The last Tam Thursday before graduation, we waited in line for two hours just to get in. Every senior who had ever laid eyes on the place was in attendance, and even the people who had never really gone were, all of a sudden, terrifically sappy about it. Everyone was taking pictures, doodling on the bathroom mirror for the same purpose that the Neanderthals once scratched onto cave walls. It was our desperate, last-ditch effort to claim some ownership over the Tam, to plant our flags and say “I was here” before the swift river of time floated us past our college days.
You want your last night at your college bar to be the best one. You want it so badly. The thing is, though, it’s not. The bar is full of faces you’ve never seen before. You end up talking less to your friends than to people you had one class with freshman year. They ascribe some importance to your life, and you ascribe importance to theirs, and in the process of making yourself immortal you forget to have fun.
I might come off as overly cynical or pessimistic, or as someone you would not want to run into at your last college-bar night. But my point is that you should cherish the other nights at your college bar — the average nights. Because, in truth, I hardly remember that last Tam Thursday. I recall that it was raining and that I played a couple rounds of Egyptian Rat Screw with a group of real Lilith Fair-types, friends of mine. But the rest, in my memory, looks like a picture taken in motion. There’s a general shape to the evening that I can’t quite make out.
I don’t remember that night because, simply put, I hadn’t paid any attention. I spent the whole night thinking about other Tam Thursdays, better and more memorable ones that storied my upperclassman years.
For instance, I thought about my first Tam Thursday, when I’d just become legal. I went with Joaquin, a good buddy of mine. So many drinks were bought for me that, at a certain point in the night, I became a sort of Robin Hood figure, fielding beers from friends and putting them into empty hands. I could just about see my Downtown Boston dorm room from the window of the bar, so that semester saw a lot of late nights at the Tam. I learned many things in that time, such as if you can see the open sign from the inside of the bar, it’s time to go home.
That spring, protests erupted on our campus, and my roommate Charlie spent the night in a jail cell south of downtown, making small talk with an ant on the wall whom he’d given a first name. We camped out in front of the jail until late the next day, when he finally got sprung.
Nobody was going to class and nobody knew what to do with themselves, but we knew that it was a Thursday. So the rest of us roommates roused our folk hero from his deep sleep by blasting Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” through a portable speaker. At the Tam, Charlie cooled his forehead with a glass of whiskey while we all used big words to talk about ourselves. I think that you’re allowed a few times in your life to feel that way, as though your glasses never fogged up and your sticky-floored dive were some kind of Enlightenment-era salon.
Once, from across the room, Ethan, Parker and I took turns lobbing tiny, spit-soaked balls of beer labels at Joaquin’s head. He was trying to talk up a girl he’d met that night, but he couldn’t quit gaping up at the ceiling. “What’s wrong?” She wanted to know. Eventually he got so fed up that he turned to the two guys sitting at the table behind him.
“I’m not mad, and it’s totally cool if you are,” he said, “but are you throwing stuff at me?”
There was another game, a card game, that Charlie and I played. It was one that my dad had passed down to me from his own college days, a bluffing game that you play by passing one poker hand back and forth. One Tam Thursday, over a round of this game, we came up with a new area of study called “Looney Tunes Philosophy” (ie. If you stick a rifle into a tree hollow, and it comes back out of another hole pointed at you, does the ensuing shot count as suicide?).
When Joaquin graduated early, we took to throwing the spitballs at Andrew, another roommate. When Andrew and I moved in together freshman year, he appeared to be about 14 years old and had the clean-cut look of a Boy Scout. (In fact, he’d just aged out of being an Eagle Scout that summer.) Now the scene in front of me was a thick-bearded man, irately shaking sopping wet pellets out of his shoulder-long hair.
You saw that at the Tam. People grew into themselves, and they grew into each other. I’d seen hundreds of haircuts change. I’d seen lovers meet and I’d seen them fall apart. I’d seen friendships blossom and end, and sometimes I’d seen them reignite — all in this little Irish bar.
And then there was the time when Parker and I convinced a friend of ours that a member of the 1970s one-hit-wonder band Mungo Jerry had just been sitting next to us at the bar top. “He was on a date,” we said. “Or at least something like that.”
Mungo Jerry turned out to be more important to this friend than we’d expected Mungo Jerry to be to any living person. “Where the hell did he go?” She was looking all over the place wildly.
“He left,” someone told her. “You just missed him.”
Or maybe I had said that line, or nobody said it at all. You forget what happened on which night, and who said what, and the plotlines all get scrambled up in your head. To quote the late, great Denis Johnson: “That world! These days it’s all been erased and they’ve rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?”
It may be counterintuitive, then, that during the last Tam Thursday I hadn’t paid a lick of attention to what went on around me. But I think it’s a good thing I hadn’t. If I had been paying attention, I would have seen the people I’d known slowly spill out into the wider world. It was easier then, as it’s easier now, to think of other times: nights before we had even considered the thought of becoming thumbtacks on each others’ maps.
Eventually someone tapped me on the shoulder. The bartenders were running around filling orders, as what remained of the Tam crowd looked for a time at the bottoms of highball glasses. Through the rain-streaked window, the streetlights and headlights of Boston were like a cheap Monet knockoff. The wall clock wore the funny, northward look of early morning, and the open sign smiled at me.
This article appears in Aug 14-21, 2025.