It's Not a Date Until Someone Splits His Pants

By Rory McClannahan

I was challenged and I never back down from a challenge. Scratch that, I back down all the time. I do have lines that I won’t cross. I won’t kill anyone for you or wear rental swimming trunks, but I generally like challenges. Keeps the mind sharp.

My long-time friend Dee made the challenge. Even though she lives far away on the East Coast, we drop into each other’s lives at least once a month over text messaging. We check in with each other.

During our quick text conversation today, she had brought up the single date that we had. (Billy Crystal is wrong, you can be friends with someone of the opposite sex.) I have no memory of the date, I just remember it had happened and was pleasant. Dee had a different memory of the same event. I took her bowling, which in itself is not anything to commit to long-term memory. It was what happened while we bowled. Apparently I had said something about how I was going to get a strike then I split my pants.

I have no idea why I don’t remember this because when she told me about it I laugh out loud. I’m sure some of you are psychoanalyzing me, thinking I don’t remember because I’m suppressing an unpleasant memory. That’s not true. I don’t remember it because I have split a lot of pants. What happened next also was not anything out of the ordinary. I had an extra set of clothes in my car and just changed my pants like it was any other day.

“I was so impressed that you had another pair in your car,” Dee wrote about the incident, intimating that I was pretty calm about the whole thing.

I told her that, unfortunately, I had a long history of weird stuff like that happening to me. The challenge she threw down was that I should write about my youthful misadventures (and adventures.) I’m flattered that anyone would take the time to read my little stories, as my dad always called them, and sometimes I wonder why I even bother. Then someone comes along with a kind word of appreciation of the work I put into an essay or story, and I keep going.

Since Dee’s challenge was inspired by my woeful dating career, I will start with one of the first ones. Junior Prom.

By the time prom came around that April, I could count the actual number of dates I had gone on with one hand and still have fingers left over. One, I know, was a Sadie Hawkins dance in which a literal crazy girl asked me and, like a stupid 80s teen movie, hijinks ensued. There also was my bowling date with Dee. You know how that ended. There may have been another date, but I pretty sure there wasn’t.

In short, I was pretty inexperienced in this dating thing. I had gone to dances and asked girls onto the floor to boogie, but not much else. Remember, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. However, with it being actual fucking prom, I was nervous about spending a whole evening, and a bunch of hard-earned money, with a girl who may not even like me.

So, when I asked her out and she agreed to let me escort her to prom, I added the suggestion that perhaps we should catch a movie as sort of a pre-date the week before prom. I sort of wanted her to get a chance to know me better and me her. Plus, it kind of made it look like she was kind of my girlfriend. You know? I’d never had a girlfriend and was interested in pursuing that curriculum.

I’ve been debating whether to tell you my date’s name and even wrote a version of this using it. I went back, though, and took it out. Her story of this experience is different than mine and she has the right to either tell it or keep it to herself. So she remains nameless.

Obviously, we knew each other, she was in a class of mine maybe. Regardless, she was just a bit more than just a presence. I found her attractive. She was tall with thick, dark hair, light eyes and a charming smile. Occasionally, she had smiled at me, maybe even laughed at one of my jokes.

My mom was thrilled I had asked my date, who was the daughter of one of Mom’s high school friends. I can’t recall, but it may have been my mother who conceived of the idea to ask my date to the prom. Mom had a way of doing stuff like that. I loved my mother, but she was a schemer. There was once a time she set me up with a date when I was in Germany. That’s another story for another time, though.

Still, I had an interest in my date. She seemed nice and we did get along when we were in the same room. But I had never had a conversation of any depth with her. If she were to be my girlfriend and we were to have this “magical” prom night, I needed know her a little better.

So, I took her to a screening of “Key Largo” with Humphrey Bogart that was being shown at the high school auditorium. There may have been pizza involved either before or after the movie, I don’t remember. At the end, we were both sufficiently comfortable enough with each other to dress up, go to a fancy dinner in Santa Fe and go to a dance held in the auxiliary gym, decorated with some sort of theme, “under the sea” or something like that.

My date looked stunning. Her dress was nice and tasteful, her smile was nice, and she smelled good. I picked her up, met her parents, gave her a corsage (she gave me a boutonniere), and drove to Santa Fe for dinner. The Ore House, I think. It’s still there.

This is where things start to sound like an 80s teen comedy. I’m not sure how the subject came up, whether it was her idea or mine. It didn’t matter because we were both on board with the scheme. Between Santa Fe and Los Alamos was Ko-Ko Man Liquor. The building itself was metal with only a door and a drive-thru window. The sign was at least 60-feet high and 20 feet across, screaming Ko-Ko Man Liquor nearly all the way to Espanola in the north and Santa Fe to the south. It was just off US 285 next to a Lotaburger and gas station. In addition to any sort of booze you could possibly want at Indian Reservation prices, Ko-Ko Man had a reputation among underage drinkers in Northern New Mexico. My brother told me that if I wanted to buy a bottle, that was the place to do it.

I was nervous as I queued up to buy a bottle. We had decided on rum although I had no idea what it tasted like. When it came to pilfering alcohol from home, my father made it pretty damn simple. He had a pony keg of Lowenbrau stashed in an old fridge. It had a tap on the side and any time I wanted a beer, all I had to do was get a glass. I didn’t understand why Dad had made my access so easy, maybe because there was no way I could take it with me.

The drive-thru at Ko-Ko Man was on the back side of the building, a window with a single 60-watt light fixture above it. There were a few cars in front of me and while I was nervous, I tried to act cool. My turn came and I leaned a bit away from the light to hide my youth. In the deepest voice I could muster I said, “Fifth of rum. Bacardi. Please.” (I figured manners in such situations was the best way to go.)

“Eight-fifty,” the guy said. I handed him the exact change and he handed me a bottle in a brown paper bag, just like in the movies. I was gold! It was easy, but in my mind it was too easy. The rest of the way up to Los Alamos I drove the speed limit and looked for cops in my rearview. I can’t remember if we cracked the seal on the bottle before going into the dance, but my feeling is that we didn’t. I think we were still digesting the fact that we had acquired it.

If there are photos of that prom, they probably reside in a box in my date’s parent’s garage somewhere. There was a professional photographer there, but I couldn’t afford such extravagances. I do know that even though I was about as nervous as I have ever been in my life, I had a good time. It was the first time I slow danced with a girl. I was gold.

After the dance, my date invited one of her friends and her date up into the mountains to hang out and drink rum. It wasn’t much of a party because the bottle got knocked over and pretty much emptied itself in the bed of the little Subaru Brat I drove. It’s just as well, I wasn’t planning on drinking much to begin with because I was driving. Still, we were happy and buzzed enough that when the rainfall started, it was the perfect opportunity to head to the reservoir and park. And do anything else that came to mind.

I guess she was a good kisser. I’m not sure how good I was, this was my first serious attempt at making out and all I ever knew about that sort of thing I learned from the Fonz. It was pretty okay, and being the young man I was, I was pretty charged up. I thought she was as well, but she stopped, sitting up.

“I got something to tell you,” she said. “We can’t go together.” (I’m not sure if “going together” is still the term for teenagers deciding to be boyfriend and girlfriend. Call me quaint if you want, but that’s how we talked back then.)

“Why not?”

She kind of shrugged. “We just can’t.”

I didn’t put up any argument. I took her home and went to the carwash to wash the rum out of the bed of my little Brat. I know that doesn’t make much sense it had been raining, but I was being extra careful. Then I drove 35 miles through the mountains to home. A nice enough evening with a rejection at the end.

Looking in the rearview mirror of my time machine, I know that the date was pretty meaningless, but at the time I was pretty broken up. Everyone knows the feeling of putting yourself out there and hoping that a spark is struck that maybe turns into a fire. After a few years, you learn that failure and rejection in dating happens more than it doesn’t.

The good thing about the experience with my junior prom is that I got better at the dating thing. It just took me about 10 more years.