An awkward pause. Jojo realized that he had to plunge into the void. “Adam…you’re gonna kill me.” He averted his eyes, lowered his head, and shook it, all the while smiling as if to say, “Wouldn’t you just know it?” Finally he removed the smile, looked at his tutor, and blurted out his problem.
“All right,” the boy said in a measured voice, “what’s this paper supposed to be about?”
“It’s about…ummm…something about the Revolutionary War.”
“Something about the Revolutionary War?”
“Yeah. Wait a second. I got it printed out.” Jojo hurried into his bedroom.
By now Mike had returned to PlayStation 3 and was playing Stunt Biker solo. From time to time he said, “Oh fuck!” as he broke his neck. The crowd cheered and groaned.
Jojo returned with a printout of an e-mail, which he now scrutinized. “It says here…it says here…it says it’s supposed to be about…Here it is: ‘The personal psychology of George the Third as a catalyst of the American Revolution.’ Eight to ten pages the guy wants. What’s a catalyst, anyway? I’ve heard of the damned things but I don’t really know what they are.”
“Oh fuck!” said Mike, intent on the TV screen, which flared with stadium lights and hot colors.
The boy, Adam, said, “When is this due, Jojo?”
“Uhh…tomorrow. The class is at ten.” Ingratiating smile. “I told you you’d kill me.”
“Ten o’clock tomorrow?…Jojo!”
The way he said it allowed Jojo to relax. What did Adam the tutor amount to? He amounted to a male low in the masculine pecking order who is angry, deserves to be angry, is dying to show anger, but doesn’t dare do so in the face of two alpha males, both of them physically intimidating as well as famous on the Dupont campus. Jojo had enjoyed this form of unspoken domination ever since he was twelve. It was a source of inexpressible satisfaction. Literally inexpressible. Only a complete fool would ever own up to such a feeling out loud—to anybody.
Out loud: “Yeah, I know.” He feigned the sort of grimace that indicates you’re disappointed in yourself. “I just like totally forgot, man. I been in study hall for two hours studying for a French test I got coming up, and I just like, you know, drew a blank on the fucking history paper.”
Adam said, “Well…have you got any notes? Any texts?”
“Nawww…I think the guy said he wanted this to be a research paper or something.”
“Oh—fuck—all!” said Mike. The crowd groaned louder than ever, and the screen flared with a change of background color.
A rising whine from Adam: “Jojo, do you have any idea what this is gonna involve? Researching the life of George the Third and the history of the Stamp Act and all that stuff and putting them together and writing eight or ten pages”—he looked at his wristwatch—“in the next ten hours?”
Shrugging: “I’m really sorry, man, but I got to get that paper in. The fucking guy’s already on my case. Mr. Quat. He’s just waiting for some excuse to flunk my ass.”
The atmosphere was heavy with the realization that failing a course could make an athlete ineligible to play during the following semester.
The roar of the crowd swelled, and then—“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”—turned into a bottomless groan.
Adam stood there looking glum, and whipped. “Okay…give me the sheet of paper.”
Jojo threw a big arm around the boy’s back and shoulders and squeezed so hard he practically lifted him off his feet. “You the man, Adam, you the man! I knew you wouldn’t let me down!”
The little tutor squirmed helplessly in Jojo’s powerful grip. When Jojo relented and released him, the boy stood there for a moment with a desolate look on his face. He shook his head slowly and headed for the door. Just before he went out, he turned around and said, “By the way, a catalyst is something that precipitates—something that helps set off something else that’s not directly related to it, like the way the assassination of a Serbian archduke nobody ever heard of was the catalyst for World War One. You might want to know what the word means, just in case you ever have to make somebody think you know what you’ve written.”
Jojo didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but he did know it was supposed to be some kind of sarcastic reprimand, as close as a nerd could get to saying how totally pissed off he actually was. The alpha male smiled and said, “Hey listen, man, I’m really sorry. I appreciate the hell outta this. I owe you one.”
The boy was not even all the way out the door when Jojo turned toward Mike and said, “What are all these oh fucks, man? You may be the microwave of treys, but you can’t stunt-bike for shit.”
No sooner had Adam closed the door and taken a few steps down the hall than he heard the muffled sound of Jojo and his roommate at the controls of PlayStation 3, crying out in triumph or pain and laughing…laughing at him, no doubt. The two morons would sit there playing their stupid video game, like they were twelve-year-olds, and yelling Oh fuck and laughing at Adam Gellin…while he had to hustle to the library and ransack some source material, cobble together some notes, and stay up all night turning out 2,500 or 3,000 words that would read like something a cretin such as Jojo Johanssen might conceivably have written. Actually, Jojo wasn’t all that stupid. He just refused to use his head, as a matter of principle. It was sad. It was worse than sad. It was pathetic. Jojo was a brute, but he was also a weakling who didn’t dare violate the student-athlete code, which decreed that it was uncool to act in any way like a student. For that reason, he, Adam, was doomed to an all-nighter, while Jojo put in a few more vacuous hours in front of the TV screen and slept the sleep of the child who knows everything he needs will be there when he wakes up in the morning.
Adam’s face began to burn with anger and humiliation. Goddamn it! The smug, heavy-handed way the big lout had acted happy to see him…the utterly transparent simulation of contrition, when he had undoubtedly known for a long time that this paper would be due tomorrow…the way he had put his arm around him in a sickeningly fake show of camaraderie…You the man!…Goddamn that muscle-bound sonofabitch! He had grabbed him and lifted him off the floor as if he owned his very hide! “You the man”—and what he was really saying was, “You’re not a man at all! You’re my servant! You’re my little slavey boy! I own your ass!”
A great muffled yawp of manly laughter from behind. Jojo and his roommate were laughing at him! Couldn’t contain themselves! Adam scurried back on tiptoe and stood outside the door to their suite. They were laughing again!—but it turned out they were laughing about Vernon Congers and how Charles kept teasing him, and Congers hadn’t a clue about how to deal with it. All right, so they weren’t laughing at slavey boy…at that moment…Nevertheless, Adam trudged along the hallway, head down, thinking of all the devastating remarks he should have obliterated the giant with. He had long ago come to terms, at least on a rational level, with the master-servant aspect of the job. For that matter, not every athlete he tutored acted superior. A few were grateful the way any needy child might be or should be, in which case a traditional teacher-pupil relationship existed, and the psychic rewards were his. In any event, the three hundred dollars a month he was paid for this service was crucial to his existence at Dupont, as was the approximately one hundred a month—all of it in tips, none in wages—he made delivering pizza, mainly to students’ rooms, for a franchise operation called PowerPizza. Of course, delivering pizza for tips created a master-servant relationship, too, but these days, students and young people generally shrank from being anything but egalitarian in their dealings with the working poor.
No matter which job he was working at, he had to make a trade-off. The downside of delivering pizza was that it was mindlessly repetitive, and your time wasn’t flexible. Whenever you worked the job, you were committed to a six-hour stretch. In tutoring athletes, you had to submit to the egos of large, stupid people who could summon you by beeper anytime they felt like it, and you had to accept the fact that you were abetting an institutional farce known as “the student-athlete.” On the other hand, the work was varied and occasionally interesting, you could do much of it on your own time…and your dim-witted charges were in some way dependent upon you, regardless of how they behaved.