It was Saturday, January 31, 1988.

I worked my third straight weekend at George’s in Fridley. They totally loved me there. Which was a very cool thing.

The roommate situation had stabilized – sort of. After we kicked Chris (the crazy guy who earned a living from welfare, working at Wendy’s, and shoplifting clothes from Dayton’s, and who’d left his cat locked in his room for three days) out, we’d taken out an ad in the “Roommates” section of the paper. A young genetics major at the “U”, “Ron”, moved in. Nice kid; short, clean-cut, laid-back…

…gay. Very very gay.

That didn’t faze me.

But when Ron tried to bring a boyfriend over, Wyatt – the aggressive libertine – blew a gasket. “I don’t like fags”, he muttered in the fake arklahoma accent he affected (he was the son of a very wealthy family from downstate Connecticut, actually) whenever he wanted to make a point.

Things got very tense, very fast.  Wyatt started actively antagonizing Ron. 

Ah, but that was the home life.  And I was at George’s, again.  And I totally rocked the joint.  Which had its benefits.

A big one – I drank free, there.  I found this out when I stopped by there one day on my way home from a bar that the agency had sent me to to “learn the joint” – spend a couple of hours learning the gear, watching another DJ work the room, etc.  Tony wouldn’t take my money.

This was a very good thing.

So I’d brought a date there the previous Tuesday, my night off.

Let’s back up a bit. It was some girl I’d met at a gig with my band, the previous year – and you may read anything you want into the fact that I don’t mention her until a eight months after we met and almost a week after our date – but only if you read absolutely nothing interesting into it.  We ran into each other at the various rock ‘n roll bars around town. I figured what the heck – let’s ask her out.

Anyway. 

I took her to George’s – partly because Tony wouldn’t take my money. A nice cheap date was the best one. Plus it made me look all connected – walking into the bar, having the owner (who might have looked Italian, it’s not like my date was going to know) welcome me like I was a member of the family and refuse my attempt to pay the bill…

…yeah, that rocked.

Oh, yeah.  Saturday night.

I had the whole floor packed.  The assistant kitchen managers had learned not to come waddling up to the booth to order me to play what they wanted – by this point, knowing that I had Tony’s blessing, I was pretty much off-limits to them.  And for the first time in my six-week-old DJing career, I achieved something that only happened a few times in the next several miserable years of club-jocking; the floor was so full, so jumping, so packed, it left me buzzing.  The same sort of high I got when my band had a (rare) great night…

…and it was me, dammit!

Tony and Papa George liked me just fine.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 3:47 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.