Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

“Listen,” he said, trying desperately to talk from that sober clear center of himself, “I love you, but I want to go to bed with you.”

As soon as he said it, he realized the two things sounded contradictory, which maybe in awful fact they were, in his own body and mind.

“To bed?” she asked, with a mocking wide-eyed imitation of innocence. Her hand that was holding the drink dipped and some of the whiskey dripped in her lap.

Sonny wanted to say yes, to fuck, but what he said was “So we can have sexual intercourse.”

She giggled, and he stared down into the warm brown hell of his drink.

Gail finished off her own drink and stood up, wobbling a little.

“All right,” she said, and reached her hand in back of her neck. There was the sound of the zipper being glided down, and she pulled the dress up over her head and dropped it in a lump to the floor. She stood there looking at Sonny in her bra and panties and seamless stockings, just like the sexy babes in the jack-off magazines, but she was there, real, in the flesh, reachable and—oh, Holy God—fuckable. She burped, giggled, and then unhooked the stockings from the garters and rolled them down and off, teetering and swaying, flinging each stocking away with an ironic, stagy flair. They fell slowly, like punctured, long balloons.

“Well,” she asked with a sour smile, “Sexu-all Intercourse?”

Sonny started ripping at his shirt, like he was blind and crazy, tearing at himself as well as the cloth, trembling and yanking down his pants, wrenching off his shoes, pulling the socks off his feet, and in only his light-blue jockey shorts lunged at her, wrestling her down to the plush carpet. They rolled and grabbed and bit, clawed and scratched, tearing off what flimsy stuff still hid them until, panting, Gail reached between his legs and said, “Oh, God.”

His cock was limp and useless.

“Listen, it’ll be all right,” he promised in a panting desperation. “You’ll see, it will be, just wait—”

“Oh, God,” she said again.

Sonny rolled away from her, mashing his face in the carpet and cursing Buddie Porter, who could make him get hard when he didn’t even care, and cursing himself for not being able to get hard when he cared so much he felt it would kill him. He shut off a scream that was rising from his chest, rolled over, grabbed the girl, and pressed himself on her, biting and fumbling in a messy mixture of fear and desire, and he felt down to his unresponsive cock that was growing just a little, tauntingly halfway there, and tried to work it inside her, but it shrank back, receding inside him, and she rolled away, muffling herself face down on the carpet, her creamy little ass heaving up and down in spasms against the floor. Sonny reached out and tentatively touched the back of her neck and she jerked away in a scooting motion across the floor, lying still, and then after a while, in a flat, dry final-sounding voice, said, “Leave me alone.”

Sonny thrust his right hand inside his mouth and bit down as hard as he could. He wanted to kill himself, he wanted to die.

“Please,” she murmured, “go away.”

Sonny jumped up in a furious, gripping panic and wrestled his clothes on, relentlessly, tearing and pulling, shoved his ridiculous feet in his shoes without any socks and blindly started for the stairway, looking for Gunner, but after he grabbed the banister he heard the steady rhythmic thump thump thump of real sex, flesh pounding on flesh, and the place where the terrible movies ran through his head lit up with a neon sign that said Don’t ruin it for everyone else , and he turned away and fled, out of the house, into the crickety night.

He never really knew how he got the mile or so back home; only remembered falling and starting again and clutching at fences and lightposts and throwing up in somebody’s yard and tossing his shoes with a dumb, quick clatter on the stone apron of a filling station, and running a barefoot, mindless, nothing-headed one-man race in which each step on anything sharp or hurting brought relief out of punishing pain, and falling, somehow, falling and finding his own single bunk of a hunk of an empty bed.

He hit the pillow and slept for a fragment of uneasy time, knocked out the way you would be if your head hit a stone. He woke with a start, wondering where he was, and much worse, who, and worse than that even, why. He reached for his cock to see if it still was there, and it was, but withdrawn, unfunctional, defeated, for all purposes dead, and Sonny came coldly awake, with a single-toned hum in his head like a note struck on a pitchfork.

He stepped quietly to the bathroom, switched on the light, and closed the door behind him. Despising the face he saw in the mirror, he yanked the mirror door open and surveyed the bottle-crammed jumbled insides of the medicine cabinet. He slipped out a packet of Gillette Blue Blades. Sponsors of sporting events. Well, there would be an event all right, he didn’t know how sporting. Some said bullfighting wasn’t a sport, but a ritual. A ritual of death. Kill the bull and spare yourself. Spare the rod and spoil the child. Here’s the church and here’s the steeple, open the doors and here’s the people. Sonny unwrapped the blue-paper jacket with a picture of Mr. Gillette on it and pulled out the naked blade, flat and black. He held it in his right hand, admiring the efficient, cold beauty of it. Be razor-sharp, with Gillette. He brought his left hand toward his face, palm up, and stared with fascination at the faint tracks of the veins in his wrist. They were supposed to be blue, but they looked more like turquoise. He had never really examined them before. They seemed too delicate and small to carry the blood of a person’s life. Maybe if they were severed, the rest of the blood in your body came rushing to the opening, like water flooding through a hole in the dike. Hans Brinker held his finger in the dike and saved a city. What city was it? Amsterdam, Rotterdam. Who gives a damn?

Sonny took the blade and made a slight, tentative scratch on his wrist. Enough to make blood come. Not a lot, but still real blood, surprisingly red and real. Sonny made a braver scratch, and then two or three in a row, quickly, so that little rivulets of blood began to flow together, forming a thick little puddle. It looked very beautiful, and Sonny started crying, not with any noise, just feeling the warm run of tears down his cheeks, and yet he was smiling at the same time. He started smearing the blood over his face and over the front of his torn shirt, like an Indian painting himself to prepare for a ceremony—a battle, a blessing, a death. Sonny sat down on the seat of the toilet, making a few more cuts and watching the new blood. He hadn’t really hit any vein that he could tell, but the blood came sliding out, pooling, running down into his hand, and Sonny watched it with a growing sense of calm, a deepening, cleansing relief, such as he had never known. He felt it was easier to breathe, easier to live; a horrible pressure in his head had subsided.

When he understood that he was not killing himself, that he didn’t intend to do that—right then, anyway—the first thing he thought of was that anyone who found out about it would think he was a chicken, a showboat searching for sympathy. He had always thought that himself about people who cut their wrists but didn’t really kill themselves—they were objects of pity and contempt, poor bastards so botched that they couldn’t even succeed at their own death, or so mulingly sick for attention and love they could think of no way to gain it except to fake a suicide attempt and have the scars to show it. Sonny knew a guy in college who cut his wrist a couple times and always went around afterward with a lot of Band-Aids so everyone could tell what happened, and everyone laughed at him and thought him a coward and a fraud. But now Sonny understood that cutting yourself might not have anything to do with suicide or even sympathy, that it was a very private act, a thing of its own; a self-treatment, perhaps, like the lancing of a wound—the lancing of the wound of living. And it really had helped. Maybe that’s why they really did it in the Middle Ages, the bloodletting cure, administered when they didn’t know what else to do. As Sonny had administered it to himself. He felt cleaner and freer than he had in a long time, but also very much afraid. He vaguely understood there were forces in him, powers and impulses he couldn’t control, that might kill him yet.