The Alcoholic Life: Me and Pappy Lewis
Posted: Thursday, July 14, 2011
by Jack H. Schick
{Author’s note: The names are changed, but the story is true}
When I was a younger fellow we lived in a rural development in central Wyoming, about ten miles out of Casper. Everybody had five or ten acres of absolutely treeless sage brush and sand. Most of us had mobile homes or double wide manufactured homes. We had septic systems and wells. Our water was un-drinkable, totally saturated with sulfides. We hauled in even our pets’ water all the years we lived there. We did have some fantastic neighbors, though—as in the “odd in appearance; irrational; illusory; exaggerated; grotesque; formed as if by unrestrained fancy” parts of the definition of fantastic.
Pappy Lewis, God rest his soul by now, I’m sure, remains one of the most memorable characters in my life. Pappy was a hopeless alcoholic. There were a lot of them out there on the high prairie. I met Pappy through his son Melvin who was a fishing, hunting and drinking buddy of mine. I was what I’d now call a youngster, back then. I’d never met a man who was so far down that dead end road before. But, having started on that road myself, I thought he was more comical than tragic--at the time.
My first personal encounter with Pappy, besides laughing at him the times I’d seen them picking him up off the floor and carrying him out of the bar, and dumping him into the cab of his pick-up truck, was nearly deadly. I was driving the mile and a half from my place over to the bar at the interstate exit to get some more beer one night when an oncoming vehicle suddenly changed lanes and came at me head-on. I swerved off the pavement, onto the shoulder and down into the barrow pit.
I was experiencing one of those angry drunks at the time. I spun the vehicle around, gunned it back onto the road spinning my tires, and raced after the jerk. The culprit was not going very fast, which probably saved us from a crash, so I caught up with him before the end of the pavement near the school bus stop. I saw his driver’s window was down. I leaned over and rolled down my passenger side window, pulled into the oncoming lane, got up next to him, and blew my horn and yelled at him. He abruptly stopped, right in the middle of the road.
It was Pappy Lewis! “You ran me off the road! What are you doing?” I yelled at him.
“I’m just trying to get home,” he mumbled. He was obviously ‘under the influence’, again.
“Turn left past the bus stop. Stay on your side of the road.” I couldn’t help laughing about him on my way over to get more beer. “Darned drunks,” I thought.
Another time, Melvin and I were over at the bar. We decided to go out to Pathfinder Dam fishing the next morning. Melvin was unemployed and I was on days off. We went home a few hours earlier than we normally would have so we could get an early start. We each took home a 12-pack so we’d have something to hold us over till lunch time the next day. Melvin was going to drive. He’d just gotten a little economy car that was great on gas and it was sixty miles out to the lake.
I managed to get up before sunrise but was a little more hung-over than I would have liked to be. When I got over to the Lewis homestead it was just getting light. I was surprised to see a completely burned out pick-up truck sitting in the road in front of the house. It was totally destroyed; the interior all burned or melted, the paint blistered off the hood, roof and fenders, the front tires melted to the rims. It stunk and was still warm.
The Lewis place was a real mess; scrap metal and piles of old lumber all over the place. Melvin lived in a dinky little trailer next to their main doublewide. I knocked. He was up already, offered me a beer when I went in. It turned out his wife didn’t live there anymore. “What the heck happened out there?” I asked.
It seems Pappy came home very drunk the night before. He managed to get the pick-up into the driveway before he passed out behind the wheel. The engine was running and Pappy’s foot was still on the accelerator. Melvin and other family members heard the engine racing. They figured, sooner or later, Pappy would shift his position or move his foot. They were just about ready to go out and shut it off when there was an explosion and the truck burst into flames.
They dragged Pappy out of the cab and threw him in the bushes. The truck was parked right among their other vehicles and out of control ablaze. Melvin and his brother managed to get a chain hooked up to the back bumper and dragged it out of the driveway. Melvin bruised his shins in the panic. His little car was scorched on one side, but still started and drove okay. Pappy was all right, but they were all a little concerned because it was a company owned vehicle. Somebody was going to have to tell Pappy’s boss about the “accident” that morning, and Pappy was still in no condition to come up with a good story.
Melvin and I spent the rest of the day out at Pathfinder fishing and drinking beer. We didn’t have much luck, but we got home okay. The truck was still sitting there in the road. I just shook my head, got in my truck and drove home.
My most memorable experience with Pappy happened on a New Year’s Eve (amateur’s night). My wife was working second shift and I had to work the next day, so I was staying home with the kids watching football. It was typical Wyoming winter weather: cold and windy. There were snow drifts all over my property and a ground blizzard going. I had a 12-pack and Penn State was playing, so I was settled in for the evening.
Suddenly, a pick-up truck came down our road, turned in my gate and plowed into the first snow drift. It backed out, plowed into it again, backed out, revved the engine and plowed in deep this time. It was stuck. It just sat there; engine running, headlights on, wipers going. By then the kids had heard the commotion and were looking out the front window with me. “What’s going on, Dad?” my son asked. “I don’t know! Go to your rooms!” I ordered. A lot of crazy things have happened in Wyoming.
I grabbed my pistol, went out the back door and, keeping in the shadows, made my way around to behind the truck. I’d not donned a jacket. The wind cut through me. The blowing snow stung. I could see someone in the driver’s seat, but they weren’t moving. Staying low, below the side mirror’s view, I worked my way up to the driver’s door. Steeling my nerves, I took off the safety on my gun, reached up and quickly pulled open the door. An unconscious body fell out. I caught it in my free arm before it flopped into the snow. It was Pappy Lewis.
“Pappy!” I yelled. “What’s going on?” He just groaned. I put the safety back on and stuck the pistol in my belt. I managed to shove him back into the driver’s seat.
“I’m just trying to get home,” he finally mumbled.
Get home? He’d done the exact inverse. Instead of turning left after the bus stop, he’d turned right. He didn’t know where I lived, but my place was the same number of houses in from the main road as his was; he’d turned left (west), through my gate instead of right (west), through his. With all the snow he didn’t notice there were no piles of rotten lumber or junk cars in the yard. It was pure chance he ended up there. I decided to get him into the house and feed him some coffee. He was in no condition to help me dig his truck out of the drift.
I turned off the football game and put on a Superman movie for the kids to watch. They just stood around staring at him after I got him stabilized on a chair at the kitchen table. He wasn’t interested in the coffee. He had a pint of whiskey in his pocket and kept pouring shots into his mug. It went on for half an hour before I gave up and got him to come outside and help me get his truck un-stuck. When he finally rocked it loose, he nearly ran me and my shovel over, zoomed backwards out my gate, across the road, down into the snow filled barrow pit and up against the neighbor’s chain-link fence. It would have taken a two ton tow truck to get him out of there.
I left him where he was and went back in the house. I told the kids that I was taking him home and would be back in ten minutes. I waded through the bumper deep snow and struggled to get his door open. He was passed out again. When I tried to get him out of his truck and into mine, he fought me the whole way. He wanted to either stay where he was—I was sure he’d be dead by morning, either blowing up another vehicle, asphyxiating himself, or running out of gas and freezing to death—or, he wanted to stay at my place. That was out. I thought he was a bad example for the kids.
When I got to the Lewis place, I left Pappy passed out in my truck, but turned it off and took the keys. No one seemed to be home at the main house so I went over to Melvin’s. I told him the story. He wasn’t pleased.
“What did you bring him here for?” He asked. He seemed pretty drunk himself.
“What else should I have done with him?” He handed me a beer.
“You should have left him where he was. We don’t want him here. She (his mom, Pappy’s wife), won’t let him in the house like that.” Melvin explained. “I’m going to have to bring him in here and I don’t want him here either.”
As I drove away I felt pretty bad for poor old Pappy. The kids were okay when I got home. I made them turn off the movie (they’d seen it fifty times already, anyway), and put the football game back on. With all the excitement, I stayed up a little too late and drank a little bit too much myself that night. I didn’t feel too good when I got up for work the next morning, but it was a holiday and there would be no supervisors around and not much on the work list. Besides, I had a great story to tell the guys. When I got home from work, somebody had come and pulled Pappy’s truck out of the snow drift.
I can't remember any other episodes with Pappy Lewis. Melvin and I sort of drifted apart over a dispute over hunting spots. I continued down that dead end road myself for quite a while, but finally wised up. I'm sure Pappy is dead by now, but he'll remain one of my most memorable characters.
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)Praising God for deliverance out of that bottle - the one I was in .....Thanks for reading and commenting. Yes, deliverance is wonderful
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