Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

Take more pictures

—Send for university catalogs

Graduate schools

—photography?

—Get some sun

He was tapping the pencil against his teeth, thinking of other constructive things to do, when the phone rang. It was Gunner, sounding very mysterious. He said he had something to show Sonny but it wouldn’t be quite ready for another few days. He’d call him when it was.

Sonny felt much better after the call. He was sure the phone had rung at that particular time because he was already going ahead on his own with constructive plans, not depending on his friend. That’s the way things worked—if you sat around waiting for something to happen, it never did, but if you forgot about it and made yourself get on with things, what you wanted to happen would happen. Sonny felt rather pleased with himself and wondered if his insight might not make a fine, memorable essay, the wise sort of thing that Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. Maybe he would try it sometime.

In the meantime he got on his bathing suit and snuck outside, behind the breezeway on the side away from the street, where he spread out a blanket and lay down to get some sun. Buddie’s remark had gotten to him. He hated to go to a pool or the lake or any place white as a sheet when everyone else was already tan, and he figured maybe he could get a secret little coat of coloring by making himself lie out behind the house for an hour a day.

He wondered what the secret thing was Gunner wanted to show him, and suspected it was probably a painting. It would probably show great promise and mark Gunner as a rising young Picasso. That was the kind of luck that guy had. Sonny tried not to feel resentful about it. He turned over from his stomach onto his back. His feet stuck out over the blanket and the grass tickled them. The sun was uncomfortably hot, and Sonny had to squint, even behind his dark glasses. He looked at his watch and found that only seven minutes had passed. Son of a bitch. He rolled back over on his stomach, closing his eyes and trying to keep his mind from falling into memories of old frustrations and failures, but it was hard to control the damn thing. It seemed like there was a movie running in his mind all the time, a movie that showed all kinds of terrible shit he had done and had happened to him and that he might do and might happen to him in the future, and Sonny couldn’t seem to stop the movie when his mind didn’t have other things to distract it, like talking or reading or watching TV. After a while he felt some perspiration on the back of his legs and decided it was time to go on. He had only been out twelve minutes, but he couldn’t lie there anymore. He went upstairs and took a long, lukewarm shower, sitting down in the stall and closing his eyes so that the water made a safe, enclosed world.

Gunner called a couple days later and said he was ready to show Sonny what he’d been working on and would like to meet him at the Key that afternoon around three. That seemed a funny place to look at a painting, a bar that was dark even in the brightest part of the day, but Sonny didn’t ask any questions. He put on a short-sleeved sport shirt, the kind you didn’t have to tuck in, and he let it hang out over his khakis so no one could see that the top button was open. He couldn’t get it buttoned anymore.

The day was bright hot, and as usual it took a little while to get your eyes focused to the bleary afternoon darkness inside the bar. There was an old guy sitting near the front, wearing a checked shirt and suspenders and an old felt hat. He was muttering to himself. Aside from the old guy and the bartender, there only seemed to be one other person in the place, farther to the back. Sonny walked toward him, blinking and squinting. Even when he got right up to him, staring him right in the face, he had to ask, “Gunner?”

The man smiled. “It is I, Agent X-Twenty-seven,” he said.

It was only his voice that affirmed his identity for sure. Sonny fumbled a chair out from the table and sat down.

“You betray a certain shock,” Gunner said, sounding pleased.

“Yeh, that’s right. I do, I am,” Sonny said, which was putting it mildly.

Gunner had a beard.

Not the kind of beard he used to grow by just not shaving a couple days before a football game so he’d look more tough and mean. This was a real, honest-to-goodness beard, bristling out of his cheeks and chin, a full-scale bush of a beard like the ones that Lincoln and Jesus and the Smith Brothers had.

It was one thing for guys like Jesus and Lincoln and the Smith Brothers to have beards. They were dead. Besides, they lived in times when other people had beards, too. But this was not such a time, not by a long shot. Having a beard in the summer of 1954 was like running around without any clothes on or passing out copies of the Communist Manifesto or reading a dirty book in a crowded bus. It was asking for trouble. As far as Sonny knew, the only living people who had beards were poor bums who couldn’t afford a razor and the guys who lived at the House of David, which was some kind of religious sect up in Michigan. People didn’t mind the House of David guys having beards because they were obviously harmless crackpots, and sort of funny. The House of David had a baseball team and it was quite a big attraction because people couldn’t imagine how guys could have beards and also play baseball at the same time.

“What’ll ya have?” Gunner asked.

“Huh?”

“You want a beer?”

“Oh, yeh. I’ll have a Bud.”

“Bring the man a Bud, would you please?” Gunner called to the bartender, just as if nothing was wrong. When the bartender brought the beer, he looked gloweringly at Gunner and then suspiciously at Sonny, as if they were some kind of criminals, or worse, maybe Commies. It made Sonny nervous. Being a friend of a guy who had a beard was the next worse thing to actually having one yourself.

“How does it look?” Gunner asked.

“The beard?”

“What else?”

“Well, it’s a swell beard, all right. If you want to have a beard.”

“What’s wrong with having a beard?”

“I didn’t say anything was wrong with it. If you want to have it.”

“Well, since I have it, that must mean I want to have it.”

“Yeh, but how come you want to have it?” Sonny asked.

Gunner swigged some beer from right out of the bottle. It was evidently easier to drink from the bottle if you had a beard. Less chance of spilling.

“It’s a theory I got,” Gunner said. He was always getting theories. “The beard itself is neutral,” he explained. “There’s nothing good or bad about a beard by itself, right? It’s just a lot of whiskers. Anyone could grow them.”

Sonny nodded, but suddenly wondered if he could grow a beard himself, even if he wanted to. Not that he’d ever dream of doing it, but he feared that if he actually tried it might just come out fuzz, little-boy fuzz, instead of real manly bristles.

“The thing is, not many people have them anymore,” Gunner went on. “So if you have one it makes you different. It makes people treat you different even though you’re the same person. It’s the closest thing a guy like me could come to being a foreigner, here, in my own home town, knowing what a foreigner would feel like here, how he might be treated, what it would be like.”

“What do you think you’ll find out?”

“I don’t even know yet,” Gunner said, and then he smiled. “But I will.”

It kind of gave Sonny the creeps, though he didn’t want to let on. It seemed like just his luck, Gunner growing a goddam beard right when Sonny got to be his friend. Hanging around in Indianapolis with Gunner Casselman made you feel special, like you were somebody, but now that he had gone and grown a beard it could only make you feel silly and a little bit scared. Sonny was afraid that Gunner could tell he felt that way, and he didn’t want to show it. In a way the beard was a test of their friendship, and Sonny was determined to pass. He was damned if he’d let himself fink out like he usually did when he was worried about what “everyone” thought.