Glory days... well according to some guy named Bruce, they'll pass you by... but way back at the end of the Reagan Era, a dark time for all mind you, our hero here was a hot shit basketball player, a high school hero of sorts who still sadly needed a date for the prom. Being a serious sort when it came to hoops i usually swore off having a girlfriend during the season, a lesson i had learned as a sophomore in high school when having been placed into the starting line-up of the varsity hoops team had given my social standing a boost on the west side of Cleveland. I was a sophomore who was seeing a senior, and sometimes a junior, while sorta dating a freshman. As one can see my time was most definitely divided and this whole mess caused no minor bit of distraction for me. Call it a learning curve as i was suddenly a well known kid in my school and since my play had backed up the hype i soon had no shortage of "dating" opportunities while at the same time having no shortage of upper classmen who thought about kicking my ass.
Fast forward a couple years and after leading my team to the Final Four and losing to the eventual state champ in the state semi-final game it dawned on me that i would soon graduate and i guess go off to college but that in the meantime it would be cool to maybe have a girlfriend. High school in a relatively white, working class burb of Cleveland wasn't as far from a John Hughes flick as one might think. There were cliques and groups and what not, in short fucking high school. I happened to run with a pack of friends who were basically Ferris Buehler, we could drift in and out of different scenes because we were fun and didn't really give a shit and didn't take any of these cliques or scenes all that seriously, we mainly just wanted to have a good time.
So while nursing my wounds after coming up a game short of a state title i decided it would be a good idea to find a prom date, i had a girl in mind and in the realm of high school cliques it could be said she ran with the "In-Crowd" or the Socials (if one digs The Outsiders), a bit on the fringes shall we say? not one of the girls at the top of the ladder but one of the pack. We had been talking a bit and so while we were milling about some outdoor mall that weekend i just sorta blurted it out and she immediately said yes. That being sorted i moved to the next order of business which was getting my end in. All class this young lad let me tell you. A couple weeks later i would do just that thus deflowering my young lady friend who came from a long line of women who had married the first guy they slept with. I did not know this at the time but would soon learn about this phenomena which of course would send me running the other way... when the truth is she should have been sprinting the other way from our favorite young scumbag.
A shrink might say that in my youth i was a bit of a manipulative bastard... or maybe worse... and one bit of knowledge that i gleaned from this situation was that this girl would be fixated on "her first." The 17yr old Kono very much thought with his dick, in fact that might have been the only thoughts he had... (as i switch to the third person to try and distance myself from myself which is technically impossible i believe but it's always brutal when one has to sit back and honestly assess what a fucking dickhead i once was... once again a point which might still be debated as if i've actually gotten any better in that department.) And so on the night of my graduation party when my lovely girlfriend had to leave early because she felt ill (she'd be diagnosed with mono shortly after, lucky for me i was too busy chasing other girls that night to ever kiss her) and i ended the evening in the bed of one of her friends. Actually said friend and i were about to fuck in my basement when Pops called down the steps and told me to get the girl home and so my man Steve-O drove us to her place, i didn't have a license and was rather drunk anyway, who then patiently waited outside, talk about a great friend, while i snuck into this girl's place, had sex while her mom slept a few rooms over, then snuck out.
Of course as i was dressing i looked down at my new friend who was casually lying there naked and smiling at me and explained that no one could find out about this, she of course agreed saying she'd be in just as much shit as i would and so it seemed we had an agreement. The funny thing was as we were fumbling out of our clothes she was fairly taunting me, saying things like, oh the great and wonderful Kono! when you gonna get to it, words dripping with sarcasm... as i got dressed she sighed, pulled me down for a kiss and whispered, we should do this again, that was fun. I smiled and said cool, we just gotta keep it a secret. Yup.
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That secret lasted roughly until my special friend woke up the next morning. I could only surmise that the first thing she did was to call a few of her friends and relay every little detail of her "conquest". What happened next? well roughly the same thing that happens when lightening strikes one of those dry forests of northern California, the story spread fast, in fact it took less that 48 hours from the time i pulled on my shorts to the time i was standing at my girlfriends front door while she refused to let me in and then smiled and asked me how my night went after she left the party. I smiled and shrugged and said it was okay before she broke down, spewed out some choice words, then shut the door in my face. Meanwhile the word on the street was that i had seduced this other girl when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Now i'm not saying i was seduced and i'm not pretending that i wasn't a willing participant in the act but let's just state that it actually wasn't my idea. Of course it should be stated that the girl i really wanted to hook up with had left some time earlier but Jackie, as we'll call her, was a suitable fill-in. Attractive, a bit wild, we'd casually flirted a few times but that was it. Now word was that the evil and malicious Kono was a cheating bastard while his poor girlfriend was home sick. Granted that was a pretty accurate description but that fact was there were two participants and one somehow seemed to be absolved of all sins. Me on the other hand? I was guilty of things i didn't even do.
Thus began a rather on again off again foray with my jilted girlfriend, Sharon. Remarkably her and Jackie buried their hatchet quite quickly while i was viewed as a pariah. Word was that Jackie apologized profusely while stating what a bastard i was and how she was drunk and let her guard down. She somehow forgot to mention how she invited me up to her room, fairly pleading with me to come up and fuck her, how before i could even get my shorts off she had stripped naked and was laying in bed beckoning me on, all that was redacted and it was our protagonist here who was guilty of everything. Granted i was guilty but i wasn't the dickhead i was being made out to be. Luckily after a week or so of quality acting i was back in Sharon's good graces which meant i would be getting laid on the steady until i left for school... which was really all i was worried about.
Once i boarded that plane and headed west it didn't take long for me to stray again and for things to come apart quite quickly. We broke up, got back together over winter break, broke up again for good when i came home for spring break (the only two times i came home all year) and then started a rather interesting pattern of hooking up now and then when we both happened to be in town. Granted we didn't have much in common though i'm not sure we ever did, me being the alterna-boy who went from his hardcore shaved head phase into his flowered shirt wearing Smiths/New Order phase. I was one of the few high school males on the West Side of Cleveland who parted his hair (gasp!) on the side and had heard the word faggot thrown my way more than a few times because i wasn't blaring Van Halen and driving a muscle car. Hell Sharon drove a bitchin' Camaro and i didn't even bother to get a license until i had to because my parents wanted me to have an ID when i went 2000 some miles away to school.
So while the dust had barely settled from Cherry's car pulling away my thoughts naturally turned to who to call next, and naturally good old Sharon came to mind. I knew i had an in and that she would look at this as another opportunity to possibly re-kindle our old thing. She was a year behind me in school and since we'd both graduated there had been a few nights spent in motels, a visit by me to her university for a weekend. Lying in bed i could still smell Cherry's shampoo on my pillows. It was a depressing thought to know she was gone for good but knowing there was nothing i could do i turned the page to start a new chapter... later that day i picked up the phone, "Hey Sharon how's it going..." (to be cont.)
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