On the steps, it so happened, Greg Fiore, the one standing, was saying
to Adam, “Why do you keep pitching this Skull Fuck story? How many times do I have to tell you, this is something that may or may not have happened â¦
last spring
. People have been talking about this ⦠this rumor ⦠ever since school started. But there's nothing concreteâ
and
it's not news anymore.”
Adam realized he was getting too worked up about itâthis story required a
smooth
pitchâbut he couldn't hold back. “You're not
listening
to me, Greg. I've got the whole thing on tape from a participantâ
two
participants. This is strictly
entre nous
, okay? One is Hoyt Thorpe himself.
He
called
me!
He coudn't tell me enough. He
wants
everybody to know about it, as long as we don't say it came from him. That's one. Now, the otherâdo you remember I finally found out the name of the governor's bodyguard? They took him to a hospital in Philadelphia so his name wouldn't be in the books in Chester? Well, I found out who he is! I've talked to him! He was a California state trooper. He just got canned, and he's really pissed. He thinks it's because some newspaper called about the story, and they want him long gone and out of the way. And guess who âsome newspaper' was?”
“You?” said Greg.
“Me. Me and the
Wave
. He'll give us an affadavit if we want it.”
Greg sighed. “You're a terrific reporter, Adam. I mean that. And you've done a lot of work. But I'm sorryâwe can't dredge up some random blow job from last May and run a story about it.”
Adam wanted to tell Greg the truthânamely, that he was one scared shitless fearless editorâbut he knew that would only make him dig in for good. So he said, “Well ⦠okay. I still think it's a great story. So how about the other story, the basketball thing?”
Greg sighed again and said, “You don't give up, do you? I don't know why you're taking the basketball thing so seriously. I don't see how you can call it
hypocrisyâ”
Adam watched Greg's lips move, and he tuned out ⦠and fumed. Greg always positioned himself as the eminence of the Millennial Mutants, not merely in terms of authority but often physical stance. At the
Wave
office he sat in an outsize oak library armchair that overwhelmed any other stick of furniture in the dismal dump. And now out here on the steps, he ends up the only one standing, while the rest of the MutantsâCamille Deng, Roger Kuby, Edgar Tuttle, and himselfâsit perched on the steps ⦠at his feet, as it were.
All Adam could come up with was, “I don't believe what I'm hearing.”
That was so lame, he looked away in an instinctive bid to disengage from combat. He blinked. Coming toward them on the walkway in front of Briggs was that girl, the Southern girl, the pretty freshman with the innocent look, Charlotte.
He stood up and waved. “Hey, Charlotte!”
So it
was
him. He couldn't have sought her attention at a more propitious moment. Charlotte didn't know quite what to make of this Adam, whom she had met only in awkward circumstances, but she could say one thing for him. He was the only student she had met who sharedâor openly sharedâher vision of what the university should be like intellectually. Millennial Mutants ⦠She couldn't say she really
got
it, but all the sameâand he really wasn't bad-looking.
“Come here!”
So she walked on over to the front steps of Briggs, and Adam introduced her to Greg, Camille, Roger, and Edgar Tuttle. Greg was the skinny one with a pencil of a neck supporting his head and the huge mop of curly hair she had noticed. Camille's Asian face was smooth and symmetrical, but she seemed irritable. Roger Kuby's pudginess covered up what were probably some fundamentally handsome features, but he was prone to stupid jokes. “Charlotte O'Hara?” he said when Adam introduced her as Charlotte. Edgar Tuttle was tall and good-looking but terribly reserved.
“I told Charlotte I'd introduce her to some real Millennial Mutants,” Adam said to Greg, who appeared a bit put off by the remark.
“What makes you think we're real?” said Roger. “That's unreal.”
Charlotte smiled out of courtesy and from nervousness, but none of the others reacted in any fashion.
“Charlotte,” said Adam, “tell Greg what you told me about Jojo Johanssen in that French class. I think he doubts my assessment of our revered student-athletes. What was that course called?”
Charlotte hesitated before saying, “The Modern French Novel from Flaubert to Houellebecq?” She wasn't sure she wanted to tell the story in front of five upperclassmen she didn't even know.
“Wellâwho?” said Roger.
“Well-beck?” said Charlotte, to give him an approximation of the French pronunciation of Houellebecq.
“OhâWell-
beck,”
said Roger, as if there were something funny about that.
“He's a young novelist?” Charlotte said. “He's sort of nihilistic?”
“Anyway,” said Adam, “Charlotte enrolls in this so-called advanced French course, and they're reading the books in ⦠English translation! Advanced French!” He looked toward her for confirmation. “Right?”
She nodded yes.
“And tell'm why,” said Adam.
The implication that she had some great expose to relate made her uncomfortable. She wanted to say, “I'd rather not get into it,” but she didn't have the nerve. She tried to get off by saying only, “The teacher said the course was for people having trouble completing their language requirement.”
“Who is this teacher?” the Asian girl, Camille, wanted to know.
“What was that term?” said Adam. “Linguafrankly challenged?”
Charlotte didn't know what to say to either one of them. The girl hadn't asked her question like someone who just wanted to hear some gossip. She sounded more like an inspector. Charlotte suddenly had the feeling that if she identified Mr. Lewin, who in fact had been nice to her, this irritable girl would see to it that there were consequences.
Fortunately, Adam just couldn't wait to parade his new inside information. “Half of them were Greg's beloved basketball players, whose combination of ignorance and pseudo-ignorant malingering he's so eager to overlook.”
“Oh, give me a fucking break,” said Greg. “All I was saying wasâ”
Feeling that he now had Greg on the defensive, Adam seized the moment to ram his argument down Greg's cynical gullet. “One of them was my tuteeâI guess that's who tutors tutorâtutees?”
Roger broke in: “SAT tutors tutor tutees for SAT twos. Try saying that fastâSATtutorstutortuteesâ”
Goddamned Roger! So he rammed Roger's interruption aside. “One of them was my boy Jojo Johanssen. Jojoâ”
Greg said, “You totally missâ”
Adam rammed Greg aside, too. “Charlotte, tell our basketball groupie here about Jojo and that question he started to answer in that class. He doesn't even want to be
mistaken
for intelligent. Now, how did that go, that question he started to answer?”
“I don't remember the details,” said Charlotte. “Besides, it was too complicated.” She was depressingly aware that she had just pronounced
besides
with a very long, flat
iâbesiiiiidesâ
whereas everybody else at Dupont gave it three syllables:
be-sy-ids.
“Beautiful!” Greg said to Adam. “Your own star witnessâ”
Camille Deng spared Adam the trouble of ramming his way back in. “Tell me this,” she asked Charlotte. “Did this guy hit on the women in the class?” What a grim set her lips had!
Charlotte could see Jojo's enormous hulk approaching herâas vividly as if he were right here on the steps.
“I don't know,” she lied. “I wasn't in that class but one day. I transferred out of there as fast as I could.”
“You're lucky,” said Camille. It was hard to tell whether her bitter tone came from personal experience or from some profound moral repugnance or ideological belief. “They think this campus is Testosterone Valley and they've got all-American dicks, and if a woman comes here, it's only for one reason. They just
assume
⦔
Edgar Tuttle spoke up for the first time. He had a sheepish voice. “That's what cheerleaders are all about.”
“What is?” said Camille.
“Well, you knowâthey're a chorus line,” said Edgar. “They kick their legs like cancan dancers, they show you the inside of their thighs, their breasts are hoisted up likeâlikeâlike missiles waiting for someone to push the button, they're wiggling their hips, they wear these skimpy outfits ⦠you know what I mean.”
Camille said, “I know what you mean, but I don't get it.”
Edgar hesitated before saying, “They're the sexual rewardâor they represent the sexual reward.”
Running out of patience: “
Whose
sexual reward?”
“The athletes',” said Edgar, “or that's what they represent. Or maybe they actually are, too. I don't know. Anyway, this is an old, old custom. It goes back a thousand years.”
“Cheerleaders?” said Roger. It was meant to be funny.
“No, what they represent,” said Edgar. “When knights were victorious in battle, one of their rewards was random sex. But sometimes there were no battles to be fought, and so about eight or nine hundred years ago they started having tournaments. Two armies would come out on the field of battle, and it was supposed to be like a game. They weren't supposed to kill each other. They used blunt swords and lances and so on. The idea was to knock the other side's knights off their horses, and if you did, you got to keep their armor, their weapons, their horses, their tack, and all this stuff was worth a fortune.”
Roger began twirling his forefinger in front of his chest, toward himself, as if to say
Let's speed it up.
“Get to the part about the cheerleaders.”
“I am,” said Edgar. “After the tournaments, the knights would have like a bacchanal, and everybody would get hammered and boff all the girls they wanted.”
Edgar's attempts at campus vernacular were inevitably embarrassing.
Boff
was totally out of date, and
hammered
and the conjunctive
like
just didn't ring right coming out of his mouth.
“Sounds like an ordinary football weekend to me,” said Roger.
For the first time, Edgar became animated. “Thank youâthat's exactly the point! Nothing has changed in a thousand years! How do you think team sports like football originated? And ice hockey. With the medieval tournaments! What team sports did the original Olympic games have? None! It's really funny if youâ”
“Wait a minute,” said Greg. “How do you know all this stuff?”
“I
read
,” said Edgar. “Anyway, it's really funny if you think about it. For a thousand years we've been having these watered-down versions of medieval tournaments, but with one big difference. The knights who fought in the tournaments also happened to be lord and master of everybody else. There was no such thing as a leader who wasn't also a warrior. But these âsports heroes' we've got at Dupont, they're nothing but entertainers. What are they going to do when they leave here?”
“I never saw any figures for here,” said Adam, eager to stay in the discussion in hopes of impressing Charlotte, “but nationally there are thirty-five hundred Division One college basketball players, and they all think they're gonna play in the NBA, and you know how many will actually make it? Less than one percent.”
“Right!” said Edgar. Nobody had ever seen Edgar riding higher. “And the rest of them, they've spent four years at Dupont University doing alleyoops or sacking quarterbacks or whatever it is they do, and they'll leave here and they'll be ⦠oh ⦔
“Sacking my mother and hijacking her car in the parking lot at the mall, is what they'll be doing,” said Roger.
“Very funny, Roger,” said Camille. “Why don't we be a little racist while we're at it?”
“Oh, racist my ass. Stop breaking my balls, Camille.”
“You're telling me that remark wasn't based on a racist assumption?”
“Okay, I'm a racist,” said Roger. “Let's have closure and put that behind us and move on. I've got a question that's so obvious nobody ever asks it. What is it with this sports mania in the first place? Why does anybody get excited because Dupont is gonna play Indiana in basketball? Either our hired mercenaries will beat their hired mercenaries, or vice versa. Why does anybody care? It's a game between two groups of guys who have no connection with our lives whatsoever, and even if they did, it's only a game! Why does a
game
get students so emotionally involved? Or anybody else for that matter. What does it
mean
to them? I don't see how it could mean
anything,
but obviously it does. It's a mystery. It's completely irrational.”