhe wouldn't be here, either. He and his beloved “brothers” were forever watching that stupid SportsCenter â¦ but it was funny, Hoyt never showed any true interest in any sport in particular. All those popped-vein, concussion-batty headbangers scampering across the plasma screen and striving for glory seemed to amuse him as much as anything else. She never heard him express any emotion whatsoever over a Dupont team winning or losing. Yeah, Hoyt was cool. They didn't come any cooler â¦ She didn't hate him â¦ He hadn't betrayed her at all. Hoyt was what he was, the same
way a cougar was a fast animal that stalked slower animals, and that was what a cougar was.

Ah, Hoyt. If only you would come take one last look at what you so cavalierly discarded, at what you once lovedâand love her you
did
âI know it!âif only for an evening or a single hour or one brief instant.

She didn't want Adam to see her as she was now. It would break his heart a little more, knowing that she could never love him
in that way
. A wave of fondness for him spread through her so suddenly, she experienced a sharp intake of breath.

“Are you okay, honey?”

It was Eugenia Diggs, who once again put her hand on Charlotte's forearm.

“Oh, Eugenia”âlooking at Treyshawn's mother with a tender smile “I'm fine. I just suddenly thought of something. Thank you, though.”

Well, if she had to disappoint Adamâand she didâshe couldn't have done it at a better moment. The moment his big story broke, he became what he had always wanted to be, a voice that made thousandsâhundreds of thousands?âstand stock-still with wonder. It was no matrix, his great “scoop” about the Governor of California and Syrie Stieffbein and Hoyt and Vance and the big Wall Street firm, but it would do, for a twenty-two-year-old college senior. It had all turned out for the best.

Why, then, the uneasy feeling, the sometimes desperate feeling, that came over her now â¦ and almost every day? If only she had someone to talk to about it â¦ to assure her that she was a very lucky girl, after all â¦ But there wasâwhen she thought it throughâonly Jojo. Aside from him, she was as alone as on the day she arrived at Dupont. Jojo was sweet. It was touching, the way he constantly turned to her for help. But Jojo was not made for talks with anyone's soul, not even his own.

She was Charlotte Simmons. Could she ever have that conversation with herself, the way Momma told her to? Mr. Starling put “soul” in quotes, which as much as said it was only a superstitious belief in the first place, an earlier, yet more primitive name for the ghost in the machine.

So why do you keep waiting deep in the back of my head, Momma, during my every conscious momentâwaiting for me to have that conversation? Even if I were to pretend it were real, my “soul,” the way you think it is, what could I possibly say? All right, I'll say, “I am Charlotte Simmons.” That should satisfy the “soul,” since it's not there in the first place. So why do I keep hearing the ghost asking the same tired questions over and over, “Yes,
but what does that mean? Who is she?” You can't
define
a person who is unique, said Charlotte Simmons. It, the little ghost who wasn't there, said, “Well, then, why don't you mention some of the attributes that set her apart from every other girl at Dupont, some of the dreams, the ambitions? Wasn't it Charlotte Simmons who wanted a life of the mind? Or was what she wanted all along was to be considered special and to be admired for that in itself, no matter how she achieved it?”

That was ridiculousâbut she was spared responding to that dreary, tiresome query by the Charlies' Children's Alumni Band. The mauve blazers with yellow piping rose from their seats and struck up with an old, old song by the Beatles called “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” They played it as if John Philip Sousa had composed it as marching music for a military band with trumpets, tubas, a glockenspiel, and a big bass drum. The two teams had completed their warm-ups, andâ
bango!
âthe cheerleaders, the Chazzies, the acrobats, and the Zulj twins sprouted up from out of the floor, and all was loud music, merry madness, and
oooooo'n'ahhhhhs.
The Zulj boys were now juggling old-fashioned straightedge razors, blades unsheathed. If they didn't catch every razor by its mother-of-pearl handleâ
ooooo
â¦
ahhhhhh
âupwards of fourteen thousand basketball fans felt as if they themselves were about to lose their fingers. This was the circus's last cavort before the game began.

The ghost in the machine kept prattling away, but there was no possibility of paying attention to it now. In no time the circus disappeared into the floor, the musicians sat down, and there beneath the LumeNex lights, on a gleaming rectangle of honey-colored hardwood, the game was on.

A towering white boy with a skiff of blond hair on an otherwise shaved head seemed to take over that entire court of superb black athletes all by himself, commandeering both backboardsâhe owned them, driving into the hole for slam dunksâdon't get in his way, and altering the behavior of UConn's big menâhe demolished them like Samson or the Incredible Hulk.

Dupont had sprung to a 16â3 lead before UConn called time-out. The circus sprouted out of the floor, Charlies' Children rose up from their seats, fannies shook, acrobatic girls did gainers in midair, the band's mighty brass wailed with greater fervorâand sheer loudnessâthan ever before. But the roar of the crowd drowned it out. From cliff to cliff and dome to floor, the cry rang out:
Go go Jojo!
â¦
Go go Jojo!
â¦
Go go Jojo!
â¦
Go go Jojo!

A bit too late, Charlotte realized that heads were turning toward her in
hopes of enjoying, sharing in, her ecstasy over the exploits of her boyfriend.
Ohmygod
â¦ She sure hoped not too many had gotten a real eyeful of the glum, distracted, thoroughly uninterested look on her face. She clicked on the appropriate face just
like that
. Since the crowd had now launched into rhythmic clapping to the one-beat cadence of
Go go Jojo
, Charlotte figured she had better join in, too. So she worked on keeping the joyous smile spread across her face and clapping with some semblance of enthusiasm.

Ohmygod
â¦ the band had now thrown itself into “The Charlies' Swing”âand in no time, so potent was the moment, the partisan crowd was bawling away with the words. It obviously behooved Jojo Johanssen's girlfriend to join in.

Victor Ransome Starling (U.S.)
, Laureate, Biological Sciences, 1997. A twenty-eight-year-old assistant professor of psychology at Dupont University, Starling conducted an experiment in 1983 in which he and an assistant surgically removed the amygdala, an almond-shaped mass of gray matter deep within the brain that controls emotions in the higher mammals, from thirty cats. It was well known that the procedure caused animals to veer helplessly from one inappropriate affect to another, boredom where there should be fear, cringing where there should be preening, sexual arousal where there was nothing that would stimulate an intact animal. But Starling's amygdalectomized cats had gone into a state of sexual arousal hypermanic in the extreme. Cats attempted copulation with such frenzy, a cat mounted on another cat would be in turn mounted by a third cat, and that one by yet another, and so on, creating tandems (colloq., “daisy chains”) as long as ten feet.

Starling called in a colleague to observe. The thirty amygdalectomized cats and thirty normal cats used as controls were housed in cages in the same room, one cat per cage. Starling set about opening cages so that the amygdalectomized cats might congregate on the floor. The first cat thus released sprang from its cage onto the visitor, embracing his ankle with its forelegs and convulsively thrusting its pelvis upon his shoe. Starling conjectured that
the cat had smelled the leather of the shoe and in its excitement had mistaken it for a compatible animal. Whereupon his assistant said, “But Professor Starling, that's one of the controls.”

In that moment originated a discovery that has since radically altered the understanding of animal and human behaviour: the existenceâindeed, pervasivenessâof “cultural para-stimuli.” The control cats had been able to watch the amygdalectomized cats from their cages. Over a period of weeks they had become so thoroughly steeped in an environment of hypermanic sexual obsession that behaviour induced surgically in the amygdalectomized cats had been induced in the controls without any intervention whatsoever. Starling had discovered that a strong social or “cultural” atmosphere, even as abnormal as this one, could in time overwhelm the genetically determined responses of perfectly normal, healthy animals. Fourteen years later, Starling became the twentieth member of the Dupont faculty awarded the Nobel Prize.

âSimon McGough and Sebastian J. R.
Sloane, eds.,
The Dictionary of Nobel
Laureates,
3rd ed. (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001),
p. 512.

VOS SALUTO

Many generous people helped me gather information for this book:
college students, athletes, coaches, faculty, alumni, outriders,
and citizens of an Eden in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains,
Alleghany County. If it were possible, I would thank each and every one
personally in these lines. I must certainly acknowledge a few who
went far out of their way on my behalf:

In Alleghany County: MACK and CATHY NICHOLS,
whose understanding and eye for details were superb; LEWIS and
PATSY GASKINS, who showed me the county's extraordinary
Christmas-tree farms, one of which was raising 500,000 trees; and the
gracious staffs of ALLEGHANY HIGH SCHOOL and the
ALLEGHANY CHAMBER OF COMMERCE.

At Stanford University:
media studies chieftain TED GLASSER; JIM STEYER, author
of
The Other Parent
; comparative literature savant
GERALD GILLESPIE; MallarmÃ© scholar ROBERT COHN;
young academic stars ARI SOLOMON and
ROBERT ROYALTY and their student entourages.

At the University of Michigan:
communication studies maestro MIKE TRAUGOTT;
and PEACHES THOMAS, who enabled a fool to rush into
undergraduate nightlife where wise men never went.

At Chapel Hill:
CONNIE EBLE, lexicologist of college slang and
author of
Slang and Sociability
;
DOROTHY HOLLAND, whose
Educated in Romance
blazed a trail in the anthropology of American college students;
JANE D. BROWN of
Media, Sex and the Adolescent
fame; and
two especially insightful students, alumni
FRANCES FENNEBRESQUE and DAVID FLEMING.

In Huntsville, Alabama:
MARK NOBLE, the sports consultant
famous for assessing, training, and healing Division I and professional
athletes; GREG and JAY STOLT, and GREG J R.,
University of Florida basketball star now playing professionally in Japan;
and Huntsville's colorful counselor DOUG MARTINSON.

At Florida, in Gainesville:
BILL MCKEEN, journalism chairman, author of
Highway 61
,
and a man with entrÃ©e to hot spots of undergraduate life,
including “the Swamp,” a football stadium
with a city throbbing beneath the grandstands.

In New York:
JANN WENNER, who once again
walked me through the valley of the shadow of weary writing; and
COUNSELOR EDDIE (“Get me Hayes!”) HAYES,
who read much of the manuscript.

In d