It was Thursday, January 14, 1988.

It was cold out. 

Wyatt, my roommate, was – as noted before – exhibiting signs of every kind of addiction one can manifest.

• Smoking – 2-3 packs a day.
• Drinking – Low-grade, probably – somewhere between a six and a twelve of cheap beer a day. 
• Drugs – torching up daily.
• Sex – He had a steady girlfriend, as noted before – Teresa, a nurse at a local nursing home.  And when she wasn’t around, he was usually bringing home someone else, 3-5 times a week.  Envious though I was, I knew it couldn’t be healthy – especially since he bragged that condoms were for dorks. 
• Gambling – poker games, interspersed with spur-of-the-moment trips to the casinos or, occasionally, Fargo to play blackjack.

And, on top of it – odd purchases.  One day, he brought home a dog, a fuzzy black Chow he’d named “Muki”.  I didn’t know dogs, much, but I did know that Chows were kinda big, and had horrible tempers. 

And two days later, he brought home another, a huge Akita named “Jack”. 

And three days later, a Samoyed named “Rosco”. 

Three huge dogs in a three-bedroom side-by-side duplex.

Jack turned out to be dumb as a bag of hammers, and kind of nasty and with a knack of getting in the way. 

Rosco was much worse; he’d walk out to the middle of the floor in front of you, squat down and poo all over the place.  And when you got up to whack his head and take him outside, he’d flee to the corner and whiz all over the place in panic.  The boy had issues, and didn’t last long – maybe three weeks – before Wyatt sold him.  And then bought another Samoyed who, as luck would have it, was equally crazy.  The Samoyeds didn’t last long, thankfully.

But Muki turned out to be a doll; loveable, sweet-tempered (especially for a Chow), affectionate.  

Life had settled into a bit of a routine in the past few weeks.

1. Wake up.
2. Put on a record
3. Make some oatmeal.
4. Go through my notes to see if I was due to make any follow-up calls to radio stations.  Although I wasn’t doing this every single day; I was focusing on biweekly followups with program directors who’d expressed interest (at this point Fall River, New Bedford, Santa Rosa, Raleigh, and maybe a few others) and trolling for rumors of other stations that were switching to “talk” formats.
5. Take a walk.  Sometimes to the library, sometimes to noplace at all.  Often, I’d take Muki and, rarely, Jack, with.  They needed the walk, I needed the focus – and there was always the chance that I’d meet a girl, although in mid-January that was a little dicier.
6. Occasionally, go to Henri’s and have a beer and shoot some pool.
7. Make dinner – ramen, a stuffed potato, or maybe a frozen pizza.
8. Go to one of the bars I was working – Jams and City Limits.
9. Come home, read, go to bed.

Lather, rinse, repeat.  That was really pretty much it.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 1:00 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.