Anyone Tampering With This Machine

’Twas a billowy evening in early May, and the frecklecheek of spring was upon the land. Beset by the fires of the season I put on the dog and escorted my love to the senior prom.

Never mind that she was 20 and I was 21 — Andrea sang in the band engaged for the prom, I went along just to see what had become of the grand old institution in these days of revolution and suchlike.

I never attended a prom when I was in high school. 1 considered myself a beatnik and my main extracurricular activities were beating it down to the store for a bottle of lemon extract and a quart of 7-Up, reading William Burroughs and learning to swallow cans of nutmeg. I finally took Andy to her senior prom after I had graduated but my main memory of the event was being entertained by the running Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf squabble of the couple we doubled with. But TODAY, I reasoned, there would be some significant change in the character of the institution, because kids today are different and all that prom/game/school spirit jazz is passe!

Which shows how much I knew.

Even the entertainment had to get gussied up according to the ancient tradition, so she borrowed a hundred dollar dress from her mother, I went home and dug out that suit whose padded shoulders had outsized me when I graduated from high school in it, put some Colt .45 and a few healthy tokes of redeye under my belt, and off we went to dig the bash that should encapsulize the bittersweet memories of four irrecoverable years for a few hundred happy ’tween-age guys and gals.

The gig was held in one of San Diego’s oldest, but still swankiest hotels, the El Cortez, one of our foremost tourist landmarks, because of its famous glass elevator on the outside of the building that takes you umpteen stories up to the Starlite Room with its 75 c cokes and sumptuous view of the sun setting through the battleships in the harbor. San Diego is a military town, first and foremost, thriving on several large local bases — the downtown streets are filled with swabs on leave impassively wandering from bars to outrageously-priced skin-flicks, and year-in-and-out, the free tour of the aircraft carriers and battleships rivals the Zoo and the Guided Walking Tour of Old Town (featuring “Ramona’s Marriage Place”, where they sell Miracle Pictures of Jesus) as a tourist attraction.

It is a strongly conservative area with powerful Right Wing interests — I know a family who belong to a Minutemen cell which has a cache of arms in the East County mountains — and needless to say, very little shit from pariahs with long hair or divergent life-styles is tolerated.

That’s not to say you can’t get loose though. The El Cortez and the valleyful of highpriced hostels called Hotel Circle cater year-’round to the long loosely flowing green and ribald hi-jinx of mischeivously-liquored conventioners.

Entering the El Cortez, for instance, one of the first things we passed was a tiny room called the Monkey Bar, which as the bland bartender explained, is a kind of ante-trough where guests can waste no time in tanking up while their reservations are confirmed and their baggage carted in by colorlessly paranoiac spade bellhops. Crossing the lobby we admired the breathtaking mural depicting historic myths of local pride, like Balboa discovering the Pacific, Father Serra patting a kneeling redskin on the head and more.

Then up in a (non-glass) elevator, down what seemed like an endless intestinal maze of hallways, more elevators, finally to cross the beautiful footbridge that spans the traffic between the hotel proper and its equally vast sister building where all the Fun goes on. This is where you start seeing guards at the doors, sullenly impassive rentacops daydreaming everywhere. Up an escalator, and at long spaced last we arrived at the scene of the grand ball. In the lobby is a table where you pay a few bucks to get yourself and your honey immortalized forever with a dully tinted photo (like pre-technicolor Hollywood tones) in a gilt frame, most probably a love offering for old Mom and Dad to prop on the mantlepiece and remember you by forever, sheepishly grinning in immaculate clothes that will make you look almost as much like a Man as that uniform whose gilt frame will go next to it a year or two hence.

Next to the actual entrance to the ballroom there was a concession stand occupied by half a dozen rentacops of both sexes. I hoped to catch them giving me the bad eye as Andy and I walked by, but no, they didn’t even glance at my long hair and red eyes, and once in the ballroom I could see why — a heartening minority of the kids in attendance were subtly hip either in attire or demeanor, longhairs with enormously

splashy ties that clashed sizzlingly with the tux, escorting faintly funky chicks in multihued wraparound robes like formats from a bash in New Delhi. They were the minority of course — panning slow eyes around the vast room I saw a vaguely shifting sea of chicly sliced evening dresses and flouncy lace-and-rayon creampuffs that helped separate the kids With money from the Penneys crowd pretty fast.

The guys all had on the same white dinner jacket and black cravat, and; everyone was sitting at tables or standing stiffly in awkward little cliques making desultory conversation and quiet, consciously inane jokes. One entire wall was covered with gold cardboard stars about the size of LPs, each bearing the name of one couple registered for the event. The idea is that when, say, Herb and Estelle come wandering uncertainly in the door, they can orient themselves by shambling across the room to the far wall and pulling off their personal star to lay on the table where they’ll sit fidgeting for the better part of the next four hours.

So, we sat down at a table near the bandstand, starless, and Andy limbered up by quietly singing through her songs while I unfolded the copy of the National Close-Up I brought along for entertainment and started reading an article called “Insane Virgin Murders to ‘Have Sex with God’ ”. The band finally started playing, and a few hardy souls bravely broke the ice on the dance floor.

The Windsors are a hard, punching, top-flight cabaret band. All of them except Andy are super-straight, with very short hair and ivy league duds even when they don’t tux up, but they’re dedicated musicians with a certain concentrated

workmanlike approach that would perhaps suffer if they tried to turn hip. They all look absolutely innocuous, and any mother would love to deliver her daughter into their hesitant hands on Friday night.

Ted, the organist, is a clumsy, rather flighty fellow with big horn-rimmed glasses that don’t seem to fit him right, and one could easily imagine what near-paralysis might ensue if he suddenly found himself on the hip scene and needing or wishing to get loose at last. But just like lots of other unprepossessingly imageless folks out there in Middle America, he’s got real soul, works* constantly at his playing and at certain moments when the band is really cooking you can see him spank those keys and throw back his head laughing soundlessly in sheer ecstasy, transported.

Nothing like that, however, can be said of Ric, the band’s leader, a short plump ball of grease and ego who looks like Chris Montez and plays lead guitar and sings with an unrelenting display of “showmanship” histrionics that never reveal him to be feeling anything but an intense and constant awareness of himself out there in that heady limbo under those lights, making flashy elbow english on the guitar, just certain he’s knocking all those folks DEAD.

The Windsors are quite versatile — naturally they’ve learned everything from earspliting “acid rock” with almost-harnessed feedback to the supperclub “adult pop” of the Sergio Mendes sound and songs like “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”, which is where Andy comes in, singing from five to ten numbers a liight in her untrained but finely-ranged and wellingly emotional voice. She digs Barbra Streisand a,nd Judy Garland and sings torch songs with a sincerity and feelingful clarity that gets through to the kids even though they seem restless for more funk. Although they should probably be grateful for any amount of rock at all — last year this same school’s senior class was treated to a buoyant evening of real dance music from the Big Band Era (no, I don’t mean Blood, Sweat and Tears), with a stageful of balding fortyish cats bouncing out every rug-cutter from the Cha Cha to the Twist.

Which brings up an inescapable fact about the whole institution of the high-school prom: like most other “wholesome”, battened-down forms of Fun prepared for American youth, the whole thrust of it is meant to please and satisfy people who haven’t sweated grades and acne for a decade or more. The entire set up, from the formal attire to inability to teach math or grammar or even Citizenship to the kids who constantly shock and befuddle them. Anybody who ever spent much time around a high-school knows the rage and suffocation that lays behind the Reader’s Digest myths. Schools are not run to awaken kids but to produce technicians and obedient citizens and to try to ease the desperate fear which middle-class America bears of its own children.

The idea is to present a pastoral front which can be covered in the local press without threatening anybody’s mental health, reassuring all those Moms and Pops who will never see the bright student suspended for corrupting his peers with “dirty books” by D.H. Lawrence, the vain little fish-eyed vice principals and deans who handle disciplinary problems with

arbitrary prejudice against youngsters whose errant individualism offends their sensibilities, all the harried misfit teachers doing their best grade after grade to obliterate every youthful manifestation of creativity or passion because their own training never taught them how to handle either one.

And of course proms are one of the pacification program’s prime myths. Looking around that room it was fairly obvious that no one was having much fun. How can you get loose and dance in a flapping mass of Tricia Nixon taffeta or a tight-cumberbunned suit most likely rented and making you feel a decade displaced in baggy slacks and trim lapels? The band would be working fiercely, pushing the rhythms higher and faster and hitting all those Creedence/Stax funk beats that are such a groove to dance to, and there on the floor a bored, stiff-looking sea of people bobbed awkwardly in shiny deluxe corsets. It never really filled up until the last number, a rocketing medley featuring “Land of a Thousand Dances” and Hendrix “Fire” and several other high-velocity crowd pleasers.

A large crowd gathered clapping hands around an open circle in the middle where couples or single showoffs took turns soloing ala the teen dancetime TV shows. This was the only time in the evening that sizeable numbers of people seemed to be trying to get loose, and even here that strain in the grins and furious clapping and overloud laughter was saddeningly apparent.

For the rest of the evening, the majority of the celebrants sat politely around the tables, chatting subduedly. I racked my brain trying to figure out how they could possibly be pacifying themselves. Reds? Narcolepsy? Charades? Granted a few the choice of bands, is geared to the fantasies and expectation of parents, professional chaperones and hospitality hostess types. You can’t really include teachers and scholastic administrators in there because most of them are wise, in their ulcers and their sense of beaten-down resignation to their people seemed to be squeezing some excitement out of the evening, mainly by staying on the dance floor, but the vast majority reminded me of extras in Grand Hotel.

Finally, I just got up and ambled over to a tableful of pensive strangers and said: “Hi, my name’s Lester Bangs and I’m. covering this prom for CREEM magazine and I just wanted to get some opinions — whataya think of it so far?”

One bustly little blonde with lust-pouting lips and a giant corsage ventured that it was “nice . .. the atmosphere . .. and the band is really outasite.” Her date, nervously popping a cigarette in and out of his mouth and snapping the puffs back Cagney-style, eyed me with sullen suspicion and said: “We like it, man.” Somebody else at the table reflected that it was “quiet but relaxing” and finally I broke down and said: “Do you mean to tell me that anybody is actually having fun in this place?”

I didn’t say it snidely, just out of utter perplexity, but it drew so much hostility that I moved on to another table where a 17 year old couple, who already looked sedate and colorless enough to pass for a junior accountant and his cheerily fawning Pillsbury wife, admitted that they were bored stiff.

“But what if, you know, you have children someday and they ask you about your senior prom and you didn’t go?”

I moved back to my table, stupefied. Thinking about all the current media flap over what a restless, challenging, unconventional generation of Under-30’s we supposedly are, and how little difference there was between this crowd of bland zombies and the ones I went to high school with five years ago.

Suddenly, I had had all I could stand. Queasy and scowling, I moved past the stunned rentacop at the door, down to the Monkey Bar to fortify my gut with a few good snorts of class bourbon. When I got back, the band was in the middle of a thump-perfect rendition of that scintillating drum solo from “In-A-Gadda-da-Vida”. All the tuxes and formal? had stopped dancing and were staring with rapt glazed eyes at the bandstand.

And the only'thing they could be glazed from was hunger, because they weren’t even serving tuna sandwiches and punch at this one. Mac down at Jack In the Box later, kids, it’ll keep you out of trouble on your way to the afterprom.

The Windsors went into the part where the guitar scrapes the strings in screaming elephant imitation, and I ducked out another door in search of the head. The one I found was locked — apparently only one official bathroom designated for this function. I finally found it.

On the way back, I cut through the kitchen, passing two ice machines with signs on them that said: “Anyone caught tampering with these machines will have to answer to the head engineer/”