Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

He climbed up the cunning little stepladder to the top bunk and rolled onto it. Luke Matthews made a sleepy snort and tossed below him. Maybe he was dreaming of his old, evil days. The book hadn’t said exactly what the horrible shit was that Luke had done, but it must have been pretty awful to get him all that time in jail. Murder, maybe; rape, at least. Maybe old Luke had been a sex fiend. Maybe even a queer one, you couldn’t be sure. A lot of the religious guys went in for that sort of stuff. There was one guy Sonny’s mother brought home to save him during a college vacation who supposedly healed people by faith, but Sonny didn’t go for the method of treatment. The Reverend Brownlow, who traveled with a mannish-looking wife and spoke often and glowingly of his young son who went to Florida State on an athletic scholarship, took Sonny into the bedroom and told him wonderful things would happen if Sonny would only kiss his white little flittish hands and say, “I love you,” three times. Sonny didn’t want to find out what the wonderful thing was and the Reverend Brownlow, shaky and perspiring, prayed that God would love him anyway. For all Sonny knew, Luke Matthews might favor similar methods of treatment, given the opportunity. Just because a guy was craggy-looking didn’t mean he wasn’t queer.

Sonny tried not to think about it. He tried to shut his mind and go to sleep, but he found that his hand was moving with a homing pigeon’s habit-formed aim toward his prick. It was soft, and that only made him feel more urgently the need to make it hard. He thought of Marty the Jewish girl, remembering the way she carefully picked the little fleck of cigarette ash off her lower lip—that thin and sensuous, cool and arrogant lip. Sonny felt excited and yet, even though he coddled and stroked and massaged his prick, he couldn’t get it hard, and that made him frantic. He had started to jounce around a little in the effort to coax his cock to attention, and telltale squeaking sounds began to escape from the bedsprings. He heard Luke Matthews stir below, and held himself perfectly still, barely breathing. Jesus, you couldn’t jack off in the top bunk of your All-American-boy double-decker bed when a goddam professional Holy Man named Luke Matthews was sleeping in the bunk underneath! Or maybe the craggy old God-peddler was only pretending to be asleep, lying in wait to catch Sonny in the awful act and make him repent for his sins.

Sonny took his hand away from his uncooperative cock and put both hands under his pillow in the form of prayer. He concentrated hard on thinking of healthy, unsexy stuff. The courageous battles of World War II, Flying Fortresses raining vengeance on the evil enemy. Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer … crisp autumn afternoons, and football. Knute Rockne, All-American. The Fighting Irish of Notre Dame. “Outlined against the blue-gray October sky, the four horsemen rode again.” The Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. Most people could only name you three. The hard one was Miller. Don Miller. Most anyone could name you Stuhldreher, Crowley, and Layden. Elmer Layden, the fullback. When Sonny was a kid he had a game called “Elmer Layden’s Official College Football,” one of those board games painted like a playing field, a little metal football you moved back and forth and a tube with three dice you shook after calling a play to see how much yardage you made. Elmer Layden’s Official College Football …

Oh, God in heaven. Sonny remembered something about the Elmer Layden game that he didn’t want to remember at all. It was just the opposite of the healthy-crisp-autumn-afternoon sort of thing he was trying to concentrate on. After he got to high school he never played the Elmer Layden game anymore but it still sat around in his closet, along with Monopoly, Chinese Checkers, Photo-Electric Football, and Champion Ice Hockey, which consisted of a long metal plate with a little goalie at each end that you could turn around real fast with a knob and have them slam a marble back and forth with their sticks. He had outgrown them all, but found a new use for the Elmer Layden football game—a use that would have probably made Elmer Layden, All-American, puke with disgust. The cardboard “playing field” of the game was hollow underneath, so if you lifted it out there was a secret kind of box, a hiding place that no one was likely to discover. Sonny had used that innocent-seeming, All-American-appearing place to hide the dirty sex magazines he started buying in high school whenever he worked up the nerve to go downtown to the stores that sold them, stores that reeked of guilt and filth, where no one except the lewd old bastards at the cash register looked anyone else in the eye; those smutty, gray-faced perversion profiteers who sneered at you as they put the magazines you bought into the telltale plain brown paper sack. The magazines Sonny bought had names like Titter and Wink and Peek , and inside were pictures of impossibly sexy babes wearing black-silk stockings and elaborate garter belts and skyscraper heels, lolling their tongues in their luscious mouths, kicking their shapely legs in the air, adjusting the strap of their lacy brassieres that could barely hold in those pointed boobs. They promised the most unusual sort of evil erotic excitement and stimulation. Sonny would flip through the paper with a feeling of unslakable thirst, imagining what he’d like to do and have done to him by the different women, deciding which one he’d jack off to after he had sized up the whole gallery, playing out the scene in his fantasy, speaking the fake name of the woman in the picture that the magazine gave them to help you pretend they were real, and then setting his hard cock against the inside left part of his thigh so he could lie on it and rub back and forth without having to use his hand (a technique that seemed in its pretense more nearly like actual fucking). He would feel himself swell with a throbbing, incredible ecstasy that grew so intense it was almost unbearable until it burst, blotting out his mind in an ultimate blind moment of release, leaving him spent and limp, sprawled on the sticky result of his fantasy.

Afterward the magazine would seem sickening to him and he’d hide it away, as quickly as possible, under the green-cardboard football field, and stick the Elmer Layden game box underneath the Monopoly set in the closet. When it was over he felt lousy and dirty, and the magazines that only moments before had displayed the pictures of a paradise prized above everything else suddenly seemed ugly, shabby, shameful, embarrassing, and sick. In his nauseous revulsion he would sometimes stick them back in their plain brown paper sacks and and sneak down to the basement and shove them in the furnace, watching them burn to the black crisp oblivion they deserved. Then usually after a couple of weeks he would wish he still had them, feel a need for their pictures as deep as the urgent thirst that comes with a hangover, and he cursed himself for destroying the magazines, knowing he would have to put himself through the humiliating ordeal of going downtown to those smelly stores and forcing himself to do it all again.

Sonny hadn’t used the Elmer Layden game ever since he went into service; when he got out of basic and PIO school he and some other guys got an apartment off the base in Kansas City and Sonny kept his girlie magazines in an old college notebook that had a zipper on it. He had thrown the notebook and the magazines inside it away just before he got out of service, though, as part of the abolition of his past, of wiping the slate clean and starting fresh. He could have kept the zipper notebook and used it for something else, but he didn’t even want to be reminded of what he had used it for before. He felt sure that when his real life began he wouldn’t feel the need for those magazines of sexy fantasy, not only because it was an adolescent kind of thing but because he thought he wouldn’t need to pretend things then, he would actually do them, he would fuck sexy babes whenever he felt like it; until of course he met the just-right Rodgers-and-Hammerstein sort of girl across a crowded room and would fall in love forever and enjoy pure, legalized, clean, moral sex with his wife and be free of dirty thoughts and desire for the rest of his life. Actually, he originally thought that jacking off was just something you had to do until you fucked, and once you started fucking you didn’t feel the need for masturbation anymore. It surprised and depressed the hell out of him when after he fucked for the very first time, struggling and slipping and panting on a moonlit golf course with Buddie Porter, he came home and jacked off twice. He figured that must have been because he wasn’t madly in love with Buddie, maybe it was only when you started fucking girls you were madly in love with that you didn’t have to beat off anymore.