It was Friday, August 7, 1987.\u00a0 The big day: I’d been working at my freelance writing job for two weeks, and was getting paid in another week.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And I’d gotten my final<\/em> unemployment check!<\/p>\n And the party I’d started planning when I got the job was finally happening.\u00a0<\/p>\n I’d invited most of my friends in the Twin Cities; my roommates had added quite a few of their own – because, let’s face it, what’s\u00a0\u00a0a party without people?<\/p>\n Then as now, I loved going <\/em>to parties; but I’d never thrown one before.\u00a0 Indeed, other than MOB parties, I’ve never thrown another (not to say I won’t – but that’s a subject for another thread).\u00a0 So I went through some internal calculus, and tried to figure out what made for a great late-summer party.\u00a0 I came up with:<\/p>\n It was a scorcher – probably in the mid-nineties, humid as hell.\u00a0 I ran to Big Top Liquors – then as now, the booze lynchpin of the neighborhood – and figured, what the heck, I’d grab two 30-packs of Strohs.\u00a0 Oh, make it three.\u00a0<\/p>\n Then, to Rainbow, for a couple of pounds of beef, cheese, charcoal, brats, onions, buns…<\/p>\n …and then, home.<\/p>\n People started showing up around sixish.\u00a0 First came\u00a0Liz’ boyfriend, and\u00a0some of my late-KSTP friends.\u00a0 Then my pal Rich.\u00a0 Then some of Liz’ co-workers from a group home in Minnepolis.\u00a0 Then the guys from my band.\u00a0 Then more of Liz’ co-workers.\u00a0 Then still more of them.\u00a0<\/p>\n The party started out so <\/em>well.\u00a0<\/p>\n For the first four or five hours, it was wonderful; good company, good conversation given a great shove down a beer-soaked slip-n-slide, good food (I was, and remain, a great grillmeister) – just a memorably good time.\u00a0<\/p>\n By about tennish, people were gathered on both porches, cooling off, enjoying things.\u00a0 People had nice buzzes going on; roommates’ co-workers, and I think one of my band-mates, started slipping away to the upstairs bedrooms in various combinations.\u00a0 Everyone was enjoying themselves.\u00a0 Even me – although I had long lost track of how many Strohs I’d sucked down in the August heat.\u00a0 Still – it was a great party.<\/p>\n Twenty years later, I’m still not sure exactly where it went wrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n I think it was around ten that a couple of Liz’ co-workers’ friends showed up.\u00a0 One of them, a fellow who resembled\u00a0a genetic melding of\u00a0Jeffrey Dahmer and Zeljko Ivanek, walked in, grabbed a beer, and came out to the porch, scowling.\u00a0 Then heckling people – my friends, my band-mades, and eventually me.\u00a0 And then getting really abusive; “You really shuck<\/em>.\u00a0 Thish izh a sh**y<\/em> party.\u00a0 You’re shtu<\/em>pid”.<\/p>\n I took one of Liz’ co-workers – the one who’d brought the guy – aside.\u00a0 “Who izh<\/em> thish moron?” I asked.\u00a0 He apparently was an off-duty corrections officer from the Stillwater Penitentiary.\u00a0 “Could you tell him to mellow out a little?”<\/p>\n Well, he tried.\u00a0 It didn’t stick.<\/p>\n I don’t honestly remember, twenty years later, what came first – me standing in his face and saying – not yelling, I am fairly sure – “You’re standing on my<\/em> porch, at my<\/em> party, drinking my<\/em> beer, and insulting my<\/em> friends?\u00a0 What am I missing here?”, him saying “I think you’re a faggot”, or me promising to strangle him with his own intestines.\u00a0 His pal intervened about the time I was picking up a piece of scrap wood off the porch.\u00a0 They left.<\/p>\n Which isn’t to say the party ended.\u00a0 Just that it got kinda weird.\u00a0 Almost like the evening’s gestalt <\/em>got turned 90 degrees.\u00a0 Which, by the way, also felt like the temperature around midnight.\u00a0 Conversations that had been friendly turned…well, not “confrontational”.\u00a0 Everyone was still having fun.\u00a0 But the near-brawl had lent the evening an edge that it hadn’t had, and didn’t need.\u00a0 And there were some other little scuffles; one of Liz’s co-workers girlfriends hooked up with a differnet co-worker; animosity ensued.\u00a0 And one of my other roommate Brenda’s boyfriends ran into another of them.\u00a0 (It could have been worse; she was stringing three along at the time).\u00a0 An undercurrent of ugly started creeping into the evening.\u00a0<\/p>\n And of course, everyone kept right on drinking.\u00a0Some of the co-workers had brought plenty\u00a0<\/em>more beer and\u00a0booze.\u00a0\u00a0Now, I’ve never really been a heavy drinker – except for a stretch after my college graduation, I have rarely had more than 2-3 drinks in a sitting in my life.\u00a0 I’m sure I was well past a dozen beers by midnight.\u00a0\u00a0 Well <\/em>past.\u00a0<\/p>\n Damn.\u00a0 It felt good<\/em> to be working again!<\/p>\n I think it was like 4:30AM when Liz’ boyfriend decided to make one last hamburger. <\/em>He grabbed a chunk of the beef…<\/p>\n …that had been sitting on the counter since 6PM, in the sweltering evening, in the even-more-sweltering kitchen, molded a patty, and tossed it on the grill.\u00a0<\/p>\n I think it was about 5:30AM when he chundered phosphorescent green spew all over the kitchen.\u00a0 And dining room.\u00a0 And stairway to the bathroom.\u00a0 And he wasn’t done.\u00a0 Oh, nosireee.\u00a0<\/p>\n It was about then that I passed out.\u00a0<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n Casey, my other guitar player, woke me up at about 8AM.\u00a0 His car, a mid-seventies Toyota, had no starter, and needed a push-start to get him and Bill, my drummer, home.\u00a0 We staggered outside – it was already scorching hot – and gave the car a shove down Fry Street (the irony wasn’t lost on me even then), a block or so, until it caught.\u00a0<\/p>\n I staggered back to the house, sweating toxic goo, feeling queasier by the step.\u00a0<\/p>\n I got in the back door.\u00a0 My foot skidded on some leftover phosphorescent green chunder.\u00a0 I felt my stomach jumping up, like one of those videos of a mid-fifties ejector seat firing off; I ran upstairs to the bathroom, and…<\/p>\n …well, you know.<\/p>\n My head felt like it’d been bored out with a grain auger.\u00a0 Every muscle in my simultaneously ached and rioted to eject more stuff from me, from whatever end was available.\u00a0 I lived in a universe of sour and ugly.<\/p>\n Liz staggered into the bathroom.\u00a0 “Telephone!”, she yelled, before clomping back to bed.\u00a0<\/p>\n I crawled to the phone.\u00a0 “Hullo?” I groaned, sounding very, very sick even to myself.<\/p>\n “Hi, Mitch!\u00a0 It’s your mom!\u00a0 Have a rough night?”<\/p>\n I stayed on the couch, sweating and praying for either rain or death, all day.\u00a0 And then\u00a0most of Sunday cleaning.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was Friday, August 7, 1987.\u00a0 The big day: I’d been working at my freelance writing job for two weeks, and was getting paid in another week.\u00a0 And I’d gotten my final unemployment check! And the party I’d started planning when I got the job was finally happening.\u00a0 I’d invited most of my friends in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-twenty-years-ago-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n