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I lost my virtue in a shopping mall. Sort of. It was actually in my boss's office at the Mexican restaurant where I had my first-ever job, in what's known as Metro Parkway, the shopping complex surrounding Metrocenter Mall at I-17 and Peoria. This was in the late 1970s, when Metrocenter was so big it was spilling out into its own parking lot, creating a surrounding landscape of still more stores and restaurants. My senior year in high school, I worked as a maître d' in a big, sprawling Parkway supper club that served flautas and flan, and where I had a fling with my boss, who was real humpy but kind of old -- I think he was 26 at the time.
It seems most of my earliest rites of passage took place at Metrocenter. It was there that I finally realized, once and for all, that I'd never find a sport at which I didn't suck when I tried -- and failed -- to skate at Metro's legendary ice rink one summer day in 1974. And I was served my first drink in a bar there. I think it was called the AeroLounge, a cocktail lounge shaped like an airplane that wrapped around the skating rink. One entered, as I recall, through the cockpit, and waitresses in stewardess costumes brought your drinks to little tables in front of wee portholes that overlooked the skating rink below. I ordered a White Russian, something I'm still embarrassed about 30 years later.
Metrocenter opened for business in late 1973, and for those of...