Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

To My Two Collegians

You have been a joy, a surprise, a source of wonderment for me at every stage of your young lives. So I suppose I shouldnt be astonished by what you have done for me and this book; but I am, and dedicating it to you is a mere whisper of my gratitude. I gave you the manuscript hoping you might vet it for undergraduate vocabulary. That you did. I learned that using the oath Jesus Christ establishes the speaker as, among other things, middle-aged or older. So does the word fabulous, as in Thats fabulous! Today the word is awesome. So does jerk, as in Whatta jerk! It has been totally replaced by a quaint anatomical metaphor. Students who load up conversations with likes and totally s, as in like totally awesome, are almost always females. The totallys now give off such whiffs of parody, they are fading away, even as I write. All that was quite in addition to the many times you rescued me when I got in over my head trying to use current slang. What I never imagined you could doI couldnt have done it at your agewas to step back in the most detached way and point out the workings of human nature in general and the esoteric workings of social status in particular. I say esoteric, because in many cases these were areas of life one would not ordinarily think of as social at all. Given your powers of abstraction, your father had only to reassemble the material he had accumulated visiting campuses across the country. What I feel about you both I can say best with a long embrace.

Vos Saluto

Many generous people helped me gather information for this book: college students, athletes, coaches, faculty, alumni, outriders, and citizens of an Eden in North Carolinas Blue Ridge Mountains, Alleghany County. If it were possible, I would thank each and every one personally in these lines. I must certainly acknowledge a few who went far out of their way on my behalf:

In Alleghany County: MACK and CATHY NICHOLS, whose understanding and eye for details were superb; LEWIS and PATSY GASKINS, who showed me the countys extraordinary Christmas-tree farms, one of which was raising 500,000 trees; and the gracious staffs of ALLEGHANY HIGH SCHOOL and the ALLEGHANY CHAMBER OF COMMERCE.

At Stanford University: media studies chieftain TED GLASSER; JIM STEYER, author of The Other Parent; comparative literature savant GERALD GILLESPIE; Mallarm scholar ROBERT COHN; young academic stars ARI SOLOMON and ROBERT ROYALTY and their student entourages.

At the University of Michigan: communication studies maestro MIKE TRAUGOTT; and PEACHES THOMAS, who enabled a fool to rush into undergraduate nightlife where wise men never went.

At Chapel Hill: CONNIE EBLE, lexicologist of college slang and author of Slang and Sociability; DOROTHY HOLLAND, whose Educated in Romance blazed a trail in the anthropology of American college students; JANE D. BROWN of Media, Sex and the Adolescent fame; and two especially insightful students, alumni FRANCES FENNEBRESQUE and DAVID FLEMING.

In Huntsville, Alabama: MARK NOBLE, the sports consultant famous for assessing, training, and healing Division I and professional athletes; GREG and JAY STOLT, and GREG JR., University of Florida basketball star now playing professionally in Japan; and Huntsvilles colorful counselor DOUG MARTINSON.

At Florida, in Gainesville: BILL MCKEEN, journalism chairman, author of Highway 61, and a man with entre to hot spots of undergraduate life, including the Swamp, a football stadium with a city throbbing beneath the grandstands.

In New York: JANN WENNER, who once again walked me through the valley of the shadow of weary writing; and COUNSELOR EDDIE (Get me Hayes!) HAYES, who read much of the manuscript.

In domo: My dear SHEILA, scribere iussit amor, as Ovid put it. Scripsi.

Tom Wolfe

Victor Ransome Starling (U.S.), Laureate, Biological Sciences, 1997. A twenty-eight-year-old assistant professor of psychology at Dupont University, Starling conducted an experiment in 1983 in which he and an assistant surgically removed the amygdala, an almond-shaped mass of gray matter deep within the brain that controls emotions in the higher mammals, from thirty cats. It was well known that the procedure caused animals to veer helplessly from one inappropriate affect to another, boredom where there should be fear, cringing where there should be preening, sexual arousal where there was nothing that would stimulate an intact animal. But Starlings amygdalectomized cats had gone into a state of sexual arousal hypermanic in the extreme. Cats attempted copulation with such frenzy, a cat mounted on another cat would be in turn mounted by a third cat, and that one by yet another, and so on, creating tandems (colloq., daisy chains) as long as ten feet.

Starling called in a colleague to observe. The thirty amygdalectomized cats and thirty normal cats used as controls were housed in cages in the same room, one cat per cage. Starling set about opening cages so that the amygdalectomized cats might congregate on the floor. The first cat thus released sprang from its cage onto the visitor, embracing his ankle with its forelegs and convulsively thrusting its pelvis upon his shoe. Starling conjectured that the cat had smelled the leather of the shoe and in its excitement had mistaken it for a compatible animal. Whereupon his assistant said, But Professor Starling, thats one of the controls.

In that moment originated a discovery that has since radically altered the understanding of animal and human behaviour: the existenceindeed, pervasivenessof cultural para-stimuli. The control cats had been able to watch the amygdalectomized cats from their cages. Over a period of weeks they had become so thoroughly steeped in an environment of hypermanic sexual obsession that behaviour induced surgically in the amygdalectomized cats had been induced in the controls without any intervention whatsoever. Starling had discovered that a strong social or cultural atmosphere, even as abnormal as this one, could in time overwhelm the genetically determined responses of perfectly normal, healthy animals. Fourteen years later, Starling became the twentieth member of the Dupont faculty awarded the Nobel Prize.

Simon McGough and Sebastian J. R.

Sloane, eds., The Dictionary of Nobel

Laureates, 3rd ed. (Oxford and New York:

Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 512.

Every time the mens-room door opened, the amped-up onslaught of Swarm, the band banging out the concert in the theater overhead, came crashing in, ricocheting off all the mirrors and ceramic surfaces until it seemed twice as loud. But then an air hinge would close the door, and Swarm would vanish, and you could once again hear students drunk on youth and beer being funny or at least loud as they stood before the urinals.

Two of them were finding it amusing to move their hands back and forth in front of the electric eyes to make the urinals keep flushing. One exclaimed to the other, Whattaya mean, a slut? She told me shes been re-virginated! They both broke up over that.

She actually said that? Re-virginated?

Yeah! Re-virginated or born-again virgin, something like that!

Maybe she thinks thats what morning-after pills do! They both broke up again. They had reached that stage in a college boys evening at which all comments seem more devastatingly funny if shouted.

Urinals kept flushing, boys kept disintegrating over one anothers wit, and somewhere in the long row of toilet cubicles somebody was vomiting. Then the door would open and Swarm would come crashing in again.

None of this distracted the only student who at this moment stood before the row of basins. His attention was riveted on what he saw in the mirror, which was his own fair white face. A gale was blowing in his head. He liked it. He bared his teeth. He had never seen them quite this way before. So even! So white! They vibrated from perfection. And his square jawthat chin with the perfect cleft in ithis thick, thatchy light brown hairthose brilliant hazel eyeshis! Right there in the mirrorhim! All at once he felt like he was a second person looking over his own shoulder. The first him was mesmerized by his own good looks. Seriously. But the second him studied the face in the mirror with detachment and objectivity before coming to the same conclusion, which was that he looked awesome. Then the two of him inspected his upper arms where they emerged from the sleeves of his polo shirt. He turned sideways and straightened one arm to make the triceps stand out. Jacked, both hims agreed. He had never felt happier in his life.