I Am Charlotte Simmons Page 6

  “Vernon!”

  “Yo! Vernon!”

  “Vernon—over here!”

  With a chilling realization Jojo looked … over there. They—fans—groupies—university groundskeepers—were all over Vernon Congers, and he had yet to play in a single game for Dupont or anyone else at the Division I level! Congers probably struck them as a good-looking guy, assuming they could stomach the cornrows and dreads. That was it, nothing more than looks. Of course, he had gotten a lot of pub due to speculation last spring that, as one of the hottest high school prospects in the country, he might skip college and go straight to the pros. That was it, nothing more than pub. That was it … and yet there it was. The young shit-talking hot dog already had one hell of a hive.

  Finally the young gods reached the locker room.

  “Know’m saying?

  Fucking gray boy say, ‘Yo, you a beast.’

  I take my piece, yo, stick it up yo’ face.

  Yo li’l dickie shaking, it won’t cease

  Faking you got heart. You ain’t got shit, yo.

  Know’m saying?”

  Rap music by Doctor Dis was kicking and screaming from one end of the room to the other. Rap of some sort was always kicking and screaming from one end of the room to the other. Thanks to a nonaphonic wraparound sound system, there was no getting away from it, not in this locker room, where black giants ruled. The team captain always got to choose the CDs on the loop. Charles, who was a senior, was the captain this year, even though he was no longer a starter. Nobody was cooler than Charles. No one commanded more respect. In Jojo’s opinion, Charles was totally cynical about the music. If most of the boys wanted rap, he’d give them rap … the most rebellious, offensive, vile, obnoxious rap available on CDs. Curtis swore he had seen Charles coming out of Phipps one night after a Duke Ellington and George Gershwin concert by some white symphony orchestra from Cleveland. He said he knew for a fact that was the kind of shit Charles really liked. Nevertheless, Doctor Dis was who Charles had chosen for the locker room. Doctor Dis was so sociopathic and generally disgusting, Jojo had the suspicion that Doctor Dis himself was a cynic who created this stuff as a parody of the genre. He’d stick in words like “beast” and “cease,” words more than half the Dupont national basketball champions had never uttered in their lives. At this very moment, in fact, the Doctor was singing?—saying?—

  “Know’m saying?

  Call yo’self a cop? Swap yo’ dick and yo’ass,

  Ev’ry time you shit, yo’ balls go plop plop.

  Wipe yo’ dick, and it bleeds choc’late.

  You needs to fuck with yo’ butt, cocksucking cop cop.

  Know’m saying?”

  But the locker room itself was luxurious beyond anything the thousands of hooples who had watched the “pickup game” could have imagined. The lockers were made not of metal, but of polished oak in its natural light color with a showy grain. Each one was nine feet high and three and a half feet wide, with a pair of louvered doors and all manner of shelves, shoe racks, beechwood hangers, lights that came on when the doors opened, and a fluorescent tube near the floor that was on twenty-four hours a day to keep things dry. Above the door was a brass strip with the player’s name engraved on it, and above that, framed in oak, a foot-high photograph of the player in action on the court. Jojo’s was one from the publicity department. It showed him soaring above a thicket of upstretched black arms and tapping in a rebound. He loved that picture.

  As Jojo entered the room, four black players, all with the shaved heads, he noticed, Charles, André, Curtis, and Cantrell, were standing around in front of Charles’s locker. Jojo couldn’t resist joining them. Had to … Their conversation offered the possibility of recognizing the triumph of Jojo Johanssen, the white boy who took no shit.

  As Jojo approached, Charles was saying, “Say what? What’s that motherfucker know about my grades? What’s he care? He’s one dumb motherfucker, that motherfucker.”

  André, grinning at him: “I’m just telling you what the man said, Charles. Man said you go over the library every night after study hall and hump the books. Said he saw you.”

  “The fuck he saw me. That motherfucker’s so dumb he don’t know where the library’s at.” Charles was no longer his witty and ironic self. He had just been accused of not only getting good grades—it was rumored that his GPA was 3.5—but of trying to get them. “What’s he talking about—books. He don’t know what a book looks like. Motherfucker’s so dumb he counts on his fingers and can’t get past one.” Whereupon Charles extended his middle finger.

  “Ooo-ooo-weee!” said Cantrell. “Gil hear that, man, he gon’ come gitchoo!”

  “Shit, he ain’ gon’ come git nothing. He gon’ put his finger up his ass’s all he gon’ do. Talking about my grades …”

  “Hey, man,” said Curtis, “what grades you be getting anyway, you don’t mind me asking.”

  “Heghhh heghhh heghhh …” André began laughing from deep down in his belly. “Maybe we don’t need no more swimmies. We got Charles.”

  Jojo sidled up to the group and said, “Take no shit from’m, Charles. You got grades!”

  He glanced at the others to register their amusement at this witty turn on the expression “You got game.” Instead, he got three blank faces.

  “Whaz good, Jojo?” said Charles with an empty expression of his own. Charles always said “Whaz good?” instead of “Whuzzup.”

  “Not much,” said Jojo. “Not much. I’m beat.” He figured that would give them an opportunity to think about what had forced him to work so hard—and whom he had put in his place.

  Nobody picked up on that, and so Jojo tried to amplify his point. “I mean, that kid Congers was all over my back out there. I felt like I was in a fucking sumo wrestling match for three hours.”

  They looked at him the way you might look at a not particularly interesting statue.

  Nevertheless, he doggedly pursued his mission and risked the direct approach. “Anybody know what happened to Congers? He okay?”

  Charles cut a quick glance at André and then said to Jojo, “I assume so. He isn’t hurt, he just had the breath knocked out of him.”

  Assume so! Isn’t hurt! Every time! Never failed! Every time the black players talked among themselves, they’d go into an exaggerated homey argot, with all sorts of motherfuckers and he don’ts and I ain’ts and don’t need no mores and you be gettings for you are gettings and where’s it ats. The moment Jojo arrived, they’d drop it and start speaking conventional English. He didn’t feel deferred to, he felt shut out. Charles’s expression was unreadable. Charles, who had laughed about it in front of him and Mike after it happened! He wasn’t even going to talk about it in front of André, Curtis, and Cantrell. The cool Charles Bousquet was treating him like some random fan he’d had the misfortune of running into.

  A conversational vacuum ensued. It was too much for Jojo. “Well … I’m gonna take a shower.” He headed off toward his locker.

  “Hang in there,” said Charles.

  And what was that supposed to mean? Even after two seasons Jojo never knew where he stood with the black players. What had just happened? Why had they suddenly treated him like a hoople? Was it because he had just walked up and assumed he could join in a conversation among the four of them—or wot? Was it that none of them was going to talk to him about any friction he might have with a black player if another black player was present? Or was it because he had made a crack that was a play on “You got game,” which was a black expression? It made your head hurt … He tried to tell himself it wasn’t him, it was the whole racial divide. He was one white boy who had competed with black basketball players all his life, and he could play their game. He prided himself on that. He was so proud, in fact, that he had opened his big mouth to Mike about it, hadn’t he? Nevertheless, it was true, starting back when he was growing up in Trenton, New Jersey. His dad, who was six-six, had been the center and captain of the basketball team the year Hamilton Ea
st reached the state finals; he had a couple of feelers from recruiters, but no college wanted him badly enough to offer him a scholarship, which he would have needed. So he became a burglaralarm mechanic, like his father before him. Jojo’s mom, who was plenty bright enough to have been a doctor or something, was a technician in the radiology lab at St. Francis Hospital. Jojo adored his mother, but she centered her attention—it seemed to him, anyway—on his brother, Eric, His Majesty the Brilliant Firstborn, who was three years older. Eric was a whiz in school, the best student in his class, and a lot of other things Jojo got tired of hearing about.

  Jojo was an indifferent student who would show flashes of intelligence and ability one day and then inexplicably slump and drag his grades back down the next. Well, if he couldn’t be the student Eric was, he would be Mr. Popularity, the cool dude Eric never had been. Jojo became the class clown and class rebel, a pretty mild rebel, in point of fact, and then he became something else: very tall.

  By the time he entered junior high school, he was already six-four, and so naturally he was steered toward the basketball team. He turned out to be not only tall but also a real athlete. He had his father’s coordination and drive. His mom worried about his size because people were going to expect him to be more mature than he actually was. But his dad was excited. His son was going to make it. Dad believed he knew why he himself never had, despite all his clippings and stats. He’d had the misfortune of playing in the 1970s, when the black players had begun to dominate the game at the college level and captivate the recruiters. Perennial basketball powers like Bradley and St. Bonaventure were daring to put all-black teams on the court. Jojo’s dad was no genius perhaps, but he had figured out one thing: the advantage the black players had was absolute determination to prevail in this game. To them it was a disgrace to let yourself be pushed around by anybody and a terminal humiliation to let yourself be pushed around by a white player.

  That summer, when Jojo was fourteen, his father started driving to work in the morning and dropping Jojo off at a basketball court on a public playground in Cadwalader Park, a mainly black area—Jojo and a brown paper bag with a sandwich in it. The court was asphalt with metal backboards and hoops with no nets. His father wouldn’t pick him up until he got off work late in the afternoon. Jojo was on his own. He was going to learn to play black basketball or else, sink or swim.

  This wasn’t as drastic a form of education as it would have been in a big city. Trenton wasn’t the sort of place where the presence of a white boy on a mainly black playground would create an automatic flash point. But it was drastic enough. The black kids played a physical game with absolute determination. If you were white and backed down from them, they wouldn’t do anything or say anything. They would merely run right over you with a cool aloofness. Without so much as a word, they’d let you know that you deserved no respect. After one day of it, Jojo resolved never to back down from a black player again.

  The playground game wasn’t so much a team sport as a series of duels. If you had the ball and passed it to the open man under the basket, nobody considered that admirable. All you’d done was throw an opportunity away. The game was outdueling the man guarding you. Making a terrific jump shot from outside didn’t get the job done, either. The idea was to fake your man out or intimidate him, outmuscle him, drive past him “into the hole,” soar above him, score a layup or dunk the ball if you were that tall, and then give him the look that said—this was where Jojo first learned it—“I’m kicking your ass all over the court, bitch.”

  One day Jojo was defending against a tall, aggressive black player they called Licky. Licky feinted this way and that, then gave Jojo a shoulder in the chest, drove for the basket, and soared for a layup. But Jojo soared higher and blocked the shot. Licky yelled, “Foul!” They began arguing, and Licky decked Jojo with a single punch to the face. Jojo got up seeing red, literally. A red mist formed in front of his eyes, and he threw himself on Licky. They exchanged a few wild punches, then went crashing to the asphalt and rolled in the grime. The other players stood there rooting for Licky but mainly just enjoying the beano. After a while they broke it up because Licky and Jojo were running out of the energy required to make it interesting; they wanted to get back to the game. When it was over, Licky was on his feet, heaving for breath to the point where he was unable to enunciate the curses he intended to direct at Jojo, who was sitting on the asphalt with a bloody cut over one eye, a split lip, a fat nose, and blood running down from the nose and the lip and dripping off his chin. He struggled up, wiped the blood off his face with the tops of his forearms, walked to the center of the court, and made it obvious that he was ready to resume play. He heard one player say to another, sotto voce, “That white boy’s got heart.” He took it as the greatest compliment of his young life. He had it in him to command the respect of black players.

  If so, why had Charles and them just frozen him out? Well, if that was the way it was going to be, he couldn’t let it bother him, could he … All the same, it did! The black players ruled in basketball, but he couldn’t believe they’d distance themselves from him. On the court there was no color line. All were close-knit and worked together as one—and joked together as comrades-in-arms—on a team that had won the national championship last season with him in the bruising position of power forward. He looked at the picture above his locker … Jojo Johanssen soaring above a lot of flailing black arms and stuffing the ball against Michigan State in the Final Four in March. He had broken through the glass ceiling in this game … or he thought he had.

  Such speculations kept rolling around in his head while he took a shower and got dressed. He was so lost in his thoughts, he was surprised when he realized that he was the last player left in the locker room. Him and the polished oak lockers and the foul mouth of Doctor Dis were all that remained. As usual, the doctor was venting his vile spleen:

  “Know’m saying?

  What you saving yo’ cunt for, bitch?

  Some rich old sucker you be hunting for?

  Motherfucker he be stuffing shit up his nose, too,

  For a brain fuck, ain’t having no truck with ho’s, yo.

  Know’m saying?”

  Then Mike, already dressed in his T-shirt and jeans, came back in.

  “You still here?” Mike said. He headed for his locker. “Forgot my fucking keys.”

  “Where you going?”

  “See my girlfriend,” said Mike.

  “What girlfriend?”

  “The girl I’m in love with”—he gestured in the general direction of the court.

  “Oh, come on, not the one with—you didn’t … I hope to hell you’re shucking me.”

  “I wouldn’t shuck you, Jojo. What are you gonna do?”

  “You’ve gone fucking balls to the walls, Microwave.” Jojo shook his head and gave Mike the twisted smile you give an incorrigible but amusing child. “Me? I don’t know. I’m beat. Go get a beer, I guess. That fucking game went on forever. Coach just sits up there in the stands …”

  “Ummm.”

  “You know we scrimmaged for three hours? Without one fucking break?”

  “Well, it beats running,” said Mike. “Last August, eighty-five degrees and you’re out on a track running laps.”

  “Everybody has such a fucking edge on,” said Jojo.

  “Edge?”

  Jojo looked about to make sure nobody else was in the room. “The first day of so-called practice, and I’d like to know who the hell was practicing. Everybody’s out there playing as if their whole goddamn season depends on impressing Coach on August whatever this is. Everybody’s out there trying to cut your legs off to get their minutes.”

  “You mean Congers?”

  “Yeah, him, but it’s not just him. I’m sick of the whole black player thing. Coach—now, he’s white. Most of the coaches are white. But they just assume if two players have equal ability and one’s black and the other’s white—they just assume the black player’s better. You understand
what I’m saying?”

  “I guess.”

  “When I was at the Nike camp that year, I practically had to dunk the ball with my fucking feet before they noticed me.”

  “They noticed you, or you wouldna been at the camp, and you wouldn’t be here.”

  “But you know what I mean. And it’s actually worse than that. They think—the coaches think, I know this for a fact—they think that in a clutch situation, like the last seconds of the game, you gotta give the ball to a black player to take that last shot. He’s not gonna choke. The white player of equal ability will. The white player will choke. That’s the way they think, and I’m talking about white coaches. It’s gotten to the point where it’s a fucking prejudice, if you ask me.”

  “You know that for a fact? How do you know that for a fact?”

  “You don’t believe me? Look at your own situation. You’re the best three-point shooter on this team. There’s no fucking question about that. I bet you not even André himself would dispute that. If Coach ever had one of those three-point contests like they have at the All-Star game, you’d annihilate André. But he’s the starting shooting guard and you’re not.”