Going All the Way

by Dan Wakefield

  Her mother had to call her, and Sonny was afraid she might not get there before his time ran out. It was probably only a minute or so, but it seemed a long time to Sonny while he stood there waiting in the lighted phone booth, and he got more edgy. When Buddie finally answered, all out of breath, he was kind of mad at her. He told her without any explanation to come and pick him up at the Standard station.

  “Do I have time to change?” she asked.

  “No!” Sonny shouted.

  “All right.”

  She drove up about five minutes later in her mother’s station wagon. She was wearing a pink party dress made out of some stiff, frilly material, and she had a gardenia corsage on the left shoulder.

  “What the hell are you all dressed up for?” Sonny asked when he got in the car.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was going to a dance.”

  “A dance? What dance?”

  “At Meridian Hills. One of those summer dances they have.”

  “With a date?”

  “Harry was taking me.”

  Harry Stapler was a very nice, serious guy who had a good position at the Indiana National Bank and was madly in love with Buddie. As Sonny’s mother so often and ruefully summed up the situation, hinting at her son’s own lack of appreciation, “Harry Stapler worships the ground that girl walks on.” His mother knew all the gossip about Sonny’s friends.

  “You mean you broke the date with him,” Sonny asked with irritation, “at the last minute?”

  “He understood,” Buddie said.

  “What the hell did you tell him, for Chrissake?”

  “I told him something came up.”

  “Oh, my achin’ ass.”

  Sonny chewed her out something awful for breaking the date with Harry, but all the time he was doing it he secretly somewhere felt this little twinge of pleasure that she’d done it, broken a date for a dance at a country club just to come and meet him at a goddam filling station.

  After Buddie said how sorry she was, Sonny told her to drive to the Topper, he had to have a drink real quick. It was too early for the combo and the place was fairly quiet. The few people in the place stared at Sonny and Buddie, probably trying to figure out what a girl all dressed up was doing with a guy in a T-shirt and dirty khakis. Sonny felt like rum and Coke, and Buddie had that too.

  “Is anything the matter?” she asked.

  Sonny said he didn’t feel like talking till he finished at least one drink. He sat in glum silence, swallowing the stuff like medicine. When the second round came, he lit a cigarette and told all about Luke Matthews and how pissed off he was at his mother. He said he felt like taking off for some place, just getting the hell out. He didn’t want to go back and sleep in his room with that religious nut. They had more drinks, and Sonny said he was running kind of low so Buddie opened her purse and slipped him a ten-dollar bill under the table.

  “Maybe I’ll hitchhike to Michigan,” he said after his fourth rum and Coke. “I could sleep on the beach. Bum around.”

  “Oh, Sonny. Don’t do that.”

  “Why not?” he demanded.

  “Something might happen to you.”

  “Who gives a shit?”

  She reached across the table and touched his hand. “I do,” she said.

  He pulled his hand away. “I don’t.”

  “Oh, Sonny.”

  “What?”

  “I wish you were happy. I wish I could make you happy.”

  She sounded so syrupy sweet it made him sick.

  “Fuck it,” he said and ordered another drink. Buddie didn’t have any more drinks. She had only another three dollars after the ten and didn’t want the money to run out if Sonny still felt like drinking. The combo came on around nine, and the place began to fill up and get real smoky. That made Sonny cheer up a little; the hazy darkness and the booze and the music. The colored guys in the combo played fairly good jazz, the kind Sonny liked where you could pretty much always figure out what the melody was, the way Brubeck did it. After the second set Sonny had lost count of his drinks and he was feeling a lot less pain. He had one more and then figured he might just go home and sack out instead of hitchhiking up to Michigan and bumming around on the beach until he got arrested or starved to death or was carried away in an undertow or something.

  Buddie drove him home and parked across from the house, turning the lights and the motor off. Sonny really just wanted to go on in and hit the sack, but he felt like he owed her at least a kiss, for being a good kid. He put his hand on the back of her neck and she scrambled all over him. Her mouth was open so wide he thought she might fracture her jaw. She was hot as a furnace. He tried to mess around a little, but he didn’t really feel much like it. Her crinkly pink party dress didn’t sex him up at all, and it scratched the hell out of him. He started thinking of Marty, the stuck-up Jewish girl at the museum, and imagining how great it would be to have her get hot with you. He closed his eyes, picturing how she looked, but he knew it was good old Buddie sprawling all over him. He pulled away.

  “What’s wrong?” Buddie asked in a hoarse whisper.

  “We can’t really do anything here,” he said. “We better just stop.”

  “We could do something,” she said and pulled his hand down, placing it inside her panties. “Please,” she whispered.

  Automatically, trying not to think about it, he felt around with his longest finger, rubbing it in the soft part between her legs. She was already wet. The finger probed inside, like a trained animal that didn’t really have anything to do with Sonny. It moved itself around, obediently, performing its task. Buddie shivered and squirmed and panted, digging her fingers into Sonny’s neck and then let out a frightening gasp as a sudden stream made Sonny’s hand warm and sticky wet. Buddie rested her head on his shoulder and he sat perfectly still, thinking how great and exciting this had been in high school. The next day, when the guys asked you what you got the night before, you could say you got finger action inside the pants. That wasn’t as good as really fucking but it rated right along with dry-humping and was much better than just the necking stuff like frenching and getting covered-tit or even bare-tit. It was really pretty much of a failure if you parked with a girl and got only covered-tit, and sometimes when Sonny just got covered-tit he actually lied if anyone asked and said he got bare-tit.

  “Oh, darling,” Buddie sighed.

  Sonny took his hand away and wiped it on the upholstery of the car seat. “Listen,” he said. “I really got to go.”

  Her crinkly dress was all scrunched around and tangled up, and her hair was a mess. She looked like she’d been through a wringer. “Call me,” she said. “Please?”

  “Sure. I promise.”

  He gave her a little peck on the cheek, got out of the car, and walked straight up to the house without looking back.

  Most of the house was dark, but the porch light was on, and a light in the downstairs hall. Usually his mother kept the light in his room on for him—a torch burning in the window, “Make my bed and light the light …” but tonight it was dark because of the sleeping guest. Sonny felt his way into his room and to the desk, where he turned on a small lamp with an imitation antique shade of dark-green glass. He looked around the room, and sure enough, there was old Luke Matthews sacked out in the lower bunk. Sonny took off his shoes and socks and pants, and was ready for bed. Ever since he’d been old enough to get ready for bed by himself—his mother still put his pajamas on him until he asserted his independence at around twelve years of age—he mostly wore the shirt and undershorts to bed that he’d worn during the day. It was easier than taking everything off and getting into pajamas.

  He climbed up the cunning little stepladder to the top bunk and rolled onto it. Luke Matthews made a sleepy snort and tossed below him. Maybe he was dreaming of his old, evil days. The book hadn’t said exactly what the horrible shit was that Luke had done, but it must have been pretty awful to get him all that time in jail. Murder, maybe; rape, at least. Ma
ybe old Luke had been a sex fiend. Maybe even a queer one, you couldn’t be sure. A lot of the religious guys went in for that sort of stuff. There was one guy Sonny’s mother brought home to save him during a college vacation who supposedly healed people by faith, but Sonny didn’t go for the method of treatment. The Reverend Brownlow, who traveled with a mannish-looking wife and spoke often and glowingly of his young son who went to Florida State on an athletic scholarship, took Sonny into the bedroom and told him wonderful things would happen if Sonny would only kiss his white little flittish hands and say, “I love you,” three times. Sonny didn’t want to find out what the wonderful thing was and the Reverend Brownlow, shaky and perspiring, prayed that God would love him anyway. For all Sonny knew, Luke Matthews might favor similar methods of treatment, given the opportunity. Just because a guy was craggy-looking didn’t mean he wasn’t queer.

  Sonny tried not to think about it. He tried to shut his mind and go to sleep, but he found that his hand was moving with a homing pigeon’s habit-formed aim toward his prick. It was soft, and that only made him feel more urgently the need to make it hard. He thought of Marty the Jewish girl, remembering the way she carefully picked the little fleck of cigarette ash off her lower lip—that thin and sensuous, cool and arrogant lip. Sonny felt excited and yet, even though he coddled and stroked and massaged his prick, he couldn’t get it hard, and that made him frantic. He had started to jounce around a little in the effort to coax his cock to attention, and telltale squeaking sounds began to escape from the bedsprings. He heard Luke Matthews stir below, and held himself perfectly still, barely breathing. Jesus, you couldn’t jack off in the top bunk of your All-American-boy double-decker bed when a goddam professional Holy Man named Luke Matthews was sleeping in the bunk underneath! Or maybe the craggy old God-peddler was only pretending to be asleep, lying in wait to catch Sonny in the awful act and make him repent for his sins.

  Sonny took his hand away from his uncooperative cock and put both hands under his pillow in the form of prayer. He concentrated hard on thinking of healthy, unsexy stuff. The courageous battles of World War II, Flying Fortresses raining vengeance on the evil enemy. Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer … crisp autumn afternoons, and football. Knute Rockne, All-American. The Fighting Irish of Notre Dame. “Outlined against the blue-gray October sky, the four horsemen rode again.” The Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. Most people could only name you three. The hard one was Miller. Don Miller. Most anyone could name you Stuhldreher, Crowley, and Layden. Elmer Layden, the fullback. When Sonny was a kid he had a game called “Elmer Layden’s Official College Football,” one of those board games painted like a playing field, a little metal football you moved back and forth and a tube with three dice you shook after calling a play to see how much yardage you made. Elmer Layden’s Official College Football …

  Oh, God in heaven. Sonny remembered something about the Elmer Layden game that he didn’t want to remember at all. It was just the opposite of the healthy-crisp-autumn-afternoon sort of thing he was trying to concentrate on. After he got to high school he never played the Elmer Layden game anymore but it still sat around in his closet, along with Monopoly, Chinese Checkers, Photo-Electric Football, and Champion Ice Hockey, which consisted of a long metal plate with a little goalie at each end that you could turn around real fast with a knob and have them slam a marble back and forth with their sticks. He had outgrown them all, but found a new use for the Elmer Layden football game—a use that would have probably made Elmer Layden, All-American, puke with disgust. The cardboard “playing field” of the game was hollow underneath, so if you lifted it out there was a secret kind of box, a hiding place that no one was likely to discover. Sonny had used that innocent-seeming, All-American-appearing place to hide the dirty sex magazines he started buying in high school whenever he worked up the nerve to go downtown to the stores that sold them, stores that reeked of guilt and filth, where no one except the lewd old bastards at the cash register looked anyone else in the eye; those smutty, gray-faced perversion profiteers who sneered at you as they put the magazines you bought into the telltale plain brown paper sack. The magazines Sonny bought had names like Titter and Wink and Peek, and inside were pictures of impossibly sexy babes wearing black-silk stockings and elaborate garter belts and skyscraper heels, lolling their tongues in their luscious mouths, kicking their shapely legs in the air, adjusting the strap of their lacy brassieres that could barely hold in those pointed boobs. They promised the most unusual sort of evil erotic excitement and stimulation. Sonny would flip through the paper with a feeling of unslakable thirst, imagining what he’d like to do and have done to him by the different women, deciding which one he’d jack off to after he had sized up the whole gallery, playing out the scene in his fantasy, speaking the fake name of the woman in the picture that the magazine gave them to help you pretend they were real, and then setting his hard cock against the inside left part of his thigh so he could lie on it and rub back and forth without having to use his hand (a technique that seemed in its pretense more nearly like actual fucking). He would feel himself swell with a throbbing, incredible ecstasy that grew so intense it was almost unbearable until it burst, blotting out his mind in an ultimate blind moment of release, leaving him spent and limp, sprawled on the sticky result of his fantasy.

  Afterward the magazine would seem sickening to him and he’d hide it away, as quickly as possible, under the green-cardboard football field, and stick the Elmer Layden game box underneath the Monopoly set in the closet. When it was over he felt lousy and dirty, and the magazines that only moments before had displayed the pictures of a paradise prized above everything else suddenly seemed ugly, shabby, shameful, embarrassing, and sick. In his nauseous revulsion he would sometimes stick them back in their plain brown paper sacks and and sneak down to the basement and shove them in the furnace, watching them burn to the black crisp oblivion they deserved. Then usually after a couple of weeks he would wish he still had them, feel a need for their pictures as deep as the urgent thirst that comes with a hangover, and he cursed himself for destroying the magazines, knowing he would have to put himself through the humiliating ordeal of going downtown to those smelly stores and forcing himself to do it all again.

  Sonny hadn’t used the Elmer Layden game ever since he went into service; when he got out of basic and PIO school he and some other guys got an apartment off the base in Kansas City and Sonny kept his girlie magazines in an old college notebook that had a zipper on it. He had thrown the notebook and the magazines inside it away just before he got out of service, though, as part of the abolition of his past, of wiping the slate clean and starting fresh. He could have kept the zipper notebook and used it for something else, but he didn’t even want to be reminded of what he had used it for before. He felt sure that when his real life began he wouldn’t feel the need for those magazines of sexy fantasy, not only because it was an adolescent kind of thing but because he thought he wouldn’t need to pretend things then, he would actually do them, he would fuck sexy babes whenever he felt like it; until of course he met the just-right Rodgers-and-Hammerstein sort of girl across a crowded room and would fall in love forever and enjoy pure, legalized, clean, moral sex with his wife and be free of dirty thoughts and desire for the rest of his life. Actually, he originally thought that jacking off was just something you had to do until you fucked, and once you started fucking you didn’t feel the need for masturbation anymore. It surprised and depressed the hell out of him when after he fucked for the very first time, struggling and slipping and panting on a moonlit golf course with Buddie Porter, he came home and jacked off twice. He figured that must have been because he wasn’t madly in love with Buddie, maybe it was only when you started fucking girls you were madly in love with that you didn’t have to beat off anymore.

  Sonny’s head ached from the rum, but he felt completely wide awake and terribly horny. He wondered if maybe there were any old girlie magazines left in the Elmer Layden game. He could take it into the bathroom
and lock the door. As quietly as possible, he creaked down the wooden bunk ladder to the floor and stealthily made his way to the closet. The door whined when he pulled it open. He stood stock-still for a while, listening for Luke Matthews’ steady breathing, then reached his hand into the right-side shelves of the closet where his old games were stacked. He tried to feel the right box by its size and started pulling one out that began to rattle. It must have been the Monopoly set, and the little metal pieces were making the noise. He shoved it back in with slow care. He felt the box below it and was almost sure it was Elmer Layden’s Official College Football. He slipped it out little by little, holding the box above it with his other hand so he could let it down quietly when he pulled the Elmer Layden out.

  Luke Matthews tossed a little and made a honking kind of snore sound. Sonny stood perfectly still, then after a minute or so of silence he tiptoed out of the room, holding the game steady so the dice wouldn’t make any noise. He stopped outside the bathroom door, listening for sounds from his parents’ bedroom right across the hall. All was quiet. He went in the bathroom and closed the door before switching on the light. Then he flipped the little lock on the door handle. Settling himself on the toilet seat, he carefully lifted the top off the Elmer Layden Official Football game box and set it on the floor. His heart was starting to beat a little faster in anticipation of the possible trove of erotic treasure just below the playing field. He reached his finger between the bottom part of the box and the cardboard playing field, lifting it off to reveal—nothing.