It was Sunday, December 11, 1988. 

I was working at the Mermaid.  It was my 26th birthday.  And my life was pretty much going nowhere.  And I was feeling very, very sorry for myself.

I watched the small, desultory crowd in the bar – a few pool players, a few alcoholics, a few couples out on the town on a cold Sunday – and felt the warm wash of…fatigue?  Disappointment?  Frustration?  Whatever it was, I marinaded in it.

“This is my f****ng life”, I thought, spinning one inane record after another, standing in the dusty, smoky booth in my ratty tweed jacket and khaki pants.  Of the four jobs I’d interviewed for in New York not two months ago, two had tanked completely, one was giving me the impression that they’d be “waiting for funding” until long after all the principals were dead, and the final one, doing voice-overs at WOR for $225 a week, which didn’t even count as “starvation” money in New York, just wasn’t going to be worth moving for, all on its own. 

So I was back to square one.  Again.  And I was seriously doubting I had what it took to get to square two, or that it’d matter if I did.

The evening was uneventful.  I shut things down at the end of the night, and grabbed an after-work drink.  And another.  And another.  I let it slip that it was my birthday, so the bar staff kept ’em coming.  I was pretty lit up by the time the bartender decided to wrap things up, around 2AM. 

I got in the car and drove across the parking lot to the Perkins; I needed coffee and lots of greasy food to be in drive-home worthy condition.  I grabbed a booth and ordered the Potato Pancakes. 

They came, I noticed – as I always did when I went to Perkins, since the potato pancakes were the most addictive thing on the menu – with syrup.  Which made no sense, since potato pancakes were basically more-cohesive hash browns, and everyone knows that ketchup is the only condiment that mixes with hash browns, dammit.

I sat in the booth and slowly ate the pancakes and read the Twin Cities Reader until 4AM or so, and then drove home.  I took the long way – down Highway 96 all the way over to Rice Street, and then all the way down Rice to Maryland, and then east across the freeway to the East Side. 

I stopped at the top of one of the many choppy hills on the East Side, probably close to 5AM; it was dark, and very cold, and the lights of the city shown like a million crystal-clear little gems off into the distance.  It was a vista that would have filled my soul with delight not so long before. 

“Whoop di f****ng doo”, I thought. 

I drove home to the rat-trap house full of drug dealers and my roommates girlfriends-du-jour, to hibernate for another cold winter day and get up to do it all again.

1.Chili 2.Bracelet 3.Species 4.Pass 5.Evolutionary 6.Equilibrium 7.Require 8.Crime 9.Cavorting 10.How 11.Dissolution 12.Labels 13.My 14.Same 15.President 16.United 17.Rhetoric 18.Authorities

(2-3-2-1-12-7-5-2-2-6-1-1-2-2-3-5-4-8-4)

I’m bummed to hear that T.D. “Tommy” Mischke has gotten whacked at KSTP-AM.

I’m not, of course, surprised.  More on that below.

David Brauer:

I called Mischke Saturday morning and he was gracious, diplomatic and cautious. “I want to be able to talk about it, but I need a little time before I can,” he said.

No doubt.  Mischke’s career with Hubbard has been a blessing for all of us who’ve loved his show over the years.  But in this day and age it was also a pretty unlikely gift, I think, to Mischke himself.  I have a hunch (an unqualified one, but I’m confident in it) that he knows it.

Brauer gets this part wrong, though.

He began as Don Vogel’s sidekick in 1992…

 Nope.  He started in 1986.  At least, that’s my story, and I’m sticking by it.

———-

Back when I was screening calls for Don Vogel, we had a regular caller – “The Phantom Caller“.  He’d call in and give a different pseudonym, sometimes a couple of times a week, sometimes with a little gap in between.  I quickly figured out his voice; I’d cue Don that I thought the “Phantom Caller” was on the line; Don would go to him quickly; he was a huge fan.  Mischke may have known how many times he left Don in stitches and gasping with laughter on the air; he probably didn’t know how many times he incapacitated all of us in the control room as well.

Tom had some ingenious moments; I have a cassette of some of the great Phantom Caller bits from Vogel’s first go-around at KSTP, and it’s still hilarious stuff, each of them a finely-honed little gem of writing delivered with the kind of voices that Mischke has made famous for the past decade and a half.  The best moment of all?  One blustery, rainy fall day, we took the Vogel show on the road, to a display window in the old “Powers” store in downtown Minneapolis (it’s long gone, of course; it was on one of the blocks where Gaviidae Common sits today, if memory serves).  As I stood outside with a microphone looking for comments from the assembled multitude (which was gratifyingly large for that era of KSTP shows), a guy came dashing up Sixth Street in a yellow unitard with a red cape and a mask.  He plunged into the center of the crowd, saying not a word, but handing out little one-page, handwritten humorous blurbettes – each completely unique.  He handed ’em out until he ran out – maybe twenty seconds – and then ran off to a car that waited with (as I recall) a getaway driver down the street.  We spent the next segment having people read their own personalized Phantom Caller (and, I guess, Handbiller) bits live on the air. 

It was not long after this that I actually met “The Phantom Caller”.  Back during the days of the “Fairness Doctrine”, talk radio was a financial gulag.  The listeners were older and not all that well-off; the audiences at KSTP were a fraction of what they’d be a few short years later after Limbaugh resuscitated the format.  As a result, I – like a lot of entry-level talk station employees – freelanced like a madman to make ends meet.  One of my many side gigs involved doing freelance writing for a slew of Saint Paul neighborhood papers (which, at that time, was a steadier source of income than trying to freelance for the dailies – if not quite as “glamorous”).  Two of them were “The Highland Villager” and “The Grand Avenue Gazette” – both edited by one Mike Mischke.

One day I drove down to their offices in Highland to turn in a story before I drove out to the station.  Mike looked my copy over as we traded some small talk about the Vogel show – and then looked up. 

“By the way, I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you this, but my brother Tommy is the Phantom Caller”. 

It all clicked. 

I did, as a matter of fact, sit on that factoid until the last show of Don’s first hitch at KSTP, back in January of 1987. 

I listened to Mischke for much of his career at KSTP, although I regrettably couldn’t listen much after he moved to days, a few years ago. 

Tom’s more than a host, of course; he’s also a neighbor.  He coached my (our, actually) kids’ softball team a few years back; I run into him periodically at the neighborhood coffee shop or the grocery store.  He actually remembers me, which is kind of a kick, and not really surprising.

———-

Mischke’s show was a genuine original; all the right people liked him (Garrison Keillor had him on Prairie Home Companion as a musical guest a few years back – Tom is, of course, a very talented pianist and harmonical player).  But like a lot of genuine originals in any art form (and Mischke’s radio was a sort of art form – and I say this while stressing that radio as a whole is a craft), the art depended on having a patron to shield the artist from the spikes and deadfalls of the open market.

That someone, so rumor always had it, was Ginny Morris, one of the granddaughters of Stanley Hubbard the Elder, the founder of Hubbard Broadcasting (and one of the great pioneers of American broadcasting in his own right) and the person who really pulls the strings on the radio side at Hubbard.  Ms. Morris – so the rumors in the industry had it, at least when I was paying attention to them – kept Mischke on the payroll, and on the air, for many long years when there was no explicit market demand for a free-form, eccentric stream-of-consciousness show like his.  As talk radio morphed into what it is today – a venue for partisan anger, humor and information – Mischke was an outlier who, I think it’s fair to say, could only exist in the market with the aid of someone who really really wanted him to exist.

And like anyone with a cult following, his cult can’t imagine life without him.  David Brauer – himself a former KSTP-AM morning guy and someone for whom the radio market could not find a place – does what many of Mischke’s biggest (or at least most-prominent) fans do; sneer down their rhetorically-patrician noses at the hoi-polloi that just didn’t get it:

Expect a torrent of outrage; for 17 years, Mischke has been a genuine, funny, decent presence in a commercial-radio landscape filled with haters and bloviators.

If a conservative talk show host orders a pizza in the woods and David Brauer or Garrison Keillor or Nick Coleman isn’t there to hear it, is he still hateful?

Seriously – do Mischke’s more exceptionalistic fans seriously believe that Tom was a higher life form that suffered the fools with whom he was forced (by some unthinking, lumpen fate) to associate out of the goodness of his own sainted heart?

No.  Rush Limbaugh and Jason Lewis and Sean Hannity and Dr. Laura Schlesinger and all of the other “haters and bloviators” during the station’s golden age that, as it happens, coincided with Mischke’s career as a headliner, gave KSTP-AM the opportunity to give Mischke his opportunity.  “Hate and bloviation” (AKA “opinion that dissents from Garrison Keillor and David Brauer and Steve Perry and the rest of the Twin Cities’ closely-held media elite) allowed KSTP to run a show like Mischke’s – a show that earned the station a lot of high-end mindshare but never (so the rumor mill has it) got the numbers that would have allowed it to survive purely on the merits of its own market share.

Limbaugh and Jason Lewis carried Mischke – not the other way around.

In the past few years, KSTP-AM embarked (this is my opinion, but I’ll stand by it) on a suicide dive, following the opinions of some pretty dubious consultants who never much liked the conservative talk phenomenon; the shows that pulled KSTP-AM out of palookaville fifteen and twenty years ago, Limbaugh and Jason Lewis (along with Joe Soucheray, who still delivers the numbers although he’s been doing essentially the same show every day since Bob Dole was a candidate, not a pitchman) got away without much overt gnashing and wailing on KSTP’s part.  That, combined with the drastic drop in ad revenue tied to the economic slowdown, is making life pretty dismal (according to the rumor mill as well as the news of layoffs at Channel Five) over at Hubbard.

So what’s next for Tom?  Tom’s always audibly chafed at life in corporate America, even the indulgent, “Lord of the Flies” version of it that Hubbard seemed to have provided him for the past sixteen years; he’s always been able to not only string together a living, but do it with style. 

It’s happening all over the business.  All of radio is hitting an epic revenue trough.  There is almost no part of radio that isn’t being gutted by the combined onslaught of the IPod, satellite radio, the proliferation of media.

Except conservative talk, of course. 

For better or worse. 

———-

Me?  I hope his goodwill with Garrison Keillor pays off for him.  I think he’d be an excellent addition to some part of Keillor’s little empire (although Tom might find Keillor a much less understanding or tolerable boss than Ginny Morris); I think having TD alongside Tim Russell and Sue Scott would be genius.

[Conflict of interest note; Konrad hired me at KSTP in the mid-’90s; he was a very supportive boss. Tommy was a very supportive colleague.]

[Conflict of interest note of my own:  I also used to work with Konrad, at KDWB in the early ’90s.  In 1991, KSTP-AM interviewed for a new program director; Steve and I were the final two.  Steve got the job, partly because he’s a very talented guy who deserved a job, and partly because the consultant who was being paid to bend Ginny Morris’ ear was convinced that political talk was dead, and that Limbaugh was a success not because he was conservative, but because he was breezy and irreverent.  In his world, Jason Lewis and Sean Hannity and, for that matter, the Northern Alliance had no future – but Turi Rider was a creative genius.  I disagreed; Steve got the job.  Would KSTP-AM be better-off today had I gotten the gig?  Maybe, maybe not.

But at my third interview, whilst discussing the point with the consultant who, it was clear, was going to make the call, and feeling like I was losing the point, I figured I’d toss out a favor to an old friend.

“If you like funny radio…have you ever heard of a guy named Don Vogel?  I hear he just got fired in Milwaukee”. 

“I think I have is tape somewhere”, said the consultant.  “I haven’t really listened to it”. 

“Give it a listen”, I said. 

It wasn’t long after that that Vogel came back to KSTP-AM (along with not a few of the products from a number of my answers to the question “what would you do if you were the program director”).  And then they hired Mischke, first as the producer and then his sidekick.

(Don on left, Tom on right, and the listener who owns the photo in the middle).

Make what you will of it.  Just saying.

Anyway – best of luck, Tom.

Big post about Obama’s tightrope walk in trying to diminish expectations among his disciples followers?

Eaten.

Six hours of meetings await.

May have to reconstruct tomorrow…

So as I reported yesterday, I forgot to defrost the turkey.

“Run to Rainbow”, I was told, “and get a pre-made turkey!”.

“No”, said the stubborn, penurious Scandinavian.  “There must be another way”.

And indeed, not only was there…

…but it rocked. The best turkey I’ve made in recent years.

A few years back, on this blog’s first Thanksgiving, I wrote a piece for Thanksgiving that, six years later, still pretty much says everything I want and need to say:

I moved from North Dakota to Minneapolis in October of 1985. It was a spur of the moment thing – in fact, it started with a drunken statement to a bunch of classmates at a college homecoming party two weeks earlier. It was five months after graduation, and they’d all come back to Jamestown (my hometown and college) with stories of their fun careers, fun cities, fun lives…

I was doing roofing and siding, wondering what the hell one did with an English degree. But after five or six gin and tonics, I found myself dancing with Monica Costello, and telling her “Yeah – I’m still here in Jamestown”. Really, she asked? “Yeah, but I’m moving”. Where, she asked. I thought about it for a second. “Minneapolis” seemed to be a place I could afford to get to. When, she asked. “Two weeks”, I blurted out without really thinking.

Damned if everyone didn’t remember that promise when we all sobered up. So – two weeks later, I loaded two duffel bags and a guitar into my ’73 Malibu, and I was off.

Six weeks later, it was Thanksgiving. I still had no job, I was broke and malnourished and cold. I’d had a few interviews, but no bites. I had dinner at a friend’s place. And on the way home, I drove downtown, and walked out onto the Central Avenue bridge, and looked out over the city in the dark. If you’ve never seen it, looking at downtown Minneapolis in the dark, when everything’s all lit up, is stunning; for someone just in off the prairie, it was like looking at Manhatten. I was cold, and scared out of my shorts about my short-term prospects – and for the first time, I felt strangely at home in this new city.

And every since then, Thanksgiving has seemed like the turning of the new year for me – the time when I reflect on the past year’s agonies and flubs and successes, and look forward to the next year. Much more so – for me anyway – than New Years’ Eve, which is more decompression from Christmas than anything.

Things to be thanksful for?  Many.

But I forgot one. I’m thankful to be here. Now. Doing what I’m doing, and with the chance to be doing the same thing – or better – next year.

God bless you all. And if you don’t believe in God – well, bless yourself silly.

And that’s all still true.  It’s been an “interesting” year, in the classic Hindu sense of the term.  But I am – we are – still here.  And as I frantically scour the internet for directions on how to cook the turkey that I neglected to defrost two days ago (how do I forget that every single year?), it feels almost trite to count off all the things I’m thankful for.

I’m here.  But there’s less of me (I lost 20-30 pounds this past year.  It’s been a difficult year on the family front, but there are more than enough of the little sparks of hope that keep one going.  Yes, I am doing better than I was this time last year, or even four years ago.

As I look at the news from Muimbai, I am thankful that I live in a place at a time where people furrow their brows and cluck with concern about “nasty campaigning” and “partisanship” over things that would pass for “high school pranks” in parts of the world where nastiness means “AK74s” and “partisanship” means “piles of bodies lined up behind a warehouse”.

I’m thankful for the outlet this little old blog provides, and for all the people who’ve come into my life in the almost seven years I’ve been doing this.

So Happy Thanksgiving to all of you!

So I checked in on Nick Coleman’s latest column, and I thought…

…no. Wait. I retired from fisking the Non-Monkey.

Never mind.

It was Wednesday, November 23, 1988. 

I was going to head back to Jamestown for Thanksgiving.  I didn’t want to miss Christmas in the bars; lots of extra money and tips for working the Xmas holiday, so I figured I’d tough it out. 

So I worked out a Wednesday through Saturday “vacation” with my boss, packed up the night before, and got ready to leave. 

The phone rang; Wyatt, hung over as usual, grunted “got it” upstairs before I could get to it.

Wyatt, as usual, had been “entertaining” again.  I’d never really kept track, but he’d kept to his old average of seven or eight women a week, including the “girlfriend”.  There were a few semi-regular ones, but I hadn’t gotten a look at whomever it’d been the night before.  I’d gotten home from the bar a little too late. 

As I was packing my duffel bag, Wyatt walked down the stairs wearing a pair of basketball shorts.  He was moving with a little more purpose than his usual hung-over shamble.  He looked worried.

“Hey, dude”, he said in a whisper very unlike his usual booming baritone with the fake arklahoma accent.  “Could you do me a favor?  I’m in a big-ass jam.  Teresa’s on her way over.  Could you give Jennifer a ride home to Saint Louis Park?  And keep it all quiet, OK?  She’s hot, man”.

I stood for a moment.  On the one hand, Saint Louis Park was on my way out to 94, more or less.  It wasn’t far out of the way, really.

On the other, I wanted Wyatt to rot in hell.  He was late on the bills again.  His dog was crapping all over the place, again.  He was hitting the bottle with both fists, again.  And his drug-dealer friends – oh, yeah, the coke dealing – were over at all hours of the day and night.

“Ummm…”, I started, looking up the stairs as a woman came down the stairs.  Early twenties, auburn hair, gorgeous…

“…sure”. 

“Hi, I’m Jennifer”, she said. 

“Mitch”. 

“See ya, Jenn”, Wyatt said, ambling toward the kitchen as we walked about door. 

We walked out to my car. 

We started talking as I drove down the hellish little one-way, past the crack house.  Jennifer was an art student at Minneapolis College of Art and Design.  She loved Russian literature, I found out around Dale Street.  By Snelling, I found she knew some people I knew, in the Minneapolis music scene; we had at least two common acquaintances.  And she played guitar.

By the U of M, we were comparing Bob and Tommy Stinson anecdotes.

And by downtown Minneapolis, I was falling madly in love. 

And damn, that sucked.  I was living in a garret next to a crack house, working as a nightclub DJ, eating ramen most of the time, sharing a miserable rodent-trap house with a slacker and an addict.

Worse?  We were hitting it off. 

“Worse“, I thought, as I listened to her talking about her big senior project.  “That’s how screwed up my life is.  I’ve met someone just mind-warpingly gorgeous, and we’re hitting it off famously, like I’ve never hit it off with a woman at a first conversation before, and the first thing on my mind is all the reasons it can’t possibly work out.” 

I drove down Hennepin to Lake Street, past the Walker and the Guthrie; she loved the theatre, and I could fake a love for art as well as anything else.  She’d been in plays.  I’d been in plays.  She’d been to a production of Lion in Winter that she’d loved, recently; I’d played Henry II in Lion in Winter, just five years earlier, in college.

As we drove past Lake Calhoun, I was grinning ear to ear, as I cringed inside.  “There really is no way.  There is no f*cking way“. 

She lived at her parents’ place, near the junction of 7 and 100 in Saint Louis Park, the near-western suburb of Minneapolis. 

“So what can you tell me about Wyatt?” she asked after directing me down an arterial off of 7.

“And if there’s no f*cking way for me, there’s no f*cking way for him, either”.

“Wyatt has a girlfriend.”

Her head spun toward me. 

“On top of that, he is probably banging seven or eight other women a week that he picks up in bars.”  She cocked an eyebrow.  “Serious.  The guy’s a whore.  If he’s bagged one chick in the last year, he’s bagged two hundred”. 

 I felt a weight lift from my soul.

Jennifer was quiet, except for directing me down a street toward the cul-de-sac where her parents lived, in a brownish rambler with trees all over the place.

“He doesn’t believe in protection.  Not at all.”  A brief flash of alarm crossed her face.  “Seriously.  Get yourself tested.  The guy’s a poster boy for “high VD risk”.  [Anyone but me remember when it was called “VD”? – Ed.] 

She was looking at me; like I was crazy, or she was alarmed by the information, or (I’d suspect at twenty years’ remove) a little of both.

“Look, sorry, but the man is a pig.”  I paused for a moment.  “You deserve better”, I added. 

She sat for a moment and wrinkled her face in contemplation. 

“Well, thanks…”, she said, sounding a little nonplussed.  “Good to know.”

I gritted my teeth.  “Look, sorry.  But when I say he’s a pig…”

“Yeah…” she said, opening the door.  “Gaah.  Seriously – thanks…”

Our eyes met for a moment. 

“Happy Thanksgiving”.

“You too!”

She got out of the car and closed the door.

I watched her walk in the door, and inside. 

I turned back toward Highway 100 for the six hour trip to Jamestown.

It was good news, in a way, that I never saw her again.

It was Monday, November 21, 1988.

Wyatt’s “plan” to “repay” the money he owed me involved…:

a) …spending a few thousand dollars that his grandmother had sent him on…

b) …a bunch of cocaine, that he would…

c) …sell, to…

d) …make money, to…

e) …pay Shane and I.

I suggested the obvious alternative – give us the $600 or so he owed us from the money from his grandmother, and buy his cocaine with whatever might have been left over – might have been better for all concerned.  He had bigger plans, naturally. 

I pondered – how do I get rid of a roommate?  My ponderings usually resolved to “there’s nothing I can do”. 

Which seemed to be a habit I was in with most areas of my life at the time. 

I had left to do some grocery shopping early in the morning.  I came home to Wyatt presiding over a living room full of people – all of whose body language, dress and attitude looked you in the eye and said “drug trade” without a hint of worry. 

“Hey” said Wyatt, “this is Marshall”, pointing to a stocky, unsmiling black guy with a big scar on his cheek in a Members Only jacket “and that’s Jeff”, a too-thin white guy with a porn-star mustache and long hair wearing a yellow plaid flannel shirt.

“Hey”, I nodded.  They eyed me, making not the faintest sign of acknowledgment.

I walked into my room, shut and hooked the door.  Then I sat down at my “desk” – a party table on which I stacked a bookshelf, which actually made for a fairly handy deskoid structure – and called the radio station in New York I’d interviewed at last month.  The program director had told me to check in in a month or so.

The receptionist answered.  “Is Charlie there”, I said, asking for the program director.

“I’m sorry, Charlie is no longer here”.

My heart fell like a shot goose.  I sat, my jaw too heavy to move for a moment.

“Um…why?” I finally blurted out.

“The station changed ownership and format.  We’re now a gospel music station!”, she chirped.

I thanked her, hung up, and leaned back in the chair, my legs and arms too heavy to move anywhere for the moment. 

Crap.

I sat for a moment, having a hard time focusing on much.  I still have the voiceover gig at WOR, and that network gig out there, I reassured myself.

But they’re not going to happen, I de-assured myself.   

I heard Wyatt, Marshall and Jeff doing their business through the wall.  It took a moment to focus; unsurprisingly, they were moving some of Wyatt’s “product”. 

I walked to my bed, and reached down behind the mattress and took out the little .22 automatic pistol I’d been keeping there for emergencies.  I checked the chamber – empty.  I checked the magazine – full.  I stuck it in my pocket.  It’d stay there for a while.

Crap. 

It’s a meme.  This time, it’s from Rev Ma, over at Night Writer.

I can’t help myself.  It’s true.

55 Things
1. The phone rings; whom do you want it to be?
Mostly?  Friends.

At 3AM?  A manageable problem.

2. When shopping at the grocery store, do you return your cart?
To the little corral thing?  Absolutely.  I’d hate to make someone chase my cart around.

3. If you had to kiss the last person you kissed, would you?
Seems a safe bet.

4. Do you take compliments well?
Well?  Sure.  Often?  Not so much.

More below the fold.

(more…)

Yes, my good friend, it would seem you’ve been hitting some hard times.

I’m truly, truly sorry to hear that your car has broken down.  It can be a real hassle when cars break down. 

And it’s sad that your daughter is sick, and needs to get to Regions.  I’ve been there; trying to take care of family emergencies with a balky car can be harrowing, for sure. 

And it’s drastically bad luck that she’s in the car right now in her condition, with Mom over on a side street out of sight of this parking lot.  Gawd, that has to stink.

And I know – I know! – that you are under immense stress.  The tone of your voice truly says it all.  I feel your pain and your stress, on a level perhaps deeper than you might suspect.

And I know this is the kind of time that you could use a helping hand from a stranger – say, $100 to get your car towed and catch a cab down to Regions.  Christian charity is a powerful thing, and Minnesotans are rightly famous for it.

I do feel I should lend you the hand you need.  I feel it in the pit of my gut.

And I’d feel it a lot more if this weren’t the second time you, yourself, have tried this con on me in this self-same parking lot in the past year.

That is all.

It’s been a busy, crazy year at the Berg household.

Not all of it in a good way.  But it’s been one of those things with its upsides.

Due to a variety of issues dating back a few years, I was in a subprime adjustable rate mortgage that I was having a hard time getting out of, last winter.  And when I say “subprime”, I mean Slobodan Milosevic could have gotten a better loan that me, at the time.  It was pretty bad; it started adjusting about a year and a half ago, and by the time it was done it was eating up about 2/3 of my takehome pay (and I make decent, albeit not spectacular, money).  That, along with a few other family crises, made things a wee bit tight around the Berg house.

So along about last Christmas, when my car broke down, I gave it a long, hard think.  My employer pays for my “all you can ride” card on Metro Transit.  My kids’ schools are nearby.  Most of what I needed to do in my life was walking, biking or busing distance away.  The upshot; if I absolutely needed to get by without a car (and all of its attendant bills), I could.

And by that point, I absolutely needed it.  The savings on repairs, car insurance and gas alone, at that point, made it worth it (and this was back when gas was still at or around a mere $3 a gallon).  Not having those bills kept things on the level while I sorted out the rest of the mess.

My “experiment” ended up running about ten months.  I bused to work until mid-april, when I started biking – which I am still doing, although it’s getting more and more difficult as it get colder.  The kids bused to school.  We did a lot of getting around via bus, bike, and good old-fashioned shoe leather. 

And boy, do I have stuff to report!

On the upside:

• Pants: I fit into pants 2-4 sizes smaller than I did last winter.  My belts are all verging on too big.  Everything I own fits better, unless it fit perfectly before, in which case it’s gotten kinda loose and baggy.  I like that.
• Money: I can say honestly that I bought not one drop of $4/gallon gas.  That aside, I saved enough to help get the family through what was probably the nastiest financial hurdle I’ve had, except for my stretch of un/underemployment back in 2003.  In some ways it was worse; when you’ve got little to no income, there’s an ineluctible logic to it all; it just makes sense.  You stretch, you scrimp, you do what you have to.  When you’re working hard and making decent money and still feeling broke?  That sucks. 
• Party: When you take the bus or bike to Keegans (or,  y’know, wherever) and driving a car is not an option, and you’re one of those guys whose tolerance has dropped from 4.5 to 2.5 beers in the past decade, let’s just say it’s one less thing to worry about. 
• Hah:  Back when I was an adjunct instructor at a MNSCU university, I had the option of paying my “fair share” for collective bargaing or, for $8 more, joining the union.  I joined the union, because most of my liberal, “pro-labor” friends had never been in a union.  I figured this gave me bragging rights.  In the same way, while I see no empirical reason to believe in man-made global warming, I’ve rather enjoyed being able to hector my “liberal” friends and neighbors about their patrician “carbon footprints” and gas-guzzling Priuses.
• Good:  That’s how I feel, these days.  I feel  better, walking and biking and just being generally more active.  My attitude’s better (and believe me, I’ve needed it to be better).  And sailing past the Capitol, seeing the High Bridge over the Mississippi in the distance, and zipping into the canyon on Saint Peter between Babani’s and Saint Joe’s is a wonderful way to kick off a work day.

Of course, it’s not all hearts and flowers:

• Expectations: I want to laugh when I see some of the lefties – especially the transit-oriented leftybloggers – yapping about running their lives on transit.  I notice that not a single one of them seems to have kids; children are the big clinker in the “transit-oriented lifestyle”.  If you have to get kids to an after-school event, it’s a major expedition; if you have to take one to urgent care, it’s either miserable (hauling sick kids on the bus is a rotten feeling, although I never had to do it) or expensive (cabs in the Twin Cities are nothing to write home about). 
• Metro Transit Is A Black Hole of Suck: Although the stats show that the Twin Cities’ metro transit system is less of a money suck than many/most other major cities’ transit setups, it is not ready for prime time.  The part that bugged me the most?  Bus-driver acquaintances tell me that absenteeism is a problem – and when too many drivers call in sick, and they can’t find a replacement in time (which is not at all uncommon), MTC shaves routes.  They’ll skip a bus departure on some of the lower-traffic routes – including the one I use to get home.  I can’t tell the number of times (usually once or twice a month) where I’ve had to wait the extra half hour for the twenty-minute bus ride home, because the bus never comes.  Even the hideously-expensive Ventura Trolley often runs a few minutes late, and if you try to ride it on weekends (as I did on Saturdays for much of this past few months, getting to and from AM1280 on Saturdays when I didn’t have the legs to bike from Fort Snelling all the way down Highway 13), the line is staggeringly likely to be down for maintenance along one part of the route or another, replaced by “55” buses that make the half-hour train ride from downtown to the mall an hour-long ordeal. 
• Minnesotans Are Terrible Drivers: Being a bike commuter was a great experience; there is really very little in life better than blasting downhill on Shepard Road or Constitution on a beautiful summer morning; it’s a stunning way to kick off a day.  But you can only enjoy it so much, because so many Minnesota drivers are too busy putting on their makeup, changing their IPod settings, or nodding off to Willie and Jay to pay attention to things like, I dunno, bikers.
• Tote That Load: One of the reasons I lost so much weight was because I spent so much time hauling loads of groceries home from Rainbow – about a 3/5 mile walk.  Yes, I could have taken the bus, but hauling bags on the bus is a major hassle, and frankly the quiet time was often nice – unless I had to bring a couple of gallons of milk and stuff home.  Then, it just got heavy.  And no matter how much you haul, you still have to go shopping in a couple of days, again.  Which nullifies some of the savings from not paying for gas and such, I thought, muttering to myself as I trudged home more than once.   Much more than once.
• Government “Services” Demean and Degrade The Consumer: After a few of those missed buses, and bobbled schedules that left me standing for wasted half-hours at one bus stop or another, I found myself adopting the sullen, angry listlessness that PJ O’Rourke observed among anyone who has to sit and bark on command for government “services”, only to be implicitly told “you’ll take what we give you and you’ll like it”.  It’s not the better me.

So this past week or so I got my mortgage squared away.  It left me with a few extra bucks I wasn’t used to.  I fixed the car, bought insurance, and updated my tabs.  For the first time in ten months, I’m driving again.  I kinda like it.   I do not plan on going car-free again.  But then, who plans on these things? And I’ll still be biking (weather permitting) and busing to work, because as long as there’s an option, it’s cheaper, and I just flat-out enjoy it.

It was interesting doing it, and knowing that I can do it.  And with that said, I’m more than ready to relegate it to the “ephemeral anecdote” drawer. 

Really, really ready.

It was Monday, November 7, 1988.

I came back from New York feeling pretty upbeat. 

And even if the stuff in NYC didn’t pan out, I had other irons in the fire, and of course my band was happening again.  Some of the things that made me me were starting, it seemed, to work out again.

Either way, it looked as if I’d be able to bid the whole miserable situation goodbye soon.

I was right, although I didn’t know exactly how right I was, or why.

Wyatt was already a month behind on his bills – rent, power, phone, the works.  Shane and I were both getting tired of carrying him.

It was about 10AM, and I was heading out to go downtown when Wyatt came downstairs.

“Hey”, he said in his fake Arklahoma accent, “I got a plan to get the bills caught up”

“Ah.  Cool”, I responded.  It wouldn’t have been the first “plan”. Some of them worked, although none of them lasted.

“Yeah.  I’m bringing some product up from Florida”.

“Well, cool”, I said, walking out the door.  “Later”.

I was a couple dozen feet down the sidewalk when it sank in.  “Product?”

I occurred to me he wasn’t talking Amway…

…on the same election night where Jesse Ventura got elected “Governor” that I got around 37,855 votes for State Treasurer, running as a Libertarian. 

(My only platform plank?  Abolish the office of State Treasurer.  As luck would have it, that was also the subject of a ballot initiative that year, which passed by a 2-1 margin. While some DFL hack got most of the votes, I declared moral victory; the people decided they didn’t need some party flak to do their abolishing for them). 

But this year, I didn’t even know my hat was in the ring…

Minnesota’s Secretary of State was kind enough to post my precinct’s ballot.

So here’s my “to-do” list for the day; my votes are in bold:

POTUS:

JOHN MCCAIN AND SARAH PALIN REPUBLICAN
BARACK OBAMA AND JOE BIDEN DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR
CYNTHIA MCKINNEY AND ROSA CLEMENTE GREEN
ROGER CALERO AND ALYSON KENNEDY SOCIALIST WORKERS
RALPH NADER AND MATT GONZALEZ INDEPENDENT
BOB BARR AND WAYNE A. ROOT LIBERTARIAN
CHUCK BALDWIN AND DARRELL CASTLE CONSTITUTION
US Senate
DEAN BARKLEY INDEPENDENCE
NORM COLEMAN REPUBLICAN
AL FRANKEN DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR
CHARLES ALDRICH LIBERTARIAN
JAMES NIEMACKL CONSTITUTION
US Fourth Congressional District
ED MATTHEWS REPUBLICAN
BETTY MCCOLLUM DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR
Minnesota House District 66B
MARK A. ROOSEVELT REPUBLICAN
ALICE HAUSMAN DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR

Soil and Water, Districts 2, 3 and 5

I will follow Saint Paul’s endorsements to the letter.  Whatever it was.

Judicial Elections

Well, I won’t be voting for either Howard Orenstein or Gail Chang-Bohr in the Second District Court race: as usual, I’ll be writing in my cat, Nosemarie Berg, for this office, partly as a protest against the paucity of acceptable candidates, partly (as noted in the past) because it’s my way of ensuring that my vote is in fact counted.  Of course, I’m not the only one that votes for Nosemarie – she’s actually developed some traction over the years – so I’ll be writing in another pet for another one of the unopposed seats.  Will it be Clu, the dog?  Candy, the other cat?  We don’t know. 

Stay tuned.

It was Tuesday, November 1 8, 1988. 

Although I fully expected to be moving to New York before too terribly long, I’d long since learned that job leads weren’t a gift horse you could look in the mouth.  And there was a station in the east suburbs that wanted to talk with me. 

The program director was a guy who’d audibly lit up when I called, the previous Friday.  “You’re Mitch Berg? From the Don Vogel show?”   He’d been a huge fan.  He’s also heard my old weekend graveyard show – he’d caught it on the way to do his own airshift a few times.  In fact, we had met, at one Don Vogel remote or another.

“I’d love to talk with you!”.  He hosted the station’s morning show, and he wanted a news guy/sidekick type. 

Sure, I was interested.  Anything to get me out of the bars, until something in New York came through.

He gave me directions to a bar in Stillwater for Tuesday at 1PM.

Election day.

“Yeah”, he laughed when I quizzed him, “the bar is open on election day.  It’s kinda ‘under the table”, he said, audibly nudging and winking.

And so I drove out to Stillwater.  I took a right off of Highway 36 and drove down a frontage road that led to the bar – the Club Tara, a funky-looking little roadhouse. 

I walked into the bar.  “Miiiiiitch!”, the program director – a very Minnesotan-looking fellow in his early fifteis – yelled, waving.  He had a half-empty pitcher and a big basket of fries on the table in front of him.  Another guy, thin, sharp-faced and younger than me, sat with him.  Both were nursing beers, although seemingly nursing them pretty quickly.

I sat.  The program director introduced me to his Operations Manager.  We chatted for close to an hour – mostly about politics, Don Vogel, and what a fun place the Tara was.

The Ops guy checked out, and another guy – the Sales Manager, another, pudgier guy in his late twenties, checked in.  We talked for about an hour and a half, polishing off another pitcher and a plate of mini burgers in the process as we talked about…politics, Don Vogel, and what a fun place the Tara was.

It was about 3:30 when the Sales Manager left – just as another sales person, this one Cathy, a mildly zaftig and plenty-cute mid-twentysomething woman with light auburn hair and in high heels, walked in.  We sat until 6PM, knocking off probably a pitcher and a half between us, talking about…yep, politics, Don Vogel, and what a fun place the Tara was.  Oh, I may have flirted a bit; Cathy lived in Saint Paul, as luck’d have it. 

Finally, we all had to leave; the three of us talked until close to 7PM in the parking lot, exchanged business cards, and promised to call later. 

I took the back roads back to Saint Paul that night. 

I followed up a few times in the next year; they never quite got the money bit worked out.

UPDATE:  D’oh.  As Flash points out in the comments, Nov 1 was not election day – November 8 was.  I forgot that election day was the first Tuesday after the first Monday. 

I get the dates (and, occasionally, info) for some of these “20 Years Ago” bits from various notebooks and journals I wrote over the years.  Others, I reconstruct from proximity to other events.  This’d be one of them; there was a long, sloppy loopy job interview at a bar on election day – whatever the date was. 

It was Sunday, October 31, 1988.

Mark, Bill and I were in the basement of a house on Dupont Avenue, in the “Wedge” neighborhood in South Minneapolis.

And it was the time of my life.

After Bill called me in September, the three of us – Mark, Bill and I – got back together and started playing again. It worked out very well, actually – all of us worked nights (Bill and Mark were short-order cooks, and I, of course, was in the bars).

One day in early October, we heard that a couple of musicians who lived around the corner had built a recording studio in their basement. Mark and Bill’s sister’s boyfriend’s band, in fact, had just recorded an album there. The price – $15/hour for an 8-track recording studio – was right…

…assuming we planned everything out perfectly.

And so the plot was hatched. We figured that among us we could pool maybe $200 to put into recording…something. That boiled down to about 12-14 hours of recording time. In that time, we figured we’d need to…:

• put down basic tracks – the three of us doing the rhythm guitar, bass and drum parts
• dub lead and background vocals and any extra instruments.
• Finally, “mix down” from eight-track recording tapes to two-track stereo “masters” to be put onto vinyl or cassette or whatever we ended up doing.

We talked with one of the owners – “Ron” (who was the lead singer of an anarchic, Red-Hot-Chili-Peppers meets Grateful Dead band, the “F**king S**t Biscuits”), and booked three of the slowest nights of the recording week and, as it happens, the recording year – nights when the studio’d be happy to get any revenue at all – Wednesday and Thursday (I took a couple nights off from the bar), and tonight.

Wednesday night, we booked six hours to bang out basic tracks. We settled on five songs: four of mine (“Fourth of July”, “Long Gray Wire”, “Great Northern Avenue” and “Five Bucks and a Transfer”) and one of Mark’s (“Black Window”).

How tight were we? In three hours, we had ’em all done, and managed to put down the lead vocals for a song or two.

Thursday night, it was overdub time. Four hours (which Ron, being a good mensch, let us stretch to five and a half.  I think he was having fun). Mark and I finished the lead vocals pretty quickly, and then it was on to overdubbing. I put down the lead guitars on all of the songs – I managed all of them in one or two takes, except “Fourth of July”, which involved switching guitars and playing one slide-guitar solo between a couple of verses. Then, an organ part on “Fourth of July” (two takes and out, and it sounded great!), and a completely-extemporized piano part on “Long Gray Wire” that sounded a little like Ian Hunter if he’d had a stroke. Next, Bill and I knocked out the background vocals for “Great Northern”, which took a take and a half – we’d been doing the song for almost two years. With the last hour or so, Mark and I noodled around with percussion parts for “Window”, which had morphed from a straight-up minor-key rocker into a psychedelic escape and evasion drill; a bucket of broken glass and me talking through a set of headphones to sound like a police radio completed the effect.

And tonight? The mixdown.

Whether through artistic perfectionism or sheer boredom, Ron wound up throwing in two hours for free, on top of the six we’d booked (and could afford).

And damn, it sounded good. We left the studio around 3AM, and walked around the corner to the band house, lugging our gear about a block, very happy with the results.

Hope, as they say, springs eternal.

———-

Well, hope for my career as a rock star did not spring eternal.  Indeed, my career as a Minneapolis Underground Rocker was very near an end, although I wouldn’t know that for a while.  But Mirror Image Studios seems to be pretty much eternal, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys.   I found their website a while ago, and Ron still runs the place, in the same house it was in 20 years ago. They list the band, as well as me. No, I didn’t do a solo album – but I did record there on my own. A lot.

But that comes later in the story.

It’s fun reading the list of some of the people who’ve recorded there, before and since – lots of names that had faded into the recesses of my memory get yanked out and slapped awake:

• Babes in Toyland – a friend of mine dated Lori Barbero before they became famous – back when a chick named Courtney played in the band.
• The Fuckin Shitbiscuits – ibid. Famous for shows more anarchic than the Replacements – and done entirely straight. Ron didn’t even drink beer, as I recall.
• Neomort – I had a roommate who knew these guys.
• Ingrid Chavez – When she first moved to Minneapolis, she worked at a coffee shop with a friend of mine. We talked. She mentioned she had a demo tape. I hit on her. We had a good laugh. Two months later, she was better known as Prince’s girlfriend.
• Strange Friends, Perfect Strangers, – in later attempts at starting a band, Bill and Mark and I played with a bunch of these guys.
• Lisa Wray – I saw her opening for GB Leighton, I think, on one of my first dates after my divorce.
• Dumpster Juice – I know some of these guys, but I can’t remember how.
• Tina and the B-sides – one of the great losses the Cities’ music community ever suffered.
• The Blue Up – The band that was the beginning of the end of the Twin Cities’ punk scene.
• Mofos – hosts of a zillion great nights at the Uptown.
• The Flaming Ohs – I jammed with Bob, their drummer, many times. Last I heard of him, he was running worst “open stage” night in the history of music, at the late, unlamented Fernando’s.
• Rifle Sport – the first band I ever saw performing when I moved to the Cities.
• Powermad – I met a bunch of them at a party with a speed-metal-singer roommate of mine.
• Tequila Mockingbird – never saw ’em, but I always loved the name.
• Jeff Walker – he sat in on guitar during the last gig I ever played on a stage with a band in the Twin Cities – with “The Supreme Soviet of Love”, in 1996 at the Turf Club. Amazing guitar player.
• Boiled in Lead – one of the greats bands in Twin Cities music history.
• John Fenner/Mubla Buggs – Friends of friends. Like Phish for people who aren’t as serious and straightlaced.
• Paul Metsa – the GB Leighton of the eighties.
• Duck Kicking Vulture – perhaps the scariest night I spent in a bar in my life, at the First Avenue in 1986.
• Mitch Berg – Who?
• John Q Public – That’d be us.  We changed our name to Joe Public soon – but I’m getting ahead of things.
• Run Westy Run – I never knew how much I hated The Doors until I went to about ten Westies gigs. But their first single, “Dizzy Road”, is one of my favorite records ever to come out of the Twin Cities.
• Dezzy Dickerson – speaking of your Prince connections…
• Destroy All Monsters, The Sluts, Beat the Clock, The Neitzches, Halo of Flies, Glennrustles, Spam Grievance, That Darn Kat, Swingin Teens, Farm Accident, Bone Club, The Sizzling Eggheads – all had about eight seconds of Twin Cities Reader-induced fame. I knew some of them, but didn’t make a big deal about it.
• Cheap Dates – as above, but really bad.
• Cows – Incredibly depressing noise-thrash band; like Sonic Youth on meth.  But great guys.

Anyway.

It was Saturday, October 29, 1988. 

I’d taken a well-deserved night or two off from the bars the previous week to record the demo tape with Bill and Mark.  But now it was back to work. 

My employer, the sleazy DJ service, was putting me in a new bar tonight. 

The sleazy DJ service’s “office staff” – Scott, really – could be pretty awful with directions back in those pre-Mapquest days.  It didn’t help that I was pretty ignorant about the ‘burbs – what road went where, how everything was laid out.  In three years of getting around the Twin Cities, I joked that every single time I tried to find something in the suburbs, I muffed it on the first try.  It wasn’t far from the truth; whenever I had to find something in the far ‘burbs, I usually allotted an extra hour or two, since I almost inevitably needed to call for help or ask for directions somewhere. 

But this one was easy, said Scott.  Go north on 35W to County Road H.  Go west on H – the only option you have.  “Look for the signs on your left”, he said, and if that failed “you’ll see the big naked Mermaid”. 

It was the fabled Mermaid Lounge, Supper Club, Lanes and Night Club, in Mounds view.

I parked out front, and walked in the front door.  It looked pretty mild-mannered; mostly middle-aged folks sitting around drinking Schmidt, munching on popcorn and burgers and watching sports on the overhead TVs.

It looked very, very tame.  Like, the tamest place I’d been in…well, ever. 

I looked around for the DJ booth.  Nothing.

I walked up to the bar and flagged down the bartender, a short, stocky woman with dusty blond hair.  “Where’s the DJ booth?”

“Oh, that’s downstairs”, she said in an accent straight out of “Fargo”, pointing over toward a staircase that led down. 

I walked through the bar and down the stairs.  The smell of stale cigarette smoke reached out like the tentacles of the Hydra, beating me over the head and shoulders.  I walked into the basement, the “Mermaid Nightclub”.  Lit by a hundred flashing tubes of neon – overheads, beer lamps, whatever – it was dark, dank, smoky, and throbbed with a dismal energy I hadn’t felt in any of the many other dismal, reeking bars I’d worked in the previous…

…year?  Yeah.  Almost a year.  Damn.

It was a huge room, with three bars – two little satellite bars at the ends; and a big one in the middle.  The near end of the room was given over to nearly-empty tables; the far end, to pool tables, which seemed very, very busy.  I walked to the main bar, where a couple of bartenders – a stocky, muscular guy with curly sandy hair, and a gorgeous woman with peroxide hair – were stocking up for the evening. 

The guy – Larry – walked me over to the DJ booth…

…that would be, I had no way of knowing at the time, my home away from home for the next two and a half years.

It was Monday October 26, 1987.

One thing that I missed in the confusion of my trip to New York (and, frankly, the effort of untangling it all 20 years later) is that I’d gotten a call from Mark and Bill a few weeks earlier.

They wanted to get the band going again.  They’d tried a couple of different bands with a couple of different groups of people over the previous ten months or so.  I’d only seen one or two of their gigs – working nights got in the way of having much of a bar-based social life. 

But as Bill put it, I was the one who wrote the good material, and who had the drive to try to make it.

“True enough“, I’d thought as I’d planned to try to move my life to New York.

But we did plot one big plot, and I figured I’d have time to do it even if one of the job offers from NYC came through quickly; one of their neighbors owned a recording studio.  And he liked our band.  And he’d cut us a break on recording an eight-track demo. Mark and Bill’s sister’s boyfriend’s band, in fact, had just recorded an album there. The price – $15/hour for an 8-track recording studio – was right, presuming we planned everything perfectly.

The three of us got back together, on my free nights in the week or so before I went to NYC, and played some of the songs we’d done back when we were gigging steadily in the bars. 

And damn, it was fun.

We booked time for the coming weekend. 

It was Sunday, October 22, 1988. My last day in New York City.

I had a late-afternoon flight out of the city. I slept in a bit, waking up around 10ish. I packed my stuff, ran down to a liquor store to get a six-pack of my long-lost second-cousin’s favorite beer, which I left with a thank-you card in the ‘fridge, and locked up around 11ish.

And then…I moseyed. Meandered. Took my sweet time. I walked up Broadway a ways, past Union Square, just savoring the flavor of the place a little more.

But finally I couldn’t put it off any more. I walked down into the subway, and went to Grand Central, and there onto the “7” to LaGuardia. The subway became an “el” after it crossed the river, and I watched Brooklyn and Queens roll past below me, Manhattan receding in the distance. I switched to a bus somewhere in Queens – a very West-Indian neighborhood, if memory serves, and it might very well not – and wistfully watched as the neighborhood slowly switched from a tumbledown scrum to row after row of tidy brick houses – and, finally, the approaches to the airport.

One of those jobs has to pan out. It just has to, I thought. It HAS to. Nobody’s luck is that bad.

I caught my flight home without any major events. We climbed out of the city as the sun started slipping below the horizon. I craned my neck and watched the city fade into the distance behind me.

The flight home was uneventful. I flirted with a cute redhead who was in the seat next to me. She was connecting to Atlanta, I think; we talked for a solid hour; she about her travels (she was in sales), I about the job hunt. She seemed fascinated – but not enough to miss her connecting flight.

And I left it all behind when the plane landed. It was about 9:30 when we landed. I hurried down to the exit, and took a bus to downtown Saint Paul. That left me a mile to get home; I slung my suit and duffel bags, and started walking. It was a damp, chilly night, and as I walked across Lafayette over Swede Hollow, I felt…vulnerable. Alone. Compared to 4AM the night before, walking down a still-teeming Broadway, I felt like I was the only person on the street, but for the occasional shadow around the occasional corner.

Finally, I shambled up my street to the house. I walked up the stairs and around the back of the house. Passing the living room window, I saw Teresa, standing by the couch, naked, pulling on her underwear, yelling something or other in an angry shriek. I turned my head and went to the back door. “Hey, everybody”, I said with gusto as I rattled the key as loudly as I could in the lock. “Home from New York, baby!”. I opened the door, slowly, and loudly plopped my stuff on the kitchen floor.

“Hi, Mitch”, Teresa said, poking her head around the corner, having donned a burgundy turtleneck and jeans.

“It wasn’t nothing”, I heard Wyatt yelling from upstairs.

“F**K YOU, AS***LE!”, she yelled back at him, walking toward the front door. “NEVER AGAIN, YOU BASTARD!”

“See you, Teresa”, I called.

“Bye, Mitch”, she yelled back.  “BYE, AS***LE!”

“Bye, you crazy bitch”, Wyatt yelled down the stairs as Teresa slammed the door.

I carried my stuff to my garrett at the front of the house. Wyatt slumped down the stairs. “How’s New York?”, he asked, sounding slurred.

“Love it, man”. Christ. He was bombed. “What’s up?”

Wyatt rolled his eyes. “Oh, Ruby called, and she answered the phone and got all weird”

“Crazy, man”.

“No sh*t”.

He opened the door, and walked outside as I slid my door shut, hooked it, and lay down on my bed.

Oh, dear Lord, I hope one of those things comes through for me.

It was Saturday, October 21, 1988. It was my “free” day in Manhattan. I was going to reward myself with a day, and night, of…

…I had no idea what. Roaming the city, doing whatever sprang to mind, mainly.

I walked down to Washington Square. Had a bagel at some kosher bakery just off the Square. Grabbed a copy of the Times and sat on a bench and read for a while.
Took the subway downtown. Got off at Cortlandt Street, and looked up at the World Trade Center towering above me. It was about 10AM. I stood with my back against the wall next to the stairs to the subway and just stared up, not caring that I looked like a total tourist. I crossed the street, and stood for a moment at the northeast corner of the North Tower, just looking up, taking in the huge-ity of the whole thing. It was a brilliantly clear morning, a couple of cirrus clouds accenting the sky like pieces of white garnish on a huge nouvelle cuisine plate.

I went inside, and got into the very, very long line of people waiting to go up the elevator to the observation deck.

I stood behind a couple of very Italian-looking girls from New Jersey – Camille and Angela. They were students at some college or another. We struck up a conversation. I mentioned I was from the Twin Cities. Both of them were huge Prince fans. I regaled them with stories of running into Prince and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis in Minneapolis, popping tops with Brown Mark and Matt Fink, shooting pool with Lisa Melvoine, running into Marty Z at First Avenue.

All bullspittle, of course. But I was in New York, place of new beginnings. I wasn’t going to get a little thing like my boring past from four days ago get in my way.

Finally, we went up the elevator. It took a couple of changes, as I recall, to get all the way up to the observation deck (106th floor, I think), but finally, we were there.

I spent an hour and probably a couple of bucks worth of quarters using the telescopes; it seemed you could see halfway to Iceland. Or Iselin. I scoped out the Hoboken docks (I loved On the Waterfront) and the “Swamps of Jersey” between Jersey City and Newark, and the whole panorama of Manhattan and the boroughs across the East River. I circled the deck several times, drinking it in for a solid hour, losing Camille and Angela in the process and not really caring all that much.

I could really learn to like this.

I finally made my way back down the elevator, and jumped on the train. I ran over to Battery Park to the South Street Seaport museum (?) – being a North Dakota native, naturally, I loved ships.  It was all a blur, even then, but I was enthralled.  I could have spent hours more, but I moved on.  I figured I’d be back soon enough.

I grabbed a kebab from a pushcart and sat and just watched New York harbor for a while.  I was too excited to think much; I remember sitting and feeling aware of my blood pounding through my head, my fingers, my teeth, as I sat, ate, watched and dreamed about what a future here could be.

Dayum.

Then it was off to Central Park, where I wandered around for hours, ending up in front of the Dakota on the place where John Lennon was murdered, watching a raucus double-dutch competition across the street.

I could really, really learn to like this.

I got back on the subway as it got toward suppertime, and went back downtown.  My mind churned. What do do? Take the voiceover gig and get a job in a video store or driving a cab to make ends meet until something else comes up that’ll pay the bills for real? Or hold out for one of the better gigs – like the overnight or the network jobs? One of them has to come through – right?

Right?

Well, I had some time to think about it.  I figured in a week or so, it’d all get clear enough.

I stopped back at the loft, clipped some cash into my pocket, and turned around, locked up, and left again. As the unseasonably warm day started drifting into a fairly balmy evening, I walked down Broadway, sauntering slowly, marinating myself in the sights and sounds and smells of the Village. I lost track of how far I walked, but I hung a right on Bleecker Street – mainly because I remembered it from Springsteen’s “Kitty’s Back”, I think – and kept going.

Score.

I walked through a chunk of (I think) NYU campus, and then into a warren of clubs, dive bars and little diners. Guys roamed the streets, pressing “complementary ticket” flyers for bands playing up and down the street into my hand. I grabbed a Gyro at some little diner at Bleecker and – Sullivan, I think? – and sorted out what to do, luxuriating in having too damn many choices, and loving it.

Went into a couple of bars; one horrible punk band, one really good “white soul” band, and a couple of two-drink minimums later, it was back out on the street. It was closing in on 11PM when I walked into a comedy joint.

A woman – the manager? – met me at the door, and ushered me to a table for one. I bought a vodka sour, and waited five minutes for the show – a triple bill featuring a couple of comics and an improv group, “Noo Yawk Tawk” – to start.

The first comic, a guy from Champaign Illinois, who looked for all the world like Mystery Science Theatre’s Mike Nelson, made the biggest rookie flub a non-New-Yorker performer can make in Gotham; he admitted he wasn’t from New York. The hecklers chewed the poor guy to bits. He was a trooper, and he held on by the skin of his teeth, but he got rattled, bad.

The next guy – a short, bald fellow who looked a little like the Gestapo guy from Raiders of the Lost Ark – got the payback, though. He took the stage, stared at the hecklers, and tore them to shreds, shutting them up – I really, really wish I remembered how – before starting his real routine. I was agog; I wanted to learn this.

And then I noticed; he seemed to be playing to me. And not in the whole “make everyone feel like you’re playing to them” sense of the term. As in, lots and lots of eye contact.

He killed. And then he left the stage, and “Noo Yawk Tawk” started their routine, taking suggestions for topics, nouns, verbs, activities and so on from the crowd. And I was gratified to notice that just about everything I yelled out made it into the act. And, like the second comic, they seemed to be giving me a lot of attention.

Twenty minutes into their act, the manager came over to me. “Excuse me, sir – are you a producer?”

I probably did a double-take. “Huh?”

“Are you a producer?”

“Well, I used to be…”

She grimaced. “I’m sorry – this table is just for producers! I’m sorry – could I get you to sit over…”, and she pointed toward the bar. “I’m so sorry – I’ll comp you a couple of drinks. I’m sorry for the misunderstanding…”

I had, and have, no idea why she put me there in the first place. But for a couple of free drinks, it was a worthwhile flub.

———-

I wandered up and down Bleecker for hours afterward, finally walking home up Broadway at around 4AM. I felt – and this was the last thing I’d expected – without the faintest worry about anything going wrong. Even at 4AM, the streets were still plenty busy; I walked past dozens people in small groups.

I got “home” to the loft, and flopped into bed.

I could really, Really, REALLY learn to like this.

It was Friday, October 21, 1988.

Only one interview today. But what an interview – at WOR Radio. Gotham’s version of WCCO (more or less).

I met the program director at the studios. We had a brief – maybe fifteen minutes – chat. He seemed to have been very impressed – especially with my voiceover tape.

At the end of the conversation, he asked “So if you’re gonna move to New York, I think I can use you as a staff voiceover guy”.

My heart quickened.

“It’d be nine hours a week at $25 an hour”.

I did the math in my head. $225 a week.

“Interested?”

I smiled. “I’d have to figure out how to make ends meet, but I’m interested, yes”

He agreed – I’d have a lot to think about. We shook hands, and I agreed to call with a decision next week.

I walked up to Times Square.

I could really learn to like this, I thought.

Then, I turned my thoughts to figuring how I could move to New York and manage to earn the rest of a living, on the pretty fair assumption that $225 a week wouldn’t go as far in New York as in the Twins.

I took the train back downtown and took a walk through the Village.  I wandered around ’til close to midnight; eating Chinese food and stopping in bars and walking up Broadway way into the thirties, and back, as it got dark.  It was a gorgeous night out. 

Somehow.

It was Thursday, October 20, 1988. It was my second full day in New York – and the busiest day by far.

My cousins gave me the keys and a self-addressed envelope. They were going out to a “cottage” on Lawn Gisland; I’d have the loft in the Village to myself. I’d mail the keys to them on my way out on Sunday. I thanked them profusely; they headed out by 8AM.

I had my work cut out for me.

My first stop was a shabby office building up in the Thirties. I was going to meet a guy to talk about being a producer/host for an all-weekend, all-talk network – the first attempt I’d heard to exploit the repeal of the “Fairness Doctrine”. The concept: hire talk talent from around the country to do three-hour shows on the weekend; beam the shows via satellite to New York, and thence back out to other stations that wanted quality, major-market talk talent for their weekend lineups. The guy talked a great game; Morton Downey, Tom Leykis, and a slew of other major market names were “interested”.

The job: serve as the network’s producer. This involved working a forty-hour week – on Saturday and Sunday. The work day would involve being in at 6AM Saturday to 2AM Sunday morning, and then again from 6AM Sunday through 2AM Monday morning, with four hours off in between.  Two twenty-hour shifts – a forty-hour week in two days, followed by a five-day weekend.  Or more likely four, if we assume Monday was for recuperating.

To set the hook in my cheek? I’d get a show, from 6-9AM both mornings.

Hell yeah.  I was interested.

I left after two hours. The guy sounded interested. We agreed to talk again in about a month, when the financing picture was a little clearer.

I grabbed a slice of pizza, and went to my next interview. It was at a radio station on Seventh Avenue, just south of Central Park. The program director was a Hispanic gentleman in his late twenties to mid thirties. We chatted for an hour or so. The job…

…well, the job was the perfect metaphor, in retrospect, for the Dinkins years. It would have involved being on the air from midnight until 5AM, every weeknight. “But don’t worry”, said the PD, “you won’t have to do much prep. All anyone wants to talk about is race”. The way he described it, the job would sound a lot like the classic “bigotry” scene from Do The Right Thing, listening to whites, blacks, Puerto Ricans, Russians, Dominicans, Koreans and every other ethnic group bitch about each other all night. “You can try to talk about other things”, he added sardonically. “Sometimes it catches on, but usually, all anyone wants to talk about is race”.

It sounded perfect.

He was interested. We agreed to talk again in a couple of weeks.

I spent some time wandering around the southern reaches of Central Park, on an unseasonably warm day, soaking up New York.

I wandered down Seventh, mildly shocked to see Carnegie Hall – THE Carnegie Hall, I thought, as if there might be another one around somewhere – to my left.  It was late afternoon, and I just kept walking, block after block after long, colorful, filthy, fascinating block, in my interview suit and my new, pinchy interview shoes, wide-eyed and gulping it all in.  And, I might add, fairly sure I wasn’t lost, and that I had a fair idea of where I was…

…until I realized I’d wandered into the top of Times Square, in all of its tawdry, tacky pre-Giuliani splendor. 

I grabbed a hot dog from a street vendor (pondering after I ordered how one could order “onions” on a dog and get a thin, runny slop of tomato broth with a wan assortment of floaties that may have been dried onions that had soaked in whatever the juice was) and wandered around the place, gawking and gaping like a complete tourist and not really caring a bit; I’d imagine people thought I was high.  I had a big day coming the next day – but I was in no hurry to get back to the loft.

I can do this, I thought.

Finally, I hopped the train and rode down to Union Square.  The stairs smelled like urine.  A guy was busking at the top of the stairs, really badly.  I acted like a New Yorker (!) and ignored him completely as I walked up the stairs and over to Broadway to get “home”. 

I grabbed a couple of slices of pizza and went upstairs to the loft.  My cousins were long gone; I had the place to myself.  I was footsore and tired…

…and I couldn’t sleep at all.  I grabbed a beer and a plate for the slices, and sat on the leather couch in my cousin’s front room, looking out at the skyline in the Village, at the apartment building across the street, with lights shining through windows and people having dinner at half-seen tables, and people and cars going past below, and a constant “thrum” of cars and horns and stuff contantly humming in the background.

Something’s gonna break.  I can feel it.

It was Wednesday, October 19, 1988. My first “working” day in New York.

And I was going to have to figure out New York’s transit system now. I had an interview at a little talk station in White Plains. I got up at 6AM and caught the subway up to Grand Central Station. I caught a train, next, and watched as the city, eventually, morphed into the leafy ‘burbs of Westchester County; Scarsdale and points north.

The interview?

I should have stayed in Manhattan. The program director – a tired-looking fellow in his late thirties – spent about an hour telling me that White Plains was too expensive for anyone to live in on the salary he was willing and able to pay.

My actual suitability for the job – mid-day talk show host – never really came up.

Two hours later, I was on the train back into Manhattan.

I got back to 12th and Broadway around three in the afternoon, and spent about two hours browsing around the Strand. I picked up a copy of Warsaw Diaries by Kasimierz Brandys – the story of the Solidarnosc uprising and the attendant crackdown in 1981 as told by someone who witnessed the whole thing from a table in front of a coffee shop where he and his graduate students debated the whole thing in the context of post-existential literature. I bought it because…well, it seemed like a Greenwich Village-y thing to do.

———–

My cousins and I left the baby at the apartment (with the nanny, natch) and walked to a nearby restaurant for dinner. The sights and sounds of the Village (and the smells – whole blocks reeked of burned hemp) put a spring in my step. I figured I could learn to love this.

Tomorrow – the busiest day of the bunch. Two interviews. I laid out a clean shirt and got ready.

It was Tuesday, October 18, 1988. I was off to New York.

My pal Rich stopped by around 6:30AM; I ran down to the street lugging my duffel and suit bags, threw them in the back of his ’82 Accord, and away we went, through the claustrophobic crack-alley of my street down to LaFayette, and thence to Highway 3 and, finally, 494 to the airport.

My flight left at 7:30; I made it in plenty of time by the standards of those pre-9/11 days. It was the first I’d been in a plane since the summer of ’82, when I went to Europe. It was cool but pleasant out, with scattered breaks in an overcast sky. I sat in a window seat, and watched the bustle of the airport turn into the blur of takeoff, the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers and the southeast suburbs and the farmland of western Wisconson flling away and, finally, the sense of flying over miles of gauze as the plane reached cruising altitude over a wall-to-wall overcast, somewhere over Cheese country.

———-

It was three or so hours later that the plane dropped through the overcast somewhere over the water, on final approach to LaGuardia. The disconcerting part, for me, was seeing nothing but human edifices for as far as the eye could see – not a significant stretch of unblemished green anywhere in sight.

I kinda dug it.

I got my luggage, and walked through

I walked out onto the concourse in front of the terminal and hailed a cab. “Union Square”, I told the rumpled looking Russian driver.

We pulled out onto the freeway, and then over to the BQE, my sense of direction doing flip-flops…

…until I saw the twin towers of the World Trade Center to the southwest. Now I knew where I was.

———-

I got out of the cab near 12th and Broadway, by the Strand Bookstore, and walked up Broadway, looking for the address. It took me a couple of tries, but I found the door, and rang the bell.

My long-lost second cousin and his wife were both big-time executives with Wall Street firms. They had a brand-new baby – maybe six weeks old – and a nanny…

…and a loft apartment straight out of Architectural Digest, seven floors above Broadway. A huge rehabbed industrial space with newly-varnished floors, with a raised kitchen with all-brushed-stainless-steel appliances way back before brushed stainless steel was cool, and three bedrooms spaced around the back of the huge open “living room”, with a gorgous view of the Village out the eight-foot-tall windows over Broadway, this was not, I figured, your typical “New To New York” setup.

My cousins – and their nanny, a sixty-something Queens native who sounded for all the world like a less-screechy Edith Bunker – welcomed me to New York, made dinner, and debriefed me on the last ten years of all of our lives.

I shared a room with the baby but, I was informed, only for two nights. They’d be going out of town on Thursday, and I’d have the place to myself for the rest of my week in the city.

I got my suit situated, and got ready for the next morning. It was going to be a busy couple of days.