Two weeks after we purchased the weekend house in Duchess County, Trudi stopped returning to New York on Sunday night. She would, however, make the trip to the city for Wednesday afternoon couples counseling. We had each of us been talking to mental health professionals most of our lives, so it wasn’t a stretch for us to engage a shrink to moderate this geographic development.

Not long into the process, the therapist, a woman named Rhoda Schroeder, asked me to describe my drinking. “Oh, I drink a lot,” I said, finessing the question with what I expected would be taken as a lighthearted exaggeration. “What do you think is a lot?” was the comeback I anticipated.

“Well, Robert, I think you drink too much and I want you to schedule an evaluation at Smithers,” was what I got.

For the duration of our marriage, I had been a daily drunk. Weekends, I was damp and sloppy and reeked of potential embarrassment. During the week, though, my goals were modest and my efforts more circumspect. After work, I would consume a six-pack of lite beer, augmenting the buzz with a joint or two of decent downtown weed. This nightly ritual always brought the desired result – basic oblivion. Meanwhile, Trudi might nurse a beer and take a couple of tokes while the two of us sat on the coffee table in front of the TV playing Atari. We exploited the conviviality that relationships slide into when affection and rationalization dance around issues no one can acknowledge.

 

It took me two weeks to get evaluated. Rhoda Schroeder had taken me completely by surprise, and then I surprised myself by following through. But for the next week or so, I played the I-can-quit-by-myself game, only to find myself getting shitfaced on spritzers.

When at last I made it to Smithers, I was befuddled, exhausted, and not a little defensive. Preliminaries consisted mainly of the famous twenty questions for which a single affirmative answer would confirm a problem with alcohol. Have you ever felt remorse after drinking? Did your ambition decrease the longer you drank? Have you ever had a complete loss of memory as a result of drinking? Yes. Yes. Yes.

Do you drink alone? Oh, shit.

I found myself in a beige room facing a metal desk. Out the window was a brick wall. Behind the desk sat Howard, a gruff guy with enough street cred to make me feel self-consciously pansy-assed, in the way only an Upper West Side, co-op owning, pot smoking, Wall Street-type could feel when confronted by an Ivy League-educated, recovering heroin addict. He asked me about my drinking, then asked what drugs I had done, and when I recited a long list of what I considered minor dabbling, he called me a ‘garbage head.’ I spluttered, nonplussed, and entered their nine-month, outpatient treatment program.

I left shaken and stirred. In five days, they expected me to start showing up for group therapy Tuesdays and Thursdays. Maybe I could do this.

Tru and I started spending evenings and weekends together. In a whirl of affection and expedience, we married. We were crazy for each other, in addition to being out of our minds. She tempered her exuberant panic attacks with anti-psychotic medication, while I was saturated by daily drunkenness. We joked self-consciously that our romance was like that movie David & Lisa, two young nutjobs in love. Unsupervised nutjobs.

We moved into a sunny apartment overlooking the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel. Tru operated her graphic design business from a corner of the living room, while I be-suited myself for a job as advertising manager at a publishing house.

The task of accommodating my substantial intake to my fantasies of being a middle-class guy of modest hipness with a wife and an apartment and a job required an enormous amount of emotional nimbleness. My heedless drinking subsided into mere maintenance, every night a six-pack and a bowl of marijuana. I just needed to catch a good, solid buzz and pass out. Weekends and special events, however, I could boldly go, entertaining either congenial inebriation or wretched excess. I never knew which. Every five weeks or so, I had to pay a visit to my pot dealer in the Village. He sold terrific dope and I enjoyed these excursions. Trudi, on the other hand, usually declined to accompany. I quickly learned not to force her social anxieties.

 

‘Twas the night before Thanksgiving. We’d run out of marijuana, smoked the last joint, and then the very last mingy pipe-full of roach residue. To replenish the stash, I motivated myself downtown. I brought a six-pack with me and settled in for an evening of rock n’ roll and mellow intoxication. All of a sudden, there it was – Cocaine. I’d snorted once before to no avail, but that night I was in a limber state and game for anything. Common knowledge had it that coke was an accelerant, speed-y, and the resultant presence of mind allowed one to imbibe rash amounts of alcohol with no impairment. Drinkers endorsed this as a most excellent thing.

The bright dawn of the following day brought with it the lacerating hangover that came from drinking all night on cocaine and then getting up way too early. My eyes felt like two piss-holes in the snow. Puking would have been cathartic, but sometimes resistance to this crucial act of self-preservation was the only thing an ego has to hold on to. I wheezed myself into a blazer and tie. Tru and I negotiated Port Authority Bus Terminal and heaved ourselves onto a bus headed for New Jersey. At the end of the highway lay the bosom of my family.

One whiff of turkey and I bolted down the hall to the cool release of the bathroom. Quietly, I crept upstairs to my old bedroom to sleep the sleep of misery. When I ventured back down, all powers were arrayed against me; my parents and my wife perched on the edge of the sofa with pusses on. What happened was an impromptu intervention. I whimpered and vowed to seek counsel from the therapeutic community. I understood intuitively I could manipulate the confrontation, so I submitted to the general contempt. I promised to get help. I didn’t promise to stop drinking.

I had thoroughly obliterated any possibility of completing my education, but I couldn’t stay in my parents’ house, feigning motivation while jonesing pitifully. In a desperate scramble, I invented a plan to move to Washington, D.C. to seek my fortune. I stuffed everything into the wayback of my automobile and strapped a mattress to the roof, Joad-like. I crashed on the sprung pull-out sofa of my newly-married best friend. After a few languid weeks in their garden apartment, during which I taught myself macramé, I found employment at a liquor store in suburban Maryland. I claimed knowledge of wine, based on my tenure with the liquor importer. I thought I was doing okay, moving to and fro, talking of Beaujolais Nouveau, until I misheard a phone order from Happy Rockefeller and sent her a case of Chateau Oo-La-La ’72. The job had lasted a week.

What am I, a swallow? How many times can one return to New Jersey? My parents’ capacity to enable my bleary schemes was losing its resiliency. I spouted one bullshit story after another. Or sulked in my room. My father, stern and unrelentingly helpful, sent me on countless interviews for potential work. He had the will to solve the problem and he marshaled every connection to find a niche for me. Opportunities zoomed by. Life felt tattered and stupid. Decision-making was anathema: resistance merely rote. I had smaller fish to fry. Alcohol had become my morose subtext.

When the house was dark and quiet, I climbed out my bedroom window, sat on the garage roof, drank a six of warm tall boys, flicked the butts of my cigarettes into the shrubbery below, and pissed into the gutter.

 

An old acquaintance invited me to meet him at a bar in SoHo, at the time a brand-new, trendy-by-day/scary-by-night neighborhood. He was in possession of the hair, the chin, and the self-assurance to sell ad space for The Village Voice. He was everything I was not. Everything. After we bullshitted one another for a couple hours, the evening dribbled to a close. Sullen peevishness fired me up the West Side Highway. I rolled down the window and, with the radio full blast, hurtled across the George Washington Bridge with one eye closed. I made it to my hometown when my vision finally gave out. Two oncoming headlights multiplied into three, then five –

The impact of the glancing collision knocked me into the steering wheel. No one was hurt. Oddly, I wasn’t even breathalyzed. After a certain unquantifiable number of beers, I wore an unmistakable facial expression my friends dubbed – The V’ed-out Look. I would ratchet my brow into brutal corrugation in an attempt to prevent my eyelids from slamming shut. Despite the effort, the lids always drooped perilously. The police seemed more interested in the younger kids in the other car. Perhaps shock and bewilderment overrode The V’ed-out Look. But, Officer, I have a record, I thought, I hit them. In any event, the cops drove me home. I put myself to bed. There were no charges, but the Barracuda was scrap. The accident was a wake-up call. I had to acknowledge that my driving had consequences. My brilliant solution was to sell the car for parts and move into Manhattan.

Walk. Don’t Walk.

Simple enough.

 

I found myself a one-bedroom in East 80s, a walk-up not far from my college friends, Shelley and Mitch. A satisfyingly hermetic chamber, daylight never penetrated. It had been loopily decorated by some colorblind person who had ill-advisedly taken the brown acid. Matted shag carpeting the color and aroma of soil covered the floor and the walls bore an earth tone finish that looked like very coarse sandpaper and would draw blood if you happened to brush against it. The wallpaper in the bathroom was foiled and flocked; in the kitchen, it was just foiled. My trusty old brown beanbag chair fit the color scheme perfectly. Here was place I could call home.

I had a real job at last. I assisted a freelance art director, a man of persuasive charm and spotty follow-through. Engaged to help with his Bicentennial art exhibit and book project called 200 Years of American Illustration, I was essentially responsible for fielding phone calls and documenting the art that came in. The boss was hardly ever around, which allowed me to recover from my hangover, work on the crossword, and write long, fussy letters to my distant drinking buddies. In the afternoon, people involved in his many projects might appear and it would fall to me to entertain them, while hedging as to the probability of his return. One such person was Trudi Farber, an animated redhead with an easy laugh who was illustrating a series of elementary school workbooks. Sometimes she actually waited to see if he’d show up and the two of us gabbed the afternoon away. Months went by before I asked her out.

Meanwhile, I hung out with Shelley and Mitch, smoking hash and listening to Bowie and Mott the Hoople or smoking hash and watching basketball on their twelve-inch black-and-white TV. The Knicks’ backcourt was a thing of beauty. These evenings dwindled when Mitch entered a master’s program and disappeared entirely when Shelley took a bartending gig at Tittle Tattle, a singles bar on a strip of First Avenue in the 60s.

Shelley had been hired solely on the basis of her tits, which were great. This fact she exploited proudly. Once or twice on weekday nights, I drifted into Tittle Tattle around eleven to lurk in the corner where the bar met the wall, cadging drinks and glaring at the sports celebs and pimp-ish guys who tried to get her to lean over the bar. I could sit amidst all that lubricated hubbub, not talk to anyone, and still feel part of the world, the microscopic, resentful, lonesome, pathetic part. Most nights, though, I was perfectly content to nestle in my beanbag chair surrounded by umber waves of shag; a Miller beer and a heaping ashtray close at hand.

I threw a party in my empty new apartment (the one after the brown one) and invited Tru to meet a few of my friends. The beanbag chair had pride of place in the barren landscape, along with the component stereo with a broken turntable. The group sat on the floor, drinking beer and smoking reefer. For some forgotten reason, possibly related to my obligations as host, I dug a loaf of white bread out of the fridge. I ripped a slice in half and crammed the pieces behind my glasses. “Hey. I’m Stevie Wonder-Bread,” I said and did an awful imitation of the guy. What did Trudi think? Was I trying to be funny? Was I acting like an asshole preemptively? Funny or lame, humiliating or ironic; any interpretation was welcome. It turned out she didn’t give a shit.

I skulked home to New Jersey and did more consuming of guilt than beer. I mowed lawns, tried caddying at the country club, all the while plotting to get out of the house, but I was stuck upstairs. My parents found me mystifying and infuriating. After one of our brief, interminable dinners, the three of us at cardinal points of the dining table picking at casserole, my father announced that he and I would take a drive. Fifteen minutes later, he pulled the car to the side of the road, and, in the phosphorescent gloom, we had the talk. What did I want? What did I think my strong points were? Did I think I had a ‘problem’? How could he help? This called for powers of self-assessment I didn’t have or want. My heart pounded. Where were my cigarettes? I hated everything.

A good-paying job with a liquor importer and distributor fell into my lap. I commuted to the Park Avenue headquarters where I served as a factotum. The most onerous thing I had to do was wear a Mr. Peanut costume at the Christmas party to celebrate the company’s acquisition by a huge snack food conglomerate, a case of the hors d’oeuvre consuming the cocktail. That spring, the Teamsters went on strike, shutting down the Jersey warehouse operation, so it was up to us white-collar guys to keep the operation flowing. I rode shotgun in a panel truck, delivering cases of liquor throughout New York City. We made all the stops, from the spotless loading dock at the Waldorf-Astoria to the plexiglass-reinforced liquor stores of Spanish Harlem. Other times, I worked fulfillment, packing orders in the warehouse, loading trucks and boxcars.

One special day, I helped make a batch of gin. In the recesses of the warehouse, the old still occupied its own room, which it seemed to have completely outgrown, as if it were a monster adopted when it was cute and only the size of a tuba. Crowning the great, copper boiler, like an upturned umbrella of gold, was the alembic for the juniper berries, orange peel, ginger, and other spices. From this gleaming hopper, helixes of copper piping sprouted and spun, looping down into the receiving vat. Grain alcohol percolated in the boiler, sending vapors through the botanicals and up into the piping, where it condensed, and out poured mother’s milk.

 

I told everyone I was saving my money so I could return to college and finish my degree. I reapplied and was accepted, but, in truth, all I wanted was to go back and finish my drinking. Under my parents’ roof, I certainly couldn’t drink the way I was used to. Taking occasional long weekends to go get fucked up with my friends didn’t fill the need. Sleeping in my childhood bedroom was taking a toll. Self-restraint imposed by circumstance was one of those ‘sounds right’ sobering-up techniques that drunks use all the time when contriving to bring calamity down around their heads.

One spring night, I went to local bar to have a friendly beer with a friend of a friend, and when he didn’t show, I let it rip. Six, seven, eight shots, chased by a Bud or three. I swallowed the last of my beer, pushed back from the bar, and fumbled toward the bathroom. When I returned, my stool had been taken. The bartender shrugged. I could make an issue. Fuck it. I left.

My better angels told me how very fried I was; so, taking precautions, I cinched myself into the seatbelts and aimed the Barracuda up the middle of the road. If I kept my foot off the accelerator, I could exploit the forward momentum provided by the idling engine, while focusing all my efforts on navigation. If I shut one eye, I could make the white line behave. I rolled along deep in thought, until I heard a knock on the window. Applying the brake, I swung my gaze to the left.

“Can I see your license and registration?”

“Oh. Yeah. Um. Sure, Officer. Yes. First, let me get out of these seatbelts.”

After a struggle with the buckle –

“Step out of the vehicle, sir.”

I had been arrested for drunk driving by an officer on foot. Apparently, I was tracking past the police station at considerably less than five miles an hour. My license was suspended for six months.

The State of New Jersey insisted on educating me about the consequences of mixing booze with cars. I had to attend a series of classes at Bergen Pines, a mental hospital in the next town over. It dominated the suburban plain like an emerald city made of ochre bricks. You could see it for miles; thank goodness. I hitchhiked and walked the distance there and back. They lectured us on the alcohol-related automotive tragedies and showed movies featuring the Jaws of Life. Somehow, I have no recollection of mandatory AA meetings. The experience was gruesome and quickly forgotten; another reason to get the hell out of the Garden State.

 

With all the cunning at my command I kept my back-to-school balls in the air. It involved an exhausting and preposterous excuse-and-promise pantomime. I made lists and solemn vows, waving my hands through the air for good measure. My enthusiasm was pretty convincing and I believed it myself. “It’ll be a good thing, not having a car. I’ll stay out of trouble, because I won’t be able to leave campus.” I would find a nice, quiet dorm and walk everywhere.

As soon as of my folks’ taillights winked out over the horizon, I exhaled and hitchhiked down to The Roc.

The less said about the subsequent year the better. Nothing was the same. There really wasn’t much difference between misery in the dorm and misery in New Jersey, except for the depth of field and the volume of distractions. I was simply there to drink. I sagged into a self-fulfilling prophecy depression. Yes, I was too fucked up. There could be no concentrating on anything like schoolwork, so I loaded up on Lit. courses to keep the academic pressure on.

My classmates were long gone, taking with them my social context, my reputation, and my sense of humor. People didn’t seem to like me much; consequently, I drank in my room, even when I got my car back. Winter lasted forever. I always kept a six-pack of bottled beer outside my window, where it froze and thawed and froze again, losing all flavor and carbonation. The perfect loser’s beverage.

My city connections enabled me to score some excellent pot, which scored me temporary campus cred, especially with the stingy, late-night, pothead crowd. I didn’t consider this to be dealing: I was acting as a host. Many nights I got high by myself, cueing up classical LPs on the turntable – the 2001 soundtrack, the Brandenburg Concertos, the Rite of Spring. The pounding of Stravinsky at three o’clock in the morning brought down the wrath of the other guys on the corridor, as opposed to blasting The Who’s Live at Leeds, which could be slept through effortlessly.

Finally, I closed the book on the protracted academic farce, let the school year end with a whimper, and got my ass back to New Jersey.

 

I thought that majoring in alcohol and minoring in psychedelics would enable me to create and sustain an identity. My misfortune was to confuse an identity with a personality. In addition, drinking gallons of beer, smoking bales of marijuana, and ingesting dazzling quantities of LSD reinforced the rationalization that if I ignored anything long enough, it would go away. As far as my academic and social efforts were concerned, I had chosen a path of no resistance. Over time, the strategy resolved into a state of being. I would try to stay as fucked up as I could for as long as I could.

The source of my restless discontent lay in adhesive family history. Accidents of fate, old grievances, and the gravitational pull of isolation were generating more and more self-destructive steam as time went on. The paradox of alcohol is that it both soothes and perpetuates this. So, when Dad was appointed to the college’s Board of Trustees in the fall of my sophomore year, it transformed the administration from mere agents of the patriarchy into goons for the old man. It wasn’t the kind of thing I would ever talk about. My friends didn’t give a shit or probably even know. I imagined every member of the faculty was aware of exactly who I was. I’d be goddamned if I’d show up in one of their classrooms.

 

The school calendar was organized around three spectacular Houseparty Weekends. Every couple months, the student body slowly turned away from the grind and focused on the business of getting epically bombed. If you had the wherewithal to remain ambulatory after thirty-six hours of steady drinking and made it to Deke’s Sunday morning gin-and-juice, you possessed super-human stamina; what was referred to as ‘hair.’ If not, if the Saturday parties laid you low, you were considered ‘hurt.’

The carpet had been rolled up and stowed in a corner of the dining room along with a pile of mismatched furniture. Meanwhile, with all deliberate glee, a toxic brew of orange juice, grapefruit juice and grain alcohol was being blended in a garbage pail. Morning bright and painfully astringent, it tasted transcendent at the first sip. After a cup of the stuff, you were drunk and after two, you were sopping and beside yourself with pleasure.

The hired band huddled in front of the fireplace: their amps were huge. In no time, everyone was dancing with everyone else or no one in particular. Before you knew it, it devolved into a form of mud wrestling. Sunshine streamed through the casement windows.

My balance abandoned me all of a sudden. I skidded in the sludge, landed on my ass, bounced up, spun around, and belly-flopped. A strange knee came up to meet my forehead. Laughing, I touched my eyebrow and came away with bloody fingers. The infirmary stitched me up and back I went to the party.

 

Late sophomore year, I set my sights on securing a place in the campus drinking society. It consisted of eleven junior and seniors from all the cool fraternities. Called Nous Onze, it was pronounced ‘New Zones’, which accurately described its purpose. This would be my finest achievement: at last, common acknowledgement of the one thing I knew in my heart I was good at. But the fools blackballed me. Geddo told me later that some of the seniors believed I was just too fucked up. Too fucked up? Despite the lack of endorsement, I showed up at their parties the following year anyway. The skeptics had graduated, along with their misgivings.

Nous Onze presumed to be an outfit with class. We wore sport coats and ties. We drank cocktails made with top shelf liquor. We invited faculty members and paid attention to our dates. A regular was an associate professor from the Religion Department. He fancied himself a smooth operator and he very much enjoyed the company of football players and hockey players. They played along, as religion was the favorite major among scholar/athletes, for its requirements were hilariously easy. The good professor invariably got sloshed, came on to one of the guys, was rejected, and toddled off into the night.

One Nous Onze party, the party adjourned to a room upstairs to sample someone’s new pot, something ‘gold.’ This tipped the prof into a stupor immediately. One toke over the line. He stretched out on the bed, while photos were snapped of him surrounded by smiling young women, his head in one girl’s lap and feet in another’s. The party would end up at the Shoe and ultimately the Deke basement.

 

As a practical matter, a person had to wake up in the daylight in order to go to classes. Why I was never asked to “take a leave of absence to reassess your priorities, Bob” remains a mystery. Reading, I loved unconditionally, but setting pen to paper proved hopeless. When some course required me to write an essay, the effort usually resulted in painfully constipated bullshit. Turned in late. Or never.

My standards skittered downward, forming a base from which to plummet. Most young drunks flame out pretty quickly, noisily, and with more than a little hostility, but it was my dumb luck that the 1969/70 school year ended in chaos. The student strike following the invasion of Cambodia and the killings at Kent State and Jackson State threw finals and thus year-end grades into the hopper. Everybody who needed to – skated.

All the while, I participated in an emotionally convoluted, not very original, long-distance dynamic with my father. He was impossible and righteous, so I would be impossible and pathetic. He pursued; I retreated. Yet there was no confrontation, at least no confrontation with consequences. I had him wrapped around my middle finger. If my luck held, I might get away without anything ever being resolved.

I dared not jeopardize my rationale, my identity as ‘V.’ – omnipresent drunk, academic fuck-up, bridge player, and … pizza maker.

 

In a strip mall on the way out of town, a new restaurant/bar called The Clinton House appeared in the fall of my senior year. The Shoe now had some serious competition. The place had a pair of owners, Bobby and Richie, from Utica ten miles away. They served up heavy Italian-American hospitality. Their jukebox favored Sinatra, Nat Cole, and Jimmy McGriff. “Here Comes the Sun” was one of the few nods to current taste. The Harvey Wallbanger was the latest drink, a Screwdriver garnished with a splash of that heinous yellow liqueur from that towering bottle. The kitchen stayed open late, serving sandwiches and pizza. They developed a robust late night college business – me.

Richie needed a break after ten hours in the kitchen and, sensing I guess my willing distractibility, put my untried culinary skills to work on the late shift, ten o’clock to 1am. I assembled meatball heroes and pepperoni pizzas, cultivating a reckless tendency to add a fourth meatball to the sandwiches. Still, I was dependable – the way someone who really ought to be studying for midterms could be dependable; dependable the way someone drinking for free could be dependable. Some Saturdays, Richie asked me to pitch in as sous-chef, so I’d show up in the afternoon to prep, then work the crazy dinner as well as my late night shift. After a night like that, I slept for twelve hours straight. I intuitively understood the usefulness of diversion in the face of responsibility. I could justify fucking off because I had a job.

I had a job so I could drink.

I woke up whenever I woke up. I shuffle off to the Campus Center, where I sipped black coffee, smoked one Winston after another, and completed The New York Times crossword puzzle. With that accomplished, I adjourned to the Deke basement to watch Star Trek reruns and drink flat beer. Then it would be dinnertime, which was followed by two or three hours of semi-serious bridge. When the game broke up, I would wander back to the dorm to read Balzac or Twain until the Pub opened or I was due at The Clinton House.

 

There were moments of breathless exhilaration, too: flashes of glory. Joy, even. In the spring, when the glaciers finally retreated, we took to lounging on the grassy slope in front of the Deke House, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. The slope faced the building, which resembled an enormous, half-timbered stage set. Between the grass and the House, the brothers parked their automobiles.

On sunny afternoons, braver Dekes worked on their tans on the flat dormer above a third floor bathroom. It was an acrobatic vantage point. Getting to this perch meant backing your ass out the bathroom window, inching your way across the face of the building to the dormer’s juncture with the roof itself, and then hauling yourself up onto its surface. There you could bask to your heart’s content.

Not content to simply bake on the little tarpaper rectangle, I ventured off over the roof, exploring. I scampered up and down the roof’s pitches with simian agility. Over the ridgeline the hazy panorama of the Mohawk Valley stretched to infinity. I disappeared behind a gable and popped back into view yards away. I exaggerated the instability of my footing. From down on the grass, ‘oohs’ and ‘whoas’ and ‘Jesus, Vs’ wafted skyward. I was close to heaven, released from earthly bonds. Thirty feet below – asphalt.

 

Another warm and serene afternoon in late May, I sat on the grassy slope with some underclassmen, drinking tap beer from a two-gallon Almaden bottle, while my classmates graduated in the hockey rink. For the first time ever, I couldn’t get drunk. Usually, I drank with measured gusto so as not to be rendered protoplasmic before the bulk of the ‘fun’ was over, but that day I was drinking was if my life depended on it. I remember the weariness and bitterness and I can still feel the panic. My parents were angry and worried: my friends, pitying or oblivious. For me, it was an out-of-body experience.

What happened was like one of those transitions in the movies where the new scene bumps the old one off the screen with a horizontal left-to-right wipe. College was college was college, then I blinked and college was gone.

Around 3:30am, Ray would declare ‘last call’ and sell us a six-pack of Carling Black Label to go. The party, by now it was a party, adjourned to the Deke basement, but first, the women had to be deposited back at their dorms. We would then sit on the bar; because there were no stools and the floor was so sticky you’d adhere permanently if you stood still for three minutes. The indestructible juker played in the other room. Conversation usually revolved around pussy and no-pussy. No-pussy is the drunken young man’s favorite topic: it’s salacious, fraught, and can be spun out forever. Not getting any is the bond that holds all male relationships together and “When a Man Loves a Woman” is its theme song.

Or the party might migrate upstairs to someone’s room, The Who or Santana blasting. Smoking pot when you were wasted always seemed like a genius idea, but it only further attenuated what had become a long, increasingly muffled, night. We might amp up the no-pussy discussion by dropping the needle on “Satisfaction” or go all psychedelic, pass around pipefuls of hashish, and listen to The Moody Blues. After an album side or two, the talk slipped into monosyllables and activity was limited to the passing of the joint or the pipe.

One night, late, I was in someone’s loud and smoky room leaning against the doorjamb, sliding slowly down, when some guy grabbed me and hoisted me onto a chest of drawers. This new perspective was inspirational. I crouched and glared. The circulation of the joint sometimes paused in front of me.

“Oh, very nice. Take it. Here. Take a fuckin’ hit. Okay, don’t.”

And it passed me by.

“What the fuck’re you doin’, anyway?”

I lowered my gaze to my interrogator. “I am … a vulture,” I said. I felt a spinal vibration. No, I was The Vulture. I stated this with all the gravitas of the deeply stoned, while in fact what I was doing was channeling Snoopy perched on his doghouse roof imitating a bird of prey and thinking predatory thoughts. I was merely wasted. But I had claimed everyone’s attention and declared myself.

 

By the time school started up again in the fall of 1969, I was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon, a seasoned pot smoker, and I was V. Vulture had been distilled to its essential consonant. I could roll an efficient joint and always had an ounce of my own. Geddo and I shared a room in Deke House. He had a steady girlfriend, a pretty blonde with thick curls, who he imported from a women’s college two hours away on the occasional weekend. They would take to the top bunk immediately, while I lit out for the Shoe. As the sun was coming up, I slid into the bottom bunk and passed out.

The war in Southeast Asia had loomed in the foreground for so long it became part of the cultural furniture. Neil and Buzz strolled on the moon, then opted to fly on back to Earth with Mike. The entire summer had been preoccupied with Woodstock, three days of peace and music. Rock ’n roll was life’s soundtrack. It was brilliant and personal, cushioning the tumult with a backbeat. Was I a hippie? I wore bellbottoms and had scraggly hair. Hell, I even strung my own love beads.

The fires of the distant world cast a sympathetic glow upon our tiny rebellions. So it seemed like a good idea to me to try to sell five hundred tabs of acid on a campus of maybe eight hundred students. During Thanksgiving break, a friend from prep school talked me into it. He fronted me the purple barrels and I became a campus entrepreneur. I sucked at it. “Wanna trip?” Is that what you say? I managed to get rid of two hundred somehow and kept the remainder in a baggie outside my window. I sometimes fronted the acid on my end, too. No one would ever get paid. Every time the rumor of a bust blew through, I’d retrieve the LSD from its hiding place, stick it under the mess of papers in the glove compartment of the Barracuda, and park the car on the other side of campus. Smart guy. No bust ever came down and after a half dozen false alarms we quit reacting.

Because I had a car and could be talked into getting behind the wheel for any reason, I was the designated driver when we went to score weed in quantity. We’d take off under cover of darkness with beers between our legs and drive east to Dean Junior College or Bennington. That’s where enterprising middle-class kids distributed pot by the kilo. I usually got an ounce for my trouble, which was no trouble at all.

 

I just loved LSD; the perilous colors, the insane discombobulation, and the sense of exhausted accomplishment the next day. It was something I never did by myself, always with a buddy or two. Occasionally, a whole crew of Dekes would drop together and tromp through the snowy woods like a gibbering battalion or spend hours playing a spontaneous word association game called ‘The Third World Game’ with rules we reinvented each trip. On one particularly psychedelic evening, we got out a box of crayons and took turns covering the wall of somebody’s room with the mutations that Grace Slick and Paul Kantner’s unborn child would be heir to. It was very colorful.

“Gills!”

“Three rows of tiny breasts!”

“Specialized hair!”

“Specialized hair? Oh, jesus. Is there any more beer?”

“I’ll go,” I said. “Anyone wanna ride with me?”

“Are you fuckin’ kidding me, V? You’re tripping.”

“Fuck you,” I said, digging for my keys. “Anybody?”

Heading down into town, College Hill Road stretched out before me for a good half mile. It was lit by streetlamps that cast alternating semicircles of sodium vapor light as far as the eye could see. The effect of the drug transformed the street into a molten straightaway with huge incandescent moguls like some bizarro ski slope. I brought my skills to bear on this challenge and began skirting the hallucinatory hillocks in great sweeping arcs. Soon, another set of lights, bright red ones, approached from behind. I pulled over to the middle of the road. The cop gently guided me to the side, told me to lock the vehicle, and drove me back to campus.

Minutes later, back in the Room of the Nightmare Baby …

“Hey guys, let’s go to the Pub.”

 

LSD often gave rise to situations of stupefying complexity. A fraternity brother, Owen, called over Christmas break with an excellent proposition – Would I like to see Jimi Hendrix at the Fillmore East on New Year’s Eve? “Meet us there,” he said, “I’ve got an extra ticket.”

Somehow, I found him. It surprised me to see him with a bunch of his friends. We merged with the mob of stoned people milling out front in a state of mildly agitated happiness and I gave in to the magic. “Here, V.” and he handed me a ticket, “And a tab of sunshine for now and one for later.” I threw back the pills. We passed through the doors and ambled toward the stairs to the balcony. “Bummer, man,” said the usher to me, “You’re through that door,” indicating with his thumb. “Hey, Owen!” I shouted at his retreating back. He turned, “Look, V. It’s a really great seat.”

It was a great seat, right in the middle of the orchestra. As I sidled down the row, I noticed that on every seat was a small metal tambourine. The acid kicked in. I sat there with the noisemaker in my lap as the crowd poured in around me. The house lights went down. The Band of Gypsys took the stage and Hendrix’s guitar ripped a hole in the universe. The light show began to pulsate. The audience rose as one. Except for me, nailed to the chair by hallucinogens and a toy tambourine. The top of my head disappeared. My tender consciousness scattered like confetti. Afterwards I couldn’t find Owen either, but I located my car and drove miraculously back home to New Jersey.

My father was waiting up for me. I don’t remember the gist of our conversation; all I do remember is clutching the tambourine as if it held the secret of human existence.

The drinking age in New York State was eighteen and so was I. This was most excellent, for freshman existence was a trampoline of anxiety – new people, new expectations, new responsibilities. Fraying parental resentments were all that tethered me to the planet. I made some friends on my dorm hall and even made some classes. And I made the remarkable discovery that getting shit-faced drunk was something that could be enjoyed with impunity and regularity.

That time of year, the campus glowed. It got dark earlier and earlier, but afternoons were long and lazy. Light from the late sun came at such an angle as to set the nineteenth century stone buildings afire. The red and yellow trees burned like crucibles against a steel sky. We sat on the grass and watched them shoot and reshoot scenes for a Hollywood movie. A book written by a graduate was being spun into an eccentric undergrad romance. It was a bizarre and dazzling pantomime. Having the college experience dramatized before my eyes compounded the sensation that I now inhabited some amber-colored snowglobe.

Beneath the dining hall down a short flight of concrete steps, the campus pub, The Pub, lay in wait. Its notable features consisted of Utica Club on tap at one end, a jukebox at the other, and a cigarette machine in between. Even when things were hopping, around 10:30 or 11 o’clock, it was pretty sedate. If you were seen at The Pub later than that, it meant you had no money and no car, those being your most obvious deficits. Every once in a while, a pack of upperclassmen would swoop in like predators on the veldt, ensnaring freshmen women and, as an afterthought, trolling for potential fraternity pledges. After a beer or two, they would vanish with their prey, off to some local saloon, leaving the Pub to its utilitarian mopeyness.

Joining a fraternity was a highly desirable outcome. All life revolved around the Houses. My new best friend was a mover-groover, socially adept, and visually distinguished due to his grand nose and prominent height, 6’4”. His full name was G. Edward Halliday, but everyone called him Geddy or Geddo. He could talk to anybody and seemed taken with the idea of having a sidekick. Hanging out with him, I would get swept up in the frat boy dragnet, preferably by guys from Delta Kappa Epsilon. Deke was a self-proclaimed superior fraternity; half hockey players and half acidheads, dedicated to sardonic indolence and united by beer. With Geddo, I was always able to score a ride out to the bar much, much classier than The Roc. It was called The Shoe.

 

The Horseshoe Bar and Grill stood at the top of a rise, surrounded by half an acre of dirt parking. As we cruised up the highway, its neon horseshoe glimmered through the trees and utility lines. Half-drunk passengers in the backseat would whisper, “Shoe. Shoe. Shoe.” The bar occupied the first floor of a converted farmhouse. Ray and Connie, the proprietors, lived upstairs. They coddled the college crowd with cold frosties and cheeseburgers, greasy gray disks sealed in white American cheese. A mug of UC cost a quarter.

“I’ll have a draft, Ray. And change for the cigarette machine.”

The Shoe’s pool table was better lit and not as cramped as The Roc’s. Blue chalk cubes and quarters lined its perimeter. Cue sticks arced through the haze, threatening to bean you on the head or whack you in the nuts. Pool was not really my game. Occasionally though, a window of implacable competence might open, usually during the second beer, where I could win a game or even run the table. It was important, then, to put down the cue and retire gracefully. Trying to hold the table was a bad idea. Public triumphs were rare and fleeting, but that didn’t really matter because there were other distractions.

In the Shoe’s smoky limbo, conversation came easy. I goofed around with the girls who’d been stranded by the guys watching the ballgame at the bar or with the couples for whom a night out at a divey establishment was considered a date. I teased Connie, too. She acted like the attention was a nuisance, like she’d rather be frying hamburgers. She’d pull in her chin, try not to smile, and glow despite her makeup.

The Shoe was home. Yes. It was a little house with a set of watchful parents; parents whose sole desire was for you to drink as much beer as you possibly could. We had the place to ourselves most of the time: no hassles about being hippies or assholes or from the college. I don’t remember any locals being part of the nightly scene. Why would they want to?

Bars in Oneida County didn’t close until 4am. You could spend six hours drinking and smoking and playing pool and have change left from a ten-dollar bill. Starting sophomore year I drove my own car, a green Plymouth Barracuda. Not the muscle car that came a few years later, but its second incarnation after the original fastback Valiant, snazzy in kind of a pitiful way. I could get myself to the Shoe. I became such a steady customer that Connie and Ray began sending me Christmas cards. They got my address off my checks. To this day, when the subject of my drinking past comes up, my father most remembers this. “… and Bob got a Christmas card from his college saloon!”

A year later, I was launched, becoming collegiate myself. G forces pinned me to the back seat of the Chrysler as we climbed College Hill Road. We pulled up to the freshman dorm and unpacked the car.

“No thanks, Mom,” I blushed, “I can make the bed later.”

“Come on now, Robert. I can do it in a jiffy.”

“No, Mom, really. Thanks.”

“Here. Take a corner.”

Dad shook my hand and I pecked Mom on the cheek. Good-bye. Next thing you know, I was weightless.

Minutes after they drove away, I hitchhiked down the hill with my new roommate to a bar called The Roc. The Roc was in a crooked little house painted red with a sign outside missing the ‘k’. The door opened with a gasp. Stepping inside, the only sound to be heard was the shuffle of talk and the murmur of the jukebox; the only movement came from the shadows stirring in the cigarette smoke around the pool table. A second ago, it had been the middle of the afternoon.

A bartender stood behind the bar and a three-gallon jar of pickled eggs sat on the bar. It was hard to tell which was which.

“What are you boys having?”

There were hundreds of summer camps in Maine in the ’60s. It was a seasonal gulag for middle-class white kids, ages eight to sixteen. To be shipped off to the woods by my parents for eight whole weeks was a consummation devoutly to be wished. Hiking down the road, rowing a rowboat, lying in the grass staring the sky, not a parental cloud anywhere. I spent ten summers at the one camp, two rows of cabins on a hill overlooking one of Maine’s perfect lakes; eight of those years as a camper, and two as a junior counselor.

My first summer on staff, I abruptly ended up in charge of the entire swim program due to some staff shake-up I can’t recall. Though I made a fool of myself in all land-based sporting endeavors, I was a really good swimmer with a knack for helping older kids who were ashamed about their inability to swim. I had patience and a whistle and sunglasses and I got extremely tan. I wrote my mom and asked her to send me a pair of white swim trunks, the really snug, square-cut kind. I showed off on the dock in that happy, self-conscious, “I have a whistle” way.

Counselors got one day off a week: they left camp after breakfast and were expected back at midnight. I took my days off with my three greatest friends: Phil, Ned, and Jimmy. Typically, the four of us would water ski behind Jimmy’s outboard till we could hardly stand up, then go check out a movie in Portland. Towards the end of the summer, our day off got rescheduled so that we shared the day with Phil’s brother, a senior counselor. He was an upperclassman at Amherst, breathtakingly cool and a little condescending in a way that could gratefully be interpreted as intimate. That very night he was hosting a cookout across the lake. And after water skiing, we could go.

The little, gray cottage was surrounded by cars and enchantment. R&B and barbecue smoke beckoned, pushing back the gloom of the overhanging hemlocks. In a pressed, short-sleeved madras shirt, khaki shorts, and Weejuns with no socks, I took that apprehensive step into the glamorous world of people three or four years older than me: college kids. The older counselors were drinking Schlitz from bottles or a concoction of gin and grape Kool-Aid, the camp version of a Purple Jesus. There were hamburgers and hotdogs, too, but no one paid any attention. I was offered a white enameled camping cup full of the devilish purple brew. Underneath the ‘grape’ flavor and the juniper wallop of the gin, I could taste metal from the chipped rim of the cup. The Temptations spun on the portable record player and “My Girl” insinuated itself through the fun.

I got sunshine on a cloudy day…

I drank a second cup of the Kool-Aid and a third. I’m pretty sure I danced. I know I swayed. The party shut down at 12:30. All of us were going to be late back to camp. The moon was on the rise, huge and throwing shadows. A caravan of half-a-dozen cars crept stealthily, lights out, down the dirt road, past the infirmary and the maintenance shed and into the parking lot. I rolled down the car window, stuck my head out, and hollered at the top of my voice – Wavus Camps SUCKS! – slammed the door, and wobbled off to my cabin. The next day: no puking, no hangover. In the afternoon, the camp director pulled me aside. “Bob, in all the commotion last night, it was your voice I heard. This is a warning. Anything – Anything – happens again; you’ll have to leave.”  My first drunk. I got in trouble, but nothing happened.

I felt my future billow out before me – one long summer in Maine.

 

I love Christmas music.

Phil Spector’s Christmas album, A Christmas Gift for You, was the gateway LP for me. The Ronettes shoved me so far down the slippery slope, I had to come home for Christmas simply because Darlene Love said ‘please.’ The perfect antidote to “Blue Christmas,” “White Christmas,” and other dreary standards, hymns, and carols was Ronnie Spector’s rocking version of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”

Here’s a collection of holiday bibelots of the musical persuasion. Spend this Xmas in heaven. Make them your own.

5 lb. Box of Money – Pearl Bailey

2000 Miles – The Pretenders

All I Want 4 Xmas – Spike Jones

All those Christmas Clichés – Nancy LaMott

Away in a Manger – Celtic Woman

Away in the Manger – Tanya Tucker

Baby, It’s Cold Outside – Ann-Margret & Al Hirt

Back Door Santa – Clarence Carter

BeBop SC – Babs Gonzales

Blue Christmas – Elvis Presley

Blue Christmas – John Holt

Bobby Wants a Puppy Dog for Christmas – Merle Haggard

Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) – U2

Christmas Ain’t Christmas… – Ebonys

Christmas Blues – Dean Martin

Christmas Canon – Trans-Siberian Orchestra

Christmas Celebration – B.B. Lee

Christmas Comes But Once a Year – Marva Wright

Christmas Day – Detroit Junior

Christmas in Dixie – Alabama

Christmas in New Orleans – Louis Armstrong

Christmas Is the Time – Darlene Love

Christmas Island – Andrew Sisters

Christmas on Riverside Drive – August Darnell

Christmas Song – Mel Tormé

The Christmas Song – Ella Fitzgerald

Christmas Wrapping – The Waitresses

Christmastime Is Here – Vince Guaraldi Trio

Ding Dong! Merrily on High – The American Boychoir

Father Christmas – The Kinks

Feliz Navidad – Jose Feliciano

The First Noel – Mahalia Jackson

Frosty the Snowman – The Roches

Gettin’ in the Mood for Christmas – Brian Setzer Orchestra

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen – Manfred Mann

Happy Xmas (War Is Over) – John Lennon

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas – Judy Garland

Holly Jolly Christmas – The Format

I Believe in Christmas Eve – Smokey Robinson & The Miracles

I Believe in Father Christmas – Emerson, Lake & Palmer

I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus – Pete Fountain

I Saw Three Ships – Marianne Faithfull

I Told Santa Claus – Fats Domino

I Want an Alien for Christmas – The Fountains of Wayne

I Want You for Christmas – Russ Morgan & His Orchestra

In the Bleak Midwinter – James Taylor

It Came upon a Midnight Clear – The Roches

It’s a Big Country – Davitt Sigerson

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Xmas – Kate Smith

It’s Xmas Time – Marvin & Johnny

Jingle All the Way – Lena Horne

Jingle Bell Hustle – Wayne Newton

Jingle Bell Rock – Bobby Helms

Jingle Bells – Ray Coniff Singers

Jingle Bells – Glenn Miller

Jingle Bells – The Wiggles

Jingle Bells – The Puppini Sisters

Jingle Jangle – Penguins

Joy to the World – Peas

Kay Thompson’s Jingle Bells – Andy Williams

Last Christmas – Wham!

Let It Snow – Aaron Neville

Let It Snow – The Dixie Cups

Let It Snow – The Rockettes

Let’s Make Christmas Merry Baby – Amos Milburn

Lonely Christmas – The Orioles

Louisiana Christmas Day – Aaron Neville

Make Every Day Xmas for Your Woman – Joe Tex

The Man with the Bag – Kay Starr

A Marshmallow World – Dean Martin

Mary’s Boy Child – Harry Belafonte

Mele Kalikimaka – Poi Dog Pondering

Merry Xmas Baby – Dr. John

Merry Xmas, Baby – Charles Brown

Mr. Santa – Del Rubio Triplets

Must Be Santa – Brave Combo

My Christmas Tree Is Hung with Tears – Sarah Brown

O Christmas Tree – Aretha Franklin

O Holy Night – Dion

O Holy Night – Irma Thomas

Papa Noel – Brenda Lee

Pretty Paper – Roy Orbison

Pretty Paper – Willie Nelson

Ring those Christmas Bells – Peggy Lee

Ring those Christmas Bells – Fred Waring & The Pennsylvanians

Ring those Christmas Bells – Jimmy Sturr

River – Joni Mitchell

Rock ‘n Roll Xmas – George Thorogood

Rockin’ in the Manger – 5 Chinese Brothers

Rudolph, the Red Nose Reindeer – Gene Autry

Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer – The Ventures

Run Rudolph Run – Chuck Berry

Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto – James Brown

Santa Claus Is Back in Town – Elvis Presley

Santa Claus Is Coming to Town – Ella Fitzgerald

Santa Claus, Santa Claus – James Brown

Santa Struts His Stuff – Frozen Tundra & The Whelps

Santa’s Messin’ With the Kid – Eddie C. Campbell

Silent Night – Sinéad O’Connor

Silent Night – Fats Domino

Silent Night – Al Green

Silent Night – Baby Washington

Silent Night – Dresdner Kreuzchor

Silent Night – Frankie Lymon

Silver Bells – Jackie Wilson

Silver Bells – Booker T. & The MGs

Sleigh Ride – Squirrel Nut Zippers

Sleigh Ride – The Late Greats

Sleigh Ride – The Ronettes

Snow – Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye & Rosemary Clooney

Someday at Christmas – Stevie Wonder

Such a Night – Aaron Neville

Thank God It’s Xmas – Queen

Thanks for Christmas – XTC

The Twelve Days of Christmas – Field Music with Kathryn Williams

We Three Kings – The Roches

Welcome Christmas – The Clumsy Lovers

The Wexford Carol – Yo-Yo Ma & Alison Krause

What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve? – Johnny Mathis

White Christmas – Allen Toussaint

White Christmas – Bryn Terfel

White Christmas – The Drifters

Winter Wonderland – Eurythmics

Winter Wonderland – Louis Armstrong

Xmas in Heaven – Billy Ward

Xmas in Heaven – Monty Python

Zan Vévédé – Angélique Kidjo

Zat You, Santa Claus? – Louis Armstrong