Fishing Stories - Pete

My dad had a fishing buddy named Pete Dick. His name was not nearly as unfortunate as that of Pete's brother, Green. I don't know what nick names people gave to their penises back when Pete was born, but I suspect that dick was not one of them. Or maybe Green's parents enjoyed cruel irony. I looked in the phone book to see how many Dicks I would insult by this story, and I found that there were only a few left in the area, although their were a good many sons of Dick. But this story is not about names or dicks, it is about Pete.

What Pete was, was a drunk. Not a garden variety steady drinking, hard to tell when drunk, drunk like my dad; Pete was a spectacular binge drinker. He would stay completely sober for any where from three months to a year, then fall off the wagon, and stay dead drunk for two or three weeks. During the drunken episodes, he did not work, and if he ate, it was very little. He would emerge from his drunken state, thin and haggard, with a three week growth of beard, clean himself up, go back to Lock mill, and resume work. Apparently Lock Mill had a very lenient absentee policy.

Pete would also emerge from drunkenness completely broke. In my earliest memories of Pete, he lived at Lock Hall. This was a big, three story boarding house that stood right across Church Street from the Lock Mill office, on the property where Danny's is located now. Once, after Lock Hall closed down, I went into the building through an unlocked window. Up on the third floor, I found the fire escape. It consisted of a window and a big thick rope that you could throw out of the window. I guess, in case of fire, it was more effective than tying bed sheets together, but not by much. I cut loose the rope and took it home; It made a great swing. Later, after Lock Hall closed down, he moved down the street to another house where he rented a room. Sometimes when he was on a drunk, he would become an inhabitant of "Tick City". This was the wooded area east of Church Street where McCachern Blvd. is now. Tick City was off limits to normal people and children like myself, so I never actually visited it. Back then, Concord was dry, and some times the drunks would resort to drinking a high alcohol aftershave called Polly Peach. My dad said the ground was littered with thousands of the little bottles about the size and shape of a Texas Pete bottle. I suspect that you could perform a little archeological dig in the woods along the greenway and still find some of these little bottles. I guess Polly Peach went well with a Sundrop chaser. Speaking of chasers, I don't remember anyone of my dad's generation ever mixing any kind of alcohoic drink, they drank it straight with a "chaser". The equivalent of a shot and a beer.

Because of his unfortunate drinking habit, Pete didn't have anything. He didn't drive or have a car, a wife, or house. He had one rod and reel, and one double barreled shot gun. I guess he had a variety of clothing, but his clothes were unremarkable, at least to me. When my dad would pick Pete up to go hunting, he would come out the door with his shot gun, and if dad picked him up to go fishing, he would come out with his rod and reel, nothing else, regardless of the number of days they might be gone.

Pete was a good bit older than my dad, so the drinking had its ultimate effect on Pete before it did my dad. I think the binge drinking was the equivalent of being hit in the head with a sledge hammer four times a year as opposed to a light tap on the scull with a claw hammer every Saturday night. Pete finally got to the DT's stage, and was thrown out of his boarding house for starting a camp fire in the middle of his bedroom floor. His sister in Albemarle volunteered to take Pete in. There were two unfortunate results of this charity. His drinking hobby was completely curtailed, and according to my dad, when Pete died, his worst nightmare was implemented. Pete had a morbid fear of having his body donated to science and hung in some lab suspended by tongs in his ears.