A Crumpled Dollar and a Red Cup Used to Buy Saturday Night |
For a crumpled dollar bill and a red plastic cup, you bought entry into a humid basement where adulthood seemed just a pump away. |
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News for the America we remember |
The moisture in the air was thick enough to chew on that Saturday in August of 1978. Three of us were standing in the gravel driveway of a house in the suburbs, staring down into the trunk of a borrowed Ford Torino. Nestled in the back, sweating condensation onto the carpeted mat, was a half barrel of Stroh's. It weighed a hundred and sixty pounds full, and it looked like a silver bomb waiting to detonate our weekend. This was the centerpiece, the heavy aluminum anchor around which our entire social ecosystem would rotate for the next eight hours. |
Getting it out of the trunk was an exercise in adolescent physics and bruised shins. You always underestimated the sheer, sloshing mass of a full keg. We grabbed the rounded handles on the rim, grunted, and hoisted it onto the driveway, almost dropping it on my foot in the process. It sat there gleaming in the fading afternoon light, a dented monument to questionable logistics and collective bargaining. We had pulled together about thirty dollars to procure it, leaning on an older brother who demanded a five dollar transport fee and the right to cut the line all night. |
Every proper gathering in those years required this exact ritual. A six pack was a private affair, but a keg was a public event. It required infrastructure. You needed a galvanized metal wash tub, usually purloined from someone's garage, and three bags of crushed ice from the local convenience store. You needed the tap, which was rented with a hefty deposit that meant whoever held the receipt guarded the tap pump with his life. Most importantly, you needed a venue. In this case, it was a dark, wood paneled basement belonging to a friend whose parents had gone to a lake cabin in Wisconsin for the weekend. |
We rolled the beast around to the back door, wrestling it down the concrete steps into the basement. The tub was waiting. We hoisted the keg in, dumped the ice around the sides, and packed it down with a garden hose. Then came the delicate operation of tapping it. There was always one guy who claimed to be an expert in this field. He would align the notches, push down on the lever, and twist. Half the time, he got a blast of pressurized beer foam straight to the chest |
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