our other roommate, Dan<\/a>, out earlier in the month. Oddly, for as amazingly promiscuous a man as he was (he said with a straight face at about this time that “my goal in life is to f*** every woman in the world”), he had a very dim impression of gays. “I don’t like faggots”, he said many times. He did his best to live up to both statements. The women bit – well, that should be obvious.<\/p>\nAs to Dan? His property – including several of his paychecks – started disappearing. By early May, Wyatt had taken to actively antagonizing Dan’s boyfriend. He did it when I wasn’t around – I heard about it all second-hand…<\/p>\n
…but by the end of May, Dan had had enough. He gave notice.<\/p>\n
A day or two later – in early June – Dan and a few friends showed up with a truck and moved him out in during the day, while Wyatt and I were out. He left me a note – he just couldn’t deal with Wyatt’s BS anymore.<\/p>\n
So that made for an extra-large rent payment, and a payment to the Pioneer Press<\/em> to put an ad in the “Roomates Wanted” section.<\/p>\n———-<\/p>\n
But that was the closest thing to excitement that I managed. My days during this brutally hot summer were very, very circumscribed. I’d wake up around 9ish. I’d have something to eat, usually. I’d jump on my bike and ride most of the day – unless something was broken, which would involve a half-day quest to roll my bike laboriously to a repair shop. If I was feeling especially industrious or motivated, I might stop at the Dairy Queen, or the library, or ride down to Crosby Park, or…well, whatever rolled my way, really. If I was not <\/em>feeling motivated, I’d ride to see how dry my mouth would get before I could take a drink, or how yellow my pee could get, or how many of my old apartments and houses I could reach, or how many miles I could ride without seeing anything <\/em>interesting. Some days, I did nothing but ride box grids in different neighborhoods; others, I’d just pick a street and ride it to the end, or as far as I could get before I had to turn around to get back for work.<\/p>\nLooking back (because I’d never have put it this way back then) most days’ rides would have bookends of despair; at the beginning of the ride, I was pounding out the miles to forget about how awful it felt to be so…aimless. Such a failure<\/em>. And at the end, there was the dull ache of knowing I had to wash up and go to yet another awful bar.<\/p>\nI’d have something to eat (usually a baked potato stuffed with cheese and onions), then off to whatever the bar of the evening was. I’d grab the traditional after-work drink at the bars that allowed it, drive carefully home, and check in for the latest in Wyatt’s game of musical women. About half the nights, Wyatt would have hooked up with some girl he’d met at his day job during the day, and would have Teresa, his hot blond “steady” girlfriend, over at night. On the other nights – when Teresa worked (she was a night nurse at a nursing home), they’d bump uglies in the afternoon, and Wyatt’d pick up some other floozie at Christenson’s or the Belmont or O’Gara’s for the evening’s entertainment. I figured that Wyatt was boffing, on the average, with between four and seven different <\/em>women a week. Every week.<\/p>\nWhich was, in and of itself, depressing.<\/p>\n
I’d usually fall asleep reading a book, to the sound of Wyatt and whomever-it-was having thudding, drunken, arklahoma-inflected, drug-enhanced sex in the next room, or having a thudding, drunken, arklahoma-inflected, drug-enhanced argument about something or another.<\/p>\n
And then I’d wake up, and it’d start again.<\/p>\n
Every f*****g day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was Sunday, June 26, 1988. There truly wasn’t much going on in my life around this time. My nights involved going to work at one gawdforsaken bar or another, six nights a week. The good news – I was the best “jock” the DJ service had, and they told me so; my boss said […]<\/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-1839","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\/1839","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=1839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1839\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}