High School Reunion
I graduated high school in 1980, which means here in the year 2000 that it is time for my 20th high school reunion. I really wouldn't have given that landmark event a second thought at all had I not been so pleasantly surprised by a visit from an old classmate the other night while working at the Paradise Lounge. With my head buried in my CD collection, I sensed someone standing at the dj booth door and turned to discover my last girlfriend ever from my senior year in High School, Karen Surprise-yes, her real name. Karen and I had always stayed in touch after High School, having both relocated to California after graduating, but sometime after her second marriage, her second child and our ten-year high school reunion, which we attended, we lost touch with each other. Then suddenly out of the blue, ten years down the line Karen re-appears looking incredible, has had her third child, her first child Margaux is a 12 year old punk rocker screaming all the words to "Rebel Girl" by Bikini Kill now, her husband has found success in the world of computer software, and she's flashing the largest square cut diamond ring I've ever seen. I asked her if it was new and she said, "No, but these are!" as she thrust her chest forward. "I had a tit job." This shocked me considering my first memory of Karen as the new girl in school. She was blonde, from California (in Oregonian that translates to "slut") and she had the biggest breasts in school. She embellished her already flashy entrance to School district #6 by promptly getting physical with three popular steady boyfriends of three members of our cheerleading squad. Then there were the days she wore her bra on the outside of her shirt. I was instantly captivated-she shook our world up-was chastised yet revered, hated yet worshipped, like no other girl we knew. Karen Surprise was like our very own Joan of Arc-or even dare I say it, The Jesus of School. She often took the fall for the sins of others.
Karen's parents were very mysterious, sometimes flat-out weird, always leaving and arriving from various foreign locations, sometimes her mother would go to pick up her father from the airport wearing a brown wig and glasses. I thought nothing of it. They left town frequently, leaving Karen and her brother and sister alone with a variety of odd indentured servant-like guardians that her father would take under his wing for help with his Peruvian race horse business, odd social misfits who would end up getting drunk and firing rifles into the air then puking behind their travel trailer quarters near the garage at one of the many wild parties Karen threw. I'll never forget the time when in the middle of a roaring teenage lust and kegger-fueled party the phone rang and Karen hushed everyone saying, "Be quiet, it's my mom on the phone." So everyone froze and I remembered that earlier in the week Karen had undergone an abortion, which was likely the reason her mother was calling. With a room full of drunken stifled teens giggling and threatening to explode in dead-giveaway party noise, Karen said, "Yes.yes it was okay.a little.I'm okay. Yes, mom, I went to confession. Oh he just gave me 10 hail marys and told me to stop sleeping around." Everyone just lost it. "Mom I gotta go, Johnny is blasting the stereo, Johnnnny! Bye Mom."
Our relationship began as more a friendship, we started
passing notes back and forth to each other in class, notes where we would assume characters and write really totally perverse sexual things to each other. Eventually in a sort of business-like way we decided we were boyfriend and girlfriend. My mother met her and after their visit she asked, "Donald, is Karen loose?" I of course said she wasn't but people maybe thought she was because of her large breasts. It lasted and took place over most of a summer until suddenly Karen and her whole family had to relocate to Chico, California. It wasn't until several months later that I discovered the true nature of her Father's occupation, which had a lot to do with Peru but little or nothing to do with race horses, unless of course if they were used as very unique containers for a popular South American cash crop. You could well imagine my surprise. I later confirmed this with Karen over the telephone. She was actually embarrassed by my finding out because above all else, and this was how I think Karen was the most misunderstood by others, she truly was a good girl.
A few years later when I moved to California Karen tracked me down with the help of my mom and we got to talking. She asked me if I was a fag. I said I was and she said, "I kind of thought so. Remember that first time you came to dinner at my house? Well after you left I asked my Mom what she thought of you and she said, " Karen, He's a fag!" I told her what my mom had asked me about her and we both had a good laugh and she proceeded to tell me about her current lifestyle which at that point in time would have best been described as the heavy metal groupie years. Those years culminated with Karen's first marriage to a bass player from a local Metal band called Head On. I attended that wedding at a chapel in the low rolling hills of somewhere in the south bay and was it ever so strange. The gathering attendees of the ceremony were definitely divided in two camps, nice normal family members and freaky looking Heavy Metal and Goth guests, all chains and leather and eyeliner and attitude. It seemed to be almost time for the ceremony but the bride was nowhere to be found. Members of the family were starting to get worried and I found myself wandering back and forth between the tittering and nervous and appropriately dressed family and friends group and the heavy metal, beer in paper bags, spiked accessories and clown white faces group, who had convened in the bright sun a few yards down the lane from the chapel smoking cigarettes and pot and prompting nasty responses from the normal members of the wedding party. It was really getting late and still no sign of Karen. I was about to go join the Goths for a smoke when a white car careened up the hill and stopped right before me. The door opened and a positively radiant Karen in all white leaned out of the car. I offered my hand to her to help her out of the car and said, "Where have you been, people were starting to worry," and she clenched my hand and pulled me closer and whispered, "I just had a miscarriage about two hours ago, Shhhhhh!" and we both busted up laughing. "This is the best wedding ever," I said.
That marriage lasted a couple of years and ended amicably with the two of them remaining friends. I missed her second wedding but I do know that an Elvis Impersonator married Karen and her husband Gregg, who have been married 14 years now I believe. Somehow we lost contact with each other after we attended our ten-year high school reunion together, which was really dull save for the fact that I won the grand prize of $50 dollars at the raffle after the buffet style dinner, which I accepted proudly without a bucket of pigs blood soaking me in slow motion. I don't know if anyone concerned themselves with my being gay or not but I do know I was the best-dressed guy there and a few of my female classmates hit on me. I only divulged this to one person at the reunion, the one girl who had blossomed into a flashy high-priced prostitute. She was cool.
But back to the present, Karen also told me that as well as her tit job, she has five tattoos, none of which she could comfortably show me right there on the spot and that when her duties as a mom lead her to situations where she meets other moms, like the P.T.A. and whatnot, none of the other mothers will talk to her because of her pink hair that one time or the fact that she's dressed like a prostitute and her husband reportedly looks like Jesus with long hair and a beard. She fears she alarmed her neighbors as well when she did a fun little Goth-themed photo-shoot with
Margaux in the back yard all made up with a death-like pallor and words written on her skin in a neo-crucifixion sort of set up. Karen said that one general rule her and Greg have always maintained in bringing up their children is to not really censor much of the world from them. What a novel idea. I can't wait to meet the kids again and get reacquainted with my ex-girlfriend from high school, but I told Karen I'll only go to our 20th high school reunion (and she already started trying to talk me into it) if she will help me re-enact a Columbine-style massacre in black trench coats and para-military gear when our class tours our old stomping ground. I'm a bit frightened because she'd probably be okay with that condition.