Smoking Pipes and Djarum Cigarettes

THE PAST…I had never met anyone like Paul D. before. As freshman, he was cocky and seemingly in control. He knew what music he liked. He had very definite taste in clothes, somewhere between GQ and Outside Magazine. He was completely comfortable talking to the ladies. He had his own car, a little Dodge Dart. He was the polar opposite of me in many ways.

Paul had recently ended a long-term relationship with a smoke’n hot gymnast and was dating a smoke’n hot…well, hottie. It wasn’t like Paul was GQ handsome. He was more like unique handsome. But it was his self confidence that put him in competition for the best of the best in everything. For some reason at the end of sophomore year, Paul adopted me. I mean we are talking right at the end of the year. There may have been less than a month left of school, maybe six weeks when we first met. Shortly thereafter, we were both Sigma Chi pledges and he asked me to room with him the following year. Paul D. was somehow on my path. And it’s a damn good thing he entered my life.

Sophomore year was one of the grand highlights of my life. It was sort of a coming out party for whoever had been buried deep inside me. Paul D. pulled that person out. He made it safe for me to expand, explore and experiment in search of me.

Within two weeks of starting sophomore year, Paul and I had our fraternity suite setup with the Cerwin Vega speakers, a three-story bamboo cage filled with two parakeets, a couch and stolen chair from the freshman dormitory creating a nice sitting area and a loft bed that literally sat four inches from the ceiling, just high enough so that your nose touched the ceiling as you squeezed in at the end of the night.

Paul and I figured we only needed one bed since we’d be partying hard and one person could always use the couch. With the added headroom created by the loft on the ceiling, we were equipped fully to fulfill our potential. We were locked and loaded. There would be more girls through that suite in the first semester of sophomore year than I had seen cumulatively over my entire life.

I can still see Paul D. sitting in a lounged position on that stolen couch. The parakeets chirped above  him.   The Cerwin Vega speakers pounded. Paul sat in the most relaxed, confident way. There he was, King of all that surrounded him; smoking his curved smoking pipe in a cardigan sweater, blowing smoke rings and bellowing big belly-felt laughs.

I stood in the corner appropriately leaning casually with one arm on the wall, under the ceiling bed. I was wearing an outfit Paul no doubt picked out, an odd mixture of Grosse Pointe Michigan preppy and sailing instructor. I had never smoked cigarettes before. I puffed on my Djarum cigarette thinking about my newfound freedom and feeling restless in my new surroundings.