King of Her Desire

52

While the bands schmoozed for a while at their tables when the show ended, those of us heading for Elliott's after party had to crowd into these dressing rooms backstage to throw our prom clothes on. Wanda gave me that side part, too, which kept me tossing my hair out of my face all night. The whole "Fabio" effect...

And when the whole gang came back in dressed in those vintage gowns and tuxes, everybody just went nuts. Including Elliott who had been coaxed over to another table by Abra and some old TV show friends who also cracked up when they saw us.

And Elliott goes, "Okay..." Looking all suspicious.

So I strolled up to her with one of those little plastic boxes they put corsages in and said, "That prom you missed back when? Here's your chance, Mama!"

Oh God, you should've seen her eyes. She was all these things at once: confused, thrilled, scared...

And Carol winked and said, "We have a dress for you, too! Hurry!"

Elliotto looked from Carol to me...and then let Carol and Sochi drag her backstage.

And she came back wearing this really sexy, really spangly gold thing that clung to that Coke bottle body of hers perfectly. Gerri had warned us that a real Cinderella gown wouldn't go down well, so they'd found a vintage one that'll never go out of style.

And what does she say when she rejoins us?

"I don't get a fun one?"

Sigh.

But anyway, she let me pin that corsage to a little spaghetti strap without getting too scared. The onlookers applauded when I stepped back, wiped my brow, and exhaled real loud. Everybody exhaled, actually. I think they were afraid I'd run that pin through her heart or something.

And when we headed up the aisle and out to the cars, that woman whooped and clapped her hands like a little kid in a candy store. Old cars, remember? She loves old cars, and there was a whole line of them shining like new money out there.

And as soon as Espy saw her do that little happy dance, she cranked up El Tiburon on those huge speakers in back and all the cars started rocking and bouncing to that merengue beat—jaws dropped, other cars stopped...I can't even. I swear, I can't.

Photographers crawled over each other trying to get the best shots, fans looked like they were trying to climb over them--it was absolute pandemonium. We had cars that could shimmy and shake and raise up on their back wheels like friggin' Transformers. One of those suckers looked like a goddamned T-Rex when it stood up. I mean...what?!

And turned out that my girl Sochi could merengue her fine ass off, bruh. Got that bodice swaying one way and those hips swaying the other—damn she had moves.

So we put on a show out there with my people from Tucson and the Cali crew, too. We didn't need some choreographer to tell us how to do it. But you would've thought we'd been working on that shit for weeks, though. It was that lit.

The problem being that once all the other invitees and their people saw all this, they wanted to go with us, instead of to the other after parties. So we had this big old convoy of cars following ours all the way to the hotel where Ben had also outdone himself.

Dude had enlisted all these set designers and whatnot to recreate an entire high school gym with all the cheesy decorations and a huge net full of balloons ready to drop down from the ceiling at some point. I knew nothing about all that so I just gaped like everybody else.