(random morning memory after a night of insomnia)
I was 27, studying at U.F. (I served in the military first) and working as a manager at a little mom-n-pop steak house called Steak & Pasta Works. Good food, but just expensive enough to attract a certain crowd with just enough money to sit down but not enough manners. That's a shitty thing to say, but it's true. It wasn't a job I enjoyed unless the cooks were kind enough to smoke me out behind the walk-in fridge and then the night would go as smooth as cool water.
Like any restaurant, especially in a college town, we went through busboys once every two weeks. It's a crap job and not something anyone does for long. At the beginning of my third semester we hired a 19 year old guy named Maury as a busser. He wasn't a real blond, but that couldn't have mattered less. He was shockingly beautiful. Not just "he's pretty to me" pretty, but honest to goodness, conversation stopping stunning. He was all the more heartbreaking to look at because you knew it wasn't going to last. Everyone hits their peak-of-pretty at different ages and you could tell that Maury was in the full bloom of his. It would be all downhill from here for him. We had a brief fling. It was silly and fun and involved smoking a lot of weed and was the kind of fling I would never have thought of at his age though he was constantly telling me relax, man, it's just fun, don't think about things so much. I stopped thinking about it so much and just enjoyed the fun. The servers soon found out and were scandalized and jealous. I loved it. Every minute of it. I was still driving my little 64 1/2 Mustang that I had restored myself and Maury and I left every night together to the roar of vintage steel revived by the magic of Edelbrock and Holley.
He told me one night that some guy had offered him $500 to do a j/o video. I told him not to do it. It was a mistake. It would be on the internet and in the computers of countless people forever, until the end of time. It would never go away. He said the same things to me he always said, relax, man, it's just fun, don't think about things so much.
And that's when I realized that it wasn't just a difference in age between him and I. There was a deep paradigmatic difference in the way he looked at the world and an insouciance that told me tomorrow was never on his mind. The fling ended after a bit. He did the video, mentioning it to me one night at work, to which I only grunted an mm-hm of acknowledgment.
I haven't a clue where that kid is today or what he's doing. I'm sure the glow of beauty is long faded, the trim waistline gone to paunch. That video, though, I am sure is still circulating in uncounted websites onto uncounted screens in locked bedrooms as we speak.
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