The Buckaroo T-shirt

I'd never heard of 3.2 beer until I got to college. Never was much of a drinker either. I drank my first cold one the summer before coming to Iowa for school. Pulled one from an old refrigerator in the basement office of the state park where I worked, a fridge we kept stocked with Schlitz and Hamms and Kingsburys, whatever we’d confiscated from under-agers on the beach. If that fridge got short, we'd go on patrol some Saturday afternoon just to restock. It was a good, healthy system.

That first beer was so cold it slid down like a dream; but then, as I remember, it'd been a hot day on the Lake Michigan shoreline. Once quitting time came, the whole crew indulged.

So, I was hardly a practiced drinker when I got to college. None of the guys who climbed in a car and drove all the way west to South Dakota did so because we loved beer or had to answer some habit. Mostly, we crossed the river because doing so was a sin, or something similar at the Christian college I attended, that little watering hole, the kind of place, mid-Sixties, where doing something because you shouldn't ad a magic way of creating its own specious of blessedness.

Took a half hour to get to the border, where the Rock and the Big Sioux put a few curves in the otherwise straight road west to a town named Hudson, a little burg moving past whatever prime it once may have had.

Decline was written in empty businesses downtown, but Hudson had a tap, a place called "The Buckaroo," where you didn't have to be 21 to belly up to the bar, not as if anyone ever asked. We'd roll in from across the river and drink Grain Belt at what?--fifty cents a glass, 3.2 beer, I was told. I had no idea what that meant.

We didn't go often—just once in a while on a Friday night, and nobody got hammered. You'd have to swallow a bathtub of 3.2 beer to get there. I remember thinking some guys seemed to need a snoot full. Not long into the evening and they'd start singing or dancing or yammering on endlessly. Some guys wanted badly to get silly. We'd toss back a few and turn into Dean Martin wannabees, then leave with a six pack or two to road load all the way back home.

Who knows why some of us loved it when so many classmates thought such South Dakota visits orgies of drunkenness, ripe transgressions of the strict college code? There were dark and sweet moments back then, when it just felt great to sin. Sometimes we'd watch the Buckaroo's noisy front door, thinking the Dean of Students would take the trip west himself just to catch sinners. Rumor had it, he did such visits. All of that made 3.2 beer even more a delight.

The Dean never showed up, and we never got caught—in 1967, dorm counselors weren't armed with breathalyzers. As sin goes, the Buckaroo was pretty darn petty. Dante didn’t bother with 3.2 beer in the Inferno, no separate and distinct level of hell.

Once upon a time I loved this old t-shirt because of the story I’m telling. I picked it up right there at the Buckaroo forty years or more after sneaking a beer or two or three at a place by the same name. Years later, my wife and I started something of a date with a visit across the river to Hudson for barbecue ribs, sinfully good. Buckaroo it was, Hudson, South Dakota, where a half a century before, a handful of Christian college students took it upon themselves occasionally to sin boldly, as Luther would have it. Well, somewhat boldly. For years, I treasured the wickedness this shirt covertly told the world.

But like my Gilson shirt, the glory of its story is long gone. If the only t-shirt I wore to the gym all winter was my dark blue Buckaroo, no one would ever cast a second glance. I’m the only one--the old man who comes there most everyday--who gets the dim-lit glory of what the shirt still conjures.

It's old and worn now, the lettering yellowed now and broken up. It's lost its punch, been outwrestled by time itself. No one gets its joke.

I’ve forever been a fan of the literary trope, memento mori, which in Latin, I’m told, means something like “remember that you die." I've always appreciated the way Hamlet holds Yorick’s skull in Act V, of crossbones just about everywhere you look in Rome.

No matter. Still hurts worse than any one of those tall cool ones ever did.