It was Wednesday, November 23, 1988.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I was going to head back to Jamestown for Thanksgiving.\u00a0 I didn’t want to miss Christmas in the bars; lots of extra money and tips for working the Xmas holiday, so I figured I’d tough it out.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So I worked out a Wednesday through Saturday “vacation” with my boss, packed up the night before, and got ready to leave.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The phone rang; Wyatt, hung over as\u00a0usual,\u00a0grunted “got it” upstairs before I could get to it.<\/p>\n
Wyatt, as usual, had been “entertaining” again.\u00a0 I’d never really kept track, but he’d kept to his old average of seven or eight women a week, including the “girlfriend”.\u00a0 There were a few semi-regular ones, but I hadn’t gotten a look at whomever it’d been the night before.\u00a0\u00a0I’d gotten home from the bar a little too late.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As I was packing my duffel bag, Wyatt walked down the stairs wearing a pair of basketball shorts.\u00a0 He was moving with a little more purpose than his usual hung-over shamble.\u00a0 He looked worried.<\/p>\n
“Hey, dude”, he said in a whisper very unlike his usual booming baritone with the fake arklahoma accent.\u00a0 “Could you do me a favor?\u00a0 I’m in a big-ass jam.\u00a0 Teresa’s on her way over.\u00a0 Could you give Jennifer a ride home to Saint Louis Park?\u00a0 And keep it all quiet, OK?\u00a0 She’s hot<\/em>, man”.<\/p>\n I stood for a moment.\u00a0 On the one hand, Saint Louis Park was <\/em>on my way out to 94, more or less.\u00a0 It wasn’t far out of the way, really.<\/p>\n On the other, I wanted Wyatt to rot in hell.\u00a0 He was late on the bills again.\u00a0 His dog was crapping all over the place, again.\u00a0 He was hitting the bottle with both fists, again.\u00a0 And his drug-dealer friends – oh, yeah, the coke dealing – were over at all hours of the day and night.<\/p>\n “Ummm…”, I started, looking up the stairs as a woman came down the stairs.\u00a0 Early twenties, auburn hair, gorgeous…<\/p>\n “…sure”.\u00a0<\/p>\n “Hi, I’m Jennifer”, she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n “Mitch”.\u00a0<\/p>\n “See ya, Jenn”, Wyatt said, ambling toward the kitchen as we walked about door.\u00a0<\/p>\n We walked out to my car.\u00a0<\/p>\n We started talking as I drove down the hellish little one-way, past the crack house.\u00a0 Jennifer was an art student at Minneapolis College of Art and Design.\u00a0 She loved Russian literature, I found out around Dale Street.\u00a0 By Snelling, I found she knew some people I knew, in the Minneapolis music scene; we had at least two common acquaintances.\u00a0 And she played guitar.<\/p>\n By the U of M, we were comparing Bob and Tommy Stinson anecdotes.<\/p>\n And by downtown Minneapolis, I was falling madly in love.\u00a0<\/p>\n And damn, that sucked.\u00a0 I was living in a garret next to a crack house, working as a nightclub DJ, eating ramen most of the time, sharing a miserable rodent-trap house with a slacker and an addict.<\/p>\n Worse?\u00a0 We were hitting it off.\u00a0<\/p>\n “Worse<\/em>“, I thought, as I listened to her talking about her big senior project.\u00a0 “That’s how screwed up my life is.\u00a0 I’ve met someone just mind-warpingly gorgeous, and we’re hitting it off famously, like I’ve never hit it off with a woman at a first conversation before, and the first thing on my mind is all the reasons it can’t possibly work out<\/em>.”\u00a0<\/p>\n I drove down Hennepin to Lake Street, past the Walker and the Guthrie; she loved the theatre, and I could fake a love for art as well as anything else.\u00a0 She’d been in plays.\u00a0 I’d been in plays.\u00a0 She’d been to a production of Lion in Winter <\/em>that she’d loved, recently; I’d played Henry II <\/em>in Lion in Winter, <\/em>just five years earlier, in college.<\/p>\n As we drove past Lake Calhoun, I was grinning ear to ear, as I cringed inside.\u00a0 “There really is no way.\u00a0 There is no f*cking way<\/em>“.\u00a0<\/p>\n She lived at her parents’ place, near the junction of 7 and 100 in Saint Louis Park, the near-western suburb of Minneapolis.\u00a0<\/p>\n “So what can you tell me about Wyatt?” she asked after directing me down an arterial off of 7.<\/p>\n “And if there’s no f*cking way for me, there’s no f*cking way for him, either”.<\/em><\/p>\n “Wyatt has a girlfriend.”<\/p>\n Her head spun toward me.\u00a0<\/p>\n “On top of that, he is probably banging seven or eight other <\/em>women a week that he picks up in bars.”\u00a0 She cocked an eyebrow.\u00a0 “Serious.\u00a0 The guy’s a whore.\u00a0 If he’s bagged one chick in the last year, he’s bagged two hundred”.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0I felt a weight lift from my soul.<\/p>\n Jennifer was quiet, except for directing me down a street toward the cul-de-sac where her parents lived, in a brownish rambler with trees all over the place.<\/p>\n “He doesn’t believe in protection.\u00a0 Not at all.”\u00a0 A brief flash of alarm crossed her face.\u00a0 “Seriously.\u00a0 Get yourself tested.\u00a0 The guy’s a poster boy for “high VD risk”.\u00a0 [Anyone but me remember when it was called “VD”? – Ed<\/em>.]\u00a0<\/p>\n She was looking at me; like I was crazy, or she was alarmed by the information, or (I’d suspect at twenty years’ remove) a little of both.<\/p>\n “Look, sorry, but the man is a pig.”\u00a0 I paused for a moment.\u00a0 “You deserve better”, I added.\u00a0<\/p>\n She sat for a moment and wrinkled her face in contemplation.\u00a0<\/p>\n “Well, thanks…”, she said, sounding a little nonplussed.\u00a0 “Good to know.”<\/p>\n I gritted my teeth.\u00a0 “Look, sorry.\u00a0 But when I say he’s a pig…”<\/p>\n “Yeah…” she said, opening the door.\u00a0 “Gaah.\u00a0 Seriously – thanks…”<\/p>\n Our eyes met for a moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n “Happy Thanksgiving”.<\/p>\n “You too!”<\/p>\n She got out of the car and closed the door.<\/p>\n I watched her walk in the door, and inside.\u00a0<\/p>\n I turned back toward Highway 100 for the six hour trip to Jamestown.<\/p>\n It was good news, in a way,\u00a0that I never saw her again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was Wednesday, November 23, 1988.\u00a0 I was going to head back to Jamestown for Thanksgiving.\u00a0 I didn’t want to miss Christmas in the bars; lots of extra money and tips for working the Xmas holiday, so I figured I’d tough it out.\u00a0 So I worked out a Wednesday through Saturday “vacation” with my boss, […]<\/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-1852","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\/1852","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=1852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}