The day after the talent show, my brother and I got on a Greyhound to visit our older cousin, Reynaldo, who attended Frostburg State University in western Maryland, a good three or four hours away. Reynaldo was my father’s sister’s son, and he’d come from Damascus, Syria (where his alcoholic father was stationed as Venezuela’s ambassador) to study science and engineering at a US university. Reynaldo learned English when his family had lived in London, so he was fluent. He’d been telling us crude sexual jokes and helping with our algebra homework for the last few years. Early October and the leaves had exploded into blood, wine and fire. Frostburg is particularly beautiful then, full of green hills, golden wheat fluff and those leaves, and as we got off the bus at the college campus, it was still early afternoon, bright and warm. Reynaldo walked us to his dorm room where we met his roommate, a guy named Ed. Ed liked to fish and hunt, mostly, and drink lots of beer. It would be the only semester he attended. They had a mini fridge, stocked with Busch Beer in cans, and I asked if I could help myself. Ed said sure thing. I don’t think I’d ever been drunk before in my life. I was 14 at the time. I may have had a slight buzz once when my father let me have a small glass of Sangria at a restaurant, the year before. And when we were much younger, Stephen and I would ask Dad if we could have one or two bitter sips from his Budweiser can at crab feasts. Now I drank five cans quickly, one after the other, in this dorm room, and the drunk hit me hard. I felt elated and scared. The leaves outside the window blurred and bled. At the time I dipped Copenhagen. So, drunk and spitting into an empty beer can, I swayed, my head floating. Later we went out for pizza, and after that we went to the movies. Eddie and the Cruisers was playing, a film about a popular band in the early 1960s whose lead singer was mysterious, handsome, enigmatic, and by the film’s ending, he’d given up his career to sink into anonymity by faking his own death. The last shot of the movie is of Eddie, now with a full beard, standing outside an appliance store, watching televisions through the shop’s plate glass window, seeing the news coverage of his fatal car crash. It was pretty clearly an homage to the rumors about Jim Morrison’s faked death. When we were back in the dorm room, Reynaldo and his roommate in their beds, my brother and I in sleeping bags on the floor, Ed made the Eddie/Jim Morrison connection for me and my brother, but we’d already made it. I knew the story from the famous Doors biography, and I told Ed so. Stephen didn’t drink at all that day, and I was still buzzed, hours after draining the five cans. “You all are young,” Ed told us, in the darkness. “You don’t know anything. One day you’re going to discover what it’s all about.”
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Peter Ramos’ poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse, Indiana Review, Mississippi Review (online), and other journals. Nominated ten times for a Pushcart Prize, Peter is the author of two books of poetry, Lord Baltimore (Ravenna Press, 2020) and Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008), as well as three chapbooks: Television Snow (Back Pages Books 2015), Watching Late-Night Hitchcock & Other Poems (handwritten press 2004), and Short Waves (White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2003). Peter has been invited as a poetry fellow to the CoLab Residency at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), and the Constance Saltonstall Artist Residency, among others. He holds graduate degrees from George Mason University and the State University of New York at Buffalo. A professor of English at Buffalo State University, Peter teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature.