Published: May 10, 2008 01:01 am         

Tale of a man who couldn’t hold his liquor

To call a man or a woman a drunk is not an insult, but merely a reference to their state of being. I have seen mean drunks. I have seen crying drunks. I have seen happy drunks. It mostly depends on the stage they are enjoying at the moment. They all start out sober and progress from there to happy. The next stage seems to be feeling sorry for themselves or falling madly in love with some innocent bystander. (I had a drunk woman fall madly in love with me once at a dance.) For any number of reasons they progress from there to being mean and belligerent, and the last stage is wanting to be left alone, at which time they may leave by any means available. Preferably not walking, because they can’t.

We once lived above the north end of the dam at Pipe Creek Falls in a house we pulled from a half mile away with a horse. (Yes, we did!) It was a big roomy house, and we enjoyed it. Across the road from our house was a hillside, which I now own, that had a cabin on it. This cabin was owned by some people from Logansport who liked to come out on Saturday night to drink and play poker. Sometimes they would bring along a sucker who couldn’t hold his liquor, and this is the story of one of those men.

When I was in high school, I was an avid reader. It was nothing for me to devour a complete book in one night, starting early and reading into the wee hours. This was especially true in the winter time. I would pop a dish pan full of popcorn, go down into the cellar where the Jonathan apples were kept, and end up behind the hard coal stove eating apples and popcorn while reading my book. On this particular Saturday night, Mom and Dad had gone somewhere, and I was alone with a copy of Ben Hur, (a fascinating book) my popcorn and my Jonathans.

I had one apple core lying on the stand, and was well into the book and the popcorn when I heard a knock at the door. When I went to the door and opened it, there stood a man who could hardly stand up, and his breath would peel varnish. The cabin only had an outhouse, and this guy had visited it and couldn’t even find his way back to the cabin. I took him out into the yard and showed him the lights of the cabin.

“Go down this hill,” I told him, “Turn left at the bottom, and the driveway to the cabin is right there to your left. Just go up it and it will take you right to the cabin door.” He thanked me and left. I went back to my book, popcorn, and apples, thinking I had done the right thing, and dove into Ben Hur. I must have been down another apple or two, when there was another knock at the door. I opened it to discover the same drunk still as lost as ever. I never did figure out why he could find our house and not the cabin.

Well, if he needed more help, I would give it to him. I put on a jacket and grabbed Dad’s big coon-hunting flashlight. Then, stepping outside, I took the man by the arm and led him down our driveway to the road. From there I took him down the hill and around the corner to the drive that let up to the cabin.

“Right there is where you want to go,” I said, as I shined the light at the cabin, lighting it up with the beam. The lights from the inside lit the cabin much the same as a lighthouse perched on some stony outcropping. He started up the drive, and I headed back up the road to the house feeling good about going the extra mile and helping my fellow man, even if he was so drunk he couldn’t find his rump with both hands. Back at the house, I settled down behind the stove and once more attacked the book, the popcorn and the apples. I felt quite contented and proud of myself.

A half hour or so later Mom and Dad came home, and as they came into the house, they were laughing. It seemed they had picked up my friend about a half mile away from the cabin heading south across Little Deer Creek bridge on county road 850 East. I was astounded, because the man had to have crossed the old Pipe Creek bridge in complete darkness, never mind the cliffs at both ends, and headed south towards the little town of Onward in the pitch black night with the lights of the cabin shining behind him.

In disbelief, I told them what had transpired prior to their finding him, and the effort I had spent trying to get him back to the cabin. It had never dawned on me he would be too drunk to find the cabin after I practically took him to the door. I was dumbfounded when my Dad told me I should have taken better care of him, because he could have fallen over a cliff and been badly hurt or possibly killed. I guess it all comes under the old saying that God always watches over drunks and fools.

Joe Bowyer is a columnist for the Pharos-Tribune. He can be reached through the newspaper at ptnews@pharostribune.com