In a perfectly ordinary voice Coach said, “You two trade shirts.”
All the ramifications of those four words hit Jojo at once. He was stunned, dumbstruck, paralyzed. Demoted to the second team. Six days before the opening gameâwhich was here at Dupont! Against a pushover, Cincinnatiâbut the first game of the season! Students, alumni, the Charlies' Club donors! The press!âscouts from the League!âthey'll all see Jojo Johanssen sitting on the bench! What team in the League was even going to consider a demoted has-been power forward! The very people who had looked at him as if they were looking at a godâthe students, ordinary fans, sports junkies in front of the TV sets, all those hooples who wanted a little piece of Go go Jojo, an autograph, a smile, a wave, or just the chance of being in the same place he was, breathing the same air he breathedâeven they would avert their eyes! Jojo Johanssen, object of pity!âassuming anybody bothered thinking of him at all ⦠Congers was already taking off his yellow shirt, revealing his abdominals, which stood out like cobblestones, and his obliques, which surmounted his pelvic saddle like plates of armor.
Jojo just stood there staring at Coach, as if any second he was going to say, “Just kidding. Only wanted to get your attention.” But Coach was not the just-kidding type. His eyes were not dancing with merriment. The moment stretched out ⦠stretched out ⦠stretched out ⦠stretched out ⦠until finally Jojo had no choice but to start taking off his mauve shirt. A dishonored knight surrendering his sword and suit of mail. Every eye was pinned on him as the LumeNex lights beamed down on the blond wood stage ⦠It might as well have been the whole world, because the whole world would soon know, anyway. Dead silence ⦠not a sound ⦠but what was there to say when you were watching a man being broken? The final indignity was putting on the yellow shirt and feeling the sweat left over from Congers's magnificent, exhilarated, triumphant black body chill his own deflated pale white, bled-white, dead-white carcass.
The scrimmage resumed, and in a sheerly intellectual sense, Jojo knew that this was the time to show what he was made of, to dog Congers on defense in a way no power forward had ever been dogged before, to outrun him, outjump him, outmuscle him, fake him out, shoot him out of the water, crush the sonofabitch. Oh, yes; that he knew intellectually. But his spirit was in ruins, and that was all his body knew. It was Congers who did the outdogging, outrunning, -jumping, -muscling, -faking, -shootingâand the crushing. Within fifteen minutes it couldn't have been more obvious that once more, Buster Roth, lord and wizard of the Buster Bowl, had shown himself to be an unerring judge of horseflesh. Jojo left the floor feeling as humiliated as any athlete on earth had ever felt.
Sure enough, the rest of them were diligently not looking at him, not even Mike. Mike was making a big point of keeping himself wrapped up in conversation with Charles. On the edge of Jojo's peripheral vision, however, one big pair of eyes was fixed right on him. He turned his head. It was Delores, the student manager with the Indian face and the big bottom. She was the only person still sitting on the bench.
“Hang in there, Jojo,” she said.
If she had said it out of sincere concern, it would have been bad enough. All he needed at this point was some pity poured on him by a “student manager.” As it was, a smile seemed to be playing at the corners of her mouth.
A red mist formed in front of Jojo's eyes. He squared his stance toward her and said, “What the hell's that supposed to mean?”
Abashed, she shrugged her shoulders and her eyebrows. She never took her eyes off him, however, and kept on giving him a whatâironic?âstare. “I was just tryingâ” She didn't finish the sentence.
“You were just trying bullshit, is what you were just trying,” said Jojo.
“Well, you don't have to take it out on
me
.” The calmness of her voice somehow made it worse.
“Take
what
out?” He didn't wait for her to answer. He thrust his chin forward and gestured toward her. “Why do you do this? Tell me that.”
“Do what?”
“This âjob' you got, this student manager”âhe started to say
shit
but thought better of itâ“thing?”
“Wellâ”
“Nobody respects you for it. You know that, don't you?”
The girl shrugged nonchalantly, which made Jojo furious.
He stepped closer. “Everybody laughs at you, if you wanna know the truth! Everybody wonders how you can get yourself down low enough to take this shit! Student manager ⦠Student manager, my ass! Student slave is more like it! Student urinal puck supplier!” He stepped still closer. “The whole team spits on you people!”
Jojo was now the very picture of looking down at somebody. The six-foot-ten hulk of him towered over the little ball of Indian hair and nappy gray cotton rag down below him on the bench.
She looked frightened, but she didn't budge. In a tiny voice she said, “That's not true, and I'm sorry about what happened out thereâbut I didn't do it.”
Of course she was rightâwhich made it that much worse.
“You think it's not true! How about a little experiment? If I spit on the floor, you're the one who's got to get down on all fours and wipe it up!”
She looked up at his huge white blond-tipped head, which was now florid with anger. She was afraid to attempt any reply at all. The giant was at the point of detonation.
Jojo swelled up his chest, lifted his head upward as high as it would go, and snuffled, scouring his sinuses, nasal pathways, and lungs so furiously it was as if he wanted to suck the bench, the girl, the entire Buster Bowl and half of southeastern Pennsylvania up into his nostrils. He grimaced until his neck widened, striated by muscles, tendons, and veins, swelled up his chest to the last milliliter of its capacityâand spat. The girl stared at the edge of the court where it landed: a prodigious, runny, yellowy pus-laced gob of phlegm.
“Clean it up,” said Jojo, halfway between a hiss and a snarl, whereupon he started walking away.
The girl, Delores, didn't move or make a sound. At that moment, Buster Roth, heading off the court and back to his suite of offices, walked past, did a double take, stopped, and stared at the virulent mess on the floor.
He turned toward Delores. “Jesus Christ, what the hell is that? Clean it up!”
Delores pointed at the retreating Jojo and said, “Get
him
to do it.”
Roth was so astounded that anybody at Dupont, especially a creature so insignificant as this one, would dare talk back, he was speechless.
“He
put it there,” said Delores.
The analog chemical computations within Buster Roth's brain were almost visible. It was obvious that she was right. No doubt his flattop blond giant
was the slob who had put it there. So he had a choice: order this little girl to do what he saidâor make Jojo do it. But the girl was smart as a whip, a tireless worker who did most things before he had to ask her, the best student manager he had had working for him since God knew when. On the other hand, did he really want to make Jojo's humiliation total and complete by ordering him to get his 250-pound hulk down on all fours in the Buster Bowl and clean up an oyster like that one? Jesus Christ ⦠it was an insoluble dilemma. So without a word and without so much as looking at either of them, Buster Roth went behind the bench, picked a crumpled towel up off the floor, walked over and dropped it on top of the noxious mess, and began rubbing it around with his foot. It wouldn't be a perfect job, but he was damned if
he
was going to get down on all fours, either. He figured he'd just smush it around like this until it was no longer identifiable.
When he finished, the floor at that spot had become a glaze of mucus about two feet in diameter. The mighty LumeNex lights of the Buster Bowl highlighted it in a viscous relief, or was he just seeing things? In any case, he'd get some other manager to clean up the remains later on.
Jojo, heading down the ramp to the dressing room, had heard the exchange. His humiliation took a further nosedive ⦠into guilt. How could he have done what he just did? How could he have called the girl a slave and all that other stuff? And she had stood up to him, and to Buster Roth, too! He envisioned her twenty pounds lighter, slim in the hips, and naked.
Â
Â
The moment Hoyt got a glimpse of the guy coming toward them, he pegged him as a dork.
“Yo,” he said to Vance, who was seated across from him in the booth at Mr. Rayon, “who is that guy?” He made a slight motion with his head.
Vance turned his head in that direction as inconspicuously as he could. “No clue.”
Hoyt took another glance. The guy was wearing a red Windbreaker with BOSTON RED SOX on the front. It was unzipped, revealing a “lively” sport shirt, which was tucked into his pants, which were black flannel. And what was it about his hair? It was dark, curly, too longâand had a part in it. A
part
! By now long hair was very Goth. Now you wore your hair short with no part. The guy wore his hair
parted
! On top of that, he was skinny without looking in any way wiry, much less buff. He might as well have had a sign around his neck saying DORK.
The guy came right over to their table. He looked down at Hoyt with these big, wide-open, timorous eyes and said, “Hi! You're Hoyt?” Then he managed a grin that was probably supposed to look affable. In fact, the small muscles in his lower lip were twitching.
“That's right,” said Hoyt, looking him in the eye in a challenging manner.
The dork turned toward Vance and tried another smile and said, “And you're ⦠Vance?”
Vance didn't say a word. He just nodded yes ⦠in a cool fashion that as much as said, “And therefore ⦠?”
The dork looked from Vance to Hoyt and from Hoyt to Vance and said, “I'm Adam. I don't mean to ⦠uh ⦔ He couldn't think up the word for what he didn't mean to do, and he smiled, averting his eyes.
“Then why the fuck are you doing it?” Hoyt said under his breath.
“What?” said the dork.
Hoyt made a small dismissive motion with his hand.
The dork soldiered on. “You guys mind if I ask you something for just a second?”
Vance looked at Hoyt. Hoyt eyed the guy for a couple of beats and said, “Go ahead.”
“Thanks,” said the dork. Almost without looking, he leaned backward, grabbed a chair from the next table and pulled it up and sat down, hunching forward with his forearms resting on his thighs and his hands clasped between his knees. “I'm from the
Daily Wave.”
His eyes darted this way and that at Hoyt and Vance. “Several people have told my editor that you guys”ânow he smiled as if he were about to bring up that merriest subject imaginableâ“pulled a helluva prank on the governor of California last spring when he was here for commencement.”
His eyes darted even faster, and he held on to the smile for dear life. Evidently the smile was supposed to cover up a case of rapid ataxic eyeblink and the fact that his Adam's apple went way up and then way down in an involuntary swallow.
Hoyt could see Vance staring at him in alarm. He said to the dork in a bored manner, “Who told you
that
?”
The dork said, “I guessâwell, nobody told
me
exactly. They told my editor, was the way it happened. And he asked me to check it out. So I'm just here toâ” He couldn't find the word to complete that sentence, either, and resorted to a few shrugs. His shoulders shrugged, his eyebrows shrugged, and his lips smiled innocently.
Hoyt looked at Vance. “You know what he's talking about, Vance?”
Vance shook his head no; too emphatically, if the truth be known.
Hoyt looked at the dork. “The governor of California ⦠What's supposed to have happened to the governor of California?”
The dork said, “Well, just before commencementâa day or two beforeâI'm trying to remember when the Swarm concert wasâI need to check all this outâthat's why I'm asking you guys”âhe lifted his eyebrows in a way that suggested a helpless pleaâ“to get it all straight. Anyway, what these people told my editor wasâit wasn't just one personâI mean, we probably wouldn't even care if it was just one personâbut this is one of those things that's all over the placeâ”
“What
is?” said Hoyt. He began rolling his forefinger toward himself in the semaphore that says, “Hurry up, get it out.”
“Wellâthis is what these people, these students I'm talking aboutâthey're all studentsâor at least I don't know for a
fact
that they're all students, but that's what my editor told meâhe didn't go out
looking
for this story,
nobody
didâthey came to usâ” The dork broke off. He could no longer recall the syntax of what he was supposed to be saying. “Anyway, they told us that it was after the Swarm concert at the Opera House, and it's after midnight or something, and you guys were walking back to campus through the Grove and you see the governor right out there in the Grove and this girl is giving him a blow jobâ” He stopped to look at Hoyt and Vance, as if to give them a chance to answer. “Am I right so far?”