Wino

The Late Richard Pryor used to do a routine he called "Wino." It was about the neighborhood wino and Pryor basically walked you through a typical day in the life of the wino and the wino's exchanges with people that lived in the neighborhood as he staggered through on his way home.

My exchanges with my alcoholic roommate are not closed to being that funny but I guess it is more of a sad/funny situation. There are days when I come home from work and I really just want to hear the sound of silence. With my roommate, I am never that lucky. I am never, ever that lucky.

When I get home from work in the afternoon, my roommate is sitting on the coffee table (why use a couch or a chair? He does have the decency to have a seat cushion on the coffee table) drinking his Milwaukee's Best Ice out of the can through a straw watching bad "B" movies on the SyFy network. When he has had enough of those, he watches every "Judge" show on TV that luckily for me comes on back-to-back-to-back-to-back. He thinks he has watched enough of those shows to where he could pass the Bar Exam. I doubt that he has passed many bars. If you are going to be delusional, be delusional big.

When he is really drunk, my roommate finds religion. That was also in Richard Pryor's "Wino" skit. "Yeah, I know Jesus. I remember when the boy got kilt. It was on a Friday.... down by the Railroad Depot. I tried to warn him. I said Boy, don't you go down there fucking with them Jews without no money." My roomie wants to slur his religious convictions to me and I realize "thou shall not get sauced" is not a Commandment, but I still find something wrong with that picture. I also get to hear about how his uncle was an ex-Mafia member turned Baptist Preacher. Luckily for me, my roomie has one of his sermons on tape. He makes me listen to that with him "for inspiration." The only thing it inspires me to do is to get up and leave.

Roomie is blessed with no shame, a cast iron stomach, and an amazingly resilient liver. I should be so lucky.