Beer always tasted warm then, a sip of danger, something new. I lived in Wisconsin when I started to drink beer - not unnatural, I guess. Somebody told me once that the number of bars in every small town in Wisconsin is exactly equal to the number of churches. Or maybe I said that.

I remember the first beer I had - at age five when I convinced my mom who was cooking spaghetti in our small apartment to give me some of the bottle of Schmidt she was drinking. She poured some into a small water glass and left the kitchen to answer the phone, and, big boy that I thought I was, I drank what was left in the dark brown bottle (when Schmidt still came in squat big mouth bottles whose six packs had the same nature scenes that seemed to adorn a lot of campers in those days). I didn’t understand why I felt the way I did after that - things spinning around, etc. The next thing I remember now is the rising-sun my spaghetti-filled vomit made on the wall next to the bathroom.

The first girl I kissed, the first girl I slept with, the first girl who nearly drove me nuts in the frustration of dealing with another human being who seems to count - we met over beer at a fraternity party in college where somehow we ended up wrestling in the kitchen (where parties always seem to sift to in the wee hours after the people who really need the party, need the other people, who are left. It’s when people who showed to get laid all have paired up and left or given up for the night).

She and I began playfully nudging each other, then shoving, then we were rolling on the sticky dirty gray linoleum and I held her arms behind her back which infuriated her, because there was nothing she could do about it.

Heather, my first girlfriend, was from Milwaukee, or at least a nearby town, where her parents owned a farm, but her father, a frustrated farmer, working in town as an engineer or something, trapped in a suit-and-tie office when he wanted to let his fingers run through the loam and go back into the farmhouse and tell his wife - Heather’s mom - "Corn’s gonna be A-OK this year" to smiles all around.

But enough about that - I mention Heather and her home town only because that town is Milwaukee and Milwaukee is famous for beer (cf. "What Made Milwaukee Famous Made A Loser Out Of Me") and beer is the point at which Heather and I met and beer was the point at which we left (the first time anyway - although many people say the first time you break up is always the last - everything is just fits and starts after that), her throwing up the nights beer, first into a paper bag in her room, and then the bathroom in the house she lived in - torrents of used beer ("reeb", an old roommate of mine calls it - "beer" backwards, get it?) coming out her mouth and nose and, I swear to God, her ears as she made awful noises that sounded like a tortured man cornered by hellhounds at the edge of the abyss. "Roooghshan Jeremy, it’s just not working Bleagh we’ve got to end it".

But before that, we had a heartfelt talk the day after the wrestling match, maybe two, and I wasn’t sure if that meant we, you know, liked each other, so after a day or so of furtive glances and weighted conversations with long pauses, I finally got the courage to ask her if it (our wrestling) had, you know, meant anything and she sat in my lap, turned off the light and kissed me - my first kiss! I smiled in the darkness until her lips came back and she planted another one on my own astonished lips. There were a few more kisses, and then she, apparently (obviously) more experienced than I, let her tongue slip into my open mouth - my first French kiss! I was so shocked and overjoyed - even my idle dreams of my wife Susan had never involved anything like this! - that I let a laugh escape, ruining the mood and making Heather suspicious.