I thought I would share a personal story from the 1980's. That's me and my girlfriend, Shannon, from prom in the picture above. My hair is very 80's but that's not the story......its even worse.
My
senior year was ……interesting. That was the year I dated Shannon (name
NOT changed to protect the innocent….since she wasn’t). It all started out as you’d expect, nice guy
asks out girl way out of his league and she says yes, guy floats around
on a cloud for 4 months then all hell breaks loose and he wonders who
he’s dating. I’ll quickly skip past the first 4 months (which is how it
felt at the time) and get right to the day I should have seen as the
blinding spotlight of Yikes.
I
started my senior year as a very skinny, slightly geeky 16 year old (I
turned 17 two months into the school year) and I had a car (an early
birthday/graduation/Christmas gift that summer). Shannon was a junior
and not yet 16 (important info for later). We would meet each day at
lunch and talk about what we wanted to do after school (information
pertaining to said activities and discussions has been omitted for
purposes of maintaining a Family-friendly rating). Shannon didn’t have a
6th period class as she had already been kicked out of it (for
ditching) and would have to wait around an hour after her final class
for me to get out before we could leave each day.
Well
on this one particular day, she asked me if I could give her my car
keys so she could wait in my car instead of having to walk around the
whole hour. (play ominous, foreboding music here). And since I’m an idiot
and can’t see how that might go bad I said “sure” and handed over my car
keys. The end of the school day comes and I head out to the parking lot
and “Hey….my car’s not here! Hmmmm, that’s odd. Shannon doesn’t have a
license yet and my car is a stick shift. She can’t possibly know how to
drive a stick yet. I think I’ll wait a few minutes and HOPE she shows
up soon with my car." (play Jeopardy music here) A half an hour goes by
and the parking lot is now empty except for me. So I head over to the
pay phone (back when they still existed) and I call her house….and her
Mom answers the phone!!! “Hi, umm …its…ahhh…. Steven…..is…is Shannon
there?” NO, SHE ISN’T!!!! WHERE ARE YOU???? “I’m…uhhh…I’m still at
school” DON’T MOVE, WE’LL BE RIGHT THERE!!!!! The next 15 minutes I
thought were the longest of my entire life….until they arrived (in my
car) and drove me the next 15 minutes back to their house. I spent the
whole drive in the backseat of my own car being yelled at by my
girlfriend’s parents the whole way. It seems that in the intervening
time since giving Shannon my keys, several things happened and most of
them were not good.
Shannon
decided to skip the rest of her classes after lunch and head home.
Another girl was her accomplice in this and since they now had access to
a car, they were off. When they arrived at Shannon’s house they quickly
discovered that her Mom was home for the day, so they jumped back into
the car and decided to head to the beach. Along the way, the two
unlicensed 15 year olds ran a stop sign……in front of a Police officer!!
The flashing lights go on, the girls stop…Oh wait…No, they didn’t!!! They
floor it and try to run. About 3 blocks into the chase, one of them gets
the bright idea to pull into a driveway and hope that will confuse the
cop who's only 30 feet behind them. Turns out the drive way they pulled
into had a car already parked in it. To this day I’m amazed that the
front bumper on a 1975 Ford Mustang II can do that much damage to
another car and not sustain a single mark on it. The 1958 Chevy Bel Air
parked in the driveway was knocked completely off the jack stands it was
on and the front end was about 12 inches shorter than normal. Again, my
crappy Mustang II sustained not even a scratch. There wasn’t even paint
transfer.
Well
you can imagine the next hour or so as the police called her Mom and
they take reports and paperwork is filled out and names and numbers are
exchanged. Shannon’s parents managed to talk the police into releasing
the car to them and they took her home, where she promptly ran away. So,
I’m now sitting in her parent’s kitchen being read the riot act and
threatened that if I don’t go find her and return her, they will file a
police report stating that I’m corrupting their daughter. I try to
explain what happened and how I had no part in any of what occurred but
they’re mad and not throwing things at me so I agree to be an unpaid
amateur bounty hunter.
I
head back home in my impervious, classic-car-destroying Ford heap and
there she sits, on my front porch, looking pitiful. We talk about what
happened for an hour and I convince her to go home (mostly so I don’t
get in any trouble). When we arrive at her house, her parents tell me
that she’s now grounded for the next month and I should just forget
about seeing her anymore (like that ever stopped teenagers). The next
few weeks were filled with calls from insurance companies and threats of
lawsuits and my Mom had to threaten to have the car declared as
stolen…Twice!! Once by Shannon and once by her parents. Eventually we
get the whole matter resolved with the damage being paid by her parents.
The
final chapter on this story is that in the month that she was grounded
and I wasn’t allowed to see her, she snuck out several times and went to
dance clubs in Hollywood where she met some college guy and cheated on
me with him. Her parents caught her with him and they were doing drugs
together. I only know this because her Mom actually called me and
apologized because the whole time we were going out, they were convinced
I was giving her drugs. During the argument with her parents, Shannon
actually said to them that I was too nice of a guy to do drugs. To this
day I’ve never done ANY drugs, not once (play some Adam Ant - Goody Two
Shoes here).
The
part that still bugs me is that she never gave me back any of the
records I let her borrow. Wham’s first album. The Pet Shop Boys, Please.
Real Life. Camouflage. I’ve replaced all of them over the years on cd
but those were all original vinyl copies. If I could have a spot in a time machine, I would get those records back. I wouldn’t
change going out with her. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be able to tell
that story forever. But What was I thinking?
