It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part LXXXI
By Mitch Berg
It was Sunday, June 26, 1988.
There truly wasn’t much going on in my life around this time.
My nights involved going to work at one gawdforsaken bar or another, six nights a week.
The good news – I was the best “jock” the DJ service had, and they told me so; my boss said that “I can put you in any bar I have – R’nB, Rock and Roll, oldies, County Western, background music, whatever – and they love you”. And they were putting me in different bars, at least; after months of bouncing back and forth between “Jams” in Brooklyn Center and “City Limits” in Rosemount, I was starting to get into some more places.
The bad news – I got put in every bar they had. It’s not like they got any better than Jams or City Limits, for crying out loud. You had your choice; sleazy R’nB bars, redneck Rock and Roll dumps, tired and empty Oldies bars, malignant “country” joints, and somnolent “none of the above” lounges. All of them equally depressing.
And, truth be told, that’s just what I was. Depressed. I’d been going at the talk radio job hunt for over a year, now. Nothing.
My station-calling had slowed to a trickle. Every week or two, I’d get a flash of inspiration…
…no. That’s not true. It wasn’t “inspiration”. It was a flash of desperation – a sudden, searing flash of panic; “THIS IS HOW MY WHOLE F****NG LIFE IS GOING TO BE” would beat my eyes open at 9AM, and I’d race downstairs, a curdled ball of panic in my stomach that would impel me to an hour or two of frantic, despairing calling, more to say I’d done it, sort of like a ticket-punching ritual done for its own sake than out of any hope that there’d be anything on the other end of the line. Think of rebound dating.
I’d get to the end of these sessions feeling worse than when I’d started. And yet there I went – every week or so, it’d overwhelm me again.
Again – sort of like rebound dating.
———-
One change – Wyatt had finally driven our other roommate, Dan, out earlier in the month. Oddly, for as amazingly promiscuous a man as he was (he said with a straight face at about this time that “my goal in life is to f*** every woman in the world”), he had a very dim impression of gays. “I don’t like faggots”, he said many times. He did his best to live up to both statements. The women bit – well, that should be obvious.
As to Dan? His property – including several of his paychecks – started disappearing. By early May, Wyatt had taken to actively antagonizing Dan’s boyfriend. He did it when I wasn’t around – I heard about it all second-hand…
…but by the end of May, Dan had had enough. He gave notice.
A day or two later – in early June – Dan and a few friends showed up with a truck and moved him out in during the day, while Wyatt and I were out. He left me a note – he just couldn’t deal with Wyatt’s BS anymore.
So that made for an extra-large rent payment, and a payment to the Pioneer Press to put an ad in the “Roomates Wanted” section.
———-
But that was the closest thing to excitement that I managed. My days during this brutally hot summer were very, very circumscribed. I’d wake up around 9ish. I’d have something to eat, usually. I’d jump on my bike and ride most of the day – unless something was broken, which would involve a half-day quest to roll my bike laboriously to a repair shop. If I was feeling especially industrious or motivated, I might stop at the Dairy Queen, or the library, or ride down to Crosby Park, or…well, whatever rolled my way, really. If I was not feeling motivated, I’d ride to see how dry my mouth would get before I could take a drink, or how yellow my pee could get, or how many of my old apartments and houses I could reach, or how many miles I could ride without seeing anything interesting. Some days, I did nothing but ride box grids in different neighborhoods; others, I’d just pick a street and ride it to the end, or as far as I could get before I had to turn around to get back for work.
Looking back (because I’d never have put it this way back then) most days’ rides would have bookends of despair; at the beginning of the ride, I was pounding out the miles to forget about how awful it felt to be so…aimless. Such a failure. And at the end, there was the dull ache of knowing I had to wash up and go to yet another awful bar.
I’d have something to eat (usually a baked potato stuffed with cheese and onions), then off to whatever the bar of the evening was. I’d grab the traditional after-work drink at the bars that allowed it, drive carefully home, and check in for the latest in Wyatt’s game of musical women. About half the nights, Wyatt would have hooked up with some girl he’d met at his day job during the day, and would have Teresa, his hot blond “steady” girlfriend, over at night. On the other nights – when Teresa worked (she was a night nurse at a nursing home), they’d bump uglies in the afternoon, and Wyatt’d pick up some other floozie at Christenson’s or the Belmont or O’Gara’s for the evening’s entertainment. I figured that Wyatt was boffing, on the average, with between four and seven different women a week. Every week.
Which was, in and of itself, depressing.
I’d usually fall asleep reading a book, to the sound of Wyatt and whomever-it-was having thudding, drunken, arklahoma-inflected, drug-enhanced sex in the next room, or having a thudding, drunken, arklahoma-inflected, drug-enhanced argument about something or another.
And then I’d wake up, and it’d start again.
Every f*****g day.
