It was Saturday, January 21, 1989.<\/p>\n
Just so you know, I have standards. I had ’em back twenty years ago, too. Examples:<\/p>\n
To those of you out there who are keenly aware of how addicts and their enablers work – yep. I am – or was, in 1988, anyway\u00a0– a ripe suck. A pushover. An easy target for a real addict.<\/p>\n
But even I <\/em>had my limits.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n It was bitterly cold night. Wyatt had left early before going to the bar to do his bouncer shift, so I relaxed a bit for the hour before I had to head out to my bar for the evening, the Mermaid. I drove out, grabbed a burger before my shift, and went to work.<\/p>\n It was a Saturday night at the Mermaid.\u00a0 As crappy as I’d felt the previous night (er, morning), Saturdays at the ‘maid always made me feel good.\u00a0 I mean, I hated my job, but at the ‘maid, at least I was able to do a good <\/em>job that I hated.\u00a0 The bar was jumping.\u00a0 I kept ’em out on the floor.\u00a0 It was a good night.<\/p>\n The bar closed down around 2AM (no booze after 1, of course).\u00a0 I had an after work drink with the staff, and went home.<\/p>\n One drink.\u00a0 In retrospect, it was a good\u00a0call.<\/p>\n I parked out on the street, and walked in the door. It was about 2:45 AM, and very dark.<\/p>\n Shane was waiting in the front hallway. “Hey”, he whispered in the voice he used when he was about to let you in on a big secret.<\/p>\n “What’s up?” I asked, tired and waiting on the punch line.<\/p>\n “Wanna know where your rifle is?”<\/p>\n I felt a cold chill race up my back.\u00a0 My heart sent a message to my brain; “Permission to start pounding, sir<\/em>?”.<\/em><\/p>\n “What do you mean?”<\/p>\n Shane padded over to the stairwell and pointed up.<\/p>\n There were three jagged holes in the plaster above us. I felt a cold draft; I couldn’t tell if it was the cold night air leaking down through holes through the roof, or just my blood running ice-cold in fear and anger.<\/p>\n “He came home with some bar snatch” Shane started. “He was coked up…”<\/p>\n “Naturally…” I responded, leaning over to pick up a cartridge casing from the floor.<\/p>\n “…and thought he heard a crack dealer in the attic”. He’d been paranoid, apparently.<\/p>\n “So he…”, I started, already knowing the answer.<\/p>\n “He grabbed your rifle, loaded it, and busted off a couple of shots”, Shane completed the thought. “I was sitting in the living room watching a movie. It scared the shit out of me”.<\/p>\n “So where is he?”, I asked, waving Shane toward my room.<\/p>\n “Up in his bedroom, with the skeeze”.<\/p>\n “Where’s the rifle?”<\/p>\n “He took it up there with them”.<\/p>\n I walked through the door to my little garret in the front room, which Wyatt had helpfully left open, and flipped on the light. A box of cartridges lay on the desk, with a bunch of rounds scattered on the floor where Wyatt had let them scatter, apparently in his frenzy to shoot the “crack dealers in the attic”.<\/p>\n “I can’t handle this shit any more”, I muttered.<\/p>\n “Yeah”.<\/p>\n A plan formed in my head. Or, should I say, a “plan”.<\/p>\n I grabbed a day or two’s worth of clothes, the box of cartridges, a couple of personal treasures – some photos, books and so on – and stuffed them into the duffel bag. I took them and my acoustic guitar (my electrics were over at the band’s practice space) and a little .22 rifle I had stashed behind the bed, and ran them out to the car. Shane grabbed a trash bag full of his own stuff and did the same.<\/p>\n One more thing to do.<\/p>\n I reached into my jacket pocket and grabbed the little .22 automatic.<\/p>\n Shane’s eyes got wide.\u00a0\u00a0“Mitch, what the f**k?”<\/p>\n “I’m gonna get my rifle back”.<\/p>\n I racked a round; the little .22 chambered with a not-as-reassuring-as-a-.45 “snick”. I lowered the hammer (it was a double-action) as I padded up the stairs as quietly as I could go in my “work” dress shoes.<\/p>\n I held the gun in my right jacket pocket; I slipped the safety off as I stood aside the door frame, in case he figured he’d missed one of the “crack dealers” in the attic who was now coming to avenge his riddled buddies.<\/p>\n I knocked on the door. “Wyatt?”<\/p>\n Nothing.<\/p>\n “Wyatt?”<\/p>\n Still nothing.<\/p>\n I opened the door and stepped inside, moving out of the doorway into the shadow by the wall. The room reeked of booze and pot smoke. Wyatt and a woman I’d never seen (not that that was anything unusual), a thin black-haired woman who had the too-skinny look of someone who was no stranger to coke and uppers, were passed out under the covers. Soundly unconscious, they didn’t budge.<\/p>\n I saw the rifle, leaned against the wall by the bed. I grabbed it and quickly left the room, not bothering to shut the door. I safed and pocketed the pistol as I walked down the stairs, and checked the rifle as I walked into my room. The safety had been left off, I noticed as I remembered Wyatt’s “all the guns in the house should be under my control” rant the previous weekend. I unhooked the magazine and racked the bolt carrier back; a round flipped out onto the floor, and one more glared up from the detached magazine.<\/p>\n I cased the rifle, and ran out to the car. I stuffed the case in the trunk and drove away. I don’t think I locked the door on my way out.<\/p>\n ———- And, above all, for twenty years, I’ve pondered – what was <\/em>the chick Wyatt brought home thinking<\/em>? You’re met a skeezy, lowlife bouncer at a bar. You go to his place. He hears crack dealers in the attic. OK, if you’re drunk or jonesing I can see maybe letting all of that <\/em>slide.<\/p>\n But then he grabs a rifle and blasts several holes in the ceiling<\/em> – and then <\/em>you go upstairs, hoover up some blow, and get the freak on?<\/p>\n Sometimes I’m happy that I got out of that time of my life with any <\/em>regard for the human race.<\/p>\n Also, alive.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n I drove Shane to his friends’ place in Frogtown. Their phone had been disconnected, so\u00a0I drove over to the old Texaco station on Snelling and Minnehaha to use the pay phone. I called my bandmates – it took a couple of tries – and arranged to sleep on their couch that night.<\/p>\n And one other thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was Saturday, January 21, 1989. Just so you know, I have standards. I had ’em back twenty years ago, too. Examples: Steal my stuff? I could get upset. Trash my place? Don’t do it, buddy. Threaten me? Not a good way to make me happy. Bring a criminal trade – and plenty of criminals […]<\/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-1849","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\/1849","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=1849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI’ve wondered about many things about that evening for the past twenty years. Did nobody in that loathsome neighborhood hear<\/em> a bunch of large-caliber rifle shots coming from the house? Did nobody call the cops? (Why, indeed, did Shane apparently just keep on watching his movie?)<\/p>\n