Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

Afterward they had a couple cool brews, and Sonny felt clean and strong.

“You really got it down cold, all that stuff,” Gunner said admiringly.

Sonny smiled and looked down at his brew. “Shee-it,” he said. With appropriate modesty.

They planned to go out and shoot some more film real soon. But when Gunner called the next day, he had plans of a more exotic nature.

“We’re choppin’ in tall cotton,” he announced.

“Yeh?”

“No shit. Nina’s got a date to go to Churchill Downs for the races. She’ll be in Louisville overnight and the place’ll be ours.”

“Hot damn.”

“Can you line up something for Saturday night?”

“Sure, I think so.”

“One of us can have the bedroom and the other the couch.”

“Great.”

“Remember DeeDee Armbrewster? Shortley girl I used to be pinned to and all that crap. She just got home from I.U. graduation and gave me a buzz. Sounds like she’s hot to trot.”

“Great.”

“Yeh. I’m a little on the horny side.”

Gunner was used to getting it regular. Sonny said very casually he’d line up something for himself and be ready for action. When he hung up, he felt a little panicky, and he went to his room and bolted down the lunch his mother had left. Then he put on a pair of undershorts and lit a cigarette. He didn’t like to smoke in the nude, for fear a hot ash might fall on his dick and damage it beyond repair. He was always thinking of things like that.

The problem now was who to get for Saturday night. If only this was happening back in Shortley or maybe even in college, he could get a lot of girls who’d just want to go on a date if they were going to be doubling with the great Gunner Casselman. Maybe some still even felt that way. Maybe that sexy Phyllis who Sonny saw at the Riviera. She used to go to Northwood Methodist, but now she was at nursing school, which probably meant she went all the way. Nurses were supposed to do everything. Sonny had meant to call her but for some reason he had put it off, and now it was too late. If he wasn’t absolutely sure she did the big trick, he didn’t want to take her to Gunner’s and feel like a greenass, just sitting out in the living room playing records while Gunner was humping away on DeeDee Armbrewster right in the next room. The only girl he was sure of was Buddie, and so, even though he didn’t really want to screw her anymore very much, he knew he had better take her. What the hell would Gunner think of him if he couldn’t produce a girl he could lay?

Gunner had been getting his ever since high school, everyone knew that, even Sonny. Even if you weren’t on the inside, the word got down to you somehow. Gunner did it right in the school building. He did it with Patty Mandrake on a table in the biology lab, he did it with Sissy Glisson down in the boiler room, he did it with DeeDee Armbrewster in the bushes by the side entrance of the building between the acts of the Annual Shortley Variety Show. He even did it in the back of the auditorium when they showed free movies at lunchtime. There were teachers snooping around sometimes but Gunner had Blow Mahoney for a lookout. Blow got his name because the thing he liked most in life was getting blown, and he talked about it all the time and greeted people by saying, “Hey, blow!” Sometimes he used to drive around the block at lunchtime in his old Model T, and when he first went around, you’d see Sandy Masterson sitting next to him, but then by the second time around you wouldn’t see Sandy at all, you’d just see Blow himself, driving along with a look of incredible ecstasy. When he didn’t drive to school he and Sandy would go to the lunchtime movies and do it there in the darkened back of the auditorium; and since Blow always sat upright in his seat while Sandy was giving it to him, he was happy to keep a lookout for Gunner at the same time, while Gunner was making it with DeeDee behind the last row of seats. Blow was happy to help out a friend, as long as it didn’t interfere with his own pastime.

Maybe because not many guys made out as much, everyone talked about the ones who did. Everyone in the whole city seemed to know what happened to Gunner when the night before the opening round of the state basketball tournament his senior year he twisted his ankle jumping out of the second-story bedroom window of Alison MacAdoo, whose father had come home unexpectedly early from a concert of the Scottish Rite Chorus. When Gunner hobbled onto the floor the next afternoon, his ankle all taped, the whole fieldhouse let up a roar, and everyone cheered, “We Want Gunner,” even the kids from other schools. He was a hero even though he didn’t get to play. It was like that in college, too, and even though Sonny was down at I.U. and not even in a fraternity, he heard stories of Gunner’s exploits at DePauw, like the time he got caught naked with a Theta on the roof of the Sigma Chi house by Mother Simmons and lost his scholarship for a full semester. And Gunner himself said Japan was the best he ever had.

Buddie, of course, was glad to accept Sonny’s invitation to “a party over at Casselman’s place,” which is how he had described the evening to her. Sonny consoled himself that even though he’d rather have a sexy new babe to go with, it would be a relief to have a comfortable private place to make out. Usually he and Buddie, like most everyone else they knew, had to do it in cars and on golf courses and fields of deserted farmhouses, where you were always getting caught in barbed wire or rolling onto old cowshit or worrying about getting bushwhacked. It seemed like unless you were married and had your own place, you had to be a combination acrobat, woodsman, and stud to ever make out. Which is why some kids got married, so they could fuck when they wanted without getting thorns in their ass or find themselves putting on a show for a bunch of bushwhackers. Sonny used to go bushwhacking himself when he was in high school, driving around with a carload of guys and sneaking up on some poor couple making out and then flashing a goddam spotlight on them and hooting and jeering and yelling a lot of dirty stuff and running away after spoiling things. It was a favorite sport.

Sonny really was hot for the idea of having Gunner’s place to do it in, without being bothered, but the trouble was, when the evening of the “party” came, he wasn’t at all in the mood. He’d have much rather gone out boozing with Gunner, or developed some pictures, or even just stayed home and watched television. That was always happening to him. It seemed like the need for sex came in waves, and for some reason whenever the sex was available the need was at its lowest ebb. The times when he seemed to be drowning with desire there was never anything around. Now with this great setup he couldn’t have cared less. If it just was a date he had with Buddie, he’d have made some excuse and got out of it, but he wouldn’t dream of backing out and letting Gunner suspect he wasn’t a regular guy who took it whenever he could get it.

Gunner came by and honked for Sonny after supper, and they went to pick up DeeDee.

“Listen, ole buddy, would you mind coming in?” Gunner asked him when they got to the Armbrewsters’. “DeeDee’s old lady’ll talk my ear off. She’s one of these amateur patriots, ya know?”

Sonny was afraid he knew all right—his mother was friends with some of those ladies—but he was happy to make things easier for Gunner if he could by going along. It was like talking to religious people, you felt more comfortable if you had a buddy with you.

Mrs. Armbrewster was a large woman with combs in her graying hair and a pair of rimless glasses that hung on a velvet ribbon around her neck. Mr. Armbrewster wasn’t around, and Gunner said later he seldom was; he worked long hours at his office and bowled a great deal.