It was Monday, October 7, 1985. One week until I was going to leave for the Twin Cities.

One more week to kill.

Killing time back then was harder than ever. Two nights a week, “Fred’s Den” – a bar on mainstreet in Jamestown – had Open Stage nights. Mondays was acoustic night, while Wednesdays they’d drag up a drum kit and some amps and guitars, and people’d jam all night. The whole panoply of Jamestown musicians would show up, if they didn’t have a paying gig (and most of them were in that awkward time when they were starting to realize that an A and R man from Epic Records wasn’t going to drop through Jamestown, North Dakota and catch their gig at the Albatross or the Gladstone or Fred’s in Jamestown, or the T&T or Mick’s in Fargo, or any of the other places they’d gig; they were starting to ponder the notion of getting straight jobs they’d actually have to keep. They were some amazing nights out, by the way – I’d be playing on stage with Bill Weber and the Gilbertson brothers (Ken and Paul) and the host, a guy who’d attended Berkeley (in Boston, not the Bay area) for voice and hung around the songwriter scene in Manhattan with the likes of Springsteen in the early seventies (but had apparently had drug problems or mental illness or something, and had come back to North Dakota, as so many people did who left town), and even the legendary Don Salting on guitar, the great Tim Cross on drums, Ken Aune on a beat-up old upright piano, and…

…well, finding a bass player was always tough. Usually it was some guitar player who’d fudge it. I was probably better than most at that – 12 years of playing cello gave me a pretty fair idea about holding down the bottom of a group. But by this point I was sneaking my pal Scott Massine in – he was 19, but hey, the bartender was a musician, too, and he knew how bad the joint needed a real bass player.

And we’d jam. And jam and jam and jam. We did all the standards; “12 Bar Blues in E”, “12 Bar Blues in A”, “12 Bar Blues in G” (I had a “C” Marine Band harmonica, so I could actually blow some harp on that one), and one magical evening, “12 Bar Blues in F”. Occasionally we’d do actual songs – “All Along the Watchtower” was a regular, and Scott and Tim and I did a pretty mean “I Will Follow” – but actual “songs” made a lot of the guys uncomfortable. They just wanted to jam – none of that silly singing, y’know.

So we jammed.

To this day, playing on a stage with a bunch of other musicians – no matter what the genre – is one of my favorite things in the world. In some ways, Mondays were even better; I’d bring a “wood” (or borrow the host’s Martin D-45) and play and sing a couple of songs on my own. The deal was this; everyone got three songs, no questions asked (unless you sucked and got booed off the stage, although let’s be clear – this was not the club scene in Eight Mile – although I do remember the bartender, Blaine Steller, jumping up an the bar and yelling at some old railroad guy who’d started the same song four times and kept forgetting the words and singing out of key, “You F*****g Suck, Get Off The Stage”). Then you got a drink; after a few weeks, they limited it to beers and weak bar pours, after a few unfortunate incidents with people who played five sets and got “paid” in Long Island Teas.

I usually played a couple of covers and, if I was feeling brave and the crowd was either good or too sparse or drunk to care, one of my own songs.

I went up there that last Monday in town, October 7. As I was walking past the stage, Don Salting said “I’m gonna play a Bruce Springsteen song”. “Which one?” I shouted. “Thunder Road”.

“Mind if I join you?”

He didn’t. I grabbed a guitar, and for once in my life hit all the harmony parts, dead-on (or so my memory tells me). It rocked.

I got another set, and I played a couple of songs; as I sat, figuring out what was going to be #3, somebody yelled out of the dark “Play Darkness On The Edge Of Town“. It was a song I’d been doing as a solo number off and on for months. I was kind of amazed that anyone had heard me at all.

Boded well, I thought, for my move to the Twin Cities, where the plan was to become the next Paul Westerberg. So far so good.

Today, Tim Cross is a high school music teacher in southwestern North Dakota. I think Ken teaches music somewhere, too. Don Salting is, I think, a computer guy, and plays some bagpipes as well – birds of a feather, I suppose. Blaine the bartender married a girl I’d had a mondo crush on in high school, and moved to Montana, where I hear they still live, building log cabins for superstars (or, again, so my memory says). Most of the rest of the guys are at the town’s State Hospital – mostly as orderlies and attendants. It’s been the town’s biggest employer for a while now. I don’t know if any of them plays anymore.

Fred’s Den became a teen club a year or so later, and has sat largely defunct for most of these last twenty years. The current owner – she runs a couple of restaurants next door – rents it out as a banquet hall and party room. Four years ago, my high school graduating class had its twentieth reunion party there.

I was doing the “entertainment” (A game of The Weakest Alumnus, which was a gas, although I’m sure the fact that most everyone was bombed didn’t hurt). I stood on that same stage, looking at about half of my class gathered in the booths, and flashed briefly back to a darker, smokier time.

In the past twenty years, my sense of place has pretty much moved to the Twin Cities. But that night, on that stage, a little of it flickered for my old hometown.

But that was all 16 years in the future. In October of 1985, I had a move to plan.

“Plan”. Heh.

Resumes in hand – and an actual job lead clipped from the Sunday Star/Tribune (which, I didn’t yet know, didn’t put all of its job leads in the outstate edition), I set my date: Monday, October 14.

I had a couch or two to stay on. I had a company in the Twin Cities that was interested in talking with me when I got to town.

I had a goal!

I had nine days to kill before I could blow out of town, outside of work (which at that time was doing roofing and siding in the tiny town of Cleveland, North Dakota). But I had a little spring in my step that I hadn’t had before my impulsive decision to move.

Did I mention that I had nine days to kill?

I spent part of it working on my car.

Of course, my car needed at least that long to be ready to go.

I was driving my first car at this point – a 1973 Malibu that I’d bought from my pal Rich Larson. I’d paid $125 and a case of beer for it. (Don’t laugh – I think at that point North Dakota title transfer forms had space for things like beer and cattle along with money). It had been a “farm car” in Northern Minnesota (from whence Rich hailed). This was important; in the winter, Minnesota salted its roads, while North Dakota used some sort of chemical or another. As a result, fifteen year old cars in North Dakota were frequently pretty pristine, while Minnesota cars tended to get mottled with rust. The Malibu? Well, it has gotten me through a year and a half of college, and even a couple of trips to Fargo – 90 miles, no accidents or breakdowns. She ran great, but rust had eaten most of the side panels up to the two foot level. The driver’s side door panel flapped in the breeze; if I got going much more than 20 miles per hour, it picked up a bit of an airfoil effect; I’m sure if I could have gotten it up to 150 it might have taken flight (and rolled me over clockwise, since the left door panel was either fine or completely rusted away; I can’t remember).

But it had a 350, and it could still go plenty fast. Although the tires were bald and, not being much of a mechanic, the thing was pretty much running on faith.

I bought a couple of new used tires, changed the oil, and got ‘er ready for the trip.

It was a little afternoon on Wednesday, October 3, 1985. I drove up to my old college – where I’d graduated about five months earlier – and saw the “career counselor”, Mrs. Gump (the name has been changed, not so much to protect her identity as because I’ve completely forgotten it).

Mrs. Gump was a flinty, late fortyish woman who had a reputation as a businesswoman; she’d worked for several years for a regional clothing chain based in Fargo. She was working at the college part-time, after having moved to Jamestown to…

…well, that part of the story was a little fuzzy.

But I went in feeling very confident; while I didn’t have a lot of work experience (a couple years at three radio stations, three years as a stagehand at the college theater, two years as a computer tutor, two more as a remedial english tutor, and a bunch of odd jobs), I at least knew how to write. If nothing else, I figured I could write a pretty mean resume.

The woman tore my typewritten rough draft to shreds. The red ink on my draft resume looked like the Valentine’s Day Massacre. Worse, I made the mistake – according to Mrs. Gump – of writing in fairly natural English. Her suggested rewrites…

…sounded like something out of a nineteenth century broadsheet. Lots of passive tense, lots of referring to myself in the third person (“Mr. Berg is considered an excellent…”), lots of superlatives that, in her examples, seemed to dangle in sentences for no more reason than, say, Kevin Federline’s existence (“Excellent references available upon request”) – the sort of stuff that made my news-writing head spin.

“The people you’re writing to aren’t news people. They’re business people. They write and read different”, said Mrs. Gump.

“Like what? Like extras in a community theatre melodrama?” I silently wondered.

So I rewrote my resume. She gave it her stamp of approval, and I walked down to the local printer to get them photocopied on heavyweight paper (“Absolutely vital!”, said Mrs. Gump. “If you don’t use 60-pound ivory-laid paper, you’ll never even get an interview!”) at about a hard-earned buck a pop.

And I looked at them, when they came back the next day (!) and thought “I’m a fine candidate for a Horace Greeley review, anyway…“. And I rewrote my resume in regular English, just to be safe…

After the little outburst on Friday, September 28, 1985, I had a weekend to think about it.

I didn’t. I did the whole homecoming thing. I told everyone that I thought would care about the plans (which amounted to maybe 15 people).

But now it was Monday, October 1. It was back to work.

I set to things with a resolution I’d gotten out of the habit of, during the past five months. I gave notice at my various jobs. I figured out what kind of money I had. I got my car – a very beat-up ’73 Malibu that was, in retrospect, not even roadworthy – ready for the drive. I called my friends in the Cities, arranging couches to crash on.

And I went to the library to look at the Sunday Star/Tribune’s want ads, looking for anything an English major with a putative talent for writing could do – and came away feeling just a tad depressed.

I needed a resume.

Now, my obscure little college wasn’t much on career counseling – a sore spot among a lot of graduates of the day. The college was, to be fair, trying to stay solvent (it came within 24 hours of closing the following year). But they had just hired a woman to help out in that department – a woman who had had an executive job at a small clothing-store chain in Fargo, and so knew the world of business. She worked like ten hours a week, out of a little office in the back of the cafeteria.

I made an appointment for Wednesday to get a resume whipped into shape.

I graduated from college in May of 1985 – and spent the next four months basically trying to figure out what do to next.

It was twenty years ago tonight – Friday, September 28 – that it all started to resolve itself.

I really loved college. Despite the maniacal pace I kept (I averaged like 23 credits a semester), I enjoyed it; after the penal drudgery of the lock-step high school curriculum, the idea of charting ones’ own course and learning it all just for the sake of learning it all was a dream come true. I loved it so much, I never got around to making a plan for what to do afterwards.

I went to an obscure college in my hometown, Jamestown ND. I was in the horns of a dilemma; my grades weren’t spectacular enough to make anything like law school or graduate school a viable option – even if I’d been interested in either. Which I wasn’t. The other traditional option with a BA in English was teaching – but I had absolutely no interest in that, and had never taken an education class.

So.

I spent the summer working a bunch of crummy jobs – roofing and siding, delivering water beds, the local Waldenbooks – during the day, and usually drinking at one place or another all night (as I’d been doing for the whole summer after graduation, five or six nights a week), while I tried to figure out what I was going to do. In those days when only Al Gore had access to the Internet, it was hard to find out what was happening elsewhere, as far as applying for jobs and trying to launch a career elsewhere (even if I’d had a career in mind).

And “elsewhere” was another interesting topic. Where was I going to go? Because staying in North Dakota certainly wasn’t an option. I didn’t know what I wanted to do – but I surely knew what I didn’t; pretty much any job I could get on the Great Plains, certainly the ones I was qualified to do – which with my B.A. in English wasn’t a whole lot.

Time crawled forward. My alcohol tolerance crawled upward. Life, however, did’t.

Finally, it was Homecoming time. It was the last week of September. All my friends from the class of ’85 came back to Jamestown, talking about their fun jobs (computer programmers were the big export from Jamestown College back then, but there were nurses, teachers, management trainees, doctors, law students – the whole post-grad works) and cool cities (Chicago, Denver, Portland, Seattle and, of course, the Twin Cities) and their cool lives.

And I wanted one of those.

We were down at the Elks Club for the “Over 21” Homecoming Dance, a table full of my classmates and I. As we launched into our assortment of drinks with great gusto, we went around in a circle, talking about who was doing what.

Finally, they got around to me. “What are you up to, Mitch?”

“Ummmm…”. There was no varnishing the state I was in. “I’m doing some roofing and siding work, that kind of thing. But…”

I’d had probably five drinks – not that much, given the tolerance I’d built up over the summer, but it was enough to make me pretty toasty. “I’m going to move soon.”

“Aw, awesome!”, they said, happy for my sudden burst of resolution. “Where to?”

I sat and thought for a moment. Where did I want to go to that I could afford to get to? New York and Chicago were out. Fargo was still North Dakota. The Twin Cities, with their music scene peaking at the time and only 350 miles away and relatively cheap at the time by major-metropolitan areas, beckoned.

“Minneapolis”, I blurted out, draining the last of a Vodka Kamikaze.

“Cool!”, they said, nodding their heads.

“Don’t let them ask when. Don’t let them ask when“, I silently begged.

“When?”

“Oh, crap. OK. How long’ll it take me to get this together. Must…be…deliberate…”

“Two Weeks”.

“Awesome!”

I wandered around the rest of the night, euphoric as much from the weight that lifted over having finally made a decision as from the booze. I danced until the band unplugged. I finally had something, at least for the evening; I could tell all my old friends that I, finally, was getting underway. And, I figured, there was no way anyone’d remember the next morning, anyway.

They did, of course. I was cornered. A couple of friends in the Cities offered to put me up on their couches for a bit, while I got going. A few other had some people I could talk to about jobs.

So like so many things in my life, my move to the Twins started as a rash, impulsive response to an unexpected challenge, under the influence.

Not bad, all in all.

More later.