Steve The TV Repairman

I was Steve's roommate for about eleven months. When I first moved in, our mutual friend told me that Steve was a "functioning alcoholic." I did not know exactly what that meant but I eventually figured out that it meant you could not tell if he had drank one beer or one case of beer. He acted the same no matter how much he had to drink. There was no slurring of the words, no loud behavior, or any of that.

I had a job and Steve didn't. I worked with the public and the only human contact Steve had was with the cashier at the grocery store where he bought his beer and the clerk at the liquor store. I would come home at the end of the day and see Steve's drunk ass sitting there watching bad movies on the SyFy Network or Judge Judy and I would want to twist his head off like the cap on a Jack Daniel's bottle. I just wanted to go in my room, kick back and watch some TV, and just forget the day.

One of the things that I eventually picked up on when Steve had to much to drink was that he liked to follow me around the house and talk to me. One night he stood in the doorway of my room while I was trying to watch The Big Bang Theory and droned on endlessly about some bullshit. I turned up the volume on the TV. Steve talked louder. I turned up the volume some more. Steve started yelling at me. I turned the volume down during the next commercial and Steve told me, "Something is wrong with the volume control on your TV. It got pretty loud there for a few minutes. I was afraid you couldn't hear me." He offered to take a look at my TV. The poor drunk dumbass was clueless. For a brief moment, I thought about beating him with the remote control but I did not want to risk breaking the remote.