When Summer Was All There Was
I went up to her at the club, which was rare for me. A photograph still exists of us dancing to Black Sheep or A Tribe Called Quest. It was another balmy Long Island night that started around 11 PM with Boone’s Farm and Ernest and Julio Gallo. It was probably one of the nights when I used a knife to push the cork into the bottle because I didn’t know how to properly use a wine opener. I got her number and called her the next day. We set up to meet for lunch.
It’s hard to overestimate the amount of dumb shit we did as young drunkards, wilding through another summer of play above work. If you told me we did 100 dumb things a summer, I would think it sounds light. But those 100 dumb things were some of the most fun anyone has ever had, even in ten lifetimes. We were unchained wildebeests on a mythic quest for summer love, which really was just feeling crunked every night and waking up for work every morning with a hazy idea of what happened.
There was no regular year head when you were in summer mode. There was that night and only that night. The days of work were just soft pedals on a three-person bicycle which got you from here to there. We rode aimlessly through our days to arrive at the nights, sun-kissed and expectant. There was a real feeling that every night was going to be the best. And it usually was, until the next night.
I used to do the Kid n’ Play dance with my friend, Bart, at 137 AM on a Wednesday, after six Tom Collinses and a few Woo Woo shots. I held up many a corner bar, waiting for someone to talk to me, but instead just talking shit with John all night about how tomorrow there would be a better place to stomp our feet and ogle our eyeballs. Life was encapsulated in the present moment.
We napped in sheds, made up games for kids to play, and pushed back our hangovers by seeing whose lunch had an extra sandwich. We skinny-dipped too often, vomited on the regular, and swooned over looks across a smoky club that were meant for taller and older gentlemen behind us. It didn’t matter. Summer was all there was.
It wasn’t unusual to go to sleep past 3, get up at 6, work all day, play hoop, work out, and restart the cycle. We were in our late teens and twenties and didn’t need sleep training or restriction of any kind. Life was an unfolding path before us, littered with scantily clad nightcrawlers and warm Busch beer in the backseat of a car that ranked number one in the history of the world for most mailbox baseball rides driven.
I can’t say I’m proud of what we did, but I am also not not proud of what we did. Kids don’t have fun today like we had fun. In some ways, that is very good, and in some ways, very sad. I don’t want someone else to wake up to their stepbrother at 4:18 AM telling them he “parked” his car somewhere in the woods and you need to drive him back to find it. When I asked him how he got home, he said he ran five miles barefoot in loafers. I drove him back in my underwear and found his car so far back in the forest that it was impossible that it was there. But it was. And we lived another day to tell the story.
It wasn’t all drinking. We really only drank past 10 PM. The rest was human camaraderie and unbridled friendship that could never be broken. It was that feeling of belonging that so many people have lost. We were a small community of wayward young adults flogging themselves through each night.
Oh, right. She showed up for that lunch, smoking a ciggie with a giant cold sore on her lip. It was the longest hour of my life. Even the summer can lead you astray.
© Jonathan Greene, September 19, 2026
