The Post-Referee Love Life

Seoul, South Korea. Spring 1997

I could fill a couple posts here with some of the fun things JT and I did in late March and early April of 1997 (Eating Dog Soup, Propositions in Myoung-Dong, Fact Finding in a Room Salon, etc...). But secretly I know you all are just wishing I would fast forward to the part where JT and I unbecame friends. I know I haven't written yet about that fact, but some of you are probably expecting it solely based on my history of losing friends as documented here. Well, not so fast dear reader; I'm not prepared to recount that whole drama in one go.

And so it was that in late March and early April of 1997, JT and I were still continuing our 9-year friendship. We were hanging with Skylark on a regular basis. Her English was not getting much better (as far as I could tell), but JT was apparently falling hard for her. Truthfully, I can easily understand that happening to him. She was a real cutie. Educated, employed with a day job and Arbeit (아르바이트), but perhaps a bit naive (I'm not sure if I already wrote about the story she told me of getting duped out of her whole paycheck? Some guy stopped her in the street and asked her to deliver an envelope of cash up the the 3rd floor of an office building; he was on crutches and couldn't climb the stairs. She agreed, but he asked for some collateral from her in case she decided to make off with his cash. She handed over the envelope that contained her monthly salary in cash--the Korean paycheck. She never looked inside the guy's envelope. If she had looked she would have realized it was filled only with valueless paper. Up to the 3rd floor she climbed feeling good about herself, only to return down and find the crutched man long gone with her cash. Bummer dude.) But she was really cute and just as sweet.

Anyway, JT had a long history of easily falling in and out of love. I never took it that seriously. Even in college when he got dumped and sulked by himself in our shared room for 2 days and blared The Smiths tune "How Soon Is Now." It seemed too staged to be truly sad, and before too long he was moving on to another.

Besides, I was still trying to help him connect with Ji-Su. I never figured him for the capacity to fall in love with more than one fair Korean at a time. I would soon find out how wrong I was...