It was Saturday night, October 12, 1985. Two days until the big move.<\/p>\n
The best rock and roll bar in Jamestown had closed the previous summer; there really were no decent bands playing that night. No matter, though, I thought; I’d go up to the college and visit my friends. Surely, I thought, my last night in the Twin Cities would draw someone<\/em> out for a night on the town. Right?<\/p>\n Not so fast.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n School up at my alma mater, Jamestown College<\/a>, had been in session for about six weeks. Most of my friends – the ones who hadn’t graduated or dropped out – were thoroughly involved in class work. A brief thought on the part of a couple of them to throw a “going away party for Mitch” came in a distant fourth to “a date”, “another party” and “studying”.<\/p>\n I walked up to the North Hill, up the steps, to the college. I wandered through my old dorm, around the chapel (the HQ of the music department which, majors aside, is where I spent most of my time in college). Most of my friends – Rich Larson, Beth Erickson, Ray Zentz, Joe “Spanky” Knowski, Scott Massine – were either occupied, or too trashed from a week of school (and\/or a Friday night of binge-drinking) to want to do much. I ran into a few, of course – Rich Larson (on his way to a date), Ray Zentz (practicing one instrument or another); I think I may have even run into this person<\/a>, to whom I’d handed over the school paper, although memory fails me at the moment.<\/p>\n I hung around for half an hour, amazed at all the Freshmen who had no idea who I was, my attitude souring by the minute, until I walked out of the student union, back to the stairs that descended the North Hill, and back into town.<\/p>\n By the way – you caught that? I called it the “North Hill”. Jamestown is in the valley of the James River, at its confluence with Pipestem Creek. There are three major parts to Jamestown; the “Valley”, below the river bluffs; the “South Hill”, mostly stores and cheap hotels and some humongous trailer parks and the State Hospital; and the “North Hill”, home of the college, the city hospital, and some of the town’s nicest real estate, especially “Skyline Drive”, with its gorgeous overlook of the river valley, the dam (a big reservoir upstream from the town) and the rest of the city. Of course, neither “North Hill” nor “South Hill” are hills; they are the level of the prairie itself. The town is below ground level. Such is perception in a place like that.<\/p>\n “Ratzen fratzen “friends”. If I could count all the “going away parties” I’d been to for the other rat bastards, I could probably buy a round at my own<\/em> party, for @#$#@^%’ s sake”, I grumbled, feeling sorrier and sorrier for myself as I went. “I’m so @#$#@^%@# glad I’m moving…”<\/p>\n There was one more hope for the evening. I walked back down the hill…er, you know…and back toward the middle of the little town, across from my grandmother’s old house, to The Club.<\/p>\n The Club was a room in the basement of J.I. Stocking, a guy who’d graduated from high school and college about five years earlier than I. He and a couple of his classmates – John Johnson and Pat Flannery – had built a semi-replica english hunting lodge in the basement, complete with a kegerator, dartboard, comfy sofas, the works. The room was J.I’s, but the idea was Pat’s. Pat was the sort of eccentric genius that every small town seems to breed. He was a model builder; more than that, he was a “scratchbuilder”; he’d build models out of lost and founds, bric-a-brac, bits and pieces of found treasure.<\/p>\n What kind of models? Whatever caught his fancy. One day it was a scale cutaway model of the Captain Nemo’s submarine Nautilus<\/em>. Another week it’d be “every experimental German jet aircraft of the ’30s and ’40s that was ever committed to blueprint”, out of bits and pieces of plastic; another month, it’d be a working replica of an eighteenth-century nine-pounder naval gun, firing homemade cannon balls (this was an interesting one; yes, it worked). He built ’em all. Sometime just out of high school, a company in Los Angeles got wind (so the story went) of Pat’s talents, and hired him to come to LA to work on a show they were working on, “Project UFO<\/a>“. The series was cancelled shortly before Pat was going to start his job building UFO models; no matter, he turned his talents to building more…stuff.<\/p>\n One weekend in, I think, 1979 or 1980, boredom overtook him, and he built The Club; he built (reportedly in one manic binge) a kegerator, a wine rack ( from scratch, natch), a bar, panelling…I think the only thing bought in a store was a dart board.<\/p>\n The Club met three nights a week. You’d drop a couple of bucks in the stein by the kegerator, you could drink and eat peanuts and talk sci-fi until 1AM (house rule – same closing time as the bars). It was a good, cheap, regular buzz.<\/p>\n I walked down to The Club, walked down the narrow stairway, pitched in a couple of bucks, and laid into a beer with gusto. It was warm, the conversation was geeky and well met, and pretty soon the evening was starting to work itself out. “Who cares<\/em> if my college pals are a bunch of total let-downs? I’m leaving!<\/em>” I smiled a sloppy smile and handed my mug to J.I., behind the bar, who had tap duty that evening. A few other people – John’s brother Mark, and Mike Fischer, who’d just moved back to North Dakota from Los Angeles, where he’d worked making lenses in an optometry shop (among his clients; Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys).<\/p>\n I looked around the room after a while; Fischer, Pat, John and Mark had all left Jamestown at one point or another, and all had returned. J.I. had always been in Jamestown. I tried to think of any from our little circle of people who had left and stayed gone<\/em>; I couldn’t.<\/p>\n The evening kept on; I kept drinking. As 1AM came around, I walked out onto Fourth Avenue, and started walking home to my Mom and Dad’s place. I wondered, as I shuffled down the street (not terribly drunk, mind you; I had quite a tolerance built up after a summer of three nights a week at The Club and a couple more at Fred’s and an odd night or two out drinking with the friends) and wondered:<\/p>\n I know what it is that makes people wanna leave this place. The big question is, what is it that makes people want to come back? <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Was there some inexorable gravity that tugged people, plans and dreams be damned, back to this little dip in the drift prairie? Something I didn’t know about, but that would jump out at me in six or nine or twenty-four months, and send me packing back to this cold little outpost on the Plains?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I got to Dad’s place – everyone was long asleep – and went to bed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was Saturday night, October 12, 1985. Two days until the big move. The best rock and roll bar in Jamestown had closed the previous summer; there really were no decent bands playing that night. No matter, though, I thought; I’d go up to the college and visit my friends. Surely, I thought, my last […]<\/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-39944","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\/39944","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=39944"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39944\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39947,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39944\/revisions\/39947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}