I hadn’t experienced great loss or disappointment yet, and so there was a purity to my happiness that was unsullied by the bad things that inevitably temper one’s outlook. I remember staggering home from parties with friends, and stopping at Luigis sub shop, and ordering deep fried cheese strombolis and french fries with cheese sauce and thinking this was maybe the best tasting stuff in the whole world, and how on earth did I manage not to gain weight from all that cheese? And Fred Leone, the guy who owned the sub shop, doing bird calls and telling dirty jokes and never taking advantage of the college kids, even though half the time they were too drunk to know how much they were paying him.īut mostly what I remember was unalloyed joy nearly every single day. I remember the gamy smell of crowded elevators at the end of a day of classes, and professors who wore corduroy sportcoats with faded blue jeans and scratchy looking turtlenecks and old sneakers with black socks and hearing stories that some of these old guys had affairs with their female students and smoked dope in the upper floors of the fraternities for which they served as advisors. And then thinking I was projecting my own Freudian thoughts on an otherwise noble piece of statuary, and was that really so surprising given the night I had just had? and Church Street, and thinking it looked like a big phallus with a hunky soldier perched at the top. I remember my first sexual experience, an unsatisfying little romp I had with an upper classman in his apartment near the center of town, and looking out his window in the morning and seeing the huge obelisk of a monument to Civil War soldiers at the intersection of Bellefonte Ave. Because who had the buck-fifty to actually buy cigarettes then? in the student lounge, watching old Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies on the Late Late Show, and of sneaking cases of Old Milwaukee into the dorms in my backpack, and using a bent wire coat hanger to steal cigarettes from the vending machine in the lobby late at night when the front desk receptionist was off duty. I remember walking down West Water Street in town, the nicest street in Lock Haven, where millionaire lumber barons built their enormous homes in the 19 th Century, and dreaming that someday I might own one of those places myself, if I was successful enough. I remember suppressing the erotic thrill of drawing back the shower curtain in the men’s communal bathroom and seeing endless rows of nude athletes toweling themselves off and standing in front of mirrors with shaving cream on their faces. And mashed potatoes scooped out of huge stainless steel bins with ice cream scoops and dropped onto waffles and overlaid with chicken gravy. And peanut butter pie on long cookie sheets and hamburgers with molten cheese ladled on top by the ancient cafeteria workers.
I remember the way cold slush seeped into my sneakers on rainy winter days as I tramped my way to classes every morning, and the taste of menthol cigarettes and bad coffee at Bentley cafeteria. I remember how young college boys looked when they doffed their t-shirts and tossed Frisbees back and forth on the grassy lawns behind the dorms. I remember how the sun reflected blindingly on the Susquehanna River on bright spring days. And, surprisingly enough, I actually do remember a lot about those years, despite all those beer parties and stoner nights.