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.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 10:23 pm 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.