On Prom

For the conspicuously initialled JZ

Though it was my very first Prom, there was an inevitability to the night that rejects a chronological retelling. The night is a proud, wounded body that fights the transplantation of such a poorly chosen organ. It fights it in every cell.

Instead, rolling the night in my palm like a fat glass marble, I’ll begin in as good a place as any. How does the story end? As stories must when love’s denied: with tears and a journey. (I’m not sure there were really any tears, but certainly a number of journeys. Most went home for the summer, the first years and those second years with jobs, fellowships or the inability to escape the gravitational pull of IA will return. I left for San Francisco.)

Seen this way, it was inevitable that Dan Rosenberg would out-Atlas Atlas, carrying poet Zach Savich, who himself is a world of worlds and, because he is a bogan, a world of underworlds.
00:16

And of course at the afterparty at Kevin Gonzalez’s pad Dan would out-Atlas Dan, hoisting Dean Young and every single colour stitched onto his cowboy shirt like a flag that yells ‘Prom!’ to distant ships at sea.
03:17

The prom queen and king would, of course, be crowned and ensilvered respectively and – because it was decided democratically – no-one would understand how they had won their titles.
23:24

GA looked like the next presidential prom king of the United States but that is scarcely worth mentioning, given the number of next presidents that come through the town. Still, Georgia might well have won the title if it weren’t for the intimidation of the syphilitic genius ghost of Al Capone who haunts Alcatraz (and summers in the forest near Oz) to this day.
21:06

While syphilis ultimately reduced Capone to a gibbering moron, its neurological impact is thought to have contributed to creative leaps in the works of: Nietzsche, James Joyce, Arthur Rimbaud, Vincent Van Gogh, Gauguin, Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Tolstoy and William S Burroughs. Oscar Wilde was also suspected of ‘suffering’ the creativity-enhancing disease but this has been dismissed because, “Wilde never showed any of the warning signs of paresis—grandiosity, euphoria, or bizarre, uncharacteristic behavior.” Ha!

“Great wits are sure to madness near allied / and thin partitions do their bounds divide,” wrote John Dryden. Like athletes with illicit substances, the cruel, competitive arena of creative writing has led many of the poets at the writers’ workshop to experiment with syphilis to improve their work.

I doubt syphilis could’ve improved our impeccable rendition of the Fugees’ Killing Me Softly feat. Julia Wong, Blueberry, ACKM and GA. Alice, I doubted the freakoutability of your selection and I was wrong. I would like to publicly apologise. For what it’s worth, I had a postmonition that we would kick ass!
00:33

Rosenberg Wilkes-Booth-Lee-Oswald-Olivio spent much of the night trying to shoot me unawares, performing his patented ‘No Look / Skyhook’ photography. I tried to protect myself by keeping human shielding about me and was able to freeze most of his attacks with powers such as Eyebrow Raise, and the Glad Eye.
21:55 - 01:12

But he got me in the end, got me as he always eventually had.
01:24

The prom was hosted at CandyLand, a sweet dive on the outskirts of town. No-one told the regulars they weren’t invited. CandyLand kicked us out at one thirty. When would things get interesting? All proms have a scandal, right?
21:47

The preball, at Andy Starlings and Melissa Dickey’s abode. Adam Fell was dressed as a reporter from the Daily Awesome.
20:28

And it was the end and Zach and I had won Prom, because we had the coolest and classiest t-shirts and because we lasted longest; we were still going even after the rash deeds and misunderstandings that led to the tears that were or weren’t and the journeys in all directions.

Prom!

Prom!
Prom!
Prom!
Prom!
Prom!