I Am Charlotte Simmons

29. Stand Up Straight for Gay Day

Adam now saw his apartment, his lopsided little slot, as a sanatorium for a single patient, the girl he loved…the love of his life. He wanted to proclaim his love! He literally wished he could go up on a promontory with Charlotte at his side and put one arm around her and lift the other to the heavens, saying: “Behold! Gaze upon her ineffable beauty! This is the girl I love! She…is my very life!” But who was there to proclaim it to? He knew the Mutants better than anyone else, but to proclaim to this intellectual cabal, “I’m in love!”—even the thought of all the stupid laughter and sidewise glances was more than he could bear.

At the same time, he had a deep worry, which he imagined was lodged in some posterior lobe of his brain. Jojo’s plagiarism case was unresolved. Nothing seemed to be happening. The case was dormant, to all outward appearances. But he had lied to the judicial officer…on the advice of Buster Roth, who was not his friend. He could be thrown out of Dupont! He couldn’t imagine it. It was as unreal as the thought of death. Yet there it was! He had dug the grave himself! This unimaginable thing…could happen!

Every possible moment he spent with Charlotte. He slept next to her in his little twin bed, elated by her dependence on him—she could get no sleep at all unless he held her for a couple of hours or more—and frustrated by the fact that sleeping next to her was a different preposition from sleeping with her. “Different preposition” was the very word that formed in his thoughts. “Witty,” he said to himself, without the faintest tinge of amusement.

In any case, he couldn’t spend every moment with her. This was final exam week for the first semester, and he had to ace these exams in order to be in the running for a Rhodes scholarship. At the same time he had sworn to himself to revive “The Night of the Skull Fuck”…for the Wave in some way that would make Hoyt Thorpe realize: Vengeance is ours, saith Charlotte Simmons and Adam Gellin, and we shall be paid. On top of that, a mundane but time-consuming matter: four hours of pizza deliveries every night. He was paid by the hour for tutoring athletes. But the Athletic Department had stopped giving him assignments. He, Adam Gellin, Millennial Mutant and prince, Prince of Love in a fairy tale, had to hop in that decrepit Bitsosushi and hustle PowerPizza pies.

Charlotte had taken to lying listlessly in bed during the day. If she got up, she never wore anything but Adam’s synthetic School of Hudson Bay lumberjack shirt. Obviously, she had no intention at all of leaving the apartment. One of Adam’s most urgent duties was making sure she did pull herself together, at least long enough to get dressed—in the same clothes she arrived in—and go take her exams. She protested that she couldn’t take them, because she hadn’t been able to study. Adam assured her she was a genius, that she had worked so hard and brilliantly during the first half of the semester, the momentum she already had would be enough. The past was the past, it was time to put it behind her and move forward into the billion-volt future that awaited her and her unparalleled life of the mind, and so forth and so on—dreadful, dutiful mouthfuls of clichés, in short, but he could tell that his flattery and optimism were gradually beginning to work.

Inwardly, sympathy, money, and charity were battling it out with an incessantly smoldering, smoking, smitten lust for virginiticide at the hands of and the mouth, breasts, and loins of his beloved. One moment charity would be telling him he should take her to the Health Center and put her in professional hands for treatment of depression. This girl wasn’t merely unhappy, he realized after the first day, she was depressed. But lust rebutted: that would really finish her off…sinking into the theory-quacking innards of the twenty-first-century versions of the madhouse—being perhaps declared “clinically” depressed and sent home—he couldn’t let that happen. What she needed was love, caring attention, encouragement, praise, visions of a radiant future…and order. He needed to establish a positive routine for her. Yes!—you must take your exams. Yes!—you must have a neat appearance whether you leave the apartment or not. And to himself: Yes!—this miserable poverty-rotted slot I live in must have the appearance of order.

The first day Charlotte went out, quaking, for an exam—neuroscience—Adam inserted the eyes of a movie drill sergeant into his head and saw this place for what it was: an inexcusable rat’s nest. And the bathroom…in a common hall…since all four apartments, meaning four boys who were little more than nodding acquaintances, used it, nobody ever found it worth his while to keep it clean. The filth, the foul odors, the grime in the crack where the tile floor met the tub, which had corroded green copper stains stretching out a foot or more from the drain, the shaved beard stubble hair accumulating in a sludge in the bottom of the basin, the virulent ring of sludge near the top of the basin, the grit on the tiles, which were the old-fashioned tiny octagonal kind, cracked here and there, the black mold that was spreading over the shower curtain, which was an ancient sheet of plastic the color of intravenous feeding tubing that drooped where three curtain-rod rings were missing, the paint blistering and peeling on the ceiling thanks to lack of ventilation—Adam had never seen all this with real eyes, Charlotte’s eyes, before. Bringing order to this disgrace became a mission. He found a snow shovel, an old gray wood-backed scrub brush and a one-fourth-full bottle of ammonia in the cellar. He scraped the pox-erupted paint off the ceiling…got down on all fours and scrubbed the mold and paint poxchips off the shower curtain, the scum from the basin, the corroded copper stains and poxchips out of the tub and—on hands and knees—the tile floor, nearly asphyxiating himself with the ammonia…picked up all stray garments and other detritus in his slot…made the bed with hospital corners the way his mother did…swept up the underbrush of dust balls, hair balls, mashed Band-Aids, ATM receipts, dead Snapple bottles of diluted fruit juice concoctions, black plastic caps with pocket clips from thrown-away throwaway ballpoint pens, junk-mail flyers, and magazine insert cards. It took him more than three hours.

No sooner had he put all random objects, his sneakers, the heaps of paper on his desk, his glasses cases, his medicine kit, and his Community Coffee mug, which he had to carry back and forth to the bathroom, into neat rows and piles, than Charlotte returned from the neuroscience examination. She entered the slot with a miserable look on her face. Adam waited for it to brighten when she noticed the new shining order of the place. He smiled, opened his arms wide in a comically exaggerated fashion, and said:

“Welcome to the new, brighter life chez Gellin!”

Charlotte rushed into his arms, threw her arms about his waist, lay her head on his chest, and burst into heartrending tears.

“Oh, Adam, I butchered it, I butchered it, I buh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh….” The convulsions came so fast, she couldn’t even complete the word.

“I seriously doubt—”

“I didn’t halfway study enough! It was so horrible! Now everyone’s going to give up on me! I’ve let everybody dow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-own…” She gulped for breath. “Mr. Starling, Miss Pennington…everyboh-

ah-everyboh-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ody…”

Relentless tears. Adam wondered who Miss Pennington was. “Come on! Pull yourself together! Everybody feels that way after a tough exam! I can guarantee you’ve done better than you think you have.”

“Ohgod, it was bad enough as it was! Mr. Starling won’t even look my way anymore! He thinks I’ve turned into he doesn’t know wha-uh-uh-uh-uh-uht…”

“Stop it! Stop it!” Adam barked it out like an order, surprising even himself. “I won’t have it!”

Charlotte abruptly stopped crying and stared up at Adam with her mouth slightly open and her tearful eyes shining…with respect bordering oddly on pleasure, as women sometimes do when a man claims the high ground and rebukes them.

The team pulled up to the CircumGlobal Lexington in a brand-new Mercedes SuperLuxe charter bus, white with stylized blue speed lines on the sides. Jojo was sitting halfway back, next to Mike. The seats were like first-class seats on a Boeing 767. The windows were tinted dark as sunglasses, so that at first he couldn’t make out anything. But then he saw them. Like the other players, he never consciously admitted to himself how satisfying the sheer presence of the gawkers and the groupies was. Quite a crowd outside the entrance to the hotel…He was surprised that Lexington, which he had always thought of as a Kentucky college town, was big and big-time enough for a CircumGlobal…A lot of well-to-do white Necktie types he was looking at…probably waiting for cabs to go out to dinner or whatever, and…there they were, six, eight, maybe ten groupies…white. The groupies were always white, although at least 85 percent of the stars of big-time college basketball were black. Strange business, the groupies.

Jojo rose with alacrity, or rose insofar as a man six-foot-ten could rise up in a bus. No matter what his troubles were, no matter if a freshman hot dog had taken his starting position, no matter if an athlete-hating history professor had sworn to have him expelled from Dupont, no matter what—the ten minutes it took them to enter some grand hotel and stand around the lobby waiting for the student managers to sort out their luggage for them and check them in at the desk were ten minutes of Heaven on Earth. He knew damned well that every member of the team, including the swimmies, got the same rush, even though nobody, including him, was ever going to be fool enough to say so out loud. For those ten minutes, they were giants be-striding the earth.

The moment they, the players, emerged from the bus, descending the steps, ducking way down to avoid hitting their heads on the doorframe—

The onlookers held their breaths, lest these giants crack their skulls. They let out their breaths as the giants cleared the door and stood up straight, like gigantic jackknives unfolding.

The groupies pranced forward, pretty white girls whose faces, had they chosen to leave them unpainted, could have been those of the sweetest, most dedicated day-care-center volunteers. As it was, their eyes shone from way down in Night Life black occipital craters. Their eyelids bore cantilevered store-bought lashes, their lips gleamed with an astonishing range of hues, the waists of their jeans were below the tops of their hip joints, and the jeans were so tight, their belly buttons so conspicuously pierced with silver rings from which hung a short string or two of pearls…that they looked like hookers. They obviously looked that way to the adult hotel guests, who had never seen such a troupe in their lives. But they weren’t. They were volunteers. They were offering their bodies for nothing more than the honor of having these famous giants use the fissures in their loins and faces howsoever they chose. They were like the temple harlots in Buddhism—or was it Hinduism—or what the hell was it? The name Left-handed Shakti blipped through Jojo’s brain…The course had been called The History of Religion in Asia and Africa, but all Jojo could remember were the temple harlots. The idea had made him feel perversely concupiscent at the time. But in his current mood Jojo felt sorry for the groupies. Whose little girls were they? Did their parents have so much as the faintest knowledge of all this? Jojo had had enough of these volunteer hardwood harlots. Such an empty, decadent pleasure, devoid of any emotion higher than an animal’s, unless you counted smug satisfaction as an emotion.

“Treyshawn!” piped up one of the groupies, a little blonde whose breasts looked like a pair of small round gym balls that could be removed or reattached at a moment’s notice.

“Hey, sugar,” said Treyshawn out the side of his mouth, in a gloriously bored fashion.

“Hi, Jojo! Remember me?” Jojo took a look out the corner of his eye. Not bad, actually. A tall white girl, brunette, delicate features, great legs revealed by a skirt hiked all the way up to…there. Jojo not only didn’t “remember” but also was not going to lower himself by responding. On the other hand, he was the second one to be solicited, preceded only by Treyshawn. So they hadn’t forgotten him!—despite the fact that he never started on the road anymore. He was just beginning to savor that little boost in status when—

“Vernon!”

“Vernon!”

Two of them, two juicy little groupies crying out for…the man who had cost him his starting position on the team of the national champions.

As the boys went through the revolving doors and into the lobby of the CircumGlobal Lexington, it started all over again, the awe, the ahhhs, the unabashed gawking. They towered above the hooples in the hotel lobby. They were like an entirely new and advanced order of humanity. Buster Roth required his boys to wear jackets and ties on road trips. The white players—Mike, the swimmies, and himself—all wore navy blazers with khaki pants, except for one of the swimmies, who wore a pair of gray flannels. But the black players were into styling, voguing. Styling and voguing this year meant three- and four-button single-breasted suits. Treyshawn wore a five-button, custom-made. The top button buttoned way up high. The bottom button seemed to be about six feet lower. The suit made Treyshawn look like a chimney. Coach knew what he was doing. When the team came walking into a blingy hotel lobby like the CircumGlobal’s, they weren’t mere giants. They were ready to…rule. That much you could read in the gawking faces of all the swells staying at the hotel.

Jojo had exulted in that feeling many times. Tonight, however, too many problems were converging at once. He was no longer a starter. The humiliation of it right now was bad enough. But what about the long-term meaning, his dream—no, more than his dream…his assumption, the basic assumption of his life, that he would play…in the League…the League! The elevation that would give his whole life meaning! It was merely that, a baseless assumption. There was still a chance of his changing all that. But he wasn’t going to change anything if he got thrown out of Dupont. It had taken a long time for the truth to sink in concerning this history teacher who was bringing him up on a charge of plagiarism, Mr. Jerome Quat. He had never for a moment allowed for the possibility that Coach couldn’t take care of the situation. Why, Coach was a Dupont legend; but it now developed that not even Coach plus the president of the university could budge this prick Quat. The fucker knew very well Jojo Johanssen could have never written a paper like that, and sooner or later he would find a way to prove it. Eventually, if it dragged on long enough, that wuss Adam—was it Tellin?—or Kellin—what the fuck was his name?—whatever it was, he’d cave. The guy wasn’t built for hanging tough under pressure. No, Go go Jojo was fucked. The mildest penalty would be suspension for one semester—the one in which most of the basketball season and the NCAA tournament, the March Madness, occurred.

Or he could get an F in the Age of Socrates. He was in way over his head, just as Coach said he would be. He had gotten wrapped up in Socrates and Plato…Socrates’s equation of knowledge and virtue, his “universal definitions” as distinct from Plato’s Ideas, but he wasn’t used to all the reading, the way the real students were, or doing the papers, which involved insights and analogies and a lot of other things he’d never had any practice in, or using big words, “the dialectic,” “eudaemonological ethics,” “intellectualist and over-intellectualist attitudes.” When he had the chance, he’d be in front of his computer. Mike would want to play Grand Theft Auto or Stunt Biker, or NBA Streetballers, but Jojo would be there at midnight online, looking up words. An F in the Age of Socrates would have the same consequence: he would be banned from athletics for a semester.

There must have been at best a half-dozen groupies in the lobby, even though the CircumGlobal wasn’t the sort of place that was going to let them hang around volunteering their perfect pink lamb chops for long. Coach had ordered everybody to ignore the girls. Even smiling at them created a trashy impression, and he wasn’t going to stand for them besmirching the program’s reputation. Yeah, yeah. Jojo could see the boys checking the cutie-pies out with sidewise glances and then sniggering to one another and trying to foresee the future, i.e., life after bed checks.

Mike and Jojo shared a big room with a pair of queen-size beds. Jojo couldn’t have isolated the details for you himself, but he could tell…this was a luxury hotel. A pair of great fluffy white terry-cloth bathrobes in the closet with the CircumGlobal family (dating back to 1996) crest embroidered on the breast pockets…likewise upon the matching bath sandals…

Mike didn’t waste a minute. He immediately went to the inevitable School of Mahogany armoire, housing the television set, picked up the remote, settled back into an easy chair, and turned on one of the hotel’s own vast in-house selection of Pay-per-View hard-core pornographic movies. Jojo, on the other hand, retrieved two books and a spiral notebook from his Dupont duffel bag and headed straight for the desk, where the lamp had a bulb brighter than forty watts, this being one of the not immediately visible amenities of a luxury hotel, and began poring over Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which contained a lot about Socrates.

From the television set came the usual whinnying and unnghhhs, those two sounds being the outer limits of acting ability in the adult movie genre. Jojo glanced over. From his angle all he could see was a linguini of shanks, flanks, paunches, haunches, swollen nodes, pendulous melons, and stiffened giblets writhing with spastic jerks and spurts on a hotel bed.

“How the fuck can you sit there watching that shit, Mike?”

“That’s not the question,” said Mike. “The question is, how can you sit there reading that…whatever the fuck you’re reading?”

“Well…I got to study, man. I got the finals in this”—he paused, not wanting to say the name Socrates—“this history of philosophy course I’m taking.”

“Whoa-ho!” said Mike, lifting his hands and contorting his face in a mock show of surprise. “I forgot! I’m now rooming with—”

“You say the name Socrates, dude, and I’m gonna cut your fucking nuts off for you.”

“Hey, anything but that, Soc—I mean, old roomie of mine. There’s some fine, fine jiner waiting for us down there after bed check.”

Jojo emitted a philosophical sigh. “You know, I was wondering when we came into the hotel. Why do groupies do what they do? Why do they come fuck a bunch of basketball players they don’t know and will never see again? I don’t get it. It’s not as if they’re busted or something. Some of them are really pretty. They don’t look like sluts. Well, they sort of look like sluts. But I still don’t get it.”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t think about it. It seems to make them happy. Why look a gift horse in the mouth, is what I say.”

There was something curious about what Mike had just said. Jojo couldn’t put his finger on it. Provided with a printed transcript, he probably would have, eventually. Sooner or later it would have dawned on him that his roommate had spoken three consecutive sentences without using the words fuck or shit or any of their conjugative or compound variations.

Bed check was usually just before midnight, and, sure enough, at 11:55 the telephone rang and Jojo answered the one on the desk. The assistant coaches, Skyhook Frye and Marty Smalls, made the calls.

“Hey, you’re getting good, Sky,” said Jojo. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“We got a rough game tomorrow, Jojo,” said the voice of Skyhook Frye. “So don’t you guys fuck with me. Okay? Now, where’s Mike? He better be fucking there. Or not fucking there, as the case may be.”

Jojo handed the phone to Mike.

Mike listened to Skyhook, all the while giving Jojo the upward roll of the eyeballs that says, “Tedious motherfucker, ain’t he.”

“Me?” said Mike. “I’m in bed. You woke me up…Would I shit you, Sky?…Okay, peace.”

Mike hung up and said to Jojo, “Whatta we do—wait—fifteen minutes or what?”

“I’m not going out. I got too much homework.”

“Are you fucking serious?”

“Yeah, I’m serious! I can’t fuck around. I’ve got an exam coming up in this…Age of Socrates course.”

“What the fuck is it with you and—”

Jojo cut him off. “Watch it! It’s like I told you, I can say ‘Socrates’ but you can’t. It’s bad enough hearing it from fucking Coach.”

“Even with that hottie”—Mike motioned toward the lobby—“waiting for you?”

“What hottie?”

“ ‘What hottie’…the one who’s all legs and no dress. She practically lay down on the floor and spread ’em as soon as we got off the bus…I saw you checking her out…‘What hottie’…”

The recollection stirred Jojo. He couldn’t help it. He fantasized her standing before him…those fabulous long legs…that little hint of a skirt barely covering her hip sockets…and she has on nothing underneath…and she has shaved her pubic hair…Get ouddda here! He forced the tumescent-making thoughts out of his mind.

“Oh, that girl,” he said. He pulled a face, as if to say she was just another groupie, and so what was the big deal? “I gotta pass this fucking course, is what’s on my mind right now. All I got to do is get an F, and I’m truly fucked.”

Mike tried this way and that way to coax him out of his righteous abstinence from life after bed check, but Jojo would not be moved.

“Well, that’s okay,” Mike said finally, “…if you wanna be like that…But don’t give me a hard time if some Dupont…fan…happens to insist on joining me when I get back to the room.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Jojo. He made a point of turning to the books he had on the desk before he had completed uttering the first yeah.

Once Mike had gone, Jojo began to enjoy the bracing virtue of self-denial. This was in fact the perfect time to focus upon Aristotle’s Metaphysics and get that out of the way. He could just imagine Mike and probably André and Curtis and Treyshawn, maybe Charles, heading off to some bar with their little cum dumpsters and having the same birdbrain conversations they had in Chicago and Dallas and Miami…just long enough to chat them up a little before scrogging…all so sad and weary and shallow…for, as Socrates himself put it, “If a man debauches himself, believing this will bring him happiness, then he errs from ignorance, not knowing what true happiness is.”

Jojo began taking notes. He had hardly ever done that before; but this course, the Age of Socrates, and this teacher, Mr. Margolies, had actually gotten to him. “Concepts”…it was all about “concepts” and “conceptual thinking.”…The age of Socrates was the age of the first systematic thought. By the very way they thought, the Greeks changed the world. Socrates believed in Zeus. Whether or not he believed in the others, too—Hera, Apollo, Aphrodite, and…and…Jojo never could remember all of them—there was no record anyway. But Socrates believed in Zeus…Jojo wondered if people used to get down on their knees and pray to Zeus or hold hands around the dinner table and thank Zeus for the meal, the way his great-aunt Debbie did…but whatever. Socrates was a fiend for logic, all the “inductive reasonings” and “ethical syllogisms”…Jojo had Aristotle’s Metaphysics in front of him, and Aristotle was saying, “Socrates did not make the universals or the definitions exist apart; Plato, however, gave them separate existence, and this was the kind of thing they called Ideas.”…Jojo was sure that would be on the exam, and so he decided to read that section over again…“Socrates did not make the universals or the…”

Jojo had a picture of Socrates and his students in his mind, although he really didn’t know where he got it from…They’re all sitting around in togas…Socrates has long white hair and a long white beard and a white toga, and his students all have laurel wreaths around their heads…and the togas…He wondered how they carried anything in the togas. They were just sheets, as nearly as he could tell. But maybe they didn’t have so much…stuff…to carry…no car keys, cell phones, ballpoint pens, credit cards…Yeah, but what about money? They must have had to have money. Or maybe they didn’t, at least not every day. What the hell was there to buy? They didn’t have CDs or cars to buy gas for or Gatorade and Powerbars and all that…Then he wondered about what you did with your toga when you had to go to the bathroom…He could imagine all kinds of difficult situations…For that matter, if the students wore laurel wreaths every day, where did they get them from? Who made them? Women, he reckoned, but what women? Socrates didn’t say much about women…Who did the dishes? Or the laundry? Maybe they had slaves, or was that just the Romans? Well, he didn’t have time to go off on all these tangents. Back to the Metaphysics…This shit was hard to read…What’d he mean, “As man’s body is composed of materials gathered from the material world, so man’s reason is part of the universal Reason or Mind of the world”? It gave Jojo great satisfaction to figure this stuff out. If only he had started taking all this stuff seriously when he was a kid…or even when he was in high school. “Socrates overlooked the irrational parts of the soul,” Aristotle was saying, “and did not take sufficient notice of the fact of the weakness of man, which leads him to do what he knows to be wrong.” Jojo thought that over. Socrates just got through saying man’s reason is what it’s all about, not false happiness like going around fucking groupies, and all of a sudden here’s Aristotle saying moral weakness, such as fucking groupies, is what it’s all about, too. He wondered if Aristotle and Plato and Socrates had groupies. Just how well known were they? When they went away and checked into—but they probably didn’t even have hotels then, or not this kind, where—

There was a rap on the door, which was evidently metal, even though it was painted like wood.

“Who is it?” yelled Jojo.

“House keeper,”…accenting the first syllable and sort of singing the whole word, the way they did in hotels.

With a sigh, ticked off at being interrupted, Jojo went to the door and opened it.

“Jojo? I’m Marilyn.” Fair young face, lots of eye makeup—

—long legs, fabulous legs, looking even longer, since her foot was tilted up at a forty-five degree angle upon a pair of sandals with the most negligible of little slip-on straps and heels that must have been close to four inches high. They rose and rose, those fabulous legs, up to the most negligible little skirt in the world—it was her, all right.

Demurely: “Can I come in?’

“Oh…sure, sure,” said Jojo, ever the courteous giant. As he held the door open for her, he started trying to figure out how to tell her she couldn’t stay. How did she even know what room he was in?

She came in and stood right in front of him as he let go of the door, which closed by itself.

“Wow!” she said with big eyes and a lovely girlish smile. “You look tall on TV…but you’re really tall!”

Jojo was confused. She was one of those people you can just tell right away are nice and well-mannered.

“How did you know what room I was in?”

“Your teammates told me.” She continued to smile in the nicest, sunniest fashion. “They said you’ve been studying very hard and feeling lonesome, and you needed a break…and here I am.”

Jojo shook his head. “Oh, those—” He stared at the floor and shook his head some more. Then he lifted his head, and she hadn’t moved. Her face was no more than eighteen inches from his, and most of that was due to his being a foot taller than she was. “Look—Marilyn—it’s Marilyn, right?”

She nodded yes with the same simple, adoring look as before.

“You’re nice to come give me a break and all, but I got to study. Don’t listen to my—” He caught himself as he was just about to say “fucking” but caught himself. “—teammates, especially the guy—the white guy. Mike.”

Her expression never changed: cheery, lovely, straightforward, utterly non-ho’-like. “Well…could I just watch?”

“Watch? Whaddya mean, could you watch?”

“Watch you study.”

He searched her face for irony—and found none. She was different from most groupies. She didn’t gush with all the likes and seriouslys. She didn’t flirt with her eyes.

“Why would you want to watch me study?”

She looked up at him in the same open, guileless way, still smiling. But now her smile had a slight cant to it, as if to tell him he still didn’t understand, did he.

“I won’t stay long,” she said.

No sooner had the word long left her lips than—bango!—her hand cupped his crotch. She was still looking straight into his eyes with the same smile, which kept saying, “Oh, I wish you understood.” Now she had unzipped his khakis and put her hand inside.

Jojo shook his head…but without conviction. Now she had her hand inside the fly of his boxer shorts, and Jojo involuntarily closed his eyes and in an odd, trancelike way began saying, “Oh shiiiiit…oh shiiiiit…”

By the time they reached the bed, she had somehow managed to un-buckle his belt and undo the top button of his khakis. Like many a man before him, his brain had dropped like a stone into his groin.

He was barely cognizant of the next few hours…

Rising up toward an opening from out of some sort of dark shaft into a blinding light…For an instant he had absolutely no idea where he was. From deep darkness into excruciating light, it hurt his eyes, was all he knew, that and the odor of spilled beer.

In the next instant Mike’s voice: “Aw, shit, roomie, didn’t mean to—” He emitted a high-pitched whistle, using his tongue and upper teeth. “So that’s what your friend Soc—uh, your Greek friend looks like. Not bad. Go go, Jojo. If I’d known the Age of Soc, uh, uh, was like that, that’s who I’d be studying, too.”

Groggily, Jojo propped himself on one elbow. Mike and some sort of blond bimbo were standing about five feet inside the door staring at him—at them!—him and Whatshername? Marilyn? Whatshername was lying face-down, stark-naked, the inside of his right thigh lay athwart her bare bottom, and his foot was hooked beneath her thigh. They had fallen asleep! Jojo couldn’t think of what to say. He lay there sprawled and speechless, still deep in the hypnotic state. He tried to figure out which was worse, lying there like he was or removing his thigh from the girl’s naked bottom, giving Mike’s groupie an eyeful of his genitals.

“Jojo,” said Mike, “I want you to meet Samantha.”

Jojo just stared. The girl’s blond hair was so short but so curly, it reminded Jojo of ivy grown amok. She had on a lacy top, resembling a peignoir, with jeans, at the moment a fashionable teenage clash of chords deemed provocative.

“Samantha, say hello to Jojo.”

“Hi, Jojo,” the girl said.

“And Marilyn,” said Mike.

“Hi, Marilyn,” the blond groupie said, even though the naked girl in the bed looked dead to the world.

“It’s ‘Marilyn,’ right, roomie?” said Mike, with a mocking smile. “She looks wiped out.”

Jojo said nothing. He was staring groggily at Mike’s blond groupie. She was smiling at him flirtatiously—flirtatiously—and so broadly, it brought out the dimples in her cheeks and forced her eyes into squints. She had on such long, mascara-laden false eyelashes, they looked like rows of charred match-sticks. She wanted to flirt?—and him stark-naked with one leg wrapped around a stark-naked girl?

Now the girl, Marilyn, was beginning to stir. She rolled toward Jojo, so that his leg enclosed yet more of her body. She lifted her head, puzzled, then spotted Mike and his groupie. She turned back toward Jojo and gave him a kiss on the lips, then said, “I have to go tinkle.”

With that, she got up and sauntered stark-naked to the bathroom, as if this were the most natural social situation in the world.

Mike stared at her approvingly. “Whattaya been studying, Jojo, Helen of Troy?”

Jojo sat up on the bed, conscious of the fact that this laid his flaccid but still-swollen penis out flat on the undersheet, then retrieved the covers, which were bunched up at the foot of the bed, and got a glimpse of his and Whatshername’s clothes abandoned all over the floor in the first rush of lust.

“He’s really big!” Mike’s groupie whispered to Mike, nodding at Jojo.

“Yeah, he’s big in many places,” Mike said in a full voice obviously aimed more at Jojo than at the groupie. “But that don’t mean he’s big every place.”

Jojo didn’t so much as look at them. He just reached down, pulled the covers up, got under them, and rolled over on his side, turning his back on Mike and the groupie.

Pretty soon Whatshername Marilyn returned from the bathroom. For some reason she had a towel around her waist. It covered her up down to the knees. But she sauntered toward Jojo with her shoulders back and her breasts rampant, then abandoned the towel upon the floor along with everything else and climbed into bed. He hadn’t really taken it in before, but she had shaved her pubic hair, too. How did the word get around?

Mike finally shut out the lights. Jojo could hear him and his Whatshername Samantha undressing and getting into bed amid a lot of giggling and teasing and Oh-no-you-don’ts. The next thing he knew, Whatshername Marilyn’s hand was between his legs.

She whispered in his ear, “Hmmm…I think he’s awake, too.” The sensation of her breath blowing across the stand of little hairs in his ear aroused him.

“Oh shiitt…oh shiitt…” Since he had already been about as totally embarrassed as you could be, there was no longer anything left to act discreet about, much less proper, was there…

The last thing he remembered, before failing asleep again, was himself scrogging his groupie with complete moral abandon—“moral” was the unwelcome word that crashed the party in his central nervous system—and listening to the unnghhhs, Yesyesyesses, notyetnotyetnotyets (the groupie), and Yeahbabyyeahbabyyeahbabies from the next bed. In the nearly but not altogether total darkness he could make out Mike’s groupie straddling his hips and bouncing up and down.

It made Jojo think of a rodeo. All she needed was a cowboy hat to wave in the triumph as she scored her animal.

Later on—he couldn’t have said when—he woke up again. This time it was dark, and Mike was saying in full voice, “Jojo! Jojo! Yo! Jojo!”

“Uhhhht?” Jojo managed to say, meaning “What.”

“Wanna swap?”

“No.”

“If you change your mind, let me know. You’ll love Samantha, I’m telling you. Say hello to Jojo, Samantha.”

“Hi, Jojo,” the groupie said.

“See?” said Mike. “Nice girl.”

Even in his groggy state, Jojo was appalled. By the light that came in under the door, he could see Mike and his groupie head to the bathroom.

He rolled toward Marilyn and embraced her, this time with pity and guilt and an urge to…save her. Something about her made him think she really was a nice girl.

She misinterpreted Jojo’s intentions. She put her hand between his legs again.

This time he was not aroused. Embracing her more tightly than ever, he whispered into her ear, “I can tell you’re a nice girl. Why do you do this?”

“Do what?” she whispered.

“Well—” He didn’t know how to put it…“Wh…be so nice and obliging to somebody like me. Like…make yourself available and everything. You don’t even know me, and that girl—she don’t know Mike.”

“You’re serious?” She said it in such a way that obviously he was either making a little joke or was a little dense.

“Uh…yeah. Why?”

“You really don’t understand?”

“No.”

“You’re a star.” Most obvious thing in the world.

“And therefore?”

“Every girl wants to…fuck…a star.” She said it in the same sweet, sincere voice she said everything else. “Any girl who says she doesn’t is lying. Any girl.”

Try as he might, Jojo could not think of a cogent reply.

A moment later she added, “And every girl.”

In the morning—she was gone. Jojo loathed himself.

A pair of speakers boomed out over the length and breadth of the Great Yard.

“Think about it!…you know?…Think about it…Freedom of expression extends only to conventional expression? Is that the message the university is sending but doesn’t have the guts to come right out and say? Or should I say straight out?”

Got a small ripple of laughter from the throng with that one. “How come straight writers can write about straight intercourse from the lubricant secretions of the vaginal ducts—which they call ‘juicy’—that’s what they call it, ‘juicy’—and then they bury their faces in this juicy pie, and that’s supposed to be romantic passion—”

Got a big laugh with that one, did Randy. Namby Pamby Randy Grossman was at the podium up on a jerry-built dais on the plaza at the entrance to the Library Tower, the same place presidents and dignitaries spoke at commencements and convocations. A crowd of what?—four hundred?—five hundred?—students wearing blue jeans stood upon the grass facing Randy. On Stand Up Straight for Gay Day every student was supposed to wear blue jeans to show support for gay rights. Adam had his blue jeans on. Not only that, he stood on the ground in front of the dais, a good ten feet below the level of the microphone, along with nine other students supporting lengths of raw pine lumber bearing placards. His read, FREE SPEECH IS QUEER, TOO! In other words, he had become one of Randy Grossman’s spear carriers. He wondered if it would look odd if he held the placard over his face.

“But just let us write on one of Dupont’s sacred walkways in chalk about Eskimo pie juice, in which—if you haven’t tried it, don’t trash it—a guy puts an ice cube in his mouth and then your cock and massages your prostate with two fingers, and you’re telling me that’s weirder than the straight guy with his face in the pie lapping up bodily fluids plus every bacterium and virus known to STD plus the odd streak of urine?”

Oh, Randy got whoops, screams, yodels of laughter with that one—and Adam, in his heart of hearts, wanted to drop through a crack in the Library Plaza and disappear. Morally, politically, he felt not only duty-bound and righteous in what he was now doing, but courageous as well, a bit noble, if the truth were known. The Gay and Lesbian Fist, and specifically Randy, had challenged all progressives on campus, students, faculty, administrators, employees, all and whomever, to join the Stand Up Straight for Gay Day demonstration, so that no longer could anyone dismiss it as Oh them again. One progressive cause was everybody’s progressive cause. Otherwise, they would never build up the momentum they needed. Randy had caught him and Edgar in the Wave office and left them no room to wiggle out of it. So here he was, on the plaza in front of the Library Tower, the most prominent spot in the Great Yard—there were TV crews—he could see the cameras, and their red lights, showing that the camera was on, were aimed right at him—or at least they couldn’t miss him.

“…call it graffiti if you want to. That’s okay.” Puffed up by applause and laughter, Randy was booming out like Jesse Jackson or somebody.

“But graffiti can also be art, and art can be vandalized, as this university has vandalized one of the great calligraphic achievements in its history—”

Adam didn’t know Randy had it in him. But it didn’t really help that when he wanted to emphasize a point, he would throw up his hands…with his elbows pressed against his rib cage. Not that there was anything wrong with making effeminate gestures—gestures and walks and body language generally shouldn’t be categorized that way—but Randy made effeminate gestures, when you got right down to it, and none of the hundreds who had gathered here in the Great Yard could miss it. And nobody watching those videotapes they were making—which would be shown where?—to how many thousands?—millions?—on network television?—but they couldn’t broadcast references to fellatio and cunnilingus on TV, could they? Much less Camille’s placard—she was in this same lineup of spear carriers, down at the other end, with a placard aloft reading, FUCK A DUCK! FUCK A CUCUMBER! FUCK ANYTHING! FUCK ALL! The same sign company had produced all the placards, including hers, but she had no doubt composed this piece of polymorphous perversity herself. But those millions or however many would pick up on Randy’s effeminacy immediately—

—and what else would they pick up? Adam Gellin as one of the Gay and Lesbian Fist’s loyal fellatiotic troopers, FREE SPEECH IS QUEER, TOO!—in short, Adam Gellin, gay—in plain, noneuphemistic English: Adam Gellin, queer, lover of anal sex and Eskimo pies. He hated himself for even thinking such a thought, having any such faintness of heart. He could tell Edgar felt exactly the same way. Edgar was at one end of this lineup of spear carriers—or placard carriers—at the foot of the podium and the feet of Randy Grossman. Edgar’s placard read SUPPORT GAY MARRIAGE—NOW! From the moment he picked it up and shouldered it, he looked ashen. The two of them had the same problem, and he bet Edgar, like him, was ashamed to talk about it. Edgar, like him, had no obvious sexual involvement with women. He had often wondered if Edgar was gay, and Edgar had probably wondered the same thing about him. Maybe Edgar was gay. How was anyone to know? Why was everybody so obsessed with the labels? What was wrong with the neutral term “bachelor”? Why had he given in and allowed Randy to shame him into coming—so the entire campus could conclude he…was homosexual? Not that he hadn’t done exactly the right thing, what so many others who gave lip service to gay rights wouldn’t have dared do—and his thoughts began to race around in a circle again.

“—beloved ‘truth,’ as they probably think it is,” the amplified leader of the people was saying, “they don’t even know their truth! Made to order by them—for them! What kind of ‘truth’ is that?—the ultimate delusion! The self-scam! The self-scam! The so-called ‘trustees’—the ring that controls Dupont—they’re so retro, they won’t stop at conning you and me, they’re—”

Adam couldn’t believe it. Randy was getting louder and more shrill. Now he thought he was an orator. He was turning rhetorical…figurae repetitio, figurae sententiae…Namby Pamby Randy Grossman, leader of the people—

“Boooo…Boooo…” A chorus of boos was rising from somewhere in the rear ranks of the crowd. Adam, standing at ground level, couldn’t see.

But Randy, up on the dais, could. He started screaming. “Yo! You! Yeah, you! You repressed queens in the back there—”

“Boooo!……Boooo!…” The chorus was mounting in volume.

“—you in the short pants! That’s cute! It’s so butch! The Eskimo pie got you all turned on, didn’t it? You can’t wait to get back to the frat house and try it, can you!”

The blue jeaners in front loved that. They cut loose with the sort of cries and yodels of adrenaline-pumped people bloody ecstatic over grievous wounds inflicted upon the enemy.

But the boos of the agitators rose to the level of a roar, then broke into a chant. Adam couldn’t hear what they were saying at first, but then he got it.

“COCK—SUCKERS! COCK—SUCKERS! COCK—SUCKERS!”

It was so blatantly bigoted, he couldn’t believe it. Students had been expelled or suspended for an entire year for less, especially when it was antigay.

Then he could see them. Some were bulling their way through the blue jeaners as if they were about to storm the dais and seize the microphone. Others had come around the flanks of the crowd. Now he could understand Randy’s reference to “You in the short pants.” To a man, they wore shorts, mostly khaki shorts, the kind commonly worn with flip-flops in the spring and early fall, except that they were wearing construction boots—and it was freezing out here. At first Adam didn’t get it, the short pants, but in the next moment he did. “You want everybody to wear jeans to show support for gay rights? We’ll show you something—utter mockery—even if it means freezing our asses off!” There must have been dozens of them, and as they came to the fore, their chant overwhelmed the attempts of the crowd, taken by surprise, to shout them down.

“COCK—SUCKERS!” they chanted. “COCK—SUCKERS!”

But wait a minute—now that they were close, Adam realized it wasn’t COCK—SUCKERS at all. “GOD’S YUCCAS! GOD’S YUCCAS! GOD’S YUCCAS!”

Randy was shouting into the microphone: “Stuck on sucking cocks! You’re stuck on sucking cocks! You’re queerer than we are!” he boomed out over the Great Yard. “Admit it—”

“GOD’S YUCCAS! GOD’S YUCCAS! GOD’S YUCCAS!”

“—you wanna suck each—” Randy broke off his analysis in mid-sentence. All at once he realized they were shouting “GOD’S YUCCAS!”

Some of them were no more than fifteen feet away—and big. What did they intend to do?—Adam leaned forward and looked this way and that at his fellow placard holders. He didn’t want to be the first to break ranks—nor did he intend to be the last.

He glanced up. Randy was no longer at the podium. The little shit must have bolted, fled. Adam brought his placard—FREE SPEECH IS QUEER, TOO in front of his face. But what good would that do? None. So he peeked around the placard…In the immediate foreground—Hoyt Thorpe! He was the one leading the chant!

“GOD’S YUCCAS! GOD’S YUCCAS!”

Fear and hatred descended upon Adam’s amygdala with equal force. Tormentor of the woman he loved!—physical threat to his very hide in the here and now! He worked it out by concluding that if he now confronted the bastard physically, it would play right into the counterdemonstrators’ hands—and besides, Thorpe would recognize him—and the Night of the Skull Fuck story would be compromised, and—

What? A woman’s voice raged over the Great Yard: “FUCK YOU IN THE ASS, YOU CLOSET QUEENS! YOU FUCKING HIV VAMPS! WHAT’S THIS SHORT PANTS SHIT? YOU HOPE SOME CHILD MOLESTER WILL STICK A WEENIE UP YOUR HERSHEY HIGHWAY?”

Camille. Could only be. Adam didn’t even have to look up to be absolutely sure. But he did anyway. Her face was as contorted as he had ever seen it.

“WANT IT THAT BAD? WHYN’T YOU PULL YOUR LITTLE PANTIES DOWN AND LEAN OVER AND TAKE IT LIKE A MAN! YOU FUCKING SHIT-FACED MAGGOT MOTHERFUCKERS!”

Camille’s raw-throated rant breathed life into the blue jeaners. They broke into a roar of their own. Thorpe and the other frat boys—there was Vance Phipps, too!—their lips were still moving in the chant

:::::GOD’S YUCCAS:::::GOD’S YUCCAS:::::but they could no longer be heard. Hoyt Thorpe held up his hand, as if to restrain his boys and avoid a pitched battle, then slowly led them away and back toward the other end of the Great Yard. Nobody could hear them, but they kept chanting

:::::GOD’S YUCCAS:::::GOD’S YUCCAS::::: Hoyt Thorpe looked over his shoulder, smirking coolly at Camille as he retreated.

Others in the lineup of placard bearers were turning this way and that, talking to each other excitedly and casting glances in the direction of the departed frat boys. Adam took advantage of the moment to slip away. He strolled nonchalantly toward the library, letting the shaft of the placard lean against his shoulder at the angle of a rifle…looked about…laid the placard facedown on the plaza…and walked as casually as he could into the library, through the front entrance. Just what to do next…he had no idea. Stop standing out on the Great Yard holding a sign above his head saying QUEER, that was the main thing.

He stood in the lobby, just stood there, looking up at the ceiling and taking in its wonders one by one, as if he had never laid eyes on them before, the vaulted ceiling, all the ribs, the covert way spotlights, floodlights, and wall washers had been added…It was so calming…but why?…He thought of every possible reason except for the real one, which was that the existence of conspicuous consumption one has rightful access to—as a student had rightful access to the fabulous Dupont Memorial Library—creates a sense of well-being. But as one fear subsided, that gave another fear room to rise. Adam’s deep worry rushed to his forebrain. The plagiarism case. It wouldn’t disappear. He didn’t want to see Jojo again, and he dreaded seeing Buster Roth again. Getting out from under the corrupting pressure of “the program” had proved to be an enormous relief…except that he really wasn’t out from under it yet…Jojo and “his” paper on the psychology of George III…Just how did they think someone like Jojo was ever going to write a paper on the psychology of anything…unless somebody wrote it for him? A wave of paranoia…he was following a strategy laid out for him by Buster Roth. He could see Roth right now, as if he were right in front of him. What did Roth care about the fate of Jojo Johanssen’s ex-tutor? Nothing. Roth would impale Adam Gellin’s carcass on a spit if he thought it would benefit “the program”…He began to drive himself crazy…trying to imagine how Buster Roth could use his statement…that he hadn’t helped Jojo on the paper in any way…to improve Jojo’s chances in this case. He closed his eyes. So there he was, standing in the lobby with his eyes closed, torturing himself with his thoughts, listening to a thousand footsteps echoing off the stonework of the grand space—

“Adam, what are you doing? Why aren’t you out there?”

It was Randy Grossman. He had a frantic, accusing look on his face. Adam knew the more pertinent question was why wasn’t Randy out there, why he had disappeared—but Adam was too overwhelmed by guilt to even mount the argument. The truth was, he did want to get away from the demonstration. Randy and the Gay and Lesbian Fist were 100 percent right in their cause. Gays and lesbians deserved not merely to have equal rights, they deserved also to be welcomed, embraced, hugged to the bosom, as sisters and brothers, the moral and social equals—in many cases, the moral superiors—of straight people. Absolutely no question about it! But to be labeled as one of them? Yuchhhh. The thought made his flesh crawl. He couldn’t imagine anything more ruinous or disgusting. That made him feel even guiltier as he stood here in the soaring sanctum of the Dupont Memorial Library looking at Randy’s appalled expression. Randy had done a brave and noble thing. He had come out. He had put his reputation on the line. He had overcome many fears and limitations and girded his loins…even unto the task of ascending to a podium in the Great Yard to lead the people on Stand Up Straight for Gay Day. And he made Adam’s flesh crawl, which made Adam feel guiltier.

He began sputtering and making imaginary snowballs and trying to explain to his moral superior, Randy, that he wasn’t leaving—by no means!—it was just that he…uh…he’d had a…muscle spasm, yeah, a muscle spasm, from holding the placard in place for so long, and he’d had to put it down for a moment and he was heading right back into the fray and so forth and so on.

Thus morally cowed—by Randy Grossman!—he sheepishly left the library and picked up the placard—Randy Grossman, his superior here at the Masada of our times, watched him suspiciously every step of the way—and headed back to the ruckus, the rhetorical mayhem of the sound system, which made twerps think they were leaders of the people, to the battle-ground—for that was what it might become! Suppose Hoyt Thorpe had retreated merely to regroup and—attack!—assault! He could see the cool smirk on his face! Yet shame proved to be more powerful than fear. Adam found himself back in the line of Praetorian guards in front of the dais, with a big sign over his head saying QUEER.

“—not even by pushing the envelope of their at once bulked-up and refined hypocrisy can they find a basis in case law or morality or simple human decency for their opposition to same-sex marriage. Not only that—”

This time it was the voice of a man, not a student, thundering out of the speakers and the Great Yard and echoing off the stone façades of Dupont’s most venerable buildings. Adam put the placard over his face so he could look back up over his shoulder at the podium and see who it was. It was a fat man in his fifties, probably, wearing a V-necked gray sweater that was too tight and brought out many unfortunate folds in his flesh. Adam didn’t recognize him, but considering his elocution, it was a good bet that he was on the faculty.

“—so that the religious right chooses to stress the premise that marriage is all about children. But if we look at their own holy text, how often does their own holy prophet, Jesus, dwell upon children? He doesn’t dwell upon children…at all. In fact, he only mentions them once, and that’s in response to a question. It’s in what the religious right refers to as the New Testament, the Book—their name for a chapter—the Book of Mark, verse forty-two, in which Jesus says, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of Heaven.’ That’s their own prophet on the subject of children. That’s it! Let’m come shake hands with me here in public! That’s it! It’s a photo op! On the basis of that they’re telling us their religion is opposed to same-sex marriage? They don’t know their own religion! We’ve got a knowledge gap here, and we’d have to build a bridge for them to ever get across it!”

Whoops, howls of laughter, as the wise man outed the philistines.

“Now, my wife and I have two children, and we love them, we’re extremely close to them, and we’d do anything in the world we could for them. But do we think our marriage is ‘all about’ them? We both have careers, and we happen to think our marriage is also ‘about’ our work. I’ll go further. We happen to think our work is meaningful. My wife is an attorney, and she is always on call, by her own choice, for the court to appoint her to represent indigent defendants in criminal actions. I teach here at the university, and I happen to think—of course, I can’t guarantee that my students don’t think otherwise”—big smile, hearty chuckle—“I happen to regard teaching as—to use words I hope the religious right will be comfortable with—a ‘holy calling,’ and our marriage is ‘about’ those things, too. Is there any reason why partners in a same-sex marriage could not rear children, could not adopt and raise children from among the literally millions of children in this country who are without parents, with the same love and dedication my wife and I try to give our children? Of course not. The two things, the gender composition of the marriage and the rearing of children couldn’t have less to do with each other! Couldn’t have less! To have to deal with such a nonsensical argument at all…stuns the normal mind!”

That brought a burst of approval from the crowd of blue-jeaners and spurred the speaker on to greater heights.

“The sheer ignorance of it actively victimizes those who are the most vulnerable and defenseless, the children of this country! Victimizes them and subjects them to unspeakable abuse!”

A roar of approval, but Adam put the placard in front of his face again. He wasn’t joining in. Whoever this old guy was, he was a foxy old bastard. He had just happened to have to divulge that he was married and had two children. Oh, of course, to be gay was 100 percent terrific, maybe it was far, far better to be gay, but he just happened to let it out of the bag that he was a straight cat, he was, he was. Adam resented that. This faculty member, whoever he was, could score big points by appearing at the Stand Up Straight for Gay Day rally—but with a microphone to let the world know he himself was no fucking faggot…while Adam Gellin had to stand here stock-still and silent, holding a sign up over his head that said QUEER in big letters. Why couldn’t he have a microphone, too, or at least add a line to his sign? Now it said,

FREE SPEECH

IS QUEER,

TOO!

Why couldn’t he add,

AND NOT JUST

STRAIGHT

LIKE ME!

Damn, that was longer than what was already there…The damned placard by itself would have to be six feet high. With the stick…the thing would end up eight or nine feet tall…

The old guy was really soaring now, barrel rolls, outside loops, power dives, inverted spins…There was no holding him back…

Who was he, though? Overcome by curiosity, Adam sidled over to Camille, who was once more a Praetorian guard. He was careful to keep his sign facing front and his face behind it.

“Who is that?” he said.

“Jerome Quat,” said Camille out the side of her mouth. “He’s one of the few faculty members with guts. The rest just sign petitions.”

“Jerome Quat?” Adam was startled. “Teaches history?”

Camille nodded yes. A tremor went through Adam’s solar plexus. His heart started banging as if it had an appointment somewhere else. Jojo’s history professor!—the very one who had him and Jojo trapped inside a box like a couple of insects! This was him!

Adam’s every instinct told him to vanish—now. But he couldn’t very well bolt in the middle of the guy’s talk…Randy and the guilt factor…So he just stood there with the QUEER placard over his face, thinking…Gradually his mind caught up with his amygdala…

Mr. Jerome Quat came down, at length, from the heights of oratory and stood at the podium accepting the applause and cheers—real cheers—and one of the current undergraduate chants of approval, which went, Wooo wooo wooo wooo! Camille had joined in and was going wooo wooo wooo wooo as she put her placard down and hurried from her post to go back behind the dais and congratulate him. Adam followed her. Quat had descended from the dais at last and was currently thronged by Fist leaders and fans…and seemed to feel no urge to hurry away from their flattery and gratitude and more flattery.

Camille was elbowing her way to the great man with typical Deng doggedness. Adam stayed on her heels, even elbowed his way past an odd body or two the way she did. He put his hand on her shoulder. She spun about angrily but then saw who it was.

“He’s awesome!” he said to Camille. “He’s the Man! I never heard him speak before! I gotta meet him!”

“I’ll introduce you!” said Camille. “He’s the only one with any fucking guts!”

When she reached Quat, she raised her hand to give him a high five, and he slapped her palm with gusto. “Mr. Quat, you’re the only straight professor on the whole fucking faculty with any fucking guts!”

Far from being taken aback, Quat threw an arm around her, squeezed her to him and said, “It’s Jerry, Camille…Jerry. You’re the one with guts! The way you sent that bunch of frat boys packing—that was golden!”

They proceeded to do quite a duet in that fashion before Camille was aware Adam was planted right in front of them, barely thirty inches away.

“Mr. Quat—”

“Jerry.”

“—this is my friend Adam Gellin.”

“Adam Gellin…,” said Quat, as if ruminating…

“I told you about the Millennial Mutants?” said Camille. “Adam’s one of us. There’s supposed to be all these liberal straight guys who are going to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Fist? A lot of them are going to—but they’re dicks—”

“ ‘Dicks’? Camille, I love you, kid!” said Quat with a great chortle.

“—and they don’t show, but Adam did. He was right down there in front of the podium with a placard.”

Quat shook hands with Adam and began ruminating again. “Adam Gellin…Why do I know your name? Just the other day…”

“Adam writes for the Wave,” said Camille. “He wrote the story about the trustees and their Buddy Club. You see that?”

“Everybody saw that! Congratulations,” he said to Adam. “The way you made those pompous—but that isn’t what I was thinking about…It was something else…It was just the other day, too…”

Adam took a deep breath—and held it. Odds…evens. Acey-deucey…He thought of Charlotte…waiting for him. Damn it! This time he wasn’t going to let himself be frozen with timidity.

“Mr. Quat,” he said, “I think I can tell you why. Until recently I was a tutor for the Athletic Department. I was the tutor for Jojo Johanssen.”

He pursed his lips and stared straight into Quat’s eyes. He tried to resist swallowing, but he couldn’t. He’d said it—and now he was in play.

Quat didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he began nodding his head. “Ahhh,” he said. “I see.” More nodding.

He seemed as unsure of what was happening as Adam did.

Later that afternoon Adam opened his cell phone with such a feeling of elation that it even dispelled—for the moment—his fear of the Quat situation. He immediately called Greg at the Wave.

After keeping him hanging—for about five minutes, it felt like—Greg came on the phone and said, testily, “What is it, Adam? We’re on deadline here.”

“This’ll take two seconds,” said Adam. “You know the Skull Fuck story?”

“Holy shit, Adam!” said Greg. “How many times—”

“Just one thing, Greg, just one thing. I’ve got the angle! This makes it news! I just got off the phone with a source deep…deep…within the Saint Ray house. Hoyt Thorpe just took a bribe from the governor of California to keep quiet about the Skull Fuck story. And just thirty minutes before this call I got a call from Thorpe saying he’s changed his mind, and we can’t run the story. A bribe, Greg! A Dupont student gets fucking bribed by the likely Republican nominee for president!…Greg…Are you there?”

Finally, wearily, Greg said, “Yeah. I’m here.”

“Greg, this source is ironclad. We’re talking iron-fucking-clad.”