Note: I know I haven’t blogged here in forever, and this is a weird place to start again, but the following started as a short post on Tumblr, and just got a little too long for that venue, so I decided to actually post something here.
The above is a notation from my 11th grade prom date, Kiko Bukoski, in our senior yearbook from Kapa’a High School (class of ’88). I will never know exactly why he asked me to go with him – he was an extremely popular bad boy, and I was a huge nerd; his regular girlfriend was one of the cheerleaders; while they may have been broken up at the time he asked me to the prom, he was very clearly still with her by the actual event.
This is to say, I ended up being sort of his second date. Like, I was the one he drove to the event itself (in some rented lavender sports vehicle – I couldn’t make this shit up), and there is a ridiculous official “prom portrait” taken of us, but once there he was basically with her and all his friends who wanted nothing to do with me.
I have speculated that he envisioned (yes, seriously) some sort of Carrie prank for me, but didn’t have the heart to go through with it. Or maybe he’d asked me on a dare, never expecting me to say yes, because all I did in class was give him shit. (He was one of those with bigger, deeper ideas than he liked to let on, due to whatever burdens popular people imagine they have – namely, that they not be mistaken for nerds.) But I figured it’d be a good participant-observer sociological research opportunity (this is how I treated most potential social interactions), so I’d said yes when he asked me.
Or maybe (though I doubt it) he actually liked me. Who can say? All I know is that we all ended up skinny dipping in Hanalei Bay, and that, just to fuck with him, I stole his underwear from where he’d stashed it (in a canoe, I think?). I don’t remember how I got home, and I don’t think we ever kissed or anything of that nature at all. It was hilariously stupid.
(The only fun part of the night – before the skinny dipping – involved dancing by myself to a hired band’s lazy version of Louie Louie; my stoner friend Dave was in the band, and we kept looking at each other like Why the fuck are we even here?)
After the event, Kiko continued dating the aforementioned girlfriend and we proceeded as if nothing had ever happened between us. (Which it really hadn’t.) But his note in my yearbook made it seem far more salacious.
I’d still love to know what the hell he was thinking.
