Smoke Filled the Apartment & While Me & Dave Tried to Put Out the Fire, the Girls Opened the Double-Hung Windows...

Previously, Part 18: It Was 1978 & I Was Partying My Way Through College Like Everyone Else...

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Back in high school, my friend Dave and I smoked a lot of pot. It was the '70s, we weren't the only ones. When he enlisted in the Marines and didn't stop, they sent him home. After being accepted at Boston State, he moved into a small one-bedroom apartment in the Fens not far from me. 

He kept a 357 magnum in a drawer next to his bed, a big fucking gun he referred to as his "heater." Occasionally, he'd fire it out his fourth-story window at nothing in particular. When I told him he was fuckin crazy and that he was gonna get himself arrested, he just laughed and told me not to be "such a pussy…"

Dave and I had been friends since fifth grade. When we were kids, me, him, and another kid from the neighborhood delivered the Patriot Ledger. We were paperboys. The Ledger was always running contests for paperboys. If you could get a certain number of new customers, you won trips. We went out at night with our manager, in his delivery van, to try to sign up new customers.

The three of us won a trip to Washington, DC, and traveled there in a Greyhound bus full of paperboys and two chaperones who drank the entire weekend and couldn't care less what we were doing. We were twelve years old and running through the streets of DC without adult supervision. I slipped running down the stairs of the Jefferson Memorial and ripped one of the knees on the new pair of suit pants my mother bought me for the trip. It was 1968.

When Dave and I won a trip to Paragon Park, they wouldn't let him ride the roller coaster because he wasn't tall enough. Dave was a small kid, but a perfect example of "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog." He was a tough kid who could get up in someone's face if he had to.  

Dave's girlfriend Alison was from Sharon, too, and the two of them partied with me and Susan a lot. One night, we were partying in my apartment, and I decided to take out my blender and mix Orgasms, which are White Russians sprinkled with Amaretto. Alison was gulping them down like milkshakes, even after I warned her of their potency. Three liquor drinks can sneak up on you in a hurry. I kept filling her glass until she got shitfaced. We all got pretty drunk.

Alison was eyeing the marble fireplace and asked me to start a fire. I explained that the realty company told me not to use it. It was in my lease. Besides, I didn't have any firewood.

Dave had a brilliant idea. He suggested I burn my old Adirondack chair, the one my friend Donny gave me when I moved into the boarding house in East Walpole. We were all very drunk, and it seemed like a reasonable request at the time.

I broke up the chair, threw it in the fireplace, opened the damper, and used some newspaper as kindling. I started the fire and it appeared to be going just fine. But then the apartment began filling with smoke until we could barely see. The chimney wasn't working, and that's why they told me not to use the fireplace. Dave and I sobered up in a hurry and scrambled to put out the fire while Susan and Alison opened the double-hung windows. We were very lucky the smoke alarms didn't go off. I would've been evicted…  

One night, Alison went to the Cask 'n Flagon by Fenway Park with some of her college roommates, and one of the popular Red Sox players was there and started hitting on her. She was a hardcore Red Sox fan and immediately called him out, “You’re a married man with kids. I’m 20 years old, and you’re hitting on me. Shame on you!”  

She embarrassed the player so badly he pulled two Red Sox tickets out of his wallet and apologized repeatedly. She was tough and very good-looking, too…

I was a P.E. Major, and Dave was living on pizza and beer and avoiding any type of exercise, so I suggested we start running three days a week. I told him to bring his baseball glove so we could toss a ball around. He was a decent second baseman in Little League.

We decided to run around the Fens, but not before we burned a fatty. Once we started running, we began tossing the ball back and forth between us to break up the monotony. I was leading him to make him run harder. The idea was not to let the ball hit the ground. We challenged each other and had a fucking blast.

When we got back to 587, we started tossing the ball under a nearby overpass. Then I told Dave to back up, that I was gonna toss the ball over the overpass. I chucked the ball high and over the highway, and he waited for it on the other side. It wasn't easy. You had to find the ball first and then make a spectacular catch. After a while, we got pretty good at it. I remember once, the ball didn't make it over, and a rando threw it back to us. We ran and played catch three times a week, and Dave slimmed down.

Dave grew up in Sharon on the lake and did a lot of pond skating. He was a hockey player, and I got him on a team in Cambridge with some hockey players who were regulars at Father's Fore. They'd come in on Wednesday nights and have a couple before their ice time, usually 11:00 pm.

Having Dave nearby was great. But I also hung out after hours with Kevin, the manager of Father's Fore, Bear, a bartender and one-man riot squad, and whoever the waitress was that night. You bond quickly with the people you work in a bar with. You break up fights together and toss drunk knuckleheads out on the sidewalk, which is a lot of fun. 

Sometimes, after cleaning the bar and restocking, we'd stick around and drink till 3:00 am. Occasionally, after our work was done, Kevin would call out, "Let's go to Vin's place!" and after the bar was locked up tight, the four of us would walk across the Harvard Bridge to 587, whiskey bottles and beers in hand.

They worked nights in the bar full-time so they could sleep all day. I had classes in the morning, and as much fun as we had drinking, it made life more difficult for me. But looking back, I had a great time, and I'd do it all over again if I could.

Life was good, and I had no intentions of changing anything until I got my diploma, which would've made me the first person in my family to get a college degree.

Then, the heads of the P.E. department came to talk to my entire class. About thirty of us. They said there were only two gym teachers per school, and since the average teacher stayed at their school for 25 years, there were limited job opportunities on the horizon. They advised us to change majors. I was pissed and asked if all the P.E.-specific courses we bought and paid for would count toward a degree in another major. When they said no, I lost all faith in higher education. They must've been tracking the job market for a while and waited until then to tell us. We were all in our junior year.

I wasn't sure I wanted to change my major. I considered journalism and law enforcement, but I wasn't sure what I was gonna do next.

Then Susan brought up marriage, and as much as I loved her, the thought of getting married scared the crap out of me. I was just 22…

To be continued…

*All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental…