Going All the Way

by Dan Wakefield

  Sonny’s mother was wearing a tailored suit of the type she had adopted ever since she had, as she put it, “lost her shape,” around the time Sonny went off to college and she started eating so much. She wore silk stockings with flat brown oxfords, like most of the women wore who she met in the Moral Re-Armament Movement, but unlike some of the more devout and stringent females of the MRA, she still applied makeup and regularly went to the beauty shop to have her natural reddish hair twisted into the countless tiny ringlets that always reminded Sonny of electric coils. It seemed to him fitting, somehow, as if the coils were part of some incredibly powerful electrical system that propelled his mother with breakneck speed and energy through her many good works and her dizzy ups and downs of feeling and quick, deep friendships that so often soon turned to misunderstandings and betrayals and outbursts of passionate hurt and rancor. Sonny figured that if somehow those coils of his mother’s energy could be hooked up to a generator, her emotions could power the electrical system of the whole city of Indianapolis.

  Sonny had hoped his father would be driving the Chevy, but his mother had driven the church station wagon. It was a beat-up old wooden kind, and it said Northside Methodist Church on the side of each front door, and below that was a cross, and under that, in quotation marks, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Sonny always slouched down in his seat when he rode in it or when he drove it. His mother worked in the church office and had the use of the wagon most all the time.

  “You get in back,” Mrs. Burns told Sonny, “with Adele.”

  He did, sitting as close to the door as he could, but Mrs. Fenstermaker slid beside him and grasped his nearest hand. With her other, many-ringed hand she pointed to Mrs. Burns, who had bustled into the driver’s seat, and with a great sigh, Mrs. Fenstermaker said, in a tone of almost sacred gratitude, “If it weren’t for that woman. Your mother.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Mrs. Burns said and started the motor with a gassy, explosive roar.

  Mrs. Fenstermaker turned her eyes full force on Sonny, like hot rays, and explained, “When I met that woman, I was on the verge. The absolute verge.”

  The car leaped forward, rocking the passengers. Sonny felt hot and nauseous, and the sake was doing dangerous things to his head and his stomach. He wished to hell his father had driven so it would at least have been smooth. His mother drove the car like a bronco, pushing it into great bucks and sudden stops. Whenever she shifted, the car made a lurch, tossing the passengers back and forth like riders in a rodeo. Sonny leaned back and closed his eyes.

  He tuned out the chatter between his mother and Mrs. Fenstermaker, concentrating on the delicate state of his stomach, as if perhaps he could keep it settled by force of will. The sake seemed to have created a high ringing sound in his head, and he had the sensation he could feel his own teeth. The voices of the women were like a shrill gabble of birds, indistinguishable, until, after a couple of miles, he heard his mother saying, “Sonny? Sonny? There it is. Good old Shortley.”

  “Mmm.”

  He knew what his old high school looked like, knew exactly the stern and impressive facade of brick and limestone, the wide plaza at the entrance, and the steps rising upward in two long tiers. He knew how scared and excited he was when he first walked up them as a freshman, and in through the massive doors to the clatter and din of the bustling hall. He had thought, back then, that his real life might be beginning, but it hadn’t turned out that way.

  “It’s a shame,” Mrs. Fenstermaker said. “About Shortley.”

  Sonny opened his eyes and asked, “What’s a shame about it?”

  Though it had given him less than he had hoped, he still was loyal to the old school. It was best in the city, and its graduates were proud.

  Mrs. Fenstermaker smiled sadly. “It’s getting dark inside. A fine school like that. They say eventually it will be completely dark inside.”

  “Dark inside?” Sonny asked.

  He didn’t know what the hell the, old doll was talking about. Had the lights gone out? Was the electrical system breaking down?

  “It’s coming,” his father sighed.

  Mr. Burns turned around toward Sonny, cleared his throat, and his face took on that look of grim intensity that came when he spoke of the wrongs and outrages of the modern, immoral, something-for-nothing, tradition-destroying world—the world that was launched and shaped in America by FDR, and that even Dwight D. Eisenhower seemed powerless to reconvert to its old, decent ways.

  “The Supreme Court laid down the law, just this week. The races will be mixed, right in the schools, whether anyone likes it or not.”

  Sonny understood then how his old school was “getting dark inside.” When he went to high school, all the Negroes had to go to Crispus Attucks; no one questioned that, it was part of the natural order of things. But a few years after he graduated, the city saw the handwriting on the wall, the coming tides of socialistic integration sweeping across the country out of Washington, and so had “voluntarily” (before being forced) decreed that colored kids could go to any high school they wanted—that is, if they lived in the neighborhood. And the catch was that colored were slowly but surely spreading north to the neighborhood of grand old Shortley.

  “I visited school last year,” Sonny said. “There weren’t many then.”

  It was a feeble kind of defense and sort of a betrayal of Sonny’s own belief that all men were created equal, including the colored. That was one of the radical notions he had picked up from liberal professors in college, and he didn’t like to argue with his parents about it. If you talked about it much, the danger-signal vein of anger would start to show in his father’s forehead, pulsing and throbbing, the sign that Sonny most feared as a kid when he did something wrong and his father found out. He wasn’t in any condition for an argument right now, of any kind.

  “Well,” his father said, “it’s coming. It’s only just begun.”

  “That’s right.” Mrs. Fenstermaker grimly nodded. “They’re up to Twenty-eighth Street now.”

  Every time Sonny came home from college or the Army he heard the latest report on how far They had advanced out of their old small, crowded, rickety bastion. The ominous They, like some relentless army, crept north past one parallel block after another, destroying real-estate values as they went, as brutally as Sherman laid waste the property of Georgia in his march to the sea. This time They were on the march, invading formerly forbidden territories, forcing the retreating whites farther north to the suburb fortresses.

  “Thank God you went to Shortley when you did, Sonny,” Mr. Burns said.

  Sonny sat straighter up in his seat, feeling he had to somehow gather his thoughts and speak out his own position on the matter, but before he could say anything, Mrs. Burns bolted the car away from a stoplight with a lurch of special force, and then in a loud voice said, “Adele, have you been to the sale at Ayres? I understand they have some wonderful things in cotton.”

  Sonny’s mother hated controversy, especially the political kind. Mr. Burns turned around to face the front again and Sonny sat back, pressing his eyes closed, until almost ten minutes later the car jerked to a halt in the gravel drive and Mrs. Burns gaily announced, “Sonny, you’re home,” and, in an extra comment that made his stomach spin even more frighteningly, “Home for good!”

  Sonny pulled himself out of the car and saw the Colonial-style two-story house—it looked like a little slice off the end of Mt. Vernon—waver before him in the afternoon sun. The house, in a new development that had never quite caught on, always made him feel guilty, for he knew his mother had insisted on it being built for the pleasure of his adolescence, over his father’s migraine fears that it was way out of line with what they could really afford.

  “Look, Sonny. There’s Winkie!” Mrs. Burns said.

  “I see him,” Sonny said.

  Winkie, the mongrel dog that Mrs. Burns had found and adopted when Sonny went off to college, came bounding off the porch, his great tongue flap
ping like a wet pink flag.

  “Good old Winkie,” Mrs. Burns said. “Sonny, say hello to Winkie.”

  “Hello, Winkie.”

  Winkie barked, sending waves of pain through Sonny’s reeling head.

  “Winkie says hello to you,” Mrs. Burns explained.

  “I heard him,” Sonny said.

  “Good old Winkie.”

  Mrs. Burns knelt down and nuzzled the friendly mutt, cooing in his ear while he licked and yipped his love. Mrs. Burns loved to hug and cuddle Winkie, explaining that ever since Sonny “grew up” and “grew away from me” she couldn’t hug and cuddle him anymore, but good old Winkie didn’t mind. It sounded like a reproach, suggesting that Winkie was nicer and more understanding than Sonny. Sonny supposed that was true.

  “Ohh,” Mrs. Fenstermaker said, “how I love this wonderful home. I can’t wait to get inside and kick off my shoes.”

  Mr. Burns had unlocked the front door, and Sonny went straight upstairs to the bathroom. He loosened his tie, knelt down in front of the toilet like a communicant before an altar, bowed his head in thankfulness at having the bowl there below him, and heaved up a mixture of sake, beer, and breakfast. When he finished he lay down next to the toilet, his head on the cool linoleum floor, which smelled reassuringly of childhood.

  There was a soft, tentative rap at the door, and his mother’s voice said, “Sonny?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you in there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” he said under his breath.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ll be right out.”

  He pulled himself off the floor and splashed his face with cold water. His mouth was fuzzy and sour, but his toothbrush was in his gear and he didn’t want to use someone else’s. His mother’s, for instance.

  He took a deep breath and opened the door.

  “You’re white as a sheet,” his mother said.

  “I just have to go lie down a minute.”

  Sonny headed for the door to his bedroom, her following. He flopped down on the lower bunk of his All-American-boy double-decker bed and unbuttoned his jacket. His mother sat down on the bed beside him, and he closed his eyes.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “I hope you’ll have an appetite. I cooked a big roast for supper. There’s so much of it, I asked Adele to stay. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Sonny said nothing. He concentrated on breathing.

  “She dolls herself up kind of flashy, I guess, for a widow. But she’s a wonderful person. Very intelligent, too.”

  Mrs. Burns’ voice lowered to a whisper, and she said, “I don’t know how she got herself mixed up with that Italian. Remember that little Dominick fellow, works at the little vegetable store in Broad Ripple? The one on Guilford? Well, I don’t know what he has, but he sure had her eating out of his hand. And then one day he cut her off just like that. Priest’s orders or something. Well, she went to pieces. Slashed her wrists and turned on the gas. A neighbor found her and got an ambulance, and when she got home from the hospital, this neighbor—she’s in our church—told Reverend Halverson about her, and he went to call, and I took her some soup and some books I thought might help, and we got to be great friends. That was only two weeks ago, but I feel I’ve known her all my life. What I can’t understand is what she saw in that little Dominick. But, you know what they say about the Italians. The men—”

  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.”

  3

  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.