A Man in Full

by Tom Wolfe

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