The Year Was 1987, Part Three

Another reason for the dramatic re-invention of my persona was falling in love for the first time, right around the age of 20. I was working as a Service Assistant (busboy) at Chi-Chi's, a Mexican restaurant chain some of you may know. As this was my second summer there, I already knew several of my co-workers, especially Melody, but there was a new waiter named Tim who was creating quite a stir in the hearts and crotches of the waitstaff. He was dating Carol, the innocent Catholic-girl hostess, but my gaydar and I knew better.

This interstational busboy-waiter-hostess triangle was made even more complicated by the fact that Doreen, another veteran waitress, had a crush on me and was in charge of dividing the waitstaff among the four dining rooms. Thus, more often than not, Tim, Melody, Doreen, and I all worked together like clockwork in the terrace. This nifty arrangement afforded me much more hang-time with Tim than Carol got, since she only stayed in the room long enough to seat the guests, who had no inkling of the food-service melodrama they were witnessing.

Since I clocked out well before the servers, I had time to go home, scrape the grease off, and change clothes before our after-hours activities: eating, drinking, and leaving exorbitant tips. Then, after Tim dropped Carol off, he would come pick me up for our roadside makeout sessions. Yes, folks: 1987 was *my* Summer of Love or, as I prefer to call it, Sex in a Subaru. I've always wondered what my poor mother thought. She would see/hear me go to work, come back five hours later, primp for an hour, leave again, come back again two hours later, wait patiently on the living-room sofa for thirty minutes, leave again, and return just before dawn. Ah, the resiliency of youth...simply rinse and repeat.

While I was truly excited about returning to Wooster to begin my junior year, I also knew that this meant things would never be the same between Tim and me. The night before I left, one of those incredible summer thunderstorms barreled through the Delaware Valley. We drove around in the rain, parked, cried, and held each other. Those four things, over and over, all night long. Even now, every time I hear one of "our" songs from that summer--"With or Without You" (U2), "A Little Bit of Heart and Soul" (T-Pau), "Didn't We Almost Have It All" (Whitney Houston)--I still remember the sound of the storm and the dampness of it all.