That Monday, I was so humiliated that I avoided Mr. Randell at every turn, sure that he had heard about my disastrous job behind the mike. And when the next Friday rolled around, I very happily stayed far away from the football field, sure that restraining orders had been issued to keep me away from the announcer’s booth. I never felt more relieved in my life to not be somewhere than I did that Friday night and enjoyed an evening of
SCTV
watching and junk food eating with my next-door neighbor Craig.
The following Monday, Mr. Randell called me into his office.
“So,” he said with a very disappointed look on his face, “where were you Friday night? You missed the game.”
I was shocked. I couldn’t even conceive of anyone’s expecting that I would have returned to the scene of my failure. And now, completely embarrassed, I just couldn’t bring myself to admit to him that I assumed I had been fired.
“Uh . . . I thought it was gonna rain Friday night and that they were gonna call the game off, so I didn’t go.”
I sat there for a fifteen-minute lecture on responsibility and what it means for a man to keep his word, basically the same one my dad had given me during Little League. I nodded and looked remorseful the entire time, taking solace in the knowledge that if this was the hair shirt I would have to put on in order to never have to attend another football game again, it was well worth it. And it was still more pleasurable to wear than Pete’s coat.
At the end of his tirade, he gave me a very fatherly look and shocked me by saying, “So, I can count on you to show up and announce the game again this Friday?”
I looked at the man and realized that drastic measures had to be taken to escape this Sartre-like situation that the job of being our school’s football announcer had turned out to be.
“Mr. Randell,” I said apologetically, “I’m afraid I can’t announce the football games anymore. Friday nights I have to go shopping with my mom.”
THE LAST AND ONLY PROM
S
ince I was seven, I had a huge crush on the girl who lived next door to me.
Mary was the middle daughter in a family of eight kids and was the same age as me. She, myself, and her younger sister Stephanie comprised what became officially known as the Garage Club. We used to spend every summer in my family’s garage putting on plays and haunted houses, as well as the one time we opened a dance studio by making up a few simple steps to the Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods classic “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero.” We then passed it off as “the latest dance craze” sweeping some other city far from our own, thus ensuring that no one would figure out we had simply invented it in two minutes and then demand their twenty-five-cent tuition back. Once, the Garage Club even raided the garbage Dumpster behind my father’s army-surplus store and turned a load of discarded packing materials into a potpourri of sellable items. Cardboard dividers whose purpose in the world of shipping was to keep cowboy hats from crushing each other became actual hats in our garage boutique. It’s amazing how the word
Hat
written in Magic Marker on a cardboard divider can actually convince a four-year-old to fork over fifty cents and march off into the street wearing a glorified piece of garbage on his head. Cardboard boxes that once contained musty old canvas tarps miraculously became portable forts, available to any kid in our neighborhood with one dollar of allowance money and the will to cart the thing off on his or her bike. Unfortunately, when I made treasure maps that led the buyer through the most treacherous parts of our neighborhood only to discover that the “X” that marked “the spot” merely marked the spot where I hadn’t actually put anything, the plan backfired. Several angry older brothers descended on our garage with their crying siblings, demanding their money back and threatening to close us down if we ever tried to peddle our shoddy wares within the neighborhood again. But the one thing that kept me going, even through these retail hardships, was the fact that I was working side by side with my beloved Mary.
The irony is that I had already married her sister Sharon. It was a simple ceremony, me in my Sunday school suit and Sharon in her confirmation dress, wearing a simple veil made out of a disgustingly dirty piece of drop cloth from my dad’s paint bin. Sharon was an older woman, it was true. But we had decided that our love could overcome the one-year age difference between us and make our bond all the stronger. We were married on the back stoop of my house, with my mother performing the ceremony by uttering a quick and nervous, “Even though this isn’t real in the eyes of God, I now pronounce you pretend husband and wife,” and then handing us a pitcher of Kool-Aid so that we could start our honeymoon on the swing set fully amped-up on sugar. But even during my wedding ceremony, with Mary standing next to Sharon, acting as her bridesmaid, and the three-year-old ring bearer Stephanie wistfully picking her nose at Mary’s side, I knew that my marriage to Sharon was merely a sham, a small dalliance on the road to true marital bliss with my future wife, Mary.
Over the years, Mary and I were inseparable. We did everything together, which usually involved some form of torturing her little sister Stephanie. We bonded through cruelty, as many children do, finding our friendship growing each time we invented a new and increasingly insulting nickname for Stephanie. “Zit” seemed to stick the longest and was only improved upon by upgrades in pronunciation. Zit became Zut became Zoot became the performance-dependent
Zooooot
became years of eventual therapy for poor Stephanie. Not that
I
was spared, by any means. Mary called me Fig Newton constantly, and while it never felt like a romantic pet name, at least it showed the world that we were more than just casual friends.
Once, when we were thirteen years old and saw the movie
Aloha, Bobby and Rose,
Mary and my ex-wife Sharon were traumatized and inconsolable at the death-by-cop demise of Bobby at the film’s end. Having hated the overwrought teen drama, I found the whole thing rather amusing as we walked home, since the two girls seemed incapable of stopping their crying jags. My inflammatory comment “I don’t know, I think Bobby had it coming” was met by Mary’s searing glare and a very angry “Shut up,
Pig
Newton!” That one
did
hurt, not so much because I had been called a pig, since I was extremely skinny and not at all piglike, but because she looked so hatefully at me in that one moment. And so I vowed never to upset her again.
My love for Mary seemed to grow exponentially once we hit our teens. Mary was blossoming into full womanhood and I was blossoming into full awkward gangliness. Her breasts and hair grew; my ears, nose, arms, and feet grew, unfortunately in complete disproportion to the rest of my body. I found myself secretly staring moonily at Mary’s face as we would play board games like Battleship and Kerplunk and the nerve-jangling Operation. The ease and grace of her hands as she deftly removed a Wrenched Ankle or an Adam’s Apple was something to behold. Little did she know that as she was removing a Broken Heart, she was in full possession of mine.
Once, in junior high, my older cousin Leslie taught me how to say “I love you” in French. And so, on Mary’s birthday, I bought her an innocuous card and on the inside flap, in what I considered to be unreadable microprint, I wrote the words
“Je t’aime.”
Then, to draw attention away from it, I wrote in the place where you’re supposed to sign a card a very innocent “Happy Birthday, Your friend, Paul.” I gave her the card as we headed home from school that day and told her to open it when she got to her house. My thought process was simple. Mary would see the secretive French “I love you” and process it subconsciously. Then, overcome with years of unrequited love for me, she would rush to my door, throw her arms around me, and profess her undying affection. And so, heart pounding, I sat at home that afternoon, waiting for her to arrive. As the hours passed and our front door was silent, I realized something had gone wrong with the plan. I headed over, wondering if my microprinting was indeed
too
micro, causing my French declaration of love to go unseen. I knocked on her door and was immediately met by Sharon, who looked at me through the screen door with a face that said “I know something that you don’t want me to know.”
“Hey, Sharon,” I said cautiously, knowing something was up.
“Hey, Fig Newton . . .” Long torturous pause. “Geeee tay-meeee!”
Having said this, she burst into laughter, which was followed by the sound of distant laughter inside the house from her older sister Becky and their mother. Sharon fell away from the door, hysterical. Then Mary appeared, with a look that was a mixture of uncertainty, amusement, and disbelief. She cracked the screen door open and looked at me.
“Fig Newton . . . do you
love
me?” It wasn’t a tender, rhetorical question but one of true confusion.
“What? No. What are you talking about?” I said, covering way too hard, completely transparent.
“Didn’t you write that thing in my card? That French thing?”
“What? Oh,
that?
No, I was practicing writing out some French stuff and my pen got stuck and I used that card to try and make the pen start writing again and I guess I wrote that on there to make sure that the pen was working. Oh, man, I can’t believe I wrote that on your card. Ha ha.”
She had a look on her face that said she wasn’t buying a word of this, and I made a hasty retreat back to my house before she could say anything else. The sound of her sisters and mother laughing escorted me back to my front door. I stayed in my room the rest of the day playing “I Honestly Love You” over and over on my stereo and wondering why I had fallen apart so completely in what could have been a turning point in my life.
As time passed and we went on to high school, both Mary and I got busy with our own groups of friends and our own after-school activities. I became best friends with her older brother Craig, who was four years my senior. And because of this, I was over at her house as much as ever. Craig and I spent most of our time talking about
Star Wars
and making super-8 Claymation films and reading
Starlog
magazine. But being in her house, close to her but not as accessible as before, just made my love for her grow deeper and more profound. In some weird way, she was my ace in the hole. With all the fleeting crushes I had on girls throughout my high school career, having a girl I had grown up with living next door felt like a resource I could eventually call upon once I felt I was ready for a truly long-term and mature, albeit safe, relationship. It was as if she had been promised to me in my youth and we were simply waiting for the right moment in our lives to commence with our deep and predestined romance.
As the end of my senior year approached, it was becoming clear to me that this moment had better come quickly. Simply put, time was running out. In addition to our ill-fated date to my junior high dance, I had already screwed up a year earlier when I invited Mary to attend a Yes concert with me at Olympia Stadium in downtown Detroit. Instead of being honest about my romantic intentions, I presented the evening as more of a “hey, let’s go as friends to this concert” event. I guess that in my heart I was assuming that an evening of sitting next to each other, serenaded by the keyboard virtuosity of Rick Wakeman, would cause romance to blossom between us. Of course, this turned out to not be the case, since we ended up being driven to the concert by her older brother John and his friend Tony, two stoners who effectively romance-proofed the whole event by cranking their car stereo louder than a Ted Nugent concert, smoking joints as they drove excessively fast, and keeping me in constant paranoia that we would be pulled over by the police. I imagined my picture splashed all over the front page of the
Macomb Daily
under the headline “Local Business Owner’s Son Dies in Drug-Related Car Wreck, Shames Family.” But even though the date was a failure in the love department, I could see from the moments in between fearing for our lives and being deafened by Yes’s ponderous concert promoting possibly their worst album ever,
Tormato,
that Mary and I were indeed the perfect couple just waiting to happen.
All I needed was the right situation.
And so, one day in May, I decided to ask her to an event that could not be interpreted as anything other than an evening of romance and pronouncements of lifelong devotion . . .
The senior prom.
I did it at the end of her driveway. I hadn’t talked to her in a few weeks and when I went over to her house to ask her to be my date, it was with a resolve that had come from years of preparation in front of my bedroom mirror. I knocked on her door and she appeared at the screen.
“Hey, Fig Newton, what’s up?” she said the same way she’d said it a million times before.
“Um . . . can you come outside? I need to talk to you.”
I don’t know if it was something in the tone of my voice or because I had turned my nervousness into an expression of steely calm, but she seemed to sense that I was going to ask her something that was outside the normal bounds of our friendship. We walked away from her house toward the road, chatting a bit about school, as the gravel from her driveway crunched beneath our feet. I had heard that driveway gravel crunch my entire life. It made me think of the years she and I had spent growing up together. My driveway was cement, and so I was always enamored with the way my tennis shoes sounded on her gravel whenever I walked up and down her driveway. It always made me feel as if I were a supercool cowboy, grinding up the rocks beneath my feet as I strode bravely toward my showdown with a bad guy. But on this spring day, a day I had waited years for, the crunching sound was quieter, as if the gravel were trying to help me out by not adding any additional distractions to my heartfelt task.
We stopped at the end of the driveway and faced each other. I stared at her for a few seconds, unable to speak.
“What’s up?” she asked in a friendly tone.
When you’re a little kid, there comes a moment when you’re standing on the edge of a diving board for the first time, staring down at the water, unsure if you’ll ever have the nerve to jump into the deep end. Then suddenly something in you just says, Ah, screw it, jump in already. And so I stepped off the diving board and plunged feet-first into the water.
“Mary,” I said, “do you want to go to the prom with me?”
She stared at me for a second, then smiled, a smile I had never seen her give me before, and said very sweetly, “Sure, Fig New—” She stopped herself, then . . .
“I mean . . . Paul.”
Oh my God, I thought. She actually said yes. The moment I’d waited for my entire life had just happened.
And
she called me by my real name. I’d waited since I was five for her to stop calling me “Fig Newton” and call me Paul again. And now all my dreams had come true in the time it took me to ask her to a school-sponsored dance. I couldn’t believe it. I was so happy.
So why did I feel so weird?
Mary smiled at me again. I smiled back and wondered if I was supposed to kiss her. It seemed like the kind of moment in which you were supposed to kiss somebody, but I didn’t know if she’d let me and I didn’t know if I wanted to. I’d never kissed her before, and it didn’t seem right to do it for the first time standing in the same front yard in which we used to play hide-and-seek. And so I simply nodded and said, as romantically as possible, “Okay, great. We’ll have a great time.”
I walked her back to her door, but instead of walking the way we normally walked, like two people who’ve known each other all their lives trying to get from one location to another, we were now walking in an “aw, shucks,”
Our Town,
shy-young-couple-in-love sort of way: the guy with his hands in his pockets, looking down as he walks slowly and ponderously, and the girl with her arms crossed in front of her as her feet lightly kick at the dirt with each step she takes. It no longer felt as if we were Paul and Mary, the kids who started the Garage Club and took great pleasure in squirting baby lotion down Zit’s throat as she lay napping with her mouth open. We now felt more like
Paul and Mary,
the teenagers whom people might now say were “perfect for each other,” who were “such a cute couple,” and who had “finally gotten together.” We got to her door, said good-bye to each other, and then she went inside, but only after looking back at me and giving me another warm smile. As the door shut behind her, I turned and headed home, feeling happy and relieved and excited.