I can count the number of dates I had in high school on one hand. I was just too awkward and underconfident. So when somehow I got up the nerve to ask Alice on an actual Saturday night date, I was definitely nervous.
On the phone, I'd asked her if there were any movies out that she wanted to see. It seemed like the gentlemanly thing to do. She chose “Animal House,” which was new at the time.
I drove her to the movie in my brown Datsun, which smelled like a combination of bong water and one of those air fresheners that looks like an evergreen tree.
“Animal House” is kind of an awkward movie for a guy who is inexperienced with girls to sit through on a first date with a girl he hardly knows. By 1978 standards it’s a pretty raunchy comedy and not exactly a family movie. I would’ve had a lot of laughs watching it with my guy friends, but with an unfamiliar girl it just felt weird. John Belushi sitting under the grandstand eyeing cheerleaders' panties, a young guy gesturing to the cucumbers at the supermarket, telling a housewife, "Mine's bigger." I had been led to believe that girls were imbued with a kind of idyllic innocence, and was sure that Alice didn’t have these kinds of blatantly impure thoughts. And I was afraid that it all might reflect poorly on me somehow.
So I was already feeling out of my comfort zone and not too confident about the progress of the date when we left the multiplex and stepped out into the night. Other couples were holding hands, happily walking to their cars, talking freely. I was finding it difficult to think of anything to say about the movie that didn’t bring up sex in some way.
And that's when I realized that I couldn’t for the life of me remember where I'd parked the car.
I stalled for awhile, trying to keep the conversation going as I led her through the center of the parking lot, not committing to any specific direction. But it soon became implausible for me not to admit to her that I wasn’t exactly sure where the car was.
There were scores of cars that looked just like mine, a nondescript brown Datsun. We began to comb through the gargantuan parking lot, one row at a time. By now more and more couples had gotten into their cars and pulled away; apparently their dates were going quite smoothly. “Well,” I said, feeling the need to say something reassuring, “as more and more cars leave, it’ll be easier to find it!” It was dark and I was beginning to sense that this was not the self-assured, debonair male behavior she had been pining for.
It was quite some time before we found the car. There weren’t that many cars left, and, as I’d predicted, it was considerably easier to spot. So deceptively simple in fact that I couldn’t believe it had taken me this long to find it.
It was the one with the lights on.