In our senior year, I was the only student in the school who persuaded his mother to let him have her old '53 Buick. It was big, black and had a voracious appetite for gas. Going around in it was like throwing out 10 yen coins as you were driving around Sannomiya. Now in our senior year there was a new girl in the class, I think her name was Carol, but I'm not sure. Soooo, one morning I was driving proudly up to the school. I just started going up the big hill from Gomo and, lo and behold!, there was the beautiful Carol, at the bottom of the hill, alone and apparently in deep distress.
There was a lot of competition in those days and the front runners were Steve Fleuelling among others. I was among the second tier of candidates. I remember that Carol was good friends with Bertha Fernandez, so I made a serious effort to worm my way into the good graces of Bertha so that I could eventually get to Carol. This is known as the roundabout method and perfectly suited for my, then, roundabout way of thinking. I couldn't just go up to her and say, "Let's..." or “Would you like to…” No, that would be unacceptable. What if she said: "No."? That would be an embarrassment and it would get around the whole school even before devotion was over. So I hinted to Bertha how, as a good friend of hers, she could, sort of, put in a good word for me with Carol. But we depart from the story.
Before beginning up the big hill, I stopped the car, by slamming on the brakes and screeching to a stop. I jumped out and gallantly opened the door so that Carol could climb in and be driven forth-with and in style to the bus parking which was in the courtyard at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the school buildings. Now for those of us who remember, Carol had the biggest, most attractive and luscious breasts in the whole school. So while I was concentrating on her intellect, trying to make clever conversation and showing how sincere my interest was in how she felt about Japan and her new friends, all at the same time, I lost track of time and place. (An illustration of Einstein's theory of relativity, relative to driving the girl of your fantasies up the CA hill) Time and place were quickly reconciled. Imagine my surprise as another driver, coming down the hill crashed, head on, into my mother's car. What an embarrassment! What a loss of face! I had no words to rescue myself other than curse the innocent driver of the other car. Carol didn't know what to do either. We got out of the cars. And now comes the most humiliating part. Just as we got out, the school bus was heading up the hill. Carol flagged down the bus and, how she got through the narrow opening of the door with her enormous breasts, I don't know, but she did it. All the students on the bus, from first graders who, no doubt, would need an explanation as to what was going on, were leaning out of the bus windows, pointing at me and the two forlorn heaps of twisted metal on the side of the road. The bus soon left us in the dust and in the exhaust of the diesel engine. Needless to say my "chances" with Carol came to an abrupt and ignominious end. Fleuelling stepped in and masterfully finished the job with the aplomb and the savoir faire that he was well known for. What can you do? We can't change past. Steve will have to fill us in as to what really happened when he took her to some dance or other whose name is not as important as what happened after...
