I saw a post on Facebook today by my lifelong friend Christine Worth Miller that brought back memories from very long ago.
She was writing about the advent of Pizza Hut pan pizzas and how they were served, and it reminded me of a time in 1971 and ’72 that she, Chris Gullotta and I used to go out drinking in Washington, D.C., three or four nights a week. Even on weeknights, when the three 0f us had to go to work the next day, we were out well past midnight and relying on the resilience of youth to get us through work the next day.
On the weekends, when the bars closed down at 2 a.m., we drove most of the way home and then went to a pizza place that no longer exists. It was across Route 236 from where I had gone to high school, in the Pickett Shopping Center. As best as I can tell from Google Maps, the site once occupied by Pizza Kaezano now has a Japanese restaurant called Blue Ocean.
I’ll bet it doesn’t serve pizza, particularly at 3 a.m.
I haven’t seen either of my friends in person in more than half a lifetime, Christine since the early ’70s and Chris since 1985. Chris was the one who introduced me to my first wife, who I saw for the last time in 1982.
The three of us are on the far side of 70, and the aforementioned first wife will reach that milestone Saturday. It’s funny the details we remember, like horrible songs that serve as earworms. I was telling my current wife the other day that I have in my memory three people’s Social Security numbers — mine, hers and my first wife’s.
Of course I also remember the lyrics to the theme songs of most of the stupid TV shows I watched back then.
Back in our clubbing days, we nearly always went to the same place, a basement bar called the Montage on Connecticut Avenue. It got torn down in the mid ’70s to make room for one of the Metro lines, and I don’t think there was ever another place I frequented regularly. Not in D.C. or any of the many states in which I lived in later years.
I had turned 21 just before we started our frequent clubbing, and I was having a difficult time finding a mixed drink I liked. I had settled on vodka as my alcohol of choice, and for some reason I was drinking vodka collinses. My memory of them is that they tasted like battery acid, although I suppose I’m vulnerable to the same question as someone claiming a cheap beer tasted like tiger piss.
How do you know?
Eventually I discovered screwdrivers, which tasted much better.
But after 1972, I never had regular friends with whom I went clubbing.. The last time I made regular visits to bars at all was in late 1986, when I celebrated biweekly paydays in Greeley, Colo., by going alone to what was really more of a restaurant and having nachos and two pina coladas.
I was turning 37 then, exactly half a lifetime ago.
It all seems so strange. It was right at the beginning of two wonderful years in Colorado, a unique time in my adult life. For the first four months of my time in Greeley, I didn’t own a car. The car I had been driving for more than seven years had died just before I left St. Louis. I bought a new car in March 1987, but until then I took the bus wherever I needed to go.
I don’t know that I could have managed much longer, but it was a wonderfully goofy feeling to have been able to get along without a car for as long as I did.
When I bought a car, it was brand new and cost me $10,000. That sounds cheap now, but in 1987 it was nearly 50 percent of my annual income. I loved that car and I drove it for nearly four years until an 18-wheeler ran into me and totaled it on I-10 in Los Angeles.
That happened more than 33 years ago. It seems like everything enjoyable in my life happened so many years ago. The friends I mentioned earlier and my ex-wife are still alive, but every relative I have who was older than me are dead, and I have lost two wonderful friends who were actually younger.
My children came into my life when they were 12 and 7. They’re 43 and about to be 39 now and I have grandchildren older than my kids were when I met them.
I still read. I still watch movies and a few television shows. I still love baseball, although even there, it has been six years since I went to a game.
Aside from those things, so much is gone.
I used to be able to make 18-20 foot jump shots on a basketball court or bowl an occasional 200 game. I actually broke 80 several times on the golf course. I could throw a football 50 yards in a perfect spiral.
All those things are gone.
I’m mostly OK with it. Heck, we all get old.
But I sure would like just once more to be able to sit in a booth at Pizza Kaezano and shoot the breeze with Christine and Chris.
That would be wonderful.