Chapter 1

I suppose I should thank my daughter for dragging me kicking and screaming into the modern era, but at the time (1999) I was darned if I could understand what the advantages were. The Internet seemed to be an especially irrelevant time waster utterly unsuited for my daily attention let alone maintenance of a web page, but in the end she convinced me that the rewards were there ... if I could find them.

Yeah, right, sure...

Truly, I'm not a Luddite. I do use a computer at work ... really! However the idea of putting up a webpage of my own broadcasting out to everyone and their dog a continual status update of what I was up to, and exactly how satisfactory (or not) my most recent bowel movement was, didn't strike me as 'need to know' information that should be broadcasted out willie-nillie to everyone that I even had a vague relationship with. Sure, my kid had a page, along with all of her friends, as well as my ex, and all of her friends as well. So, in the interest of keeping détente going, I ground my molars a bit and allowed the jewel of my life to parade her father's inadequacies out on the World Wide Web for everyone to inspect. My daughter fluttered her eyes and said please, so how could I say no?

Grrr...

My daughter was actually enjoying the situation far too much and she seemed to have an unlimited patience for the tedium of trying to find someone (anyone) from my past that I would even consider talking to today. She plugged in my college and high school locations and dates into a variety of search engines and at the click of a mouse button found at least half a billion people that in theory I had shared some bit of past history with. Nice in principle, but in actuality I didn't recognize a single name. Not one. Certainly no one that I would be willing to trade snapshots of the kids and my most recent vacation, let alone pictures of the pets with. I'd been a loner pretty much throughout my formal schooling and could easily number my long-time good friends on one hand with several fingers left over.

Undaunted, the pearl of my eye set herself a goal to find someone, somewhere, that I'd lost contact with that I would give my eye-teeth to make contact with today, decades later.

Fat bloody chance!

Ex-girlfriends from school? Not hardly. Certainly no one that I'd pined after with unrequited love, let alone the few I'd actually consumed any sort of love with. In those days I was short (my growth spurt to over six feet came late in my college years), geeky, pimply and permanently face affixed into a book in those years. I had dated about half a dozen ex-girlfriends from this period but not one that I cared an iota about revisiting today. Half of them I couldn't even remember their last names.

Undaunted, and with an unhealthy amount of ambition and with my school yearbooks in hand, she plugged in the names of girls that I 'vaguely' remembered to pull up their pages. Invariably all of them either happily married or still living in denial about adulthood and clutching on to youth and perpetual partyland with every millimeter of their carefully salon sculpted nails. Uck!

Just when I thought I was home free, at the near edge of my daughter's seemingly limitless patience, she finally struck Yukon gold.

"What about old friends from that crappy amusement park you used to work at all during high school?" She enquired.

Damn! While I have easily forgotten nearly everyone else I worked with during those three years of high school, one name came readily to mind, right up at the top of my memory. Unforgotten ... carved into stone deep in my reminiscences.

Damn her for dredging that thought up once again after over twenty years! Still, some part of me just had to know.

"Ummm, try Candice Meacham, 1977 ride operator at the Six Flags amusement park." I helpfully suggested, and she eagerly clicked the search string in. Ack ... now I'm done for it ... please God come back with no computer result hits!

Nope. It was not to be ... now I was well and truly screwed.

"Bingo! Got a hit!" The pride and joy of my live remarked. "She's living in Austin somewhere, but there's not a whole lot of information on her page. She's set for top level privacy settings, should I request that she accept your friend invitation?"

"NO! Absolutely not!" I ordered, and much too quickly. My daughter, who was not at all a dunce, smelled a rat nearly at once. It took her nearly half an hour, but in the end she dug the story out of me, nearly kicking and screaming. She takes too much after her mother in some ways!

Let's say right from the get-go that I hated my entire time in high school. I was bored, unmotivated, and smart enough to get top grades without ever once cracking open a textbook to actually bother to study. I wasn't athletic, musical, or inclined for any club, social group or extracurricular activity. I was also piss-poor, from a poverty stricken family with barely a dollar (if lucky) in my pockets.

No money — no car — no dates! That about sums up my high school social life fairly neatly.

Instead, by my sixteen birthday, I was working nearly full time for craptastic wages and buying my own school clothes and supplies, mostly for the local Six Flags theme park that we nicknamed 'DisasterWorld'. They paid just barely over minimum wage and promised the idea of 'fun, fun, fun' while working on the job! In actuality, they were slave drivers that abused the heck out of us school kids and worked us half to death for peanuts. Eat a single French fry in the kitchen, even if it had fallen to the floor? Termination offense! Yep, right out of the 'Work will make you Free' school of personnel management. In two and a half years I'd received just two pay increases that totaled $ .25 cents an hour after being promoted to the highest level of grunt level hourly level supervisor, just below a salaried Supervisor.

Heck, I was young, socially stupid and was amused far too easily, and it was (slightly) better than working for the local pizza joint. Somehow I survived working there for two and half seasons. I guess that place trained me to survive anything! I showed up for work when scheduled, never took a sick or play day, kept my head down and did my time. It was a lot like being a convicted felon in a great many ways.

I'd had a couple of 'sort-of' girlfriends while working at the park, but nothing lingering or remotely memorable. I can't remember any of their names now, either. For most of my time there I was far too low social status to attract any attention of any of the better class of hostesses. Too geeky and no car. Riding to work and back on a ten-speed bike just isn't that sexy. Nope.

Still, I found a few freaky chicks willing to descend to my level, but certainly no one worthy of showing off at home to mother. For the most part, these gals were butterflies, just floating from flower to flower. Yeah, they stopped briefly at mine, but after sampling me once or twice they were off to other fresher blooms.

Until I met Candice.

For argumentative purposes, I will willingly concede that Candice was the 'One True Love of my Life (tm)'. On the other hand, our torrid love affair didn't even last a full week. Our relationship was as deep as the ocean, but the current was fast and shallow and lead directly to rocks that neither of us could avoid. I loved her with everything in my soul, but it was just not fated to be.

I first met this girl of my adolescent dreams, at the end of season crew party in the late summer of my senior year of high school. It was the second to last weekend of the year that the park would remain open seven days a week, just before school started. These parties were always formal, suit and tie, and were for the most part just a dance with horrible finger food and ghastly fruit punch, much like a school Prom.

I'd come equipped with a date, sort of ... a girl from high school that I had dated for awhile in the fall, but that relationship was already very 'off' by this point. We were still sort of friends and I'd only invited her because she had really wanted to go, and she loved to dance — not necessarily with me. In fact she had already made backup plans to have her mother come pick her up when the party was over. She paid her admission by giving me the first three dances with her and then she was off like a rocket for other more interesting partners and I hardly saw a glimpse of her the rest of the evening. No big deal or hurt feelings ... it was just about exactly what I had expected and planned for.

Yeah kids, Disco really did suck in the late 1970's! On the other hand, bras were very much out of fashion that year and most party dresses did allow for quite a lot of nice tit bouncing when the young ladies danced. Always look for and appreciate the silver linings to every tragedy.

I hung around for awhile, drank punch, nibbled hors d'oeuvres, ogled the ladies and calculated the minutes until I thought it would be safe enough to leave. I was a Food Service Manager (the day shift boss of a dumpy popcorn, cotton candy, drink and ice cream stand) and had fantastical unwholesome notions of actually making Supervisor at the time. Silly me! It would never happen, and I knew better, but I was trying to play the political game at the time ... mostly badly.

Just about the time I decided to call it a night, from far across the dance floor, sitting alone at a table was the girl of my dreams and I knew it right away!

Don't tell me that love at first sight doesn't exist — it does! Really!

It didn't matter that I was probably the single shyest person in that hotel ballroom. I knew then, and at once, that I had to go over and at least talk to her. I don't quite know how I actually managed it, but somehow I found my way over to her table. The odd part is that when I made it about half of the way over towards her, our eyes made contact and there was some sort of instant magnetic connection between us and she got up to meet me.

"I'd love to!" She said, even before I actually managed to stammer my request to dance with her.

I survived the first dance, a fast Disco number "Staying Alive" without looking too stupid or causing my partner an injury, and then Gods of Fate kindly bestowed upon us two long and slow dances in a row. By the end of the first one my lovely partner was pasted as tight against me as she could get, like wet cardboard stuck to glass. It was heavenly. By the end of the second slow dance we were kissing and madly grinding against each other. No one noticed us; the dimly lit dance floor was covered with several hundred other young couples pretty much also trying to fuck with their clothes still on.

Ah, to be young once again and filled with teenaged hormones!

For the next hour we conversed during the fast songs and held each other tight during the slow grinders, afraid to ever let the other partner go or slip just out of hand's reach. The feeling was electrical ... it was like magic. The two remaining hours passed as if just moments.

When the last dance was announced at ten minutes to ten p.m., Candice looked at her watch with a startled look, and cursed.

"Goddamnit! The one day that I finally meet a boy worth knowing, and I've told my dad to come and pick me up early! He's probably been waiting on me already for over half an hour now already! Crap, am I going to be in for it!"

She grabbed her clutch purse, and while towing me in one hand towards the door she tried to make sure that her makeup wasn't too smudged up. A lost cause; she had been pretty thoroughly snogged and smooched and needed a complete refit, which she didn't have any time for.

A quick peak out the door confirmed that her father was outside the hotel waiting in the car, rather impatiently from the looks of him, and with one last deep kiss or three, we made our farewells and plans to see each other at the park the next week. Running to the car, she disappeared into the caverns of her dad's black Mercedes and was all too soon lost from my sight.

Still, not at all bad for a first date!

Candice had told me earlier (on the rare occasions that our lips weren't stuck together) that she lived with just her father, who was some big-shot trial attorney. She didn't need to work, but had wanted to do something 'normal', like the other girls at her high school, which unfortunately wasn't the same as mine. In fact, our two schools were just about as geographically far apart as it was possible to get.

She had worked at the park only the second half of this summer season, and was one of the senior ride operators over in the Chinatown area of the park. She had a red nametag just like mine which technically also made her a Manager, paid the same crappy wage as I was. Operations always did have higher turnover and a much faster promotion cycle than us grunts in Food Service. Her ride was called "The Rickshaw', and it was pretty much a low-stress, kiddie type ride suitable for the whole family, and it was always insanely crowded with waiting guests.

Since her break schedule was the most uncertain, we agreed that when she got her thirty minute lunch break she would call over to my stand so that I could then take mine, and we'd both run like heck separately over to the employee canteen so that hopefully we could enjoy up to ten full minutes together with each other before we'd each have to race back to our stations to be back on time. Being more than five minutes late back from a break was nearly a death penalty offense to our Nazi overlords, and just one of many termination offenses, especially for the Team Leaders, Asst. Managers and Managers, since we were supposed to provide the example to the lowly Hosts and Hostesses that worked under us.