Confession is like housecleaning - get it all out and then start over from scratch. Right? I'll give it a try.
A summary of my Senior Prom night so far:
1. I
didn’t get asked to prom by anyone
2. I
asked someone who then declined
3. Made
plans with some church kids instead
4. Rock
and roll bowling in The Big City
5. Met
up with friends to tell tales at the end of the night
By the time we all met up at the end of the night, I was
sort of worn out from hanging out with the kids who did not feel inclined to do
anything edgy. This is where my defective character starts to rear it’s ugly
head, because as much as I was willing to go along with the church dinner and
then go bowling with these kids, I was sort of hoping that they would loosen up
a little and chill out. Of course, they were who they were and I was who I was
and when I brought out the whippets and
the balloons, they decided that it was late and that they should be getting
home.
I don’t even remember where I heard about whippets. In case
you managed to get through the 90’s without working at a Starbucks, whippets
are the CO2 cartridges that you use to, for instance, charge whip cream
dispensers. You can also use them to make soda water (my grandpa used to have
one he kept in the house for mixing drinks). At that time, no one had yet
bothered to make a big deal about whippets. Someone had told me about them and
I thought they sounded like fun. In my 17 year old naivety I assumed that
because I went into a legitimate store
and purchased them, along with a plastic dispenser and a huge balloon,
that this was all legal and technically, it was all legal. Of course, no one
told us we’d be killing off huge numbers of brain cells. The straight kids were
the smart ones that night.
Whippets don’t actually seem to have any lasting effect at
all. You put a little, silver, rounded cylinder of CO2 into the plastic device,
and place the balloon around one end of the plastic device, crank it down so
that the sharp bit inside punctures the CO2 cartridge and lets the CO2 out into
the balloon. Then you take the balloon
and inhale the CO2 and fun ensues! Well, at least for the person who inhales;
the first couple of time you watch this happen, it is pretty entertaining to
watch your friend who just inhaled a disturbing amount of something that isn’t
air into their lungs turn red and fall over onto the floor laughing hysterically
at nothing whatever. After about 60 seconds, the whole thing is over and
everyone is back to normal. Then the next person takes a hit off the balloon
and it all begins again. This is what a bunch of band nerds in a very rural
small town could come up with for fun in 1989. We didn’t even have any booze!
The whippets were a lark, but after a while, it stopped
hysterical. And most of us stopped. We probably were raiding the refrigerator
for something to eat when my friend’s younger sister came home. I think she had
been at the prom, too. She was a year younger than us, and in a whole other
social circle. We were in the marching band, we were the nerds of the school
and were somewhat prideful about it. She was a cheerleader and ran around with
the popular, extroverted friends who joined student council and wrote articles
for the paper and worked on the yearbook. I don’t know exactly what she had
been doing earlier that night. All I really remember is that at some point, she
suggested that we should go toilet paper PJ’s house. I didn’t even know that
she knew PJ and when she suggested it, I was surprised. I asked her brother (my
good friend), why does she want to toilet paper his house? And he didn’t know.
I’m pretty sure he was just waiting for us all to leave to he could get lucky
with his girlfriend. He didn’t really care where we were going or what we were
doing. I got the impression that maybe she had asked PJ to go to prom also and
she was pissed off at him, or maybe they had gone out on a date and he had been
less than chivalrous, something had happened. That was enough for me to jump on
the bandwagon.
This is where I feel the blush of shame in my face, even
just writing about it. This guy, PJ, had declined my invitation to the prom,
but he had done it politely. He hadn’t ever been rude to me in any way, he just
did not like me the same way I liked him. My ego was hurt. And I was feeling
like I needed something to happen that night. I hadn’t gone through any of the
traditional rituals that most girls did on that night. Even though my own
choices were the reason for not participating in a staple of western teenage
culture, at that moment, I wanted to feel denied that right of passage. I
wanted to blame someone for my lack of dress, shoes and corsage, and PJ seemed
as good a person to take the blame as anyone. I agreed to go with her to toilet
paper his house.
Cindy and my friend’s sister and a couple of her friends all
got into a car with toilet paper, eggs and a bottle of dish detergent. I don’t
think we actually used the eggs. The toilet paper was mess enough to be sure.
We through it high up into the trees over and over again and it was actually
pretty fun, once I got the hang of it and I realized that there was sort of an
art form to getting it to look like it always looked in movies when they showed
toilet paper hanging from trees. We poured dish detergent onto the windows of
the cars in the driveway (the idea there is that you can’t tell it’s on the
window until you turn on your windshield wipers and then it takes forever to
wash it all off) and then we drove off into the night cackling maniacally, very
pleased with ourselves. I do remember thinking at one point that we should be
careful not to wake his parents, but then I thought, oh well, it’s not like
we’re destroying anything, right? We’re not spray painting anything, or
breaking anything. Everything we did could be undone, so what could be wrong?
Now as a parent I think that if I caught kids doing that to
my house, the very least I would do would be to call their parents and make
them come clean it up. If not call the police and try to charge them with
vandalism. I completely convinced myself that what we did was no big deal.
Everyone did it at some point, right? PJ would probably wake up in the morning
and have a good laugh when he looked outside and saw that his house had been
the target. He would probably be joking about it at school on Monday!
That, of course, is not how it played out. Even though I
wanted my choice to be vindicated as a normal act of childhood, when I did hear
PJ talking about what had happened in band the next week, he was not happy
about it. He was trying to figure out who had vandalized his house. He had no
idea who would have done something like that to him. He did not seem to get the
joke at all! So the part of my brain that KNEW that what I had done was wrong,
the part that couldn’t stand to live with my choices that night lead me to
impulsively confess my sin to him right there in front of several other people.
I laughed and tried to play it off as a huge joke and weren’t we all so funny!
I’ll bet it took you HOURS to clean up that mess!! Thinking back on it, I
realize now that the look I saw on his face was sheer disbelief. He saw the
reality of what happened even if I refused to acknowledge it. For the rest of
the school year, he was horrible to me. He treated me exactly the way I
deserved to be treated – like a lousy bitch who had toilet papered his house.
And I did NOT get it. I honestly did not realize how badly that must have been
for him, to realize that someone who said they were a friend, decided to defile
the place where he and his family lived simply because he did not want to go to
a dance with me.
Not many things I harbor regret for, but that is one of
them. I suppose I could track him down and apologize. Maybe someday I will, if
he would even want to speak to me again at all. Wouldn’t blame him if he
didn’t.
After we came back from our toilet papering adventure, Cindy
and I went to the local diner and ate pie. We didn’t go home to sleep until
early in the morning – it was the one night of the year that I did not have a
curfew. I think that I needed to stay up late enough that I was deliriously
tired so that I would actually sleep that night. Otherwise, I would have
rightly been robbed of a peaceful rest.
