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Drinking became the preoccupation of these tall and festively pimpled years. All drinking was led by Katz, for whom alcohol was not so much a pastime as a kind of oxygen. It was a golden age for misbehavior. You could buy a six-pack of Old Milwaukee beer for 59 cents (69 cents if chilled) and a pack of cigarettes (Old Gold was the brand of choice for students of my high school, Roosevelt, for no logical or historic reason that I am aware of ) for 35 cents, and so have a full evening of pleasure for less than a dollar, even after taking into account sales tax. Unfortunately it was impossible to buy beer, and nearly as difficult to buy cigarettes, if you were a minor.

Katz solved this problem by becoming Des Moines’s most accomplished beer thief. His career of crime began in seventh grade when he hit on a scheme that was simplicity itself. Dahl’s, as part of its endless innovative efficiency, had coolers that opened from the back as well as the front so that they could be stocked from behind from the storeroom. Also inside the storeroom was a wooden pen filled with empty cardboard boxes waiting to be flattened and taken away for disposal. Katz’s trick was to approach a member of the staff by the stockroom door and say, “Excuse me, mister. My sister’s moving to a new apartment. Can I take some empty boxes?”

“Sure, kid,” the person would always say. “Help yourself.”

So Katz would go into the stockroom, select a big box, load it quickly with delicious frosty beer from the neighboring beer cooler, put a couple of other boxes on top as cover, and stroll out with a case of free beer. Often the same employee would hold the door open for him. The hardest part, Katz once told me, was acting as if the boxes were empty and didn’t weigh anything at all.

Of course you could ask for boxes on only so many occasions without raising suspicion, but fortunately there were Dahl’s stores all over Des Moines with the same help-yourself coolers, so it was just a matter of moving around from store to store. Katz got away with it for over two years and would be getting away with it still, I daresay, except that the bottom gave way on a box once at the Dahl’s in Beaver-dale as he was egressing the building, and sixteen quart bottles of Falstaff smashed onto the floor in a foamy mess. Katz was not built for running, and so he just stood grinning until a member of the staff strolled over and took him unresisting to the manager’s office. He spent two weeks at Meyer Hall, the local juvenile detention center, for that.

I had nothing to do with store thefts. I was far too cowardly and prudent to so conspicuously break the law. My contribution was to make, by hand, forged driver’s licenses. These were, if I say it myself, small masterpieces—albeit bearing in mind that state driver’s licenses were not terribly sophisticated in those days. They were really just pieces of heavy blue paper, the size of a credit card, with a kind of wavy watermark. My stroke of brilliance was to realize that the back of my father’s checks had almost exactly the same wavy pattern. If you cut one of his checks to the right size, turned it over, and, with the aid of a T square, covered the blank side with appropriate-sized boxes for the bearer’s name and address and so on, then carefully inked the words “Iowa Department of Motor Vehicles” across the top with a fine pen and a straight edge, and produced a few other small flourishes, you had a pretty serviceable fake driver’s license.

If you then put the thing through an upright office typewriter such as my father’s, entering false details in the little boxes, and in particular giving the bearer a suitably early date of birth, you had a product that could be taken to any small grocery store in town and used to acquire limitless quantities of beer.

What I didn’t think of until much too late was that the obverse side of these homemade licenses sometimes bore selected details of my father’s account—bank name, account number, telltale computer coding, and so on—depending on which part of the