A Man in Full

by Tom Wolfe

Atlanta had never been a true Old Southern city like Savannah or Charleston or Richmond, where wealth had originated with the land. Atlanta was an offspring of the railroad business. It had been created from scratch barely 150 years ago, and people had been making money there on the hustle ever since. The place had already run through three names. First they called it Terminus, because that was where the new railroad ended. Then they named it Marthasville, after the wife of the governor. Then they called it Atlanta, after the Western and Atlantic Railroad and on the boosters’ pretext that the rail link with Savannah made it tantamount to a port on the Atlantic Ocean itself.

He could tell it was a girl because of the little caramel-colored foot that protruded from the jeans, shod only in the merest of sandals. Then, much faster than it would take to tell it, out the window came her hip, her little bottom, her bare midriff, her tube top, her wide shoulders, her long wavy black hair with its heavenly auburn sheen. Youth! She hadn’t even bothered to open the door. She had come rolling out of the Camaro like a high jumper rolling over the bar at a track meet.

“Hey, Val, Mr. White’s here!” Val turned out to be a blond woman, in her late twenties, if Roger Too White was any judge. Everything about her, especially the provocative way she lowered her eyebrows when she smiled, gave off whiffs of frisky trouble. She came into the entry hall from some side room with the same desperate delight in her eyes as the coach. “Hi!” She really sang it out. “Mr. White, I want you to meet my wife, Val!”

He saw this type of prominent white person all the time in Atlanta. Buck McNutter was a prototypical Southern white boy, from Mississippi, which was an even harder case than Georgia, a real hardtack Cracker in his heart but one who had decided that if he had to deal with these nigras, then the better part of valor was to put on a good show of being civil about it. (Proving Booker T. absolutely right, of course.)

The combination of the dark wood, the soft light, and the gleaming objets was such that at first Roger Too White failed to notice the figure sprawled back on a tufted leather sofa. The long legs were utterly ajar. The long arms rested slackly on the sofa’s seat. The milky-white eyes, set in a dark brown face beneath the brow of a shaved head, stared with utmost sullenness. Roger Too White knew that face immediately because it was even more famous in Atlanta than Coach Buck McNutter’s. It was the face of Georgia Tech’s all-American football star, a running back named Fareek Fanon, constantly referred to in the newspapers and on television as Fareek “the Cannon” Fanon, a local boy, the proudest product of one of Atlanta’s most run-down areas, the Bluff, in a neighborhood known as English Avenue. Even slouched back the way he was, with dreadful posture, in this dim room, the young black man radiated physical power. He wore a black polo shirt with red stripes on the collar, wide open at the throat, revealing the long, thick pair of muscles that came down the sides of his neck and inserted at the clavicle. Adorning his neck was a gold chain so chunky you could have

used it to pull an Isuzu pickup out of a red clay ditch. In his forearms and in his elbows and wrists you could see the dense muscles and cable-like tendons of the real ghetto boy (not to mention a massive gold Rolex watch with diamonds set in the face), and above all, you could see that wary, hostile look through the eyes. The polo shirt hung out over his hips, which were engulfed in a pair of ridiculously voluminous black homey jeans that bunched up at his ankles where they met a pair of black Frankensteins, just like those the college boy had been wearing on Piedmont Avenue. In each of his earlobes, which seemed small for so big a man, was imbedded a tiny diamond-bright gem. They may have been diamonds and they may have been rhinestones, but Roger Too White wouldn’t have put it past a kid like this to insist on diamonds. “Mr. White,” said Buck McNutter, “I want you to meet Fareek Fanon.”

Fareek “the Cannon” Fanon didn’t budge. He waited a couple of beats, then gave Roger Too White a barely perceptible nod and a little shrug of the lips that seemed to say, “So you’re here. So what?” McNutter glowered, clenched his teeth, mouthed the words “Get up!,” then pantomimed Get up! with his chin. The Cannon gave McNutter the little ...

Slowly, with a great show of world-weariness, the Cannon got up. Even with his abysmal posture he towered over Roger Too White. Roger Too White extended his hand, and the Cannon deigned to shake it, albeit with a gloriously bored limpness. “Fareek is a member of our football team,” said Coach McNutter. “Oh, I know that very well,” said Roger Too White, smiling, looking the young man in the eye, hoping to establish some rapport with this har...

The Cannon said nothing. Instead, he gave Roger Too White a quick look up and down, a dubious look, as if to say, “Why would I care what some bi...

McNutter’s eyes blazed with reproach. He’d had enough of this ghettoboy cool attitude. “All right, Fareek—tell Mr. White who the young woman is!” In a bored, barely audible voice the Cannon said, “Some white girl goes to Tech.” “‘Some white girl goes to Tech’!” said McNutter. “Tell Mr. White what some-white-girl-goes-to-Tech’s name is, Fareek! Tell him her name!” “I ’unno.” “In a pig’s eye you don’t know!” roared McNutter. Then he turned to Roger Too White. “I’ll tell you who it is, Mr. White. Her name is Elizabeth Armholster. She’s Inman Armholster’s daughter, that’s who she is.” “You’re kidding!” said Roger Too White, in spite of himself, realizing too late that this was not a very professional response from anyone who fancied himself a high-powered lawyer.

“I’m not kidding,” said McNutter, “and he wants Fareek’s ass, and he wants Georgia Tech’s ass, and if we lose Fareek, then it’s my ass, too.” Inman Armholster. Inman Armholster was one of the first five names

you’d think of if the subject was the White Establishment in Atlanta. He was in every network worth networking with in this whole town. He was Old Family and Piedmont Driving Club all the way, and he was rich as Croesus. He could have been up on that terrace tonight, an...

Croker was almost bald, but his baldness was the kind that proclaims masculinity to burn—as if there was so much testosterone surging up through his hide it had popped the hair right off the top of his head.

Sirja was blond and sexy, too, wasn’t she … That little Finnish hooker—a notions buyer for a Helsinki department store!

How had he ever let a 105-pound Helsinki notions buyer do what she was now doing to him … With a sinking feeling, more of a nervous intuition than a thought, he realized that the Charlie Crokers of this world would never let any such thing happen to them …

on the walls a pair of NO SMOKING signs glowered down upon the Croker Global crew with the sort of this-means-you lettering you might expect to find in the cracking unit of an oil refinery, but not at a conference of twenty-four ladies and gentlemen of banking and commerce in the PlannersBanc Tower in Midtown Atlanta.

He’d call him Mr. Croker as coldly as he could, by way of letting him know that things have changed, that he was no longer a star customer, a priceless pal, and an Atlanta business giant; he was just another shithead.

“Look,” said Charlie Croker, “you may recall that one of your own people, Mr. John Sycamore, assured us over and over again that if—” “Mr. Sycamore’s no longer on the case.” “That may be, but—” “Mr. Sycamore is no longer a factor here.” “Yeah, but the fact is, he was your representative, and he practically got down on his knees and—” “Mr. Sycamore’s hopes—” “—begged us to take that last $180 million loan and assured us—” “Mr. Sycamore’s hopes—” “—if any situation arose regarding the payback schedule, he—” “Mr. Sycamore’s hopes and dreams, whatever they were, no longer exist so far as the obscene mess we have now is concerned. They disappeared down the memory hole.”

“Gimme the cars, Sheldon.”

Harry said, “Seven company cars … Sell ’em.”

“Those cars are in constant use,” said Croker. “Besides, suppose we sold ’em—to the distinct disadvantage of our operations, by the way. What are we talking about here? A couple of hundred thousand dollars.” “Hey!” said the Artiste with a big smile. “I don’t know about you, but I have great respect for a couple of hundred thousand dollars. Besides, your arithmetic’s a little off. It’s five hundred and ninety-three thousand. A thousand more insignificant items like that and we’ve got half a billion and plenty to spare. See how easy it is? Sell ’em.”

“Gimme the air...

a Gulfstream Five.” Then he looked up at Croker and, in a voice like W. C. Fields’s, repeated: “A Gulfstream Five … a Gee-Fiiiiiiive …

“Sell ’em. From now on we’re gonna be like the Vietcong. We’re gonna travel on the ground and live off the land.”

“It says here you got a stud named First Draw, and he’s worth three million dollars.” He lifted his big chin and peered down his nose at Croker. “That’s true,” said Croker. Harry said, “First Draw … Does that horse’s name by any chance allude in some way to the proceeds of a real estate construction loan?” Sniggers and guffaws from the PlannersBanc end of the table; and not even Croker’s somber young Wismer Stroock could resist a small smile.

“I understand pain. I understand suffering. I understand the human cost.” Now he looked up, straight at Croker, with a gaze that bespoke the utmost sincerity. “I’ve been there. I was in the war … I lost four fingers …” With that he raised his right fist above his head as high as it would go, with the back of his hand twisted toward Croker, so that it looked like a stump of a hand with only the ridges of the four big knuckles remaining. Then he extended a single finger upward, his middle finger, and kept it that way, a look of quizzical sadness on his face. “Sell it,” he said.

“Did you say cactus?” asked Croker. “Right,” said the Artiste. “So if you’ll just step outside for a little while, we’ll appreciate it.” “Are you trying to say caucus?” Croker was all but snarling. “No, cactus,” said the Artiste with a merry smile. “This time we want all the pricks on the outside.”

As I remember, you used to laugh at all this Afrocentric business. I remember one night—when

was it?—’87?—’88—you made so much fun of Jesse Jackson and his ‘African-American’ pronouncement at that press conference—you remember?—wherever it was—Chicago, I think—that press conference where he started everybody using ‘African-American’ instead of ‘black’?—you remember that night—you

And when these gay-rights groups, who are all white boys, of course, start trying to compare their ‘struggle’—it’s always ‘struggle’—with our folks’—I mean, they’re comparing a lot of white boys hugging and kissing each other with a people rising up from slavery—it makes the smoke start coming out of your ears.

Miss Kingsley Croker … Serena and Kingsley and Heidi and Wally, and up on the third floor of the other wing was the Woo Dynasty: his cook, Nina Woo, and her sister, Jarmaine, the housekeeper, and Jarmaine’s son, Lin Chi.

Jesus Christ! What a menagerie! All these people to look after, support, pay for—all of them sleeping like tops, no doubt—while he has to wake up in the middle of the night with insomnia and go to the mat with phantom gains and a lot of other horrible nonsense.