Just another drunk in the sky.

Continuing the series on drunk people I run into from time to time. Remember the drunk guy I told you about at Dodger stadium tossing willy-nilly many bags of roasted peanuts while the police drug him out of the stadium? Then there was a drunk man on a flight from Chicago who finger played the itsy-bitsy spider with the two-year old across the plane aisle and wouldn’t stop
Or the drunk woman who wouldn’t stop shouting “play Lobamba for me” to a small lounge band playing at a Lake Tahoe casino. Never mind they had no musical arrangement for such, they told the blathering drunk woman.
Well, here is another in-flight story. Wife and I boarded a flight in Los Angeles headed for Honolulu. I must explain here sometimes we do not get to sit together. They call it flying standby. We are assigned only the seats not booked and sold. And the reason for this we were airline employees. In the pejorative, they call us ‘Non- revvers.’So, she was assigned a seat a couple of rows ahead of me. So, I was back a few rows sitting next to a couple of librarians from LA. Just looking at them they had no reason to tell me their occupation. However, the two librarians were stone sober. None the less when I spoke to them, I had to look straight ahead.
But anyway, the drunk person in this story was the older man sitting in the middle seat with his wife to his right. Both sitting to the right of my wife two rows ahead of me. We hadn’t even got off the ground and this man was full bore drunk. Broadcasting his condition to anybody ten rows in every direction. Speaking with a slurred tongue. Speaking a language only he could understand. But his warbling pronouncements were obviously directed to my wife. With Jim Beam breathy prattling he seemed to attempt to carry on some kind of seat-to-seat conversation with her. And all she could to is nod her head or give up a few uh ha’s. In the meantime, others sitting around the drunk man and my wife were wondering when she might excuse herself and never come back. Moments later one gentleman across the aisle tapped her on the shoulder and offered to switch seats with her. But to me and other’s amazement she declined. Mumbling something like she is okay. Never the less the drunk man persisted in making unintelligible conversation with my wife. Then a male flight attendant approached her with a seat re-assignment. Again, she declined Then I stepped forward and asked her to take my seat by the two librarians and hoping she would do so. But again, she answered in the negative. Darn! Then at that juncture I began to wonder if some kind of hanky panky was going on? But I was certain an old drunk guy with his semi-sober wife at his side was not her type. So, this went on for the full four and a half hours until we landed in Honolulu. My wife certainly deserved a gold star for her act of sacrifice and courage. To this day I never understood why she didn’t abandon the drunk man’s space. Grimacing face with rolling eyes.