No Pearl necklace…

By Brion Boyles

When I was a young lad in the Navy, I was engaged to a Japanese girl named Hitomi… a bargirl in my ship’s homeport of Sasebo, Japan. She had a crush on some obscure German rock guitarist and had her room completely plastered with his posters. I had never heard of him… Michael Schenker? Anyways, fast-forward … I had been at sea for about a year away from Hitomi, and my ship had dropped anchor at Pattaya, Thailand, for some well-deserved R n’R before heading home to Sasebo. On our first day in Pattaya, shipmate Chuck Fisher and I were riding in a Thai version of a jeepney… just him, me and some long-haired, blonde guy with two Thai hookers. He was dressed head-to-toe in black leather (it was at least 95 degrees F), sweating like a fountain and obviously drunk off his ass, but he looked familiar and I told Chuck so. Anyways, we got off the jeepney at a bar and spent the rest of the day carousing the streets…until we found ourselves in a live music joint around midnight. THERE, again, was the leather dude… half-passed out, at the table in front of us.
After a few beers, the bar-owner climbed onstage, grabbed the microphone and announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a surprise guest here, who has agreed to play for us! Please welcome….Mr. MICHAEL SCHENKER!”

Well, to my surprise, this clown got up and beat a guitar for a few minutes… and then fell off the stage. They brought him back to his table of hookers, and I mustered up the nerve to ask him for an autograph. I didn’t have anything to write on… nothing but my beer-soaked tab. I told him about Hitomi and how thrilled she’d be to have a personal note. He scribbled something illegible on the tab like “Tnks, Hmito!” and signed it… again, illegibly.
I stuffed it into my wallet and thought “What are the chances?!?!? Run into THIS loser guy, of all guys, and TWICE in the same day!”

I wrote and told Hitomi I had a very special gift for her… I think she was hoping for pearls or something….and when we arrived back in Sasebo a few weeks later I pulled the wrinkled, stained beer-tab out of my wallet and said, “Here’s a personal autograph…from MICHAEL SCHENKER!”
She gave me the look of Death and threw it in the trash.
Not too sure if I was lying or not, she later retrieved it… but she ended up marrying some lieutenant who gave her a diamond ring the size of an ashtray…

Postscript: Apparently, Michael Schenker was in the bands “UFO” and “The Scorpions”, as well as having his own “Michael Schenker Group”…and known as “a legendary figure in the world of rock guitar”…

I still have no idea who he is.