It was Friday, July 15, 1988. 

It was hot.  Blazingly hot. 

I’d been out biking since early morning.  Not the kind of fast, purposeful riding I do today getting to work or going places, mind you – more a sort of aimless rambling about the metro.  I went up to Northeast Minneapolis, by Broadway and Stinson, meandering about the tangle of roads that, today, are a thriving shopping center, but back then were just…well, it’s hard to remember.  There wasn’t much there, there, back then.

I ambled down Broadway down into the presidents (north-south streets in Northeast Minneapolis are named, in order from west to east, from Washington through Coolidge (including the little-known eighth president, Central, responsible for the Central Doctrine if I recall correctly). 

My level of motivation was dropping by the day.  Oh, I was trying to keep my brain moving; I’d bought a cookbook, “Cooking for One Or Two” – either a supremely optimistic title or a very depressing one – the other day.  I’d spent a few hours getting a big pile of beef and veggies cooked and stored in the freezer of the old wreck of a fridge in the house on Fry and Minnehaha.  That way, I could just grab as much of these staples as I needed to get a quick, modestly healthy mean for one (or two!  I mean, it could happen!) ready in a hurry. 

Baby steps, I figured.  Hang on to some semblance of normalcy, and normalcy will return.

And on I pedaled. 

There is nothing more miserable than a concrete vista on a hot, miserable, humid day, I thought.  The only way it could be worse was if I was walking, I thought, as the scorching mid-day turned into a steamy, humid morass of a late afternoon. I started pedaling home.  Gotta take a shower and get ready for another night at City Limits.

At least I had all the fixings I needed for stuffed peppers.  That’d be a nice treat. 

I got home.  Wyatt was “entertaining” upstairs – probably one of the bartenders from the bar he was working at. 

We had a new roommate, by the way, since early in the month; Shane, a singer in a speed metal band.  He was nineteen, about 5’6, wore his hair in a white trash afro (long, frizzy and all over the place) and looked every inch the metal dude.  He was a nice guy, though, and paid his bills on time.  This became important, later.  Anyway – he was off practicing with his band.

It was about 4:30.  I went to the fridge. 

I grabbed the handle. It felt kind of funny, but it didn’t register before I pulled the freezer door open.

Warm.

A blast of warm, dank, rank air met me as I looked into the freezer; a freshet of filthy, stinking water sluiced out onto the floor at my feet.

It was at least 120 degrees in the “Freezer”.  All the meat I’d cooked and frozen was warm, suppurating, and worse than inedible. 

I spent half an hour throwing out ruined food, and then went to the sink to wash my hands, grumbling about the $40 worth of food I’d lost – a  lot of money for me, back then…

…when I felt a drip from the cabinet above the sink.  I looked at the cabinet; a little stream of water was oozing out from under the cabinet door, collecting, and dripping into the sink.  The water looked brown, and smelled…also brown.

I opened the cabinet.  Filthy water was leaking into it from…

..above.  The bathroom.

So I’d lost a cabinet AND a freezer full of food. 

This was adding up to be a great day.

I called our landlord – a fella we’ve talked about before – and left a message. 

Then I stalked upstairs and started getting ready for work.