Going All the Way (2 page)

Going All the Way
cuts pretty deep in the literal way, when Sonny Burns takes a razor to his wrist in a time of desperate frustration and despair. That was the truth of that character in that circumstance, just as his anger at the itinerant evangelist Luke Matthews was true, and his anger, in fact, at God. To “renounce” such scenes would be for me to “renounce” the truth as I see it as a writer of the people, time, and place I am trying to portray.

A writer I know and respect who read my screenplay of
Going All the Way
wrote to question my inclusion of the Luke Matthews scene, now that I am a person of declared religious faith. I answered him in a letter that “It would never occur to me to betray my own truth of that era of life by some kind of ‘religious revisionism' imposed retroactively with the outlook that came thirty years later.”

By the same token, I would feel it a travesty to try to go back and revise the young men's blighted views of women and women's anatomies to adhere to the political correctness of a more enlightened era. I hope both male and female readers will understand, as most have over the years, that the blatantly sexist attitudes of the time, expressed in the thoughts, language, and behavior of the characters, were as destructive and de-humanizing to the men as to the women; that I no more advocate such attitudes than I advocate people cutting their wrists or cursing God; that in trying to tell the truth of the dark forces of life I hope to expose rather than encourage them, as all serious writers have done throughout history.

When people have asked me what this book is about I have said “it's about friendship.” It's also about seeking, questioning, risking, rising from despair and defeat, beginning again, finding the joy and love of being alive, in the moment, as Sonny Burns does in the end, when he is able to experience and appreciate the taste of pumpkin pie, the smell of coffee, the scene and color of autumn leaves, the flow of life that is moving within him, moving him on, again, to begin.

October 1996

PART ONE

1

When the two soldiers boarded the train at St. Louis they caught one another's eyes for a moment in a mutually questioning gaze that broke off teasingly short of recognition, like a dream not quite recalled. The short, boyish-looking soldier moved away into the crowd, his apple cheeks burning brighter, as if they had just been shined, and he climbed in a coach farther down. Something about the face of that other soldier he had seen hinted of the past, and that was precisely what the young man wished to avoid on this of all days, which he felt marked the start of a whole new part of his life—the “real part,” he hoped. Settling into a seat by a window, he closed his eyes and breathed in deeply as the train jolted forward, nosing into the future, unlimited.

As soon as the conductor took his ticket he started for the club car, hoping for something that would cool as well as calm him. The air-conditioning system was on the blink, and it was one of those muggy, midwestern days in May when everything seems to stick to you. Women fanned themselves with newspapers and babies bawled in the thick heat.

The young soldier had to make his way through seven coaches to get to the club car, pressing on the airlock door of each one with all his might and trying not to show any sign of the exertion it took before he broke through the sealed barrier with a
foom
of triumph. By the time he reached his destination his arms felt like spaghetti. He determined he would begin the daily push-ups and other basic exercises he had promised himself to continue on his own after basic training but never kept up. Now that he was done with the Army and his real life was beginning, he was going to do those things, he was going to discipline himself.

He ordered a Schlitz and started to undo the button of his collar that was so tight it felt like a string cutting his neck, but then he saw the long tan legs of the blonde. He pulled his tie tighter into place and tried to center it, smiling as he choked. The girl seemed like an omen to him of the phase of his life that was now beginning, a time in which well-tanned and lovely women would be his rightful due. When the Schlitz came, he lifted the cool can to his lips in a private toast, but his trembling hand tipped it too quickly and some of the beer went drooling down his chin, pretty as a madman's spittle.

Mercifully, the girl wasn't looking at him. He wiped fiercely at his chin and the front of his tie and jacket, then calmed himself with a long, carefully aimed draught of the beer. There was an empty seat on one side of the girl, and on the other side was an old guy around forty wearing a shiny suit with one of those diamond Shriners pins in the lapel, obviously no competition. The girl looked cool and athletic—not in a volleyball or field-hockey way, but in something graceful, like swimming. She would glide through the water with long, arching strokes, no thrashing around, just a little foam raised prettily by the rhythmic flutter of her delicate feet. The young man pulled out his cigarettes, trying to devise a good opening line. What do you think about Senator McCarthy and the Red menace? No, that could just start an argument. Never open with religion or politics, that was the oldest rule of all. What do you think of Marlon Brando? Did you like
The Catcher in the Rye?
Is Dave Brubeck really art? Will the mambo last? Have I seen you someplace before? Do you want to fuck?

He could think of nothing witty or original and had almost finished the beer. The near-empty can made a nervous rattle on the circular chromium serving stand. The young man decided to order another and promised himself that when he finished the second one he would go and sit down by the girl whether he had thought of a sharp opening line or not. It took him some time to get the attention of the old colored waiter, and he feared the girl might notice his lack of success. Once she stared right at him and smiled, but he looked away, pretending not to notice. When the waiter finally brought the beer, he gave him an extra large tip, hoping to establish good relations for the future, but the old guy merely grunted when he pocketed the change. No matter, the beer was cold, and the soldier could feel his determination blooming within himself, nurtured by the Schlitz. He would soon be ready. He would stride with casual confidence across the aisle, slip into the seat beside the girl, and say whatever first came to his mind.

Just then a big guy in a wild sport shirt that said “Waikiki” all over it entered the car, cased the scene, and plopped down right in the empty seat beside the girl. The guy had tattoos on his forearms, which probably meant he was dumb. The soldier consoled himself with the thought that the poor guy didn't have a chance.

“Talk about your early summer heat,” the tattooed man said loudly to the girl, “I bet it's hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk.”

How corny could you get? The soldier really felt embarrassed for the poor guy, and he hoped the girl didn't brush him off too bad. But the girl was smiling.

“In St. Louis, I bet you could,” she said.

They laughed—together. The guy ordered drinks for him and the girl, and soon they were chattering away like old pals. The soldier tried not to hear them. He tried to think of important things, like the Future, not some silly broad on a train you could pick up just by giving her a stale old line about the weather.

What burned him up most was the guy wasn't even a serviceman. It didn't seem fair. The young man had hoped that when he went in the Army he'd be able to pick up all the girls he wanted, just by being in uniform. As a kid he had seen all those World War II movies where an ordinary GI could go to the Stage Door Canteen and dance the night away with Judy Garland, or maybe just walk down the street and have June Allyson pop out from behind some shrubbery and say, “Hi, soldier,” and walk off with him into the sunset. Of course, you could guess what happened in the sunset, even with nice girls like June Allyson. It didn't mean they were bad, it meant they were patriotic. But Korea wasn't the kind of a war that got you laid for being in it. The young man had worn his uniform for two years, and it hadn't done shit for him. The only broad who said, “Hi, soldier,” to him was a dumpy old babe around forty at the USO in Kansas City. She gave him some oatmeal cookies that crumbled in his hand.

The war wasn't really a war—a “police action” some of the papers called it—and nobody gave much of a damn about it except for the politicians and the military men and of course the guys who got drafted and all their relatives. Being a soldier during that half-assed war was like being on a team in a sport that drew no crowds, except for the players' own parents and friends. The young man had got a much bigger kick out of World War II, when he served on “The Homefront” as a kid collecting scrap metal and tinfoil and raising a “Victory Garden” of radishes and carrots that nobody ate, and learning to be an “air-raid spotter” so that if the Nazis decided to bomb Indianapolis—thereby knocking out the very heart of the nation—he would be able to stand on the roof of the Broad Ripple lumberyard and spot the Stukas and the Messerschmidts as they dove toward such cultural targets as the Soldiers and Sailors Monument or the world-famous Indianapolis Speedway. World War II had been a fun war, full of glamour and glory, but Korea was just a bore, a national nuisance, drab as olive. His whole generation had been stuck with it, but somehow the young man took it as a personal piece of bad luck. Just the sort of thing that was always happening to him.

“You like the races, huh?” the tattooed guy was asking the blonde. The soldier didn't want to hear about it. He got out the rolled-up copy of the latest
Newsweek
magazine he had stuck in his hip pocket, and plunged into it right at the hardest part, foreign affairs. As well as doing daily exercises in the fruitful, new life that the young man was going to begin, he had also promised himself he would keep his mind in trim, stay up on things, be alert and informed, and as part of this resolution he planned to read
Newsweek
magazine each and every week, not just the sports and entertainment sections but the world and national news and the art and literary parts. Most everyone read
Time
, and the young man figured he might have a little edge by being a
Newsweek
reader, might just be a little more in the know than your average citizen.

The big world news was about the “crisis” of the Fall of Dienbienphu, the French bastion in part of the Commie Orient. It sounded pretty bad. The magazine said that

While it might turn out to be only a heroic incident in the continuing struggle to contain aggressive communism, it might prove to be the cataclysmic event that would trigger a chain reaction culminating eventually in a third world war—this time an atomic war of unimaginable deadliness and devastation.

Fuck it all. More of his kind of luck—the next world war not only wouldn't be any fun, it would probably kill everybody. He often had this feeling that maybe if he ever got settled down, married to a great, sexy-looking babe who was also very tender and motherly—sort of a cross between Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, and old Jane Gallagher of
The Catcher in the Rye
—and he had a great job that paid a lot of money and a couple of beautiful kids and had just moved into a cozy house with a lot of fireplaces and a white picket fence, he would go out to pick up the mail and look up in the sky and see a monstrous mushroom-shaped cloud, and that would be the end. He regarded the H-bomb too as a personal menace, a weapon uniquely and insidiously devised to scare the shit out of him, until it finally blew him to smithereens.

He couldn't finish the article about the latest world crisis, and he flipped through the magazine in search of some less depressing stuff. “Business Trends” said that the Atomic Energy Commission was encouraging colleges to expand their courses in “nuclear studies.” Senator Joe McCarthy was fighting with the Army, making more of his famous “points of order,” trying to scare everyone about the Reds in government. The first jet transport plane was almost finished. Roger Bannister had broken the four-minute mile. That was something, but the soldier already knew about that. He turned to the book section, hoping to improve his mind. There was a story about some philosopher who a lot of eggheads thought was hot stuff. It said:

Sören Kierkegaard, a melancholy Dane of a century ago, is a triple-threat hero among modern intellectuals. He unwittingly fathered the gloomy philosophy of Existentialism. He anticipated the rise of modern remorse by developing a twentieth-century sense of guilt in the heyday of the optimistic nineteenth.…

Shit. The soldier figured he was even born in the wrong damn century. The century of gloom and guilt. Wouldn't you know it? He finished his beer and looked up to see if he could flag down the grumpy, indifferent waiter. A
foom
of the air-compression door announced the entrance of somebody new in the club car, and the young man turned to look.

At the entrance to the car was the soldier whose face had floated up to haunt him from the steam of the hissing train on the platform. He was tall, built in an angular way with broad shoulders that sloped in a V to a narrow waist and hips, and long, slightly bowed legs. His face was lean and dark from the kind of a beard that never quite shaves completely away, leaving a permanent five-o'clock shadow. The face was naggingly familiar to the chubby young soldier who was staring at him, and yet he couldn't quite place it. The tall soldier started walking forward, when the train gave a sudden lurch that sent beer cans skittering precariously over the chrome tables in a general clatter, and something fell and smashed behind the bar. It was the sort of jolt that usually sent anyone who was walking down the aisle reeling into the lap of some stranger, but the tall soldier seemed to catch the very motion of the car with his hips, feinted with it, and continued on, his expression unchanging, his rolling gait with the feet pointing inward moving ahead, ready for anything. It was with the movement that the graceful soldier revealed his identity, for it was the same elusive, flowing sort of move that had so often evaded enemy tacklers, the natural action of the greatest broken-field runner in the history of Shortley High.