Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

“With Buddie?”

Sonny clenched his fists, then worked them open and shut, open and shut. “No,” he said.

“Who’s the big date then?” she asked cheerily.

“There isn’t any big date! There isn’t any kind of date! I’m going to pick up Gunner and go have a beer or go to a movie or something!”

“There’s no need to yell. I just asked.”

He let out a deep breath. “O.K. I’m sorry.”

Mrs. Burns opened her purse and fished out the car key. It dangled from a chain with a bright plastic daisy on it.

Sonny started to reach for the key but then pulled his hand back, not wanting to grab. Instead of handing him the key, she held it in her open palm, staring down at it.

“Sonny?”

“Yes.”

“I know you’re in real thick with that Casselman boy. I just hope you influence him , instead of letting him—”

“For Christ sake! He’s not a ‘boy.’ I’m not a ‘boy.’ Don’t give me that crap!”

Mrs. Burns bit her lip and her head jerked to the side, as if she’d been slapped. Her eyes squeezed shut so hard it contorted her whole face. Sonny fought back a scream. He wanted to tell her to mind her own fucking business and keep her goddam nose out of his life.

But he needed the car.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Tears slid down from her squeezed eyes.

“Don’t,” he said. “Please.”

Her hands fumbled blindly in her purse and came up with a wadded Kleenex that she dabbed at her eyes, without opening them.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Take the wagon.”

The key was lying in her lap, and Sonny reached down and plucked it out, the way you would reach in and pick a coin from a fire. He stuck the key in his pocket and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“Thanks,” he said.

Sniffling, she dug in her purse again, pulled out a wadded bill, and pressed it into his hand. He stuffed it in his pocket, not looking at it. Almost every time he went out, she gave him a five- or a ten-dollar bill. They never spoke about it, and Sonny tried not to think about it. He just took it.

“Thanks,” he said.

He stood for a moment more and then walked to the door. When his hand touched the knob, his mother’s voice, not quite steady yet, called, “Sonny?”

“Yes?”

Sniffing and sobbing, she called through her still-trickling tears, “Have a good time!”

“Thanks,” he said and walked out.

Gunner said he really had a thirst on him and suggested they go tip a few at the Topper, down on Illinois Street. The Topper had a combo but it didn’t come on until around nine, and in the early evening the place was pretty quiet. Gunner told Sonny all about The Lonely Crowd , and how he realized he had always been “other-directed” most of his life, and hoped now he was getting more “inner-directed,” doing what he believed in himself and not giving a shit what the crowd thought. He said Sonny had probably been more of an “inner-directed” kind of guy right from the start, and he wished that he had too, he wouldn’t have wasted so much time on Mickey Mouse crap like fraternities. Sonny accepted the compliment, just as if it were the truth. He really figured he wasn’t any kind of “directed,” he just got blown along by things.

Sonny tried to remember something deep from the couple of essays of Emerson he had skimmed, just to throw something into the conversation to show he read intellectual stuff himself, but the few phrases and thoughts he could bring to mind were wispy and fleeting, nothing you could really grab hold of. Gunner ordered them another round and lit a cigarette. It had suddenly gone dark outside, and one of those quick, drenching showers came that splattered on the plate-glass windows and pummeled the sidewalk and street with streaks of silver and then, with a grumble of thunder, passed on. The guys didn’t say anything for the three or four minutes of the rain, but just watched and listened to it. They were sitting at a table by the open door. No one had bothered to close it during the shower, and the fresh smell of the rain drifted in through the stale, beery air of the bar. It was like some deep, poignant perfume mixed of elemental things. Both guys shifted restlessly in their chairs. Gunner stabbed out his cigarette, half finished.

“Man,” he said, “what I wouldn’t give for a nice, new piece of ass.”

“Yeh,” Sonny said. He had felt it himself with the furious rain and the moist, lingering odor it left.

“Something real soft and tender,” Gunner said.

“Ooooh, baby.”

“I’d give my left nut to be in Kyoto right now.”

“God,” Sonny said. He imagined a sweet, gentle Japanese girl, slowly and artfully removing a silken robe, beckoning to him as she spread her sweet-smelling body over a golden divan. A flickering lamp, throwing long shadows. A soft rain, washing the exotic emerald foliage outside the window.…

“But the fact is,” Gunner said, “we’re at Thirty-fourth and Illinois Street, in the Topper, in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.A.”

Sonny’s dream disappeared with the very sounding of names that identified his present location. He took a drink of beer and said, “How about DeeDee?”

“No thanks. Not till she gets off that marriage kick.” Gunner poured his glass full again. “Besides,” he said, “how about Buddie, for you?”

Sonny shrugged. “I dunno.”

“See? That’s what I thought.”

“What?”

“It’s not just getting laid we want. A guy can get laid anytime. It’s something— extra . More. At least new. Different.”

“Yeh, you’re right.”

Gunner was always saying stuff that Sonny felt himself but never said, fearing it might sound wrong or that other people wouldn’t know what he meant and would think he was a little weird or something.

“Maybe we ought to go hunting,” said Gunner.

“You want to?”

“No harm in trying.”

“Hell, no,” Sonny said and waved at the waitress to bring more beer. He had spent more evenings like that than he cared to remember, cruising around with another guy and trying to pick up some tail, getting drunker and hornier as the prizes eluded them, or scorned them, or were won by others, right in front of the eyes of the losers. Long, muddled evenings when the need filled you up like a horrible pressure that wiped out everything else and was finally relieved at home in the shameful unworld of fantasy under the covers, in the lonesome dark, shot. But maybe with Gunner it would be different. Gunner had guts and lean good looks, and success was a habit with him. That was the most important thing of all, that aura of success; the cunts could smell it on you. They could sniff a loser from here to South Bend. With their eyes closed.

“Remember Donna Mae Orlick?” Gunner asked, rubbing his chin. “Waitress at the Ron-D-Vu?”

Sonny laughed. “Who doesn’t?” he said, just as if he’d fucked her himself. It seemed like everybody else had. Donna Mae was famous. She mostly liked jocks, though. Even in a literal sense. Sonny heard that Donna Mae had done it once for Rip Stolley, who was “Mr. Basketball” of Indiana in his senior year in high school and went on to be All-American at Purdue, and Donna Mae had got him to give her one of his old jockstraps. She carried this moldy old jockstrap around in her purse for a couple years, and was always whipping it out to impress somebody, though the sight of a cruddy jockstrap—even when it came from “Mr. Basketball”—was enough to make most guys toss their cookies. Some of the other waitresses swore that it wasn’t Rip Stolley’s jockstrap anyway, but that might have just been because they were jealous.

“I don’t even know if she’s around anymore,” Gunner said. “Jesus, I haven’t been back in a year and a half. We could buzz the D-Vu, though, and ask around.”