It was Wednesday, August 17, 1988.

After I turned down the apartment on York Street, it was time to get down to business; we had two weeks to find a place for the three of us to live.

And not a day went by where I didn’t have a bad feeling about my decision. While Wyatt had a brief stretch of relative sobriety, it was always more a matter of situational tactics than a change in lifestyle. He dried up enough to get a job with an asbestos-abatement company. “I’ll be able to pay some of the back-bills I owe”, he said, not-all-that-convincingly.

But as soon as the checks started coming in, he started hitting the bottle again.

And while he was a fairly jovial drunk, most of the time, you could see bits and pieces of ugly leaking out. He’d yell at someone, smack one of the dogs…the usual alcoholic stuff.

The worst? The day after I called the guy who’d offered me the apartment, Teresa – Wyatt’s gorgeous “girlfriend” – came over during the day, unannounced. Wyatt, of course, had another girl – a west-side Mexician girl named “Rosa” – over.

I was down in the basement working on some project or another in the early afternoon; Teresa walked in, and apparently caught Wyatt and Rosa in flagrante. First came the yelling. From where I sat, it sounded like Teresa actually got the better of Rosa, who walked out (or so I heard from the footsteps). Then the real fight, with thrown laps and scratching and kicking and a little actual bloodshed, started. I heard six feet walking out the door above me; Teresa had apparently taken one of the dogs.

Wyatt came ambling down the stairs a few minutes later – until he got to the bottom of the stairs. Then he broke into a run out the door. From the basement, I could hear the screaming on the front lawn; Teresa had apparently keyed Wyatt’s car before she left.

I thought briefly about calling the guy on York to see if the apartment was available. I figured there was no chance…

At any rate, we found a house for rent in the Pioneer Press; a three-bedroom frame out in Swede Hollow, on the East Side. The house was on an impossibly-narrow one-way street, surrounded by dilapidated houses with people sitting out on the porches; bullet holes stitched the walls of at least two houses. The whole enterprise smelled like “crack neighborhood”. But it was three bedrooms, no garage, $500 a month. I think the landlord liked the fact that we didn’t look like Section Eight or crack dealers; he offered us the place on the spot.

I walked away from the meeting relieved to have a place, but not really feeling good about the whole thing.