Mourning the Loss of Hooters, And Everyone I Loved There

“Would you?” my best friend asked, gesturing toward our waitress, wearing the trademark orange and white Hooters short shorts and shirt.

“I would,” I replied, smirking under the crap ton of TV screens blasting basketball. It was our typical routine as we rubbernecked the all-female waitstaff, our eyes shooting away the moment someone saw us. The “would you” game hasn’t aged well, though I’m sure people still do it. Teenagers today probably objectify others in more politically correct terms. But the custom bonded us and gave us something to talk about, two awkward ‘90s teens trying to act grown.

Over the past year, Hooters locations began disappearing, dozens at a time, culminating in March, when the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, $376 million in debt. A casualty of inflation, rising food costs, a surge of competitors in the wing space, decreased interest in casual dining, and a string of perhaps not altogether unsurprising lawsuits and controversies precipitated the business troubles; on June 4 alone, more than 30 locations closed.

For anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of trying Hooters wings, they’re a weird combination of fry, chicken, and sauce—way more crunch than the average buffalo wing. You can sometimes score drums made up of over 50% breading, which might sound disappointing but tastes massively delicious. Nostalgic curmudgeons will tell you the food’s gone downhill, but the wings taste better than ever. If anything has changed, it’s the customers. We come, now, weighed down with memories, in search of a drug whose power diminishes with every subsequent hit.

I graduated from high school in ’99, just as the “breastaurant” chain, which opened its first location back in 1983, peaked in popularity. I was a lanky nebbish who loved comics—the floppy ones, not the movies, which barely existed at that time. I knew nothing about sports and listened to Sarah McLachlan, not Nirvana. But after trudging through my entire school career essentially friendless, during my senior year, I mastered the art of self-mockery, winning “most changed” in senior superlatives at my upstate New York school.

For my generation of teens, getting invited to Hooters was a life milestone. For me, it was second in line to the bar mitzvah. It meant you were embraced by the dudes, some who had tongue-kissed girls before, some who even lifted weights—heavy ones, not just the bar.

The guys who embraced me were such dudes that many of them even played football. They weren’t quarterbacks or anything, I don’t think. I never asked them or cared. They were the other people on the team, whatever you’d call them. Defenders, maybe? Smashers? They would never date prom queens or be portrayed by James Van Der Beek in a movie, but being with them still felt like I was a minor character in Varsity Blues. In reality, I was probably Rachel Leigh Cook in She’s All That—given a glossy makeover, I suddenly looked like the belle of the ball. In a gaggle of goyim, I was the crew’s Jewish jester, their mascot.

Of course, when my friends and I played the “would you” game—which, to be clear, was about sex—I never had any interest in would-ing anyone. Not just because our waitress wanted nothing to do with a couple of drooling boys, but because I was pretty much asexual. Even thinking about a girl kissing me caused me panic. Would-ing someone was my nightmare. Still, I could appreciate a woman’s beauty, and I loved to look.

There was always a bet over who the waitress would sit next to when she got tired from all that serving. Serving food. Serving looks. We didn’t think about how the entire reason for the waitress sitting with us was because it meant she was scoring the entirety of our measly paychecks from whatever first jobs we had: stock boy at the local grocery store, or, in my case, at my dad’s wallpaper store.

Over the years, we graduated high school, attended college, left the grocery and wallpaper businesses, and all got jobs at the mall—for me, at the Watch Station, directly next to Hooters. It became easier to get a waitress to sit with me, especially since our crew diversified, with dudettes tagged along for the hijinks. Eventually one of my female buds got a job waiting tables there, and Hooters became less a place I went to watch pro-wrestling with the boys, and more a place I went during my shifts to visit her.

Everything felt right in the world when she and my best-dude friend began nearly dating. On weekends, we’d go to whoever’s-parents-weren’t-home’s house and down Bud Light and Mike’s Hard Lemonade, listening to City High asking what we would do. My best dude friend and best dudette friend would be getting their flirt on the entire time, sometimes behind closed doors, definitely tongue-kissing. Meanwhile, I’d be putting on a show in the family room—stumbling drunk, I’d hide my glasses in the couch cushion so I couldn’t find them in the morning: a little game I enjoyed playing with sober Jay.

I have no idea why my friends never full-on dated. They spent many nights lounging in his car and roaming the mall together, like all of us ‘90s kids did. They even jokingly played the “would you” game as guys and girls flooded past, making idle talk while taking note of the other’s interests. Even after the fling ended, they always spoke highly of each other, always cared. Maybe they just drifted off into other people’s arms. Maybe they were just too young. It was one of life’s biggest what-ifs for me. Maybe for them, too. But it’s too painful to discuss now.

He got married, had kids, and moved 20 minutes away, which felt like a different state. She had a kid and moved to a different state, which felt like another country. I kept going to Hooters, enjoying the wings, even after my friend stopped working there. That Hooters closed, and another opened nearby. I brought my girlfriend, who became my wife. We had kids and I brought them, too. Then, last year, my dude-friend died at 43 from Stage 4 Colorectal cancer—his family ordered wings at Hooters after his funeral—and at the end of May, my girl-dude friend was diagnosed with stage 4 inoperable cervical cancer at age 41.

It was rumored Hulk Hogan might buy Hooters, though that fantasy died when he did last month, and some locations are in the middle of a “re-Hooterization,” toning down the sleaze in favor of a more family-friendly vibe. This past Father’s Day, surrounded by my wife and four kids, I visited my local branch, which remains open, at least for now, and nearly began bawling into my plate.

In the song “The Difficult Kind,” by ‘90s icon Sheryl Crow, she sings that “there ain’t nothin’ like regret to remind you you’re alive.” For me, it’s not regret but loss. 

I love my life, love my wife and my little sidekicks, but my happiness is laced with a nostalgia for a youth I can never return to. I am constantly mourning, the way every 40-something mourns. The wings today are just as good as yesterday; it’s our lives that have changed. While I don’t want to be that same boozed up, insecure, self-mocking boy, I want to feel the first flooding of acceptance I felt when I was originally invited to climb upon that skyscraping orange barstool. I want my friends back. I want to live at a time when the only people I knew who died seemed ancient, not the peers I love; it may be a quarter century since our Hooters days, but it still feels like we’re barely out of our teens, and death has stolen so much from us.