"Did you sleep last night and do you remember dreams?
Do I ever cross your mind and do you ever think of me?
When you think about your life are there things you would reverse?"
Around this time of year, autumn 1992.
When I think back to those times, and the things that happened, I can hardly believe they happened in my own life. Seems like something I saw in a movie.
Drinking way too late into the nights at neighborhood bars. Tuning into C-SPAN in the early afternoons, still bleary-eyed, to see Bill Clinton speaking to campaign rallies, hoping against hope the twelve-years long nightmare of Reagan-Bush was about to come to a merciful end. Showing up mildly stoned every Thursday afternoon at 4:15 to a graduate school course called "Literary Suicides." An awful Jets team. In a slugfest for the ages, young buck Riddick Bowe polishing off Evander Holyfield. Doing primitive data entry on a primitive computer at random hours in the offices of a left-wing political organization. It all runs together now.
There's something about being young and wildly alive: everything seems big. Sports, politics, and most of all, girls. Everything that came before happened in the history books; everything happening in the present happening in front of your own two eyes made it so it seem so much more real.
&&&&
Thursday, October 16th, 1992.
A bunch of us graduate students would gather in Ralph's Tavern every Thursday night to celebrate the end of another week; our weeks ended on Thursday, which even then, I recognized as a luxury. Twenty, maybe twenty-five of us, would congregate at Ralph's to down as many dollar pints as we could before midnight, when the pints reverted to regular price, and to stuff our singles into their kick-ass jukebox.
I had an interest in a few girls at this point: Brigid, the girl from my undergraduate days, the one I thought I loved; Stacie, the red-haired beauty I thought, for a few days, might be the next one before I went and fucked it up; Katherine with a K, the one who kept bumming clove cigarettes off of me one night and the first girl I'd ever met who whole-heartedly agreed with my assessment that The Replacement's "Tim" was the greatest rock-and-roll album in history; the dark-eyed, dark-haired one who lived and worked within a block of Ralph's whose name I've since forgotten; the girl from "Literary Suicides" who'd show up once in awhile and not talk much; and Lauren, a fellow grad student who I'd developed a little crush on but who I'd ruled out, out of hand, because she'd once dated a guy who was fast becoming my best friend.
Lauren was from England, and in the middle of that October, a few of her friends came over from the homeland to visit her.
And I hit it off, big-time, with one of them.
The first Thursday, I alternated between flirting with her and one of Lauren's other friends, but then everyone seemed to get awfully drunk and some sort of argument developed and various people wound up teaming up in the women's room, alternating between crying and puking, so I backed off and took off, finding a parking ticket on my car on my way home.
The next week, though, I went back out, and I swung for the fences.
Her name was Steph. She was a nursing student back home. It turned out we had very similar tastes in music. I can still remember what I wore that night: a light blue button down over a Husker Du t-shirt, a pair of green fatigues bought at the local Army-Navy surplus store, and an old pair of lace-less Timberland boots. I fancied it quite a bad-ass look, thank you very much.
There were a lot of things I liked about her beyond the sarcasm and similar tastes in music. I had a think for raven hair back then, and she had that. She was most definitely what we used to call "cute" back then. "Cute" was a real compliment back then, by the way; it meant way more than pretty, it implied a sort of combination of pretty and generally excellent taste in music (which meant more than anything else back then), written word, and politics.
We drank a few hours away in Ralph's and I glued myself to her side, and she to mine, in retrospect. I realize, only twenty years later, that I may have seemed as exotic to her as she did to me. We were, after all, and despite our similarities, from different countries.
Eventually a large group of us staggered up to another bar called Michael's, and we drank some more, and talked some more, and whereas I usually talked to some or all of the group, that night I focused all my attention on Steph. Somewhere over in the basement of my mother's house is a picture of me that night, sitting at a table at Michael's, a way-more-than-half-the-bag smile on my face, an arm around Steph, the table littered with empty beer bottles, shot glasses, and plastic cups.
&&&&
At around two-thirty in the morning someone decided we should all go across the street and get a slice, so we all moved out, and everyone moved across the street. Everyone other than Steph and I.
We stood next a utility pole, both knowing the end was nigh.
A light rain fell.
When you looked at it through the orange glow of a street light in Albany, New York, in the fall of 1992, it looked like one incredibly romantic light rain.
Steph and I faced off under the street light.
I looked across the street at the pizza joint at our mutual friends; no one paid us any attention.
So you're going back tomorrow, I asked.
Yes, she said.
I didn't know what to say.
You know why I came out tonight, I asked.
Why?
'cause I wanted to see you again before you left.
She sighed.
I'm kinda seeing someone at home, she said.
I don't really care.
The rain picked up. We looked at each other. Kissing her seemed the only logical thing to do, so that's what I did.
&&&&
We wound up walking the city streets for awhile, in the rain, and wound up in Washington Park. There's a romantic little footbridge that goes over the pond in the park, and I tried to get her to walk it with me, I had always wanted to kiss a girl at the crest of that bridge, but she said she had fear of bridges.
A young maple stood near the east entrance to the bridge. I pulled two orange leaves off the tree and gave one to her.
Here. Take this home with you.
She laughed. I really am afraid of bridges, you know, she said.
She took the leaf.
The one I kept for myself, I still have, twenty years later.
It's in my wallet.
I have kept it there all these years to remind me that you never know when something good is going to happen.
&&&&
We made it back to my car, and then we drove around in the rain for awhile, looking for songs we might like. At one point an oldies station played "Unchained Melody" and she asked to keep it there and she sang along, really belting out the last few lines, which, given her generally hip taste in music, surprised me a little, but I kind of enjoyed it.
Eventually we found a secluded spot and I parked the car and fooled around in peace for awhile, and then I took her back to Lauren's apartment. She had a flight to catch in a few hours.
I remember sitting outside that apartment block, with the car parked, holding hands, neither of us saying much, just the purr of the car engine keeping us company. She looked at me and said, give Lauren your address, I'll give her mine.
OK, I said. I felt deflated. Morning's light had touched the gray sky; the party was over, much to my chagrin.
She reached over and kissed me.
Write to me, she said.
I will.
The clock on my car radio read 6:16. Funny, the things you remember, or forget, in life. I'll always remember the clock reading 6:16 as she kissed me goodbye.
&&&&
We did write to each other for awhile, but things happened in the interim. No matter how much I tried to cover it up or distract myself with other dalliances, I fell harder and harder for Lauren, and eventually, to make a very long story short, we wound up together, married for over thirteen years, until she died in the fall of 2007. A few years later I wound up married again, to Sheila.
I don't really know what made me think of that October night back in 1992 tonight; I don't know what made me think of Steph, out of nowhere. I certainly have no regrets: I followed my heart, my intuition, and those things led me first to Lauren and then to Sheila, and I couldn't have been more right about either choice.
Something reminded me of her; might be tonight's sky, might be this song I'm listening to tonight. I couldn't help but think back for a minute or two.
I don't know why, but I couldn't help but think back to that long ago night, I couldn't help but wonder what became of Steph. I hope she's happy. I hope she's still alive, at the least; after what happened to Lauren, I know even that's not a safe assumption.
I hope she's happy.