It was Thursday, December 31st, 1987. 

I was working at “Jams” in Brooklin Center again.  My boss, the spiky-haired guy at the DJ service, said they – especially Scowly, the manager – loved me out there. 

It was wet and sloppy out, and I had a miserable cold; sinus congestion, hacking my lungs out, brutal headache.   Barely functional.  But I needed the money real bad, and the DJ service was desperately short of jocks.

So off to the bar I drove, around 7:00.  I had not much better to do that night.  Wyatt was going to a New Years party with Teresa; Chris was packing up to move. 

I celebrated with one of Jams’ burger baskets – happy new year to me! – before I started turning on the gear.

The good news; one of the bartenders took pity on my state.  He brought me a shot of Jeszynowka – a brand of Polish blackberry brandy made from (this is important) blackberries (as opposed to grain alcohol with “blackberry” syrup).  “Best decongestant and cough syrup ever made”, he said.  And danged if it didn’t work.  Or at least if it didn’t feel like it’d worked.  I had another, just to be sure.

My condition aside, it was a great evening.  The bar – not a big place, mind you – was packed to the gills.  The DJ booth – a square formica “bar” with maybe twelve square feet of space – was an oasis of elbow room. 

And the dance floor was packed – the first time I’d ever had that happen in almost a whole week of being a club jock. 

Scowly really liked me.

———-

The bartender who’d sicced me on the Jeszynowkia – “Tom” was his name – was a genial, stoner kind of guy.  He invited me to a party at one of the bowling alley managers’ places after closing time.  It was just up the street, in Brooklyn Center.

I got there – a tiny post-war prefab just north of 100 and Shingle Creek – around 1:30 AM.  It was almost as crowded as the bar had been.  The air was blue-green with cigarette and pot smoke.  The first keg of the evening was starting to sputter, as someone started tapping #2.  I knew nobody – Tom the bartender never showed up.  Nobody knew me.  A couple was arguing in the corner.  I struck up a conversation about the Vikings with someone who asked me if I was working hard, or hardly working.  I left around 2:15. 

I have to get out of this racket, I thought as I picked my way through the icy streets back to I94.

———-

I got home around 2:40 or so.  The tart tang of pot smoke covered the smell of male cat spray, finally.  Wyatt was in the kitchen making some scrambled eggs, with a borderline-chubby, late-teen/early-twentysomething girl.  Not Teresa.

“Hey!  This is Ann!”

I waved “hi” as I went up to my room, locking it behind me.  I reached into the closet, under a pile of dirty laundry, and grabbed a plastic water jug with a couple of inches of cheap gin in the bottom – where I’d been hiding it from Wyatt – and poured a couple of fingers into a plastic mug on my nightstand. 

I carefully hid the jug again, and sat at my desk, pushed up against the wall by the window across from my bed, and slowly sipped the gin as I looked out on the street, the streetlamp shining with crystalline intensity in the frigid night air.  I caught the faint whiff of the slowly-dissipating funk of male cat spray over the cheap-gin aroma as I put my feet up on the desktop, and took a long drag as Wyatt’s headboard started to bang against the wall.

Happy Friggin’ New Year, I thought, hoping this’d be the last one like this.

Yep.  Last one like this.  1988’s gonna be my year.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Twenty Years Ago Today. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.