Going All the Way (35 page)

They went in a joint called the Port O' Call, pushing their way past sailors and servicemen and brawny guys from the mills, and they got a table pretty near the stage. You had to drink a minimum then, but at least you could sit down and not get crunched by the other horny bastards. Gunner advised they only drink beer, since usually all the other drinks were watered. They ordered two beers and had barely started to drink when these two really sexy-looking fairly young babes slid off their stools at the bar and kind of slinked over and asked if the guys wouldn't like to buy them a drink. Sonny could feel himself start trembling and getting hot and if he could've gotten a word out he'd have told them sure, but Gunner said, “No, thanks, ladies, not in the market, sorry,
no chance
—” and made a swift, short gesture with his hand, like he was cutting off any further talk about it, that was all she wrote, the end, curtains. They took the hint, but before slinking back to the bar, one of them, a really young-looking pretty girl with big eyes and thick brown hair with bangs, blew a contemptuous puff of smoke at Gunner and said, “Screw, punk.”

Gunner just laughed. “They're B-girls,” he said. “Just B-girls. They let you rub your hand up around their pussy if you buy 'em enough fake champagne, but that's all you get, for something like twenty bucks, maybe.”

“Yeh, I know,” Sonny said.

He knew because he had been one of the suckers who did that once when he was stationed in Kansas City. He knew it was a B-girl place but he was loaded and all sexed up and this girl was being real nice and chummy and gave him the usual bullshit about how she'd meet him later at an all-night drugstore down the street and he actually went and hung around the damn place about forty-five minutes before he got the idea. Guys are really stupid when it comes to stuff like that. Mainly because they
believe
the damn girl, even though they know what the setup is. Sonny even told the girl that he really liked her, “as a person.” Oh, his aching ass.

And still he'd been ready to buy that one a drink, who had just come over, telling himself that, well, he'd find
out
if she was just a B-girl, maybe she was the real thing. He'd be tough about it and find out just what the price was and where they'd go, and if she was just giving him the come-on, he'd kick her ass out and not buy her any more drinks. Probably that's what most of the guys told themselves. Every time they went back and every time they spent twenty bucks or so for some watered drinks and a little feel. The thing that really shook Sonny was that these weren't just kids, or innocent servicemen away from home for the first time, or boozed-up businessmen getting taken for a ride, these were goddam
steelworkers
, the brawniest, biggest, toughest, hardest he-men in the goddam country. Which didn't speak too damn well of the country.

“It's sick,” Gunner said. “It really is sick.”

“Fuckin'-A,” Sonny agreed.

A stripper came on, one of the old ones with sagging tits and blotchy legs. Those kind are usually the worst doing their act, too, because they know they're not much to get sexed up about, so they try to act real bored and like they don't give a shit. Sonny could understand how they felt, in a way, maybe he'd do the same thing if he were them. If they really gave it all they had and tried hard and nobody clapped or got worked up or anything, it would really make them feel bad. But this way, by not even trying, they could figure that if no one paid much attention to them it was because they weren't really trying. Gunner looked over the stripper and went back to talking again.

“They say prostitution is evil,” he said. “But at least with a whore you actually get something, you at least get your rocks off. What's really sick, if you ask me, is the B-girl shit where you pay all that money for just looking and thinking about it, but not really doing it.”

“Do they have that in other countries, the B-girl thing, where nothing actually happens?”

“Yeh, but not as much as here. The thing about Japan is, there are places like that but there are also places where you can really go and get laid. And damn well, too.”

“It must be great,” Sonny said. “To know it's there if you want it.”

“Sure it is. Hell, if you had a real prostitution system set up here, with clean girls, I bet you wouldn't have all your alcoholics and all your suicides. I mean—well, I'm sorry. I was just talking in general.”

Sonny could feel himself blushing, but he knew Gunner hadn't meant to get him thinking about his wrist, and besides, he figured Gunner was right.

“The thing about the way it is here, in America,” Sonny said, “is that they get you thinking about it all the time, there's all this stuff to get you sexed up, and then a lot of the time you can't do anything about it. It'd be better if they had women wearing those old Puritan outfits with dresses down to their shoes, and cover everything up, and just try to forget about it unless you're married. But the way it is now you see all these boobs and great-looking legs every day, and there are sexy ads of women in their underwear in all the papers and magazines, and strip shows and B-girls and dirty movies and jack-off magazines, and then after you're all fired up by all this stuff coming at you all the time, if you don't have a regular girl or something, what can you do? Guys like Billy Graham talk about all the sex and how our society is corrupted by so much sex, but it's mostly to look at, not to touch. It's like putting a kid in this great toy store and then telling him he can look at all the terrific toys but he can't really have any of them or play with any of them.”

He never really said all that to anyone before, but he sure as hell thought about it a lot. Sonny really trusted Gunner, knew he wouldn't kid him about it like a lot of guys would. Most guys just try to sound like they're big cocksmen and get all they want, and you have to pretend you do too, or they laugh and make cracks like maybe you're a goddam queer or something. That was what Sonny liked about Sparky, him telling that story about the seven hundred bucks and not getting laid. Most guys would have pretended they had made out like bandits and had all these great call girls licking honey off their cock. That was something Sonny wanted to try sometime. Buddie would probably do it, but he didn't
want
her to do it.

Gunner was nodding at what Sonny had said. “Too true,” he said. “Too true. Like Sparky spending the seven hundred bucks and not getting laid. In Japan, he could have bought him a girl for a couple months for that and she'd have washed and ironed and cooked for him on the side, and they would have lived in a nice house.”

They ordered more beers, and another stripper came on who wasn't as bad as the first one. This one was younger and had a pouty kind of mouth, and kept rubbing her hands over her body like she really was hot for herself. There wasn't a real band, just a record, and when it stopped and somebody backstage had to turn it over, the first broad had just stood there real bored like, but this one kept rubbing her hands around herself, cupping them under her boobs and admiring them, stuff like that. When she took off the evening-gown thing she started out with—they always started out with a long outfit like an evening gown, so you didn't see too much at first and that made it seem like you were seeing more later—when she got down to the bra and panties, you could see this scar on her stomach. Maybe she had an abortion. Or maybe some wild lover gashed her with a knife. They said most strippers had pimps who beat the shit out of them a lot. When she took off her panties and bra and got down to just the pasties on the tits and the G-string with a little silvery thing covering her cunt, she turned around and wiggled her ass a lot and rubbed her hands over it, and a lot of guys clapped and whistled. Then at the end she slipped her finger under the string of the G-string like she was going to take it off and they yelled like mad, even though everybody knew she couldn't take it off because it was against the law, but she rubbed her hand over the little silvery patch and looked pouty, like she
wished
she could take it off, and everybody liked that.

She was really the best at the Port O' Call. They sat through the others, though, there were about five in all, and had about five beers watching them, and when the bored one with the flabby tits came on again, they paid the check and took off. They walked up the street, sort of window-shopping in the different joints—usually you couldn't see too well inside, which made it easier for the doorman hustler to tell you something terrific was just starting 'cause it was hard to tell. You could look at the photographs, though, they all had photographs of the girls in sexy positions, like a theater marquee that shows you shots from the movie that is playing, except in some cases a great-looking girl in a picture outside might not be in there at all, they just had her picture, and inside were a bunch of old broads with flabby tits. Another thing they did to fool you was make up names for the strippers that were almost like the names of great strippers, but one letter or something was changed, so they couldn't be sued for libel. Sonny almost got taken in, but Gunner set him straight. Sonny got all fired up when he saw that one place had the great Lilly St. Cyr, who is so sexy it is painful, but Gunner laughed and said, “Shit, man, you think Lilly St. Cyr is in Cal City?”

“Well, how can they say she is then, if she's not?” Sonny asked.

“Look how they spell it,” Gunner pointed out.

The big sign spelled the last name “Cir” instead of “Cyr,” but it was close enough to have fooled Sonny and no doubt lots of other dumbasses, especially because you
wanted
it to be the real one, and so you helped fake yourself out. There was a lot of other cheating shit they did like that too. Like they went into this one place, the Arabian Nites, because outside was this picture of a delicate blond babe with a chain around her neck being carried off by a gorilla. They figured that was not to be missed, but there wasn't any goddam gorilla at all, there was a blonde but she didn't even have the chain around her neck. Gunner got pissed and he said to the MC, “Where's the gorilla?”

“Where's what gorilla, buster?” the MC said real smartass.

“The one outside in the picture,” Gunner insisted.

“Where's the gorilla?” the MC asked in this smartass way to the audience, mocking Gunner. “Boy, we get a lot of weirdos in here, I tell ya that. Ya hung up on gorillas, go to the zoo.”

“How come you got him in the picture outside then?” Gunner asked, and suddenly from out of nowhere there's this monster of a guy hulking over Gunner, wearing a shiny blue suit and a big diamond pinky ring and he says real calm but in a way you knew he wasn't crapping around, “Let's not have any trouble, boys. We don't like having trouble here.”

“Sure,” said Gunner, and they finished their beers and cut out of there. They didn't want any trouble, either, not from that guy. Not even Gunner. The bouncers they have in those places, you never notice them until something happens and then they appear on the spot, looking like they'd just as soon mash a guy's nuts as look at him.

They hit a couple other places that didn't have much worth writing home about, having a beer at the bar so they could see if it was worth taking a table but it wasn't. Then they checked into another place called The Sharp Slipper, and there was a real Amazon blonde who looked worth taking in, so they got a table and caught the last of her act, which wasn't too bad. There was at least a live combo there, the usual bored old zombie-looking gray-faced guys on sax and trumpet, and a colored fella on drums who looked pretty knocked out. He wasn't your grinning happy kind of colored fella, but the kind who looked blank, like he'd seen stuff you wouldn't even want to think about and he wanted you just to leave him alone. Sonny really felt awful when this goddam joking MC came on—those joking MCs in the strip joints, they look like they probably haven't changed their underwear for five years even though they may have some terrible shiny new suit on, there's something truly scummy about them—anyway this one told some shitass joke about the “Soo-preem Court Decision,” trying to imitate a colored guy's accent, and Sonny never really got the joke if there was one, but there was a lot of stuff about “us coons” and “nigger heaven” and there were some guys who whooped and laughed. There are some guys who would whoop and laugh if you just said coon or nigger. All the time this colored guy was just sitting at his drums with a blank stare, not moving or changing his expression, just sitting through it like he probably had to do every night, and it got Sonny really feeling like shit, but what could he do?

Then he forgot about the colored fella altogether when the next stripper came out. She was Frenchy La Rome, the feature attraction. She was real young, not any more than twenty at the most and probably less than that, but she acted like she was queen of the goddam world and took no shit from nobody and by God you were lucky as hell to be able to see her in action. She had thick blonde hair that hung to her shoulders and wasn't curly but sort of wavy and lush and part of it fell over her face like Veronica Lake. Instead of one of those evening-gown outfits she had on a shimmery gold-silk sheath dress that came just to her knees, and long gold gloves to her elbows and sheer black stockings and black high heels. That really got Sonny excited in itself, because most of the strippers don't wear stockings, but the ones who did went into a big production of rolling them off and that always sexed him up like mad, the slow, tantalizing way they took them off. But the thing about this girl was not just the outfit or even the curvy body all tight under the sheath, or the sexy, full-mouthed face with catlike green eyes, hung with that goldish hair. The thing that really got you about her was that way she had of seeming like she knew she was such hot stuff.

You could always tell when a really good one came on, because the place got suddenly hushed and everyone stopped crapping around. When the bad ones or even just the so-so ones were on, some guys were just talking to each other and laughing, or yelling stuff at the stripper like “Give us a little grind, baby” or “Hey, I got somethin' just for
you
,” and all kinds of crap, but when the really good ones were on, nobody felt like horsing around, everybody was drinking in the scene, trying to store it up in their head so they could run it back to themself some lonely night in bed and jack off like crazy thinking about it. That's the way it was when Frenchy La Rome was on.