A Boy From Wisconsin Drinking Champagne

A boy from Wiz-kahn-sin drinkin’ sham-payne.

My girlfriend’s stepfather was a mean old bastard who smoked three packs of Marlboro Lights a day and refused to die. He was more curmudgeonly than abusive, cruel in a passive, mercifully introverted way.

The first time I met him was at the Westgate hotel and casino in Las Vegas. Kate had just graduated from fashion trade school in LA and Meredith, her mother, insisted we come out to Nevada to visit her and Jim, Kate’s stepfather.

The story goes that Jim was at the tail end of his prime when they first met. Meredith was a widowed nurse and Jim was near retirement age, but still fun, virile, and able to support Meredith’s two young girls, financially if nothing more. And there was nothing more.

The alcoholism that had presented itself so charmingly during their courtship didn’t lend itself to a domestic life with two stepdaughters. He held court in front of the television, smoking and drinking in an uninterrupted stream. When the girls would come home from school or go out with friends, he would offer some ungenerous judgment about their appearance, but never with enough force that anyone outside the fifteen-foot radius of the television set was in any real emotional danger. Eventually his scathing critiques grew quieter and quieter, until he was soon just mumbling them to himself.

Nursing had only been a profession for Meredith before she met Jim, but his abrupt decline turned it into something more of a lifestyle. Her off-hours were consumed with tending to his ailing health. She began turning down invitations to after hours drinks and holiday trips. Her life became an unearned penance, hippocratically tending to Jim as whatever it was she’d seen in him slowly extinguished before her eyes. After Kate, her youngest, left the house and moved to LA, Meredith accepted a job out of state and moved from Texas to Nevada, dragging Jim with her, kicking and screaming.

Kate and I drove up from LA and met them at the casino nearest their house, where we found Meredith waiting for us in the smoky lobby. Jim was sitting beside her in an armless chair that he must have dragged over from the nearest slot machine. He held an ashtray in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. While Kate and I hugged Meredith and said our hellos, Jim stayed seated, finishing his cigarette. Eventually he stubbed it out and got to his feet. He was wearing a Walmart polo shirt tucked into khaki pants, an outfit so incongruous with his hardened, shrinking features that it seemed to scream, “I no longer buy my own clothes and wouldn’t know how to do it if I had to.” He stood there awkwardly for a few moments, his posture that of a structurally depleted wire clothes hanger in the final stages of a losing war with gravity. He looked at me briefly. Then he spoke up. “We gonna git somethin’ to eat?”

This, I would come to discover, was Jim-speak for “Hello. Nice to meet you.”

We shuffled over to the hotel’s restaurant and sat down around the table. The waiter came by and Meredith ordered champagne for her and Kate. She asked if I’d like one. “Sure,” I said with a sort of bashful enthusiasm I would soon come to regret. When the waiter turned to Jim, he growled that he wanted a Miller Genuine Draft. In a can.

Drinks arrived. Meredith proposed a toast to Kate’s graduation and the three of us raised our glasses. Jim raised his beer can to his lips, in solidarity.

I was explaining to Meredith that I was born and raised in Wisconsin, but had moved out to LA to pursue writing. I glanced over hopefully at Jim, thinking he might feel some sort of non-coastal camaraderie with me. He’d lived most of his life in the panhandle of Texas, and I was still very much a midwestern boy at heart. We’d both spent our lives hugging the country’s interior from opposite sides, and now here we were, in the great neon tumor of the American Southwest, about to break bread. Surely there was some kinship in that?

There was not.

“Wisconsin,” he said a few times, chewing on the word like a hunk of sinewy refuse, before spitting it back out. “Wisconsin.”

Meredith and Kate resumed talking, but Jim just kept staring at me out of the corner of his eye. I squirmed in my seat and searched my mind desperately for more possible common ground to exploit, anything to help make it through the dinner.

My imagination wasn’t exactly running wild with possibilities.

I was in my early twenties at the time and, by all appearances, Jim predated the gold rush. The only real commonality I could land on was that we were both physically present in the same space at the same time–an observation so unremarkable that, even in my anxious, cloying state, I couldn’t bring myself to pass it along.

To break the tension, I cleared my throat and was about to helpfully point out that the beer he was drinking was from Wisconsin—like me!— when he cut me off with a grunt, and in a long, gravelly drawl, announced, “A boy from Wisconsin drinkin’ champagne.”

I waited for something more. A predicate, perhaps. But none came.

I looked down at my drink, confused. I wanted to assume that, whatever he was trying to say, it was good natured in essence. But the statement was followed by such a static glower that it only punctuated the utter disdain in his voice.

A boy from Wiz-kahn-sin drinkin’ sham-payne.

The blood rushed to my cheeks as I stared at my pale French wine bubbling in its slender, effeminate glass. I suddenly knew exactly what Jim meant. And I saw myself as he must have seen me. Through the cosmopolitan pretense of my tight, black, clearance-rack woven shirt. Past my deliberately chaotic tousled hair and poorly practiced affectations. Straight through to my soul: A grinning, buck toothed idiot with an Alfalfa cowlick and creamed corn in my veins.

I instinctively released the stem of the champagne glass and repositioned my hand, gripping it roughly, like a man. I took a deep swig and set it down on the white linen tablecloth with more force than necessary. Unfortunately, the carbonation jerked back up on its way down, giving a parting horse-kick straight into my nasal passages. A bubble of wine burped out of my nostril. I went to wipe my nose with my sleeve then stopped myself and tastefully dabbed at my face with a cloth napkin. Jim watched my every movement with his unblinking, sidelong sneer.

There’d been a momentary surge of adrenaline when I thought that maybe he was insulting my home state. But it quickly subsided with the realization that, more than anything, he was only insulting me. “Yeah,” I said. “Well,” I said.

Maybe he was right to look down on me. Maybe I went on to prove that by spending the rest of the evening trying and failing to get Jim to tell me a single thing about himself or his life. I don’t know what I wanted from him, but it wasn’t forthcoming.

To be fair, he had difficulty hearing me, but that was superseded by the fact that he truly, deeply didn’t care. Every once in a while he would perk up and cup his ear for me to repeat myself and then, upon hearing what I’d actually said, he would wince and settle back into his chair, offering the faintest nonverbal grumble in response.

I’d been so shocked initially by the way Meredith and Kate seemed to completely ignore Jim’s existence and converse as if he wasn’t there at all, that, every couple of minutes, I felt compelled to try and rope him back into some new strained interaction. Eventually I gave up.

Smoking wasn’t allowed in the hotel’s restaurant, so Jim quickly dragged his chair a foot or two away from the table and sat there chain smoking through the meal. He was far enough away from us that he could blow his smoke just over the chest-high planters marking the boundaries of the dining area, but close enough that he could lean over in our direction and shakily spoon some more black bean chili into his pursed, wrinkly mouth.

Ten years later, long after we had broken up, I would run into Kate at a party in downtown LA. I’d ask her how Jim was doing. And she would shake her head, disappointed, and say, “He’s still alive. Can you believe it?” I would nod. Yes. I could believe it.

As dinner was coming to an end, Kate and Meredith finished their champagne. The waiter came by, offering to refill their glasses. They nodded gratefully and went on talking. When the waiter got to me I slid my glass away from me and shook my head. “No,” I said.

I ordered a beer instead.