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.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Sunday, December 23rd, 2007 at 5:31 am and is filed under Twenty Years Ago Today. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.