I could tell on the ride over that my prom date was eager to get to the dance. She kept asking the driver, “How much longer? Are we almost there?”
There was an annoyed look on her face when I nudged her and calmly pointed to the DO NOT TALK TO THE BUS DRIVER sign.
We got off the bus a few stops later and then walked another five blocks north before she started nagging again. “Where we going? How much longer? These tacones are killing me!”
I calmly pointed up to the ROGER LODGER MOTEL sign and she asked me with a bewildered expression, “This is where the dance is at?”
“Nobody goes to the actual prom dance anymore,” I explained, “we’re going right to the boom-boom room.”
For a moment, I thought she might protest, but she sounded relieved when she told me that she couldn’t wait to get out of that tight prom dress she had stuffed herself into at the beginning of the night. According to her, it was the same gown she had worn to her quinceañera five years earlier when she was about fifteen pounds lighter. I was seventeen years old at the time (of our date, not her quinceañera), and those of you with high speed calculators are probably asking, “You took a twenty-year-old college girl to your high school senior prom?” Not exactly.
She was twenty years old all right, but she wasn’t in college. Apparently she thought “stay in school” meant “stay in school as long as possible” because she was still in the twelfth grade; a senior at a rival high school across town. That’s where we met—in a summer session of Algebra II that had been taught at her campus. I got a B in that class and she failed it for the second time.
Her name was Claudia, and it was in fact her age that had prompted me to ask her out. I had suddenly grown attracted to older women, and not because I thought they were more mature or more interesting than the girls my age, but because I was trying to shed my virginity as soon as possible—a feat that some male classmates of mine (who were no longer “cherries”) ensured me would be easier to accomplish with older women than with the teenage girls I had been striking out with.
Claudia and I checked into the Rodger Lodger Motel as Mr. and Mrs. Garcia. I paid cash for a standard room with a queen-sized bed, and when we got to the corridor that lead to our room, I grew increasingly anxious with every step. We arrived at room 189 and I told Claudia to check out the accommodations on her own while I stayed outside to smoke a cigarette. Each nervous drag from that cancer stick brought feelings of anxiety as I thought about the peer pressure that had brought me to that point in my life. I began to question my intentions and the motives that were driving them. Would forcing this rite of passage really turn me into a man who would finally earn the respect of his friends? It seemed to me like no good would come of it, and the whole thing reminded me of an incident that occurred at Grover Elementary School when I was twelve years old.
My friends and I were in the eighth grade when it happened. Me, Emilio, Freddie, and my best friend Carlos would often play basketball on the weekends, but instead of playing over at the junior high courts where we belonged, we took our talents down to Grover Elementary. The school was a good fifteen minutes out of our way on foot but it was worth it, because playing conditions designed to accommodate the b-ballers of the third grade meant lowered basketball rims, which allowed us bigger kids to slam dunk like big time hoopsters.
One late Saturday afternoon, after wrapping up another “jam session” down at the kiddie courts, my buddies and I began our usual walk back home through the courtyard and various outdoor hallways of the open-air campus. All four of us had attended that school together so it was familiar territory, and certain sights and locations would often trigger a group reminiscence of childhood memories that ranged anywhere from schoolyard fights to schoolgirl crushes.
“That was the year I kissed Lydia Lopez for the first time,” I bragged.
“Where did you kiss her?” asked Emilio.
“On the lips, genius.”
“No, what location?”
“Oh. Behind the portables during recess. I’ll never forget it because it was the same day that Edgar Fuentes shit his pants.”
Edgar was a pudgy oddball with terribly dry and scaly skin. This girl Rosetta once told him, “You so ashy you need an ashtray, and that’s coming from a black girl.” Edgar’s family was poor and couldn’t afford much, let alone skin moisturizer, so he wore the same blue jeans, the same shoes, and many times, the same shirt to school every day. That is until that one morning when he showed up in a pair of white jeans. They were clearly used hand-me-downs but he strutted around the classroom like the cat’s meow and told everyone they were brand-spanking-new. Talk about pride before the fall. A couple of hours later, right before recess, someone noticed a shit stain in the crack of his ass. It wasn’t a big stain at first and if he had been wearing his usual greasy blue denims he might have gotten away with it, but a brown stroke on a white canvass is a dead giveaway.
“Look, everybody,” shouted a kid as we all got up to go outside. “Edgar dumped his pants!”
“No I didn’t,” replied Edgar, and that was the weirdest part. He just kept denying it.
“Edgar, you smell like a sewage plant. Did you shit your pants?
“Nope.”
“Edgar, you have a brown spot on your ass in the shape of South America. Is that kaka?”
“Nuh-uh.”
It was bizarre. Edgar didn’t go to the bathroom at recess to do damage control; he just ran around and played like the rest of us, as if he didn’t have a turd flopping around in his drawers. He even went down the slide, which was one of those metal slides that got piping hot from the sun and burned your ass all the way down. I remember it was a scorcher that afternoon and Edgar slid down with his hands in the air yelling “whee!” and then nobody followed because of the racing stripe of melted shit he left behind that seemed to sizzle on the hot surface like a fecal strip of bacon.
“Edgar, you just left a trail of hot fudge on the slide.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Edgar, you have smeared shit streaking up the back of your shirt. Are you sure you didn’t crap your pants and then slide down the slide and leave a four-foot skid mark?”
“I’m positive.”
Suddenly, our collective, present-day memories of Edgar shitting his pants were interrupted by what we saw inside of old Mrs. Tarango’s art room class. It wasn’t the usual color charts and rudimentary artwork cluttering the walls that caught our attention, nor the clunky mobiles that dangled limply from her ceiling, but the row of fifteen or twenty plastic “snowmen” that were lined up along the window sills of the classroom.
Right away we acknowledged the old mainstay assignment from Mrs. Tarango’s yearly curriculum. It was a tradition—the same art project that our older siblings had been subjected to during their tenure at Grover a few years before our class was exposed to it, and a good while before it had been forced upon this latest crop of poor, unsuspecting third-graders. The assignment went like this: each student was given an empty two-liter plastic bottle which they painted white, filled with water, and then capped off so that the pale container became a weighted, empty canvas on which to express one’s creativity through the world of arts and crafts. We didn’t have World of Warcraft back then. We had arts and crafts. Using buttons, yarn, and other notions, students were required to decorate their cylinder until it eventually came as close as possible to bearing the likeness of a frosty snowman.
Every year the finished art projects were pressed up against the windows for the world to see, but this year, most of the snowmen were more difficult to view because of the many warped and faded windows. This was tornado country, so a majority of the glass windows around the school had been replaced with durable sheets of flexible polycarbonate that could better withstand the impact of hail and high winds. It didn’t take long for my buddies to realize that the unbreakable material, which afforded plenty of give, created a situation that was primed for adolescent hi-jinks.
Lalo, Freddie, and Carlos started pushing against the windows and knocking down poorly constructed snowmen two-by-two. One snowman with an old sock for a hat hit the floor so hard that it broke apart and essentially melted all over the floor. My friends laughed maniacally as they continued, but when they noticed that I was not participating, their laughter stopped. They spurred me to join in but when I refused, their coaxing turned into juvenile threats of social abandonment. They told me that I would be walking home alone and potentially spending the rest of my eight-grade school year as an outcast if I didn’t partake in the vandalism. As a teenager in good social standing, I couldn’t let that happen, so I dropped the basketball I was holding and suddenly lunged toward the nearest window with both arms fully extended. An immense sound of breaking glass followed and when my limbs retreated from the shattered glass in instant pain, there was a sizable shard lodged inside my left forearm. Obviously, I had struck one of the windows that had not been replaced with the flexible material but there was no time to discuss it. When you commit property damage as a kid, there’s only time to do one thing, and that’s run like hell.
I was bleeding like a stuck pig as we darted through the back alleys, and I felt myself growing weaker with every stride. My buddies took notice and suggested that we barge into the nearest residence and demand immediate medical attention. The first few homes we visited were empty, and I began to panic. By the time we reached the fourth house, I was starting to go into shock, but luckily there was a woman there that sprang into action and drove me to the hospital. Her name was Lydia and she comforted me on the entire ride over. When we arrived at the emergency room, she took complete control of the situation, as if I was her own child. Because of her, I was laid up on an examination table within twenty minutes, ready to be patched up. By the time my mother got there, I had ten sutures in my left forearm. Lydia was gone and I told my mom what happened. On the drive home she lectured me about the dangers of peer pressure and when she finished, I promised her that I would never again allow the sway of others to dictate my actions.
When I stepped into the Rodger Lodger motel room, I noticed Claudia’s tacky gown resting on the even tackier bedding of the lumpy queen-sized bed. She came out of the restroom wearing only a towel and before I knew it, we were off like a quinceañera prom dress. It began with passionate kissing before she abruptly shoved me onto the bed and started undressing me. I was barely able to pull the three-pack of condoms out of my back pocket before my pants went flying across the room. She got on top of me and commenced to grind her naughty bits against mine, causing the rickety bed to rock back and forth against the wood-paneled wall. At one point, we were rocking so hard that the picture frame hanging overhead fell from its perch and landed right on my head. The glass shattered on impact and a thick shard sliced my forehead, leaving a one-inch gash. I could sense the blood starting to pool inside the cut and when I sat up, I felt it wick down the contours of my panicked face. I imagined myself looking like Sissy Spacek at the end of Carrie and I laid back down, nearly fainting. The sight of blood didn’t seem to bother Claudia and she appeared utterly undaunted by the sudden trauma as she calmly wet a hand towel and placed it over my wound. She got on the phone to request medical assistance but she didn’t dial 9-1-1; she called her EMT cousin Fernie, who said he’d be ther in fifteen minutes.
“Ever had stitches before?” she asked and I told her the same boring story I told you about snowman-tipping-gone-wrong at Grover Elementary. After I almost put her to sleep, she pointed to a large scar on her abdomen and told me that she too had been scarred by the consequences of peer pressure. She was a bit of a chola so initially I thought she might’ve been stabbed in the gut in a gang initiation or something, but it turned out that she had been a single mother for the last five years of a child that she had conceived when her then-boyfriend pressured her to have sex for the first time on the night of her quinceañera. It was a C-section scar on her tummy, and it suddenly made sense to me why her maternal instincts had been so beautifully honed during my moment of crisis.
Claudia kept replacing bloody towels with new ones and she continued to keep me at ease while we waited for her cousin to arrive. When Fernie finally showed up, he hung six stitches on my forehead. Claudia held my hand during the entire ordeal, even after Fernie had bandaged me up and been well on his way. I fell asleep in her loving arms, and when we woke up the next morning, I gave her my virginity. They say the first time can be so awful (and it was) that it will leave a lasting impression on the rest of your life, but I didn’t care. I was already scarred for life.