It was Wednesday, August 17, 1988.<\/p>\n
After I turned down the apartment on York Street, it was time to get down to business; we had two weeks to find a place for the three of us to live.<\/p>\n
And not a day went by where I didn’t have a bad feeling about my decision. While Wyatt had a brief stretch of relative sobriety, it was always more a matter of situational tactics than a change in lifestyle. He dried up enough to get a job with an asbestos-abatement company. “I’ll be able to pay some of the back-bills I owe”, he said, not-all-that-convincingly.<\/p>\n
But as soon as the checks started coming in, he started hitting the bottle again.<\/p>\n
And while he was a fairly jovial drunk, most of the time, you could see bits and pieces of ugly leaking out. He’d yell at someone, smack one of the dogs…the usual alcoholic stuff.<\/p>\n
The worst? The day after I called the guy who’d offered me the apartment, Teresa – Wyatt’s gorgeous “girlfriend” – came over during the day, unannounced. Wyatt, of course, had another girl – a west-side Mexician girl named “Rosa” – over.<\/p>\n
I was down in the basement working on some project or another in the early afternoon; Teresa walked in, and apparently caught Wyatt and Rosa in flagrante<\/em>. First came the yelling. From where I sat, it sounded like Teresa actually got the better of Rosa, who walked out (or so I heard from the footsteps). Then the real <\/em>fight, with thrown laps and scratching and kicking and a little actual bloodshed, started. I heard six feet walking out the door above me; Teresa had apparently taken one of the dogs.<\/p>\n Wyatt came ambling down the stairs a few minutes later – until he got to the bottom of the stairs. Then he broke into a run out the door. From the basement, I could hear the screaming on the front lawn; Teresa had apparently keyed Wyatt’s car before she left.<\/p>\n I thought briefly about calling the guy on York to see if the apartment was available. I figured there was no chance…<\/p>\n At any rate, we found a house for rent in the Pioneer Press<\/em>; a three-bedroom frame out in Swede Hollow, on the East Side. The house was on an impossibly-narrow one-way street, surrounded by dilapidated houses with people sitting out on the porches; bullet holes stitched the walls of at least two houses. The whole enterprise smelled like “crack neighborhood”. But it was three bedrooms, no garage, $500 a month. I think the landlord liked the fact that we didn’t look <\/em>like Section Eight or crack dealers; he offered us the place on the spot.<\/p>\n I walked away from the meeting relieved to have a place, but not really feeling good about the whole thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was Wednesday, August 17, 1988. After I turned down the apartment on York Street, it was time to get down to business; we had two weeks to find a place for the three of us to live. And not a day went by where I didn’t have a bad feeling about my decision. While […]<\/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-3065","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\/3065","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=3065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3065\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}