Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

You could always tell when a really good one came on, because the place got suddenly hushed and everyone stopped crapping around. When the bad ones or even just the so-so ones were on, some guys were just talking to each other and laughing, or yelling stuff at the stripper like “Give us a little grind, baby” or “Hey, I got somethin’ just for you ,” and all kinds of crap, but when the really good ones were on, nobody felt like horsing around, everybody was drinking in the scene, trying to store it up in their head so they could run it back to themself some lonely night in bed and jack off like crazy thinking about it. That’s the way it was when Frenchy La Rome was on.

There was a little runway that came out into the audience, and she paraded up and down it, swinging it around, and then went back to the stage and unzipped the sheath and wiggled out of it. She talked, too, saying stuff like “Don’t you boys wish you had a little a this,” and slapping her ass or petting her boob, and running her tongue around her mouth. You could almost hear the perspiration coming off all the poor horny bastards. When it came to taking off her stockings, after she got one almost off she wouldn’t pull it clear off but hooked it on the toe and then pulled it back like a slingshot or something and flipped it out into the audience, and man, these fucking steelworkers were diving for it like it was worth a million bucks, and two guys got in an argument over one of the stockings and ripped it in half and the bouncer had to get them settled down. With just her high heels and G-string and pasties on she came parading back down the runway and she’d stop and tousle some poor guy’s hair or crouch down with her legs apart and wiggle her cunt at him, and the place started whooping and whistling then. She stopped right on the runway at a place near Sonny and Gunner’s table and crouched down and gave them the old cunt wiggle, right in their faces, and she could see their tongues were hanging out and she said, “You fuckin babies, you oughta be home suckin’ on Mama’s tit,” and then she turned around and waved her ass at them and when she finally finished, after laying on her back and humping up and down, with a big crescendo from the combo. Sonny was pressing his legs together against the hard-on he had, dizzy and almost sick with lust. Even Gunner looked like he’d been through a wringer.

“Too much,” he said. “Too much.”

“God, what I wouldn’t give for that.”

“You’d give plenty, and you probably wouldn’t get much, either.”

“Yeh, I know. God, though. God almighty.”

“What the hell are we doing here?” Gunner asked.

“I dunno.”

“Torturing ourselves, that’s what.”

“Yeh, I guess.”

“Come on, let’s go to a regular bar and just have a beer. If we can find one.”

He meant one that didn’t have a strip show, and they finally found one, a real mucky joint that didn’t have a name but just had one of those neon signs that said, “Bar,” like if you wanted any frills you could take your business elsewhere, this was just a goddam Bar, period. Gunner said he figured they didn’t water the drinks in a regular bar like that, so he had a Cuba Libre and Sonny had a seven-and-seven. They had already had God knows how many beers and Sonny suddenly knew he was getting soused, if he hadn’t already gotten there. He didn’t want to admit it, though, even to himself. He was all sexed up and felt desperate, like he had to do something, something to get relief from a woman, or at least have a plan for doing it, a course of action, a goal to aim at and look forward to, some hope, whatever, anything.

“Listen,” he said, “have you thought of anything? About what I can do? About a woman. About women. I have to do something.”

Gunner grasped at his head, grimly, and said, “Yeh, we gotta do something. We gotta figure something out.”

“We really do.”

He took a slug of his drink and shook the glass around, rattling the ice cube. “I been thinking,” he said. “Have you ever spent any time with a woman, alone? I mean, where you had a lot of time in the sack and didn’t have to worry about doing anything else for a couple days?”

“Not really. Buddie stayed in my room down at Bloomington a few nights. But you know, that’s another story. Mostly, though, it’s been on some fucking couch with people in the next room or upstairs or a golf course or shit like that. You know.”

“Yeh. Well, what I was thinking was, if you got some gal who you were hot for and you had a lot of time to relax and play around with her, off in the sack someplace, that might do it. It might work out real good and you wouldn’t have to worry so much.”

“Yeh, it might,” Sonny said, but he was drunk enough to admit the real fear that flared in his head when he thought about it. “What if it didn’t, though? What if it didn’t work?”

“I dunno, man.”

Sonny hated to hear him say it, but he was being straight. “Anyway,” he said, “who would I get to do it with me? You can’t just go up to some girl and ask her to do that.”

Gunner finished off his drink and ordered another. So did Sonny.

“I was thinking,” he said. “How do you feel about DeeDee Armbrewster?”

“How do I feel about her?”

“Yeh. I mean, does she sex you up?”

“Well, yeh. But why?”

“Well, she’s really good. Sexually. I mean, aside from all that crap about marriage. But with sex, she really likes it, she likes to do anything, and she knows how.”

Christ, back at Shortley Sonny had even jacked off about DeeDee sometimes, sort of like he would about the stripper, knowing she was out of his reach, he could never do anything but just think about it with her, pretend he was doing it with her. He still didn’t see what it had to do with his cure, though, the fact that one of Gunner’s old girls was sexy and good at doing it.

“But what’s DeeDee got to do with it?” he asked.

Gunner rubbed at his brow, hard. “Well, I was thinking. Maybe she’d do it. Maybe if I sort of explained, not everything, but maybe if I sort of told her you’d had a bad time with somebody and you really needed some action, it was important, maybe she’d just do it.”

“Jesus.”

Sonny could hardly believe it. That Gunner would even try to get her to do it for him, much less that she’d do it. But he could tell Gunner was serious; he really wanted to help. Even with one of his own old girls.

“The trouble is,” Gunner said, “her getting this marriage bug. That might screw things up. If she’s thinking that way.”

“Yeh, I would think so.”

“Man, if we were only in Japan. What a fuckin shame. That you didn’t get over there.”

“I know.”

“Well, shit. Here we are in Indiana, surrounded by Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois—” He stopped, hit his forehead with the palm of his hand, and said, “Illinois!”

“What about it?”

He took out a cigarette and offered Sonny one but he didn’t want any distraction; it looked like Gunner was on the trail of some plan, but he couldn’t imagine what the hell Illinois had to do with any plan about getting laid.

“Tell me something,” Gunner said. “Have you ever been to a whorehouse? I mean, does the idea of a good whore turn you off? Lots of guys just don’t like the idea.”

“Oh, I like the idea O.K.,” Sonny said, “if it was really a good one. But the time I went to one was pretty crappy.”

Once in service he had taken a ten-day leave with a buddy in his office and they went to California and on a Sunday shot down to Tijuana for the bullfights. Afterward they started boozing it up in the bars and strip joints and got very horny. They went to a whorehouse that was crowded as hell, mostly with Mexican guys, yelling and arguing. You sat on a little bench, like waiting for a doctor, and when a whore was finished, she’d come down this hall and try to get you to go to her room. The whores were mostly pretty moldy-looking, and Sonny got dragged off by one about forty-five who was pretty fat but didn’t look too syphilitic or anything, as far as he could tell. She got him in the room and asked if he wanted to suck or fuck and he said first he’d like to suck and then fuck and she said that’d be three dollars. She opened his pants and examined his prick, then put some Kleenex over it and started sucking away, and before long he shot his wad real good. He started to take off his pants then to fuck, but she said he had already got his money’s worth. He tried to argue, but she said she would make trouble, and with all those wild Mexican guys out there, Sonny didn’t want any. So he’d paid three bucks for a Kleenex-wrapped blow job.