It was Friday, August 24, 1990.

Payday.

I was still working for the sleazy DJ service.

You heard that right.  In the fifteen months since my last update to this series, nothing much had changed.  I was still spinning records in bars.

And my ritual every other Friday was always the same; drive from my place in Northeast Minneapolis to Sleazy DJ Company’s headquarters in Eden Prairie.  Aim to get there around 2PM, when the checks might occasionally arrive.  Wait around with the rest of the guys – usually five or six of us would be gathered in the office, waiting.

This we did because the spiky haired boss never put the checks in the mail on time.  They’d ride around in his car for days, eventually getting popped in the mail over the weekend sometime, sometimes arriving at our places by mail a week after payday, postmarked the Monday or Tuesday following payday.

So those of us who didn’t have day jobs would trek out to Eden Prairie and wait.

And wait.

And when the waiting got oppressive, we’d grab bags of rubber bands and have epic rubber band fights around the office.  I had the “sniper” thing figured out, scoring solid hits all the way down the office’s smudgy hallway.

There were some payday regulars:  Scott, the former radio guy and assistant manager; Robbie, a pudgy white guy who looked a little like David Johannson but tried to sound like Flavor Flav,  and was mortified when we found out that his mother ran a temp  service in Edina for which he eventually wound up working as office manager; Ryan, a nerdy guy who resembled Alan Ruck from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and who was planning on going to aviation school in North Dakota; Jeff, a movie-star handsome guy with a wrenchingly cute blond girlfriend who was seen without him only at these Friday paycheck stakeouts, whose stated goal was to become an Army helicopter pilot;  Kevin, a tall, skinny guy whose claims to fame were being an incredibly talented beatmixer and having a knack and preference for picking up the biggest, most obese women in any bar he worked.

And Spiky-Haired Boss usually came dragging in between 4:30 and 5 with the checks.  Just like every payday.

But I kept showing up at 2.

I had Fridays off; being the #1 jock in the place, I had the pull to get a prime weekend night off.  Fridays, I usually went to “Little Tin Soldier” to play, depending on the weekend, either “Clear for Action” (or some other naval wargame) or “Twilight 2000”.

And this night was going to be no exception.

It was a Friday pretty much like any other over the previous three years.

Not much to recommend it, really.

Oh, I’d been engaged for about six months. I forgot to mention that.  But the engagee has asked that I not write about that.  So I won’t.