One of my uncles by marriage finished his WWII service guarding German POWs, and what German profundities he hadn't already picked up as a child from old relatives on the (Iowa) farm, he completed courtesy of contact with the Kriegies. Anyway, when I was quite young, I would earn a small sip of beer if I would repeat a phrase from his lexicon of atrocious Germanisms. These many decades later, I only remember one word of the lot but can still recall how he and all the other uncles would roar at my performances.
Mr. niteowl77
*Having been around genuinely mean and dangerous drunks later in life, I remain grateful about how benign these men were during our holiday to-dos.
I have known some mean, dangerous and unpredictable drunks.
I hate those kind. After I get their measure, I avoid them, but sometimes you don’t see it until you get them in the right situation...such as a public setting.
Ugh. My dad was a drunk for the majority of his life, and kicked it in his last decade. But thankfully, he was not violent or disrespectful. He just got quietly drunk.
The only time my whole life that he ever displayed any outward manifestation in my eyes of unusual drunken behavior was when he overheard me (age 13) and one of my friends discussing a Playboy magazine and he slurred in a sarcastic monotone “You wouldn’t know what to do with one if you had it.”
I was so shocked my mouth must have dropped open. I had never heard my dad make any kind of comment like that, especially to me or one of my siblings. He was always all business to us when he was drunk, impossible to tell he was drunk.
I had a friend who shared a house with a fairly large guy, one of those guys who was a beast in high school football, bigger than everyone else, and pretty much had his way on the field with the opposition, from what my friend told me.
And the guy was congenial enough when you hung out with him and were viewed by him as his friend.
But when he drank, his personality could change from embarrassing big drunk guy to dark, mean, dangerous and unpredictable drunk.
And it could change on a dime, which, once I figured out something wasn’t right with him, made me damn nervous.
One night we were in a crowded nightclub, walking through the crowd, and he and another big guy banged shoulders as they passed. Happens a hundred times in those places.
They both swung around and looked at each other. The other guy looked at him in puzzlement, and the guy with us looked at him with a complete blank look, but there was something in his eyes that was very, very different, and not in a good way.
We watched this, holding our breath, when he clapped the other guy on the shoulder and grinningly said something like “Hey, want a beer?” or something inane like that.
We all exhaled. A few months later, we went to an Eric Clapton concert with a bunch of people in a pouring rainstorm, and had to leave in a damned hurry because this guy actually pissed on some people.
That was the last time I ever saw that guy.
So, yeah, I’m with you. You can definitely appreciate some good natured drunks if you have ever spent time around the other kind.