Dear Wendy Metzger

Dear Wendy Metzger,

I’m sorry for singing the last verse of “Stairway to Heaven” into your ear while we were slow dancing.

This was when we were in 7th grade. In Markham Place gym, getting towards the end of our first official school dance. I hadn’t danced with anyone up to the moment you approached me. I was a dork, you’ll remember. I wore flood-ready jeans and the same exact off-white baseball t-shirt with three-quarter-length navy-blue sleeves every day. (I had six of them.) And a grey Members Only jacket, much like the ones worn by my dork friends Jeff Cadman, Peter Arbour and Chris Bruno. I’d spent most of that evening standing in a tight circle with those guys, air-guitaring to “Beat It” and “White Wedding.” Thank god it was dark in that gym.

We all stole glances at Mark McCarthy making out with Suzy Lambert — right there in front of everyone, right in the middle of the floor. Mark was in our grade, but Suzy Lambert was an eighth-grader, a very pretty and developed one. Mark’s eyes were closed, but I’m sure he knew everyone was watching him. I remember wondering what he must have been thinking, how much like a champion he must have felt. It was like looking at a taller, different, cooler species of human. How must someone’s brain have worked to allow for something like that to happen?

I’m sure my friends tittered when you walked up and tapped me on the shoulder. But you seemed way more confident than any of us did. You smiled when you asked me to dance, hamming up a Sadie Hawkins-style formality. I’m sure I made some joke for my friends benefit, but I was very happy to say yes, happy to be the one walking away with a girl. I don’t know what song what song we danced to first. “Little Red Corvette”? Probably not, I doubt I could have made it through the part about “Trojans, some of them used” in that situation. Maybe “Every Breath You Take,” or “Faithfully.”

I know it was a slow song, because I was acutely aware of how close our pelvises were, and I was having a very hard time figuring how high, or low, on your back my hands should go. You talked to me, nicely — we were getting to be something of friends in Mrs. Gill’s science class-and by the end of the song, I was comfortable enough to ask you to dance again. The lights blinked on for a moment, last call, and then the gentle notes started up and the flute, as familiar to me as my own name, and I knew I was in trouble. It was “Stairway To Heaven,” the live version from The Song Remains The Same album. I was a total Zep Head at the time, regularly thrown into geekazoid spasms of ecstacy at the sound of their music. As far as I was concerned, “Stairway to Heaven” was the greatest song ever written, the single greatest piece of art ever created, the pinnacle of human cultural achievement. How would I keep my composure?

Not so well, as it turned out. I did all right at the start, holding you closer than I had before. “This is an awesome song,” I whispered. And I think you agreed. Everyone knew it. The music teacher, Mrs. Bloomberg, let us sing it in music class.

But as considerate as it was of the DJ to play it as the last song (and we’d come to learn that it was played as the last song at each and every school dance), because it was ten minutes and fifteen minutes seconds long, “Stairway To Heaven” is a terrible song to dance to. It gathers in tempo and heaviness as it goes along, and you really don’t know how to keep swaying, locked in an awkward 12-year-old embrace, through the changes. (Mark and Suzy weren’t having any difficulty, I noticed. They weren’t even swaying, really. And both Mark’s hands were on her butt.)

A little after the half-way point, when the drums had kicked in, I was fingering imaginary double-neck guitar riffs on your dress. Softly enough, I hoped, that you wouldn’t feel them. But you probably did anyway. “The piper’s calling you to join him,” Robert Plant sang, and a couple of minutes later, by the end of Jimmy Page’s solo, the song in full stomp, I was helpless. I knew I was going to sing the last verse. It wasn’t quite an uncontrollable urge. Almost. But it also had to do with holding on to what was my strongest sense of identity at that point. I was a Zeppelin fan. A rocker, even if only in my mind. I always sang along with this song. Usually in full-throat screaming, drowned out by the speakers in my room. It felt like I’d be breaking some kind of promise to myself if I stifled the words I knew by heart.

So, unlucky you, out they came. “And as we wind on down the road…” Had my voice changed yet? I don’t remember. But I’m guessing whatever adenoidal falsetto I mustered up probably didn’t sound quite as polished as Robert Plant’s golden pipes. It must have seemed very strange. Did you wonder if I was singing to you, like a serenade? Or maybe that there was something wrong with me, something wrong with most boys our age? Maybe you were impressed? That I knew all the lyrics? Or you thought how attractively uninhibited I was for singing along when the spirit struck me? That’s hard to imagine, knowing how I felt back then, and how I felt like I looked, and how much I thought about that. I could never have come off as uninhibited. You were probably just confused. I would have been if I were you. I was confused and I was me.

Jesus, thinking back, what a performance it must have been. All the way to the end. That last line is so comically melodramatic in hindsight, stretching “buying” and “stairway” into three syllable words. Sorry again. You must have been relieved when it was over.

A part of me was relieved, too. But another part of me would have stayed there dancing with you all night. Your hair smelled like shampoo.

Dave Bry’s come a long way, honest.