Going All the Way

by Dan Wakefield

  Sonny sat down on the couch and Gail settled beside him, pulling off her shoes and tucking her feet in underneath herself. She leaned back, not touching Sonny, but making herself touchable. He casually slung his arm up on the back of the couch, not actually touching her but getting himself in position. After Gunner passed the drinks around, he flopped in one of the easy chairs and Marty curled up on his lap. Gunner told a couple good stories, a nice mix of high-school football and Japanese religion, and then Marty nestled down closer to him, pressing her mouth on his ear, and Gunner cleared his throat and said he and Marty were going upstairs for a while and everyone should make themselves at home. He gave a little look to Sonny, a look that said, “O.K., man, do your stuff,” but wasn’t too obvious or embarrassing. A lot of guys would go out of the room with some cornball wink or terrible joke like telling the girl, “Be careful, that guy’s horny!” or something that would ruin everything for you, but Gunner wasn’t like that, he made Sonny feel like he really did hope he made out.

  Sonny was alone in the dimly lit room with Gail, and the passionate gypsy music was building to another climax. He got up and poured more whiskey in his glass, then sat back down and tried to think of something to talk about for a while. He wanted to talk some more before trying anything, so he would feel more sure of her wanting him to do it. They had already, at dinner and at the dance, got through the usual crap about what did you major in and what are you going to do (she majored in English and wanted to get an Interesting Job), plus the kind of extras you throw in like Do you remember what you were doing when you were a kid and Franklin D. Roosevelt died, and how older people didn’t understand The Catcher in The Rye either because things had changed so much since they were kids or else they didn’t remember, and how Adlai Stevenson was a brilliant man but seemed too wishy-washy for most people to trust him being a great leader; all the preliminary shit.

  Sonny had really enjoyed the preliminary shit with Gail, though, because she seemed so feminine and sexy and impressed by his opinions, and looked him right in the eyes, and ran her tongue over her lips a lot, and laughed whenever he said something he meant to be funny. He gulped the hot solace of his new drink, thinking, Oh, God, oh, Jesus, maybe this is It, The Answer, the Great Girl who will make everything O.K., the perfect combination of sex and intelligence that every man is supposed to find, that is his rightful due, as stated by the United States Constitution itself, which promised Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, making it an actual law that was right on the books! Sonny sometimes wondered if the catch was in the word “pursuit” of happiness; suspected that the acquisition of it wasn’t really promised, just the chase, and that you might have to keep pursuing it until you keeled over and couldn’t even sue the government for your rightful share.

  “Do you really think you might go to New York?” Gail asked. Sonny had been talking big about the GI Bill and him and Gunner maybe going to Columbia and getting interesting jobs in New York. Gail had said she was going there herself in the fall, maybe to look for a job in a publishing house, which her background in English qualified her for, and so Sonny had been more positive about the possibility of New York than he actually felt; but with the saying it he began to believe it. A whole life had bloomed in his mind, with him and Gunner and Marty and Gail having a youthful, sexy, fascinating life in New York, skipping hand in hand as a foursome down the Great White Way, like in those color musical movies about backstage life on Broadway, where people from little towns lived on spaghetti and wine in the basements of the big city until they were discovered and became great stars with their name in lights.

  “New York is really the only place, when you get right down to it,” Sonny said. “Don’t you think?”

  “Well, there’s San Francisco, they say.”

  “I guess. But it’s not New York.”

  “No,” she sighed, “it’s not,” nestling closer against Sonny. He guzzled down the rest of his new drink and got up to pour some more.

  “You like some more?” he asked.

  Gail shook her head and got out a cigarette. When Sonny sat back down, she put her hand on his knee and whispered, “You won’t drink too much, will you?”

  “Oh, no,” he said and laughed. “I got a large capacity.”

  “I’m having such a wonderful time,” she said.

  Sonny gulped so much from his glass that he almost choked.

  He rubbed at his eyes and said, “Jesus, me too.”

  “I’m glad.”

  Sonny took another burning swig of the whiskey and said, “You know, really, I’d like to tell you something.”

  “Yes?”

  She looked up into his eyes, and inhaled her dizzy perfume.

  “Well, what I want to say is, you’re—” He took another fiery gulp, then set down his glass. “Fantastic,” he said. “I mean, Jesus, you’re everything, you’re incredible, I never knew anyone. I’d do anything for you. I’d—”

  She drew her head back off his shoulder and said, “You don’t even know me.”

  “Yes I do! No kidding, I mean, I know what I feel, I feel—I don’t know how to explain it. Everything.”

  “Shhh,” she said and put a finger very gently on Sonny’s mouth. She moved her own mouth up to about a hair’s distance of his, and he leaned down just a little and tasted her lipstick, like some wonderfully sour jam, and then he put both his arms around her and they were kissing, really kissing, her sharp little tongue flicking at his teeth and in between them, and he started mashing his left hand all over her firm little tits and then reached down and felt her ass and she cuddled into him, biting at his lips, digging her nails in the back of his neck, and he suddenly pulled away.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, her eyes searching.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.

  He had been scared shitless he was going to come, and he felt if he could only take a piss he could get a new start. Gail moved back and primped some of the hair into place that was falling in her eyes.

  “Oh,” she said coolly.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Go ahead, for God sake!”

  Sonny got up and went to the downstairs bathroom. After he pissed he looked at himself in the mirror and brushed his hand through his messed-up hair. Most of the pancake stuff was rubbed off his nose, leaving the pimple red and sore-looking, with awful brown flakes from the makeup around it. He figured anything he did would only make it worse, and he just washed his hands and tried not to think about his nose. When he went back to the den he poured more booze in his glass and sat down. Gail had turned the gypsy record over and the fucking Spaniards were stamping and yelping again.

  “I’m sorry,” Sonny said.

  “About what?”

  “That I had to go to the bathroom.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said, kind of disgusted.

  Sonny felt panicky, like he was in a bad dream where he did and said all the wrong things and couldn’t stop. He had done all this before with girls he liked, practically slobbered over them until they demanded to be taken home, and he couldn’t understand what had happened, why they didn’t accept his trembling declarations of love, but now it was worse because he knew he was doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, but he couldn’t stop, couldn’t break out of the nightmare he was making for himself on the spot. He wanted to explain but it was too complicated, and he reached out and took Gail’s hands in his own.

  “Listen,” he said, “I wish I could make you understand. I love you. I am hopelessly and madly in love with you.”

  She closed her eyes and said, “Get me a drink.”

  Sonny jumped up and fixed the drink, and when he placed it in her hands, he said, “Here, darling.”

  He sat down and lit a cigarette, trying to steady himself. He knew he should be like Richard Widmark, or at least like Gunner, and say he wanted to screw her whether she liked it or not and hump her like a goddam maddened stallion, fucking her senseless. />
  “I’m sorry I said that stuff,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t have said it. About being in love with you and everything. But it’s true. I’m sorry, but it’s true.”

  She took a healthy swallow of her own drink, which Sonny had made strong as hell, and said in a very even, quiet tone, “If you don’t stop being sorry, I’m going to scream.”

  “I’m—” He stopped himself and wavered up to slosh some more booze in his glass. He spilled some, and it dripped down his debonair white-linen slacks.

  “You’re drunk,” she said.

  “I’m not!” Sonny shouted, and he felt that was true, or partly true. The part that made his hands shake and made the room waver and her face go fuzzy right before his eyes was drunk, but somewhere, below all that, some part of himself saw everything soberly clear.

  “Listen,” he said, trying desperately to talk from that sober clear center of himself, “I love you, but I want to go to bed with you.”

  As soon as he said it, he realized the two things sounded contradictory, which maybe in awful fact they were, in his own body and mind.

  “To bed?” she asked, with a mocking wide-eyed imitation of innocence. Her hand that was holding the drink dipped and some of the whiskey dripped in her lap.

  Sonny wanted to say yes, to fuck, but what he said was “So we can have sexual intercourse.”

  She giggled, and he stared down into the warm brown hell of his drink.

  Gail finished off her own drink and stood up, wobbling a little.

  “All right,” she said, and reached her hand in back of her neck. There was the sound of the zipper being glided down, and she pulled the dress up over her head and dropped it in a lump to the floor. She stood there looking at Sonny in her bra and panties and seamless stockings, just like the sexy babes in the jack-off magazines, but she was there, real, in the flesh, reachable and—oh, Holy God—fuckable. She burped, giggled, and then unhooked the stockings from the garters and rolled them down and off, teetering and swaying, flinging each stocking away with an ironic, stagy flair. They fell slowly, like punctured, long balloons.

  “Well,” she asked with a sour smile, “Sexu-all Intercourse?”

  Sonny started ripping at his shirt, like he was blind and crazy, tearing at himself as well as the cloth, trembling and yanking down his pants, wrenching off his shoes, pulling the socks off his feet, and in only his light-blue jockey shorts lunged at her, wrestling her down to the plush carpet. They rolled and grabbed and bit, clawed and scratched, tearing off what flimsy stuff still hid them until, panting, Gail reached between his legs and said, “Oh, God.”

  His cock was limp and useless.

  “Listen, it’ll be all right,” he promised in a panting desperation. “You’ll see, it will be, just wait—”

  “Oh, God,” she said again.

  Sonny rolled away from her, mashing his face in the carpet and cursing Buddie Porter, who could make him get hard when he didn’t even care, and cursing himself for not being able to get hard when he cared so much he felt it would kill him. He shut off a scream that was rising from his chest, rolled over, grabbed the girl, and pressed himself on her, biting and fumbling in a messy mixture of fear and desire, and he felt down to his unresponsive cock that was growing just a little, tauntingly halfway there, and tried to work it inside her, but it shrank back, receding inside him, and she rolled away, muffling herself face down on the carpet, her creamy little ass heaving up and down in spasms against the floor. Sonny reached out and tentatively touched the back of her neck and she jerked away in a scooting motion across the floor, lying still, and then after a while, in a flat, dry final-sounding voice, said, “Leave me alone.”

  Sonny thrust his right hand inside his mouth and bit down as hard as he could. He wanted to kill himself, he wanted to die.

  “Please,” she murmured, “go away.”

  Sonny jumped up in a furious, gripping panic and wrestled his clothes on, relentlessly, tearing and pulling, shoved his ridiculous feet in his shoes without any socks and blindly started for the stairway, looking for Gunner, but after he grabbed the banister he heard the steady rhythmic thump thump thump of real sex, flesh pounding on flesh, and the place where the terrible movies ran through his head lit up with a neon sign that said Don’t ruin it for everyone else, and he turned away and fled, out of the house, into the crickety night.

  He never really knew how he got the mile or so back home; only remembered falling and starting again and clutching at fences and lightposts and throwing up in somebody’s yard and tossing his shoes with a dumb, quick clatter on the stone apron of a filling station, and running a barefoot, mindless, nothing-headed one-man race in which each step on anything sharp or hurting brought relief out of punishing pain, and falling, somehow, falling and finding his own single bunk of a hunk of an empty bed.

  He hit the pillow and slept for a fragment of uneasy time, knocked out the way you would be if your head hit a stone. He woke with a start, wondering where he was, and much worse, who, and worse than that even, why. He reached for his cock to see if it still was there, and it was, but withdrawn, unfunctional, defeated, for all purposes dead, and Sonny came coldly awake, with a single-toned hum in his head like a note struck on a pitchfork.

  He stepped quietly to the bathroom, switched on the light, and closed the door behind him. Despising the face he saw in the mirror, he yanked the mirror door open and surveyed the bottle-crammed jumbled insides of the medicine cabinet. He slipped out a packet of Gillette Blue Blades. Sponsors of sporting events. Well, there would be an event all right, he didn’t know how sporting. Some said bullfighting wasn’t a sport, but a ritual. A ritual of death. Kill the bull and spare yourself. Spare the rod and spoil the child. Here’s the church and here’s the steeple, open the doors and here’s the people. Sonny unwrapped the blue-paper jacket with a picture of Mr. Gillette on it and pulled out the naked blade, flat and black. He held it in his right hand, admiring the efficient, cold beauty of it. Be razor-sharp, with Gillette. He brought his left hand toward his face, palm up, and stared with fascination at the faint tracks of the veins in his wrist. They were supposed to be blue, but they looked more like turquoise. He had never really examined them before. They seemed too delicate and small to carry the blood of a person’s life. Maybe if they were severed, the rest of the blood in your body came rushing to the opening, like water flooding through a hole in the dike. Hans Brinker held his finger in the dike and saved a city. What city was it? Amsterdam, Rotterdam. Who gives a damn?

  Sonny took the blade and made a slight, tentative scratch on his wrist. Enough to make blood come. Not a lot, but still real blood, surprisingly red and real. Sonny made a braver scratch, and then two or three in a row, quickly, so that little rivulets of blood began to flow together, forming a thick little puddle. It looked very beautiful, and Sonny started crying, not with any noise, just feeling the warm run of tears down his cheeks, and yet he was smiling at the same time. 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. Sonny sat down on the seat of the toilet, making a few more cuts and watching the new blood. He hadn’t really hit any vein that he could tell, but the blood came sliding out, pooling, running down into his hand, and Sonny watched it with a growing sense of calm, a deepening, cleansing relief, such as he had never known. He felt it was easier to breathe, easier to live; a horrible pressure in his head had subsided.

  When he understood that he was not killing himself, that he didn’t intend to do that—right then, anyway—the first thing he thought of was that anyone who found out about it would think he was a chicken, a showboat searching for sympathy. He had always thought that himself about people who cut their wrists but didn’t really kill themselves—they were objects of pity and contempt, poor bastards so botched that they couldn’t even succeed at their own death, or so mulingly sick for attention and love they could think of no way to gain it except to fa
ke a suicide attempt and have the scars to show it. Sonny knew a guy in college who cut his wrist a couple times and always went around afterward with a lot of Band-Aids so everyone could tell what happened, and everyone laughed at him and thought him a coward and a fraud. But now Sonny understood that cutting yourself might not have anything to do with suicide or even sympathy, that it was a very private act, a thing of its own; a self-treatment, perhaps, like the lancing of a wound—the lancing of the wound of living. And it really had helped. Maybe that’s why they really did it in the Middle Ages, the bloodletting cure, administered when they didn’t know what else to do. As Sonny had administered it to himself. He felt cleaner and freer than he had in a long time, but also very much afraid. He vaguely understood there were forces in him, powers and impulses he couldn’t control, that might kill him yet.

  He went to the sink and ran cold water on his wrist, then wrapped a lot of gauze around it and slapped big strips of adhesive tape over it, making a bulky, awkward bandage. He tiptoed to his room, closed the door, and had a cigarette. The windows were tinted with gray, the morning beginning to open and spread. Sonny was dog-tired but he didn’t want to sleep. He crawled into bed and stuck his wounded arm way down under the blanket so if his mother looked in she wouldn’t see. He wanted to get out of the house without running into his mother or father, but didn’t want to arouse suspicion by sneaking out before they got up. They’d be going to church. He waited it out until they woke and took their turns in the bathroom and scurried off in the half-conscious, helter-skelter manner in which they drove themselves into another day. They didn’t eat real breakfast; his mother would have Pepsi with ice, his father a cup of black coffee, each one standing as they poured down the individual fuel they required to begin.