I Am Charlotte Simmons

7. His Majesty the Baby

It was very nearly dark, and along the footpath on the edge of the Grove, blinking yellow lights came bobbing and bouncing by, one after the other, weak yellow lights, bunched together here, spread out there, but a whole train of them, all going in the same direction, bouncing and bobbing and blinking along the footpath by the arboretum. Adam squeezed the brake levers on his bicycle and stopped, even though he was already late for his meeting at The Daily Wave.

It took a moment or two to figure out this spectral locomotion: joggers. The yellow lights, which blinked in order to alert motorists at night, were built into the CD players they wore Velcro’d around their upper arms. But their arms—they were hardly even there! These joggers were girls, every one of them, so far as Adam could make out, and half of them were terribly thin, breastless, bottomless, nothing but bones, hair, T-shirts, shorts, big sneakers, and blinking lights. They were determined to burn up every last calorie they could squeeze out of their juiceless hides—or die, literally die, trying.

Adam saw a story in it immediately—THE ANOREXIC MARATHON—and nobody at the Wave was going to grouse about his being late if he arrived with a good idea like this one—on top of the real bombshell he was delivering this evening concerning—he could already envision this story’s headline, too—THE GOVERNOR, THE BLOW JOB AND THE BRAWL.

He hurried on, pedaling past Crowninshield, past the Little Yard, all the while wondering if it was hard to get anorexics to agree to pictures. THE LIVING DEAD WHO WON’T LIE DOWN…The interviews? No problem for an enterprising reporter like him. None of these wimp-out caveats—“the names have been changed”—either. He could see it in print. He could feel it in print. There was something almost chemical about new story ideas. They gave him a visceral rush. THE GOVERNOR, THE BLOW JOB AND THE BRAWL—although little Greg Fiore would never have the guts to put BLOW JOB in a headline. He pedaled faster.

Out in the real world, as opposed to Dupont’s cocoon, the typical news-room of a daily newspaper wasn’t much different from the home office of an insurance company: the same somber, invincible synthetic carpeting, the same rows of workstations with young backs humped over in front of low-grade-fever-blue computer screens. Only college newspaper offices such as the Wave’s preserved the lumpen-bohemian clutter of newsrooms in the fabled Front Page era of the twentieth century, not that anybody at the Wave other than Adam himself or possibly Greg, the editor in chief, had ever heard of Front Page or its era, more than seventy years ago, back in the last century, which to college students today was prehistory.

As Adam walked in, Greg was rocked back on the rear legs of the old wooden library chair he used, holding forth to five other staff members, two boys and three girls, who had perched themselves wherever they could, against a backdrop of discarded pizza take-out boxes glistening with their greasy cheese residue, cardboard baskets that buffalo wings and chicken fingers had come in, cracked translucent tops from containers of coffee and jumbo Slurpees and smoothies, mealy-feeling molded gray composite-cardboard trays, various crumpled bags, and sheets of newspaper and computer printouts strewn upon an exhausted carpet splotched with raspberry Crazy Horse caffeine-jolt spills or worse. The bombness of it all! The pizza boxes…after this meeting he would have to hustle over to PowerPizza and put in four frantic hours of pizza deliveries.

A skinny Chinese girl named Camille Deng—that skank, thought Adam—was saying, “I think we’ve still got some unresolved homophobia issues here. I don’t buy the administration’s cop-out that the maintenance staff ‘thought they were combating homophobia.’ ”

“Why not?” said Greg, leaning back even farther on the chair’s hind legs and eyeing Camille down his nose. Greg and his gotta-be-tough-newspaperman pose, thought Adam. Greg and his scrawny neck and receding chin.

“Well,” said Camille, “do you think it’s just a coincidence that Parents Weekend is coming up, and the administration, which is always telling us how they’re a hundred percent behind diversity and everything, you think they might just possibly not want the parents to see descriptions of how Dupont guys make love written in chalk all over the sidewalks? ‘We’re Queer and We’re Here’—you think Dupont Hall wants to let that big cat out of the bag? Because they are here.”

“How come you’re saying they?” said a boy with shaggy red hair. Randy Grossman. “You sure you don’t have an issue yourself? Like maybe a little covert pariah-ism? Like maybe a little self-loathing lesbianism?”

Camille went Unnngghh in a groan of utmost contempt.

I’ve got an issue of covert pariah-ism, too, when it comes to Randy, thought Adam. Randy had turned into an aggressive pain in the ass ever since he came out. Like everybody else on the Wave, Adam had admired him for his courage. Now he wished to hell he’d go back in the closet.

Greg ignored Randy and said, “Look, Camille, some night-shift security guy spots all this writing on the sidewalks describing ‘cock-and-ass jobs’ and sticking fingers up the ass and stroking the prostate—I saw the remains of that one myself—and it’s two or three in the morning, and Security tells Maintenance, and Maintenance decides—remember, we’re talking about the night shift here—”

Camille broke in. “What difference is that supposed to make? Night-shift maintenance personnel are automatically retarded?”

“Let me finish. Maintenance figures this is antigay vandalism. ‘We better get rid of it before daylight.’ What’s so hard to believe about that? These guys—it’s the middle of the night, and how are they supposed to know this is the Lesbian and Gay Fist striking a blow for gay freedom? So they spend the rest of the night scrubbing it all off, and in the morning there’s nothing left but chalk smears, and they think they’ve done the right thing. I can get down with that, but the Fist goes postal. Whattaya think happened—a buncha guys got together at three a.m. and had a public relations meeting about Parents Weekend?”

Greg’s right, thought Adam, and Camille’s a skank, but Greg’s right from the wrong motive. Greg, like every Daily Wave editor in chief, was supposed to be a fiercely independent journalist who pulled no punches. Greg was not alone in Wave history in his inclination to pull lots of punches, since the administration, and fellow undergraduates, had an infinite number of ways—moral, social, and substantive—to make life miserable for any editor who took his charter of independence at face value. Nevertheless, it was important, not only for Greg’s public face but also for his private soul, for him to believe that he was one tough journalist who would rake the muck whenever it needed raking. In fact, the chances of Fearless Greg Fiore denouncing the administration for not proudly upholding the right of the Fist to write anal sex exotica all over the sidewalks for Parents Weekend never existed in the first place.

Of course, Adam, as he himself realized, was not altogether objective when it came to Greg Fiore. It went without saying that he, Adam, was the senior who should at this moment be sitting in that rickety chair looking down his nose at staffers from his eminence as editor in chief. He couldn’t blame Greg for the situation, but he found it in his heart to resent him all the same. No, at bottom it was his parents who were to blame, most specifically his father, who had left him and his mother in the shabby circumstances that made it necessary for him to work two jobs in order to get through college. Editing a daily like the Wave was a full-time commitment that left no time for things like delivering pizza and filling in for Jojo Johanssen’s brain. Adam couldn’t have accepted the job of editor if they had come on their knees begging him. Jews without money. Adam’s father was the grandson of some Jews without money—Jews Without Money was a 1930s “proletarian” novel that Adam had read just because of the title—who had immigrated from Poland to the United States in the 1920s and wound up in Boston, where they remained Jews without money. His father, Nat Gellin, had been the first Gellin, or Gellininsky—Adam’s great-grandfather had given the name a little trim—to go to college. Strapped for money, he had been forced to drop out of Boston University after two years, at which point he considered himself lucky when he got a job as a waiter at Egan’s, a big, popular, glossy downtown restaurant that attracted the sort of businessmen who liked to dine breathing the same air as bigger businessmen, flashy politicians, TV anchors, journalists from the Globe and the Herald, and the odd visiting show-business celebrity. In sum, Egan’s was irresistible to that creature of the big city, he who must be “where things are happening.” Nat Gellin had the three qualities essential for success in such an establishment: punctiliousness, tact, and charm; and in just under ten years he had worked his way up from waiter to captain to maître d’ to manager. Adam barely remembered him, but his father must have had the gift of glib bonhomie, too, because Egan’s, historically, was Irish through and through. The joint had a bar trade that by six o’clock in the evening fairly roared with the boisterous conversations of people who knew they were drinking in the right place. The bar featured massive swaths of oak with polished brass accoutrements, inch-thick glass shelves bearing ranks of liquor bottles lit from below as if they were onstage—and Nat Gellin in a gray unfinished-worsted suit, a freshly starched shirt, and a navy tie with white pin dots, a look he had picked up from the team of official greeters at “21” in New York City. He greeted one and all at Egan’s with a smile set between a pair of rubicund round cheeks. He had the knack of never forgetting a name, not even if the fellow came in only once in a blue moon. It was while he was a mere waiter and college dropout that he met pretty, cute, bouncy little Frances “Frankie” Horowitz, a high school graduate who had a job routing customer accident and theft calls for Allstate Insurance.

Adam’s mother idolized the incomparable restaurateur Nat Gellin. Even years later, in the midst of monologues of pure old-fashioned hate, she would come out with something like “There isn’t another Jew in Boston who coulda done what your father did with that Irish restaurant.” What Adam took away from all that was the idea that a successful Jew was one who was a hit with the goyim.

Nat Gellin of Egan’s was a hit with the goyim, all right. Two years before Adam was born, Nat charmed an old-line Brahmin bank, First City National, into a prodigious loan and bought a half interest in Egan’s from the original Michael F. X. Egan’s five children, who were happy to get some cash out of the place in the here and now. Then he bought a house in Brookline to go with it, even though it meant he was now leveraged over the moon. Adam spent the first five years of his life in what he would recognize years later was a big, elegant Georgian house in Brookline, built about 1910 on a small lot, after the urban fashion of the day, in what was no doubt the right section back then and wasn’t bad now. Nat’s hubris was leveraged up to the ultimate, too. His ascension from salaried manager to profit-sharing full partner made him feel that he had risen to a higher social and, one might say, romantic level. One night, while wafting bonhomie in his restaurant, he met a blond twenty-three-year-old recently graduated from Wellesley, a WASP with all sorts of Ivy League and Beacon Hill connections, and in due course he began having to stay later and later at night to wrap up all the loose ends in his establishment, the operation of which was a matter of infinite complexity, after which, nevertheless, came the inevitable drive back to Brookline and to Frankie.

Frankie. He had grown, and she hadn’t grown with him. She had grown older, however, and no longer looked pretty, cute, and bouncy as much as she did chunky, prematurely middle-aged, and not much different from any other uneducated American mom putting on weight and growing more and more remote from where things were happening, as she cooed and cooed in Brookline over her baby, Adam.

It was one Sunday, while Nat was in just such a gloomy yet hubristic mood, and she was in the sunroom watering some Lollipop Stamen lilies, that he decided he had to tell her straight out. He actually used those words: “I know it’s not your fault, Frankie, but I’ve grown, and you haven’t grown with me.”

He couldn’t have worded it in a worse way. He was not only telling her he was leaving her, he was also informing her that it was because she was an unsophisticated dimwit, an embarrassing zhlub. Adam was so young when it all happened that his memory contained nothing more than a single snapshot of his father—specifically, of his porky belly and his genitals emerging naked from the bathroom. He also had a snapshot of the moment his mother informed him Daddy was moving out, although he couldn’t remember how she put it. He was old enough a couple of years later to be quite aware that they were moving from the grand house in Brookline to the second floor of a not-so-great house in the West Roxbury section of Boston, although he was still too young to have any more than a vague idea of the status implications. His own personal status was fabulous. He was His Majesty the Only Child. His mother put him on that throne, sang his praises, worshiped him, strewed petals of adulation upon his every path. Inasmuch as his teachers also made a fuss over him, it never occurred to him that the elementary school he attended, along with a lot of unruly Irish, black, Italian, Chinese, Canuck, and Ukrainian children, might be somewhere toward the soggy bottom of the Boston public school system. He was royalty in the school building, too; His Majesty the Prodigy. It was only after he was thirteen and had a scholarship to Roxbury Latin, a famous and prestigious old private school, that he realized what a free fall it had been from Brookline to West Roxbury—and learned how it happened.

Nat Gellin’s divorce papers had roused all the bouncy spunk Frances Horowitz Gellin had possessed the day she met him, except that now it came out not as “cute,” but as revenge. There had been a time when Nat used to love regaling Frankie with war stories of the restaurant business, and she knew that restaurateurs treasured customers who paid cash. At that time, the only record of cash receipts was the tape that came out of the register—and the tape was thrown into the trash the moment the joint closed at night. The cash itself was a pie, up to the owners to divide as they thought best. For three months, Frankie and her lawyer went out in the middle of the night and retrieved those tapes from the trash outside Egan’s. The lawyer thought she was going to use the evidence as a threat to squeeze a better settlement out of her prosperous entrepreneur husband, but Frankie went straight to the federal government. Nat got off with a fine, but the fine was so enormous that he had to sell his half interest in Egan’s and the house in Brookline, and even after that he remained nailed to the ground by the bankers. The settlement, the alimony, the child support—those became nothing but words on a document. There was no longer any more than a pittance to be extracted from that well-known host and boulevardier Nat Gellin. And boy, did Frankie leave one dumbfounded, flummoxed, outstanding-billoxed lawyer staring at the remains of her case.

At the time, Frankie didn’t care, because she had had her revenge, and yes, it was sweet. She cared later on, when things got so bad that she had to take a job making cold telephone calls for the retail sales department of a cable television company, the sort of calls that interrupt people at home and make them wonder what kind of loathsome creep was so hard up as to take a job doing that. But not even free-floating scorn daunted her, since she was serving a higher cause: turning Adam into a star who would light up her life.

Until Adam started going to Roxbury Latin, no two people were more devoted to each other. Adam was an academic star throughout his school days, and the constant praise of others and the glitter of success in the boy’s own eyes did, indeed, light up Frankie’s life. As her part of the deal, Frankie kept Adam’s confidence—and ego—pumped up to astonishing proportions. There was nothing that could hold him back from going forth from West Roxbury and conquering the world. Frankie had never gone to synagogue again after her social downfall, and Adam grew up without any religion—or any but the most cursory knowledge of Judaism. But she did tell him about the Jewish people. Again he couldn’t remember exactly how she put it, but it was clear that the Jews were the greatest people on earth and Israel was the greatest nation on earth, and the United States, although a wonderful country in other ways, was riddled with anti-Semitism. Such was the foundation upon which Adam Gellin’s Weltanschauung, like many another’s, was built.

At Roxbury Latin, Adam learned a little too much about status distinctions for Frankie’s good. Roxbury Latin was anything but a snobbish school. In fact, it had an atmosphere of old-fashioned Protestant scrubbed-wood asceticism about it. Nevertheless, there were quite a few socially well-placed boys who went there and lots of sophisticated parents active in school projects. It was at Roxbury Latin that it first dawned on Adam that his mother, Frankie Gellin, the former Frances Horowitz, the woman who had not only nurtured him but fed his ego, fed his ego, fed it, fed it, fed it, fed it until he was a giant amid Boston’s swarms of ordinary people—this woman who had done all that was in fact a very ordinary person, an aging, tiny, round-shouldered woman with no education, no sophistication, no knowledge of the world and no curiosity about it, a poorly read person who couldn’t possibly converse with him about Shakespeare, much less Virgil, and still less Emily Dickinson or J. D. Salinger. It was pretty hard to understand irony or allusion or metaphor if you didn’t have the faintest notion of what it was playing off of. His mother didn’t get it and never had. Adam went into his later teens believing himself to be a brilliant and infinitely promising young star who had been born to the wrong parents.

From worshiping his mother, he veered overnight into resenting her. Why? He had no idea. He didn’t even know it was resentment. He thought it was a matter of cultivation, her lack of it and his Roxbury Latinized depth of it. He was unable to face the truth, which was that he didn’t want to believe that it was an intellectual and social nullity like this, his mom, his embarrassing, ill-spoken cipher of a mom, who had created Destiny’s Adam Gellin. That would have made his grand ego seem like a fraud. (Nor was his the first case of Shrunken Mommy complex among those who regard themselves as intellectuals.)

“—or was that before you got here?”

With a start, Adam realized Greg was looking straight at him and asking him a question, probably containing a barb about his being late for the meeting, but he hadn’t a clue as to what the question actually was. His mind churned for a moment, and then he said, “Sorry about being late”—he made a point of looking at the others when he said it, to avoid the appearance of apologizing to Greg—“but I’ve just come across something like totally incredible but totally true.”

Greg sighed in an impatient I-don’t-have-time-for-

this manner. “Okay, like what?”

Adam now realized this was the wrong moment to pitch his story, but the drive known as information compulsion overrode common sense. “Well, the speaker at commencement last spring is the leading contender for the Republican nomination for president, right?”

Greg nodded even more impatiently.

“Well, one night two days before commencement last spring, the guy’s already on campus, and two frat boys—two Saint Rays, in fact—catch him getting a blow job out in the Grove from this girl, a junior—and I know her name, although I guess we can’t run it—and there’s a brawl with the guy’s bodyguard—”

Greg broke in. “This is something that’s supposed to have happened two days before commencement?”

“Exactly,” said Adam.

“That was what—one, two…four months ago? That’s really awesome, Adam, but we’ve got to go to press three hours from now, okay? And the story I got to deal with right now happened this morning, okay?”

“I know that,” said Adam, “but I’m talking about one of the most important politicians in America here, and—”

Greg broke in again, sarcastically. “That’s bangin’, Adam, but—”

Camille broke in on Greg: “Did it ever occur to you, Adam, that all your story ideas are like designed to make women look pathetic? Or is the problem that it does occur to you?”

Oh you pathetic skank. But what he said was, “Whattaya mean, all my story ideas?”

“I mean like this Predatory Professor thing you want to do. You want to make women look like—”

“Whattaya talking about, Camille? That’s not a story about women; it’s a story about male faculty members.”

Greg said, “Can we please get back to—”

“What am I talking about?” said Camille. “The question is, what are you talking about? You know very well that the subtext is, Oh, wow, nothing has changed, has it. Female students are still little sexual lambs who need protecting against all-powerful males who want to seduce them. We can’t just let them go around having affairs with whoever they feel like, can we. Your narrative is the same old story, the same as”—she paused, her mouth slightly open, obviously searching for some historical or possibly literary analogy—“the same story it’s always been,” she concluded lamely. “The subtext makes sure female undergraduates remain the stereotypical Little Red Riding Hoods.”

“Oh, fuck, Camille, subtext me no subtexts. Let’s talk about the text. The text is—”

“THE TEXT IS WE GOTTA COME TO A CONCLUSION ABOUT THE FIST AND THE ‘WE’RE QUEER’ SHIT! IT’S ONLY TWO HOURS TO DEADLINE!” Greg’s voice had become shrill.

“Why is ‘We’re Queer’ shit?” said Randy.

Greg sighed, rolled his eyes, looked away, and tamped the side of his head with the heel of his hand. Softly, his gaze panning from Randy to Camille to Adam, he said, “We—haven’t—got—time—for—semantics. We haven’t got time for deconstructing texts, we haven’t got time for four-month-old blow jobs, we haven’t got time for horny professors. We only have time for—”

Adam tuned out. He knew exactly what poor Greg would do, as did everybody in the room who stopped and thought about it. Not only would Greg be afraid to touch THE GOVERNOR, THE BLOW JOB AND THE BRAWL, he would run a completely straight-faced account of today’s WE’RE QUEER fiasco, even though the whole thing was comical, and he would write one of his nevertheless editorials, assuming he had the nerve to run any editorial at all. In his nevertheless editorials, Greg always said something like, “While the administration is probably not being evasive in referring to the erasure as an honest mistake, nevertheless the Gay and Lesbian Fist has every right to hold the administration to the strictest standards of yackety yackety yak…” And Greg would see to it that he never had time for THE BLOW JOB. The very mention of it had scared poor Greg to death.

Greg was arguing with Camille and Randy and looking at his watch, as if the sheer logic of the deadline would make them willing to acquiesce. Greg didn’t have the balls to just assert his authority and say—as he, Adam, would have—“Look, it’s getting late, and here’s what we’re going to do…”

Adam looked at his own watch and realized, resentfully, that he wouldn’t have the luxury of hanging around long enough to see his prediction come to pass. He had fifteen minutes to get over to his night job. Destiny’s Adam Gellin would spend the next four hours in a little Bitsosushi hatchback delivering slices of anchovy-and-olive, pastrami-mozzarella-and-tomato, prosciutto-Parmesan-red-pepper-and-egg, sausage-artichoke-and-mushroom, smoked-salmon-stracchino-and-

dill, and eggplant-bresaola-arugula-pesto-pignoli-

fontina-Gorgonzola-bollito-misto-capers-basil-crème-

fraîche-and-garlic cheese pizza to every indolent belly-stuffing time-squandering oaf on or off the Dupont campus who picked up the phone and called PowerPizza.

Adam couldn’t stand pizza, but tonight, as he stood at the stainless-steel take-out counter inside the alley entrance to PowerPizza, the sound of the Mexicans dicing all the onions and red peppers and the smell of sausages cooking in their cheese lava cut right into his stomach and made him painfully hungry. He hadn’t eaten since noon and wouldn’t be able to eat for four more hours, and here he was staring into a hot maw, the PowerPizza kitchen, where a motley hive of people were furiously shoveling food in gross quantities. The counter girls up front were yelling at the cooks, the cooks were yelling at the Mexicans, the Mexicans were yelling at each other, in Spanish, and Denny, the owner, was yelling at the whole lot of them in what passed for English.

“ ’Eyyyyy, whattayou do standin’eh?” He had spotted Adam. He threw both hands up in the gesture that said “Useless!”

“I’ve only got seven orders!” said Adam, indicating the stack of pizza flats beside him on the counter. “I’m supposed to have eight!”

“Okay. You get a you eight, you get a you ess moving.”

Denny, whose actual first name was Demetrio, was like a caricature of a pizza parlor proprietor, an immigrant from Naples, too fat, bald, hotheaded, and harried, and he couldn’t even yell at you without using his hands. In the evenings his entire business depended on speed—speed at the front counter, in the kitchen, and above all in the take-out deliveries, which were supposed to go out fast and arrive hot. To ensure that, Denny had devised a shrewd form of bottom-dog capitalist motivation. Delivery boys like Adam got no wages, only tips. Adam’s take each night depended solely on how fast he could get the orders to their destination. Volume was what counted, because students were not the greatest tippers in the world. He wished he could arrive at every door with a sign around his neck that said I DON’T GET PAID TO DO THIS, I ONLY GET YOUR TIPS.

One of the Mexicans slid another pizza box down the counter, and Adam had barely touched it before the all-seeing Neapolitan yelled, “You got a you eight! You get a you ess on da road! You stan’ aroun’ when you t’ru!”

Adam staggered away from the counter holding a stack of pizza flats that rose up higher than his head. Delivery boys used a battered, underpowered eight-year-old Bitsosushi hatchback. PowerPizza was part of a gaudy strip of student-oriented shops, and Adam’s first stop would be six or eight blocks behind it in an apartment building he was only vaguely aware of, since he had never heard of any student living there. On the other hand, he couldn’t imagine anybody other than students with rude animal appetites craving five full-size flats of pizza. The order came to more than fifty dollars, in any event. It would take somebody mean or clueless to tip him less than five dollars. Off the job, he was cautious at the wheel of a car. On this job you had to be a stock-car driver if you wanted to make any money. He sped through the seedy, feebly lit old residential area behind PowerPizza, barely even one-pumping the stop signs.

The apartment building was a dingy brick affair, four or five stories high, with a small entry vestibule containing a deck of about twenty mailboxes, a panel of apartment buzzers, and a glass interior door through which Adam could see a lobby that wasn’t much but had an elevator, thank God. The five flats of pizza were so unwieldy, Adam had to put them down in order to study the buzzer panel. Jones 3A…Jones 3A…Found it, pushed the button, waited for the clicking sound, pushed the door open, and did the usual acrobatics, holding the door open with the heel of his sneaker while he bent over and lifted the five flats up off the floor. Christ! Did something to his back, which put him in an even worse mood. What was Destiny’s child doing in a situation like this? How could it be that he, Adam Gellin, was a delivery boy backing his way into a third-rate apartment building in a shady part of a dreary little city in Pennsylvania, carrying five boxed slabs of idiot food while a lock-mad security-hinged plate-glass door pressed against his butt, trying to deny him entry? And his back hurt like hell.

When he reached the third floor, he found himself in a hallway with seven or eight identical flush doors, but he didn’t have to guess which one was waiting for five orders of pizza. Belly laughs, whoops, the rumble of a lot of people talking at once, and the languid synthesizer sounds of a piece of so-called Sample Rap called “Elliptical Rider” by C. C. Good Jookin’ were audible behind the door of what was undoubtedly Jones 3A. They sound black, Adam said to himself. Consciously, that made no difference. Inside his rib cage his heart had other ideas, however, and sped up. He took a deep breath and pressed the button. Nothing but the sound of people partying inside. He had to push it four times before the door opened. Adam found himself looking up at a towering young black man with a shaved head, clad in cargo pants and a T-shirt that showed off his muscles. His shoulders, biceps, and forearms were so thick and highly defined they made Adam blink. Behind the brute, a hazy, smoky dimness was punctuated by flares of electric color, apparently from a television set. Black faces were chundering conversation, through which pulsed the slow, eccentric beat of “Elliptical Rider.” An oddly sweet odor hung in the air.

In the next instant Adam realized who Jones 3A was: Curtis Jones, the basketball team’s shooting guard. On the court he looked small, since he was only—only, by Division I standards—six-five. Standing there in an ordinary apartment doorway, he looked gigantic. Adam felt relieved. The man might be a brute in a foul mood, but at least Adam knew who he was. Like the other players, Jones lived in Crowninshield, and Adam had been around him from time to time while tending Jojo. He started to say, Hi, Curtis, but thought better of it and settled for, “Hi—PowerPizza.”

If the big man recognized him, if he was at all happy that his five flats had arrived, or if he was in any other way pleased by Adam’s presence, he successfully contained his enthusiasm. He motioned toward a table just inside the door and said, “Over there.” Over there—not even put it over there, much less please.

Adam did as he was told and glanced about the room, which was big but practically unfurnished except for an outsize DVD television screen tuned to ESPN SportsCenter, which nobody seemed to be watching, and a set of quadraphonic speakers currently devoted to the drones and percussions of “Elliptical Rider.” Jones was not the only tall, powerfully built young man in the room with a shaved head. Treyshawn Diggs over there—hard to miss him. André Walker, Dashorn Tippet…but also some young black men who didn’t look like athletes or students, either. Smoky in here. The sweet odor—marijuana. The black athletes, Adam had noticed, liked weed—that was invariably the term—while the white athletes preferred alcohol, and nobody even paid lip service any longer to the rule that athletes shouldn’t get high during the season. The TV screen flared and lit up a huge white head. Jojo! That was him, Jojo. He was in the back of the room talking to Charles Bousquet. That huge white head happened to turn his way.

“Hey, Jojo.” Somehow it seemed very important that the morose and intimidating Curtis Jones realized that he, Adam, knew someone here. Jojo gave him nothing but a blank stare. Couldn’t he see who it was? Adam raised his voice this time—“Hey, Jojo!”—and waved.

Jojo nodded once, without a smile, then turned and resumed his conversation with Charles Bousquet. Adam couldn’t believe it—but then he knew it was true. Jojo was avoiding him. He didn’t want to acknowledge his tutor’s existence in the same room as his cohort of fellow giants. Just two days ago he had stayed up all night researching and writing a paper for him on a complicated subject—saved him from a catastrophic F—and now the big, ungrateful dummy cuts him half dead with a single stone-faced nod!

Curtis Jones was glowering. “Okay. How much I owe you?”

Adam fished the PowerPizza check out of the pocket of his Windbreaker, looked at it, and said, “Fifty dollars and seventy-four cents.”

Jones snatched the check from between his thumb and forefinger. “Lemme see that.” He stared at it until his eyebrows came together. “Shit.” He looked at Adam as if he were trying to perpetrate some outrageous scam. Belligerently he jammed his hand down into a pocket of his jeans, withdrew a thick fold of money clamped with a broad gold clip, riffled through it with his thumb, extracted two bills, handed them to Adam, and turned away without so much as another word.

The man’s wide back was toward him before Adam comprehended what was in his hand. A fifty and a one. A fifty and a one? Twenty-six cents? Surely Curtis Jones was going to turn back and give him his real tip.

But he didn’t. Adam was stunned. This was a fifty-dollar order! It didn’t matter who the man was. He couldn’t let himself get stiffed like this. He screwed up his courage. “Hey, wait a minute.” He’d started to say, “Wait a minute, Curtis,” but he wasn’t brave enough to act that familiar, and he was too angry to grovel and say Mr. Jones. Not that it would have made any difference; Jones hadn’t even heard him above the noise of the conversations and C. C. Good Jookin’s Sample Rap.

Adam stared at the two bills again. Twenty-six cents. Anger wrestled with fear. Fear was winning. Okay, he’d—he’d—he knew what he’d do. He’d take twenty-six cents in change out of his pocket and say Hey, you forgot your change and then throw it at him. Well, not exactly throw—more like toss. He searched his pockets. He didn’t have any change, not even a single coin. He ransacked his mind.

“Hey! Curtis!” It just came blurting out.

Jones, who had begun walking toward Treyshawn Diggs, stopped, turned his shoulders slightly, and looked back.

“What about my tip!” The trigger had been pulled now, and there was no holding back.

The big black man merely tilted his head, raised one eyebrow, narrowed his eyes, and gave Adam a certain look of male challenge that as much as said, “Okay, what about it?” Adam was speechless. Jones turned his back and started toward the center of the room.

“THEY DON’T PAY ME TO DELIVER THIS STUFF! ALL I GET IS THE TIPS!”

The room grew quiet except for C. C. Good Jookin’s synthesizer beat, which in the sudden silence seemed swollen with amplification. The odor of weed seemed somehow stronger. The lurid flashes of ESPN SportsCenter hurt Adam’s eyes. He knew his face was a burning red.

Without even looking at him, Curtis Jones said, “Hey, the man says he wants a tip.” He sounded gloriously bored. Sniggers, chuckles, and the deep rumble—hegghhh hegghhh heggghhhh—of somebody’s belly laugh. “One a you guys wanna give the man a tip?”

A few more low, restrained hegghhh hegghhh heggghhhhs, but nobody said a word, and nobody reached into his pocket, either. Adam was acutely conscious of a roomful of black faces, all turned toward him.

And one white face: Jojo’s. Adam opened his eyes wide, imploringly, and fixed them upon Jojo. Jojo! You know these guys—don’t let them do this to me!

Jojo stood there like a building. Finally he screwed his lips up to one side, shrugged his shoulders, and rolled his head in the direction of Curtis Jones, as if to say, “Hey, it’s his party.”

The others were already tired of the spectacle of the whining delivery boy. Conversation resumed, and C. C. Good Jookin’s “Elliptical Rider” sank into the general hubbub. Jojo turned back to Charles Bousquet as if his tutor had never existed. Out in the middle of the room, silhouetted against the garish rectangle of the big television screen, some black guy was nudging the great hulk of Treyshawn Diggs. Adam couldn’t see their faces very well, but he was sure they were having themselves a good laugh at his expense: the little white boy, his face contorted into a wretched plea, standing there atremble, begging a room full of black males for his tip…

Aghast at his own abasement, Adam slunk out through the door. Why even bother slamming it? It would only make his humiliation complete, if by any remote chance it wasn’t already. They—and Jojo—had treated him like the lowest form of servant and, worse, as the lowest form of male, a bitch who didn’t dare do anything more than bleat for his tip.

As he shitkicked his way along the hallway’s steel-wool–colored carpet toward the elevator, his chin hooked down over his clavicle, Adam tried to console himself. After all, what could he have possibly done about it? He had been on alien terrain in a room full of young males of a different race, half of them giant pumped-up trained athletes. Was he supposed to loathe himself for not confronting the alpha-male challenge in Curtis Jones’s eyes and fighting him? But that hadn’t been his only choice, had it. He could have told him off. He could have told them all off. He could have informed them of what vulgar, illiterate, childish, ego-inflated, brain-stunted, reverse-racist bastards they actually were. Except for Jojo, of course—and you’re worse, you towering buzz-cut blockhead! You’re so terrified of looking uncool in front of the other players, you’re afraid to show even the most minimal common courtesy to someone who just rescued you from disaster, you nine-hundred-SAT, ninety-IQ, PlayStation 3 cretin! You didn’t even want to be caught knowing me, you craven snob!

But he hadn’t uttered a word of all that, had he. He had been the craven one. He had just stood there pleading for a tip, too much of a coward to do anything else. He could rationalize it all he wanted, but there was no getting around the simple fact of the matter. He had caved in at the first sign of male challenge.

He had almost reached the elevator when the belly laughs began in earnest. They came rolling out from behind the door of Jones 3A. The bastards had given him a few moments’ grace, and now they were letting it all out. Hegghhh heggghhh heggggghhhhh!…His public unmanning was now complete.

Adam left the building and looked this way and that in the morbid darkness without actually taking in anything he saw. He got back into the Bitsosushi and just sat there, even though he had seven more orders to deliver, seven more orders that would soon grow cold.

All at once something stirred within him. It was Frankie Horowitz’s His Majesty the Child coming out of his coma.

The Child blinked, stretched, and gulped some fresh air. As Adam sat there in an exhausted eight-year-old small-size hatchback, Frankie’s prince’s crown popped up magically on his curly head.

Destiny’s Adam Gellin. In that very moment, he made himself a promise, the sweetest promise the human beast can make to himself: vengeance is mine, and I shall be repaid.