It’s funny how the simplest thing can trigger strong memories. It happened to me again today. I went outside to the front of the garage to grill a couple of hamburgers and it started to rain. The drops were slow, but pretty big, and next thing I knew, it was a soaking torrent. So much for grilling!

I went back inside, and rather than dig a George Foreman grill out of storage, I just took out a frying pan and turned a stovetop burner on. Just as soon as I dropped the patties in and they started sizzling, the combination of sound and smell transported me back to the summer of 1986. I was living with five young college women on West Dutton Street in downtown Kalamazoo. It was what they called the “student ghetto” back then. They were all friends of my fiancee at the time, and I was subletting my fiancee’s room for the summer while she moved back home with her parents. I just needed a place to stay between semesters at school, because I lived in the dorm all four years. Believe it or not, it was cheaper for me to do so because of my financial aid. The house was, shall we say, not nice. I spent a good many evenings catching mice with homemade traps made out of grocery bags and string.

I was broke and hungry for the first half of the summer. I was taking a summer class up on main campus, and I needed to commute every other day to get there. I bought a bike to help with the commute. My brother had destroyed my beloved 10-speed when I was gone on vacation one year while I was away, so I had to buy a new bike. I bought a new Huffy for about $100 at Toys R Us, where I worked, and I rode that up to campus and back. I assembled it myself to save money, and while doing so, I twisted off the nut that held the wire for the brake calipers in place. It was cheap, soft metal, and it just snapped. I took the bike back. Rather than just giving me a new nut, they replaced the entire bike, and I had to put another bike together all over again. I was very careful with the tightening that time.

I rode the Huffy up to campus on Mondays and Wednesdays, and I worked part-time at Toys R Us on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and some Saturdays. My housemates were generous enough to give me rides to work, because no one wanted me riding a bike down the busiest street in Kalamazoo at 9:30 at night. I was only working 20 hours a week at minimum wage, but that was more than enough to pay my share of the rent and to pitch in for food. My request each week was two pounds of ground beef and a pack of hamburger buns. And my caloric intake was a bowl of community cereal with milk in the morning and about a 1/3-pound hamburger each afternoon. One of my housemates taught me how to season and fry a hamburger, and I was good to go.

Not a lot of food for a 21-year-old, but it was enough to sustain me. I had the occasional box of Meijer brand macaroni and cheese. I had grown up eating that, after all.

I spent most of my time in the house reading, because I was stupid enough to take an English class on 20th century American authors. The books were long and boring. The other time I spent drawing, which paid off for me in an unexpected way. When the young women saw that I could draw, one asked me to draw a sketch of her. I had drawn from life in my freshman year, and I wasn’t bad at it, so I agreed. What I didn’t realize is that she wanted me to draw her in her underwear for her boyfriend. I tried to be professional about it. The model I had drawn in my studio art class had been nude, so I didn’t act like a total dork, but I was still nervous because this was someone I knew. When the rest of the ladies saw the result, I suddenly had a steady stream of customers. I guess that’s really the right word, because I exchanged my art skills for free rides to work. So, that made for a truly interesting summer, that’s for sure. I’m not sure how their boyfriends took having me see their girlfriends in their underwear, but they never mentioned it to me. Who knows, maybe the sketches weren’t really for them? The exposure didn’t only go one way, as I got walked in on while showering more than once, and we didn’t have a shower curtain.

At Toys R Us, I truly was in my element. I quickly became known as the “King of the 300 Aisle.” The 300 aisle was where the action figures and Barbies were stocked. I knew every toy line and I knew them well. Because there were few superhero shows at the time (can you imagine?), I watched the various cartoons that went with them. There were Transformers (Generation 1), GI Joe, Masters of the Universe, Warlord, Dungeons and Dragons, Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos, Thundercats, Silverhawks, Super Powers, Secret Wars, Star Wars Droids, and there were even some carded Mego Hulks still on the pegs, most of them with at least one broken leg.

I collected the Super Powers line myself, and had a complete set of every figure released, except one. I had never seen a Cyborg figure myself. I opened every case of Super Powers that came in that summer and still never saw a Cyborg figure. I started to suspect that it wasn’t real.

This was where I first started dabbling with toy scalping. On certain weekends I was helping my friend Marc Newman do comic book conventions. Marc had awful night vision, and in exchange for comics and pizza, I drove him to and from cons, also providing raw muscle. Back then, I thought nothing of carrying two long boxes at the same time. Boy, those were the days! At one such convention, I noticed that two GI Joe figures, Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, were selling for $20 apiece. I didn’t understand that, because I was still shelving them regularly in my evening job. The dealer said that they were hard to find in the wild, as he put it. I asked Marc if it would be okay if I grabbed a couple from work and put them up for sale at his table. he said he didn’t mind at all. So, the next week, I went to the back of the store, opened up two fresh cases of GI Joe figures, and spent $16 of my meager paycheck to buy two Snake Eyes figures and two Storm Shadows.

And sure enough, that weekend, I sold them for a total of $80! Bear in mind, I was making minimum wage, $3.35 an hour back then, so the $64 I earned in profit was the equivalent of 19 hours of labor! I couldn’t believe it. I did that for the rest of the summer. At least I could finally eat better!

The only drawback to working at Toys R Us was that I had to walk past the animatronic Teddy Ruxpin teddy bear. It had a motion sensor, so every time anyone walked past it, it began to sing, “Come Dream With Me Toniiiiiight.” And since it was on an endcap, at least 50 times a day, I heard that stupid song until I finally learned how to disconnect the motion sensor.

The summer passed pretty slowly, and things got heated for a bit, both literally and figuratively. We had no air conditioning. We all walked around in various states of undress as it got into the 90s. That, combined with not seeing our significant others on a regular basis due to crazy work schedules led to a great deal of frustration. I remember one night when we all sat in the living room, reading aloud stories from Penthouse Forum. I think we were all pretty much feeling it at that point, but certain people were sending pretty clear signals to me and some of the other ladies got jealous, even though I wasn’t responding to them. That caused friction among three of the five for some time.

Another point of tempation came when we got robbed. While we were all out of the house, someone broke in through the back French doors, and took the television, the stereo, and…the Trivial Pursuit game. Honestly of all those things, the Trivial Pursuit game hit us the hardest because we didn’t have cable anyway. We played the board game more than we watched the TV. But that sense of violation made us feel insecure. I was invited to sleep with two of my housemates for a week after that. No funny business, mind you, just sleep. Yes, the thought did cross my mind. I was 21 years old and had seen every one of them in their underwear. I have a feeling I could have, but I was engaged at the time, and remained faithful.

I ended up with a B in the summer reading class, and I don’t think I even read the last two books on the list. But I knew I could BS with the best of them and I did on the written final exam, and at the end of summer, I was almost grateful that it was time for me to move back into the dorm. At least I would eat better. All of my possessions put together fit into the trunk of one car. But what to do with my bike? Well, I’m not especially proud of this, but coincidentally, I tightened the brake caliper nut too hard (it was always coming loose) and snapped it again. I still had the receipt, so I returned the bike to the store for a refund. It was obviously faulty because it happened twice, so I got my money back instead of yet another replacement. I basically got the use of a 10-speed bike for the summer for free, courtesy of the Toys R Us where I had worked all summer.

Strangely enough, I was not invited to sublet with the five young women again the next year. Ironically, I sublet a room in the house that their boyfriends rented together. I look back on that summer now, and I’m kind of grateful that cell phone cameras were not a thing then, because I did not share stories of the summer of 1986, except for the fact that I knew how to cook hamburgers.