Surely someone would show up. Here he was, at the heart of a great university, one of the five best-known people on the campus…Nobody, not the president of the university or anybody else, was nearly so recognizable or awesome as the starting five of the national champions. Go go, Jojo. Of course, Dupont was just a stop on the way to the final triumph, which was playing in the League. In the meantime, being at Dupont was cool. Everybody was impressed that you were playing ball for Buster Roth. For that matter, everybody was impressed that you were even attending Dupont. The sweet irony was that he had wound up at a better university than Eric. If the unthinkable happened and you didn’t make it to the League, it was pretty good credentials just to be able to say you graduated from Dupont—assuming you managed to keep your grades above water and did graduate. Well, that was what tutors were for, wasn’t it?
Doubts began to form. What if something did happen? In high school, teachers would tell him that he had a perfectly good mind, but it wasn’t going to do him any good if he didn’t apply himself and develop it; and if he didn’t, someday he’d regret it. He took it as an inside-out compliment. He didn’t have to apply himself and develop his mind and all that stuff. He was of a higher order of student. He was a basketball star. The high school would make sure he had the grades he needed to stay eligible. Which they did. Several times he got really interested in courses and did pretty well, but he was careful not to let on. One time he wrote a paper for history that the teacher liked so much he read part of it to the class. He could still feel how exciting and at the same time embarrassing that had been. Luckily, word of it never got beyond the classroom.
His brother, Eric, had made all these good grades and gone to Northwestern and then to the University of Chicago Law School—and big deal. For the past four years, two at Dupont and his last two in high school, Jojo had completely overshadowed His Majesty the Brilliant Firstborn. In the general sense, nobody knew who the hell Eric Johanssen was, and tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands maybe, knew who Jojo Johanssen was. But…what if something did happen and nobody in the NBA drafted him? The problem with Vernon Congers was not so much that he might take his starting position away from him, but that Coach might bring Congers in off the bench more and more and cut into his, Jojo’s, minutes, which would mean that he would fade in the stats and in every other way. If that happened, he could forget the NBA. Suddenly he’d be that pathetic animal, a college has-been with a piece of paper from Dupont and nowhere to go. He’d be nothing. Maybe he could get a job coaching basketball at Trenton Central—and Eric would be what he was right now, a lawyer in Chicago on the threshold of a limitless future…The hell of it was, Congers was so goddamned good! Big, strong, quick, aggressive, and absolutely determined to prevail in this game! Far faster than it would take to recite it, all this rushed together in Jojo’s midsection. Now there was no mistaking the feeling, which was fear.
Had to stop thinking about it. He looked around the Great Yard. The afternoon sun, the summer light, brought out the warm undertones in the gray stone of the Gothic buildings. Glints of yellow, ocher, brown, and purple made it all look richer and somehow even more massive and imposing. The library tower…it was like a cathedral…He’d seldom been inside it, except with a tutor. Actually, there were a couple of times after midnight he had gone in there to hook up with this girl he knew studied in there late at night…
A man was walking toward him. He recognized the guy, but who the hell was he? In his early forties, probably, wearing a polo shirt, a pair of khaki cargo shorts, and sneakers…terrible posture…completely undeveloped muscles…a little paunch bulging out over his belt…scrawny legs. Jojo knew he was a body snob, but he couldn’t help it. How could a man let himself go like that? The man was carrying one of these hoople attaché cases. He was coming closer…Who the hell was he? The guy started smiling. Jojo gave him a befuddled smile in return. Just before they passed each other, the guy looked him right in the face and said, “Hello, Mr. Johanssen.” Jojo gave him an embarrassingly unconvincing, “Hey—how are you?” Each walked on. Mr. Johanssen? That wasn’t a fan talking. Now, too late, it dawned on him: that was his sociology professor from first semester last year. Like a lot of athletes, Jojo was majoring in sociology, which was known as an athlete-friendly department. But what was the guy’s name?…Pearlstein, that was it…Mr. Pearlstein. Nice guy, Mr. Pearlstein…He had given him a break on a paper he knew he couldn’t have written. More doubts…Had he detected a note of irony in the man’s voice? Hello, Mr. Johanssen, you dumb jock?
Jojo walked around some more, putting a slight roll into his shoulders, hoping to be noticed. The T-shirt he had on certainly wasn’t meant to hide the fact that he was not only very tall but very buff. Damn!…Nobody!…Maybe they were looking at him out of windows. He scanned the buildings…Nobody…but wait a minute. A pair of casement windows were open on the ground floor of Payson College—and what was that he saw on the wall? He walked closer. He was right! It was himself! A huge poster, at least four feet high, of Jojo Johanssen, triumphant, springing above a whole cluster of black players—and kicking their asses. He walked still closer, as close as he could without seeming to take an abnormal interest in some student’s room. He was transfixed…couldn’t take his eyes off it…Whoever it was…worshiped Jojo Johanssen. He just stood there staring, as long as he possibly could without seeming weird. Finally he turned away, suffused with an exhilaration indescribable, but as real, as corporeal, in fact, as any of the five senses…
He scanned the Great Yard again…nobody. Bereft of an audience, he now felt very tired. He must have really pushed himself in that endless scrimmage. He began to think of the big TV screen and the easy chairs that awaited him in the suite he and Mike shared. Suddenly it seemed like the most delightful prospect in the world, and absolutely necessary, to be sinking into one of those chairs and turning on the TV and emptying his mind of…all the stuff that had gone on this afternoon and all the stuff he’d been brooding about…
So he walked back to Gillette Way, got back in the Annihilator, and headed on to Crowninshield College. Under NCAA regulations, you could no longer have special dorms for athletes. They had to be housed with the general student population. So the basketball players were all put at one end of a big hallway on the fifth floor of Crowninshield. For the basketball players, they had knocked down the walls between the two bedrooms on either side of the suite’s common room, so that each player had one large bedroom, with a private bath and an outsize bed. To make up for the space lost by doubling the size of the athletes’ rooms, they had converted some storerooms and unused kitchens into a bunch of pretty wretched singles for the leftover ordinary students. On top of all that, the basketball players’ suites, and theirs alone, were centrally air-conditioned.
As Jojo walked along the hall to the suite, his very hide anticipated the luxury of that ever so nicely conditioned air, of his big, tired body sinking back into an easy chair, of the TV irrigating the interior of his parched skull. He opened the door—
—two young white people were lying stark-naked on the floor of the common room amid a litter of T-shirts, jeans, underpants, and sneakers, their arms and legs intertwined, right there on the carpet in front of the TV—fucking. In and out, in and out, and the girl was going, “Unhh unhh unhh.” Their legs were toward him. They were lying on their sides. The view was mainly the fleshy, meaty swells of buttocks and thighs and the storm of curly blond hair that concealed Mike’s face. Idly, Jojo wondered if this girl had shaved her crotch. Last spring and so far this year he had been seeing more and more of them completely shaved—although this girl he had hooked up with a couple of days ago said she’d had a “Brazilian wax job.” But what he really wondered about was how the fashion spread from one girl to another. As a basketball player, you could easily keep tabs on girls’ grooming down there, but how did the girls themselves stay au courant? Did they actually discuss such things—or what?