Going All the Way (15 page)

“What?”

“Ever see a brick shithouse? I mean a real one.”

“I guess not,” Sonny admitted. “Just the wooden kind.”

“Yeh, me too. And yet all our life we go around saying a woman is built like a brick shithouse if she has big knockers. What have big knockers got to do with a brick shithouse? Nothing sticks out on a shithouse, does it?”

“Not that I ever saw.”

“Man,” Gunner said, shaking his head. “It's weird. We say all kind of stuff we don't even know what it means. Or how come we say it.”

“There's probably a lot of stuff like that. We say.”

“Fuckin-A there is.”

The combo had finished a set, and there was loud giggling from the two broads.

“They're hot to go,” Gunner said.

“I guess,” Sonny said without much enthusiasm. He figured if Gunner actually got the girls, he would be stuck with the one who was not built like a brick shithouse. This one who was not had red hair that looked dyed, piled on top of her head, and enough lipstick to paint a wild Indian.

“Let's go get 'em,” Gunner said.

Sonny felt faint. “Listen,” he said, “I gotta take a leak first.”

Gunner looked him straight in the eyes and Sonny coughed and looked away, hoping he didn't seem nervous. “Look,” Gunner said understandingly, “maybe I oughta go make the first move myself. Then, if it looks like action, I'll call you over.”

“Good plan,” said Sonny.

Gunner finished off his beer and started ambling over to the two broads. Sonny hurried to the head. It was one of those moldy kind of crappers with only one toilet and no pissing trough. The toilet didn't flush too well and there was a pretty bad mess in it. Sonny took aim and then looked away from it, up at the wall. There was a picture of a cock, and underneath it said “Eat Me.” Under that someone had scrawled in pencil, “I did—Kilroy was here.” Under that somebody else had written “Kilroy Sucks.” In another place was a phone number and the message “Call Susie—she likes to blow.” Sonny read this stuff while he pissed, then shook the last drops off and tucked his prick back in. It seemed especially small, as if already retreating from the war-painted redhead. On the wall beside the door was a rubber machine, and it said in big letters “For Sanitary Purposes Only,” like you weren't supposed to use them for fucking. The brands were obscure ones you didn't ordinarily hear of, like Varsity Tip, King O' Hearts, and Kamikaze. Sonny pulled out his wallet and checked to see if he still had the single Trojan in the secret pocket of it. It was there, getting pretty rumpled and beat-up-looking. Anyway, Trojans were best. Everyone knew that. Sonny wasn't sure how everyone knew it, but it was something you just knew, like you knew that whores didn't kiss on the mouth, and Nice Girls didn't do it when they were riding the rag, and drinking too much gin in hot weather could make you blind.

When Sonny came out of the crapper, Gunner was sitting at the table with the broads, gesturing a lot. Sonny thought maybe he ought to go over, but he sat down at his own table instead and drank what was left of his beer. The combo came out to start the next set, and after another few minutes Gunner returned to the table.

“What happened?” Sonny asked.

“They're married,” Gunner announced.

“No shit? Where's their husbands?”

“Night shift at Allison's.”

“Oh, brother.”

Those were the kind of guys who would beat the shit out of you if they caught you messing around with their women.

Gunner ordered another round for him and Sonny.

Sonny felt bloated and sticky from the beer, his throat burned from the whiskey shots, and the music made a rhythmic ache in his head. It would have made sense to give up the idea of getting any pussy and go home to bed, but the quest seemed even more urgent, more all-consuming now. The thing about hunting for pussy was that once you started you couldn't give up trying until you passed out or something. No matter how many things fell through and how late it got, it became all the more important to do it then, that very night. The future didn't count.

Gunner popped his fingers. “I got it,” he said.

“Yeh?”

“Maybe. If she's still around. Broad I picked up in this neighborhood once. She dropped out of Tech and was working at Curtis-Wright.”

A factory girl! That was almost as good as a nurse, or so they said. Gunner made his way through the tables to the one telephone. It was on the wall, without any booth. Gunner looked a long time through the phone book, and then Sonny saw him put a coin in. The combo was going like crazy, and it must have been hard as hell to hear anything. But Gunner came back grinning.

“We can pick her up in fifteen minutes,” he said.

“Does she have a friend?”

“She must have,” Gunner said.

Gunner bought a pint of whiskey off the bartender, and they drove to this seedy old apartment house not far from the bar. There was a figure in the shadow of the doorway. Gunner whistled, and this girl came flouncing out. She was wearing tight black toreadors and high heels and had on a tight, low-cut blouse. A little gold cross dangled in the start of the crevice between her tits. Gunner got out of the car and the girl got in.

“Terry, this is my buddy George,” Gunner said.

“Glad to meet you, Terry.”

“Likewise,” she said without looking at him.

“Let's take a little drive,” Gunner said.

“Hey, what is this?” Terry asked. “You said we was havin' a date, Ron.”

She thought Gunner's name was Ron. That was for safety, so if you ever knocked up one of those broads, they couldn't track you down. That's why Gunner introduced Sonny as “George.”

“Yeh, well, we are,” Gunner said.

“Two fellas and one girl ain't
my
kind of date,” she said huffily.

“Sure, but you gotta friend, don't you? A friend for George?”

She looked at Sonny and a pink bubble appeared on her mouth, expanded to the size of an egg, then burst. “Maybe,” she said.

“Well, let's go get her,” Gunner said.

Terry wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and said, “I'd have to call and see.”

“O.K. Listen. We'll go back to the Tropics and you can call.”

She blew another bubble, and Sonny started the car. They were having the last call for drinks at the Tropics, and Terry said she wanted a Singapore sling.

“O.K., we'll order it for you,” Gunner promised. “You call your friend.”

Her friend said it was too late, but she would be happy to go some other time. Sonny and Gunner downed their last boilermaker and Terry chugged her Singapore sling and then gulped the fruit. When they got in the car, Gunner offered her a swig from the pint, but she wouldn't take it. Gunner took one and passed it to Sonny.

“Hey,” Terry complained, “this ain't no real date. You take me home.”

Gunner put his arm around her, and his hand dangled down onto her left tit.

“You're lookin' real great, Terry.”

“Don't give me none of your bullshit, Ron.”

“Whatya mean, bullshit? I'm telling you, you look like a million.”

“Keep your hands to yourself, you North Side cocksucker. This ain't a real date, and I'm goin' home.”

Sonny started the motor. He drove real slow, and Gunner did his best to warm her up, but she wasn't having any.

“O.K.,” he said when they got to her place, “I'll give you a call, and you get your friend, right, and we'll have a real date.”

“Yeh, and I mean a real date, like a movie and all. Not just fartin' around in a car.”

“Sure, sure,” Gunner said, “that's what I mean.”

She primped at her hair, straightened her blouse, and said, “O.K., when is it?”

“Huh?”

“The date?”

“Oh, well, real soon,” Gunner said. “Look, I'll call in the next couple days.”

“Yeh, and my Aunt Minnie is the Queen of Spain.”

“No shit, I mean it,” Gunner said.

“Seein's believin'.”

“You'll see.”

“Lemme outa this heap.”

Gunner got out and Terry switched her tail up to the apartment, her heels clicking on the sidewalk. The door slammed, and she was gone, like they had only imagined her. She really was sexy-looking, though, and Sonny was perspiring as he thought of fucking her while she yelled a lot of dirty stuff at him. Gunner took a gulp from the pint and passed it to Sonny. He took one too, and it scorched his raw, churning stomach.

“Well, we can always take Terry and her friend,” Gunner said. “They put out, but you gotta treat 'em right first.”

“Yeh,” Sonny said, but it wasn't much consolation for the moment. Even a sure thing for the future didn't help the need right then, it was only a dream, bringing no immediate relief.

They finished off the pint and then went to the Toddle House for breakfast. It was glary and noisy, and Sonny's head was throbbing. Gunner had a stack with sausage and Sonny had a piece of icebox chocolate pie and a Coke. Gunner was still hungry and he ordered a pecan waffle. In the middle of it, he put down his fork and clutched at his head. Sonny thought maybe he was sick. In a way he was, but not in the stomach.

“This isn't it, man,” Gunner said. “Chasing tail and boozing ourselves blind. Shit, this just isn't it.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean,” Gunner said emphatically, “there's got to be more in life than pussy.”

“Yeh, I guess you're right,” Sonny said.

Gunner finished off his waffle with a vengeance, like a man inspired and determined. Sonny felt better too, like maybe it was one of those points in life when things were going to change, going to begin. Finally. When they got outside, Gunner stretched and pointed at the pink streaks in the eastern sky.

“Fuckin dawn,” he said.

Sonny took it as an omen. “Right,” he said. “A new fuckin day.”

PART TWO

1

As part of Gunner's plan to find more in life than pussy, he announced to Sonny they were going down to the Herron Art Museum and look at the art. Sonny had never been to the Herron before—never been inside, anyway, even though he had passed it thousands of times driving home from downtown. It was a gray, square building that reminded Sonny of a mausoleum, maybe because it looked like one or maybe that was secretly how he felt about museums. Housing for the dead. It had never occurred to him to go inside the place, nor had he imagined that anyone except art students who studied at the Herron school had any reason for going inside.

“Are you sure they'll let us in?” he asked Gunner on the way down.

“Sure they will, it's a mu
seum
, for God sake.”

“I thought maybe you had to be a student at Herron or something. To get in.”

“It's for the public,” Gunner explained. “All you have to be is one of the public.”

“Oh.”

Gunner was right. You just walked in and moseyed around, going from one room to another, looking at the paintings and pieces of sculpture they had. But it wasn't as easy as it sounded. For Sonny, at least. There was a certain technique for standing and looking, for tilting your head in just the right way, for shifting around to get another angle on the thing, moving in closer and then farther back, squinting a little bit, and knowing the right time for leaving one painting and going on to the next. Gunner, of course, got the hang of it right off, as if it were a new kind of sport and he picked up the moves with his natural ability. Sonny felt awkward as hell and was sure that anyone could tell he didn't know a damn thing about art and was just pretending. One of the hardest parts for him was sticking with one picture for the right length of time. After he had looked at the damn thing for five or ten seconds, he figured he had seen it, and yet he knew that if you moved on that quickly it meant you weren't serious. You had to hang around and keep ogling the damn thing.

Gunner even knew how to make the whispered comments. Rubbing reflectively at his chin, he would squint at a picture and say something like “Interesting, yeh, I think he's on to something,” or “I'm not sure he got what he wanted there.” Sonny just nodded agreement to everything.

Some of the paintings were by native Indiana artists who showed pictures of hills and trees and brooks and the usual crap in pretty places like Brown County. Then there were others by people from New York that didn't have anything you could make out exactly, but consisted of lines and splotches and bursts of color, without any actual thing you could identify like a house or a cow.

It was in the room of some of these paintings without any actual pictures in them that both guys found something of genuine interest to view. It was an art object all right, but a living one, dressed in hip-hugging tomato-colored toreadors and a tight silk blouse, contemplating the paintings with absorbed intensity. Of course, in a case like this, when there was something you would really like to clap your eyeballs on for a long time, from all different angles and distances, you had to pretend not to really be looking at it—or her—at all. She carried a pair of big sunglasses and gnawed at the stems as she stared at the paintings, making Sonny want to gnaw on something himself. Every so often her tongue would come out and move speculatively over her lips in a slow, lolling sort of way. She wore no lipstick, and somehow that seemed even sexier. There are certain kinds of girls who can get themselves up in a way that is opposite from what is supposed to be sexy and come out looking even sexier. Maybe it's because they weren't supposed to do it that way but obviously didn't give a damn, or maybe because there was something offbeat about it, Sonny wasn't sure. The girl wasn't what you'd call pretty; her nose was long and had a kind of bump in the bridge of it, her lips were very thin, and her eyes were set a little too close together, but the whole effect was somehow attractive, exceedingly sexy. Maybe it was the aura about her, the stuck-up air that she didn't give a damn what anyone thought, she knew she was pretty hot stuff.