by Paul Feig
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 m
oment 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.
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 ce
rtainly 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.