In 1987, Ricardo is 17. That summer, he has a busy schedule: lose his virginity, find a way to get into bars, have a car, spend time with friends.

In 1987, Ricardo is 17. That summer, he has a busy schedule: lose his virginity, find a way to get into bars, have a car, spend time with friends. To make money fast, Ricardo decides to exploit his Italian side and take a shortcut in the middle of the crime. But things will spoil.—Anonymous

Forty-three year old Ricardo Trogi recounts his summer of 1987, when he was seventeen years old having just graduated from high school in suburban Ste-Foy, Québec. He was under much pressure from various adults, from his working class parents, Benito and Claudette Trogi - the former who worked as an accordion player in an Italian restaurant - to the provincial government through the Ministry of Education and the school's guidance counselor, to work toward a career, or at least get a job in the transition to becoming a responsible adult. Ricardo, who felt seventeen was too young to choose a career path, had other things on his mind that summer. In order of priority, those items were: to lose his virginity - something that his best mates had already done - with the person he was hoping would be "the one" being his girlfriend, Marie-Josée, also a virgin; to turn eighteen so that he could finally get into the hip downtown club, Chez Dagobert, where he and his friends were always carded by the doorman/bouncer and thus stopped at the door unable to get in; to get a car, as although riding his bicycle was healthier, it did nothing to impress girls; to get a lock on his bedroom door so that he could masturbate in peace; and to hang with his buddies Caron, Boivin and Dallaire, they who were the least flashy teens in North America without realizing it at the time. But he did have in his mind a "project" as he called it for a job/career: to open an underage (ages 14-18) club. The problem, which he slowly began to realize but which, in his belief, was the adult world ganging up on him as opposed to he doing anything wrong, was that he had no way of getting the $5,000 seed money. While some of Ricardo's five priorities and a "job/career", or at least working toward it, did occur that summer, it didn't happen quite the way he expected. The other question is whether Ricardo grew up to become a responsible adult that summer.—Huggo