Summer's a Bad Time to be Hungover In

The 1970 Mungo Jerry song "In the Summertime" has a privileged place on this list. Since it has never gone off the air, I've now heard it probably 2000 times. I always listen for the lyrics, which I still don't understand. It starts: In the summertime, when the weather is high, You can shesh right up and pleurish the sky. The lyric that makes it a true collector's item?the one that, were it released today, would bring down the wrath of Tipper Gore and Bill Bennett and possibly get it banned?is, of course: Have a drink, have a drive, Go out and see what you can find.

Strange as it seems (as Sister Rose might put it), all summer songs used to be like this?maybe not hymns to DUI, but certainly paeans to dissipation. These were to be lazy, hazy crazy days, not stern, concerned, taciturn ones. I can only assume that New York Press' readers share this sensibility of reactionary libertinism. Why else run a summer issue, after all? Do you want me to tell you how to get a good internship?

That's why those of us who have put our dissolute days behind us don't have much to say about summer. Spending hours a day in a 65-degree office surrounded by books tends to erode the difference between, say, Jan. 9 and July 24. Of course, I could write about the manifold and very real delights summer affords me?barbecues with my wife and ballgames with my children. But Life, the Saturday Evening Post and dozens of other magazines have gone bankrupt on the assumption that people want to read about Simple Domestic Joys, and a weekly paper that runs Dirty Sanchez, George Tabb and Alan Cabal seems an unlikely place to try to launch a revival.

Fortunately, until becoming an upstanding bourgeois, I don't think I had a productive or respectable summer in my life. That's because the people I hung around with in college used their summers in a way that gave summer a bad name. This was the first indication I got of how rebours the modern relationship between work and leisure had become. Now I'd probably call them sneaky hypocrites, but back then I'd just say they were plotting their lives backwards. In retrospect, "plotting" is the mot juste.

On the one hand, their parents were paying a bill equivalent to the country's per capita income in order that my friends could work their way toward building their careers, while they (and I) spent it stooped over bongs and mirrors and shoveling out to bartenders the money our immigrant grandparents had given us out of savings built sweating their asses off in hot tanneries and at costume-jewelry checkout counters in order to (I remember their awestruck, erudition-dazzled humility as they divvied the money up) "buy books." It was as if they'd left the shanties of Connemara and the shacks of Sicily for nothing.

Hey, Junior, get an education so you don't die.

Yeah, okey-doke, Papa. Hey, where's that bong! Sklrrrrp.

On the other hand, in the summer, when their grandparents and parents expected them to relax at the beach from all that studying, they headed off to law firms and think tanks and foundations for months of marathon brownnosing. There were some spectacular instances. There was Griselda Greenberg, who came back from her summer at a "public-interest" law firm?which she'd spent writing briefs for lawsuits claiming the Reaganite war machine was "wasting the potential" of generations of Salvadorans?and immediately resumed a cocaine habit the nightly receipts of which, if redirected toward a competent charitable organization, could have fed a Salvadoran village for a month. There was also Widgden Cholmondeley, who spent the summer in Chicago promoting a crackdown on "offenders against public order," and then an entire fall semester hiring the best legal talent in New York to fend off legal proceedings against his conviction (in an unguarded moment) of public drinking, the kind of charge that would have meant a stiff probation for someone named Carlos Washington.

My great college summer memory, though, is compounded of two nights: first was a March barroom evening during which I outlined to Shona Kerrigan (she had, after all, brought up her Irish "roots") what I considered to be a terrific idea for a book. It was to be a literary atlas of Ireland along the lines of the one on Scotland David Daiches had done in the 1970s. I'd like to do it myself, I said. Second was the June afternoon when Shona (who had the literary sensibility of a netted pike) asked me to drive her to Logan for the Aer Lingus flight to Dublin, where she was going to carry out said project?for which she'd just received a grant worth $18,000 for three months. I was planning to head over to Ireland in a couple of weeks with my own $875 in savings. See you there, Shona.

The only project consistent with scholastic integrity was living as the same kind of bum one lived as during the academic year. I spent a couple of summers in New York, busboying in restaurants on Columbus Ave. (Never lasted! Kept breaking shit!) But for the most part it was better to be in Europe. The astonishing thing about being in Europe was the slack people cut you for not having taken up an internship at a public-interest law firm in San Francisco. When people asked what I was doing, they'd be told: Nothing! He's hanging around in Cambridge getting drunk! But board that 7 p.m. Aer Lingus flight for Shannon or Dublin (neither of which, by the way, was in Europe back when I was visiting them), and it was, Ooooh. He's in Yurrup! Small matter if I were passed out on the floor in some rathole in Rathmines at the time.

Few of my best memories are of summer. As a young man, I judged the seasons much as I judged clothes, beds, houses, relationships and everything else: by whether they were comfortable to be hungover in. Summer?with its glare, its smog, its noise, its heat?always came up short, whatever the opportunities for sheshing and pleurishment it may have afforded.