Two hours before my first kiss, I cried in a Wendy's booth across from a nineteen-year-old college dropout. We were heading to a party — whose party, I did not know — and I was slurry with Peach Schnapps, or Bacardi Rum, or whatever cough-syrup crap I was pouring into my Cokes that summer. I was thirteen. It was a confusing time.
"Are you crying?" the college dropout asked, dipping his French fries in a squirt of ketchup.
"Uh-uh. No." I pretended to have a scratch on my chin, a scratch on my nose. A scratch anywhere, preferably one that leaked fluid.
The college dropout had shaggy blond hair and spoke like someone who was permanently stoned. Perhaps this was because he was permanently stoned. "Wait — you are crying," he said.
I shook my head. For some reason, even as an adult, this is an argument I think I can win.
But it was hopeless. A tear slipped off my chin and went splat! in my baked potato. We sat there for a while, him dipping his square burger into the ketchup, my face dripping with tears as I raked a fork through sour cream and chives. The good patrons of Wendy's — accustomed to such nuisances as screaming babies and stray fingernails in their side salads — began to stare. And the more they stared, the worse my crying became.
"I don't understand why you're crying," the college dropout said finally.
No one ever does. Sometimes, not even me.
In this case, I did understand. It had do with being uncorked by booze. It had to do with being thirteen. Mostly, it had to do with nursing a giant crush on the nineteen-year-old college dropout, whom I wanted more than Frosties and French fries. It had to do with the complicated adolescent algorithm churning away in my head, the one which indicated that he didn't like me, or didn't like like me, or liked my older cousin instead — none of which was based on actual evidence. But when did a thirteen year old ever need that?
He offered
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Crying in a restaurant is like needing to fart in church. The more you don't want to do it, the worse it gets.
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me a handful of napkins and a sip of his Coke. Blech: whiskey.
This was the first time I cried in a restaurant, and it would not be the last. Over the next two decades, I would cry in so many restaurants that sometimes I would know the floor tile and the bathroom stalls better than the menu. I never wanted to be like this. (Please understand I never wanted to be like this.) But crying in a restaurant is like needing to fart in church. The more you don't want to do it, the worse it gets.
It may surprise you, by the way, to learn that I was not always a crier. For a glorious, hard-won spell of approximately six years I was known as a tough kid who sucked it up and knocked out girls' teeth on the soccer field. This was the influence of my older cousin, a foxy tomboy who believed in arm-wrestling with boys and flipping off strangers. She distrusted tears — no, she pitied them, much like she pitied people who actually liked school or read "for fun." That disgusted her. And she spent her summers transforming me into a miniature version of herself — slutting up my wardrobe, spiking my bangs, ripping away my John Irving books and replacing them with trips to the mall. This hardened me. More than that: It intoxicated me. I worshipped my cousin, and I feared her, because her rage and her ego were so foreign to me. We didn't have much in common, save for a bloodline and a button nose. And eventually, despite the afternoons at Chess King and the lessons in Aqua Net, I would prove a total disappointment. I loved to read. I was an honor-roll student. Above all, I was a crier.
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