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Going All the Way
A Novel
Dan Wakefield
FOR ALL THE HORSES OF THE STERN MOON
“The story of my boyhood … is important only because it could happen in any American family. It did, and will again.”
EARL EISENHOWER, BROTHER OF
PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER,
APRIL 4, 1954
“Farther along we’ll know more about it
Farther along we’ll understand why.…”
AN AMERICAN GOSPEL SONG
FOREWORD
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Dan Wakefield is a friend of mine. We both went to Shortridge High School in Indianapolis—where the students put out a daily paper, by the way. His publisher is my publisher. He has boomed my books. So I would praise his first novel, even if it were putrid. But I wouldn’t give my Word of Honor that it was good.
Word of Honor: Mr. Wakefield has been a careful and deep author of nonfiction for years—Island in the City, Revolt in the South, The Addict.… The Atlantic Monthly gave him an issue all his own for Supernation at Peace and War. Word of Honor: he is also an important novelist now.
Going All the Way is about what hell it is to be oversexed in Indianapolis, and why so many oversexed people run away from there. It is also about the narrowness and dimness of many lives out that way. And I guarantee you this: Wakefield himself, having written this book, can never go home again. From now on, he will have to watch the 500-mile Speedway race on television.
This is a richer book than Portnoy’s Complaint, with wider concerns and more intricate characters, but the sexual problems are much the same. Wakefield shows us two horny young Hoosiers, and it is easy to imagine their meeting Alexander Portnoy in a Howard Johnson’s—midway between Indianapolis and New York. If they were candid with one another, they would admit that they were rotten lovers, and they might suppose mournfully that rotten lovers were not welcomed by women anywhere.
Going All the Way is a period piece, incidentally—set in ancient times, at the close of the Korean War. And every book is a period piece now—since years or even weeks in America no longer resemble each other at all.
This book is full of belly laughs, but I am suspicious of belly laughs as entirely happy experiences. The only way to get a belly laugh, I’ve found, is to undermine a surface joke with more unhappiness than most mortals can bear.
After a series of low-comedy sexual failures, for instance, one of Wakefield’s heroes cuts his wrists lightly with a razor blade, “… so that rivulets of blood began to flow together, forming a thick little puddle.” This isn’t funny, and the scene becomes less funny as it goes on: “He started smearing the blood over his face and over the front of his torn shirt, like an Indian painting himself to prepare for a ceremony—a battle, a blessing, a death.”
So much for sexual comedy. Nobody dies in the book, but a lot of people would like to, or at least wouldn’t mind.
Wakefield’s reportage of life in Middle America, as one might expect, is gruesomely accurate and enchanting. His sex-addled fools drive their parents’ automobiles through a vast pinball machine whose bumpers and kickers are strip joints and taverns and gas stations and golf driving ranges and hamburger stands. They seek whorehouses, which, it turns out, have been closed for years.
They return home periodically to their smug and vapid parents, grumpily declining to say where they’ve been. Their stomachs, already churning with hamburgers and beer, twist even more grotesquely when their parents want to know when they are going to settle down to nice jobs and nice wives and nice houses in Indianapolis.
Finally—there is a tremendous automobile crash.
And, finally again, this wildly sexy novel isn’t a sex novel. It is really about a society so drab that sex seems to the young to be the only adventure with any magic in it. When sex turns out to be merely sex, the young flee to more of the same elsewhere—and they play dangerous games with, among other things, automobiles and razor blades.
How old are Wakefield’s protagonists? About the same age Ernest Hemingway was when he returned to Middle America as a quiet, wounded, authentic hero of World War I.
PREFACE TO THE INDIANA EDITION
My friend and fellow Hoosier Kurt Vonnegut is right about most things, but I am happy to say he was wrong in predicting I’d never be able to return to Indianapolis after writing this novel (“he will have to watch the 500-mile Speedway race on television”). For a while, though, it seemed his assessment was all too accurate. When the book came out, there were angry feelings back home in Indiana that Going All the Way had gone too far. Some people (mostly ones I barely knew) thought I’d exposed their most intimate secrets, while others felt I had cast aspersions on their community and its values, the place of my own birth and upbringing. At first I wished I’d followed an early anticipation of this kind of misunderstanding and set the book in Cleveland.
But in fact I could never have set the book in some other city—not because everything in my novel could not have happened in any American city in the midwest in the nineteen-fifties—but because no other place evoked such feelings in me, called forth the kind of emotion and love set off by the very names of the streets I grew up on (Winthrop, Guilford, Carrolton), my old neighborhood (Broad Ripple), or the drive-ins of my high-school days (The Ron-D-Vu, The Tepee), or bars (The Red Key, The Melody Inn), or the few bodies of water in that landlocked home we proudly learned in grade school was “the largest city in the world not on a navigable waterway” (Fall Creek, White River, The Canal) or the lakes beyond with the Indian names where we partied and swam and water-skied (Wawasea, Maxincuckee).
Happily, time does heal, and healers seem to materialize out of the blue to help the process. Librarians are the angels of writers (the ones at the Broad Ripple branch library nourished my love of reading from age six), which was proved again by Ophelia Gorgiev Roop, who as director of adult services for The Indianapolis—Marion County Public Library invited me to give a talk there in 1985, assuring me Going All the Way was no longer a source of controversy, but a favorite reading-group selection. Drawn by the warm invitation, I agreed to make my first public appearance in Indianapolis since the book was published in 1970; the library announced my talk as “A Prodigal Son Returns.”
For their newsletter’s announcement I wrote: “I see myself on this return like the aging warrior, wrinkled and weathered, with feathers turning to gray, raising a hand in blessing and saying ‘I come in peace.’” That’s how I was received, and my old gang from high school assembled for a party that was one of the happiest events of my life. I’ve returned often since to give talks and workshops and visit with friends.
There seemed a lovely symmetry in the fact that while Going All the Way kept me away from Indianapolis when it first was published in 1970, it brought me back for the longest time I’d spent there since college when the movie script I wrote of the novel was filmed there twenty-six years later. Film rights to the novel had been optioned before, but a movie wasn’t made until two young men of talent and commitment appeared in my life in the fall of 1994 and told me this was their favorite book and they wanted it to be their first feature film.
Director Mark Pellington and producer Tom Gorai wanted me to write the script, keep the story in the nineteen-fifties, and film it in Indianapolis. They invited me to be on the set and offer my advice. This is a rare privilege for any writer, and the opposite of my former novel-into-movie experience, when the person who bought the rights to Starting Over refused even to speak to me about it on the telephone, and the movie bore almos
t no relation to the book.
The movie of Going All the Way is as true to the “novel” as it’s possible for movies of books to be. That in itself will cause controversy in some quarters (it already has), since the novel expresses the anger and confusion of a young man rebelling against the religion he grew up with, and the expression of that is portrayed in the movie. I would no more “censor” it from the movie than I would go back and excise it from the novel. Its re-publication in this edition will no doubt raise questions and criticism from those who feel my writing in the realm of spirituality during the past decade—beginning with my article “Returning to Church” in the New York Times Magazine in December of 1985 that led to the book Returning: A Spiritual Journey—is somehow in opposition to the novels that were written previously.
“Do you now renounce your earlier work?”
A young woman in the audience of a talk I gave at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in New York City in 1994 asked me that when I was there on a book tour for publication of Expect a Miracle: The Remarkable Things That Happen to Ordinary People. I said I did not at all renounce my earlier work, citing the view of novelist Ron Hansen, author of Mariette in Ecstasy, who said in an interview that a book was “religious” not because it was “about religion” but because it told the truth. I know that one person’s “truth” is the next person’s lie, but I mean “the truth” in the sense of it being the expression of the deepest feelings of a human being as he or she knows it; the kind of truth Willa Cather meant when she said “Don’t try to write the kind of short story that this or that magazine wants—write the truth, and let them take it or leave it.” No writing is worthwhile, Cather told an interviewer, if it doesn’t “cut pretty deep … the main thing was always to be honest.”
Going All the Way cuts pretty deep in the literal way, when Sonny Burns takes a razor to his wrist in a time of desperate frustration and despair. That was the truth of that character in that circumstance, just as his anger at the itinerant evangelist Luke Matthews was true, and his anger, in fact, at God. To “renounce” such scenes would be for me to “renounce” the truth as I see it as a writer of the people, time, and place I am trying to portray.
A writer I know and respect who read my screenplay of Going All the Way wrote to question my inclusion of the Luke Matthews scene, now that I am a person of declared religious faith. I answered him in a letter that “It would never occur to me to betray my own truth of that era of life by some kind of ‘religious revisionism’ imposed retroactively with the outlook that came thirty years later.”
By the same token, I would feel it a travesty to try to go back and revise the young men’s blighted views of women and women’s anatomies to adhere to the political correctness of a more enlightened era. I hope both male and female readers will understand, as most have over the years, that the blatantly sexist attitudes of the time, expressed in the thoughts, language, and behavior of the characters, were as destructive and de-humanizing to the men as to the women; that I no more advocate such attitudes than I advocate people cutting their wrists or cursing God; that in trying to tell the truth of the dark forces of life I hope to expose rather than encourage them, as all serious writers have done throughout history.
When people have asked me what this book is about I have said “it’s about friendship.” It’s also about seeking, questioning, risking, rising from despair and defeat, beginning again, finding the joy and love of being alive, in the moment, as Sonny Burns does in the end, when he is able to experience and appreciate the taste of pumpkin pie, the smell of coffee, the scene and color of autumn leaves, the flow of life that is moving within him, moving him on, again, to begin.
October 1996
PART ONE
1
When the two soldiers boarded the train at St. Louis they caught one another’s eyes for a moment in a mutually questioning gaze that broke off teasingly short of recognition, like a dream not quite recalled. The short, boyish-looking soldier moved away into the crowd, his apple cheeks burning brighter, as if they had just been shined, and he climbed in a coach farther down. Something about the face of that other soldier he had seen hinted of the past, and that was precisely what the young man wished to avoid on this of all days, which he felt marked the start of a whole new part of his life—the “real part,” he hoped. Settling into a seat by a window, he closed his eyes and breathed in deeply as the train jolted forward, nosing into the future, unlimited.
As soon as the conductor took his ticket he started for the club car, hoping for something that would cool as well as calm him. The air-conditioning system was on the blink, and it was one of those muggy, midwestern days in May when everything seems to stick to you. Women fanned themselves with newspapers and babies bawled in the thick heat.
The young soldier had to make his way through seven coaches to get to the club car, pressing on the airlock door of each one with all his might and trying not to show any sign of the exertion it took before he broke through the sealed barrier with a foom of triumph. By the time he reached his destination his arms felt like spaghetti. He determined he would begin the daily push-ups and other basic exercises he had promised himself to continue on his own after basic training but never kept up. Now that he was done with the Army and his real life was beginning, he was going to do those things, he was going to discipline himself.
He ordered a Schlitz and started to undo the button of his collar that was so tight it felt like a string cutting his neck, but then he saw the long tan legs of the blonde. He pulled his tie tighter into place and tried to center it, smiling as he choked. The girl seemed like an omen to him of the phase of his life that was now beginning, a time in which well-tanned and lovely women would be his rightful due. When the Schlitz came, he lifted the cool can to his lips in a private toast, but his trembling hand tipped it too quickly and some of the beer went drooling down his chin, pretty as a madman’s spittle.
Mercifully, the girl wasn’t looking at him. He wiped fiercely at his chin and the front of his tie and jacket, then calmed himself with a long, carefully aimed draught of the beer. There was an empty seat on one side of the girl, and on the other side was an old guy around forty wearing a shiny suit with one of those diamond Shriners pins in the lapel, obviously no competition. The girl looked cool and athletic—not in a volleyball or field-hockey way, but in something graceful, like swimming. She would glide through the water with long, arching strokes, no thrashing around, just a little foam raised prettily by the rhythmic flutter of her delicate feet. The young man pulled out his cigarettes, trying to devise a good opening line. What do you think about Senator McCarthy and the Red menace? No, that could just start an argument. Never open with religion or politics, that was the oldest rule of all. What do you think of Marlon Brando? Did you like The Catcher in the Rye? Is Dave Brubeck really art? Will the mambo last? Have I seen you someplace before? Do you want to fuck?
He could think of nothing witty or original and had almost finished the beer. The near-empty can made a nervous rattle on the circular chromium serving stand. The young man decided to order another and promised himself that when he finished the second one he would go and sit down by the girl whether he had thought of a sharp opening line or not. It took him some time to get the attention of the old colored waiter, and he feared the girl might notice his lack of success. Once she stared right at him and smiled, but he looked away, pretending not to notice. When the waiter finally brought the beer, he gave him an extra large tip, hoping to establish good relations for the future, but the old guy merely grunted when he pocketed the change. No matter, the beer was cold, and the soldier could feel his determination blooming within himself, nurtured by the Schlitz. He would soon be ready. He would stride with casual confidence across the aisle, slip into the seat beside the girl, and say whatever first came to his mind.
Just then a big guy in a wild sport shirt that said “Waikiki” all over it entered the car, cased the scene, and plopped down right in the empty seat b
eside the girl. The guy had tattoos on his forearms, which probably meant he was dumb. The soldier consoled himself with the thought that the poor guy didn’t have a chance.
“Talk about your early summer heat,” the tattooed man said loudly to the girl, “I bet it’s hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk.”
How corny could you get? The soldier really felt embarrassed for the poor guy, and he hoped the girl didn’t brush him off too bad. But the girl was smiling.
“In St. Louis, I bet you could,” she said.
They laughed—together. The guy ordered drinks for him and the girl, and soon they were chattering away like old pals. The soldier tried not to hear them. He tried to think of important things, like the Future, not some silly broad on a train you could pick up just by giving her a stale old line about the weather.
What burned him up most was the guy wasn’t even a serviceman. It didn’t seem fair. The young man had hoped that when he went in the Army he’d be able to pick up all the girls he wanted, just by being in uniform. As a kid he had seen all those World War II movies where an ordinary GI could go to the Stage Door Canteen and dance the night away with Judy Garland, or maybe just walk down the street and have June Allyson pop out from behind some shrubbery and say, “Hi, soldier,” and walk off with him into the sunset. Of course, you could guess what happened in the sunset, even with nice girls like June Allyson. It didn’t mean they were bad, it meant they were patriotic. But Korea wasn’t the kind of a war that got you laid for being in it. The young man had worn his uniform for two years, and it hadn’t done shit for him. The only broad who said, “Hi, soldier,” to him was a dumpy old babe around forty at the USO in Kansas City. She gave him some oatmeal cookies that crumbled in his hand.
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