Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe

Author:Tom Wolfe [Wolfe, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Literary Criticism, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781409018902
Google: uJ0xJHiW_GEC
Amazon: 0312420234
Goodreads: 2664
Publisher: Picador
Published: 1988-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

AMBUSH AT FORT BRAGG: A NOVELLA

Ambush at Fort Bragg

PART ONE

I, IRV

Way past midnight, up in the network’s New York control room, a man and a woman sat in a glass cubicle watching a pair of television monitors. The man was only in his early forties, but already he was bald on top except for a narrow little furze of reddish hair that arched up over his freckled dome like an earphone clamp. He had jowls, eyeglasses for nearsightedness, a shell back, rounded shoulders, and a ponderous gut, which his old gray sweater only made look worse. He also had a slovenly way of slouching in his seat so that his weight rested on the base of his spine. In short, a slob; which he realized; and the hell with it.

The woman was almost exactly the same age he was, but she had a terrific head of blond hair and correct posture to burn. She had big bones and nice broad shoulders, and she wore a pair of creamy white flannel pants, a heavenly heathery tweed hacking jacket, and an ivory silk blouse. Any single item of her ensemble, even her flat-heeled shoes, cost more than all the clothes he was likely to wear in a week. She made him look insignificant by comparison. He also realized that, and the hell with that, too.

Every now and then he glanced at her, a big blond mama sitting there as primly erect as a thirteen-year-old girl on a horse at a horse show, and he just slumped down a little farther. He was giving up on posture, poise, graceful bearing, first impressions, and all the other superficialities at which Her Blondness excelled. What did it matter, all this poise and grace, if you were up in a cubicle in the middle of the night monitoring a remote feed, f’r chrissake? Through the cubicle’s glass walls he could see an entire bank of monitors glowing and flaring in the control room outside. Or he saw them and he didn’t see them. The only things on his mind right now were the two screens in front of his face and getting Madame Bombshell to pay attention to them. To him, what was going on on those screens was the most important event in the world.

Both monitors were being fed the same action, via a hellishly expensive private fiber-optic hookup, from different camera angles. On both sets he could see the same three young white men in T-shirts, twenty-one or twenty-two years old, certainly not much more than that, boys really, drinking beer in a beat-up booth with leatherette seats, a speckled Formica tabletop, and a little café lamp. All three had smooth, tender jawlines and roses in their cheeks. Their hair was cut so close, their ears stuck out. Happy and high, they radiated the rude animal health of youth, even in the gloom of a topless bar as transmitted to this cubicle over the remote fiber-optic feed.

By now, after midnight, they had reached the garrulous stage.

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