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 dreamâno, 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 Adamâwas it Tellin?âor Kellinâwhat the fuck was his name?âwhatever 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 semesterâthe 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 â¦
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”âhe paused, not wanting to say the name Socratesâ“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 withâ”
“You say the name Socrates, dude, and I'm gonna cut your fucking nuts off for you.”
“Hey, anything but that, SocâI 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 doâwaitâfifteen 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 andâ”
Jojo cut him off. “Watch it! It's like I told you, I can say âSocrates' but you can't. It's bad enough hearing it from fucking Coach.”
“Even with that hottie”âMike motioned toward the lobbyâ“waiting for you?”
“What hottie?”
“âWhat 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 ⦠âWhat 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 â¦
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, tooâHera, Apollo, Aphrodite, and ⦠and ⦠Jojo never could remember all of themâthere 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 â¦
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 intoâbut they probably didn't even have hotels then, or not this kind, whereâ
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 makeupâ
âlong 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 worldâit was her, all right.