Druncle Joe

Prior to yesterday's class, I had never heard the term “druncle.” My husband’s alcoholic uncle, Joe, came immediately to mind, and I recalled one of the many stories of his stupid escapades.

When my husband, Jim, was a teenager, he spent one summer hanging out with Druncle Joe and Joe’s son, David. Joe is a man who is NEVER without a drink in his hand. Come to think of it, I’m not certain whether I’ve ever seen him actually eat anything (he more than likely was the one who had first coined the term “liquid lunch”). Well, not too long before that summer, Jim’s great-aunt Frieda passed away. Her estate was quickly settled and her horses were relocated, but there remained the task of the final clean-out of her house. Druncle Joe volunteered and, for some reason that I can’t fathom, he was granted permission by the family (he could be quite convincing at times). So, Joe, David, and Jim went to work taking inventory and boxing up her belongings. Well, while Druncle Joe was cleaning out one of the rooms, he found an unlabeled bottle of large pills. Now, Joe is not one to be discriminatory when it comes to ingesting anything of a “medicinal” nature, whether legal or illegal. So, without pause, he downed one of the large pills. Soon after, David and my husband found him passed out and assumed it was just one of his drunken stupors. But Joe didn’t wake up that evening, or the next morning, or even the next day. For the first 24 hours, the boys just checked on him periodically to make sure he was still breathing, but after the second day of him not waking up, they began to panic. Finally, on the third day, Druncle Joe finally woke up (seems as though he probably could have detoxed during the time he was out). Come to find out, the pill he had taken was a horse tranquilizer!