Prom Night

When prom came around, I didn't even think about going.  I was too shy to ask anyone out, and I was afraid that if I did ask, the girl--whomever she was--would say 'no.'  The only girl I liked in school was Debbie from my English class, but she would have a thousand chances to pick and choose.  All around school there was much talk and preparation.  There would be a band.  The girls would buy dresses and go to beauty salons.  It would all be wonderful.  

I fell back deeper into the shadows.  

On prom night, I was in the trailer park with Tommy.  His mother and step-father were drinking with Donny and Adair's parents.  They all decided to go out to the restaurant at the fish camp on the river to drink for the night and wouldn't be back until late.  We wondered what to do.  

Donny wanted to score some pot and said he knew a black guy downtown who could get it for us.  How he knew him was a mystery to me, but none of these kids went to school, so while I sat in my desk seats from first to sixth periods, they were--well, I didn't know.  

We met the guy in a parking lot.  He was waiting for us and when Donny called him over, he jumped into the back seat of my car.  

"Hey James!"

"Hey, man, we gotta go over to this cat's place to get the shit," he said.  

"Fuck," said Donny, "I thought you'd have it on you."  

"Take it easy, man, we'll get it.  I just don't like walking around white town with that shit on me.  He said he'd meet us there at eight, so let's drive around a little and kill some time and then we'll roll on up there."  

It was the first time I'd ever driven around with a black guy before.  I didn't know any except the fellow in my math class with the red hair and the brown and the blue eyes.  Donny did most of the talking with him as he directed us up and down some border streets on the roads between the black and the white sections of town.  There was a real difference that you could see and hear and smell.  People were hanging out in groups in front of rundown buildings, large groups of men coming to life in explosions of animated excitement.  They were not at all like the laconic men I grew up around who rarely spoke and then only in quiet tones.  Everything here seemed acted out, theatrical.  Only it wasn't.  I was there.  It was real.  

After we had cruised the streets for half an hour, James said it was time, and he directed us to a building that had once been a hotel but which had been compromised by the construction of the interstate.  Now it was converted into apartments that stood seeming feet from the highway, a dirty, green four story structure.  We parked the car and entered the front door, walking past the bent and broken metal chairs that stood like exoskeletons around a littered courtyard.  We walked into the dusky, yellow light of the building's interior and immediately went up a flight of stairs.  There on the second floor was an old reception desk where an older man sat in a cloth covered chair listening to a radio.  James spoke to him and he nodded back.

"Hey pops, I'm supposed to meet Samuel here.  Is he in?"  

The man in the chair just shook his head no.  We would wait.  It was warm in the hallway and close, and somehow this gave me a drowsy sort of comfort that was a relief to the nervousness I'd carried around all night.  I stood leaning my back against a doorjamb which led into a small sitting room with a couple of chairs and a floor lamp.  From where I stood, I could peer down a long hallway with its threadbare carpet and its series of numbered doors.  One of them opened a little and a face peered out.  And then it was gone.  A minute later, a young woman stepped halfway into the hallway, keeping her other half behind the door.  She was wearing little and looked directly at me, and I felt the blood begin to rise in my neck and face.  I couldn't quit looking as she playfully moved the door back and forth, half in, half out.  She stared at me for a little bit and then positioned her leg so that I got a good look at the beauty of her inner thigh.  My head was spinning.  I seemed to be floating there in that hallway with the strange music and yellow light and the close, southern heat when she motioned me to her with a finger and stepped back inside.  I didn't even know I was walking when James grabbed me by the arm.

"What you think you're doing," he asked me? 

I just looked at him.  

"Man, you're just stupid.  She's got a guy waiting inside just for you," he said.  I just kept looking at him.  I could barely understand him.  Everything--the light, the music, the heat,his voice--had melted into one, incomprehensible sensation of life for me.  I couldn't extricate one from the other.  James laughed and said, "Man, you just wait there.  You're gonna get killed."  

Finally Samuel showed up and there was a flurry of conversation and quiet laughter and the secret exchange of money from palm to palm.  And we were done.  It was time to go.  

Everyone was heading down the stairs when I looked back at the door, back to my Sodom and Gomorra, and just before I took the first descending step, the minute I was ready to go, I saw a man maneuver into the hallway.  He was big and muscular and sweaty, and when he looked at me I felt the apocryphal cold chill wash through my veins like a dozen arctic rivers.  James had been right.  

We took James back to where we had met him and dropped him off with a lot of laughing and hand shaking, and then he was gone.  And so were we.  

Donny immediately began to roll a joint, Tommy laughing about the things we had seen, highlighting every detail with shouts of mirth.  

As we drove down the highway through the darkness and the light, I remembered it was prom night.  I thought of the kids in their rented tuxes and frilly gowns, the girls wearing their hair in prom-dos, unnaturally teased and twisted and sprayed until it made a bird's nest on top of their heads, the larval whiteness of their necks brightly shining, corsages pinned awkwardly to dress fronts, everyone dancing and sweating until the Clearasil melted and stained white collars, the smell mixing with Brut and English Leather and Hai Karate, clip-on bowties undone at the end of the evening, everyone knowing that this would remain one of the most important nights of their lives.