Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

Gunner said he asked because he just remembered that once in college some lodge brother from Chi had taken him and two other guys to a really great whorehouse. It wasn’t in Chi, it was in this little jerkwater Illinois town, about forty miles south of Chi. The weird thing was it seemed just like a little farm town, but for some damn reason there was this great little whorehouse there, ever since anyone could remember. The girls were young and really nice and they played around with you and let you talk to them just like it was a real date and you were a real person. The little town was called Gladiola. Gladiola, Illinois. Sonny said it sounded to him like the ideal place to spend the night.

It took them a couple of hours to find Gladiola; it wasn’t even on the map and they kept getting lost. They bought a fifth of bourbon before leaving Cal City, and that kept their inspiration going, even though it was pretty damn discouraging, finding Gladiola. When they got there, the only light on was a night-light in the general store. Gunner knocked and knocked and finally an old toothless guy came down and peeked out. Gunner asked him how to get to the Gladiola House—that’s what the place was called.

“Been gone,” the man said. “Shut down a couple years ago. All gone.”

He shuffled away and Gunner said, “Fuck me in the teeth. What a fuckin piece of luck.”

“It’s my luck,” Sonny said. “They probably heard I was coming.”

It was almost four in the morning, and there they were in Gladiola, Illinois, and there wasn’t any Gladiola House anymore.

“I guess we’re up shit crick without a paddle,” Gunner said.

Sonny couldn’t say anything at all. He wished he was dead.

“Fuck it, we might as well go on to Chi now,” Gunner said.

Sonny just nodded. He didn’t care.

They came roaring into Chi through a night torched by the steel-mill fires, eerie and hellish. Gunner kept swigging on the fifth and he got too loaded to drive anymore. Sonny said he’d take over. He was past the point of knowing or caring whether he was loaded or not. Somehow he guided them into the stone gray outer web of the smoking city, and he felt that was something, anyway, he was getting them there. His eyes kept closing on him, though, and he’d wake with a jerk, just in time to keep on the road. He tried hard to keep concentrating. They came to a curve and Sonny took it all right, but then, too late, he saw it curve again—it was an S—and he knew it was too late, too late even to put on the brake, and as they headed straight into a cement abutment, he just said, “Jesus Christ,” and then they smashed.

There were flares and sirens and Gunner was bleeding, saying, “Oh, shit,” wiping blood from his face. Sonny wasn’t bleeding but he felt like his whole body had been wrenched out of place. He couldn’t believe it was happening. It was a scene like you pass on the highway and think Oh, shit, the poor bastards, and never thought it could happen to you. Sonny grabbed Gunner’s arm and started crying.

“Shit man, I’m sorry, I’m so fuckin sorry.”

“We’re O.K., it’ll be O.K.,” Gunner kept saying.

In the hospital they found that Gunner had a broken jaw and needed some stitches. The doctor on duty said Sonny was just shaken up a bit, he could probably go home the next day, but Sonny kept insisting something was wrong, his back was on fire. Finally they took some X rays and than came running in with sandbags and pulleys and told him not to move. It seemed he had broken a vertebra in his neck and if he’d jerked his head around hard he might have been killed or paralyzed. As awful as he felt, he was glad he hadn’t knocked himself off. They said he would have to lie in traction with his head in this thing that pulled it back to straighten out his neck and back, and then he’d be put in a cast, and then he’d get a neck brace, and then maybe he’d be O.K.

He knew he ought to be thankful, thankful to God for saving his ass and not killing anyone else either, but all he could think of was that if God had really given a shit there wouldn’t have been an accident in the first place. If God had been a really good guy, he wouldn’t have spirited the Gladiola House away so Sonny couldn’t fuck.

Sonny didn’t even much mind the idea of being for a couple months in the hospital. He hadn’t known what to do with himself outside, anyway. Maybe lying there all tractioned up he’d be able to figure things out better. His parents got him out of the ward into a two-person room with an old guy who had suffered a heart attack and was trying to recover. He was Mr. Weyl and he turned out to be damned interesting. He told good stories to Sonny about how he had educated himself, working in the stockyards and going to night school and getting a law degree; he had even invented things that were patented, and he patented a new soft drink once called “Cherokee Cola” and lost his fortune in it, but he didn’t even seem to mind, he seemed to think it was an interesting experience, losing your fortune, especially on something called Cherokee Cola.

After a couple of days Sonny’s parents had to go home to get back to work, which was really a relief to him, not having his mother looking at him like he was a poor invalid, and his father making those long, despairing sighs. They kept saying how happy they were he would be all right, but it wasn’t exactly glee he saw on their faces. His mother kept crying, saying they were tears of thankfulness to the Lord for saving him, but they seemed to Sonny like ordinary miserable tears. Sometimes he could see her sitting with her head down and her lips moving silently, and he knew she was praying. It made him feel like jumping out of his skin.

Gunner got out of the hospital in just a couple days, after they took some stitches under his lower lip and put some clamp kind of thing on his broken jaw. He went and stayed with the old friend of his who lived in Chi, and decided as long as he was there to settle the thing about the ad agency—whether he would go with it or not. He came every day and visited Sonny in the hospital, telling what all was going on and making great stories out of it all.

Rumsley, Klinger, and Faxworth, the three sharp young guys who had started this agency of their own, sounded like comic-opera characters as Gunner told about them. They were wining and dining him, and offering the princely sum of seven-five as a yearly starting salary, but Gunner found that instead of being impressed with them like he’d been when he worked there before going into service, they seemed now like a cartoon strip that might be called The Young Execs, what with their three-martini lunches and Madison Avenue phrases and talking of how they would help him “get a leg up on things” even though he had been in service and wasn’t aware of all the latest advances in the Ad Game. When he began to sound like he didn’t think it was his meat, they urged him anyway to take a personality test which would help him decide on what career he was best fitted for, and if the ad game wasn’t his line, they’d shake on it, no hard feelings, and wish him well in his chosen career, whatever it might be. The personality test, which was administered and interpreted by a special psychological counseling service, revealed that Gunner would do well in the fields of forestry, aeronautics, and charity work.

“I guess what I ought to do,” he told Sonny, “is fly around national parks dropping food packages for the bears. That would make use of all my talents.”

The psychological people also revealed some dark aspects of Gunner’s personality. On one part of the test you were supposed to draw a picture of yourself, and Gunner said he just drew a picture of a guy casually standing with a drink in his hand and the other hand in his pocket. They told him this showed tendencies toward alcoholism and masturbation.