It was Saturday, January 31, 1988.<\/p>\n
I worked my third straight weekend at George’s in Fridley. They totally loved me there. Which was a very cool thing.<\/p>\n
The roommate situation had stabilized – sort of. After we kicked Chris <\/a>(the crazy guy who earned a living from welfare, working at Wendy’s, and shoplifting clothes from Dayton’s, and who’d left his cat locked in his room<\/a> for three days) out, we’d taken out an ad in the “Roommates” section of the paper. A young genetics major at the “U”, “Ron”, moved in. Nice kid; short, clean-cut, laid-back…<\/p>\n …gay. Very very gay.<\/p>\n That didn’t faze me.<\/p>\n But when Ron tried to bring a boyfriend over, Wyatt – the aggressive libertine – blew a gasket. “I don’t like fags”, he muttered in the fake arklahoma accent he affected (he was the son of a very wealthy family from downstate Connecticut, actually) whenever he wanted to make a point.<\/p>\n Things got very tense, very fast.\u00a0 Wyatt started actively antagonizing Ron.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ah, but that was the home life.\u00a0 And I was at George’s, again.\u00a0 And I totally rocked the joint.\u00a0 Which had its benefits.<\/p>\n A big one – I drank free, there.\u00a0 I found this out when I stopped by there one day on my way home from a bar that the agency had sent me to to “learn the joint” – spend a couple of hours learning the gear, watching another DJ work the room, etc.\u00a0 Tony wouldn’t take my money.<\/p>\n This was a very good thing.<\/p>\n So I’d brought a date there the previous Tuesday, my night off.<\/p>\n Let’s back up a bit. It was some girl I’d met at a gig with my band, the previous year – and you may read anything you want into the fact that I don’t mention her until a eight months after we met and almost a week after our date – but only if you read absolutely nothing interesting into it.\u00a0 We ran into each other at the various rock ‘n roll bars around town. I figured what the heck – let’s ask her out.<\/p>\n Anyway.\u00a0<\/p>\n I took her to George’s – partly because Tony wouldn’t take my money. A nice cheap date was the best one. Plus it made me look all connected – walking into the bar, having the owner (who might <\/em>have looked Italian, it’s not like my date was going to know) welcome me like I was a member of the family and refuse my attempt to pay the bill…<\/p>\n …yeah, that rocked.<\/p>\n Oh, yeah.\u00a0 Saturday night.<\/p>\n I had the whole floor packed.\u00a0 The assistant kitchen managers had learned not to come waddling up to the booth to order me to play what they wanted – by this point, knowing that I had Tony’s blessing, I was pretty much off-limits to them.\u00a0 And for the first time in my six-week-old DJing career, I achieved something that only happened a few times in the next several miserable years of club-jocking; the floor was so full, so jumping, so packed, it left me buzzing.\u00a0 The same sort of high I got when my band had a (rare) great night…<\/p>\n …and it was me<\/em>, dammit!<\/p>\n Tony and Papa George liked me just fine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was Saturday, January 31, 1988. I worked my third straight weekend at George’s in Fridley. They totally loved me there. Which was a very cool thing. The roommate situation had stabilized – sort of. After we kicked Chris (the crazy guy who earned a living from welfare, working at Wendy’s, and shoplifting clothes from […]<\/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-2031","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\/2031","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=2031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2031\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}