Editor’s Note: This is Part 2 of a Sunday series (in case you missed it, here’s part 1 from last week) that I’ll continue posting here for several weeks…or as long as it takes to tell this story. I hope you enjoy.

Part 2: Early Summer in Athens

Like all summers I knew from my time in Athens, it was hot, and it was blue skies as far as you could see. If you asked me what I watched, who played, or what the outcomes were on that day, I couldn’t tell you. It’s was women’s Olympic football (read: soccer), and I was there in body only, not spirit.

It was June of 1996, and the Olympics were in town. I had made a decision to not work my normal summer job as a auto parts delivery driver at NAPA and to, instead, be a server at a restaurant found in the Atlanta Airport Marriot called Allie’s. It was international flavors with a French theme, mostly around the wine and such, but it was my one and only time waiting tables and it was a great time to be doing it.

Our hotel hosted all of the Olympic gymnastics families, who had travelled from afar and were staying in Atlanta for the three or so weeks during the International event. Each night, there were several tables of people that spoke functional English or none at all, and all of them had money. Some were stingy, most were liberal with their tipping. Either way, I drove home every night with wads of cash in my pockets, if I wasn’t heading to downtown Atlanta to party first.

It was rare air. Every night downtown was another party. People from all around the world alongside many locals were out to have a good time to all hours of the night. Events were taking place all over town and everyone drifted back to downtown at the end of the evening. We were downtown the night the bomb went off but knew nothing about it until later. Thankfully we’d headed home to someone’s house to play cards until the wee hours of the morning.

I can recall one night, a fellow waiter named John, whose name sounds eerily familiar to mine, and who has the same height, skin color, and hair style as me, right down to the same goatee, saw a group of olympic gymnasts walking past our restaurant, and he made eye contact and some apparent comment to them that garnered their attention. These were male gymnasts, by the way, and John was unapologetically gay. Anyway, this group came in a got sat at the table where they could be served by the “Cute guy with a goatee” and the hostess thought they were talking about me. In the hour I served them, I had my ass slapped, hands in places I’d rather not say, and when I asked the group of twenty of them what they wanted for desert, one of them replied “how about you slathered in hot chocolate sauce”. I said okay and filled the orders. Somewhere during that point, they suddenly realized, to their horror, that I was not John. They ate their desert and, as an apology, tipped me 500 bucks on a 200 dollar tab. I’ll take it.

Aside from the occasional sexual harassment, which I’m not sure even existed as a term in 1996, it was a great place to work. Actors and actresses would stop in there for a drink, as I can recall Jane Curtain coming in to do a script read with someone one night when things were slower. She ordered four glass of wine and an appetizer while she read the script with the producer. He had nothing to drink or eat. When they were done, they left and she paid the bill with no tip. When I looked at the bill by the table, I think she knew what I was looking at, and said “it was your pleasure serving me”.

Dan Aykroyd was right. Jane, you ignorant slut.

Aside from the excitement on the floor, the real excitement was after hours. As a group we’d go with the bartender, the cooks, the waiters, and head to someone’s house. One night it was College Park, the next Riverdale, once in Ellenwood. No one lived in town anywhere you’d feel safe partying, and no one was living on the northside of town. From there, it was poker, drinks, and drugs. Honestly, it’s best I only spent a summer serving there because I’m fairly certain that most restaurant kitchens exists only for dealing and buying drugs. There was more of that moving back there than there were appetizers and deserts, and I didn’t have the money or the interest for it. But I did like to party, and there was one every night, every week.

Anyway, it was different times. It was an international party in Atlanta every night, so when my buddy James told me he was going to the soccer games in Sanford, I pictured Athens being similarly busting at the seams with excitement, so I told him I was in. What I didn’t know was that it was for qualifying games, not medal games, and it was a day where every team that wasn’t American was going to be playing. Also, there were several other sites where Olympic soccer was being hosted, including Legion Field at Birmingham, the Citrus Bowl in Orlando, the Orange Bowl in Miami, and at RFK Stadium in D.C.

We got there and paid next to nothing for tickets. In the first match, I just remember red on white and it was women’s soccer. Maybe China and the Soviet Union. I don’t know. They played for what seemed forever and we were sitting in the stands where we normall would’ve played as Redcoats and there wasn’t another person around us for several rows. We were sweltering in the heat, and when the game ended, turns out we could stick around for the next one a half hour later. So we stayed, continue watching, and when my skin had officially turned into jerky, we decided to leave.

James was a good friend. I knew James in his post-accident era, after he had been hit back in the early 90s by a guy in a minivan who was high at the time. James drove a small Honda Civic hatchback that was t-boned by the van and was no wider than one foot wide in the middle when they had to get him out with the jaws of life. He would show me home video of who he was and what he was like prior to the accident, and he was confident, arrogant, and attractive lady’s man. After the accident he was still confident and arrogant, but had to walk with a cane and moved slowly, mainly because of the Traumatic Brain Injury he received from the accident.

The courts bounced his case around for close to ten years until he finally got a settlement. By that time, he had received a PhD and was working to help others who had gone through what he had gone through. I doubt the settlement money meant anything to him by the time he got it, but he still did well for himself. Didn’t seem to matter much, he was the wittiest and funniest of everyone in my friend group, and remains that way today.

Oh, and the other thing that was great about having James as a roommate was that he had a handicap permit, so we didn’t have to walk far from the game to get to our car. Also, with UGA parking being what it was back then, having a handicap parking permit felt like you were getting to travel to campus in a limousine. Curbside parking, no bus rides, and you could sleep a little later knowing you didn’t have to drive from here to Toccoa looking for a parking space. We even tried to have matching schedules so I could ride in and out with him each day from our Beechwood Apartments.

So, as we were walking back down to the lower level concourse and heading to the Student Center lower lot, where he was parked, I couldn’t help but recall that this was the same path I took months earlier where I grabbed some root bulbs of hedges. I started to look at the edges of the field where the hedges once existed, and wondered how long this whole thing was going to take to get going again, and would they be flourishing by the start of the football season?

James said he heard they were shipping in fully grown shrubs right after the Games were over, and they were starting on it next month to be ready by the opening game. That was just, like eight weeks away. Seemed impossible to me. But he said he read it in The Red and Black, the campus newspaper, which was actually as good as any local paper you could buy in town, so I guess they had a plan.

But what would that look like? How many hedges are they talking about? Where will they put them all when they’re planting them. Hell, inquiring minds want to know!

A few weeks later, I’d find out, alright.