Stuart Dybek - I Sailed with Magellan

“You look great,” I said, handing her the corsage.

“Thanks. I got tired of prom gowns that made me feel like a bridesmaid,” she said. “You’re looking pretty dapper yourself — perfect for being fashionably late. I mean, you don’t see many guys these days sporting the Fred Astaire look. You must be a really good dancer, huh?” She was undoing the corsage from its backing of ferns. She tilted the rearview mirror so she could watch as she pinned the flower in her hair.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Kind of a jazz singer look. I’m ready for the Blue Note.” She gave me a peck thanks on the lips that turned into a kiss, and suddenly, spontaneously, we were making out. I could feel her tongue tracing a cursive like the curlicue letters on chocolates, and the vibration of airliners coming in low for landings, and I thought my prom night would be memorable after all.

“Oh, God,” she sighed, pulling away finally, “not in front of my house.”

We made it about a half block from Laurel’s before the engine ground into a sound like corn popping and smoke huffed out from under the hood.

High heels and all, Laurel insisted on helping me push the Rambler to the curb. I raised the hood and stared into the smoke and spattering oil as if I might have some idea as to how to fix things. Either my maniacal driving had been too much for the Rambler or the carriers had been more integral than I thought.

“Usually, you’re supposed to have car trouble at the end of the evening,” Laurel said.

“Really sorry,” I apologized. “There’s a pay phone by the Dairy Queen. I’ll call us a cab.”

“Then how will we cruise around later? I thought you had this big surprise planned, that we were going to stay out till dawn — capital D .”

Laurel insisted we borrow her mother’s Olds. She also insisted that I wait outside with the Rambler. “You don’t want to meet my mother in that tux just now,” she explained, “and she doesn’t want to meet you.”

The prom was where it was always held, at the South Shore Country Club, which was nowhere near the shore, and by the time we found it in the dark the dance was in full swing, which meant that hardly anyone was left on the dance floor. The real party was going on in the parking lot. Guys had positioned their cars to form an arena lit by an inner ring of headlights. Car radios, all tuned to the same station, blared, and drunken promsters gyrated, eyes closed against the blaze of high beams, while along the perimeter, groups stood smoking and passing bottles.

Stosh and Dahl were already gone. Apparently, we’d missed the high point of the evening: Stosh’s first fistfight since freshman year. He’d gotten into it with a guy named Lusk, a wiseass on the basketball team who mostly rode the bench. The story I heard that night was that Stosh and Dahl, who looked like a model in her filmy low-cut gown, had showed up already high. Stosh had been threatening to mix up some special pre-prom cocktail at the Rexall. Dahl had stripped off her high heels and, clapping them overhead like castanets, danced barefoot in the parking lot. With the headlights blazing through her dress, it was clear that she wasn’t wearing underclothes. The other dancers opened a space for her. She was dancing alone for Stosh when Lusk drunkenly cut in and tried copping a look up her dress by doing the limbo between her legs. Dahl nailed him with one of her spiky heels. Lusk scrambled to his feet, said something to Stosh about controlling his crazy bitch, and Stosh hit him with a combination that knocked him down. Like most of the daily fistfights at St. A’s, that was the end of it. Or should have been, except that Lusk came back with his buddies, snuck up on the Merc, where Dahl was giving Stosh a blow job, and started rocking the car. Stosh put it in reverse, drove over their feet, and just kept going. Later, I found out from Stosh that he’d broken his hand on Lusk’s jaw and finished prom night in the emergency room while Dahl slept passed out in the Merc.

It was one of those nights: puke spattered on rented patent-leather shoes, guys who were buddies one second duking it out the next.

“You know what’s gross?” somebody’s date commented. “A nosebleed on a cream-colored tux.”

“That about sums it up,” Laurel said.

Before the cops came, Ken Guletta, the class valedictorian, climbed up on the hood of a car to give a speech about how our class was disgracing the tradition of St. Augustine.

“This is the only senior prom we’re ever going to have,” he shouted. “Is this how you want to leave high school? Is this how you want to remember it?”

The question hung in a momentary lapse of any sound other than the bass throb of car radios. Then the cry went up, “Pants him!” They were on Guletta before he could escape inside, dragging him twisting and pleading into the arena of headlights and tearing off his trousers.

“I can see why this place has the reputation of the Beast School,” Laurel said. A tendril of her hair had come undone. Ever since she’d seen my tails she’d wanted to dance, and we’d been swaying against each other in our own little space between cars, sipping from the steady round of bottles being passed, and from the silver flask that I’d found empty in the jacket of Uncle Lefty’s suit and filled with Bacardi. Laurel was a little drunk, calling me Freddy, and I was calling her Gin.

“Take me to the Blue Note, Freddy,” she said, and handed me the keys to her mother’s Olds.

I had a fake New York driver’s license I hoped would get me in. But I never got to test it out. It hadn’t occurred to me that seating was by reservation only. “Come back for the late show at one a.m.,” the doorman told us.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Laurel. I could see she was disappointed. “Want to get something to eat?”

“I’m too tipsy. Just drive us somewhere neat. Where’s this Baha’i I keep hearing about? It sounds like an island in the Pacific.”

Baha‘i was too far if we were going to try the Blue Note later, but there must have been dozens of places I could have taken her, and yet, with an entire city to choose from, I suddenly couldn’t think of anywhere to go. I found myself driving through Little Village. I’d meant only to turn off briefly and cruise by with a beautiful, slightly drunk girl beside me. But once back on those streets I had the impulse to show her the river, where the factories billowed veils of smoke across floodlights as if they were manufacturing fog. I wanted her to see the reflections that the furnaces scorched across oily water, the fireworks of acetylene blue splashing into red-hot sparks behind smudged foundry windows, all the incredible places where Angel and I had walked at night. In a way that I couldn’t explain to her, or to myself for that matter, it was preparation for Baha’i.

We ended up at the Fire Truck Graveyard, the car parked so that its front bumper almost touched the Cyclone fence, its headlights spraying across the battered shapes of old fire trucks. I stepped out and shook the flask. It felt as if only a couple swigs were left. Laurel’s eyes looked enormous, as if they’d grown in order to see in the dark.

“We could finish it on the seat of the hook and ladder,” I suggested.

“Are you serious? Perry, where are we?”

“I bet you never saw anything like this before.”

“I have to admit it’s a first. Is that smell the Sanitary Canal?”

“You honestly don’t think it’s kind of cool?”

“Maybe if we were here for a drug deal or to dump a body, sure. Oh my God! Is that a rat? I think I saw a rat. I’m terrified of rats.”

“C’mon,” I said, although now I was feeling jumpy, “no rats. I’ve never seen a rat. There’s probably fire engines here your parents chased as kids.”