Onward and upward: I spent Part 1 writing in general about all this, but here comes the heart of the matter. You may know where this list is headed, as I’ve already addressed what will be entry #20. Here now are the first five of the nineteen other memorable rungs that got me there.
1. Hot Shots Billiard Club, Huntington Station, NY
In almost every way but in height, I tend to be a late bloomer. I didn’t smoke my first cigarette until the end of high school, and even then, my first was arguably not even a cigarette at all: It was a clove, one of those weird things in life that has ever more to do with another’s perception of its user than it does with the user himself. The key bit of trivia here was that it was a puff off the clove being smoked by our class valedictorian as our two groups of friends ran into each other at the pool hall. Incidentally, beyond the many specific things I miss about my hometown and being young especially, one of the general things was running into people I knew, and being happy about it. This happened in college also but the surprise wasn’t as marked as we all went to the same school. And it happens sometimes now, but as Larry David can tell you that’s often more troublesome than pleasant. Back then it seemed all to the good. Anyway, soon after this first one I would start getting actual packs of actual cigarettes, purchased for and to be enjoyed exclusively at the same pool hall. It was not the beginning of a habit, then, it was all compartmentalized enjoyment. We brought home only the smell.
2. Moulin Rouge, Paris, France
About a year later, after my freshman year of college, I went for three weeks with two friends to Europe. We were all 18, which seems just impossibly young now. We spent a week in Paris before venturing elsewhere clockwise. On a day we spent in Montmartre we visited the Moulin Rouge, because we were three 18-year-old guys. We were promised nudity and were not disappointed. We had seats at a table all the way at the back of the place. I remember red everywhere, red seats, but a white tablecloth. We drank Heineken out of bottles and had brought cigarettes for the evening. It was fun, to be sure, but I remember also wanting to play it cool, not trying too hard to do so, but to see the experience not as giggly college students but as men for whom this was all just a regular part of life, nothing seedy, nothing very special. A friend of mine sat across the table from me and was having trouble lighting a cigarette, in my eyes doing it too mechanically and not naturally enough. I announced condescendingly, “I’ll show you how to be cool,” reached for the matches, and knocked over a full bottle of Heineken.
3. Montreux, Switzerland
About a week later, the tablecloth had well dried and we’d made our way through the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany before arriving in Montreux, Switzerland. A prime inspiration for the entire trip was to make a pilgrimage to the Freddie Mercury statue in Montreux (details possibly forthcoming). The first thing we did off the train was to stop in and get a bottle of vodka for the afternoon. We later walked along the boardwalk while the Montreux Jazz Festival was going on, drinking vodka right out of the bottle and impressing at least two girls, which was all right. But before we did that, we stopped at our hotel to drop off the bags and to do some shots and to smoke a little. There’s an extant photograph not in my possession of me, deep in thought, vodka in one hand, cigarette in the other. If I’m not mistaken I am wearing light blue jeans, sneakers and a t-shirt announcing my onetime participation in a baseball tournament. Clearly I was not a boy, not yet a man.
4. University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana
My trip to Europe was a thorough success. I returned with not only souvenirs but also a grasp of the wider world at large, the willingness to have let myself grow a goatee, a confidence that has not shined as brightly since, and whatever mix of that and mystery it takes to earn a girlfriend, a theretofore impossible task which I completed just weeks later. Going back to college that fall for my sophomore year was exciting for that and several other reasons: a new major (film studies vs. finance, a life-defining/shattering change) and also an appetite for the fun things that the lion’s share of America’s youth had begun to enjoy years and years prior, most specifically cigarettes and alcohol. Both of those things were plentiful in our trip out to Notre Dame for the then-annual football game. There was just an embarrassing amount of fun to be had beginning with the bus ride, right through the drinking games and eleven beers of that Saturday morning, eventually curbed by the historic nap I took through three quarters of the game itself. In there somewhere was our group on campus, watching their marching band do their thing, someone having snapped a picture of me taking a drag in my jacket and scarf in blissfully ignorant happiness.
5. Lower Campus, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
It could have been all the museums and churches I dragged my friends to on that trip to Europe, or all the movies I was looking forward to watching in my new major, but I’d really given myself over to my artistic side in the fall of 2000. The goatee, shaved for the visit to St. Peter’s, was as fully back as possible. I’d already begun to succumb to the poetry bug that bit me the previous spring, the same bug which would ultimately conquer me, divert me, distract me almost for good two years later, a deep but apparently passing obsession. But there was also the girl. And for this girl, I would write poetry, some of the less terrible stuff I was writing at the time. I had an image in my mind, of me sitting at one of the tables outside the dining hall next to my dorm, pack of cloves (gah) on the table, one burning in my left hand, pen in my right, paper in front of me filling up with the structured words that would phrase originally what she’d already meant to me. The realization was hardly as poetic: The weather had turned by the time I went ahead and wrote the damn thing, a Donne-inspired comparison of our separation (she was going to a school hours away) to planets circling each other. I finally found time at night, the seating area having turned into a wind tunnel, my fucking clove staying only barely lit. My jacket blocked some of the cold air but none of the emotion, as she’d visit me days later and I’d get the twofold pleasure of her reading the poem and liking it as I held her surreally close to me in bed there in Vanderslice 204.