 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
I Am Charlotte Simmons: Chapter 4: The Dummy
Excerpt from I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe. Copyright © 2004 by Tom Wolfe. Published in November, 2004 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
Most of them hadn't seen each other all summer, and classes had just begun this morning, but by evening the boys at the Saint Ray house had already sunk into a state of aimless lassitude. First day or not, it was still that nadir in the weekly cycle of Dupont social life, Monday night.
From the front parlor came the sound of "quarters," a drinking game in which the boys at one end of a table tried to bounce quarters on their edges and make them hop into their opponents' jumbo containers of beer at the other end. The losers had to tilt their heads back and their containers up and chug-a-lug all twenty ounces. Much manly whooping when a quarter bounced home or just missed. Needless to say, the tables, magnificent old pieces that had been here ever since this huge Palladian mansion was built before the First World War, were by now riddled with dents. It was hard to believe there were once Saint Rays rich enough and religious enough about the great fraternal chain of being to build such a place and buy such furniture, not merely for themselves-after all, their own Dupont days would be few-but for generations of Saint Rays to come.
From the terrace room came the music of a Swarm CD banging out of a pair of twelve-inch speakers that were fixed in place for parties. Everybody was beginning to get tired of Swarm's so-called bang beat, but nevertheless Swarm was banging away tonight in the terrace room. Terrace room, front parlor, back parlor, dining room, entry gallery (cavernous), billiard room (ancient pool table, felt chewed up by bouncing quarters), card bay, bar-the variety of rooms for entertaining on this one floor would probably never be built in a house again.
Here in the library a dozen or so of the boys were sprawled back on couches, easy chairs, armchairs, side chairs, window seats, most of them wearing khaki shorts and flip-flops, with their thighs ajar in the accepted manly fashion, watching ESPN's SportsCenter on a forty-inch flat-screen television set, drinking beer, needling each other, making wisecracks and occasionally directing sentiments of awe or admiration toward the screen. About ten years ago a flood from a bathroom up above had ruined the library's aged and promiscuous accumulation of books, and the once-elegant walnut shelves, which had the remains of fine Victorian moldings along all the edges, now held dead beer cans and pizza-delivery boxes for the most part. The library's one trove of mankind's accumulated knowledge at this moment in history was the TV set.
"Ungghh!" went two or three boys simultaneously. Up on the screen a huge linebacker named Bobo Bolker had just sacked a quarterback so hard, his body had crumpled on the ground beneath Bobo like a football uniform full of bones. Bobo got up and pumped his enormous arms and shimmied his hips in a dance of domination.
"You know how much that fucking guy weighs?" said Vance, who was sitting back in an armchair on the base of his spine, holding a can of beer. "Three-hundred and twenty-five fucking pounds. And he can fucking move."
"Those guys are half human and half fucking creatine," said another boy, who had sunk so far back into a couch he was able to balance a can of beer on his upper abdomen.
"Creatine?" said Vance. "They don't take creatine anymore. Creatine's a boutique drug. Now they take gorilla testosterone. Don't give me that look, Julian. I'm not kidding. Fucking gorilla testosterone."
"The fuck they take gorilla testosterone," said Julian. "How do they get it?"
"They buy it. It's out there for sale on the drug market."
Vance had managed to make an entire statement without using the word fuck or any of its participial or interjectory derivatives. The lull would be brief.
"OK," said Julian, "then answer me this. I don't care if you're the greatest fucking drug lord in the history of the world. I'd like to see you find the fucking field hands who are gonna go out in the jungle and harvest the fucking crop."
Everybody broke up over that-and immediately turned to a boy sitting in a big easy chair in the corner, as if to say, "But how funny do you think it was, Hoyt?"
Hoyt was genuinely amused, but mainly he was aglow with the realization that this happened all the time now. The boys would crack a joke or make what was meant to be an interesting observation, particularly in the area of what was or wasn't cool, and they'd all turn to him to see what Hoyt thought. It was an unconscious thing, which made it even greater proof that what he had hoped for, what he had predicted, had come to pass. Ever since word had spread about how he and Vance had demolished the big thug bodyguard on what boys in the Saint Ray house now referred to as "the night of the skull fuck," they had become legends in their own time. So Hoyt laughed, by way of bestowing his blessing upon Julian, and knocked back another big gulp of his can of beer.
"Shit," said Boo McGuire, a roly-poly boy who had one leg slung give-a-shit over the arm of a couch and one elbow crooked behind his head, "I don't care how big they are. If they're taking gorilla testosterone, then they've all got balls the size of fucking BB's."
