Going All the Way

by Dan Wakefield

  The secret storage place was empty. He must have burned the last batch of magazines in one of his fits of nauseous, self-hating zeal. He put the top back on the box and held it on his lap, trying to think of something. He was hornier and more frustrated than ever now. He set the game on top of the toilet bowl and eased himself onto the floor. There was a little round mat that was dark-green and probably wouldn’t show the jizm too badly if he managed to get his rocks off. He lay down with his cock out on the mat and pressed his body over it, moving back and forth, picturing again the way Marty the Jewish girl picked the little fleck of ash off her arrogant lip. He imagined licking it off for her with his own tongue, thought of eating her tight little arrogant cunt until it got wet and inviting, then ramming in the full throbbing head of his cock. But nothing worked. He couldn’t even get up a semi. After a while he realized it must be because he felt guilty, imagining that stuff with a girl that his good friend was hot for. Marty was Gunner’s girl, or at least he wanted her to be, and Sonny felt like he was betraying his friend by imagining all this sexy stuff with his buddy’s girl. What a shit he was.

  Exhausted and guilty, Sonny tucked his cock back in his undershorts, picked up the game, and crept back to his bedroom. When he opened the door, the little reading light above Luke Matthews’ bed was on, and Matthews was propped up in bed on one elbow, blinking and staring at Sonny.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Sonny said. “I’m going to bed.”

  “What’s that thing—that box you’re carrying?”

  Sonny let out a long breath and said flatly, “It’s a game.”

  “A game?” Luke asked, rubbing at his eyes. “What kind of a game?”

  “It’s Elmer Layden’s Official College Football Game,” Sonny explained, and stuck it back in the closet.

  “Oh,” Luke Matthews said, “I see.”

  Sonny climbed up the little ladder and flopped on the bunk, burying his head in the pillow. Luke turned off the bed light and said, “Well, good night, son.”

  “Good night,” Sonny murmured into the pillow.

  Aching and sweaty, his mind was tormented by the mouths of beautiful women that pursed to a kiss and then faded into blackness, sudden glimpses of silken thighs that crossed themselves into his consciousness with a whisper and then were gone, breasts that burst at his brain through the lacy constriction of their tight brassieres and suddenly evaporated.… Thrashing and scratching, he became uncomfortably entangled in the sweaty sheet, too tired to extricate himself, too dispirited to care, until finally, as a gray dawn turned the flat sky the color of soiled linen, he passed to the blessed void of a dreamless sleep.

  3

  Sonny woke up around one o’clock in the afternoon, feeling as if he’d been drugged and beaten on. Everything ached, especially his head. The only consoling fact was that Luke Matthews had taken off, probably in pursuit of more salvageable souls. Little wonder. The craggy old bastard wasn’t any dunce, and he no doubt decided that a college-grad Army vet who kept bad company and played kid football games in the bathroom late at night was a more complex spiritual problem than his convict-holy-man training had prepared him to deal with. He could probably make more headway with your simple, ordinary murderer-rapist. Sonny at least respected him for realizing when he was out of his depth.

  Mrs. Burns didn’t mention Luke Matthews anymore, and Sonny accepted an unspoken truce on the matter. The only reminder of the departed Holy Man was his book, which still lay on the coffee table like an unexploded bomb, a dud of the salvation-literature armory. Though Sonny resisted the temptation to bitch about Matthews’ visit, he became even crabbier and more irritable with his mother, and she became busier baking and cooking, turning out an orgy of cream-filled pastries, butterscotch rolls, and fresh berry pies. Sonny sat around the house stuffing in the goodies and despising himself, becoming more flabby and sullen all the time. He had quit calling Gunner in the evening for fear of getting Mrs. Casselman and having her snap at him, and nobody answered anymore when he called Gunner’s place in the afternoons. He stopped getting hopefully excited when his phone rang because it usually turned out to be for his mother. Once when his mother answered the phone and said it was for him, Sonny quickly licked some butterscotch icing from his fingers and rushed to the upstairs phone where he could talk in private, figuring it must be Gunner. It only turned out to be Buddie Porter, though, calling, she said, just to see how Sonny was. Sonny said he wasn’t feeling too well, but crossly refused her offers to take him for a ride or bring him some new magazines. He promised to get in touch with her if he thought of anything at all she could do for him.

  When almost a week went by without any word from Gunner, Sonny began imagining all kinds of things that might have happened to his pal. He might have been turned down flat by the sexy Jewish babe and rolled up to Chi to take the job with the advertising agency. He might have decided to leave Indianapolis without even saying good-bye to anyone, even his friends. Or maybe, worst of all, he didn’t think of Sonny as a real friend after all; maybe he’d got bored with Sonny and gone back to his old crew of big-timers, wondering how he’d ever got mixed up with a nobody like Sonny Burns.

  Sonny’s moping around got so bad that his father came into the den one evening while Sonny was watching TV and drinking a Pepsi, and rubbed his thumb against the tips of his fingers in an awful, discomforting sign that he was about to “have a talk” with his son.

  “You ought to get out of the house, get some sun,” Mr. Burns said.

  “Yes, I will,” Sonny mumbled.

  Mr. Burns cleared his throat and made the little nervous forward motion of his knees, as if trying to make sure of his stance. His face was flushed and frowning. “You can’t let yourself get down” he said.

  “No, sir.”

  The terrible, pulsing silence fell between them, and Mr. Burns let out a deep, despairing sigh and left the room. Sonny wished himself dead.

  The next afternoon Gunner called, sounding as casual and friendly as if no time had passed at all, and said he’d come by to pick Sonny up in an hour or so. When Sonny got dressed, his clean khakis were so tight in the waist he didn’t know if he could even get down a beer.

  Gunner wasn’t in the brooding mood that Sonny last saw him in, and in fact seemed on top of the world. When they settled at a table over at the Key, Gunner explained the whole thing. He’d been seeing Marty every night, and he hadn’t been home in the afternoons because Marty was giving him painting lessons. She even had her own studio, a top-floor room in a crumbling old apartment building down by the Herron, equipped with an easel and all the crap you needed to paint with, and even a hot plate so if you got inspired you could keep right on going and heat up some coffee or something and not even have to go out until the fit of creativity had passed. Gunner said that even though he’d taken an art course and messed around with sketching, he had never painted with real oils, and that’s what Marty was showing him.

  “I doubt I’ll be any good or anything,” he said, “but I get a charge out of it. Just holding the brush, mixing the paint on the palette. The whole bit.”

  Sonny felt even more loggy and good-for-nothing, sitting around all that time on his dead ass while Gunner was out mastering a whole new field of artistic activity. The bastard seemed to give out waves of enthusiasm when he talked about painting, almost like one of the religious nuts giving you the Christ line. But even though Sonny was impressed and curious about Gunner’s progress in art, he couldn’t help wondering how he’d progressed in other areas; like, for instance, the area between the luscious thighs of his new art teacher.

  Not wanting to come right out and ask about it, Sonny just made the subtle observation that “I guess she didn’t think you were a dumb jock after all, huh?”

  Gunner grinned. “Well, who knows,” he said modestly. “The whole problem was, I was playing defensive ball. When I first met her. You remember. Jesus.” Gunner grasped at his head, embarrassed
for himself. “I played it all wrong. Even when I first took her out. You know where the hell I took her?”

  “Where?”

  Gunner laughed disparagingly. “To a goddam foreign movie. At the little art movie theater they got now, down around Thirtieth and Capitol.” He shook his head at what he obviously felt was his own stupidity.

  “What was wrong with that?” Sonny asked.

  “Shee-it, man. A truly bad call. I was trying to play her own game, you see? I was trying to be more intellectual than she was, worrying about whether I was coming off like a dumb jock. It was awful. She kept putting me down, naturally. But I was hooked, and when you’re hooked you can’t think straight. I could feel what was happening—I knew I was playing the loser, but I couldn’t snap out of it. Like when you’re trying to wake up from a dream and can’t do it.”

  Sonny swigged anxiously from his beer. “So what happened?” he asked.

  Gunner popped a cigarette out of a pack of Chesterfields and struck a match from a folder using only one hand. “I got pissed off,” he said.

  “At her? You mean at Marty?”

  “Right. It’s the only thing that saved my ass.”

  “How?” Sonny asked, feeling stupid as hell.

  “Well, she invited me in for a drink after the movie, and we’re sitting in this little den kind of room they have, and some serious music is on the record player, and she’s being bitchy as hell. Just like the way she was that day at the drugstore. Remember?”

  “Yeh, yeh.”

  “I was trying to talk this big game, a lot of intellectual shit, and she kept shooting me down. Every now and then she’d yawn, which was getting me more and more pissed. Then she made some crack about how boring the people were in the Midwest, and that’s when I flipped my lid. Thank God. I just didn’t give a damn anymore, and so I said what I really thought, not giving a shit if she liked it or not.” Gunner sipped at his beer, smiling.

  “What was it,” Sonny asked, “that you said?”

  “I said to her, ‘Look, bitch, I didn’t go to college in the East, and I’m no intellectual. I’m just a big dumb jock, but I know a couple things you don’t know, or don’t want to know, like I know I want to fuck you and I know you want it too.’”

  “Jesus, what happened?”

  Gunner made the sharp, popping snap of his fingers. “She was jelly,” he said.

  “Goddam,” Sonny whispered in awe.

  Sonny couldn’t imagine himself ever doing anything like that, except with a girl like Buddie, who he already was sure of and thus didn’t care too much about. But he knew that the mean, tough-guy approach really worked, and not just for Gunner. Sonny had avidly studied an article in a recent Life that explained how different movie actors appealed to women. It said there was a surprising number of women who were hot for Richard Widmark, the guy with the madman grin who made this crazy little laugh whenever he hurt someone. Sonny had seen the movie where Widmark knocked off a poor old lady in a wheelchair by pushing her down a long flight of stairs, which sent him into a real peal of his crazyman laughter. Life’s analysis of why so many women were attracted to the fiendish little actor was that “cast in his first movie in a sadist role, Widmark appeals most to women who want to be treated cruelly. This may be a larger group than is recognized.…”

  You bet your ass, Sonny thought. He figured he would never be able to appeal to women that way and consoled himself by Life’s analysis of why so many women creamed over Frank Sinatra: “According to considered Hollywood judgment, Sinatra’s popularity is based on his appeal as a mixed-up character whom women want to take care of …”

  Sonny felt that was his own best hope.

  “I even brought home my first canvas,” Gunner was saying, having lost interest in the trifle of his sexual conquest. It seemed like now that he’d found some nice new pussy he could afford to be interested in higher things, like art. Sonny felt guilty for thinking that but he couldn’t help it, even though he knew he was probably just jealous. He said, of course he’d like to see the canvas, and Gunner drove them out to the Meadowlark, steering with one hand and beating a little jazz rhythm on the outside of the car with his other hand.

  It was really hard to find much to say about the canvas, and Gunner helped out by explaining, “It’s more like an exercise, a way of getting the feel of paint.”

  It was mostly just swatches of blue and green, laid on very thick, and all Sonny could think of was the finger paintings you did in grade school, but he didn’t mention that.

  “It looks like the real thing,” he commented.

  “Well, it’s the real material, anyway,” Gunner said and leaned the small canvas against a lamp on an end table. He put on a lively Brubeck LP and got them a couple cans of beer. Just as Gunner settled on the couch, the doorbell rang and he got up to answer.

  “Is that your mother?” Sonny asked, hoping it wouldn’t be.

  “Don’t know why she’d ring,” Gunner said. “Maybe she forgot the key.”

  After the buzzer from downstairs there was a knock at the door, and Gunner opened it. Instead of his mother there was a middle-aged guy in a rumpled light-blue sport coat and slacks that drooped down in folds around the tops of his canvas rubber-soled shoes.

  “Mr. Thomas Casselman?” he asked.

  “That’s me.”

  “I’m Mr. Libby, from Artists Unlimited.” He edged his way into the room and asked, “May I come in?,” after he already had.

  Gunner looked confused, but asked the guy to sit down. “Are you a friend of Marty’s or something?”

  “Beg pardon?” The man smiled.

  “Marty Pilcher. She’s an art student, down at Herron.”

  “Oh, no, we’re not connected at all with Herron. Or any other local group.” He made local sound very small-time. “We’re a national organization,” he said.

  “Well,” Gunner asked, scratching at the back of his head, “can I get you a beer?”

  “Oh my, no, not on the job.”

  He pulled a big portfolio onto his lap and cleared his throat. “I’m sure that you are just the sort of person who can benefit from our kind of personal, professional guidance,” he said.

  “I don’t get it,” Gunner said. “Who are you?”

  “Mr. Libby, from Artists Unlimited. Here, I should have given you my card.”

  He handed a little printed white card to Gunner, who looked at it blankly.

  “Yeh, I see, but I still don’t get it. I mean, how did you get here? How do you know me or anything?”

  “From your talent,” the man beamed. “A small sample, of course. Yet enough for a professional eye to detect the kind of rough talent that can be sharpened and honed into—who knows? A true artist.”

  “What sample?” Gunner asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “The little challenge in the matchbook cover—the drawing of a woman’s head that you were able to reproduce with enough skill to bring me here today.”

  “The matchbox,” Gunner said. “You mean the one that said ‘Draw Me?’”

  “I remember!” Sonny volunteered. “Yeh. It said ‘Draw Me,’ and you drew the woman on a napkin, at the Red Key. Remember?”

  “I remember drawing it,” Gunner said, “but I sure as hell never sent it in. I’d have had to send it in, for them to give you my name, wouldn’t I?”

  “Of course”—Mr. Libby smiled—“of course you sent it in.”

  “Goddam it, I didn’t send anything in!”

  “Well, someone must have,” Libby said. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  Gunner turned to Sonny, staring at him suspiciously. “You were there, when I drew the damn thing. Did you send it in?”

  “Me? I wouldn’t send anything in for another guy. Besides, you put it in your pocket. I saw you.”

  “Well, it’s really academic,” Mr. Libby said. “Perhaps you should simply accept the mystery as a further sign, pointing your way to a career in art. The important thing is, Artists Unl
imited can start you up the ladder of that career, with a series of home instructions that you work on and send in to our staff of master artists for a personal, professional critique of each and every lesson you complete.”

  Gunner looked dazed. “Who the fuck,” he said almost to himself, “could have sent it in?”

  “It’s as if you were sitting at the feet of one of our contemporary masters,” Libby went on, “benefiting from his own genius, the secrets of his art applied to your own work. Within five days after sending in your completed lesson, you receive in the mail—”

  The door opened and Nina Casselman walked in, pulling a big white floppy summer hat off her head and shaking her thick bright blond hair out with one hand in a way that Sonny thinks of a woman preparing for bed—but not for sleep.

  She put one hand on her hip and asked, with her eyes wide, “Am I interrupting anything?”

  “Not at all, I’m sure,” Mr. Libby said, rising.

  “Nina, this is Mr. Libby,” Gunner said. “You know Sonny Burns.”

  Nina dismissed Sonny with a glance that was suitable for brushing off a gnat and swiveled over to extend her hand to Mr. Libby.

  “I’m from Artists Unlimited,” he said.

  “Oh, really?” Nina asked with interest.

  “There’s been some kind of mistake,” Gunner said nervously.

  “On the contrary”—Libby beamed—“this young man, Mr. Casselman, has great talent in the field of art.”

  “Of course he has,” Nina said. “He has ever since he was a little boy.”

  “Oh—then you’re—his sister?”

  “Thank you.” Nina smiled. “He’s my son.”

  “Really,” Mr. Libby said, “I’d have never—”

  “Few people would,” Nina said and sat down on the couch beside Mr. Libby.