Tramps Like Us

Last Friday was Bruce Springsteen's birthday. It would have been a great time to go out and celebrate the memories of concerts past, and listen to music that has entertained and consoled me throughout these many years. It was a Friday night, after all. No reason to jump out of bed the next day. If I had chosen to, I might even have stayed up until the wee hours of the morning playing my favorite tracks and regaling any and all who would listen with anecdotia about The Boss, since it's my house after all, and if I'm keeping my family up on such an important occasion, so be it.
It wasn't always that way. More specifically, there was a time when I didn't own my own home. There was a time when I was an apartment dweller. More to the point: I was the upstairs neighbor to a single mother with a young daughter. My roommate and I did not let this stand in the way of our compulsion to revel in the nativity of our semi-major-demigod. The evening started with some basic hungry drunk boy math: three of us went out to buy some beer for the occasion, and we quickly realized that the price of a case of beer was only slightly higher than it was for a quarter keg. Reasoning that we owned our own tap and the deposit would therefore be moot, we agreed that the option of having more beer and fewer bottles and cans to deal with. And much more beer. We lugged the keg back up the stairs to our apartment and set it just outside our front door in a tub we filled with ice. The party began in earnest just before eight o'clock.
Did I mention this was not a Friday night? I believe it was a Tuesday. We didn't care. We were carrying on as if it were a national holiday, and it never occurred to us that anyone would take issue with our passion. By ten o'clock, there were just two of us left: my roommate and I. We didn't slow down, we sped up. The music got louder, and so did we. Just before midnight, we arrived at our National Anthem: "Born To Run." We turned it up again. We stomped about the room, sloshing beer on our carpet, and as the E Street Band built to its ultimate crescendo, we were pounding on the floor with our fists and counting down with Bruce: "One, two, three, four..."
Did I mention that we were on the upper floor? It was then that we heard a noise. Faint at first, so we turned the stereo down. The phone was ringing. The poor woman downstairs was calling to plead with us. Could we please turn it down? It is the intervening years and decades of maturity that allow me this perspective, since at the time, we may have felt the tiniest bit of embarrassment, but no real shame. Instead, we mumbled some half-hearted apology and then loudly derided the idea that anyone would possibly be worried about getting to sleep on Bruce's birthday.
This is one of the stories I tell when asked, "Dave, why don't you drink anymore?"