There was a little runway that came out into the audience, and she paraded up and down it, swinging it around, and then went back to the stage and unzipped the sheath and wiggled out of it. She talked, too, saying stuff like “Don’t you boys wish you had a little a this,” and slapping her ass or petting her boob, and running her tongue around her mouth. You could almost hear the perspiration coming off all the poor horny bastards. When it came to taking off her stockings, after she got one almost off she wouldn’t pull it clear off but hooked it on the toe and then pulled it back like a slingshot or something and flipped it out into the audience, and man, these fucking steelworkers were diving for it like it was worth a million bucks, and two guys got in an argument over one of the stockings and ripped it in half and the bouncer had to get them settled down. With just her high heels and G-string and pasties on she came parading back down the runway and she’d stop and tousle some poor guy’s hair or crouch down with her legs apart and wiggle her cunt at him, and the place started whooping and whistling then. She stopped right on the runway at a place near Sonny and Gunner’s table and crouched down and gave them the old cunt wiggle, right in their faces, and she could see their tongues were hanging out and she said, “You fuckin babies, you oughta be home suckin’ on Mama’s tit,” and then she turned around and waved her ass at them and when she finally finished, after laying on her back and humping up and down, with a big crescendo from the combo. Sonny was pressing his legs together against the hard-on he had, dizzy and almost sick with lust. Even Gunner looked like he’d been through a wringer.
“Too much,” he said. “Too much.”
“God, what I wouldn’t give for that.”
“You’d give plenty, and you probably wouldn’t get much, either.”
“Yeh, I know. God, though. God almighty.”
“What the hell are we doing here?” Gunner asked.
“I dunno.”
“Torturing ourselves, that’s what.”
“Yeh, I guess.”
“Come on, let’s go to a regular bar and just have a beer. If we can find one.”
He meant one that didn’t have a strip show, and they finally found one, a real mucky joint that didn’t have a name but just had one of those neon signs that said, “Bar,” like if you wanted any frills you could take your business elsewhere, this was just a goddam Bar, period. Gunner said he figured they didn’t water the drinks in a regular bar like that, so he had a Cuba Libre and Sonny had a seven-and-seven. They had already had God knows how many beers and Sonny suddenly knew he was getting soused, if he hadn’t already gotten there. He didn’t want to admit it, though, even to himself. He was all sexed up and felt desperate, like he had to do something, something to get relief from a woman, or at least have a plan for doing it, a course of action, a goal to aim at and look forward to, some hope, whatever, anything.
“Listen,” he said, “have you thought of anything? About what I can do? About a woman. About women. I have to do something.”
Gunner grasped at his head, grimly, and said, “Yeh, we gotta do something. We gotta figure something out.”
“We really do.”
He took a slug of his drink and shook the glass around, rattling the ice cube. “I been thinking,” he said. “Have you ever spent any time with a woman, alone? I mean, where you had a lot of time in the sack and didn’t have to worry about doing anything else for a couple days?”
“Not really. Buddie stayed in my room down at Bloomington a few nights. But you know, that’s another story. Mostly, though, it’s been on some fucking couch with people in the next room or upstairs or a golf course or shit like that. You know.”
“Yeh. Well, what I was thinking was, if you got some gal who you were hot for and you had a lot of time to relax and play around with her, off in the sack someplace, that might do it. It might work out real good and you wouldn’t have to worry so much.”
“Yeh, it might,” Sonny said, but he was drunk enough to admit the real fear that flared in his head when he thought about it. “What if it didn’t, though? What if it didn’t work?”
“I dunno, man.”
Sonny hated to hear him say it, but he was being straight. “Anyway,” he said, “who would I get to do it with me? You can’t just go up to some girl and ask her to do that.”
Gunner finished off his drink and ordered another. So did Sonny.
“I was thinking,” he said. “How do you feel about DeeDee Armbrewster?”
“How do I feel about her?”
“Yeh. I mean, does she sex you up?”
“Well, yeh. But why?”
“Well, she’s really good. Sexually. I mean, aside from all that crap about marriage. But with sex, she really likes it, she likes to do anything, and she knows how.”
Christ, back at Shortley Sonny had even jacked off about DeeDee sometimes, sort of like he would about the stripper, knowing she was out of his reach, he could never do anything but just think about it with her, pretend he was doing it with her. He still didn’t see what it had to do with his cure, though, the fact that one of Gunner’s old girls was sexy and good at doing it.
“But what’s DeeDee got to do with it?” he asked.
Gunner rubbed at his brow, hard. “Well, I was thinking. Maybe she’d do it. Maybe if I sort of explained, not everything, but maybe if I sort of told her you’d had a bad time with somebody and you really needed some action, it was important, maybe she’d just do it.”
“Jesus.”
Sonny could hardly believe it. That Gunner would even try to get her to do it for him, much less that she’d do it. But he could tell Gunner was serious; he really wanted to help. Even with one of his own old girls.
“The trouble is,” Gunner said, “her getting this marriage bug. That might screw things up. If she’s thinking that way.”
“Yeh, I would think so.”
“Man, if we were only in Japan. What a fuckin shame. That you didn’t get over there.”
“I know.”
“Well, shit. Here we are in Indiana, surrounded by Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois—” He stopped, hit his forehead with the palm of his hand, and said, “Illinois!”
“What about it?”
He took out a cigarette and offered Sonny one but he didn’t want any distraction; it looked like Gunner was on the trail of some plan, but he couldn’t imagine what the hell Illinois had to do with any plan about getting laid.
“Tell me something,” Gunner said. “Have you ever been to a whorehouse? I mean, does the idea of a good whore turn you off? Lots of guys just don’t like the idea.”
“Oh, I like the idea O.K.,” Sonny said, “if it was really a good one. But the time I went to one was pretty crappy.”
Once in service he had taken a ten-day leave with a buddy in his office and they went to California and on a Sunday shot down to Tijuana for the bullfights. Afterward they started boozing it up in the bars and strip joints and got very horny. They went to a whorehouse that was crowded as hell, mostly with Mexican guys, yelling and arguing. You sat on a little bench, like waiting for a doctor, and when a whore was finished, she’d come down this hall and try to get you to go to her room. The whores were mostly pretty moldy-looking, and Sonny got dragged off by one about forty-five who was pretty fat but didn’t look too syphilitic or anything, as far as he could tell. She got him in the room and asked if he wanted to suck or fuck and he said first he’d like to suck and then fuck and she said that’d be three dollars. She opened his pants and examined his prick, then put some Kleenex over it and started sucking away, and before long he shot his wad real good. He started to take off his pants then to fuck, but she said he had already got his money’s worth. He tried to argue, but she said she would make trouble, and with all those wild Mexican guys out there, Sonny didn’t want any. So he’d paid three bucks for a Kleenex-wrapped blow job.
Gunner said he asked because he just remembered that once in college some lodge brother from Chi had taken him and two other guys to a really gr
eat whorehouse. It wasn’t in Chi, it was in this little jerkwater Illinois town, about forty miles south of Chi. The weird thing was it seemed just like a little farm town, but for some damn reason there was this great little whorehouse there, ever since anyone could remember. The girls were young and really nice and they played around with you and let you talk to them just like it was a real date and you were a real person. The little town was called Gladiola. Gladiola, Illinois. Sonny said it sounded to him like the ideal place to spend the night.
It took them a couple of hours to find Gladiola; it wasn’t even on the map and they kept getting lost. They bought a fifth of bourbon before leaving Cal City, and that kept their inspiration going, even though it was pretty damn discouraging, finding Gladiola. When they got there, the only light on was a night-light in the general store. Gunner knocked and knocked and finally an old toothless guy came down and peeked out. Gunner asked him how to get to the Gladiola House—that’s what the place was called.
“Been gone,” the man said. “Shut down a couple years ago. All gone.”
He shuffled away and Gunner said, “Fuck me in the teeth. What a fuckin piece of luck.”
“It’s my luck,” Sonny said. “They probably heard I was coming.”
It was almost four in the morning, and there they were in Gladiola, Illinois, and there wasn’t any Gladiola House anymore.
“I guess we’re up shit crick without a paddle,” Gunner said.
Sonny couldn’t say anything at all. He wished he was dead.
“Fuck it, we might as well go on to Chi now,” Gunner said.
Sonny just nodded. He didn’t care.
They came roaring into Chi through a night torched by the steel-mill fires, eerie and hellish. Gunner kept swigging on the fifth and he got too loaded to drive anymore. Sonny said he’d take over. He was past the point of knowing or caring whether he was loaded or not. Somehow he guided them into the stone gray outer web of the smoking city, and he felt that was something, anyway, he was getting them there. His eyes kept closing on him, though, and he’d wake with a jerk, just in time to keep on the road. He tried hard to keep concentrating. They came to a curve and Sonny took it all right, but then, too late, he saw it curve again—it was an S—and he knew it was too late, too late even to put on the brake, and as they headed straight into a cement abutment, he just said, “Jesus Christ,” and then they smashed.
There were flares and sirens and Gunner was bleeding, saying, “Oh, shit,” wiping blood from his face. Sonny wasn’t bleeding but he felt like his whole body had been wrenched out of place. He couldn’t believe it was happening. It was a scene like you pass on the highway and think Oh, shit, the poor bastards, and never thought it could happen to you. Sonny grabbed Gunner’s arm and started crying.
“Shit man, I’m sorry, I’m so fuckin sorry.”
“We’re O.K., it’ll be O.K.,” Gunner kept saying.
In the hospital they found that Gunner had a broken jaw and needed some stitches. The doctor on duty said Sonny was just shaken up a bit, he could probably go home the next day, but Sonny kept insisting something was wrong, his back was on fire. Finally they took some X rays and than came running in with sandbags and pulleys and told him not to move. It seemed he had broken a vertebra in his neck and if he’d jerked his head around hard he might have been killed or paralyzed. As awful as he felt, he was glad he hadn’t knocked himself off. They said he would have to lie in traction with his head in this thing that pulled it back to straighten out his neck and back, and then he’d be put in a cast, and then he’d get a neck brace, and then maybe he’d be O.K.
He knew he ought to be thankful, thankful to God for saving his ass and not killing anyone else either, but all he could think of was that if God had really given a shit there wouldn’t have been an accident in the first place. If God had been a really good guy, he wouldn’t have spirited the Gladiola House away so Sonny couldn’t fuck.
Sonny didn’t even much mind the idea of being for a couple months in the hospital. He hadn’t known what to do with himself outside, anyway. Maybe lying there all tractioned up he’d be able to figure things out better. His parents got him out of the ward into a two-person room with an old guy who had suffered a heart attack and was trying to recover. He was Mr. Weyl and he turned out to be damned interesting. He told good stories to Sonny about how he had educated himself, working in the stockyards and going to night school and getting a law degree; he had even invented things that were patented, and he patented a new soft drink once called “Cherokee Cola” and lost his fortune in it, but he didn’t even seem to mind, he seemed to think it was an interesting experience, losing your fortune, especially on something called Cherokee Cola.
After a couple of days Sonny’s parents had to go home to get back to work, which was really a relief to him, not having his mother looking at him like he was a poor invalid, and his father making those long, despairing sighs. They kept saying how happy they were he would be all right, but it wasn’t exactly glee he saw on their faces. His mother kept crying, saying they were tears of thankfulness to the Lord for saving him, but they seemed to Sonny like ordinary miserable tears. Sometimes he could see her sitting with her head down and her lips moving silently, and he knew she was praying. It made him feel like jumping out of his skin.
Gunner got out of the hospital in just a couple days, after they took some stitches under his lower lip and put some clamp kind of thing on his broken jaw. He went and stayed with the old friend of his who lived in Chi, and decided as long as he was there to settle the thing about the ad agency—whether he would go with it or not. He came every day and visited Sonny in the hospital, telling what all was going on and making great stories out of it all.
Rumsley, Klinger, and Faxworth, the three sharp young guys who had started this agency of their own, sounded like comic-opera characters as Gunner told about them. They were wining and dining him, and offering the princely sum of seven-five as a yearly starting salary, but Gunner found that instead of being impressed with them like he’d been when he worked there before going into service, they seemed now like a cartoon strip that might be called The Young Execs, what with their three-martini lunches and Madison Avenue phrases and talking of how they would help him “get a leg up on things” even though he had been in service and wasn’t aware of all the latest advances in the Ad Game. When he began to sound like he didn’t think it was his meat, they urged him anyway to take a personality test which would help him decide on what career he was best fitted for, and if the ad game wasn’t his line, they’d shake on it, no hard feelings, and wish him well in his chosen career, whatever it might be. The personality test, which was administered and interpreted by a special psychological counseling service, revealed that Gunner would do well in the fields of forestry, aeronautics, and charity work.
“I guess what I ought to do,” he told Sonny, “is fly around national parks dropping food packages for the bears. That would make use of all my talents.”
The psychological people also revealed some dark aspects of Gunner’s personality. On one part of the test you were supposed to draw a picture of yourself, and Gunner said he just drew a picture of a guy casually standing with a drink in his hand and the other hand in his pocket. They told him this showed tendencies toward alcoholism and masturbation.
Gunner thought the whole thing was full of shit but pretty funny, and he almost keeled over when he found out it cost Rumsley, Klinger, and Faxworth five hundred smackers to have him take the test and have it analyzed for him. Rumsley, Klinger, and Faxworth were pissed off at the results, and they even were suspicious that Gunner had cheated on the test, though he tried to explain he would never have been able to figure out how to cheat in a way that would make him turn out as a flying charity forest-ranger, with tendencies toward masturbation and alcoholism. They agreed, grumbling, that maybe the Ad Game wasn’t his cup of tea.
Gunner went right to the V.A. office after all that and came one day to tell Sonny he had decide
d to take off right away for New York. He could probably get into Columbia for the second semester and get the GI Bill started then. In the meantime, he didn’t want to hang around Indianapolis any longer and he was going to go there and pick up some gear, take Nina out for a farewell dinner, and hit the road for New York. He figured he could get himself a room and land a job at the post office there. He knew some guys in service who said you could always get work sorting mail at night in the New York Post Office, and he would get a chance to really learn the city and psyche things out.
“By the time you get on your feet,” he said, “I’ll have the place down cold. You can probably get into Columbia for the spring semester—I brought you the catalog, and the GI Bill forms and shit. We’ll have two-twenty a month between us just from the bill. We can chip in on an apartment, live on spaghetti and wine. Do the whole thing. New York.”
He made it sound as exciting as when Sonny met him on the train and he spoke in that same tone of awe and adventure when he talked of “Ja-pan.”
“O.K., buddy,” Sonny said, smiling. “You’re on.”
Gunner was catching a train back to Naptown that night; when he made up his mind, he didn’t let any grass grow under his ass. He stood up quickly, seeming all business and rush, and said, “Look, let’s not have any goodbye shit, I’ll write from New York, and you’ll be out there in no time.”
“Right,” Sonny said.
Gunner reached down and squeezed him on the arm, his hand warm and strong, and said, “Take it slow, buddy. Don’t let ’em get to you. It won’t be long.”
Going All the Way Page 28