A Hooters Story

Big pairs of honkers, we hardly knew ye.

Note: Apologies for the botched first attempt at publishing this piece. Several hours of work finalizing the text didn’t get saved and an earlier incomplete draft got published instead. I rewrote them from memory as best as I could.

Hooters, that strip mall bastion of big tits and overpowering kitsch, is the latest chain restaurant on the outs, joining the likes of Red Lobster, Boston Market, TGI Fridays, and a bunch more I don’t feel like listing. Hooters execs say post-bankruptcy that they will live on with a family friendly pivot, surely only prolonging the inevitable.

Why these chains are bottoming out is due to some combination of private equity sabotage, the hollowing out of the middle class, and changing cultural trends. Any of these chains disappearing individually is difficult to frame as a travesty. They’re corporate entities that suck in many of the same ways that all others do. Moreover, they put out middling product and weren’t particularly cheap, likely treated their employees like shit, and were emblematic of a cookie-cutter suburban monotony that could have someone seeing the same stores and restaurants lining the landscape of Scottsdale, Arizona to East Bumfuck, Tennessee. Why have local character when you can have the same 10-20 chains dotting the main roads of every community in the nation?

At the same time, I think it’s a little glib to claim that absolutely nothing is being lost when all these places go away. Beyond the fact that many families are being priced out of a night out, these places were cultural touchstones for a generation or two. You might think you’re too good for them, and maybe you are, but a lot of people love them, and for better or worse they were the common experience of a wide swath of humanity.

The most interesting personal anecdote I have about Hooters is that I have identical twin cousins who worked as servers at one while they were in college. The beer commercial legends are true! This isn’t about that, because I never dropped in on my cousins working at Hooters, and I’m sure they’re grateful for that. A couple other women in my family judged them and sneered at them behind their backs for working there, but rest assured those haters were the most brittle women in my family.

Instead, let’s go back to the heady days of 1994. O.J.’s Ford Bronco went on the lam, and the MLB players union went on strike. I was in middle school. Had I grown up somewhere other than just outside DC, it would be right about time for a field trip to Washington to see the Smithsonian. But since we lived right outside DC, our school figured it was pointless to take us to museums we had easy access to, so rather we got a day trip up 95 to the Baltimore Aquarium.

At the time, there was a Hooters located at Harborplace complex in the Inner Harbor, a block or two from the aquarium. I’m a little surprised to learn now that it hung on until 2024, albeit relocated into a smaller space within the same venue.

30-plus years later, some details are a little hazy, so I don’t recall whose idea it was among my friend group to turn the aquarium trip into a Hooters excursion. I was too much of a goodie-goodie as a kid to spearhead that kind of stunt. However, I didn’t want to be thought of as a wuss, so it wasn’t too hard to rope me into bad behavior, at least within reason. Once the plan was hatched, however, it was all any of us could think about. We were gonna go to the Hooters, tell them it was one of our birthdays, and then they’d sing to us, or suck our dicks, or whatever fantasy we had concocted in our heads.

As an adult, such exploits would be impossibly lame, but for pre-teen boys in the throes of burgeoning sexuality, it was a way to test ourselves to not be daunted by women well out of our league and age bracket. If we could withstand that, the girls our age could never faze us. Porn was decidedly more difficult to access if you were underage in those days compared to now. My family only got dial-up Internet for the first time two years after this. A Hooters waitress might as well have been a Playboy Centerfold as far as we were concerned. One might argue stuff like Hooters is a gateway to porny aesthetics but with sufficient plausible deniablility. It was totemic American heterosexuality, alluring yet oddly wholesome all at once.

Touring the aquarium, my mind raced and I fretted like a major spazz. “Will Hooters call the cops on us?” “What if we get caught and expelled?” More likely the place would just tell us to fuck off before we got in. None of us had yet had a girlfriend at that point, and even flirting was an art we were just being introduced to. I thought to myself where would I even begin with a full-grown woman twice my age. The moray eels swimming before me had no answers.

There’s more. In the image I posted up top, see the structure in the bottom right corner with the glass pyramid roof? That’s the aquarium. The low-slung building on the bottom left on the water? That’s Harborplace. The tan high-rise office building between them? It’s named the Baltimore World Trade Center, one fewer tower and several fewer terrorist attacks than its more famous cousin. It’s also where my dad worked.

In the days leading up to the trip, I’m sure I mentioned to my father that I would be in the vicinity of his office that day. Sometimes during the summer and other instances school was out, he would bring me up to work with him, I would putz around the harbor during the day, then we would traipse 10 minutes to Camden Yards if the Orioles had a 7 p.m. weeknight start. Not much pressure for us to link up that day, since we saw each other up there enough, and I never had a schedule of how the trip would go.

Nevertheless, I had a paranoid certainty that my father would bust me doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing. He would somehow just know. I imagined strolling into the Hooters to find him and some colleagues already bellying up to a table. “Son of a bitch!” he’d yell when spotting me, slamming a wing bone down on his plate, before yanking me out of there by my ear.

Eventually the time came for our lunch break, and my friend group played it about as cool as any dumbass horny 12-year-olds might be expected to. That is to say we all broke into a full-on sprint toward the Hooters.

There were one or two boys in the group who could recognize my father from being on the same soccer team or in Cub Scouts with me. I about doubled over when I heard one of them exclaim, “Hey, Mr. Tunison!”

Ooh boy.

Sure enough, there was my dad taking a smoke break in the sad smoker’s ghetto outside his office building. “Well, what are you boys up to?” he asked. Even though I had spent most of the time in the aquarium dreading an encounter with him, I hadn’t actually taken the time to come up with an alibi if we did meet. “Uh… we’re about to… y’know… uh… we might… uh… see if we can… uh… LUNCH!”

In those days, my dad smoked Merit methols, and I’ve never met anyone else who smokes Merits as a default. I kicked myself for not smelling it before he spotted us. One of the guys in the friend group uttered Hooters and I did my best not to acknowledge that outburst. My dad surely figured out what we were planning, and let us go on our way. He could be strict and fly off the handle with some things I did, and others would barely register.

Ultimately, we were successful with our stunt, which is to say we purchased two fountain sodas and had the waitstaff sing to the guy who lied and said it was his birthday. We were too nervous to get fresh with the servers, and that’s for the best. Looking back on it, it’s a bit odd they admitted a group of unaccompanied minors and indulged our bullshit. Luckily, we caught them on a slow day, and maybe they were bored and amused by gang of kids with enough moxie to give it a shot.

Whether there’s any profundity here, I’ll leave that up to you to decide. This age is rapidly fading from view, and I wonder if there’s anything left for me in the world to come. At any rate, we put some hair on our chest that day. Whether other boys could benefit from similar experiences, I don’t know. They’ll have to hit up Twin Peaks to find out.