Recalling that night in Budapest when we walked back to our hotels feeling like men in a foreign city.
I was never addicted either. Just a few months one summer and my entire senior year. We smoked Lucky Strikes along the Danube during our few cold spring days in Budapest. Smoke trailing behind us in the wind from the river, taxi cabs idling with drivers eyeing the young Americans stumbling back toward warm beds. Then that voice. A voice I would hear whisper some years later: “I remember Budapest.” But that spring, those few days stumbling around the city, that spring I was still alive.