schlitzed

schlitzed (shlitzd)
verb. past tense. slang, as in "to be a drunk". to drink a cheap beer for the sole intention of getting blitzed beyond reason.


my grandmother was schlitzed again. this time, when she awoke, she was laying outside in the middle of her lawn, sore and bruised, surrounded by neighbors and ambulance workers who tried to take her to the hospital after she fell. blacked out, really. she says she lost her balance carrying grass clippings out to the trash. the neighbors have stopped calling us when these things happen any more.

if it wasn't so fcuking sad it may just be comical. think about it - a 79-year-old female alcoholic. most drunks don't last that long -- their livers give out long before they reach that age. or a heart attacks stops them cold in their tracks. nope, like a fine wine, my grandmother's fermented with age.

you may think this is sudden or strange her neighbors no longer take an interest in alerting us to her misdeeds. her old neighbors would certainly call to tell us if anything was wrong -- like the time last year when she fell in her living room. as she teetered around her living room in her $5 walmart sneakers (because she won't let us buy her anything better), she lost her footing and fell.... butt first into her glass-topped coffee table. she didn't cut or injure herself in the fall. nope, she just got stuck. so she does what anyone would do, she yells her bloody head off until someone hears her. we arrive just as the ambulance is taking her away to the hospital to be checked out, just enough time to clean up shards of broken glass from the table and the window where the neighbors broke in trying to get to her. to make her stop screaming.

living alone, she's taken to bouts of self-medicating her loneliness from time to time since my grandfather died.

in 1985.

that was when she gave up her "booze" as she called it in favor of beer. schlitz. or whatever cheap beer the local warehouse has on sale.

when my brother was in college, in between classes or before work he would run her to the grocery store for a food order or run other errands for her. as a mature looking 19-year-old, he rarely got carded in bars, but somehow taking your 70-year-old grandmother into the beer distributor for three cases of the cheapest beer possible raised some suspicions. as he'd load the cases into the trunk of his car, the shop clerk would chat up my grandmother, hoping she'd slip and let on that my brother really intended throw a keg party. nope, she just said that it was for her. and it was, a week's supply.

we stopped taking her on her beer runs. so she arranged for weekly delivery instead.

it doesn't shock me this time. her face is beaten and cruised, her shoulders sore. her neighbors have stopped calling each time she falls down and these days, my grandmother lets a day or two slide in between her falls and when she gets around to telling us what happened.

but she stopped drinking alcohol she told the doctor when at her appointment he flat out asked her if she was drinking before her blackout. "i only drink beer to make me poop" she tells him of the sage wisdom a doctor supposedly told her in 1962 and that no one person or shred of medical evidence has since been able to convince her otherwise.

so my stubborn old grandmother can drink with the best bike messengers, swilling cheap beer until she blacks out or gets into a barfight. doesn't everyone's?