Dino Was The Head Rat! (Fifty-Nine Years Old, Jaliah Jones, Black Female, Rat Pack Aficionado and Historian) 2000

Just ten years before he died he gave it all up.  But the public didn’t know it.  No, he had found out, ironically enough that, there wasn’t any money in sobriety.  All those years he ran with the, “Rat Pack”, all of them, to a man, were chain smokers and hard core drinkers, including himself.  He had a conversation with his third wife just before their divorce, “Cathy, I’m tired of all this shit.  I’ve been drinkin for so long I don’t know who the hell I am?  I need to find out who I am and who I used to be, before all this booze I started medicating myself with.”  And that’s what he did.  Became clean and sober and gave the smoking up too.  Well, the smoking was easy because, why even smoke if you couldn’t have a drink in the other hand?  And there was no pressure from being around and amongst The Rat Pack.   So, there was no reason he could think of not to give the shit up…now. 

Oh, people would see him in his later years holding a lit cigarette and an eight-ball glass of some clear liquid, assumed to be vodka, gin…or whatever other clear libation one who witnessed wanted to interject was in the eight-ball glass of note.  It made no difference because then perception being, “Ol’ Dino still full of vino!”   Shit, he had tried to do it without the effects of consuming alcohol and that didn’t work.  People asking him was he all right and things?  Of course I’m all right, I’m alcohol and tobacco free goddamn it!  But all he got after he said he was fine was a look from the accuser, troubling in nature and saying, “I want the ol’ Dean back.”  Fine.  He had been out on his ass so many times he could fake it easily.  He had a certain lifestyle and certain moniker to uphold, dressed to the nines and being the life of the party, with his cool self.   He was an entertainer/actor, he could definitely pull off being lit or half lit, though was neither.  And this, needless to say, was some of his best acting work: living a sober life and making the public believe he was still a drunk.  All the time he was in the public.  And for the first time in his life, he had a full time job…  (To Be Continued)