My First Girlfriend - Part 1

I had a terrible, super important crush on a girl named Yadia in 8^th grade.  She was tall and gawky in an endearing way with frizzy hair, a mouth full of braces and considered one of the smartest girls in the class.  She was just my type, a total dreamboat.  Besides my own personal short comings (man-boobs, Spanish afro, etc) I somehow snookered my way into her awful circle of friends, which I put up with just to be closer to the love of my life.  At some point in time, she asked me to the 8^th grade prom (yes we had a prom, and yes I realize the ridiculousness in asking 8^th graders to dress up and dance like adults, but this was Jersey and it was awesome).  Despite my initial hesitation (read: I turned into Helen Keller when she asked), I agreed and so began my journey to my first girlfriend and eventually my first kiss, but not to Yadia.

            Preparations for prom, despite being a relatively newbie to the whole silliness, went rather well.  I was able to utilize one of my dad’s old suits, an ugly 3-button boxy number that any cadaver would have protested against wearing in a coffin. Despite the suit being 2 sizes too big, it was the best I could do given limited financial resources.  The biggest problem presented itself when the decisions were being made on transportation to the prom.  Yadia’s friends, the lousy lot of them, had decided that in order to keep in tact the verisimilitude of such an important night, they would rent a limo for the festivities.  Yadia presented me with this information and I’m not sure how I hid the flop sweat that surely engulfed me.  How would I ever pay for such a thing? I was struggling to pay the 35 cent lunches in the café and now I’m supposed to pay for a limo? How could I ever ask my parents, immigrants who never graduated high school who’s idea of prom was “invite your friends over and we’ll play some salsa”, for money to pay for a limo?!  Yadia wasn’t pleased but I gave her a definitive NO on the limo and so we did the next best thing, we asked two of our classmates if we could hitch a ride with them…in the station wagon of one of the moms.  And so our prom was set, Yadia and I would arrive in our awful, outsized clothing – playing a macabre dress up – in style, a 1983 Plymouth station wagon.  Can you FEEL the sexy?

               Prom was to be held at the dance hall within the confines of Schuezten Park.  Schuezten Park, for those uninitiated at the finer establishments of the Jersey town I grew up in, is an old German retirement home at the top of a hill occupying the larger corner real estate of 32^nd street.  It’s a large compound with one tremendous building in the center that at many times reminded me of a toothless facsimile of the hotel from “The Shining.” A large square building, its name was plastered on the front façade in huge red letters in the style of many beer labels, acting both as an announcement to the world of its presence but also as a Bat signal for old, retired Germans.