It was Wednesday, December 23, 1987.\u00a0 I’d negotiated a couple of days off from the various bars I’d been working to take my first Christmas at my parents’ place since 1984.<\/p>\n
CLOSED CIRCUIT TO MY KIDS:\u00a0 Skip past the next couple of paragraphs, until you get to the part where it says “KIDS MAY REJOIN THIS POST”.<\/p>\n
My guitar player Casey – a fellow Jamestown native – and I carpooled it back to Jamestown for Christmas.<\/p>\n
I used to carpool back to Jamestown with a couple of different friends, back then.\u00a0 My pal Rich and I used to go in on a sixpack of Summit (brand new on the market back then) and drink one every 100 miles, on the road.\u00a0 Kept us nice and cool for long summer trips.\u00a0 (Duly noted:\u00a0 It was stupid, and\u00a0illegal as hell.\u00a0 We\u00a0were 24 and immortal.\u00a0 So sue\u00a0us all).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Casey?\u00a0 Well, he was a bit more of a drinker than Rich and I, at that time of his life (but then, weren’t we all?).\u00a0 When I picked him up at his place in Minneapolis, at about four in the afternoon, he brought out a case of Carlings and a pint of peppermint schnapps.<\/p>\n
We rolled up Lyndale and out onto I94, heading west, doing our best to bypass the morass of construction on US12, which – someday waaaaay off in the future – was going to be something called “I394”, but at the moment was merely a huge traffic cluster-hug.<\/p>\n
We talked about music as we trundled west through the freezing night (below zero, if I remember correctly, although everything that winter seemed like it was below zero).\u00a0 As the sun set, Casey broke out the beer.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The rule of thumb – when I was driving back to Jamestown with Rich, and being a “responsible” drinking driver – was one beer every 100 miles.\u00a0 <\/em>No more, no faster.<\/p>\n Casey got a running start, popping a couple before I got into them.\u00a0<\/p>\n By the time we got to Fargo, we were down to maybe ten beers; I’d had four or five; we were both pretty impaired.<\/p>\n And then it started.\u00a0 One of the things that had broken up the original band was that Casey and Bill\u00a0 – and me, I guess, in retrospect – were two-stage drunks.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Stage 2 kicked in just past Fargo, about eight at night.\u00a0<\/p>\n “Mark and Bill don’t like playing with you.\u00a0 They say you’re a control freak…”, he said.\u00a0 “They’d like to try a different band”.\u00a0<\/p>\n And on.\u00a0 And on.<\/p>\n I sat, getting more and more numb, only partly from the cheap beer.\u00a0 Casey kept on talking about how the rest of the band\u00a0 just plain didn’t like playing with me.\u00a0 I got quieter and quieter.\u00a0 Eventually I didn’t respond; I’d take the occasional sip of beer, and sank further and further into my chair.\u00a0 It would be probably fifteen years before I heard the term “shame spiral”, but I was in one.<\/p>\n We cracked the bottle of Schnapps around Tower City, trading swigs as we rolled across the drift prairie.\u00a0 Driving across the prairie at night always felt like space travel; besides the occasional cars, the only visible light was the stars and lights from the farmhouses we were passing – and on a dark enough night, sometimes it was hard to tell which was which.<\/p>\n Finally – around 10PM – we pulled into Jamestown.\u00a0 There were two beers left, and the schnapps was pretty low.\u00a0 I drove to Casey’s parents’ place…<\/p>\n …and I stumbled as I got out of the car to open the trunk so he could get his stuff.\u00a0 I was kinda blotto.\u00a0 It had snuck up on me, but when it finally caught me, it caught me but good.<\/p>\n “So<\/em>“, I thought as I drove away, keenly aware I shouldn’t be driving at all, “that’s it, then?\u00a0 The band is toast<\/em>?”\u00a0 Things had been pretty awful for a while, but over<\/em>?<\/p>\n I felt like my stomach sank into my shoes.<\/p>\n Depressed out of my mind, I drove over to Perkins to get some coffee and greasy onion rings and sober up a bit before I went to my parents’ place.\u00a0\u00a0 Of the things I’d moved to the Twin Cities to find two years before – a good job, a band, and a cool girlfriend – I’d peaked at two out of three.\u00a0 And I was back down to zero.\u00a0<\/p>\n Square one.<\/p>\n I sat in the same Perkins I’d sat in a few years ago, on a dozen\u00a0nearly-identical frigid nights, wondering the same things I’d wondered before I left Jamestown in the first place.\u00a0 What am I going to do when I grow up?\u00a0 Is there a place out there where I really belong?<\/p>\n I’d always thought so, before.\u00a0 On this Wednesday night, I wasn’t so sure.\u00a0<\/p>\n I’d given it a mighty shot, and – as it seemed as I sat swirling ketchup with piece of onion ring – whiffed.\u00a0<\/p>\n Whiffed badly.<\/p>\n KIDS MAY REJOIN THIS POST.<\/p>\n And then I drove to my parents’ house, and had a joyous reunion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was Wednesday, December 23, 1987.\u00a0 I’d negotiated a couple of days off from the various bars I’d been working to take my first Christmas at my parents’ place since 1984. CLOSED CIRCUIT TO MY KIDS:\u00a0 Skip past the next couple of paragraphs, until you get to the part where it says “KIDS MAY REJOIN […]<\/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-1811","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\/1811","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=1811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1811\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n