Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

Sonny felt nauseous again and wanted to scream. He knew there was going to be some sex thing coming about Italian men, like they had big pricks or something. His mother wouldn’t use that word, she never used words like that, but she had some way of talking about sex in perfectly proper language that got the idea across anyway.

“Please,” Sonny said. “I have to rest awhile.”

His mother laid a hand on his forehead, feeling for fever. He winced, squeezing his eyes tighter shut.

“I think you’re running a temperature.”

“I am not,” he said slowly and distinctly, enunciating each syllable. “I do not have any temperature whatsoever.”

Her hand still lay on his forehead. “There’s a lot of it going around,” she said. “Some virus, they say.”

He said nothing. Her hand felt like a hot weight, and yet it wasn’t pressing, just laying there, continuing to touch.

“You always were susceptible to summer colds,” she said. “Remember?”

He turned over, away from her, pressing his head into the pillow.

“Al-ma?”

Adele was calling from downstairs.

“Your friend is calling you,” Sonny said.

“What is it?” Mrs. Burns called down.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Is Sonny all right?”

“I think he’s running a temperature,” Mrs. Burns reported.

Sonny bolted upright in bed and started shouting at the top of his lungs. “I have a fever of a hundred and nine and am dying of a malignant communicable disease contracted in Kansas City from a visiting Japanese exchange-whore please everyone get away or you will get it too please leave me alone!”

His mother ran from the room, sobbing.

Sonny flopped back and buried his head in the pillow.

“Shit,” he said to himself, “fuck it all,” and, as if falling from a high wall, dropped into a dreamless sleep.

When he woke, there was a tray on a chair beside his bed with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, two aspirin tablets, a One-A-Day vitamin pill, and a religious magazine of inspirational thoughts called The Upper Room . Sonny looked at the tray and then lay back down, staring up at the slats and coils of the bunk above him, and said in a quiet, deliberate voice, “Fuck you, God; you’re a horse’s ass, and your only son is a queer.”

You could have knocked Sonny over with a feather when Gunner called up and asked if he’d like to get together and have a couple brews. After Sonny had sobered up from the sake and thought about the talk with Gunner on the train, he’d felt his cheeks burn with embarrassment, thinking what a fool he’d been to imagine a Big Rod like that would really want to hang around with a nobody like Sonny Burns. He figured Gunner was just bored on the train and would have talked to anyone handy. Sonny had just been handy. It was obvious to Sonny when he thought about it soberly that as soon as Gunner hit Naptown he would have a million friends to see, great parties to go to, all kinds of girls to lay. Gunner was known throughout the town as a great cocksman. He had probably told Sonny they ought to get together just to be polite. That was what you said to a guy—“Let’s get together and tip a few sometime”—and then you forgot all about it. Just a couple days after Sonny had straightened all that out in his head, Gunner phoned and wanted to meet him someplace.

Sonny was especially glad Gunner called because he hadn’t been out of the house yet since he’d been back, and he was really beginning to feel rotten. For three whole days he had mainly sat around in his undershorts, looking at television and reading magazines. His mother had stuffed the icebox with a lot of the rich, sweet stuff that he liked and hated himself for liking—banana cream pie, raspberry revel ice cream, fudge brownies, devil’s food cake with lemon icing. He would eat that stuff and drink Pepsis with a lot of ice in them, and belch a lot. He meant to start his program of rigid daily exercise, but the one time he tried he got shamefully diverted. He was all alone in his room with the door closed and he got down on the floor to do some push-ups, but before he even started, while he was lying there preparing to gather his strength, he suddenly thought of the blonde on the train with the great legs and he got a hard-on, and then he started thinking how he might have made out with her, imagined those long tan legs around him, and he jacked off picturing it all in his mind. Then he was too weak to do the push-ups. He went downstairs and had a piece of cake and a Pepsi, feeling sticky all over and worthless as hell. He didn’t even get dressed at night to have supper, but sat at the table in his bathrobe. That was his mother’s idea, for she felt he deserved a real rest after serving his country for two long years, but he knew his father didn’t like it very much. He avoided his father’s eyes, as usual. They said things like “Pass the sugar, please” and looked the other way, while Mrs. Burns chattered and told of the sorrowful, tragedy-ridden people whom she met in the course of her day’s works of mercy for the church.

Sonny had friends of his own he could have called, even a girl, but he just hadn’t seemed to be able to get going. In a way he was afraid that when he did get himself together and do something, it might mark the beginning of his real life, and it might not be any different than the old one. If Gunner hadn’t called, God knows how long he would have just sat around feeling lousy and picking his ass. When he actually had a place to go and got showered and dressed, he felt one hell of a lot better. He put on some clean khaki summer pants and his old white bucks and a neat sort of knitted T-shirt he had bought in Kansas City. His mother said she had to use the wagon that afternoon, but she’d drop him off wherever he was going.

“I’m going to the Red Key,” he said.

“Where?”

“The Red Key ,” he shouted. “Over on College and Fifty-fourth Street.”

“The tavern?”

“It’s a bar.”

“You’re going there in the afternoon?”

“I’m meeting a guy.”

“Are you sure they’re open—in the afternoon?”

Sonny took a deep breath. “I’m sure.”

She drove him there in silence and let him off right smack in front of the place even though he said the corner’d be fine. He would just as soon not have Gunner see him getting out of the car door that said “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” He sort of slinked out of the wagon and walked to the bar with his head bent down.

It was cool and dim inside, and smelled very beery. Sonny liked it. The Red Key didn’t seem like any special sort of place, unless you knew that Wilks Wilkerson and Blow Mahoney and a lot of the other Big Rod jocks who used to go to Shortley hung out there after work when they had summer construction jobs to make a lot of money and keep in shape. Sonny used to really envy those guys who could casually say, “Yeh, I’m workin’ construction this summer.” They wore dirty T-shirts and faded khakis slung low on their hips, and they were always whipping out a grimy snot rag that was stuffed in a hip pocket and give the nose a terrific, noisy blow, just like the regular construction guys did. It showed they were real men.

Gunner was already there, and Sonny pulled up a chair at his table. It was still early, and they were the only customers except for one of those old dame lushes in a messy flowered dress, singing to herself.

Gunner had been observing the old gal, and he shook his head and explained to Sonny, “In Japan, you never see a woman drunk.”

“No shit?”

“Never. See, the women are there to please the men, and if a woman’s drunk, she’s not going to be much good to a guy, right?”