More Delirium Tremens

There was a notorious drinker right here in Lewiston who was known to go on serious benders that could last for weeks.

On his last one a few years ago, this slovenly 48-year-old holed up in his dingy apartment for days, drinking vodka and beer and stumbling around in his underwear.

Neighbors said they never saw him, but they heard him plenty. On the sixth day of his binge, he apparently went on a cleaning binge. Folks who lived nearby said the man cleaned and cleaned and cleaned right around the clock. They heard him clanging buckets and mops in the wee hours in the morning and he was occasionally heard screaming: "That stink! That goddamn stink, it won't go away!"

It went on for days before all the clamor suddenly stopped. Police went in soon after and they were in fact greeted with a sour, rancid aroma. The alcoholic was found near death and he was diagnosed with malnutrition, scurvy and an advancing state of leprosy.

What the drinker had been smelling in his delirium fed cleaning frenzy was his own rotting flesh.