smoking a pipe

When I moved to Rochester in the fall of 1966, I tried to take up smoking a pipe.
This was early — the first few weeks, like before I got a job, when I was surviving on my meager savings, eating at Critics Restaurant in “Bull-Haid,” and watching trains on the Water-Level.
Seemed like a really hip image: the professorial type coolly sucking on his pipe.
But I gave it up. It was awful. The pipe would fill with spit, and make the tobacco soggy. I bought various kinds of pipe-tobacco, but they all tasted awful.
No matter what you did, you were burning the stuff and inhaling the smoke. It was unbearable.
I also bought cigars, but they were awful too.
Mahz-n-Wawdzzz was where I first drank beer. I remember the inordinate joy among Billy Gardiner and Padgett they had got Tommy’s son to join the legions of sinners. It was on a floating-roof tank in the old Sinclair refinery in Marcus Hook. (And the world does indeed have an armpit — it is Marcus Hook.)
I transferred my beer-drinking to Houghton, but never developed a lust for boozing. My friends shared a six-pak at the Watkins Glen Grand Prix in 1964, but not me.
I’ve been drunk only once — six bottles of Lowenbrau Dark Special — but it seemed rather silly. I threw it all up into the toilet.
I also didn’t like being tipsy. Amtrak served us complimentary wine on our trip to Floridy on the Silver Meteor back in the early ‘80s, but I didn’t like it making me tipsy.
There were also various parties at the mighty Mezz where beer was served, but I began to avoid it.
At one party I tried O'Doul's, and the most recent I drank water.
So now on medical questionnaires when they ask if I drink alcoholic beverages, I say “hardly ever.” For all intents and purposes it’s “not any more.”