Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

He never really said all that to anyone before, but he sure as hell thought about it a lot. Sonny really trusted Gunner, knew he wouldn’t kid him about it like a lot of guys would. Most guys just try to sound like they’re big cocksmen and get all they want, and you have to pretend you do too, or they laugh and make cracks like maybe you’re a goddam queer or something. That was what Sonny liked about Sparky, him telling that story about the seven hundred bucks and not getting laid. Most guys would have pretended they had made out like bandits and had all these great call girls licking honey off their cock. That was something Sonny wanted to try sometime. Buddie would probably do it, but he didn’t want her to do it.

Gunner was nodding at what Sonny had said. “Too true,” he said. “Too true. Like Sparky spending the seven hundred bucks and not getting laid. In Japan, he could have bought him a girl for a couple months for that and she’d have washed and ironed and cooked for him on the side, and they would have lived in a nice house.”

They ordered more beers, and another stripper came on who wasn’t as bad as the first one. This one was younger and had a pouty kind of mouth, and kept rubbing her hands over her body like she really was hot for herself. There wasn’t a real band, just a record, and when it stopped and somebody backstage had to turn it over, the first broad had just stood there real bored like, but this one kept rubbing her hands around herself, cupping them under her boobs and admiring them, stuff like that. When she took off the evening-gown thing she started out with—they always started out with a long outfit like an evening gown, so you didn’t see too much at first and that made it seem like you were seeing more later—when she got down to the bra and panties, you could see this scar on her stomach. Maybe she had an abortion. Or maybe some wild lover gashed her with a knife. They said most strippers had pimps who beat the shit out of them a lot. When she took off her panties and bra and got down to just the pasties on the tits and the G-string with a little silvery thing covering her cunt, she turned around and wiggled her ass a lot and rubbed her hands over it, and a lot of guys clapped and whistled. Then at the end she slipped her finger under the string of the G-string like she was going to take it off and they yelled like mad, even though everybody knew she couldn’t take it off because it was against the law, but she rubbed her hand over the little silvery patch and looked pouty, like she wished she could take it off, and everybody liked that.

She was really the best at the Port O’ Call. They sat through the others, though, there were about five in all, and had about five beers watching them, and when the bored one with the flabby tits came on again, they paid the check and took off. They walked up the street, sort of window-shopping in the different joints—usually you couldn’t see too well inside, which made it easier for the doorman hustler to tell you something terrific was just starting ’cause it was hard to tell. You could look at the photographs, though, they all had photographs of the girls in sexy positions, like a theater marquee that shows you shots from the movie that is playing, except in some cases a great-looking girl in a picture outside might not be in there at all, they just had her picture, and inside were a bunch of old broads with flabby tits. Another thing they did to fool you was make up names for the strippers that were almost like the names of great strippers, but one letter or something was changed, so they couldn’t be sued for libel. Sonny almost got taken in, but Gunner set him straight. Sonny got all fired up when he saw that one place had the great Lilly St. Cyr, who is so sexy it is painful, but Gunner laughed and said, “Shit, man, you think Lilly St. Cyr is in Cal City?”

“Well, how can they say she is then, if she’s not?” Sonny asked.

“Look how they spell it,” Gunner pointed out.

The big sign spelled the last name “Cir” instead of “Cyr,” but it was close enough to have fooled Sonny and no doubt lots of other dumbasses, especially because you wanted it to be the real one, and so you helped fake yourself out. There was a lot of other cheating shit they did like that too. Like they went into this one place, the Arabian Nites, because outside was this picture of a delicate blond babe with a chain around her neck being carried off by a gorilla. They figured that was not to be missed, but there wasn’t any goddam gorilla at all, there was a blonde but she didn’t even have the chain around her neck. Gunner got pissed and he said to the MC, “Where’s the gorilla?”

“Where’s what gorilla, buster?” the MC said real smartass.

“The one outside in the picture,” Gunner insisted.

“Where’s the gorilla?” the MC asked in this smartass way to the audience, mocking Gunner. “Boy, we get a lot of weirdos in here, I tell ya that. Ya hung up on gorillas, go to the zoo.”

“How come you got him in the picture outside then?” Gunner asked, and suddenly from out of nowhere there’s this monster of a guy hulking over Gunner, wearing a shiny blue suit and a big diamond pinky ring and he says real calm but in a way you knew he wasn’t crapping around, “Let’s not have any trouble, boys. We don’t like having trouble here.”

“Sure,” said Gunner, and they finished their beers and cut out of there. They didn’t want any trouble, either, not from that guy. Not even Gunner. The bouncers they have in those places, you never notice them until something happens and then they appear on the spot, looking like they’d just as soon mash a guy’s nuts as look at him.

They hit a couple other places that didn’t have much worth writing home about, having a beer at the bar so they could see if it was worth taking a table but it wasn’t. Then they checked into another place called The Sharp Slipper, and there was a real Amazon blonde who looked worth taking in, so they got a table and caught the last of her act, which wasn’t too bad. There was at least a live combo there, the usual bored old zombie-looking gray-faced guys on sax and trumpet, and a colored fella on drums who looked pretty knocked out. He wasn’t your grinning happy kind of colored fella, but the kind who looked blank, like he’d seen stuff you wouldn’t even want to think about and he wanted you just to leave him alone. Sonny really felt awful when this goddam joking MC came on—those joking MCs in the strip joints, they look like they probably haven’t changed their underwear for five years even though they may have some terrible shiny new suit on, there’s something truly scummy about them—anyway this one told some shitass joke about the “Soo-preem Court Decision,” trying to imitate a colored guy’s accent, and Sonny never really got the joke if there was one, but there was a lot of stuff about “us coons” and “nigger heaven” and there were some guys who whooped and laughed. There are some guys who would whoop and laugh if you just said coon or nigger. All the time this colored guy was just sitting at his drums with a blank stare, not moving or changing his expression, just sitting through it like he probably had to do every night, and it got Sonny really feeling like shit, but what could he do?

Then he forgot about the colored fella altogether when the next stripper came out. She was Frenchy La Rome, the feature attraction. She was real young, not any more than twenty at the most and probably less than that, but she acted like she was queen of the goddam world and took no shit from nobody and by God you were lucky as hell to be able to see her in action. She had thick blonde hair that hung to her shoulders and wasn’t curly but sort of wavy and lush and part of it fell over her face like Veronica Lake. Instead of one of those evening-gown outfits she had on a shimmery gold-silk sheath dress that came just to her knees, and long gold gloves to her elbows and sheer black stockings and black high heels. That really got Sonny excited in itself, because most of the strippers don’t wear stockings, but the ones who did went into a big production of rolling them off and that always sexed him up like mad, the slow, tantalizing way they took them off. But the thing about this girl was not just the outfit or even the curvy body all tight under the sheath, or the sexy, full-mouthed face with catlike green eyes, hung with that goldish hair. The thing that really got you about her was that way she had of seeming like she knew she was such hot stuff.