I Am Charlotte Simmons Read online

  “Well … Coach thinks he’s better on defense.”

  “Yeah, thinks. That’s just the point. You know that’s bullshit, and so do I. You’re just as fast as he is, maybe faster. The fact is, he assumes André is faster, and he assumes he’s gonna be more aggressive and less intimidated if he’s gotta defend against some hot black player.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that—”

  “Why do you think they call you Microwave?”

  “I don’t even remember,” said Mike with a shrug. He began smiling at the recollection, however.

  “You think it’s a compliment, don’t you? Well, it is, up to a point. They know Coach can pop you into a game and you’ll score a whole batch of three-pointers right away, just the way you can pop a piece a meat into the microwave and get yourself an instant meal. But they don’t think you’re a finisher, and Coach dud’n, either. Coach’ll take you off the bench and put you into the game to close a big gap in the third quarter, but he won’t put you in to make the big shots at the end of the game—and you’re the best shot on the team, maybe the best shot in college basketball!”

  “Jojo, you’re so—”

  “My situation is the same! Okay, I’m starting, but Coach dud’n think of me as a real player. Treyshawn, André, Dashorn, Curtis, the black players, they’re the real players. He comes right out and tells me. He dud’n want me taking shots. I’m not out there to score points. If I try anything other than a dunk or a little bank from two feet out or a tap-in or something, he holds it against me, even if I make it! A jumper from fifteen feet away? Dud’n wanna know about it. He comes right out and tells me! I’m out there to set picks, set screens, block shots, rebound, and feed the ball to Treyshawn, André, and Curtis, the real players.”

  “What’s so unreal about that?” said Mike. “You think you’re the only one? What about that guy Fox at Michigan State or Janisovich at Duke? You don’t think they’re real players? I sure as hell do.”

  “They’re real players, but coaches don’t think of them as real players. The only real players are black players. You and me, we just play a role. You’re the team microwave. Why? Because Coach can’t believe the best shooting guard in college basketball isn’t black.”

  “Jojo,” said Mike, “stop thinking so hard.”

  “You don’t have to think. You only have to use your eyes.”

  “You’re straining your brain, Jojo. I don’t know why the fuck you’re feeling so neglected. I heard them in there. Go go, Jojo. It id’n as if nobody knows you’re on the fucking court.”

  Now it was Jojo’s turn to feel good despite himself. That was true. Go go, Jojo. Mike hadn’t been able to hide his pleasure over “Microwave.” Jojo, all six feet ten inches, 250 pounds of him, was just as transparent. Go go, Jojo.

  Mike was eager to go meet this afternoon’s love of his life and soon departed the Buster Bowl. Jojo finished dressing. He was putting on his khaki pants when he noticed an unusual weight in the right-hand pocket. Odd—but in the next moment it didn’t seem odd at all. He knew what it would be, but he didn’t know exactly what kind it would be. He didn’t want to exaggerate the possibilities … On the other hand, he had been power forward for the national champions last season … That gave him a Christmas sort of excitement. He didn’t want to spoil the surprise by looking right away. He stepped inside his locker to fetch his T-shirt, which had sleeves not likely to deny the public a look at the density of his upper arms. Inside the locker, the oak walls had not been stained or polyurethaned but, rather, left natural and polished and oiled. At this moment they gave off a rich smell, those walls, and Jojo treated himself to a huge lungful. He was as excited as a child, and everything seemed especially wonderful, even the inside of his locker.

  He walked all the way down the hall to the players’ entrance to the arena … and still managed to fight off the impulse to look at what precisely was in that pocket, which now seemed to create heat and vibration along with the drag of its weight. He swung open one of the double doors—and there—right in front of him—there it was!—poised against a backdrop of chestnut trees and maples, which in turn looked luxuriant against the ultimate backdrop, a flawless summer afternoon sky—oh shit, it was too good to be true, but there in a no-parking zone of the arena drive: a brand-new Chrysler Annihilator SUV pickup … white, gleaming in the sun, massive, perfect for a six-foot-ten, 250-pound national champion power forward, a four-door SUV with a five-foot pickup truck-bed extension covered by a sleek white lid. And oh shit oh shit, there were chromed Sprewell spinners on the wheels! It was the most magnificent object Jojo had ever laid eyes on, a monster, but a luxurious monster, with 425 horsepower and every extra known to American automobile manufacturing. Jojo stood still on the sidewalk about fifteen feet away from this awesome manifestation of beauty and power and slowly withdrew from his right-hand pocket … sure enough, a set of keys on a ring that also bore a little black remote-controlled transmitter and an inch-long, lozenge-shaped tab with a piece of white enameled metal—just like the car’s—on one side and a license plate number on the other.

  Jojo pushed the unlock button and heard the rat-tat-tat of the four SUV doors unlocking. He pushed the pickup button, and the sleek white lid of the truck bed rose silently. He closed it, then opened the driver’s door, stepped way up—the roof of this monster was almost as high as his head—and slid behind the wheel. Tan leather seats … the smell! It was even richer than the smell of the lockers, just this side of intoxicating. On the passenger seat was what looked like a small white leather album, no bigger than a wallet. And inside … but he really already knew: the vehicle’s registration and insurance cards in the name of his father, David Johanssen. It was no doubt the same arrangement they—the booster club, known as Charlie’s Roundtable—had made for the Dodge Durango he had, in fact, driven over to the Buster Bowl this afternoon. The monthly leasing bills came to his father, but the boosters paid them in an under-the-Roundtable way Jojo didn’t particularly want to know about. Jojo liked the Durango. It was a great SUV. But this! The Annihilator, pure white, gleamed before his very eyes and gleamed and gleamed some more. It was bigger and more powerful than an Escalade or a Navigator.

  He loved it. It was like a dream. He felt as if he were in a control tower overlooking … the world. The instrument panel looked like what he imagined an F-18 fighter plane’s looked like. He turned the ignition key, and the monster came to life with a deep, highly muffled roar. Jojo thought of an underground nuclear test. The ultimate power. He loved it. On top of the dashboard was a four-inch-square card embedded in plastic. In the middle of it were two bold capital letters, AD, for Athletic Department, in the center of a corn-yellow circle, around which was a ring of black against a mauve background. That was all it said, AD … aside from a small black ID number in one corner. It was the most coveted parking permit on campus. It allowed you to park practically anywhere, anytime.

  Basketball players seldom walked through the campus. They drove, as Jojo did now. All the boys preferred SUVs. Subconsciously, they maintained the height advantage and muscular advantage they enjoyed in life on the ground. Whether by design or not, it was one more thing that isolated them from ordinary students and ordinary mortals generally.

  But sometimes you developed a craving for all those earthlings to get a load of your astonishing physical presence up close. And so it was to be with Jojo on this lovely, in fact enchanting, late summer afternoon.

  He tooled around on the campus drives a bit, so that people could envy him for his great 32-valve behemoth; but shit, there was almost nobody around, and too few of those who were seemed sufficiently staggered by the sight, not even with the chrome Sprewell spinners playing tricks on their eyes. He didn’t even spot any of the other guys’ SUVs. They had had to walk over to the parking lot to get them. Come to think of it, he’d have to go back to the lot himself to retrieve the Durango and return it to the Chrysler/Dodge dealership.

  Yet the sense of added magnifi
cence the Annihilator provided him remained strong. He was heading back to his suite in Crowninshield, and cruising along past the Great Yard on Gillette Way, looking down upon the world, when on an impulse he pulled over to the side and parked—in a no-parking zone, but what did that matter? He got out, stretched his big frame, and began strolling along a path that cut across the Great Yard on a diagonal. Go go, Jojo. He was feeling triumphant and in a mood to be noticed, although he told himself he just needed some fresh air and sun. Go go, Jojo. There were no students to be seen, only some old people, tourists or whatever they were, walking around and looking at the buildings.

  Surely someone would show up. Here he was, at the heart of a great university, one of the five best-known people on the campus … Nobody, not the president of the university or anybody else, was nearly so recognizable or awesome as the starting five of the national champions. Go go, Jojo. Of course, Dupont was just a stop on the way to the final triumph, which was playing in the League. In the meantime, being at Dupont was cool. Everybody was impressed that you were playing ball for Buster Roth. For that matter, everybody was impressed that you were even attending Dupont. The sweet irony was that he had wound up at a better university than Eric. If the unthinkable happened and you didn’t make it to the League, it was pretty good credentials just to be able to say you graduated from Dupont—assuming you managed to keep your grades above water and did graduate. Well, that was what tutors were for, wasn’t it?

  Doubts began to form. What if something did happen? In high school, teachers would tell him that he had a perfectly good mind, but it wasn’t going to do him any good if he didn’t apply himself and develop it; and if he didn’t, someday he’d regret it. He took it as an inside-out compliment. He didn’t have to apply himself and develop his mind and all that stuff. He was of a higher order of student. He was a basketball star. The high school would make sure he had the grades he needed to stay eligible. Which they did. Several times he got really interested in courses and did pretty well, but he was careful not to let on. One time he wrote a paper for history that the teacher liked so much he read part of it to the class. He could still feel how exciting and at the same time embarrassing that had been. Luckily, word of it never got beyond the classroom.

  His brother, Eric, had made all these good grades and gone to Northwestern and then to the University of Chicago Law School—and big deal. For the past four years, two at Dupont and his last two in high school, Jojo had completely overshadowed His Majesty the Brilliant Firstborn. In the general sense, nobody knew who the hell Eric Johanssen was, and tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands maybe, knew who Jojo Johanssen was. But … what if something did happen and nobody in the NBA drafted him? The problem with Vernon Congers was not so much that he might take his starting position away from him, but that Coach might bring Congers in off the bench more and more and cut into his, Jojo’s, minutes, which would mean that he would fade in the stats and in every other way. If that happened, he could forget the NBA. Suddenly he’d be that pathetic animal, a college has-been with a piece of paper from Dupont and nowhere to go. He’d be nothing. Maybe he could get a job coaching basketball at Trenton Central—and Eric would be what he was right now, a lawyer in Chicago on the threshold of a limitless future … The hell of it was, Congers was so goddamned good! Big, strong, quick, aggressive, and absolutely determined to prevail in this game! Far faster than it would take to recite it, all this rushed together in Jojo’s midsection. Now there was no mistaking the feeling, which was fear.

  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 lyin
g 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.