Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

Gunner was talking to them, making a lot of gestures, and Sonny could tell he was pouring it on, but he didn’t seem to be making much headway. They just kept staring at him and chomping on the gum, and finally he threw up his hands like he gave up, and they turned away real huffy and went off waving their tails even harder. The goddam prick-teasing bitches—boy, would Sonny like to fuck them till their ears fell off. As if he could. Maybe after his cure, though.…

“Screw ’em,” Gunner said when he came back. “Let’s haul ass outa here,” and Sonny didn’t ask him anything more about it.

They kept going north until it got dark, and stopped at a little diner, one with oilcloth on the tables that had coffee stains and a couple dead flies mashed into it, and one of those big old stand-up electric fans that made a lot of noise and just blew the hot air around. Gunner had the pork-chop special dinner, with peas and mashed potatoes, and three Cokes and two pieces of gluey blueberry pie with vanilla ice cream. Sonny had a grilled AC and a glass of iced tea.

“I know a guy in Chicago,” Gunner said, “where we can probably sack out for a while. If he’s still there. He was a young guy at the agency.”

“Great.”

“If he’s not married.”

Gunner rolled his napkin into a ball and said, “Shit, he wouldn’t get married. He was getting laid all over Chi.”

Gunner lit up a cigarette, and Sonny had one too.

“’Course we don’t have to get to Chi tonight,” he said. “We don’t have to get anywhere. We’ll just take off and see what happens.”

“Terrific.”

What happened was they ended up in Cal City around ten o’clock at night.

Sonny had heard about Calumet City ever since high school, but he’d never been there. He always wanted to go, but he’d have been afraid to do it on his own. You had to be careful or you’d get beat up and rolled. A lot of guys from the region who worked in the steel mills would come into Cal City and get horny and loaded out of their skulls and what they didn’t blow in the bars and the strip joints they might get rolled for by the thugs who were just waiting for a guy who’d cashed a big paycheck. Or a serviceman. Or a couple of veterans. But Gunner knew the ropes.

“It’s really a crappy place when you get right down to it,” Gunner said, “but if you’ve never been there you ought to go at least once.” He laughed and said, “See Cal City and die.”

There was this main street all lit up like a carnival with flashing neon signs and barkers trying to get you in the strip joints, all of them saying the main attraction was just coming on no matter what was actually happening. It was just a little country-town street except that it was nothing but bars and strip joints, and all that mothering neon glaring and blinking in the night, and behind it, in the sky, the reddish-orange glow from the steel mills, like the skyline of hell.

They went in a joint called the Port O’ Call, pushing their way past sailors and servicemen and brawny guys from the mills, and they got a table pretty near the stage. You had to drink a minimum then, but at least you could sit down and not get crunched by the other horny bastards. Gunner advised they only drink beer, since usually all the other drinks were watered. They ordered two beers and had barely started to drink when these two really sexy-looking fairly young babes slid off their stools at the bar and kind of slinked over and asked if the guys wouldn’t like to buy them a drink. Sonny could feel himself start trembling and getting hot and if he could’ve gotten a word out he’d have told them sure, but Gunner said, “No, thanks, ladies, not in the market, sorry, no chance —” and made a swift, short gesture with his hand, like he was cutting off any further talk about it, that was all she wrote, the end, curtains. They took the hint, but before slinking back to the bar, one of them, a really young-looking pretty girl with big eyes and thick brown hair with bangs, blew a contemptuous puff of smoke at Gunner and said, “Screw, punk.”

Gunner just laughed. “They’re B-girls,” he said. “Just B-girls. They let you rub your hand up around their pussy if you buy ’em enough fake champagne, but that’s all you get, for something like twenty bucks, maybe.”

“Yeh, I know,” Sonny said.

He knew because he had been one of the suckers who did that once when he was stationed in Kansas City. He knew it was a B-girl place but he was loaded and all sexed up and this girl was being real nice and chummy and gave him the usual bullshit about how she’d meet him later at an all-night drugstore down the street and he actually went and hung around the damn place about forty-five minutes before he got the idea. Guys are really stupid when it comes to stuff like that. Mainly because they believe the damn girl, even though they know what the setup is. Sonny even told the girl that he really liked her, “as a person.” Oh, his aching ass.

And still he’d been ready to buy that one a drink, who had just come over, telling himself that, well, he’d find out if she was just a B-girl, maybe she was the real thing. He’d be tough about it and find out just what the price was and where they’d go, and if she was just giving him the come-on, he’d kick her ass out and not buy her any more drinks. Probably that’s what most of the guys told themselves. Every time they went back and every time they spent twenty bucks or so for some watered drinks and a little feel. The thing that really shook Sonny was that these weren’t just kids, or innocent servicemen away from home for the first time, or boozed-up businessmen getting taken for a ride, these were goddam steelworkers , the brawniest, biggest, toughest, hardest he-men in the goddam country. Which didn’t speak too damn well of the country.

“It’s sick,” Gunner said. “It really is sick.”

“Fuckin’-A,” Sonny agreed.

A stripper came on, one of the old ones with sagging tits and blotchy legs. Those kind are usually the worst doing their act, too, because they know they’re not much to get sexed up about, so they try to act real bored and like they don’t give a shit. Sonny could understand how they felt, in a way, maybe he’d do the same thing if he were them. If they really gave it all they had and tried hard and nobody clapped or got worked up or anything, it would really make them feel bad. But this way, by not even trying, they could figure that if no one paid much attention to them it was because they weren’t really trying. Gunner looked over the stripper and went back to talking again.

“They say prostitution is evil,” he said. “But at least with a whore you actually get something, you at least get your rocks off. What’s really sick, if you ask me, is the B-girl shit where you pay all that money for just looking and thinking about it, but not really doing it.”

“Do they have that in other countries, the B-girl thing, where nothing actually happens?”

“Yeh, but not as much as here. The thing about Japan is, there are places like that but there are also places where you can really go and get laid. And damn well, too.”

“It must be great,” Sonny said. “To know it’s there if you want it.”

“Sure it is. Hell, if you had a real prostitution system set up here, with clean girls, I bet you wouldn’t have all your alcoholics and all your suicides. I mean—well, I’m sorry. I was just talking in general.”

Sonny could feel himself blushing, but he knew Gunner hadn’t meant to get him thinking about his wrist, and besides, he figured Gunner was right.

“The thing about the way it is here, in America,” Sonny said, “is that they get you thinking about it all the time, there’s all this stuff to get you sexed up, and then a lot of the time you can’t do anything about it. It’d be better if they had women wearing those old Puritan outfits with dresses down to their shoes, and cover everything up, and just try to forget about it unless you’re married. But the way it is now you see all these boobs and great-looking legs every day, and there are sexy ads of women in their underwear in all the papers and magazines, and strip shows and B-girls and dirty movies and jack-off magazines, and then after you’re all fired up by all this stuff coming at you all the time, if you don’t have a regular girl or something, what can you do? Guys like Billy Graham talk about all the sex and how our society is corrupted by so much sex, but it’s mostly to look at, not to touch. It’s like putting a kid in this great toy store and then telling him he can look at all the terrific toys but he can’t really have any of them or play with any of them.”