Prom Night

Amelie and I went to the senior prom with two band geek fairies: Billy Taylor and Warren Sells. It was something that we dreamed up during marching band practice.
         Billy was a dapper natural blond with a mass of thick wavy hair cut short on the sides and longer on top -- sort of mini 80’s pompadour. He had a smile that we all loved -- the kind you’d draw or wish for -- perfect mouth shape and dimples. Warren was a lanky band geek who liked to wear skinny ties and eyeliner. He had a totally eighties Flock-of-Seagulls-light haircut. He was in marching band, pep band, jazz band, and jazz choir.  Amelie was a big-boned Chicana with extra large breasts that she hid under over-sized punk band t-shirts; her black hair was shaved at the sides and longer on top. I was the petite one with the boyish body, and I wore my hair short and spiky, hard, shiny, and in held in place by pink, Dep hair gel and aqua net.
         “Wouldn’t it be funny if Billy and I took you and Amelie to the prom?” Warren asked one day, while his dad, Mr. Sells, our band teacher was busy between songs.
         We were all holding our instruments: Warren his trombone, Billy and Amelie their saxophones, and me my flute.
         “Billy could take Amelie, and I’ll take you,” he said making us all laugh at the image of the four of us together -- the image that we saw he was concocting in his head. Billy was about three inches shorter than Amelie who was tall and decidedly much more masculine than girls her age. I was barely five feet tall, had darker skin than Amelie, and way darker than Warren’s.
         I knew what he was going for. No one would expect the two of them to take girls to the prom. To take us would really fuck with everyone’s head. Warren did actually show an interest in women, dated them too, but most people just saw what they wanted to see -- a fairy in eyeliner with a trombone. Billy didn’t express an interest in anyone. It was easier that way. We all knew what he was, and though we never asked, everyone close to him knew that he knew too. But people liked Billy anyway. He was always smiling, and he had a disarming smile and kindness that could win over anyone, and that wasn’t an act at all. While there were certain things that Billy knew you didn’t flaunt that you didn’t test, Warren had a different approach: why not put on a show? Why not liven up their rented- Elk’s Lodge, helium balloon, pastel color fun?
         So we went, and I wore a red taffeta, 1950’s, cocktail dress that my my mom happened to have in her closet, and Amelie wore a black taffeta prom style dress with big puffy 80’s sleeves that my mom spent several days making for her from a Simplicity pattern. We knew that all the other girls would be wearing Easter colors: lavender, baby blue, pink, or metallic monstrosities in emerald blue or green.

         Amelie, Billy, Warren, and I had a rather wholesome time for two couples whose goal for the night was to shock all the preppy, popular kids, all the football players, homecoming princesses, cheerleaders, wrestlers, cowboys, and the couple made up of a junior girl and a sophomore boy, her a cheerleader, him a football star, the ones caught in the act of oral copulation in her car in the school parking lot one morning, her head bobbing up and down in his lap. And while there was a lot of talk about renting hotel rooms and partying after the big dance amongst the popular kids, Amelie, Billy, Warren, and I went straight home from the Elk’s Lodge which the prom committee had attempted to decorate in way that made the Elk’s Lodge look less like there were animal heads on the walls and more like prom, using school colored helium balloons, like every committee before them.

         The dance itself wasn’t even that memorable; we danced, fast dances, and slow dances. Amelie danced with Billy her hand resting on his shoulders, and me straining to Warren’s, and we switched partners too, often dancing all together in a clump when they played one of our favorite new wave hits. It was what happened before the dance that I remember most.

         Maybe because it was the first time that Billy took a girl to a dance, I’ll never really know, but his parents, who were not very well off at all, must have spent the whole afternoon cooking a Chinese food dinner that they served to us on a table moved into the living room. And the table had been set with a table cloth, and there were candles, and menus written by hand, and Billy’s younger brother waited on us, refreshing our drink glasses, and bringing each course separately, one dish at a time. We ate by candle light, in awe of how we each looked dressed up, and how good we felt; we didn’t care about dancing, or shocking people, or prom.

Fashion Farce

MCG and family, Christmas 1984

It was hard work being an anti-establishment rebel, and all that rebelling against trendy clothes somehow made us the worst offenders when it came to adhering to a uniform. It took a lot of time and energy to find what we were looking for, for what was required, the right clothes and in the right size at thrift-stores, but being anti-establishment made shopping at thrift stores and army surplus stores cool and necessary which was convenient because money was always tight. Amelie, Sammie, and I actually got pretty creative with thrift-store apparel, but it took dedication and luck. They may have been affordable for those of us living under the poverty level, but thrift stores in the 1980's were over populated by puce colored polyester shift dresses and slacks, and skimpy on anything black, except slips, which were a find when they fit in the bust. Finding the right clothes to complete our look, especially in Tuolumne, was hard, but finding the right shoes was even harder.

Amelie, Sammie, and I wore high top Converse because that's what Clash loving, fist pumping, alienated, punk rock kids wore -- but I hated them. I had a couple of different pairs, but the most vivid pair was a light blue pair, not sky blue, and not navy blue which would have been a lot better. The light blue pair was on sale. I needed shoes; I could afford them, the last pair in my size. Size six shoes sold out quickly because stores don't stock as many as they do the sevens and eights. When I laced them and tied them tight, the light blue Converse pulled inward in a strange way, giving my foot a clownish look -- wide in the toe and narrow in the middle. They looked okay with baggy shorts but terrible with leggings, skirts, and dresses. I guess I thought they were supposed to look good with any outfit; they looked good on Amelie. She wore them with skirts over long johns and a different punk band t-shirt for nearly every day of the week: the Clash, Dead Kennedys, MDC, Minor Threat, Black Flag, Subhumans. She didn't have clown feet. She had the black converse -- the black ones were slimming apparently.
         Before Converse, and before discovering Doc Martins, I remember being pretty confused about shoes. Most girls my age wore Keds, or Reeboks, and the rich Twain Harte girls were Topsiders.  I wasn't going to wear any of those shoes. But what kind of shoes was I supposed to wear? It was hard to find shoes that worked with my army surplus/thrift-store look. Until about the ninth grade, whatever I wore on my feet had been chosen by my mother whose budget barely covered the shoe strings: sturdy winter boots, tennis shoes, saltwater sandals, and rubber flip flops that cut into the webbing between the big toe and the toe next to it. Before getting the light blue Converse, my mom took me shopping and I picked out a pair of imitation leather shoes in gray. They were loafers, or maybe they were moccasins, but with a couple of studs on top near the toes and silver buckle on the side. Tough looking loafers? Punk rock moccasins?

They seemed like a good idea in the store. I stared at them a long while in the mirror. I thought they looked cute with the skirt that I was wearing, a catholic-school-girl skirt in green plaid wool. I turned this way and that and lifted the toe of my right foot to get a better angle. I like the way the studs on the toe caught the light, and they were the only pair of shoes that I like even a little bit in the whole store. All the others my size looked either too cheap or too trendy, so I nodded to my mom that I’d take this pair. She said that she thought they were cute, a bad sign that I neglected to notice.

         When I got those shoes home and put them on and looked in my own mirror without my mom hovering around impatiently, and without the bright lights in the store, I realized that I couldn't wear them. They were ugly. A dead, ugly gray with a couple of tacky studs and a buckle to cheer them up. And not cool dead, ugly old-lady dead, and not with a cool Wicked Witch of West buckle but a useful buckle, one that actually tightened the shoe to the foot. I didn't want to wear them, but I knew that I was stuck with them, that my mom would flip if I told her that I didn't like them after all. And it was getting too cold for my worn out black, canvas, China doll, Mary Janes.  I'd have to either wear the ugly, dead, gray, old-lady studded moccasins and hope nobody noticed them, or I'd have to scuff them up a bit and try to pretend I thought they were cool.

         I didn’t understand why it was so hard to find shoes that I could afford, shoes that were cool, shoes that were feminine, but shoes that were tough too, and shoes that were as distinctive as my new look? I needed shoes that looked good with my frilly Mexican-looking skirts and my skater shorts. I had a white skirt with green and red rick-rack, Mexican flag colors, even though I didn't realize it at the time, or my favorite a black skirt with lace between each ruffled panel. I wore it with my favorite Clash t-shirt, and black, stiff-soled, thrift-store granny shoes. Those shoes were my favorite, and I wore them nearly everyday until they practically disintegrated on my foot after not being worn for the fifteen or twenty years they sat in someone's closet before winding up at the Red Church thrift-store. I also needed shoes that looked good with my paisley skater shorts or boys 501 jeans. I somehow thought that there was just one pair of magical, cool, feminine, tough-looking shoes that could do all that.

Punk Rock Mexicana

Proving there wasn't just one white way down the middle of the road.
Props to Nathan Stephens and Jason Meigs for knowing that so early on.

         My angst about how I looked and the world really became clear to me on Saturday, May 28th, 1984 – the day I saw The Clash at the US festival in San Bernadino, California.  Before that day, everyone in Tuolumne made it clear that I didn't look like everyone else, and after that day, I began working really hard not to. But only thirteen years old, and already a Clash fan, I naively showed up to the US festival, my hair still feathered, wearing red terry-cloth shorts, with a draw string bow that cinched up each side, and some strappy-leather hippy-looking flip flops that had belonged to my mom. They were the first shoes of my mom’s that I could fit into and wear. I didn’t even have a Clash shirt yet.

         It was Memorial Day weekend, and Amelie's mom, who also loved the Clash because they sang about Latin America, drove me and Amelie all the way from Tuolumne to the San Bernadino Valley in her white compact Fiat station wagon that would only start when parked on a hill. A seven hour drive took us about ten in the dry valley heat through Fresno, Visalia, Tulare, Delano and Porterville. The dry valley heat blasted into the open windows all the way there because there was no air-conditioning just a fan, the heat making us simultaneously drowsy and unable to sleep, and when we weren't able to find a hill to park the car on, Amelie and I would have to get out and push the car. Her mom would push the car with one hand on the driver side door and the other on the steering wheel, and Amelie and I would push from the back. Just when she thought we got the car going fast enough with the ignition on and the car in second gear, Amelie’s mom would jump in and pop the clutch. When we could get the car going fast enough, it would start with jerk and a sputter. It was a bit of a hassle, and at one point I worried that we might get stuck out there in the hot valley forever.

Or maybe it was that I knew somehow that going back would be different – that I’d be different. But we didn’t mind having to push the car; we were determined to get to San Bernadino before noon on Saturday. In fact we left Tuolumne after school on Friday, arriving somewhere outside of San Bernadino and Glen Helen Park at around one or two in the morning. Amelie's mom, barely able to hold her eyes open a second longer parked the car on a hill, told us to go back to sleep before letting her head drop back on the seat. And so we all slept until I woke at around seven the next morning with a full bladder to find that we were surrounded by empty rolling hills filled with dry grass and weeds – somewhere between nowhere and having our minds blown wide open by Joe Strummer and The Clash.

         While waiting in line for the turnstiles of Glen Helen Park, Amelie and I, her mom too, watched all the people around us, a lot of young people, skater types, guys with Mohawks and leather jackets, women with pink, or, blue, or green, or purple hair, some with all four colors all at once; they were older and tougher and cooler looking than we were though Amelie, who was always a bit ahead of her time, wore baggy shorts, her Combat Rock t-shirt, and Converse.  When we finally got to the front of the line, we were stopped by a young man in a vest and pimples who was charged with looking through our bags for contraband or recording equipment. Our tickets stated that cassette recorders were not permitted, but Amelie’s mom brought hers anyway, and hiding it carefully under a newspaper, a sweatshirt, and a bottle of Mylanta which she drank to calm her ulcer, she successfully smuggled it past the young man who only peeked inside her backpack without bothering to move anything around. After closing up our bags and still holding our breath, Amelie and I pushed our way through the metal turnstiles and walked straight into our adolescence.

         Before the first act, the Divynals, took the stage, Amelie’s mom made us find a designated spot near the front of the stage for us to meet since Amelie and I wanted to walk around. People were milling about finding a place to stand or sit on blankets. We saw a group of older teens sitting in a circle playing telephone, girls with big hair, thick eye-liner, and guys with different versions of the Flock of Seagulls hair. Amelie and I stood watching them while we waited our turn in line for the porta-potties. I didn’t think that real teenagers still played children’s games, and I wondered what kind of word or phrase they were passing around the circle. There were people rinsing off in the outdoor showers, women in stripped bikinis and topless men in shorts, and people in lines at booths buying cold beer, and cold water, and US festival t-shirts.  There were people smoking joints out in the open – something I had already seen a lot of, and there were people already drunk, stumbling around and lost. After our turn in the bathroom, Amelie and I went straight to the t-shirt booth to buy t-shirts, and I put mine on immediately, happy to put on something cool over the top I was wearing and my terry-cloth shorts –relieved to be wearing something that declared the new me to the world.

         Being both musicians and edgy music fans, Amelie and knew the words to most of the songs, or at least the popular ones by the bands that played that day. We sang and pogoed along to Oingo Boingo and The English Beat. We swooned when Michael Hutchins from Inxs took the stage, swinging his wild long hair over his shoulder, and Amelie swooned over Stan Ridgway from Wall of Voodoo – she always liked the weird looking guys. We studied Terri Bozio of Missing Persons, knowing that neither of us would ever show that much skin, wear plastic wrap, or have blond hair, and we sang along in earnest to just about every Flock of Seagulls and “Down Under,” and “It’s a Mistake,” by Men at Work song, but when The Clash, the band that we were really there to see, the only band that really mattered, finally, after a controversial delay, stormed the stage around midnight we were transformed.

“All right then, here we are in the capital of the decadent U S of A,” Joe Strummer growled into the microphone. And right away, after a day of bands and people watching, hair cut at weird angles, assorted scissored band t-shirts, and leather jackets in 110 degree heat, we knew we needed new clothes, attitudes, and new haircuts, fast. But there was more to it than clothes and hair; and we got that too. The Clash took the stage and called us decadent straight away then launched into London Calling, its opening guitar riff, slicing its way through the air. We knew that it was true – technology and music and twenty dollar tickets while others were starving or being disappeared in countries like Nicaragua and El Salvador by death squads, and we wanted to be punished by the barrage of loud guitars and Joe Strummer's growl then soothed by the sounds of Mick Jones’ high sweet falsetto, seduced by Paul Simonon's swagger.

The Clash’s anti-American decadence stance spoke directly to us, both Mexican, and weird, and poor, and disenfranchised. Joe Strummer even mentioned East LA – a part of LA where he had probably never been, but where I had been born. It’s like he knew Amelie and I were there and put us under his spell, two Mexican-American weirdos, waiting to receive their message, our marching orders, and so we marched, singing every word to every song, slamming our fists in the air, and tearing up when Mick Jones sang “Somebody Got Murdered” because somebody had to care.

          When the song ended, Joe Stummer railed, “You make, you buy, you die. That’s the motto of America.”

All of it got me thinking something I had not understood before – the thing that I would never say, wouldn’t be able to articulate, even then. Amelie and I were different; we stood out because our skin was brown, and we did not come from money. None of this was going to change, and people would judge us, or try to make us feel like less, ugly even, undesirable.

“You get born to buy, and I’ll tell you those people out in East LA they ain’t going to stay there forever.”

And we hadn’t. I hadn’t stayed in East LA.

“If there’s anything going to be in the future it’s going to be all parts of everything.”

But we were all over, in Tuolumne even, a fact of life in America that wasn’t going to change.

         “It’s not going to be just one white way down the middle of the road.”

         Not just one white way down the middle of the road – not just one way, not just the white way; he was right. Joe Strummer was right about that.