Going All the Way (23 page)

It was hard to figure what to wear to the party, especially since Sonny didn't know the people, but he knew they would be artistic and therefore different. He wanted, as always, to fit in and be approved of by everyone, but it was extra hard to do that if you were trying to fit in with people who didn't want to fit in themselves. If he knew they would all wear gunnysacks, he would gladly have gone out and got him a gunnysack. But he didn't know at all, and that was the worst thing. Finally he settled on his summer seersucker suit, which was pretty plain and neutral, but he wore with it his old white bucks, for a casual touch, and an orange, satiny sport shirt for dash and color. The shirt wasn't really like him, which is why he'd bought it, hoping to add a little flavor to himself. The satiny material had some sort of electric quality about it and kept sticking to his skin in different places. The arms were way too long, and he had to keep nipping at the sleeves to keep the cuffs from bagging down over his wrists almost to his knuckles. It was especially hard to keep nipping up the sleeves when you had a coat on. You had to reach your hand in under the coat and tug up the shirt from around the shoulder. Keeping the sleeves up that way under a coat made it look like Sonny had some kind of terrible itch that he couldn't lay off of. Still, it was the only shirt he had that was kind of flashy, and he settled on wearing it.

He got all dressed and splashed some Old Spice on him right after supper, but the party didn't begin till nine, and he didn't want to just hang around the house and let his mother try to sniff out a lot of information from him about where he was going and who he was going with and why he wasn't taking Buddie. He closed the door to his room and played
Victory at Sea
over once to get in the right mood of confidence and positive thinking, and then he got the keys to his father's car and took off.

Sonny just drove around for a while, the way you do when you're killing time, turning here and there with no particular purpose, gliding along and letting the people who were going some particular place zip past. Just driving could calm you down sometimes. The wheel gave you something to hold on to, your mind could switch off everything but signals and traffic and your body sort of went on automatic, working the clutch and shifting gears, pressing the brake and nudging the accelerator just right. Sonny was glad of cars. Not just because they got you someplace, but more because they gave you something to do. Even as a little kid who wasn't old enough to drive yet, cars had helped Sonny that way, filling time, like when him and Dicky Bishop or Bobby Sturdivant would sit on the front steps of somebody's house on the block on those long early evenings of summer after supper when the sky was gray pearl and got dark so slow you barely even noticed it happening. The way you played “Cars” was to have each person guess what kind of car would be the next one to pass—Ford or Chevy or Buick, or maybe a long shot like Studebaker. For each right guess you got a point, and the kid who had the most points after it got too dark to see what kind of car it was for sure won the game. Actually there wasn't much traffic on the block and you could win by scores of 3–1 or 2–0. There were enough cars that passed to make it possible to play if you sat for a couple hours, but few enough so that it was kind of exciting when one came by. When you guessed a lot of them right, it made you feel kind of spooky, like you had the power to see into the future.

Sonny drove around for almost an hour but it still was only twenty after eight, so he fell by the Topper to have a couple drinks. The place was just warming up for a big Saturday night, the smoke and the voices getting thick, and the colored guys of the Rhythm-Airs combo breaking out their instruments and plugging in the electric organ. Sonny took a seat at the bar and ordered a seven-and-seven. He had just started to take the first sip when some joker slapped him on the back so hard he jiggled the glass and spilled a little bit, hearing at the same time the unmistakable, maniacal laugh of Uncle Buck.

“Kilroy is here!” Buck said in greeting, and Sonny turned around and shook hands with him.

“How about stepping over to a dark little booth and joining me and a charming little lady for a drink?”

Sonny didn't really feel like hearing Buck's latest stories, it wouldn't help the confident, positive mood he was trying to build, but he couldn't see any way out of it.

Buck's girl for the evening was a bright-dyed redhead with a tremendous set of knockers that you got a pretty good view of through the wide cleavage of her tight, V-necked purple-cotton blouse. Buck just introduced her as “Gerry.” His girls never seemed to have last names. They were always named something like Gerry or Flo or Stell, and they always looked wild and hard, like they'd had a lot of experience and were out to get some more.

“Hey, where'd ya get that fancy shirt, cowboy?” Buck asked, reaching across the table and fingering the satiny material.

Sonny could feel himself blushing, fearing maybe the shirt looked silly after all.

“I donno,” he said. “Somewhere or other.”

“Must of got it off one of the rodeo riders at the State Fair,” Buck said with a laugh. “Hey, where ya headed all spruced up like that? Got a heavy date?”

“Not exactly,” Sonny said.

He was terrified that he might let something slip about the party and Buck would insist on going along. God, Sonny could picture it. Buck would find out it was an arty crowd and start telling stories about his days in Paris studying with Rembrandt, and if anyone pointed out Rembrandt was dead, Buck would get pissed off and claim it was Rembrandt's grandson or something.

“Gotta meet someone in a while,” Sonny said.

“Aha! A clandestine rendezvous!”

Gerry looked at Buck like he was a little wacky, or maybe was speaking a foreign language.

Buck nudged her, gave her a big lecherous wink, and said, “My esteemed nephew here is one of the silent types—but don't be fooled. Confucius say, ‘He who talk little, get much!'”

Buck roared and slapped the table. Sonny bolted a slug of his drink, feeling his ears go red.

“I think he's kinda cute,” Gerry said, looking at Sonny in a way that made him press his legs together.

“See there, I told ya! The silent ones get 'em every time!”

“Shee-it,” Sonny said, finishing off his drink.

“Hey, let me fill that glass for you, friend and neighbor.”

Before Sonny could say anything, Buck had called the waitress and grandly ordered another round. When Buck bought you a drink, he made it seem like Diamond Jim Brady had just ordered champagne for the house.

“And how's your good mother, my God-fearing sister?” Buck asked.

“O.K., I guess.”

“You may tell her,” Buck said with a flourish, “that her ne'er-do-well little brother has just secured himself an enviable position as sales manager of an up-and-coming new corporation. A group of young go-getters have recently purchased a franchise for a new type of Infra-Ray sandwich-heater that will revolutionize the concept of the hot lunch. You don't need an oven, don't need a grille, just set 'em up on the counter of a drugstore, what have you. And yours truly will head up the management of sales for the entire Midwest.”

Sonny translated that to mean that Buck would be selling sandwich-warmers on the East Side of Indianapolis.

“Seriously,” Buck said, switching from his fun tone to his serious, radio-announcer voice, “there's a mint in this thing. It's there for the taking.”

“Great,” Sonny said.

Buck laughed and put his arm around Gerry, telling her in his fun voice, “Stick with me, baby, and you'll be fartin' through silk!”

“Mr. Big Bucks, huh?” Gerry said suspiciously, but she didn't move away when Buck's hand slid down and gave her a friendly little pinch on the right boob.

Sonny slugged down the drink as quick as he could and said he really had to take off. He was sweaty and nervous, and wanted to be alone, wanted to try and collect himself before the party. It was almost nine.

Buck shook hands and gave him a knowing leer for good luck, and Sonny said good-bye and headed for the door. Just when he got about halfway there, in the middle of the goddam bar, he turned back around as Buck yelled, “Hey, Sonny”—everyone looked up from their drinks and talk—“remember my motto, ‘Work like a Trojan, especially at night!'”

Sonny tried to grin, hearing snickers and giggles all around him, and ducked for the door, frying inside.

The party was at a guy's named Oliver Shawl, who lived on Talbott Street around 21st. Although the advancing
They
had already crossed 21st Street on their long march north,
They
had left some pockets of whites still hanging on, as in this area. The whites who still lived there either couldn't afford to move or didn't care about
Them
coming in and lowering all the property values. That was the reason many whites retreated from the black wave, not because of prejudice but because of property values. It was strictly a practical matter, and it saddened many of the liberal whites who wanted to live next to coloreds but couldn't afford to because of property values going down, but did have enough money to afford moving to a nice new neighborhood farther north. So the whites who were left were either the ones who were so poor they couldn't even afford not to be able to move because they couldn't afford to stay in a mixed neighborhood, or the impractical dreamers like artists and oddballs who didn't even care about property values.

The block that Shawl lived on was still not all one color or the other. The colored were there, though, you could see it because they sat around on their porches, the way the colored do. It was the way they had of sitting around on their porches that seemed to annoy many white people, as if they did it in some colored sort of way that made whites cluck their tongues and say, “Look at them, sitting around on their porches,” like there was something wrong about the way they did it.

Right next to Shawl's place there was a porch full of colored people, kids and grown men and old ladies, all mixed up together, sitting around talking and being colored. Sonny didn't look straight at them, but he tried to smile, sort of at an angle, hoping to show them he was friendly and supported the Supreme Court Decision, so they would be less likely to slit his throat with a gleaming razor. He had grown up hearing how niggers would just as soon slit your throat with a razor as look at you, and though he had learned in college there were many educated colored who didn't do that stuff, the razor thing always came to his mind when he saw one.

Shawl lived on the ground floor of a rickety old duplex badly in need of paint, and rented the upstairs out to students. As soon as Sonny walked in, he knew he had worn the wrong thing because nobody else had on a coat or jacket, everyone was much less formal than that.

Sonny hung around inside the door, afraid to plunge on in, but luckily Gunner spotted him and came right over. Gunner, of course, was dressed just right for the occasion, wearing his go-ahead sandals, a rumpled khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a pair of faded blue jeans that even had some splotches of paint on them. Already. You'd have thought old Gunner was born with an easel in his mitt.

Gunner looked Sonny over real quickly, probably wondering what the hell he was doing in a goddam cowboy shirt, but he didn't mention anything about it. He led Sonny to the kitchen, which was pretty moldy-looking. There was an old table with no cloth on it, and some gallons of wine, a few stacks of paper cups, and a giant box of Cheez-Its. There was a big old washtub on the floor with ice and beer in it, but Sonny said he'd like some wine. He figured that was more of an artistic kind of drink than beer. Gunner poured him a Dixie cup full of what looked like some dago red.

They went out to what must be the living room, though it didn't have any furniture except for a couple Salvation Army chairs and a kind of mattress on the floor with a bedspread over it that people were sitting on. Gunner told Sonny he wanted him to meet the host, and Sonny glanced around the room, looking for some tall, gaunt guy with haunted, artistic eyes. Gunner couldn't seem to spot him either, although there were only ten or so people in the room, but then there was a new, strange sound, a mechanical kind of whirring noise, and a guy buzzed into the room riding a motorized wheelchair. He was a neat, serious-looking guy who had evidently had one of those diseases that leaves your arms and legs as thin as curtain rods and pretty near useless. When Gunner introduced Sonny, Shawl just nodded and gave him the once-over with an expression Sonny hoped was a smile but looked much closer to a sneer.

“Join the festivities,” he said, then whirred away, back toward the kitchen.

“Shawl is pretty cynical,” Gunner said.

“I can understand.”

Marty was there in a pair of her skin-hugging toreadors and a low-cut blouse knotted at the waist. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor with her shoes off, wiggling one foot in time to the music. It was a record of a guy singing and playing the guitar, but it wasn't hillbilly music exactly. It sounded to Sonny more like old English folk songs but it was about America. Something about This land is your land, and it's my land.… The words seemed a little communistic.

Marty smiled and nodded at Sonny but didn't interrupt her foot-wiggling concentration on the music. Sonny tried bobbing his head a little to the rhythm and looked around the room. There were four or five guys, most of them older-looking, and only two other girls besides Marty. One of them wasn't really a girl but an older woman around thirty-five or so. She sat on a chair in a corner all by herself, sipping a Dixie cup of wine and staring at nothing special. She was the only person sitting in a chair, unless you counted Shawl in his mobilized wheelchair. The only other female was a fairly young, arty-looking girl wearing sandals and Levi's and a man's white shirt. Her hair was long but more stringy than sleek, and to put it most generously the girl was rather hefty. The ravishing girl that Sonny had counted on seeing across the crowded room wasn't anywhere to be seen. He should have brought Buddie after all.