NOTE: This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and alcohol references.
Introduction
The official story I tell my kids is that I never went to
the senior prom. Allegedly I couldn’t, because I had either the ACT exam the
next day, or the State Road Championships. (My story varies.) “I knew I had a
better shot at the [exam] [race] than the prom,” I explain dryly.
This year, on a lark, I decided to share the real story with
my older daughter, shortly before her first prom. In doing so I realized it’s
not a bad tale, so I’ll share it with you too, recreated from memory with
maximum verisimilitude.
My senior prom –
spring 1987
To start off, I hadn’t planned on attending at all. The
whole idea seemed completely outlandish to me. My high school was an “open
campus,” meaning I was almost never there and barely knew anybody. Meanwhile, I
was not exactly a ladies’ man. I wasn’t good looking or confident. I wasn’t up
on popular music or sports. I had no concept of fashion except Levi’s 501s and
bike race t-shirts. I was only slightly less socially retarded than my
brothers, who were so shy they were actually mistaken for foreign exchange
students.
There was one girl, Michelle, whom I could have asked to
prom, but the problem was, I kind of liked her so it wasn’t worth the risk of
rejection. But there was this other girl, in my French class, whom I didn’t
like at all. Actually, to be clear, I liked her as a pal, but didn’t want to go
out with her whatsoever. The sad truth is, she was as homely as I was, or as I
felt, anyway (which was either more or less homely than I actually was, because
what teenager ever had an accurate self-image?). This girl was fun to talk to,
particularly in class, but that was about it. If you’re wondering whether or
not I’m going to tell you her name, I’m not—for the simple reason that I cannot
remember it. This just shows you how small I am, or at least how small I was.
If she had been pretty, of course I’d remember her name.
I can’t remember exactly why I asked this girl to prom. It
was for one of two reasons, maybe both. One, she was really bummed out because
her horse had died. Yes, you read that right: in Colorado it was actually
possible to own a horse. Hers had been killed in a highway accident (trailer rollover).
I never knew if the horse died instantly or had to be put down (I wasn’t about
to ask). So I may have actually invited her out of pity. The other possible
reason is that I happened to know the obscure fact that “prom” is short for
“promenade dance,” and I really wanted to showcase this knowledge by asking,
“Would you care to accompany me to the promenade dance?” This is exactly how I
asked, and the girl immediately said yes, with a big smile. Inwardly, this
shocked and dismayed me, which made me feel like the complete dick that I knew
I was.
Well, for the next week she chattered all through French
class about her quest for the perfect prom dress. This made me feel worse than
ever. It was obviously far too late to cancel the whole thing—every moment she
spent savoring her anticipation dug us both in deeper. I knew I should try to
match her enthusiasm but I just couldn’t. For one thing, I couldn’t dance—I was
far too inhibited. Second, I didn’t own a suit and wasn’t about to throw good
money after a bad idea by renting a tux. Finally, I had no car and didn’t want
to ask my parents to borrow theirs, because that would mean admitting I was
going to prom, which for some reason I was just not prepared to do. I feared—or
perhaps hoped—this lack of wheels would be a show-stopper.
When I came clean about the car, my date (gasp!) didn’t even
care. She’d just gotten her first car, and was a modern girl. This was gonna be
great, etc. Daaaaamn! This obstacle having vanished, I decided I better bite
the bullet and rent a tux. I went down to the strip mall with my friend John. He
was attending the prom non-ironically and wanted to look sharp. I wish I
remembered the name of that cheesy tux place. Their entire clientele seemed to
be high school kids. It was obvious that these tuxes were pure shit—and yet,
every dude who put one on managed to look really good. I couldn’t understand
it. (I do now … it’s called youth.)
Well, there was actually one kid who didn’t look good in the
rental tux: me. Part of it was my fault; I was about six-foot-one, 140 pounds.
Great physique for bike racing, in the purely utilitarian way that webbed
fingers and toes would be good for competitive swimming. The other problem was
that I was a cheap bastard and was looking for that one-in-a-thousand suit that
fit me right off the rack and wouldn’t require alterations, which were $10
extra. I found that one suit, but it was—I kid you not—pink. Not some
marginally acceptable salmon or coral (which might have gone over okay, this
being the era of “Miami Vice.”) It was pure, awful pink. Pepto-Bismol pink.
Crayola carnation pink.
Because of its color, this tux was actually a cheaper rental
than the black ones. Admitting I was a nerd to begin with, and vainly
attempting the apotheosis from nerd to smartass, I decided to do it. For my
boutonniere I chose, of course, a pink carnation. I thought it very clever to
point out that, against my tux, it was “boutonniere camo,” and I tried this
line on pretty much everybody I encountered the entire night, without eliciting
so much as a smirk. But I see I’m getting ahead of myself.
Before the promenade dance proper, of course, there was the
requisite fancy dinner. I agonized over where to eat, which might suggest that
I was developing some kind of gusto for the whole affair, but the dinner was merely
the only aspect of prom I could manage to develop an opinion about. Among
prospective restaurants the front-runner was JJ McCabe’s, which was known for
being lax about liquor laws. (This was valuable only in that it leant a
mystique; I was too risk-averse, and too cheap, to actually contemplate buying
booze.) But I’d eaten at JJ McCabe’s once with my parents, and the service was
unbelievably slow … we sat for almost an hour waiting for our food. My dad
surmised that every member of the staff was drunk off his loins. I couldn’t
take that risk on prom night.
Pelican Pete’s was also kind of flashy, because seafood was still
a rare thing in Boulder in 1987. But their food kind of sucked. Tico’s had
great food and unlimited chips, but I didn’t want to actually insult my date.
The Good Earth was trendy but a little too granola for me. So I finally settled
on Sebastians, which had a salad bar that was so fancy you could get caviar.
Not that I liked caviar—it was like eating salted ball bearings—but it just
screamed “deluxe.” On top of that, the salad bar format was perfect from the budgeting
standpoint. After all, nobody orders an appetizer before a salad bar, and
nobody gets dessert afterward. I could confidently bring exactly the right amount
of money. Sebastians was a no-brainer.
The night started off badly, and not because of my pink suit
as you might have speculated. In fact, my date was wearing an orange dress. Not
a subtle, marginally acceptable peach or pumpkin color, but a purely awful tint
of orange, the color of a
Creamsicle.
I’m tempted to say it was even worse
than my pink tux, since she’d actually selected it in pursuit of aesthetic élan
rather than in defiance of it, but then nothing could have looked worse than
that pink tux. Anyway, it wasn’t like she forgave my suit because her dress was
awful; she forgave my suit because she was a totally laid-back, cool chick—at
least, when it came to me.
With herself, she was much less forgiving (which I suppose
isn’t rare). She was upset because, when doing a last-minute check of her
beloved new (to her) Toyota Corolla, making sure it was still lookin’ real good, she discovered that the
kickass narrow-stripe whitewall tires on the driver’s side were not matched by
kickass narrow-stripe whitewall tires on the passenger side. The starboard
tires were simply black. Her sweet ride was asymmetrical!
Poor thing. She hadn’t looked this miserable since her horse
died. The only sympathetic sentiment I could come up with was “Honestly, your
car looks terrible regardless,” but of course I couldn’t say that. She was so
agitated and stressed out she was sweating profusely. Actually, the sweating
probably had something to do with the fur coat she was wearing, which she’d
borrowed from her aunt. May was a bit late in the season for a fur, and it was
an unseasonably warm evening.
At Sebastians, things continued going downhill. Turns out
the legendary salad bar wasn’t every night. Maybe it wasn’t on weekends, or maybe
they decided to screw the prom crowd. Ordering off the menu meant I wouldn’t
have enough money. At least, not for two. So I lied and told my date I’d
already eaten. For the first time that evening, she seemed miffed. But the
waiter was solicitous and the place was swanky, and her spirits improved. As we
waited for our—well, her—food to come out, she said, in a conspiratorial
whisper, “Look: I come prepared. I’ve been to the Liquor Mart.” She held out
her purse. It was stocked with airline-sized bottles of Goldschlager cinnamon schnapps.
I raised an eyebrow. “I’ll drink one
if I wanna have fun,” she said, “a second if I wanna get crazy, and a third if
things get good.”
I was shocked. This girl was cool, I realized. Far, far too cool for me. I was in way over my
head. I didn’t have the nerve to drink alcohol. I was just a stupid, ignorant,
shy, untutored nerd, and here I was, out with a girl who possessed shades of Woman.
That she assumed I was game was both flattering and terrifying. I tried to
shrug, to show how cool and unflustered I was, but it came out more like a muscle
spasm.
She excused herself to freshen up, and I sat at the table
feeling utterly unmoored. What if this girl knew how to dance, too? What if her
sang-froid made her popular at the prom? What if she were actually far less of
a pariah at the high school than I was? What would I do, in this terrible pink
suit? Fortunately, not long after she returned the bread arrived, so I had
something to do with my hands. And my mouth. I stuffed my face nervously, and
actually my dark mood lifted a bit via the thrill of eating real butter, almost
for the first time in my life.
Halfway through my date’s entrée, things were looking up.
She kind of chewed with her mouth open, which helped put me at ease. I made a
lot of wisecracks about the people around us (mostly old grey-hairs, I realized
with a pang), and she giggled a lot. However sophisticated and daring she might
be, I reflected, she did seem to dig
me. So I’d almost recovered my composure when, casting about for another old
person to bag on, I spied my own father dining across the restaurant from us,
seated with a woman who was obviously not my mom.
I say “obviously” because my parents had been
divorced for almost three years. I still wasn’t used to the idea, and it stung to see my dad out with another
woman. He’d never taken my mom out on a date, not during my lifetime. Her
birthday, Mother’s Day, their anniversary …
nothing
would justify, for him, a splurge like this. The other problem was that the
woman he was dining with was Horseface, whom I couldn’t stand.
I should probably explain here that this really wasn’t
Horseface’s fault. She wasn’t a mean person or anything. In fact, she wasn’t even
ugly. Her face wasn’t so much horsey as, well, equine. Yes, kind of a long face, but not painful to look at or
anything. The real reason for the nickname is that my dad was dating,
concurrently, another woman with the same name and we had to keep them
straight. My dad seemed to be dating half the women in Boulder. (The less
attractive half, it must be said.) My dislike for Horseface was grounded
plainly in the fact of her—in the
fact of my dad dating.
So yeah, I was a bit pissed off. Perhaps the whole heady
atmosphere of the evening was affecting me, because I brashly strode over to my
dad’s table. I didn’t have a plan or anything; I just wanted to make him
uncomfortable.
This failed utterly, which I should have seen coming. For me
to also be dining at this posh restaurant only helped my dad show off—like, look
at my son, he’s only
17 but he’s
already living the good life!
My dad beamed and said, “
Hello Dana.”
I greeted Horseface politely, and she beamed too, like we were all just great
friends. I suddenly felt like I might be sick to my stomach. It dawned on me
that my blood sugar was low, and I noticed that my dad not only had some giant
entrée, but a side of fettuccine Alfredo. I was overcome with bitterness.
Whenever we went out to eat—which was mighty rare, by the
way—my dad would say at the beginning, “Boys, you may have anything on the menu
under $3.50.” This usually limited our choices to the cheapest and
second-cheapest items. And here he was living large with a side of pasta! Impulsively,
perhaps thinking that this might somehow impress my date, I said casually,
“I’ll be taking this,” and with a nod to Horseface, I walked off, bringing the
plate of pasta with me to my table.
My date looked shocked. Two things dawned on me. For one,
since I’d rudely neglected to introduce her to my dad and his date, she had no
idea who these people were. Second, after bizarrely not ordering any food, I’d now
stolen some. Suddenly this pasta was even more embarrassing than wearing a pink suit. My response to this horrifying
epiphany was to start eating the pasta as fast as possible, just to make it go
away. I doubled down on this activity when I saw my dad, a terrifying tall man
with hawk-like features and a big red beard, storming over to our table. He
didn’t even ask who my date was (which was actually a relief) and tried to take
his pasta back. We got in a little tug-of-war over it while I hissed at him
about putting on the dog with this other woman when he’d never given his own
family a nice night on the town, etc.
Amazingly, things proceeded to get even worse. My dad’s date
strutted her shameless way over to us and cried out, “What on Earth!?” I glared at her and said, “You
stay out of this, Horseface!” Only after her moniker slipped past my lips did I
realize what I’d just said. Of course she was unaware of this unfortunate
nickname, or had been until now. She gasped, started to cry, and stormed off. I
felt terrible. So, evidently, did my date, who abruptly snatched up her purse
and stood. My dad took off after Horseface—on a trajectory that, alas, matched
my date’s sudden restroom-bound vector. The two collided, and whether it was
the impact or just coincidence, my date erupted in a big, throaty,
cinnamon-schnapps-scented belch. The dinner was officially a total disaster.
The waiter, professional to the core, discreetly flitted by
to deposit our check, which I paid in cash, rounding up so we could bail
immediately. We got out to the parking lot where my date, fuming, fumbled
endlessly with her car keys. Remembering what I’d had rammed down my throat
repeatedly in Health class, I asked, “Um … how much have you had to drink?” She
held up three fingers, took the hint, and tossed me her car keys. As I fetched
them from the asphalt she made her way around to the non-whitewall-tired side
of her car.
Now, you’ll think me terribly petty for saying so, but here was
an unexpected silver lining: I got to drive! It’s not just that my masculine
dignity was assuaged (though that was, I’ll admit, part of it). The thing was, I loved to drive and almost never got to. I started up the Corolla and looked
over at my date. “Just take me home,” she said. She was on the verge of tears.
“Right,” I replied.
I drove, she directed, and as we neared her house she said,
“Wait. Just stop the car for a minute. I have to think.” A probable truth
dawned on me: she was embarrassed to get home early and have to tell her
parents that her big night had crashed and burned. “We could just drive
around,” I offered. To my surprise, she agreed. As we drove, I attempted some
damage control.
“Look,” I said, “in case you’re feeling bad about burping in
my dad’s face, don’t. Your burp … it was just awesome. The best. I’ve been
practicing my belching skills for years and I’ve never managed anything that rich and full. Your belch had authority. You clearly don’t fuck around
when it comes to oral eructation. And another thing: my dad totally had that
coming. In fact that was long overdue. I only regret that I didn’t get to do it
myself.”
My date was laughing now. She seemed relieved by my utter
lack of reproach, and clearly appreciated the levity. It certainly didn’t hurt
that she was drunk. Emboldened by how my opening salvo went over, and by the
simple act of driving a car, I talked some more, describing my parents’ divorce,
trying to hit the right balance of humility, swagger, flippancy, and
vulnerability. Eventually—boosted by perhaps her fourth fun-sized schnapps of
the evening—my date agreed to return to plan, and we headed to the prom.
The prom was at a hotel we always thought was pretty swank;
only now do I realize its cheesiness. But even then I thought the decorations
were pretty twee. The planning committee had somehow settled on a barn-raising,
pioneer-spirit, good-old-fashioned hoe-down theme, totally at odds with the
music (Madonna, the Fixx, the Bangles, U2, Berlin, Cindi Lauper, Van Halen, etc.).
As soon as we got there, my date hit the dance floor hard, trying to drag me
along. Terrified, feeling like a mouse who finds himself in the middle of the
floor, I bobbed up and down, trying to move my chin with the music. My date,
lost in the music, seemed to forget about me, so I gradually made my way to the
edge of the room.
Encountering various classmates who looked vaguely familiar,
I tried my line about the camo boutonniere a number of times and got nowhere.
Eventually I found my friend Sean, with whom I engaged in bagging on lame
people. I didn’t really know Sean very well—just from a few classes—but he
seemed oddly non-nerdy for a guy willing to hang out with me. I pondered, not
for the first time, that this might be exactly how he felt about me.
The yearbook staffers were relentless, so my date and I caved
and headed to the photo station where we were supposed to pose on a couple of
hay bales. My date, off-balance and staggering, leaned on me for support. My
rented tux shoes—made entirely of smooth plastic, it seemed, even the
soles—slipped, and I leaned back on her, and her feet—shod in ridiculous high
heels—slid right out from under her and I ended up sitting on her lap. The yearbook
photo captured us in this ridiculous configuration, and to make matters worse I
appear, in the photo, to be looking down the front of her dress. Actually, I
totally was. I couldn’t help it. The dress gaped open and it was just a reflex.
Fortunately, in those days you didn’t see the photo right away, so my date
wasn’t (yet) livid. In fact, she asked me to slow-dance.
The slow-dance was very easy. Nobody was really paying
attention to anybody but their date. They just shuffled around, leaning on each
other, probably most of the girls preoccupied with worry that their date would
do something untoward, and certainly most of the boys hoping to cop a feel (or
“grab handfuls of ass,” in the parlance of that time). I behaved myself. In
fact, it was all I could do to keep my date on her feet. I tried to recall how
many airline bottles of schnapps had been in that purse … surely she’d drunk
all of them. She reeked of cinnamon—it must have been coming out her pores.
Still, when she relaxed and leaned her head on my shoulder, that was kind of
nice. At least, it was nice for a while, until suddenly—“Oh, shit!” my date cried. She recoiled from
me as if from an electric shock. What had I done?
Turns out it wasn’t what I’d
done … it was what she’d done, which was to have a nosebleed all over my
tux. “I am so sorry!” she said over
and over, lugubriously. I didn’t know what to say. Of course I was livid about
the tux—imagine forking over good money to replace a pink tux!—but she looked so miserable I couldn’t worry too much
about myself. The poor girl. First her horse dies, then her car has only two
narrow-stripe whitewall tires, then her date is a cad in a pink suit, which she
bleeds on. She just can’t get a break! I decided to act like a good guy. “Are
you okay?” I asked. “Do you need help? Has this happened before?” She flapped
her hands around. “It’s just when I’m stressed out,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
My mind raced. “No need to apologize,” I said. “I’m just
glad it’s nothing serious. I saw this movie where a guy gets nosebleeds and
it’s from a brain aneurysm!” Now she looked a bit freaked out. “It’s okay, I’m
sure you’re not having an aneurysm,” I said, realizing how absurd it was to say
such a thing, and yet how unconvincing I sounded. “I’ll get you a damp towel,”
I continued.
I set off toward the restroom like a man on a mission.
Unfortunately, the shortest route was straight across the dance floor, which—by
this point—was back to normal (non-slow) dancing. I weaved and bobbed and
suddenly my sunglasses flew off. (Yes, it’s stupid to wear shades indoors,
especially at a dance, but I was desperately trying to look cool.) They were
stupid sunglasses, fake Ray-Ban Wayfarers that were way too dark, but still I
was hell-bent on finding them. Pacing around bent over, I got kneed in the face
(either accidently or on purpose, I never learned) and now, unbelievably, I too
had a nosebleed.
I got to the restroom where a formally attired valet was
handing out warm cotton towels. No, of course that’s not true—I grabbed a
couple fistfuls of paper towels, wetted them at the sink, and made my way back
to my date (the long way around, this time, trying to disappear). I held the towels
to the back of my neck in accordance with the old wives’ tale that it would
stop the nosebleed, which it didn’t. The towels began to shred and form little
pills, like
toe-jam footballs, on the collar of my tux. My date was not impressed. What’s more, everybody
began loudly mocking us. “Look, it’s the nosebleed twins!” someone taunted. We
beat it out of there, dripping blood as we went.
“Oh my god, drive slower,” my date pleaded. “Everything is
spinning. Oh god oh god oh god.” Halfway to her house, she puked all over her
aunt’s fur and the upholstery of her car. The stench was a horrible congress of
bile and cinnamon. I cranked my window down and hung my head out, like a dog. When
we got to her house and I swung the car into the driveway, I didn’t see the
empty garbage can there—an old-school steel one—and rammed it, causing a
massive racket. My date’s dad burst out of the house, taking the porch steps
two at a time. He was already furious, as though he’d just
known the night would be a disaster. “What in the
hell?!” he fumed. I handed my date her
keys, spun on my heel, and without a word strode off, beginning the
long journey home on foot. The night had been an unmitigated disaster. I didn’t even find my
sunglasses.
In French class the next week, my (ex-)date and I didn’t say
a word to each other. Fortunately, the end of the school year was not far off. We
managed to literally never speak again, and then we graduated, moved off to
college, and were thus spared any future awkwardness. And did I learn my
lesson? Definitely. I never attended another school dance.
Epilogue
What you have just read is a work of pure fiction. The
official story—that I never went to prom—is the true one. When I wrote that I
decided “to share the real story” with my daughter, I was equivocating: it’s a
real story in the sense that it’s really a story—i.e., really a work of
fiction. When I promised maximum verisimilitude, I meant to the story I’d told my
daughter … not to any real events. And although I can’t claim that none of the characters bear any
resemblance to any actual human, living or dead, I assure you the self-portrait
is a caricature.
This tale was born on the night of my daughter’s prom,
when my wife and I were chatting. “No, you did
go to prom,” my wife said. “How could you forget? You rented that awful
pink tux!” Thus began a dialogue of improv. “Oh, yeah!” I replied. “And my
date’s dress was orange!” Etc.
The version of this story I told my daughter ended with a
character inexplicably grabbing my leg and pulling on it—“just the way, in
fact, that I’m
pulling on yours,” I quipped. My daughter, crestfallen, said, “Oh, Dad, I
so wanted that all to be true!”
My younger daughter overheard me reading this to my wife,
and though she ran from the room, and called out to me to speak more quietly
because she couldn’t handle hearing it, she ended up listening to the whole
thing. She was hugely relieved to discover it was fiction.
Are you?
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