i wish i could remember what was playing. i know there was a radio of some sort next to the beer cooler and the pile of belts and flags and Velcro. The glove compartment of the blue Honda Civic i shared with my Mom would have had an assortment of tapes — the Smiths, the Black Crowes, the Beatles, the Cure, the Sex Pistols, Ice-T, Yaz — crammed in its belly, but there’s no way i was ready to assert my tastes in that crowd. i was the baby and still in high school; they were all at least 5 years older. This was before the Red House Painters had released anything. Before Bjork’s first solo album, before Radiohead, Mazzy Star, or Low had made it to our part of Florida. Before my freshman year of college. Almost everyone i worked with had either already graduated from UF or never would. Some of them had already been junkies; some would get around to it later. Pavement was just about to happen, and Kurt Cobain was still alive. So was River Phoenix, and his family lived just outside of town. Ditto Harry Crews. Kesl’s Coney Island was still open in its original spot. i was out in the field next to the Thomas Center in late August playing football with the kitchen. Mesmerized by the restaurant and its chummy coven of employees, i had quit the cheerleading squad in favor of my job, and i was not going to have any friends my own age for a long time.

One evening, as i was ducking around in the kitchen, re-stocking clean plates and utensils, i heard a conversation that thoroughly confused me. There was a breezy waiter with a heavy French accent named Jerome who was unpopular with the kitchen. He was asking if they would make one of his tables a shrimp scampi without butter, and one of the cooks said, “You know that dish has flesh in it? We can’t make it vegan.” Yes, said Jerome. They just don’t eat dairy. Jerome walked out of the kitchen and Bill–huge Bill with his shiny bald head and long goatee and face piercings and tattoos, mumbled, “fucking hippies.” Fucking Hippies? Huh? If my new friends weren’t hippies, then what exactly were they?

i was pretty sure they weren’t punks, either. Any punks left were over at the Slice making pizza. Later i would be standing in the restaurant’s lobby, which was always packed in those days before the Outback and everything else on Archer Road, and tiny, brilliant, Kelly–our manager who was at most 5’1 but commanded a gigantic presence in her combat boots, with her pale arms covered in mystical, messy tattoos, her black hair in a short bob with a few slender braids running down to her ass dyed alternately fuschia, turquoise, and chartreuse, her face full of piercings and her huge brown eyes outlined in black kohl, (the only person i’ve ever heard of having received an A+ from John Leavey [and in his Derrida class, no less]), who read Kathy Acker and Jane Gallop for fun and had an open relationship with her husband who ran Schoolkids Records, was playing Mazzy Star’s “So Tonight That I Might See.” A sandy-haired, middle-aged Gator fan grabbed her arm and demanded, “What in the world are we listening to? This is the weirdest goddamn thing i’ve ever heard!”– and something clicked into place. i had found myself right in the middle of the last pre-Hot Topic subculture before the grand and final coup of hipsterdom. A few years later i’d be wearing tan corduroys and Beatle boots and a burnt-orange cardigan every day, but for a second, riding the thin line between Generation X and the Doom Generation, i cut my hair and watched the final vestiges of the strange dissipate into the 90’s.

As for what we were listening to that day, the Pixies are my best guess, but it may have just been Rock 104. It couldn’t have possibly been Kiss 105. i feel certain that Scott Pacer and Guy Fortham were there. Was Allison? Phil Trickey definitely was, but i’m pretty sure Chris Edmondson was not. Bill Donnell. Kevin Curtin for sure and so Curtiss Venn would have been there, too. A few girls drinking beer in lawn chairs. Maybe Jen Coats. Laurie Hall could have been. And Chris Hall, too. David and Amanda would not have been. Trey Connor and Angie Childers? Walter Horton? Tammy Campanero? i remember the kitchen, but some of the floor staff came, too. The trons, as we were called. Waitrons. A gender neutral term for waiters they’d picked up somewhere. Mostly i hold onto that day because it was the first time i caught a glimpse of exotic, gorgeous Kasia, who had just returned from a hiatus in Portugal. She walked up carrying a beer and a cigarette in a single grip, so different in her little dress and Dr. Martens, with a red and turquoise tattoo on the back of her shoulder, jet-black hair and topaz eyes, from any girl i’d ever seen, that she made my heart beat too quickly. It was, most likely, the last time i ever played football, but not because i didn’t have a good time. i was just about to catch a chronic case of seriousness that i never really recovered from. i was led to art films at the Reitz Union (it’s true–it was was possible once!), and Japanese, and Dorothy Allison, and intimacy, and Cultural Studies, and Brit Pop, and actually existing punks, and everything turned again.