It was Christmas Eve, 1985. I'd been working at KSTP-AM for a week.
The bad news: it was a part-time job that started at $3.35 an hour.
The good news: I'd managed to find a mid-day board-operator shift that the Executive Producer, Rob Pendelton, was working. "Why should a highly-skilled executive like yourself be working the board?" I asked; Rob agreed, which gave me two more hours a day.
My budget was looking like it was working out like this:
I worked through the day - Vogel had a fill-in, as I recall. The snow started around mid-day; it was cold, and it began snowing heavily.
At the end of the day, the guest host took off like a shot. It was 6PM, and dark, and the only people left in the studio were producer Dave Elvin, newscaster Cathy Wurzer (yes, that Cathy Wurzer) and me.
I went out to start my car. Nothing. Zip. Not even a click.
I went back into the studio and started calling garages from the Yellow Pages (handicapped by my ignorance of the geography of the area; I had no idea what 'burbs to look in, or for that matter that I was probably a mile from Saint Paul, or for that matter any idea of what part of Saint Paul was where). Nobody was available - or the ones that were cost a lost more than I could afford on Christmas Eve.
Dave offered to drive me home, and Rob Pendelton could give me a ride to work the next day, Christmas.
I took him up on it. Dave dropped me off at my apartment in a slushy, white-coated South Minneapolis, and I went inside.
My roommate was visiting family in Wisconsin for Christmas, so I had the place to myself. For that matter, I had South Minneapolis to myself; there was no traffic on Minnehaha Avenue to speak of.
I pulled out and baked a Tombstone pizza - at $3, a bit of a splurge - and a couple of beers (Stroh's, as I recall), opened a couple of presents I'd gotten from my parents, and turned on the TV. I had two beers left, and ran through one of 'em as I called my family (my brother and sister were still living with my parents, whose divorce was still five years in the future).
By 9-ish, that was pretty much it. I kicked back on the couch, ate the pizza, drank the last beer, watched the Pope's mass on TV, read the book Dad gave me...
By 11ish I was bored. The TV ran an ad for "Gab Line", a phone chat line back in the era before Chat Lines got their seedy reputation (or at least when I was just off the turnip truck and didnt' know about their seedy reputation). "Only 10 cents a minute". I dialled in.
There were two people on the line; a very drunk-sounding black woman who'd just moved up from Chicago, and a guy who sounded like he'd lost all his teeth and could neither pronounce nor enunciate. I don't remember what the conversation was about - and with a drunk and a guy who in retrospect was probably a meth addict, does it matter? - but it killed half an hour and $3, yet another big splurge on this red-letter Chrismas Eve.
I hung up and sat down on the couch, playing guitar for a bit, thinking about things.
Downside: I was nearly-broke, I was alone as I could be on Christmas Eve, and my car was an inert lump of rotting metal in a parking lot in Maplewood.
Upside: Things were moving, finally. I had a job - I knew that I could get a job, that I wasn't completely unemployable and worthless - and I knew that I could get by for a while. I enjoyed the job, as crappy as the pay was. And after the holiday, I could approach the whole music thing with a clear mind and, now that I was employed (more or less), some mental energy.
All in all, not bad.
Posted by Mitch at December 24, 2005 08:54 AM | TrackBack
Wow Mitch, your stories always cheer me up. I have had some crappy times, but your life sounds so much worse.
Merry Christmas!
Posted by: Tracy at December 25, 2005 02:28 PMLife's not bad! I actually look back on that Christmas Eve as a good time (with 20 years to look back).
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