Camden liquor run

    In the What The Hell Were We Thinking Department, there was the time that Robert and I decided that we needed to go to Camden, New Jersey to buy liquor. We were sophomores at Penn, putting the "moron" in "sophomore." The young people out there need to know that 21 was not always the legal drinking age everywhere. In South Carolina, by coincidence, the age was raised, one year at a time, from 18 to 21 when I was, you guessed it, 18 to 21. In Pennsylvania at that time it was already 21 but in New Jersey it was 19 and we were 19. Now, people know themselves. I have to believe that Robert and I knew that we both looked about 30 so long as we didn't open our mouths.
    However, Pennsylvania has or had another eccentricity. Booze was sold in State Stores, liquor stores run by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I guess we didn't think we would pass muster and we aren't or in any case weren't fake ID type peoples. Goodness knows why we were so hell-bent on buying retail liquor; we weren't heavy drinking peoples either. Maybe we just wanted an adventure.
    We got one, but no liquor. Memory draws its usual gracious curtain. I remember that the only professions evident in Camden were storefront churches, liquor stores (all closed), and the world's oldest one. There was a LOT of that. I was reminded of this trip when the American Top 40: The '80s rerun played "You Can Have It If You Want It" by Kool and the Gang. We heard that many, many times on that particular evening. Women on the street walking in front of us slowly singing it. Eventually we got tired of freezing solid and stopped in at a bar to call a cab. (No cell phones in '81, y'all!) The ladies there put the Kool and the Gang number on the jukebox. Subtlety is not a big thing in Camden, apparently.
    We got this psycho cab driver. He was not happy to be taking a couple of college boys back to Penn from Camden, but that's not why I call him psycho. He kept telling us about belting his wife. We aren't the two most courageous guys in the world, but we did tell him that, uh, you shouldn't be doing that. The worst we got out of it was him spinning his wheels after dropping us off at the dorm. As far as I can remember, I never intentionally returned to Camden again.