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Men do
hurtful and idiotic things when they are drunk. My boyfriend can’t understand why I get
upset when he says something about drinking a beer with his guys — he’s military, so he
means the guys under his command (off duty, of course!). I suppose a military drinker is
more responsible than a regular country hick drinker is, but I’m not convinced.
My father was an alcoholic and wasn’t too nice to my mother when he was
drunk, and my last boyfriend went out drinking and ended up screwing the first woman who
came on to him in the bar. Okay, I’ll give him a little credit. He did try to get away
from her, but she followed him from bar to bar. But then again, if he had really wanted
to get away from her, he could have just gone home…minus the slu – uh – girl. Then he
decides to clear his conscience and slap me in the face with a confession. As Holly
Golightly would say, he’s not just a rat. He’s a super rat.
On the
other hand, men do really bizarre and funny things when they’re drunk. Take my sister’s
husband, for instance.
Glenda arrived home from work one evening to
find her husband, Jeff, well on his way through a case of Busch beer, while tearing up
the bathroom floor. Which was fine, because the floor needed to be replaced in that room
anyway, and she was grateful he was finally doing something productive around the house
in addition to drinking himself into oblivion.
She’s tired after a
long day of shoving sheets and pillowcases in and out of industrial-size washers and
decides to go on to bed.
Around four in the morning, she’s awakened
by her husband — who is the proverbial three sheets to the wind — shaking her and telling
her she needs to get up. Disoriented, she gets out of bed only to topple onto musty,
smelly dirt where the floor used to be. Puzzled and not entirely awake, she thinks, where
the hell is the floor?
Jeff has completely torn up the floor from one
end of the house to the other, and he only had three pieces of plywood to fix the whole
thing with.
I know you’re laughing, and I’ll admit I did too when I
heard the story, but my sister was anything but amused.
She screamed,
“What in God’s name did you do? Where’s the freaking floor? Are you out of your
ever-loving mind?” She’s had to put up with this sort of thing from her husband for at
least the last ten years.
Then there was the time Jeff got drunk with
his brother, Tommy, and our brother, Dwayne — when our brother used to drink; he grew out
of it. Somehow Jeff ended up in a fight with his brother over something totally lame that
our brother couldn’t even remember. They scuffled, rolled down the side of the mountain,
and into the yard.
A few minutes later Dwayne heard, “I’ll teach you
to get drunk and fight!” then some whacking sounds and then, “Ouch! Damn it, Glenda, put
the fishing pole down!” Dwayne stumbled down the mountain to see what was going on and
found Glenda chasing Jeff all over the yard, whacking the heck out of him with a fishing
pole, screaming like a shrew, while Tommy rolled around in the dirt laughing.
When Glenda came after him with the fishing pole and murder in her
eyes, Tommy lit out for the barn, right behind Jeff. Dwayne got off with strict orders to
go home.
Another time Glenda got in a fight with her drunken husband
and hurled his coffee cup across the room where it shattered against the wall.
Jeff wailed, “My Winnie-the-Pooh cup!” Then got down on the floor and
tried to piece the broken edges back together. He sniffled, held the pieces out to her,
and said, “You broke my Winnie-the-Pooh cup.” He had such a pitiful look on his face that
my sister burst out laughing, which prompted him to grab her plain coffee cup and throw
it out in the yard. There! I guess that’ll teach her.
Once he wanted
to have sex while drunk. She yelled, “Not with me in that condition, you’re not. If you
want it that bad, you can go stick it in that hole out yonder in the yard!”
He yelled back, “I’ll probably get more of a reaction from the hole
than from you!” Ouch! Low blow. The next day he was sporting a fat lip for that little
remark.
Jeff didn’t used to drink. Just the last few years he took it
up. I guess it’s his way of handling the pressures and heartache of life and getting
older, as he watches his dreams float away. It’s a sad way to deal with problems, but
good for a laugh every now and then.
My dear sister has had to learn
to be tough in her life. Most of the time she can look back on these stories and others
and laugh, which is a good thing. She won’t let Jeff bully her while he’s drinking, which
is another good thing. He tried to get rough and mean with her one night, and she shoved
him through the bedroom door hard enough to knock the door clean off its hinges. You go
girl! He crawled to the living room and spent the night on the
couch.
As for Jeff, when he’s one beer short of a six-pack, he’s
learned to stay in the barn with the rest of the “super rats” in the
neighborhood.
