It was Sunday, June 26, 1988.

There truly wasn’t much going on in my life around this time.

My nights involved going to work at one gawdforsaken bar or another, six nights a week.

The good news – I was the best “jock” the DJ service had, and they told me so; my boss said that “I can put you in any bar I have – R’nB, Rock and Roll, oldies, County Western, background music, whatever – and they love you”. And they were putting me in different bars, at least; after months of bouncing back and forth between “Jams” in Brooklyn Center and “City Limits” in Rosemount, I was starting to get into some more places.

The bad news – I got put in every bar they had. It’s not like they got any better than Jams or City Limits, for crying out loud.  You had your choice; sleazy R’nB bars, redneck Rock and Roll dumps, tired and empty Oldies bars, malignant “country” joints, and somnolent “none of the above” lounges. All of them equally depressing.

And, truth be told, that’s just what I was. Depressed. I’d been going at the talk radio job hunt for over a year, now. Nothing.

My station-calling had slowed to a trickle. Every week or two, I’d get a flash of inspiration…

…no. That’s not true.  It wasn’t “inspiration”. It was a flash of desperation – a sudden, searing flash of panic; “THIS IS HOW MY WHOLE F****NG LIFE IS GOING TO BE” would beat my eyes open at 9AM, and I’d race downstairs, a curdled ball of panic in my stomach that would impel me to an hour or two of frantic, despairing calling, more to say I’d done it, sort of like a ticket-punching ritual done for its own sake than out of any hope that there’d be anything on the other end of the line. Think of rebound dating.

I’d get to the end of these sessions feeling worse than when I’d started. And yet there I went – every week or so, it’d overwhelm me again.

Again – sort of like rebound dating.

———-

One change – Wyatt had finally driven our other roommate, Dan, out earlier in the month. Oddly, for as amazingly promiscuous a man as he was (he said with a straight face at about this time that “my goal in life is to f*** every woman in the world”), he had a very dim impression of gays. “I don’t like faggots”, he said many times. He did his best to live up to both statements. The women bit – well, that should be obvious.

As to Dan? His property – including several of his paychecks – started disappearing. By early May, Wyatt had taken to actively antagonizing Dan’s boyfriend. He did it when I wasn’t around – I heard about it all second-hand…

…but by the end of May, Dan had had enough. He gave notice.

A day or two later – in early June – Dan and a few friends showed up with a truck and moved him out in during the day, while Wyatt and I were out. He left me a note – he just couldn’t deal with Wyatt’s BS anymore.

So that made for an extra-large rent payment, and a payment to the Pioneer Press to put an ad in the “Roomates Wanted” section.

———-

But that was the closest thing to excitement that I managed. My days during this brutally hot summer were very, very circumscribed. I’d wake up around 9ish. I’d have something to eat, usually. I’d jump on my bike and ride most of the day – unless something was broken, which would involve a half-day quest to roll my bike laboriously to a repair shop. If I was feeling especially industrious or motivated, I might stop at the Dairy Queen, or the library, or ride down to Crosby Park, or…well, whatever rolled my way, really. If I was not feeling motivated, I’d ride to see how dry my mouth would get before I could take a drink, or how yellow my pee could get, or how many of my old apartments and houses I could reach, or how many miles I could ride without seeing anything interesting. Some days, I did nothing but ride box grids in different neighborhoods; others, I’d just pick a street and ride it to the end, or as far as I could get before I had to turn around to get back for work.

Looking back (because I’d never have put it this way back then) most days’ rides would have bookends of despair; at the beginning of the ride, I was pounding out the miles to forget about how awful it felt to be so…aimless. Such a failure. And at the end, there was the dull ache of knowing I had to wash up and go to yet another awful bar.

I’d have something to eat (usually a baked potato stuffed with cheese and onions), then off to whatever the bar of the evening was. I’d grab the traditional after-work drink at the bars that allowed it, drive carefully home, and check in for the latest in Wyatt’s game of musical women. About half the nights, Wyatt would have hooked up with some girl he’d met at his day job during the day, and would have Teresa, his hot blond “steady” girlfriend, over at night. On the other nights – when Teresa worked (she was a night nurse at a nursing home), they’d bump uglies in the afternoon, and Wyatt’d pick up some other floozie at Christenson’s or the Belmont or O’Gara’s for the evening’s entertainment. I figured that Wyatt was boffing, on the average, with between four and seven different women a week. Every week.

Which was, in and of itself, depressing.

I’d usually fall asleep reading a book, to the sound of Wyatt and whomever-it-was having thudding, drunken, arklahoma-inflected, drug-enhanced sex in the next room, or having a thudding, drunken, arklahoma-inflected, drug-enhanced argument about something or another.

And then I’d wake up, and it’d start again.

Every f*****g day.

It was Monday, June 13, 1988.

It was a gorgeous, sunny day. The first, pleasant hint of what was going to turn out to be a long, hot summer was seeping into the air.

Although we didn’t have a band going at the time, Bill the Drummer and I stayed friends. I’d occasionally drive over to the Band House to jam with one group of musicians or another, which was usually a great excuse to hang out at one of the bars in the area; Mondays were three-for-ones at Lyle’s (long before it was a hipster hangout); Wednesdays, we’d cadge $.50 drinks from girls at Ladies Night at the Uptown; Tuesdays were usually great nights to see and be seen at the CC Club and its a-friggin-mazing jukebox.

Monday was my night off from jocking. The service loved me; they had me working six nights a week. Typical; the job I loved, I couldn’t get arrested in. The job I hated, I was a raging success.

Life sucked.

Well, no. Not so much “sucked”, as “was very frustrating”.

And there’s nothing to blow away sucky frustration like a day at the range. Which is what I called up Bill to arrange, around 10AM.

———-

They say the most arrogant, rude, snooty, overly “enthusiastic” New Yorkers (or artists, or San Franciscans, or Greenies, or whatever) are the ones who come to it as adults. I don’t know that the same holds true for shooters – but Bill the Drummer would have been evidence of it.

Since his episode the previous spring – where he’d gotten mugged, and asked me to help him get into shooting – he’d become quite the gunny. Blessed with a $90/month rent payment, no car, almost no real bills and a job that paid decent tips, he had some disposable income (in that “living on a mattress in a converted three-season porch” kind of way). And for the previous couple of months, he’d spent it on shootin’ iron. He’d picked up…:

• An Enfield No. 4 Mk 1 – the classic British military rifle of the forties and fifties.
• A Colt M1911A1 – his father’s, from the war.
• A Walther P38 – one his father had brought home from the war. Like the Colt, I think he was happy one of his kids wanted to take it off his hands. Like a lot of combat veterans, he was deeply ambivalent about firearms.
• A Smith and Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum – a blued beauty with a five inch barrel.

I loaded up my car around lunchtime with my own arsenal – my Ljungmann (a WWII vintage Swedish rifle), my Remington Nylon .22, and my latest toy, a little .22 automatic pistol – and drove to Bill’s to load up his entire armory. Then it was off to Richfield Gun and Pawn for a grocery bag full of ammo, cleaning fluid and earplugs. Then, off to the range – “Moon Valley”, on the border between Eden Prairie and Chanhassen.

Of course, it took me nearly forty minutes to sort out the inscrutable maze of roads where 169, 494, Flying Cloud, Valley View and 212 all come together – a morass of concrete the bedevils me today, even after having worked at eight companies within three miles of that area in the past fifteen years – but eventually we got there.

———-

There are few better stress-relievers in life than sitting at the range on a gorgeous day, busting off caps. None of the better ones can be done without a person of the opposite sex along (or, y’know, the same, if you’re wired that way. Vive l’difference).

Part of it is the intensity of it all; you have to have your mind switched on, even when you’re just taking your spot on the line. If you don’t know that one dumb slipup can kill you, or someone else, you shouldn’t be there.

And shooting itself – the concentration, minding your breathing and the tension in your fingers and all the other factors – is all-engrossing, when you’re trying to hit a bulls-eye 200 yards away.

And it’s visceral. The sound of metal on metal and the implacable resistance as you pull the bolt carrier against the tension of the bolt return spring when you rack a round; the kick-to-the gut of the reports around you as other guns fire; the buildup of tension, the direct kick back to the shoulder (or the crease of your hand, with a pistol; the feeling of wrestling against the forces of physics to stay on target to get your next shot off quickly (if that’s what you’re trying to do); the smell of burned powder and hot oil and scorched brass, the taste of smoke – it consumes, and sometimes abuses, all five senses.

And the company is…well, interesting. Moon Valley catered to hard-core hunters, for the most part – guys from the third-tier ‘burbs who hailed from out back originally, who came in to zero their sights and practice up a little point shooting before they took to the field. They looked askance at some of the non-hunters – a guy who brought in an AK drew a scolding from the rangemaster when he busted off thirty rounds in a big hurry. The crowd wasn’t “gun nuts” – it was mostly marksmen.

And Bill and I. Although to be fair, after a little practice we were doing pretty well. I was hitting in the ring at 200 yards pretty nicely (20 years later, they all seem like the ten ring; grade my recollections accordingly).

———-

We hung out for 2-3 hours. We shot everything. I didn’t like the .44 Magnum one bit. And the P38 just felt wrong, and the SKS was kind of unpleasant. But I loved the Enfield – and my Ljungmann was a total hoot – a sweet-shooting darling of a rifle.

Finally, we ran out of ammo. We loaded up, and drove over to the Lyon’s Tap for what were, in their day, just about the best burgers ‘n cheap beer in the metro.

I dropped Bill and his arsenal off at the Band House, and drove home. 

Wyatt was waving goodbye to Teresa as I lugged my cases out of the car and into the house.  I hauled my guns up to my room, and taped a particulary impressive grouping to my bedroom door just for the fun of it. 

I grabbed my bike and turned around to take a little evening spin around Como as Allison – a petite, very underage blond that Wyatt kept letting into the various bars he bounced at – knocked at the front door. 

“Is Wyatt here?”

I rode until long, long after dark.

It was Monday, May 16, 1988. 9AM.

It had been an interesting weekend. Wyatt was high most of the time. He’d gotten fired from Hot Rod’s, so he was looking to be even shorter on the money. And I was starting to look for a way to jettison his freeloading ass.

And my best way of doing that might just be arriving. Today, I was supposed to call Charles, the program director in Orlando, to talk about flying me down for a job interview for an evening talk show – the perfect next step in a career that’d been on hold for over a year, now.

I threw caution to the wind; at 9AM sharp, I dialled the number.

“Buenos Dias, Radio Espanol por Orlando!”, a cheery and not-remotely-Anglo voice welcomed me.

“Oh, I’m sorry”, I stammered, hoping it was a wrong number, even as I remembered enough high school Spanish to know exactly what she’d said. “I’m looking for Dave”, the program director.

“I’m sorrrry, sir”, said the woman. “Thees station is now Spanish rrradio”

Dave, the entire staff, and the plan for the evening news magazine were out on the street.

I hung up. And stood by the phone for a couple of minutes.

Finally, I put a leash on Mookie, and went out for a long walk. My legs felt like they had sandbags strapped to the ankles. My vision narrowed to a faint little tunnel at times. I felt sick, intermittently, with flashes of anger interspersed.

I walked for hours – at least until late afternoon. I came home as Teresa was leaving. “Hi, Mitch!”, she chirped, looking fresh and blond and beautiful, in her uniform for a day at work at the nursing home. “Hey, Teresa”, I nodded.

I took a shower, got dressed for work – City Limits, tonight – and passed Wyatt in the hall. “You got the rent money?”

“I’ll get it, man”, he said, going into the bathroom with his “night out on the town” clothes, sounding perfunctory and clipped and not at all like he was gonna get it, man.

F*ck it.

As I walked out to the car, Michelle walked up the sidewalk. “Hi, Mitch”.

“Hi, Michelle”.

I slumped into the driver’s seat and sat for a moment, my arms feeling too heavy to lift to start the car.

It feels like I’m watching someone else’s life, I thought. And it’s starting to suck.

It was Tuesday, May 10, 1988.

The phone had gotten turned back on later the previous Friday. Wyatt, naturally, had not paid the phone bill. For that matter, he pled “I’m a little short this week” on the rent, too. “I’ll get it! I’ll get it!”, he eventually bellowed at Shane and me, as he walked out to meet Teresa. Or Michelle. Or Anne. Or someone.

No matter. My ticket out of this – I hoped – was waiting.

Around 9:30, I called the station in Orlando. I got the receptionist; she told me the program director was in a meeting.

“Could you tell him Mitch Berg called?”

“Oh, Mitch! Hi!”, she said, with the faint aroma of recognition, and maybe excitement, on the top. “I talked with Charles; he’s talking about wanting to bring you down for an interview”.

My heart skipped a couple of beats.

“I’ll have him call you”.

I thanked her, and camped by the phone, playing the guitar and drinking Mountain Dew, for two hours. Finally, just before his show was supposed to start, he called.

“Mitch!”

He definitely wanted to get me down to Orlando to talk.

“Tell you what – I’ve got a couple of days off coming up. Call me on Monday, and we’ll get things set up”.

I thanked him. And started sizing up my life to try to fit a future into it.

Not even Wyatt and his limp excuses could faze me today.

It was Friday, May 6, 1988. Another pleasant spring day with hints of hot and humid in the air. The spring-y scent that blew threw the windows in the morning was being augmented with a little early-summer funk, sooner than usual.

I didn’t care. Destiny awaited.

I went downstairs around 8AM, calculating the time to try to call Charlie at the station in Orlando. I figured he’d be in around 8 or 9ish, but he’d have the usual early-morning clusterfargs to take care of before he started doing show prep for his own show – 1PM Eastern. So the sweet spot would be between 10 and 11AM eastern. 9 or 10 Central.

Make it 9:10, to not seem too anxious. Never let ’em see you sweat.

At 9:10 on the button, I picked up the phone.

Silence.

I hung up and tried again.

Nothing.

Oh, there was some kind of signal on the line – an occasional electric “click” gave it away – but no dial tone.

We’d been shut off.

Wyatt had stiffed me on the bill in April, pleading “I got no money”, and promised to pay it this month.

“Wyatt!”, I yelled up the stairs. He was in bed with…Michelle, I think? One of his “B-list” girls, who’d been showing up once or twice a week.

“Huuuh”, he groaned in his affected Arklahoma accent.

“Did you pay the phone bill like you said?”

Silence.

“Yo?”

“No, I didn’t. I came up a little short this week”.

F**k, right, I muttered, you had plenty of money to go partying last night, a***ole. Figures.

I grabbed a notebook, some paper, and my passbook, and ran out to my car. I jumped in, ran to my nearest bank branch. I got $20, changing $5 of it for quarters.

I looked at my watch as I ran out: 9:30.

There was a pay phone in front of Rainbow Foods, right across the parking lot. I ran over…

…and saw a disheveled-looking obese white man wearing droopy sweat pants and with terminal plumber’s crack, swearing incoherently into the phone. I stood, hoping that meant the conversation was near an end.

It wasn’t.

9:40.

I ran back out to my car, and drove up the street, looking for another pay phone.

I saw a bar. It was open. I’d been in there once before; it had a pay phone.

I parked, and ran inside and dialed the number. After I deposited $2 and change in quarters, my call connected, as I frantically wondered how I was going to tell the guy not to bother calling me for a couple of days – I’d be “out of town” or something, anything, to keep him from trying to call and hearing the dreaded “disconnect” recording.

And, for once, I actually got through.

“Mitch! Here’s the deal”

And we talked, as I anxiously counted out my minutes, hoping that it wouldn’t be obvious that I was on a pay phone. He was interested in having me host a nightly “News Magazine” show – 6-9PM. Not the best shift – competing with prime time TV was always brutal – but it was a shot in the major markets. The money was, by industry standards, adequate, and by my standards at the moment, spectacular.

“Call me back, say, Tuesday or Wednesday. I’ll have an update. I’d like to move fast on this”, he said.

I left the bar…

…no. I didn’t. I had a beer (75 cents!) to celebrate.

Then I left. And drove downtown to the phone company. And wrote out a check for yet another *&^%$# bill.

(Twin Cities hYpStRz know the bar as the Turf Club, today.  Back then it was still the Turf Club – but this was five or six years before alternative rockers discovered the place.  The Turf was full of serious drinkers, old guys who’d worn the stools into the shapes of their butts from being there so long; the “live music” was an accordion band that’d show up on Fridays or Saturdays, back then.  We’ll revisit the Turf in about eight more years, as the series, God willing, continues). 

It was Tuesday, May 3, 1988. A pleasant spring day.

My attempts to break back into talk radio – or news, or sports, or pretty much any kind of radio at all – had fallen to a desultory hour or two of calling to check up on old contacts, once every week or two.

Oh, I was still nominally in play, sort of. Kind of. Stations in New Bedford and Fall River Massachussets, Hammond Indiana, Sarasota Florida, Santa Rosa California and Albuquerque New Mexico all liked my tape, and told me to stay in touch. So I did.

And did.

And did.

And I’d occasionally dig back through the SRDS directory – which, after a year of very heavy use, was getting pretty beaten-up – and try to see if anything had changed at any other stations.

Late the previous week, I’d called a station I’d tried once the previous year – a talk station in Orlando, Florida. I found there was a new program director. I got through to him. He was a jovial-sounding guy who’d been there maybe three months. We clicked on the phone. I’d sent him a tape.

He’d gotten it.

“Mitch”, he said, in a voice that sounded like his mouth was always full of potato chips, “I love your tape. I have an idea. I can’t go into it right now, but gimme a call back at the end of the week, and let’s talk”.

My heart jumped. I wrote it down on my calendar. Friday. Call Charlie in Orlando.

It was 2AM, Thursday, April 3, 1988.

The previous day had been pretty much like every other day, these days.

I had gotten up up around ten.

I’d started keeping my radio station calling to Mondays; the long-distance bills were sorta out of hand, if I didn’t ration things.  And there was really not much going on, anyway.

I walked Mookie.  I went to the library.

I drove out to City Limits, the bowling-alley bar in Rosemount, and worked the evening.  It was a slow, dull evening, like all weekday evenings at Jams.

I drove home, stopping at Perkins in Apple Valley, at the corner of Cedar and 42, to grab an idle late-night snack.  I loved the potato pancakes – although I never figured out why they served ’em with syrup.  Potato pancakes were like fluffy hash browns; we all know that ketchup is the only acceptable topping.

It was probably 2:15AM as I went to the counter to pay.  I took out my checkbook and filled it in…

…April 3.

It’d been a year since I’d gotten whacked at KSTP.  One year to the day.

And I’d not made one millimeter of progress.  Things had gotten worse, in fact.  I hadn’t had a voice-over job since October; I hadn’t sold a newspaper article since January.

Of course, I’d stopped trying to do either.   Pointing that out to myself made it worse.

The anniversary sat in my stomach like an undigested golf ball as I drove back to Saint Paul.

Now I was depressed.

It was Monday, March 21, 1988. It was a chilly, sloppy morning that was fixing to turn into springtime, sooner or later.

Mark and Bill, the bassist and drummer respectively in my former band, were the youngest two brothers of a big, brawling Irish-Catholic family of eight – five brothers and three sisters. All eight of them were reliably left-of-center (more accurately, socialist) on every issue; they were also blazingly smart, articulate people; although only the two oldest brothers had gone to college, all eight of them were among the best-read people I’d ever met in my life; Bill – a tenth-grade dropout – was better-read than most Masters’ candidates in literature that I’ve met; his knowledge of James Joyce is rivalled by only one person I know.

And after our various band practices, we usually adjourned to glorious hours-long discussions of politics, literature, and history, that usually ended around 2AM and left everyone wanting more. Naturally, they all knew I’d been a conservative talk show host – it was fairly safe to say I was the only conservative pundit in the Twin Cities music scene at the time. So the debates were pretty intense – but fun.

One of the issues we disagreed about the most strongly was gun control. Neil – the brother just older than Mark, who had lived in New York and was a competitive weightlifter when he wasn’t working his day job (as a mover) was the most vigorously anti-gun; “if you’re a man, you shouldn’t need a gun”, he’d say – and usually change the subject when I responded “so what if you’re a 75 year old man? Or a 90 pound woman? Or a guy in a wheelchair”.

Mark didn’t like guns because of some legal issues in his teenage years; it was a legal matter, so he abstained pretty intensely.

Bill, the drummer? Well, with him the debate was largely philosophical and intellectual.

Until today.

———-

The phone rang at 8AM. It was Bill.

“Mitch? You gotta help me buy a gun”.

He related the story; he’d been mugged the night before. Some thug had made off with about $300 in cash. That followed a breakin that’d happened a few months earlier that had netted a TV and some cheap stereo gear (and thankfully none of the musical instruments in the basement).

Bill had had enough. Although he knew Minnesota’s concealed-carry law at the time would never grant him a permit to carry in public, he wanted to secure his home – and secure it but good.

I picked him up around 10. We drove to Richfield Gun and Pawn.

He made a beeline to the store’s large, well-trafficked Assault Rifle section, and started eyeing a Norinco AK47.

I tactfully talked him away from it; for home defense, either a shotgun or a handgun were a much better idea.

I directed him toward a really nifty 12 gauge riot gun. We walked toward the counter…

…and he saw the SKS carbine. It was like a magnetic attraction.

“Bill”, I said, trying to nag him out of it. But between the firepower (semi-automatic, ten round stripper clip-fed magazine) and the price (about $100 at the time), it…well, “sent the message” he wanted sent.

I talked him into buying a box of soft-point rounds (the better for shooting indoors) along with a couple of boxes of cheap Egyptian hardball, and we drove out to Bill’s Gun Range in Robbinsdale. We set up on the line, I walked him through the safety rules (it’s always loaded), and he fired the first shots of his life, busting off five shots at a paper target.

And he came up smiling. My first convert.

Another true believer.

I had created a monster, as events turned out – but in a good way.

It was Monday, February 1, 1988. 

Working for the DJ service, the drill was to call in every Monday to find out where you’d be working for the coming week.  Guys who did mostly mobile shows – weddings and parties where they’d take a mobile rig out on the road – would get their locations and their rig assignments.  Guys who worked clubs – I was one of them – would get what club they were working on what night.  It made a handy way of firing people, if you were passive-aggressive; some jocks just stopped getting assignments for a few weeks; they usually took the hint.

I had the opposite problem.  After six weeks of club jocking, the service wished they had another of me.  They had me working six nights a week.  Which, being paid by the night, was a good thing.

The previous week:

• Monday: Off
• Tuesday:  Jams (the dive in Brooklyn Center)
• Wednesday: City Limits (the blah place in Rosemount)
• Thursday: Jams
• Friday: City Limits
• Saturday: George’s
• Sunday: City Limits (the snooziest night of the week; I usually ended up playing for the staff and two drunks by 11ish)

George’s was, of course, the highlight of the week.  All the more so because of Cathy.

So I called in for the week’s assignments.  I talked with Biff, the spiky-haired guy.

• Monday: Off
• Tuesday:  Jams
• Wednesday: City Limits
• Thursday: Jams
• Friday: City Limits
• Saturday: Jams
• Sunday: City Limits

“Um…”, I started, “No George’s?”

“Nah” said Biff.  “Couldn’t close the deal.  We were too expensive”. 

Crap.  I was already getting sick of Jams and “Slims”. 

After I got off the phone, my roommate Dan – the new, gay roommate – walked in. 

“Did you bring in the mail Friday??

No, I answered.

“I was supposed to get my paycheck”. 

Ow.  I’ll keep an eye peeled, I replied.  I noted that I’d gotten my paycheck…

I filed it away.  Maybe Wyatt knew something.

It was Saturday, January 31, 1988.

I worked my third straight weekend at George’s in Fridley. They totally loved me there. Which was a very cool thing.

The roommate situation had stabilized – sort of. After we kicked Chris (the crazy guy who earned a living from welfare, working at Wendy’s, and shoplifting clothes from Dayton’s, and who’d left his cat locked in his room for three days) out, we’d taken out an ad in the “Roommates” section of the paper. A young genetics major at the “U”, “Ron”, moved in. Nice kid; short, clean-cut, laid-back…

…gay. Very very gay.

That didn’t faze me.

But when Ron tried to bring a boyfriend over, Wyatt – the aggressive libertine – blew a gasket. “I don’t like fags”, he muttered in the fake arklahoma accent he affected (he was the son of a very wealthy family from downstate Connecticut, actually) whenever he wanted to make a point.

Things got very tense, very fast.  Wyatt started actively antagonizing Ron. 

Ah, but that was the home life.  And I was at George’s, again.  And I totally rocked the joint.  Which had its benefits.

A big one – I drank free, there.  I found this out when I stopped by there one day on my way home from a bar that the agency had sent me to to “learn the joint” – spend a couple of hours learning the gear, watching another DJ work the room, etc.  Tony wouldn’t take my money.

This was a very good thing.

So I’d brought a date there the previous Tuesday, my night off.

Let’s back up a bit. It was some girl I’d met at a gig with my band, the previous year – and you may read anything you want into the fact that I don’t mention her until a eight months after we met and almost a week after our date – but only if you read absolutely nothing interesting into it.  We ran into each other at the various rock ‘n roll bars around town. I figured what the heck – let’s ask her out.

Anyway. 

I took her to George’s – partly because Tony wouldn’t take my money. A nice cheap date was the best one. Plus it made me look all connected – walking into the bar, having the owner (who might have looked Italian, it’s not like my date was going to know) welcome me like I was a member of the family and refuse my attempt to pay the bill…

…yeah, that rocked.

Oh, yeah.  Saturday night.

I had the whole floor packed.  The assistant kitchen managers had learned not to come waddling up to the booth to order me to play what they wanted – by this point, knowing that I had Tony’s blessing, I was pretty much off-limits to them.  And for the first time in my six-week-old DJing career, I achieved something that only happened a few times in the next several miserable years of club-jocking; the floor was so full, so jumping, so packed, it left me buzzing.  The same sort of high I got when my band had a (rare) great night…

…and it was me, dammit!

Tony and Papa George liked me just fine.

It was Saturday, January 16, 1988.  A bitterly cold night.

And I was on my way to Fridley.

Well, I was on my way to try to find Fridley.

I’d gotten a call from Scott at the DJ service; they had a different bar for me to try, and they figured I’d be perfect for it.  The bar was “George Is In Fridley”, usually pronounced “George’s In Fridley”. 

“The place is kinda funky”, Scott said.  “Weird crowd – kinda half brothers, half northeast-side rednecks.  It’s also kinda a weird situation; the dance floor is also restaurant space; your first two hours will be playing dinner music.  Then they clear it off, and it’s dance time!”

“And the owners…”  he said, describing the family that ran the place. 

We’ll get back to that.

It was Saturday.  And in two and a half years in the Twin Cities, I’d never once driven to Northeast Minneapolis, other than whizzing through on 35W.  Not knowing the freeway connections at all, I drove down University for miles and miles, eventually hanging a left and going over to Marshall which, just at the Fridley/Minneapolis border, turned into River Road.

And was where the bar stood, inches north of the inter-city border.  Across River Road stood the huge FMC plant; you could see brand-new naval gun turrets, bound for the Navy’s latest class of destroyers, sitting on rail cars, the haze gray paint job standing out under the yard lights against the dismal industrial background.  George’s looked like a big pole barn, with a gravel parking lot and shabby doors covered with beer ads.

I walked inside, and found “Tony”, the boss.  He was a padded, businesslike-looking Greek man.  “You are Mitch”, he said, sizing me up.  “Mitch Berg”, I answered, shaking his hand.

We walked through the bar into the main room; it looked like it’d been a ballroom in the forties, with a slick wooden dance floor surrounded by raised restaurant seating on three sides (and covered with tables about 2/3 full of diners), and, at the far end, a DJ booth towering high above a raised stage that looked like it was big enough to hold a small “big” band at one point. 

We walked to a long table, at the head of the room, set aside from the bar and across the floor from the booth.  There were chairs only on the side away from the booth.  At the center chair sat an elderly, swarthy-looking gentleman, who was talking with a couple of women in waitress uniforms and signing some piece of paperwork, looking a bit like Richard Blaine in the opening scenes of Casablanca; the diners got progressively younger, the farther from the center you went. 

“This is my father, George, the owner of the bar.  Papa, this is Mitch…Berg?” he said and asked.  I nodded, and shook his hand.

“You do good job for us?  This should be good night!” he said, smiling, in a manner that implied that it wasn’t a question.

“You bet!”

And then someone else – looked like a kitchen manager – got the floor, standing before Papa George as Tony led me to the booth.  We climbed two levels of risers and a final set of steps – the floor of the booth was a solid seven feet above the dance floor – and he showed me how to turn all the equipment on.

“Hokay, you can do this.  One thing”, he said, turning to me before climbing back down; “you will get people coming up here telling you what to play.  You are the only one who decides, hokay?”

“Gotcha”, I replied, smiling, puzzled.

———-

I started out the evening playing dinner music – quieter stuff, light jazz, doo-wop and some slower oldies.  After half an hour, a pudgy, scowling woman in a white service jacket threaded through the tables and climbed the risers with some difficulty. 

“I’m Jessica, the assistant kitchen manager.  And you have to play some danceable stuff.  You gotta start getting things going here…”

“Er, we have about half an hour of dinner left…”

“I’m not asking!  I’m telling!  Get things moving!” she said with executive finality as she turned and climbed back down the risers.

Remembering Tony’s dictum, I changed nothing.

About half an hour later, as the diners on the floor finished up and started dissipating, the bouncers and bussers started clearing and removing the tables from the floor.  Another woman – taller, thinner, younger, in a white shirt and black skirt and with long auburn hair – climbed the risers.  “You’re the DJ”, she asked.  A name-tag on her blouse said “Tanya;  Asst. Bar Manager”.

“Yes, Tanya, I am”.

“Hokay”, she slurred as I smelled booze on her breath, “I’m the assistant bar manager, and you need to slow things down so the people can eat”.

“Will do”, I said, as she turned and hopped down the risers.  I changed, again, nothing.

As the floor cleared, I started picking up the pace – more rock ‘n roll, a little accessible R’nB – and watched Papa George at the head table.  Tony had joined him, sitting at Papa’s side.  Another guy – looked like another of George’s sons – sat at the other side.  Other couples flanked them all – there were probably a dozen people, all sitting on the same side, all facing me across the floor.  It felt a little like playing to the Corleones.

Oh, I knocked it dead that night.  Tony climbed the risers around midnight.  “You good!”, he said, nodding approvingly at the packed dance floor and the crowded bar behind it.  “You real good”.

It was Thursday, January 14, 1988.

It was cold out. 

Wyatt, my roommate, was – as noted before – exhibiting signs of every kind of addiction one can manifest.

• Smoking – 2-3 packs a day.
• Drinking – Low-grade, probably – somewhere between a six and a twelve of cheap beer a day. 
• Drugs – torching up daily.
• Sex – He had a steady girlfriend, as noted before – Teresa, a nurse at a local nursing home.  And when she wasn’t around, he was usually bringing home someone else, 3-5 times a week.  Envious though I was, I knew it couldn’t be healthy – especially since he bragged that condoms were for dorks. 
• Gambling – poker games, interspersed with spur-of-the-moment trips to the casinos or, occasionally, Fargo to play blackjack.

And, on top of it – odd purchases.  One day, he brought home a dog, a fuzzy black Chow he’d named “Muki”.  I didn’t know dogs, much, but I did know that Chows were kinda big, and had horrible tempers. 

And two days later, he brought home another, a huge Akita named “Jack”. 

And three days later, a Samoyed named “Rosco”. 

Three huge dogs in a three-bedroom side-by-side duplex.

Jack turned out to be dumb as a bag of hammers, and kind of nasty and with a knack of getting in the way. 

Rosco was much worse; he’d walk out to the middle of the floor in front of you, squat down and poo all over the place.  And when you got up to whack his head and take him outside, he’d flee to the corner and whiz all over the place in panic.  The boy had issues, and didn’t last long – maybe three weeks – before Wyatt sold him.  And then bought another Samoyed who, as luck would have it, was equally crazy.  The Samoyeds didn’t last long, thankfully.

But Muki turned out to be a doll; loveable, sweet-tempered (especially for a Chow), affectionate.  

Life had settled into a bit of a routine in the past few weeks.

1. Wake up.
2. Put on a record
3. Make some oatmeal.
4. Go through my notes to see if I was due to make any follow-up calls to radio stations.  Although I wasn’t doing this every single day; I was focusing on biweekly followups with program directors who’d expressed interest (at this point Fall River, New Bedford, Santa Rosa, Raleigh, and maybe a few others) and trolling for rumors of other stations that were switching to “talk” formats.
5. Take a walk.  Sometimes to the library, sometimes to noplace at all.  Often, I’d take Muki and, rarely, Jack, with.  They needed the walk, I needed the focus – and there was always the chance that I’d meet a girl, although in mid-January that was a little dicier.
6. Occasionally, go to Henri’s and have a beer and shoot some pool.
7. Make dinner – ramen, a stuffed potato, or maybe a frozen pizza.
8. Go to one of the bars I was working – Jams and City Limits.
9. Come home, read, go to bed.

Lather, rinse, repeat.  That was really pretty much it.

It was Thursday, December 31st, 1987. 

I was working at “Jams” in Brooklin Center again.  My boss, the spiky-haired guy at the DJ service, said they – especially Scowly, the manager – loved me out there. 

It was wet and sloppy out, and I had a miserable cold; sinus congestion, hacking my lungs out, brutal headache.   Barely functional.  But I needed the money real bad, and the DJ service was desperately short of jocks.

So off to the bar I drove, around 7:00.  I had not much better to do that night.  Wyatt was going to a New Years party with Teresa; Chris was packing up to move. 

I celebrated with one of Jams’ burger baskets – happy new year to me! – before I started turning on the gear.

The good news; one of the bartenders took pity on my state.  He brought me a shot of Jeszynowka – a brand of Polish blackberry brandy made from (this is important) blackberries (as opposed to grain alcohol with “blackberry” syrup).  “Best decongestant and cough syrup ever made”, he said.  And danged if it didn’t work.  Or at least if it didn’t feel like it’d worked.  I had another, just to be sure.

My condition aside, it was a great evening.  The bar – not a big place, mind you – was packed to the gills.  The DJ booth – a square formica “bar” with maybe twelve square feet of space – was an oasis of elbow room. 

And the dance floor was packed – the first time I’d ever had that happen in almost a whole week of being a club jock. 

Scowly really liked me.

———-

The bartender who’d sicced me on the Jeszynowkia – “Tom” was his name – was a genial, stoner kind of guy.  He invited me to a party at one of the bowling alley managers’ places after closing time.  It was just up the street, in Brooklyn Center.

I got there – a tiny post-war prefab just north of 100 and Shingle Creek – around 1:30 AM.  It was almost as crowded as the bar had been.  The air was blue-green with cigarette and pot smoke.  The first keg of the evening was starting to sputter, as someone started tapping #2.  I knew nobody – Tom the bartender never showed up.  Nobody knew me.  A couple was arguing in the corner.  I struck up a conversation about the Vikings with someone who asked me if I was working hard, or hardly working.  I left around 2:15. 

I have to get out of this racket, I thought as I picked my way through the icy streets back to I94.

———-

I got home around 2:40 or so.  The tart tang of pot smoke covered the smell of male cat spray, finally.  Wyatt was in the kitchen making some scrambled eggs, with a borderline-chubby, late-teen/early-twentysomething girl.  Not Teresa.

“Hey!  This is Ann!”

I waved “hi” as I went up to my room, locking it behind me.  I reached into the closet, under a pile of dirty laundry, and grabbed a plastic water jug with a couple of inches of cheap gin in the bottom – where I’d been hiding it from Wyatt – and poured a couple of fingers into a plastic mug on my nightstand. 

I carefully hid the jug again, and sat at my desk, pushed up against the wall by the window across from my bed, and slowly sipped the gin as I looked out on the street, the streetlamp shining with crystalline intensity in the frigid night air.  I caught the faint whiff of the slowly-dissipating funk of male cat spray over the cheap-gin aroma as I put my feet up on the desktop, and took a long drag as Wyatt’s headboard started to bang against the wall.

Happy Friggin’ New Year, I thought, hoping this’d be the last one like this.

Yep.  Last one like this.  1988’s gonna be my year.

It was Saturday, December 26, 1988.

I’d driven back to the Twin Cities early in the morning; I’d left Jamestown at a frigid 8AM, and arrived back in the Twins early in the afternoon.

I walked into the house; it reeked of chiba and…something else. I couldn’t quite place it, but it was hideous.

Wyatt was sitting on the living room couch, with a flamboyant-figured, devastatingly-gorgeous blonde woman. Both were wearing bathrobes.

“Dude”, Wyatt grunted. “Hey, Chris locked his cat in his room!”.

Chris – our somewhat-emotionally-challenged roommate – had a cat. The cat usually had leave to wander the house – but Chris had gone to visit his mom for Christmas, down in Burnsville, and locked the cat in his room while he was gone.

I’d never really had pets in my life, so I didn’t quite know the full import of “un-neutered male cat”.

“Oh, hey – this is Teresa”, Wyatt said, nodding to the woman on the couch. “C’mon up…”

I should take a moment to point out that Wyatt, in addition to being a smoker and a drinker and a heavy pot smoker, was an inveterate (albeit inept) gambler. He also had a thing for the ladies; he usually brought a different one home every night. This, however, was the third or fourth time I’d seen Teresa.

“Hi”, I said, following Wyatt to Chris’ room.

“I think she’s gonna be a regular thing”, Wyatt whispered conspiratorially as we walked up the hall to Chris’ door.

“Like, girlfriend?” I asked.

“Sure. She’s awesome”.

Then, a change of subject; “Smell that?”

It smelled bad, and the door was shut. I whipped out my driver’s license, stuck it into the lock, and popped it open…

…and was bowled over by the stench, as the cat ran out between us.

The landlord came over later in the day, took one whiff, and said Chris had to go. “Now”.

———-

I had a new bar to work that night, so I grabbed a quick nap, took a shower, and got ready.

The bar was “Jams”, in Brooklyn Center. It was another bowling-alley bar, smaller and smokier and more-cramped than “City Limits”, but a shorter drive. They also made a really mean burger basket.

I started at 8:30. By 10:15, I had a full floor, and I kept it that way until closing time. The manager – a portly woman in her late thirties with a face frozen in a permanent scowl – came by the booth. “You’re pretty good! Great job!”, she said, scowling.

———-

I came home around 2AM. Wyatt was on the couch with a woman. Not Teresa, in this case; short, dark-haired, very Hispanic-looking.

“Hey, Mitch”, Wyatt said, “This is Ruby”.

It was Wednesday, December 23, 1987.  I’d negotiated a couple of days off from the various bars I’d been working to take my first Christmas at my parents’ place since 1984.

CLOSED CIRCUIT TO MY KIDS:  Skip past the next couple of paragraphs, until you get to the part where it says “KIDS MAY REJOIN THIS POST”.

My guitar player Casey – a fellow Jamestown native – and I carpooled it back to Jamestown for Christmas.

I used to carpool back to Jamestown with a couple of different friends, back then.  My pal Rich and I used to go in on a sixpack of Summit (brand new on the market back then) and drink one every 100 miles, on the road.  Kept us nice and cool for long summer trips.  (Duly noted:  It was stupid, and illegal as hell.  We were 24 and immortal.  So sue us all). 

Casey?  Well, he was a bit more of a drinker than Rich and I, at that time of his life (but then, weren’t we all?).  When I picked him up at his place in Minneapolis, at about four in the afternoon, he brought out a case of Carlings and a pint of peppermint schnapps.

We rolled up Lyndale and out onto I94, heading west, doing our best to bypass the morass of construction on US12, which – someday waaaaay off in the future – was going to be something called “I394”, but at the moment was merely a huge traffic cluster-hug.

We talked about music as we trundled west through the freezing night (below zero, if I remember correctly, although everything that winter seemed like it was below zero).  As the sun set, Casey broke out the beer.  

The rule of thumb – when I was driving back to Jamestown with Rich, and being a “responsible” drinking driver – was one beer every 100 miles.  No more, no faster.

Casey got a running start, popping a couple before I got into them. 

By the time we got to Fargo, we were down to maybe ten beers; I’d had four or five; we were both pretty impaired.

And then it started.  One of the things that had broken up the original band was that Casey and Bill  – and me, I guess, in retrospect – were two-stage drunks.  

• Stage 1:  Jolly, gregarious, happy. 
• Stage 2:  Ugly, belligerent, self-pitying.

Stage 2 kicked in just past Fargo, about eight at night. 

“Mark and Bill don’t like playing with you.  They say you’re a control freak…”, he said.  “They’d like to try a different band”. 

And on.  And on.

I sat, getting more and more numb, only partly from the cheap beer.  Casey kept on talking about how the rest of the band  just plain didn’t like playing with me.  I got quieter and quieter.  Eventually I didn’t respond; I’d take the occasional sip of beer, and sank further and further into my chair.  It would be probably fifteen years before I heard the term “shame spiral”, but I was in one.

We cracked the bottle of Schnapps around Tower City, trading swigs as we rolled across the drift prairie.  Driving across the prairie at night always felt like space travel; besides the occasional cars, the only visible light was the stars and lights from the farmhouses we were passing – and on a dark enough night, sometimes it was hard to tell which was which.

Finally – around 10PM – we pulled into Jamestown.  There were two beers left, and the schnapps was pretty low.  I drove to Casey’s parents’ place…

…and I stumbled as I got out of the car to open the trunk so he could get his stuff.  I was kinda blotto.  It had snuck up on me, but when it finally caught me, it caught me but good.

“So“, I thought as I drove away, keenly aware I shouldn’t be driving at all, “that’s it, then?  The band is toast?”  Things had been pretty awful for a while, but over?

I felt like my stomach sank into my shoes.

Depressed out of my mind, I drove over to Perkins to get some coffee and greasy onion rings and sober up a bit before I went to my parents’ place.   Of the things I’d moved to the Twin Cities to find two years before – a good job, a band, and a cool girlfriend – I’d peaked at two out of three.  And I was back down to zero. 

Square one.

I sat in the same Perkins I’d sat in a few years ago, on a dozen nearly-identical frigid nights, wondering the same things I’d wondered before I left Jamestown in the first place.  What am I going to do when I grow up?  Is there a place out there where I really belong?

I’d always thought so, before.  On this Wednesday night, I wasn’t so sure. 

I’d given it a mighty shot, and – as it seemed as I sat swirling ketchup with piece of onion ring – whiffed. 

Whiffed badly.

KIDS MAY REJOIN THIS POST.

And then I drove to my parents’ house, and had a joyous reunion.

It was Monday, December 21, 1987.

The DJ service loved me.

I picked up beat-mixing fast. All my years of music paid off in spades; as much as the other guys at the company kvetched about it, it really wasn’t that hard:

• With the first record playing, start the second record in “cue” (playing only in the headphones).
• Speed up the second record (or slow down the first one) one notch, roughly, for every beat-per-minute difference.
• Get the two records so that the snare, high-hat or bass hit, and kept, hitting, at exactly the same time; change the speed on one or both records to get them into sync or, if needed, drag the second record with your thumb (or speed it up by twirling it a little near the spindle) or crank the speed way faster or slower for an instant, to get the beats hitting precisely together.
• With the beats in sync, turn up the volume on the second record, and fade out the first.

And voila – it was a dance party.

It helped that I had a good voice for working a room, and a decent sense of how to work a crowd. The bartenders and owners liked me, since I kept a decent crowd on the floor – and a dancing house is a drinking and tipping house.

City Limits loved me; my second bar, “Jams”, in Brooklyn Center, seemed to dig me as well.

For a quick ‘n dirty, in and out temporary gig, it looked like it’d pay the bills until a radio gig came through.

———-

Liz and Brenda had moved out at the beginning of October. I’d advertised for roommates.

I got two.

“Chris” was a clean-cut, very scandinavian-looking fellow – handsome, blond, outdoorsy-looking. And he had his share of the deposit ready to go.

“Wyatt”, on the other hand, looked like one of the backup singers in “Color Me Badd”; tall, with “Zorba the Greek” good looks and a neatly-trimmed Guido beard, he confessed he’d just gotten out of Hazelden after a run-in with the law after a brief bout of using drugs. He and I hit it off, though. He peeled off his $166 for the deposit, and moved in as Liz and Brenda were moving out.

So by October 5, I had roommates. Whew. Being on the hook for $500 a month would have been a problem.

———-

Let’s back up a minute.

I never had a lot of luck with roommates. Back in college, in my three years in the dorms, I had…:

• one roommate – a bit of an alcoholic – who knocked up his girlfriend, and skipped town.
• another with serious drug and alcohol problems who tried to kill himself with one of my knives (turned out he was dialing with repressed homosexuality; once he came out of the closet, he was a pretty happy camper. This was long after he left college).
• one roommate who…well, I never saw. He had a girlfriend pretty much the whole year. In fact, all three roommates were barely in evidence; #3 was gone the whole time, #2 left school around semester time, and the rabbit died for #1 in mid-October; in every case, in effect, I got a private room for the price of a double occupancy.

After that? My first roommate wasn’t bad. In the next house, with the five women, one was addicted to pain pills. Among the next group, one was a borderline alcoholic, and the other…well, who knew?

But it was a whole new slate of people.

———-

Well, Chris turned out to have deep-seated emotional problems. He “worked” two hours a day, setting up the salad bar at the Wendy’s on University Avenue (until he got fired, around Thanksgiving). He was on total mental disability, otherwise. He earned extra money by stealing clothing from Daytons’, and using their “no questions asked” return policy to return the clothing for a refund. Some days, frozen by panic attacks, he wouldn’t leave the house (hence the firing). Most nights, he’d sit with his cat in his room, when he wasn’t going out trolling for underage skeeze (he was a handsome devil).

Wyatt? Well, it took about a month for the house to smell like pot. By Thanksgiving, bottles were piling up, and I had to stick to buying clear liquor and transferring it into water jugs to keep him from stealing it. And he missed his share of the December rent payment; he’d lost his job as a carpenter for being too drunk to come to work four days running.

———-

At least I had the band.

Well, sort of.

We finally kicked Casey out of the band; he was drinking too much, and he got belligerent when he got drunk. Which conflicted with Bill the drummer, who also got belligerent when he got drunk, and history shows there’s only room for one drunk in a band.

But Casey and I were pals, so we came up with a solomonic solution in mid-October; two bands, sharing the rhythm section. Casey, Mark and Bill were one band, while Bill and Mark and I had a different one. We had a few gigs. Life was all right…

…except that the drunken belligerence started the morph into a sort of communal hopelessness about the odds of ever getting out of the basement, and playing places better than “Fernando’s”.

Casey called, and asked if he might carpool with me back to Jamestown for Christmas. I said “sure, why not?”

I needed the break, after all.

It was Saturday, December 12, 1987. It was a cold, sloppy Saturday night. I had gotten a call from the spiky-haired guy at the DJ service – be at the bar by 7:30 to learn how to get the equipment started up, and start playing. My training would be on the job. The bar was “City Limits” (a bar I’d never heard of) in Rosemount (a town in the southeast suburbs that, in fact, I’d also never heard of in two years in the Twin Cities).

I got into my car around 6PM and started driving. It was a good thing. One of the “quirks” I’d discovered in my first couple of years in the Twin Cities was that it always took me a minimum of two tries to find anything in the suburbs. Every single time.

And City Limits was no exception. I drove to Minneapolis, then down 35W and then Cedar all the way to County Road 42, and hung a left. And drove.

And drove.

And drove.

The townhouses of Burnsville faded away into the background. I drove through farm fields, fallow for the winter, and the occasional warehouse or small business, until I got to “South Robert Trail”, a wan little intersection with “downtown” Rosemount just off to the left. I hung a right, and drove past a farm equipment dealership with a natty-looking beige outbuilding, through more fields. And more. And more.

Finally, in Farmington (I think), I stopped and asked directions at a gas station. The guy knew City Limits (he said, with an “Oy, do I know City Limits!” kind of gusto), and pointed me back to the north.

Sure enough, the natty gray outbuilding was the bar.

I walked in. The bar smelled like burned cooking oil and dry popcorn; it rumbled with the sounds of the bowling alley through the door to the back of the restaurant. A guy – early-twentysomething, blond, tall, looking a bit like a Hitler Youth but with wry smile – sat on one of the stools by the little counterette wrapped around the DJ booth, which sat at the edge of a small, tiled dance floor.

“Scott?”

“Hey!”, he said, with a voice that sounded like it’d been on the air.

———-

He showed me how to “power up”;

1. Turn the volumes down on all the mixers.
2. Power on the amps
3. Turn on the mixers
4. Turn on the lighting switchers
5. Turn on the power to the lighting rig – the various lights, flashers, and the all-important fog machine over the dance floor.

“This bar is pretty dead, so it’ll be a great place to learn how to do this stuff”, Scott said, sipping a vodka kamikaze.

———-

And so I did. The basics were nothing I hadn’t learned at my first radio job, eight years and change earlier; cue the records on the two turntables, fade between them, make announcements during the ramps and fades. I did that vastly better than most club jocks – Scott commented on it.

The harder part was “beat-mixing” – mixing the fade from one song into the ramp for the next one so their rhythms merge, making the transition seamless and giving the impression that the music never really stops. To help out, all the music in the vinyl bins was organized by speed, in beats per minute – from George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” (90BPM) through “Walking on Sunshine” (200 and change). In theory, you could start with a slower song, and – using the turntables’ variable speed controls, keep a continuous (if slowly speeding-up) beat going for the entire night.

But that was way in the future, as I fumbled at trying to get simple beats to match up in my headphones.

I needed some work, there.

———-

But at least I had the basics down pretty quickly. Scott and I talked for a couple of hours; briefly about work; mostly about radio. He remembered my character from the Vogel show. He’d worked at a bunch of small stations in Wisconsin. He was starting to think about making another try at it.

The bar had customers. Bowlers mingled with rednecks, sprinkled with a couple of Apple Valley party girls, who occasionally staggered about the floor, dancing with each other (since none of the guys felt like it). The place pretty much emptied out at 10.

Scott showed me how to shut everything off at the end of the night, and wished me luck, leaving around 11.

And so I finished out the night, taking the odd request, playing to maybe three barstool-polishing people by the end of the evening.

And I made the long drive back to Saint Paul.

I had a pleasant feeling, knowing I’d earned $50 for the evening.

Like most of the times one walks off life’s metaphorical cliffs, I had no sense that I was falling.

Yet.

It was Monday, December 7, 1987.

I got a call from the spiky-haired guy I’d interviewed with the previous week.  They’d decided to hire me to work for their DJ service. 

“Could you start Friday?” he asked.

“How about Saturday”, I countered, remembering Friday was my birthday.

“Saturday it is”. 

He gave me the address to a bar.  In Rosemount.  I’d be meeting with one of his “assistants”, Scott, who’d “train me in” on being a nightclub DJ.

———-

I’ve reflected on that phone call and its aftermath many, many times in the past 20 years. 

It was an expedient decision – the bills needed to get paid, and the voiceover and newspaper work was slumping bad.    

But the effects on my life would be sweeping and all-consuming.  I wouldn’t know that for over half a decade, of course, but it was the first step down a path with consequences I’m still dealing with today.  Not all of them bad, of course – indeed, some of the most important, wonderful, precious things in my life  started with that phone call on that cold, snowy December afternoon, twenty years ago today. 

But on the way there, the tale wended past drugs, sex, rock and roll; it’d involve lawyers, guns and money (more the first two than the last); from clinical depression, love and self-rediscovery through fraud, gunplay and beating people with pool cues…

…but not so fast.  We have a few years to go.

It was Saturday, December 5, 1987.

I’d balanced my checkbook the previous Wednesday. Or tried. It’d earned about $75 in November. Things were getting dicey.

I needed to come up with something to help me stretch my voice-over and freelance writing income.

I looked in the Strib, and saw an ad; a company was looking for nightclub and wedding disk jockeys.

Of course, I’d always hated DJ bars; to my point of view, bars, should either have bands, jukeboxes, or nothing.

But money was money. And hadn’t I been a DJ at a bunch of radio station?

How hard could it possibly be?

I called the number in the ad; the guy told me to come out to Burnsville on Saturday afternoon for an interview.

I drove out to Burnsville, pulling into a leafy cul-de-sac.  I knocked on the door.  A pudgy guy with spiky, gelled hair answered the door.  “Hi.  I’m Biff”. [The name, obviously, is changed].  Biff invited me in.
The house – your standard Burnsville mini-mansion – was almost bare of furniture.  The living room had two armchairs, a TV on a cardboard packing box, and scattered piles of sound and light gear; amps, mixers, speakers, standards.  The kitchen, over the little bar area, looked messy and yet fairly bare.  The guy looked like he was running a DJ service out of his house.

“So”, said Biff in a Minnesota accent, “tell me about your experience as a DJ”.

I ran through my radio background, as well as my time as a musician.

“Do you know how to beat-mix?”

I sat for a split second.  “I know the basics”, I answered, thinking he was talking about cross-fading.

He looked like he thought I was completely clueless – as, as events showed, I was.

But we continued to talk, and he must have seen something he liked.  He explained his company’s operation; they had a couple of mobile rigs that worked weddings and parties, and they also supplied DJs to a bunch of area bars.

“We might start you out in one of our outlying bars”, he said, looking more or less thoughtful.  He told me to call back early next week.

We shook hands. I drove back to Saint Paul, hoping for a break that’d at least stretch my income a bit.

Just while I waited for another radio gig.  No more.

It was Monday, November 30, 1987. 

I was going on eight months of…unemployment?

Well, not really.  Since I’d gotten whacked at KSTP in April, I’d had one contracting job, sold a bunch of newspaper articles, done a bunch of voice-over work.

But things had been slowing down.  It was getting harder to sell newspaper articles; freelancer budgets were tightening up.

Or so I told myself.  I think they were tighter.  Who knew?

Voice-over work had slowed way down, too.  Where I used to get a couple of jobs a month – and October had seen three or four (including the best one of all), I hadn’t actually gotten a call in a couple of weeks.  There’d been one really rough job at a studio in Bloomington – my voice wasn’t in shape, it took fifteen takes to get a spot right, the director was getting audibly frustrated…

“These things happen“, I told myself.  “The next one’ll be better”. 

And it had been.  But it was the last one. And it had been a couple of weeks. 

And money was getting tight. 

Of course I was still talking with radio stations.  Some were interested; New Bedford, Fall River, Santa Rosa.  But nobody could actually hire me.

Yet.

So there was hope.  But money was getting tight.

My other diversion, besides Fridays at Phoenix Games?  I dipped my toe back into writing fiction.  Or trying to.  My efforts usually got 2-3 pages before petering out in ennui.

The band?  We were still playing.  I was still writing music.  Fairly prolifically, in fact.  But rehearsals were becoming a desultory grind through the material.  And the gigs were coming slower and slower, and at crappier and crappier bars.  We’d played our last gig at – Fernando’s, yet again.  Mark and Bill and Casey weren’t getting along all that well – Casey was chafing at the fact that nobody liked his music; Mark was getting tired of my flitting between styles; Bill was getting…hard to say.  Depressed?

For a fleeting moment, life was feeling like a sticky web of frustration.

It was Wednesday, November 4, 1987.

The U2 concert I’d waited for in line for hours to get tickets for had finally arrived.

Fact is, I only remember so much of the show; it was chilly out; it was dark when I arrived at the show; the girl I’d asked to come to the show – someone I’d met at a B. Dalton bookstore in Maplewood and had been talking with for a few weeks – had bowed out the day before, so I’d sold my extra ticket to a friend of a friend.

I walked into the old Saint Paul Civic Center, and found my seat; it was the seat on the far right of the first row of bleachers, in the section closest to the walkway between the stage-left side of the stage, probably six feet from the stage itself.

The BoDeans came onstage first; Rolling Stone had been raving about them for months (they were going to be voted “Best New Band of 1987” in a few months), but I’d found their single “She’s a Runaway” dreary and irritating; I expected the worst…

…and was surprised that I actually liked ’em a lot.

After the BoDeans’ set, I hunkered down for the long grind as the stagehands turned the stage around for the headliner. My seat was elevated a few feet above the floor, so I had a pretty decent view of the audience. The thing that struck me about the sell-out crowd was that there were so many people waving signs. Now, this isn’t unusual in and of itself; all sorts of people waved signs around at concerts. Most of them involved trying to get the singer’s attention; I remember all sorts of signs from real and imagined “Jersey Girls” at the Springsteen concert I’d attended in ’84, before Julianne Phillips pretty well gutted that fantasy.

But the signs at the U2 gig were…serious. Air-from-the-room-suckingly serious. I suppose we just accept today that U2, or at least Bono, are as much a social advocacy group as a rock band, but it was still kind of new back then.

So the auditorium was sprinkled with signs condemning apartheid, calling for a freeze on the homeless and food and housing for nuclear weapons (or something), bashing Reagan (some things never change).

The one that I remember? At the front of a block of seats on the floor sat a couple of girls in impeccable punk-chic; perfect hair, impeccably-scrubbed, they looked like Saint Thomas kids. Not victims by any stretch. They carried a banner between them; “I Shall Be Released”.

I tired of watching the crowd, eventually, and turned to the stagehands and the contortions they were going through to get the stage ready for the show. U2’s later tours – especially “Pop” – were famous for the campily excessive staging, so it’s easy to forget that the Joshua Tree tour brought (as I recall) the biggest light rig that had ever been stuffed into the Saint Paul Civic Center; huge trusses of fresnels and leakos hung over the stage, while the mezzanine was ringed with follow spots. As the stage itself came together, a group of guys – six or eight – climbed up chain ladders into the huge truss hanging over the stage, looking not a little like sailors manning the rigging of a man o’ war of the sail age, to work follow spots right above the set.

Eventually – I think it took nearly 90 minutes to clean up the BoDeans gear and set up for the headliner – the lights dropped, and (after another long delay) the long-familiar synth line from “Where The Streets” have no name started over the speakers. I looked up and to my right. Adam Clayton walked out, carrying a maroon Fender P-Bass (or a Jazz. I don’t remember). Then Edge started the tinkly guitar part (with a gorgeous cream-white Les Paul)…

…and they threw a concert.

The rest of the setlist, I had to get online:

1. I Will Follow,
2. Trip Through Your Wires,
3. I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (which had a snippet of “Exodus” in it)
4. MLK,
5. Gloria (always my favorite U2 song, it didn’t disappoint)
6. Spanish Eyes,
7. Sunday Bloody Sunday,
8. Exit (Bono inserted a bit of “Riders on the Storm”, which spoiled that song for me forever more)
9. Silver And Gold,
10. In God’s Country,
11. People Get Ready,
12. Bad (Bono slipped in bits of “Ruby Tuesday” – which he kept in the song for probably a generation – and “Street Fighting Man”)
13. October,
14. New Year’s Day,
15. Pride (In The Name Of Love)

And then the encore, with:

1. Bullet The Blue Sky,
2. Running To Stand Still,
3. With Or Without You,
4. 40

And that, as they say, was all she wrote. The band looked tired. The show looked like it’d been done to death (and indeed the Saint Paul show was toward the end of a very long tour). But it was U2, for crying out loud.

It was freezing as I walked up Cathedral Hill, looking at the green-rusted dome of the Cathedral.

So the Twinks made it to Game Seven.

I can’t say that I expected much.

I went to a party that night, at an upstairs duplex near Franklin and Pleasant, in South Minneapolis.  There were maybe a dozen of us – my pal Rich, my guitar player Casey, another guitar player and expat from Jamestown, Mike, and a slew of people I didn’t even know then, much less now.

And I’ll never forget the action – in the [fill in inning], when [fill in player] caught that [what kind of hit] at the [foul line/warning track], or when pitcher [pitcher’s name] caught [batter] in a [type of pitch], or the grand finale, when [play by play announcer] almost [vocal condition] as [Twin] got a [type of play] against [a Cardinal] as [one of the managers].

OK.  I’ve never cared much for sports trivia.  The main thing I remember is, as the game ground toward the end, and the Twins remained in the chase, feeling light-headed – almost high, with the communal excitement of the moment. 

I remember the final call – the immortalized pileup at home plate…

 …and running out onto the street and practically jogging all the way downtown, up Nicollet, seeing downtown glowing in the distance, feeling the crowd converging downtown as much as hearing it.

It was a gorgeous night; a little cool, but perfect.

I got downtown toward 11 or so; I lost the other people somewhere around Ichiban, and wandered around on my own; above 11th Street, the crowd was Calcutta-like. 

What did I do for the next six hours?

• Had a beer at the Little Wagon.  Or three or four.  I can’t remember.
• Watched as about 100 people piled onto a moving fire truck that was trying to get through the crowd on Hennepin.  Unfortunately, it was trying to get to an actual fire, as the driver kept yelling over the PA system.
• Took a bunch of beers that people were handing out from coolers in the street.  Passed most of them on.  Was too happy to be drunk.
• Felt, rather than heard, the noise on the street as tens or hundreds of thousands of people teemed through the streets.
• Talked about the odds of someone actually burning a police car with a couple of yobs from Brooklyn Center. 
• Made out with some girl by the entrance of the Plymouth Building.  No, really.  Musta seemed like a good idea at the time.  This, I do not believe, has ever happened again.
• Wandered down Hennepin at 5AM back toward my car, with a group of random other people, warm and snug in the cameraderie and good will that wafted through the every corner of the Cities for that night at the next couple of days.

I made it home around 5:30AM, with three conclusions:

• I’d never see another night like that as long as I lived in the Twin Cities.
• I needed to kickstart my life.
• I should have gotten the number of the girl at the Plymouth Building.

It was Saturday, September 24, 1987.

The Twins, against all odds, had gone from the AL cellar in ’86, through an improbable rally to carry them to the AL Pennant.

When it comes to sports, I’m like one of those Jewish people who never goes to Synogogue, drinks, eats non-kosher food if he feels like it, dates goyim, but hangs on to the “Jewish” heritage. I enjoy certain sports (baseball) and teams (the Bears, the Cubs, the Twinks) just on principle, because I like saying it, and because it brings me occasional insight or the occasional stray shaving of pleasure.

And like anyone who’d ever been anywhere near Minnesota sports, I’d learned to rely on the insights, since the pleasure was pretty sparse. With the Bergmanian pessimism that lies behind most Scandinavian life, I figured the ’87 Twins would, eventually, flop.

So with the Twins down 3-2 going into Game Six, I figured it was basically all over – that we were set up for a classic Minnesota “close but no cigar” at the final wire. I figured I’d forstall the disappointment and take in a movie.

I drove to the Roseville – then as now, a “dollar” theatre. As I parked in the lot by the Rainbow Foods, I flipped on WCCO…

…as Carneal (or John Gordon or whomever the F) set up the call – Ken Dayley or some other pitcher from the “who the hell was he” list pitching to Herbie. It was, of course, the grand slam that became one of the big highlights of Kent Hrbek’s career. I sat in the car and listened, grinning like a hummel, totally missing my show.

As the game ended with a big, surprising Twins win, I figured they’d choke tomorrow – but it’d be fun while it lasted.

UPDATE:  Yeah, I got your emails/comments.  In response, feel free to check the post for evidence of how little I care about sports trivia.

I mean, that was fairly clear, no?

It was October 23, 1987. A Friday night.

My big diversion from the grind of job-hunting came on Friday nights. I’d go to “Phoenix Games”, a store on Lake between Bryant and Colfax (which, astoundingly, still exists), around six-ish to do “Naval Gaming”; groups of guys (and occasional gals) would recreate historical naval battles, or do hypothetical ones, on the shop floor with little lead minatures simulating ships from the sail era, World Wars I and II, and occasionally modern-day battles.

After the evening’s activities, after the shop closed – usually around midnight – some of us would adjourn to the Embers on 26th and Hennepin for a late-night snack.

———-

A quick aside that might seem utterly irrelevant, but whose relevance will become clear later.

Back in high school, I acted in a lot of school plays. I enjoyed trying to be someone else; it was more interesting than being me.

But I digress. There was a small group of guys who were “best pals” with all the girls – James, Charlie and Brad [*]; they’d sit with them before and after play practice and belt out show tunes and talk about clothes and…

…and I didn’t really think twice about it. Charlie was a talented artist; Brad was a great musician; James was on the Speech team with me. I thought they had terrible taste in music, a fair flair for clothing, and were perfectly fine guys. No big whoop.

I was probably well into college before I put two and two together. And then yawned. In the couple of years intervening between high school and college, gay guys had gone from being a fairly threatening mystery – not unusual in small towns at the time – to pretty much a non-issue.

I couldn’t stand show tunes, but otherwise, their sexuality – and that of any other gay people – was a whole lot less important than trying to do something with my own.

Which, I occasionally mused in frustration, was probably a good reason to quit hanging around at Phoenix on Friday nights.

———-

It was about 2AM, and time to pay the tab. I walked to the front of the restaurant and grabbed a fiver to pay for my Coke and slice of pie…

…and ran into Charlie , the would-be comic book artist.  I noticed him, first, before I noticed the clothing; He was wearing black leather chaps, a vest, a harness-y thing that looked like lederhosen, some sort of black leather speedo thing, topped off with a black leather Greek fisherman’s cap.

Charlie noticed me pretty much simultaneously.  And I was gratified in the split second before I spoke that he looked just about as awkward as I must have.

“Hey, Charlie!”

“Hey, Mitch”.

How to follow up, when you’re talking to an old high school pal who’s standing there in S&M gear?

“So how ya doing?”

“Great”

“Still working at…” the restaurant where he’d been waiting tables the previous year, according to a mutual friend.

“Yeah!  And are you still in radio?”

“Nah, I’m freelancing”.

I smiled and nodded.  So did he.

“Hey, great seeing you!”

“Yeah, nice running into you!”, he responded, pointing sotto voce to the three other leather clad guys who were walking away to sit at a table.

“A friend of yours?”, one of the other gamers asked, looking distinctly uncomfortable.

There’d been a time when I’d probably have smacked the guy for suggesting it.

“Yeah, ol’ high school bud”, I responded, turning to talk with the hostess.

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It was Monday, October 5, 1987. 

I was pretty much on top of the world. 

I’d sold three stories to Saint Paul neighborhood papers the previous week – $170 in income – plus a voice-over job (another $150), which pretty much covered my bills for the month. 

And now, it was gravy.

I got a call around four in the afternoon from one of the talent agents I’d been talking with.  She told me there was a gig in Edina at 7 that evening, for a regional group of Ford dealers. 

Of course, I’d take it.

I jumped in the car and raced to a little studio just off of France Avenue and 494.   I walked into the studio; a producer and engineer were waiting, editing some other audio. 

The producer – an attractive fortyish woman – handed me the script; just a single :30 second read – and asked if I wanted to pre-read it while they got a tape ready. 

I read through the copy.  The woman and the engineer smiled “Perfect!  Jeez, I wish we’d have had tape rolling!”

The engineer spun up a tape on his console, and I took a deep breath and ran through it again.

She nodded her head. “Perfect!”. 

And that was it.  I worked all of three minutes for $150.

Less the commission, of course.

Still – I could learn to love working like that.

Still could, come to think of it…