“Wow,” said Hoyt in a bored, Sarc 1 fashion. “So what happens next?”
“Well ⦠thenâthis is what we were toldâI'm not saying it's necessarily true one way or the otherâI'm here to ask you guys”âa look filled with fathoms and fathoms of sincerityâ“because the way we hear it is, the governor has these two bodyguards who are out there in the Grove, but they're not, you know, right there
watching
or anything, but they spot you two guys and they come running up, and you guys jumped them and beat 'em up.”
“Two
guys,” Vance blurted out, “and
we
jumped
them
⦔
Vance, thought Hoyt, you are
sooooo
uncool.
“That's why I wanted to ask you guys personally,” said the dork. “That's not the way it happened? I'm just interested in â¦
you
know ⦠how it
did
happen.”
The dork now knew he was onto something. He'd have to be retarded not to.
“Vance,” said Hoyt with another Sarc 1 smile, “you're a vicious motherfucker, man.” To the dork: “And that's the âprank'?”
“I guess âprank' isn't exactly the right word,” said the dork, “but you know, âprank' in the sense of you guys didn't go out there to jump anybody and you didn't go out there to see the governor of California get some headâthe people who were telling us about it, they called it the Night of the Skull Fuck. It was like it was a really unusual, funny thing that happened, that's all. So is that the way it happened? Is it close to the way it happened?”
Hoyt could practically feel Vance's eyes boring into his head, beseeching him ⦠Hoyt said to the dork, “I tell you what. Whyn't you call the governor ofâwhat state was it?âCalifornia? See what
he
has to say.”
“I already have,” said the dork.
Vance couldn't hold it back: “You did? What'd he say!”
“They never put me through to him personally,” said the dork. “I talked to some kind of ⦠spokesperson. She said it was beneath comment. That was her expression, âbeneath comment.' But if you ask me, that's not the same as saying it never happened.”
Vance, alarm still in his voice: “So now the guy knows you plan to write something about it?”
“Well ⦠sure,” said the dork. “I
told
them.”
Vance, you are
so-o-o-o-o-o-o-o
uncool. To the dork: “Who's the girl supposed to be in this story, the one giving the governor of California a blow job?”
“I don't know her name,” said the dork, “but one of these peopleâwe got the first name of her current boyfriend.”
“Which is what?” said Hoyt.
“Something like Crawford. You guys know who that might be?”
Crawdon McLeod, thought Hoyt. Now that was weird. Who the fuck could've or would've told these dorks about Crawdon and Syrie? “Crawford ⦠Don't know any Crawford,” he said.
“Wait a minute,” said Vance. “Back up a second. You came in hereâhow'd you know who we were? How'd you know
where
we were?”
Vance, Vance, Vance-man Vance â¦
“Well, IâI called the Saint Ray house and asked to speak to you,” said the dork. “They told me you were over here.”
“How'd you know what we looked like?”
“I asked some people.” He motioned vaguely in the direction of the entrance. “You guys are pretty well known!”
Big grin from the dork, big flattering grin. The flattery left Hoyt with
conflicting impulses. On the one hand, it was time to let the dork know that dorks existed on a plane ⦠way down
there
. On the other hand, was it really so bad ⦠to be well known? Was it really such a frightening prospect ⦠the possibility of becoming
better
known? “Looking at a fucking ape-faced dickhead is what we're
doing!”
What would be so bad if that line, that
great
line, were recorded in print?
“I never read the
Daily Wave,
” he told the dork. “You read the
Daily
Wave, Vance?” He addressed Vance with a Sarc 3 inflection.
“No, I don't,” said Vance. Hit the
don't
just a little too hard. It made him sound petulant. “So you write for the school newspaper?” he said to the dork.
“Yeah ⦔
“What do you guys do if you want to run some story and it's a great fucking story and
you ain't got one fucking fact to go on?”
The dork was jolted by the suddenly aggressive tone. His lips did some funny things, as if he could no longer control the little muscles that enabled them to go this way and that.
Timorous again, the dork said, “We just hope we can â¦
get
the facts. Look”âthe big eyes again, pleading, pleadingâ“that's why I wanted to talk to you guys directly! A story like this, we try to double-check the facts with the principals. We can always go with what other witnesses said, and I guess we will if we have to.”
“What
other witnesses?” said Vance. Still in the alarm mode.
“Well, like you guys and the governor and the girl weren't the only people there.”
“Like who else was?” said Vance.
“The bodyguards,” said the dork.
“The body
guards
?” said Vance.
“Well, they were there.”
“Body
guards
⦠plural?” said Vance.
“Are you denying there were bodyguards there?” Then to Hoyt: “Can
you
deny or confirm it?”
Hoyt could hardly believe it. The little fuck had ratcheted his courage up again. Vance was staring at him, dumbstruck.
“âDo you deny it or can you confirm it,'” said Hoyt, contempt dripping from the legalistic phrases. “Deny and confirm my ass ⦠âDo you deny it or can you confirm it' ⦔ He shook his head and twisted his lips in the way that says, “You ⦠pussy.”
Pleading, pleading: “I have to ask you that! It's not up to me, it's up to
you guys. My editor's going with the story either way! We'd rather go with your version of the whole thing, but it's like up to you guys.”
“What's
it
?” said Vance. “I don't even know what you're talking about.” Petulant again.
“See those two guys over there?” said Hoyt, pointing to two students, a couple of real porkers sitting about three tables away, laughing and carrying on. “Go ask
them.
Maybe they did it.”
The dork's big eyes began bouncing from Hoyt to Vance to Hoyt again. Silence. Both were giving the dork okay-and-now-what stares.
The dork stood up and said, “Well, thanks for talking to me, guys ⦠and here ⦔ He twisted and slipped his backpack off his shoulders and fished around in it and came up with a
Daily Wave
calling card and a ballpoint pen. “If you want to get hold of me, here's the number at the
Wave
, and I'm going to give you my cell number,” which he did, using the pen. He gave the card to Hoyt. “Thanks,” he said again.
Hoyt said nothing and didn't stow the card anywhere. He just held it insouciantly between his first two fingers. He gave the dork a small Sarc 1 smile as the guy turned and headed off. The guy's backpack was mauve with a yellow Dupont D on the flap. It was very dorky to go around with Dupont backpacks and jackets and things, as if you thought that the mere fact of being a student at Dupont was a big deal in and of itself. The fact that it
was
a big deal in and of itself was part of the inverse spin of the snobbery.
Vance sighed a high-blood-pressure sigh and fixed Hoyt with accusing eyes. “Goddamn it, Hoyt, how many times did I tell you to stop talking about it! Now we got this shit-bird at the
Daily Waveâ”
Hoyt said, “Relax. What's the worst thing that can happen?”
“We get fucked, is what happens. This fucking tool has us assaulting two bodyguards, like
we
started it.
Two
bodyguardsâI mean the fuck, the fucking guy's talking about
two
bodyguards, and who the fuck needs to get caught in the middle of some goddamned story about the governor of California getting himself sucked off by Syrie Fucking Stieffbein?”
“Ea-ea-ea-ea-sy, Vance-man. Chill. Chill
out
! We didn't make the guy's gorilla go insane!”
“Yeah, but this guy's gonna get it all fucked up. He's already got it all fucked up. And now they're gonna run the bodyguard's version! You can imagine what that's gonna be! Why didn't you just deny the whole thing, the way I did? You strung it out. You strung it out so far, now the guy's telling himself it's obvious we were there.”
Hoyt broke into a grin. “
Me
? I don't believe what I'm hearing! The little shit says âtwo bodyguards,' and you say, âWhattaya mean, two? There weren't two! I only saw one!'”
“I didn't say that!”
“Well, you might as well have,” said Hoyt.
Vance eyed Hoyt for a few beats. “You know what I think? I think you'd
like
for somebody to write about it. That's what I think.”
Hoyt turned his palms upward. “Who sent the guy packing? Who told him to kiss my ass?”
He stared Vance down, but
hmmmm â¦
the Vance-man had just painted him a little picture â¦
“Let me see the fucking guy's card,” said Vance.
As he handed it to him, Hoyt flicked a glance at it himself. Adam Gellin.
“Never heard of him,” said Vance, handing it back.
Hoyt shrugged in as bored a fashion as he could. But he wasn't bored. He jotted the name down in his mind. Adam Gellin was the little shit's name.
Fuck! Why the fuck did that make him think of his fucking grades? He could be a legend in his own timeâone of the very greatest. But what the fuck was he going to do next June?
W
here is the poet who has sung of that most lacerating of all human emotions, the cut that never healsâmale humiliation? Oh, the bards, the balladeers have stirred us with epics of the humiliated male's obsession with revenge ⦠but that is letting the poor devil off easy. After all, the very urge,
Vengeance is mine
, gives him back a portion of his manhood, retaliation being manly stuff. But the feeling itself,
male humiliation
, is unspeakable. No man can bring himself to describe it. The same man who will confess with relish and in lavish ghostwritten detail to every sort of debauchery and atrocity will not utter one peep about the humiliations that, in Orwell's phrase, “make up seventy-five percent of life.” For confessing to humiliation means confessing that he has cringed, caved in, surrendered his honor without a fight to another man who has intimidated himâthat he has been unsexed and has plunged into a misery worse than the prospect of imminent death. Eternally, the sheer fear of physical confrontationâeven nowâin the twenty-first century!âwhen life's major victories are won not by knights in armor on the field of battle but by sedentary men in central-heating-weight worsted suits inside glass-walled electronic chambers. Nor will a man ever free himself from that sickening moment of capitulation. A word, an image, a smell, a face will bring it flashing back, and he will experience the very
feeling
, every neural
sensation of that moment, and he will drown all over again in the shame of lying still for his own unsexing.
Fortunately, Adam Gellin was not flashing back to
that moment
as he walked across the Great Yard at sunset, even though his destination, the new Farquhar Fitness Center, had everything to do with it. Indian summer was fading, the days had become noticeably shorter and chillier, and Adam had put on his quilted forest-green Patagonia jacket, the kind that extends all the way down to the hips and has a drawstring enabling one to tighten it at the waist for greater snugness. Random souls went in and out of the great archways of the library, but there was hardly a soul in the Yard itself. As the sun sank, bands of soft purples and pinks rimmed the horizon, and the low light did something wondrous to the Gothic buildings. Adam no longer saw them as individual structures, each with its distinctive details, but rather as a single, vast gray Gothic abstraction of stone tinged with pink, purple, and the sun's last faint gold. The elms that rose to towering heights here were gray, but backlit by a soft golden mauve. He had never seen Dupont in quite this light before ⦠solid, deep-rooted, unassailable, aglow ⦠Fortunes fluctuated, but not Dupont â¦
Adam Gellin was high on the rush of optimism a young man enjoys when he first decides to transform his body by pumping iron.
He had begun working out on the Cybex machines at Farquhar. Not that he thought he would ever bulk up enough to overcome giants such as Curtis Jones and Jojo with his bare hands. He wasn't crazy. All he wanted was a certain look that said, “Don't even
think
about fucking with
me
. Don't even
try
to make me your patsy. Save your patronizing cracksâYou the man, Adam!âfor wusses. You can't play
me
like that.”
Adam ruminated upon some of the terminology of his new questâpecs, abs, delts, traps, lats, tri's, bi's, obliquesâas he approached the crossing of the Great Yard's two big interior walkways. In the center of the intersection was the Saint Christopher fountain, featuring a huge, heroic granite sculpture of the saint himself in a toga, carrying the infant Jesus across a turbulent stream created by the rushing water of the fountain. The late-nineteenth-century French sculptor Jules Dalou had done the figures, which were now cast into the deep shadows of the verging twilight. What pecs Dalou had given Saint Christopher! What bulging delts! As he walked, Adam straightened his left arm and raised it to shoulder level, then felt the deltoid muscle with his right hand. Not much there yet, butâ
Down in the locker room, Adam changed into an extra-large T-shirt and
extra-long shorts, then headed up to the weight-training floor. Powerful overhead lights gave a slick look to the floor's black-trimmed beige expanse and its regiment after regiment, rank after rank, of Cybex machines with white frames, black iron arms, and stainless-steel weight axles, all doubled in number by the mirrored walls. On his first day up here Adam had taken a look at the other weight lifters and decided that he needed a shirt with sleeves that came down to the elbows, so serious were his shortcomings in the upper arm, chest, and thigh departments. And these young brutes weren't even athletes! Real athletes, the recruits who played on the football and basketball teams, never went near Farquhar. They had their own gyms, weight rooms, and training rooms. The muscular students here at Farquhar were merely subscribing to the new male body fashionâthe jacked, ripped, buff look. They were all over the place here on the weight-lifting floor! Ordinary guys with such big arms, big shoulders, big necks, big chests, they could wear sleeveless T-shirts and strap-style I'm-Buff shirts to show off in! What were they going to do with all these amazing muscles? â¦
Nothing,
that's what. They weren't going to be athletes, and they weren't going to fight anybody. It was a fashion, these muscles, just like anything else you put on your body ⦠cargo shorts, jeans, the preppies' pink button-down shirts and limegreen shorts, Oakley sunglasses, black rubber L. L. Bean boots with the leather tops ⦠whatever. Pure fashion! Nevertheless, Adam wanted in.
Look at these fucking guys checking themselves out in the mirror ⦠Practically every wall is a vast sheet of mirror. The cover story, you understand, is that the mirrors are here so you can see if you're doing your exercises correctly. Pure bullshit, of course ⦠They're here so you can drink in and drool over the beauty of your fashionable body! Between exercises, our dense fashion plates
sneak
looks at themselves. They can't even
wait
for the next exercise. Look at that one over there ⦠casually straightening his arm down by his side ⦠so he can sneak a look at the way his triceps pop out ⦠and
that
one ⦠he's pretending he's just stretching ⦠so he can make his latissimi dorsi fan out like a giant stingray ⦠and
that
one, over there ⦠pretending to rub his hands together at waist level ⦠when he's really pressing them together with all his might so he can watch the mighty pectoral muscles pop out ⦠Behold! The fashionable brutes! The diesels, they called them! Every thirty secondsâyou could count on itâsome brute-in-embryo would straighten an arm and sneak a look in the ubiquitous mirrors at his burgeoning triceps. Muscles were very much in fashion.
Adam stood there in his droopy clothes, panning his head this way and
that, searching forâ
there!
Up on the balcony he spotted it: a shoulder-shrug machine, designed expressly for bulking up the trapezius. Once he laid eyes on it, he
yearned
for it. Nobody had ever yearned more for a drug.
Nothing
could make you look tougher faster than a big neck merging with a trapezius bulging,
swollen
from shoulder to shoulder ⦠But there was an unspoken piece of protocol that said only heavy lifters used the apparatus on the balcony. Adam agonized; the very thought of the diesels he would find up there made his arms and legs feel like noodles ⦠but he couldn't help that, could he? He all but ran up the treaded metal stairs, fearful that somebody else, some bona fide brute, would get to the shoulder-shrug machine before he did.
Sure enough, once he reached the balcony, he was in the realm
of the thick, the dense, the swell, the diesels.
From throughout the balcony came the strangled basso profundo of gonnabe buff boys pumping iron, lying on their backs on padded benches within the bench-press frames, bent legs atremble in the squat frames, bellying into strange, padded inclined planes for biceps curls and vertical lifts for the latissimi dorsi.
“Hey, dude, spot me, wouldja!”
“That's it! That's it! One more! Don't be a pussy! One more!”âaccompanied by ostentatious groans.
“ ⦠did five hundred.”
Groaning out of a strangled throat, “Bullshitâyouâdidâfiveâhundredâyouâcouldn'tâfuckingâ
budgeâ
five hundred,” followed by a desperate interjection halfway between a groan and a cryâ“Oonaggh!”âand a dense young mesomorph emerges from the squat frame wearing a wrestler's low-cut strap-style shirt (in order to display the pecs as well as the bi's, tri's, delts, and traps), inflating and deflating with deep breaths, holding his arms slightly curved and away from his body, as if the muscles through his chest, back, bi's, and tri's are too big for his arms ever to hang down straight again, and walking about with a curious, apelike straddle gait.
Adam involuntarily tugged on the arms of his T-shirt to bring them down below his elbows to make sure none of the brutes got a look at those sad little pipes of his. He imagined that every eye on the balcony was pinned on him ⦠the featherweight weakling who had dared ascend to the balcony of the jacked ⦠not realizing that
every
bodybuilder thinks the entire gym is watching him ⦠to check out how much weight he's lifting, how many reps he's doing ⦠and whether or not he's going to try to sneak a look in the mirror afterward to see how much bigger his traps, delts, pecs, bi's, tri's, lats,
quads, and obliques look, now that the exercise has gorged them with blood â¦
Adam loaded up the shoulder-shrug machine with weightsâhad to make it look respectably heavyâtried it ⦠couldn't budge it ⦠had to take a lot of weights off ⦠mortified at the thought of the brutes' no doubt mounting scorn ⦠finally reduced the weight enough to do three sets ⦠ten, eight, and a final puny five repetitions. Between sets he took deep breaths, looked down at the floor with his face set in a terribly manly grimace, rolled his shoulders, and walked with a straddle in the accepted apelike fashion.
After an hour of lifting, Adam felt gratifyingly pumped up, and he headed downstairs, stealing glimpses of his traps where they were visible at the extra-big neck of his T-shirt as he passed mirrors, and wondering if they really did look a bit bigger or if it was just his imagination. No ⦠they
did
look bigger.
He was enjoying that temporary high the male feels when his muscles, no matter what size they may be, are gorged with blood. He feels â¦
more of a man.
The Farquhar Fitness Center had elevators, but it also had a wide, welllit stairway, and Adam, high on muscle building, chose the scenic route. On each floor's stairway landing you could look through a pair of big plate-glass doors and see what was going on within. One floor down, the sign above the double doors said CARDIOVASCULAR, which struck Adam as a pathetically medical term connoting the sickly, not the manly ⦠but the sight of students, many of them girls, running in an odd fashion on a machine caught his eye, and he went inside ⦠The machine, called a StairMaster, allowed you to runâif you could really call it runningâwithout taking your feet off a pair of huge pedals. It was a bit like standing up and “pumping” on a bicycle. There were many girls ⦠Some wore plain, sexless gym clothes, T-shirts, sweatshirts, roomy shorts, and sneakers. More, however, came dressed as ⦠girls. Super-low-cut sweatpants they had! And short T-shirts! And lots of nubile young flesh and belly buttons in between! From the back ⦠was he seeing a little buttocks décolletage, a little cleavage ⦠Right in front of Adam, a girl with long blond hair pumped away on the StairMaster in lowwaisted lavender nylon running shorts and an abbreviated royal blue basketball jersey. She didn't have large breasts, but with each rotation her nipples pressed out against the thin nylon of the halter, and her belly button winked this way and that in the long expanse of bare flesh. Four machines down the row, a girl wore black tights, which gripped every curve and crevice of her
loins like a second skin, and a flesh-colored athletic bra. The tops of her breasts bobbed up and down like flan. You had to look twice to make sure she had on any bra at all. The sight aroused Adam. His own loins were on the qui vive, as if something were about to â¦
happen
in this so-called fitness center ⦠The push of a button, the flick of a switch ⦠and they would stop pretending anymore and plunge into a full-blown rout, an out-and-out orgy, and rutrutrutrutrut â¦
Just beyond the StairMasters were rows and rows of treadmills, an extraordinary number of treadmills ⦠wide black keyboards ⦠green and orange diode lights. The noise was almost deafening. Row after row of boys and girls were running on the treadmills, some of them at quite a clip, adding the thuds of a hundred, perhaps two hundred feet pounding the treadmill belts, whose motors ground away in a bass register. Adam could see scores of breathless young buttocks â¦
He started to turn back to the StairMasters when a mane of long brown hair caught his eye. The girl was running, really running, on a treadmill next to a mirrored wall. He could see her from behind at a three-quarter angle. She was wearing ordinary sweatpants, not low-cut, but they fit tight on her buttocksâand that
line
! That
line
! A dark line of sweat had formed in the crevice between the two buttocks. It clove the declivity and reached down under into the very mystery of her loamy loins. He couldn't keep his eyes off itâthe dark, wet rivulet that led to ⦠Oh, loamy, loamy loins! He caught sight of her profile in the mirror. He staredâhe staredâand he was sure of it! It was that girl, that freshman, the one he had run into that night in the library when he had to do an all-nighter writing a paper for Jojo. All he had gotten out of her was her name, Charlotte. Other than that, she had frozen him out. She had cut him to shreds with her eyes. He had longed to run into her againâand, oh God, that
line
!