Kick Me (26 page)

And really, really weird.

At school the next day, my friend Tom was talking about the prom. He had just asked a girl to go with him and was telling me everything he felt I needed to know, especially since I had been bragging that I, too, would be squiring a young lady this year.

“Everybody gets laid on prom night, you know that, right?” he said.

No, I didn’t know that. In fact, it had truly been the last thing on my mind. “
Everybody
does?” I asked, thinking that maybe he was joking.

“Sure,” said Tom, as if I were crazy. “Why else do you think people go to the prom? To
dance?
”

My head immediately started to swim. For all the times I had imagined Mary and me being in love, for some reason sex had never entered the equation. Whether it was because I had known her since we were babies or because I had seen her cut her foot open once on a piece of glass on her lawn or because she had spent so much time referring to me as a chewy-chewy-rich-and-gooey fruit cookie, the thought of true intimacy with her was an idea that was almost foreign to me. Sure, there was the time last year when her brother John had built a wooden fort in their backyard that quickly became the neighborhood freaks’ make-out palace. I had heard that Mary had gone in there with John’s friend Al, who was
three
years older than her, and that they had actually made out. But that story had only swelled a Holden Caulfield–esque anger in me, indignation that my sweet and innocent Mary had been forced into a compromising situation with an older man. Truly that couldn’t be who she really was. Surely she didn’t actually have sexual urges. Or did she? My brain tried to sort things out. Maybe Mary
was
sexually active, I thought. And maybe when I’d asked her to the prom, she’d said yes, knowing that indeed “
everybody
gets laid on prom night.”

Over the next few days, as I went about the ritual of renting a tux—making sure that I got a tuxedo shirt with a wing-tip collar so I could look like Robert Redford at the end of
The Sting
—my mind started to fill more and more with panic.

I’m going to have to have sex with Mary after the prom, I thought. After all, it’s what
everybody
does. They don’t just go to
dance.

Visions of a ubiquitous pamphlet that had been front and center on the literature table in my Sunday school kept flashing in my brain. In big letters on the front of the pamphlet were the words
Chastity: The Pre-Marital Standard.
Not only was this prom date going to be potentially traumatic, my teenage brain kept thinking over and over, it was also going to get me in huge trouble with God. The more I thought about it, the more I knew first and foremost that I didn’t want to get laid on prom night with my next-door neighbor, and the reasons kept coming at me hot and heavy. First of all, where were we going to do this sex thing, anyway? In the car? If so, what about the fact that we’ll be dressed in gowns and tuxedos? It had taken me a good ten minutes to get the tux on in the mall fitting room, struggling with the fake tie that hooked in the back and the cumbersome cummerbund, not to mention the tight-fitting pants and oddly shaped shiny shoes that could only be squeezed into with a shoe horn. An attempt at getting undressed in the backseat of a car could quickly turn into the stateroom scene from the Marx Brothers’
A Night at the Opera,
and I knew that if I did indeed have to lose my virginity that night, I didn’t want it to be funny. And could I even get naked in front of another person? I’d barely been able to shower in gym class in front of other guys. How was I now going to let someone of the opposite sex see me naked? And what if we got caught, like teenagers always seemed to do in the movies? Would we be in the throes of lovemaking, only to have a flashlight beam shine in our faces, whereupon we’d be forced to scramble about the car in a humiliating, bare-assed panic trying to retrieve our clothes while banjo music played on the sound track and a potbellied sheriff said things like “Well, well, Earl, looks like we got us a regular Romeo here” and “All right, Casanova, what say you and me take a little trip downtown so you can explain all this to the judge?”

And most important, did I really want to have sex with Mary?

In case it’s not completely obvious by now, I was a very immature kid, even as a high school senior. Especially when it came to sex. True, I had been indulging in “the rope feeling” for years before my classmates were, but comparing masturbation to sex is like comparing skill at video golf to being a pro on the PGA Tour. Sexually, my mind had never advanced from that wedding on the back stoop of our house when I was five. To me, making out with a girl was about as much of love and romance as I could get my head around, and even that was an overwhelming prospect, the pinnacle of what my backward brain could handle. I mean, I hadn’t even figured out how to French-kiss a girl yet. How could I have sex with her? I knew that other kids my age, as well as some much younger than me, were having sex throughout the country, especially in the permissive late 1970s. But no one in my group of friends ever seemed to be preoccupied with “going all the way.” Sure, we had our crushes and would stare at the girls with the overdeveloped breasts and feel stirrings within ourselves, but no one I knew was actually getting
laid.
We had all been too busy for four years just trying not to get beaten up and to get decent grades and to get through the days with our dignity intact. Sex was something we knew was in our future, and we were all just fine with it staying there for the time being.

Or maybe it
was
just me.

Maybe all my friends, maybe
everyone
I knew was asking girls out on dates every weekend, getting undressed in front of them, and having sex. After all, we
were
seniors. The government said we were old enough to drive and soon we would be old enough to be drafted and to vote. We were certainly
old
enough to have sex. If we were living a few hundred years ago, most of us would have a wife and kids already, which means we would have had a lot of sex by now. The reality of it all was staggering. Maybe all this time, while I’d been sitting at home with my dad on Friday nights watching
Benny Hill
reruns or hanging out with my friend Craig reciting lines from Monty Python movies for the umpteenth time, everyone around me was engaged in the mature, physical act of love.

I tried to force myself not to think about it. But think about it I did. Constantly.

By the time the prom rolled around, I was a mess. I’d been having fever dreams all week, torturous visions of myself being forced to dance naked through the prom’s rented catering hall or marrying a pregnant Mary at gunpoint as my parents wept and God damned me to a life of eternal toil for going against
His
will. I put on my tuxedo that evening like a man preparing to go before a firing squad with a dress code. I tried to force myself to feel happy, to look forward to what my mother kept telling me was going to be “one of the happiest nights of my life.” Sure, it was easy for
her
to say. She didn’t know the “everybody gets laid on prom night” rule. She grew up in an era when most people actually
did
wait until they got married before they had sex. They had all lived their lives according to
Chastity: The Pre-Marital Standard.
But not me. Not for long. No, I was living in a new world, a world of discos and silk shirts and cocaine and high divorce rates and one night stands and cheesy guys wearing Angel’s Flight pants and gold chains who had sex in bathroom stalls with women they just met. Or so I’d seen on
Baretta.
But now I was about to join their ranks. Because I was about to lose my virginity to one of the founding members of the Garage Club.

I walked over to Mary’s house, stepping through the break in the bushes that separated our yards. I had jumped through that spot in the bushes every time I came to visit Mary since we were kids, sometimes leaping through it wildly, as if I were Superman breaking through a brick wall. Tonight, however, I did not leap. I stepped through cautiously, afraid of ripping my tuxedo and afraid of disturbing whatever was left of my youth that might be clinging to those bushes.

When I went into Mary’s house, her parents said hello and we chatted a bit, but I couldn’t concentrate. My ears were ringing. All I could see were the pictures around the room of Mary when she was younger. Mary in her Garage Club days. Mary in her Brownies uniform. Mary in her confirmation dress. Mary before she was old enough to care about sex.

She stepped out of her bedroom wearing a lacy white sleeveless dress. She looked pretty. My stomach tied into yet another knot.

“Hi, Paul,” she said shyly. “You look nice.”

I thanked her and told her how pretty she looked, but all I could think of was how much I wanted her to call me Fig Newton at that moment. She would never want Fig Newton to have sex with her. Fig Newton wouldn’t be expected to know how to remove a bra or to have a condom in his wallet. Paul, however, had better be ready to deliver the goods.

That night, as I drove Mary to the prom, I felt like I had a time bomb in the car instead of a girl. I was having a hard time reading her. Ever since I had picked her up at her house, she had been acting differently than she ever had before, smiling at me and not making fun of me. She truly seemed to be in a romantic mood, as she looked sweetly down at the wrist corsage I had given her and as she checked her lipstick in the visor mirror. Was this the way girls acted before they had sex? I wondered. Was this the mating ritual? Was my grandma’s old car going to become our conjugal cell before the night was through?

And was tonight truly going to be the night our childhood innocence was going to end? Not “French-kissing” end but actually “everyone gets laid on prom night” end?

We pulled up in front of the VFW hall where the prom was taking place and saw crowds of my classmates heading inside. I parked the car in the dirt parking lot. We got out and started walking. I wasn’t sure if I should take her hand or not, and she didn’t appear to know if she should offer it up. And so we walked next to each other, trying to engage in awkward conversation that was reminiscent neither of things we would talk about in our preprom date lives nor of subjects full-fledged couples could easily toss around. Instead, we tried to walk on the conversational razor’s edge, which counted observable things near us as its main topic. Phrases like “Huh, never been to this catering hall” and “Oh, that’s a pretty dress she has on” and “Careful you don’t step on that big rock” fell pithily from both our mouths as we headed toward the door. Was this how an evening that ended with backseat sex started, I wondered? Were guys and girls who would be as intimate as two people could possibly be in just a few short hours really be pointing out other people’s outfits to each other and musing over the location of the prom? I’d always imagined that sex occurred only after a night of poetry and cocktails, of smoking jackets and dressing gowns, of candle-lit dinners and long stares into each other’s eyes. I didn’t see how it could come out of an evening in a rented VFW hall with each one of us encased in polyester. But maybe I just wasn’t savvy in the ways of the world.

We entered the outer lobby. There was a line of people that made it impossible to get directly into the dance. I could hear the strains of The Knack’s “My Sharona” echoing around inside the main VFW hall, a place acoustically ill-equipped for any music other than the National Anthem. I could see flashing lights and hear the voices of my fellow students having a good time, clearly fueled, I assumed, by their excitement about the evening of sex that awaited them after they left the dance. Some student government kids checked us in as they sat behind a long folding table, the kind of table that professional wrestlers now throw each other through in WWF bouts. I looked up ahead to see why we were standing in line and saw a flash of light. It turned out that before we could enter the dance, we had to have our prom picture taken. Judging from the heat I felt coming out of the main hall doorway, they must have figured that none of us were going to look any better than we did right then as we entered fresh from our bathroom mirrors and the outside air. Once our blow-dried hair and made-up faces and synthetic formal wear got into that humidity-trapping room, we would all emerge looking more like abstract paintings than people who had spent the better part of the day getting dressed.

As we got closer, Mary and I watched the other couples pose for their pictures. Each couple would be placed in a semi-romantic position by the photographer, who would have them put one arm around the other’s waist, turn toward each other at a forty-five-degree angle, and hold their free hands tenderly together in front of them, creating a romantic keepsake of their evening suitable for framing. Everyone who did it seemed to have been dating for years. They would very confidently hold each other’s hands and melt into one another, smiling comfortably for the photographer. Even the fact that the rest of us in line were watching didn’t seem to phase them. Clearly everyone in the school was experienced in the world of dating, leaving me with the title of Most Backward Kid at Chippewa Valley High.

When the time came for Mary and me to get our picture taken, I immediately felt the strongest urge not to do it. I didn’t feel like I particularly wanted a picture to remember any of this by. And yet to not document it would both insult Mary and possibly turn out to be something I would regret. After all, like it or not, this was my last and only prom. And so Mary and I stepped into the spotlight.

The photographer regaled us with corny photographer jokes, many of which we had already heard him tell every single couple who preceded us. Lines like “Well, well, I knew I’d get to take a picture of Warren Beatty and Farrah Fawcett-Majors one of these days” and “When I tell you, think like a dog and say ‘fleas’” were just a few of the “doozies” he served up in a nonstop monologue that we all laughed at even though none of us found him the least bit amusing. The term
captive audience
came to mind, but if this guy wanted to spend his life taking pictures of kids at their proms, then we could at least have the courtesy to laugh at his stupid jokes. He told Mary and me to put our arms around each other and hold hands. We did as he asked. I put my arm stiffly around her waist, as if she were a bag of golf clubs I was trying to keep from falling over. I fumbled to take her hand and ended up intertwining our fingers strangely, making our hands look more arthritic than romantic. The photographer looked at me oddly, giving me a raised-eyebrow that said “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know how to hold hands with a girl?” And it was at this moment I realized that I had never actually touched Mary before. I mean, we had played Swinging Statues and touched each other “It” during tag and probably slapped each other “five” on one occasion or another during our childhood, but we had never made any prolonged, definite contact. I could tell by the stiffness of her fingers and by how lightly her arm was around my waist that she was feeling just as strange about this as I was. And then, when the photographer came up and shoved us closer together, so that we were pressed against each other so tightly that we could feel our hip bones touching and the warmth of our legs connecting through our clothes, turning our bodies into one unified energy field, I knew at that moment we were both feeling the exact same thing.