he woman holding court at the Tiki Lounge wore a shocking pink T-shirt, the MANIAC stretched tight across her chest in black block letters with silver sequins. I was impressed. I was young.

"People take themselves too seriously," she said, tendrils of cancer smoke creeping from her nostrils. "Especially comedians."

People laughed—seriously, they did. They raised cool glasses to their lips, dragged deep on cigarettes, carefully choreographed chance body contact that was anything but. I would have, too, but I didn't want to show that I was eavesdropping. I was too cool for that. It was summer and I had just graduated from high school. The names meant nothing to me then, but Woodstock was two months away, Altamont six, the invasion of Cambodia almost a year. As it turned out, I would miss the first two.

The woman squeezed a pale, chubby guy's van-dyked chin as if it belonged to an irresistible infant. Crow's feet of pleasure furrowed around his eyes. She leaned close enough to kiss him.

"I'd be good," she said, "if I wasn't so bad at it."

Everyone shrieked with delight. I was mute. The guy must have smelled her breath, but the crow's feet did not fly away. They acted like they belonged there. The way I belonged there. I'd turned eighteen in April; old enough to vote, or die in Vietnam or any other war my government sent me to, legal in any bar in the land.

I didn't die in Vietnam, just got a Purple Heart and some shrapnel in my spine that still aches in cold weather. It's throbbing right now in the raw December rain, as I crouch surrounded in the land of national monuments: over my shoulder Lincoln's marble Gettysburg Address; through the bare trees Washington stabbing the sky like a bayonet; a grenade toss away three grunts like me frozen in bronze, twenty years old forever.

A stark black ribbon of dead names scrolling downhill at my feet.

It's amazing how the mind works, incomprehensible almost how my first sight of the Vietnam memorial brings back not the war, but that word MANIAC taut across a T-shirt with a loud woman inside. I never saw her or it again. In the meantime, our leaders saw the light at the end of the tunnel and realized that while eighteen is old enough to get killed for your country, you must be twenty-one to start doing it to yourself.

"Hey baby," the woman cried as I left the bar. "Lighten up. Rome wasn't burned in a day."