It was Monday, September 12, 1988.

I’d been settled into the new digs, over in Swede Hollow, for almost two weeks.

It was pretty friggin’ awful. Wyatt was…well, Wyatt, only moreso. More women. More booze. More ugly scenes; Teresa had this unfortunate knack of catching Wyatt with other women, lately. It’d always boil into a huge fight, with screaming and smashing things.

I tried to spend most of my days out and about the city – biking, walking, whatever, just to stay out of the house until it was time to come home, clean up and get to whatever bar I was working. There was some good news, there, anyway; I’d gotten a bit of a raise, and they were putting me in some other bars. Not necessarily “better” bars, but other ones, bars that, unlike Jams and City Limits, I wasn’t bored stiff with yet. At least, not individually. All the bars were more or less the same; Silks in Woodbury, Mingles in Brooklyn Park, Websters in Bloomington, Shooters in North Saint Paul, the White Bear Inn in White Bear, Whispers in Minnetonka, J.P. McPicklesh***ers in Burnsville…

…oh, wait. That was from The Onion, as a spoof of that same kind of dismal bar with its atmosphere of contrived fun covering a veneer of Bergmanesque emotional barrenness.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anyway – lots of bars. The sleazy DJ service loved me because they could put me into any kind of bar – R’nB, rock, biker, country, boring, what have you. So I went into all of them.

My other solace? Maybe, just maybe, getting my radio career back.

I called Charlie, at WMCA in New York. “Yeah, I like your tape!”, he said – five words that almost stopped my heart. “Y’know – it’d be great if you could stop by in New York sometime. We might have a need coming up, and I’d like to talk with you about it”.

Go to New York?, I thought. That’s crazy. I can’t afford that.

“I think I might actually be coming out to New York fairly soon on…other business”, I vamped.

“Good”, said Charlie. “Tell you what – keep me posted. I’d love to meet”.

I hung up, and started looking for cheap airfare. As it happens, I’d never booked an airline ticket before.