Catch the Bum

(This is one of a series of nonfiction pieces based on my upcoming novel, Skunktown, Regal 2027.)

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On Friday nights, my father’s payday—that is, if he worked that week--my mother and I played this game called “Catch the Bum.” I knew she was getting ready to play because she’d start to look out the back door, anxiously staring up the road past Radeski’s turkey farm, waiting for his green Studebaker truck to come fluttering along like a wounded bird. The longer she didn’t spot it, the more agitated she became. She’d light up another cigarette, forgetting she’d left one smoldering in the parlor ashtray, and she’d take another nip from the half-pint whiskey bottle and wince the way I did with paregoric. I was nine, she was at an age beyond repair.
At last, her face would unclench itself from its death-grip of discontent, and she’d turn to me. “Whaddaya say, Mike? Let’s go catch the bum.”
“Yay!” I’d cry.
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Suddenly the hard mouth broke into a girlish grin, and she appeared what I imagined was that pretty young girl my father had married thirty years earlier. That playful gleam in her hazel eyes returned, the lightness to her step, the spirited way she seemed up for anything life might offer. To see my mother come alive like that, I almost looked forward to those Fridays nights.
We’d pile into her dented blue Falcon and bomb around town, going from tavern to tavern, searching for my father before he could “piss away” all his pay. Both of us laughing and crying out as if were on some wild carnival ride. My mother would usually be half drunk herself or spaced out on pills, or both, trying, as she put it, to keep up with the bum, as if the two were locked in a three-legged race to a finish line of inebriation. Seemingly without a care in the world now, one hand on the steering wheel, the other clutching a cigarette, she’d weave down the road, appearing to play chicken with other cars, and once or twice actually swiping a mailbox.
The catching part was all in good fun. I was her companion, co-conspirator, and navigator, on the lookout for that green truck. Despite that lingering desperation in her eyes, I could also see how those Friday nights were an inspiration for her, a way to make light of the fact that her husband was the town drunk and mostly unemployed, with bills piling high on the kitchen counter and each month came the bank’s threat of eviction. The game functioned as a thumbing of her nose at the uncaring world around her, and for the hour or two that it lasted a means of asserting herself, as if giving the finger to the world. And it was certainly preferable to her many half-hearted suicide attempts.
For me, the game was both exciting but also a little troubling. None of my friends’ families played such a game, and nothing I saw on TV suggested that this sort of thing took place in “regular” families. I tried to imagine June Cleaver throwing her apron down in a fit of pique and saying to the Beav on a Friday evening, “Let’s go find that bum of a father.” Because, of course, they knew that Ward was just in the other room wearing his afterwork sweater and smoking his pipe as he calmly read the paper before they all sat down to a quiet family dinner.
Our dinners were not so quiet. During those rare moments we did eat together, meals at our house were usually a kind of gladiatorial event, with my father and mother going at it tooth and nail, throwing one-liners across the table (“You’re drunk,” my mother would say to which my father would reply, “You’re drunk with stupidity”); these battles often escalated to slaps and kicks and punches, my mother, all four foot eleven of her, giving as good as she got, usually resorting to heaving at my father all manner of objects: plates and knives, rolling pins and scissors, empty beer and whiskey bottles, anything she could lay a hand on. Because she had such poor aim, my older brothers and I sensed when she was about to erupt and hightailed it before the projectiles started to crash into walls and break windows, and occasionally sink into noncombatant flesh. My brothers and I have various tattoos commemorating such family gatherings; breaking bread in our family had a completely different meaning.
But catching the bum was something else entirely. Instead of the grim intensity of those pitched battles waged at home, the game was fun, playful, exciting, filled with possibility, complete with its own rules and stratagems. Similar to hide-and-seek, but played by adults over the expanse of our town, sometimes even spilling over into adjacent towns, the game seemed to transform my mother from a bitter harridan to a coquettish young woman again, ready for adventure. And how many of my friends could boast that they’d caught their fathers red-handed drinking away their pay.
“Where do you think he went?” she’d ask as we glided down the road. “How about Schaub’s?”
I didn’t want to say that it obviously couldn’t be Schaub’s, a much more upscale place than what my father’s self-employed carpenter wallet could normally afford; he only went there after a big payday or if he’d sold something off, like a car he’d fixed up or a pig he’d fattened or a valuable parcel of farmland he let go for a song to pay off some debt and leave him enough for a night’s debauchery.
“Naw,” I replied, letting her down easy. “He’s got an unpaid tab there.” I was privy to such insider’s knowledge because many times I went to work with him and therefore knew the workings of his mind. “Let’s try the Brown Derby.”
I don’t like to brag but I had this preternatural knack for predicting the watering hole where we’d eventually catch him. I might guess the Sportman’s or Frank's Restaurant, the Villa Rose or the Crown Tavern--all based on a careful analysis of several pertinent factors: a precise triangulation, as it were, of where he’d been working that day with what gin mills were in proximity and where he’d wracked up the largest unpaid tab. Or perhaps where there were dumpsters out back, behind which he could hide his truck. Or where he was least likely to bump into some guy he’d been in a fight with or promised to build a garage for and had forgotten about. But mostly I guess, it was just a feel I had, an instinct, an intuition I’d honed over the years for knowing the old man’s moves and countermoves. Perhaps it was merely a gene I had inherited from some distant ancestral son of a dipsomaniacal father, who had hunted his father from public house to public house on a sway-backed horse instead of a Falcon.
When we spotted the Studebaker, as we invariably did, hidden out in back of, say, The Sportsman’s or parked strategically behind the dumpsters of the Villa Rose, my mother would turn to me and hug me, laughing uproariously.
“You called it again, Mike!”
I felt a certain pride, as if I’d won a game of Monopoly or setback, or had taken first place for the hobo costume I’d dressed up as for our school’s Halloween contest. We sat there in the parking lot for a while savoring our victory. This part of the game, though, was always a little uncomfortable for me. My mother had a streak of unpredictability. Her earlier anger would return, and now she toyed with the possibility of revenge.
“I got a good mind to march right in there before the bum spends all his paycheck,” she might threaten. And once or twice, if she were drunk or desperate enough, she actually did just that—marched into the tavern and confronted my father in front of, as she put it, his bum friends. I cringed at the very thought of her doing that, making our intimate troubles very public. Such an act would completely change the tenor of the game, turn it into something dangerous and pitiful. But most of the time, fortunately, the catching was enough of a victory; she’d put the car in gear and we’d leave.
After that, my mother might reward me with an ice cream cone or a pizza, or once or twice even take me to the drive-in theater in town, just the two of us, to watch something even more removed from reality than the game we’d just concluded. Despite the treats, though, there loomed over both of us an unspoken sadness, the game having quietly soured for us. On the way home we sat quietly, soberly, my mother’s eyes having lost the sparkle from earlier. She appeared drained, even more miserable than before we started the game. She’d won but had also lost something, too, something of herself. Perhaps another slice of dignity. Perhaps it was that she knew she’d still have to confront him later, when he came staggering in the door, his pockets empty, the bills still waiting. Or perhaps it dawned on her just how pathetic her life had become, a middle-aged woman having to chase her husband around town. I felt sorry for her. I wanted somehow to help, to protect her, to save her. But I knew even then that I was powerless to do anything. So I did the only thing I could.
“We caught the bum this time, didn’t we, Ma?”
She’d look over at me and smile ruefully.