By: Jerry Mullins

People ask me “Why do you seem to like being the town drunk?” Well, when I get asked that every once in awhile, I think about it. Then I tell them, just like I am reading a list.
“Number one, I can get away with a lot, in fact almost anything.
“Second, people don’t expect much from me, and I like that, because I don’t have to dance to anybody’s tune to please them. I can act almost any way I want to and nobody says anything, and I can dress any way I want, either dress down and people expect that, or dress up. I look pretty good when I am cleaned up. I do have my self-respect you know.
“And last, I think it’s funny looking at the so-called respectable people around town I know are drinkers, and hiding it. I see them in the liquor store and we talk. Drunks talk to each other, you know. It takes one to know one, like they say.”
I’m not sure how I started drinking and got this way. It just seemed to creep up on me. It could be I come by it naturally, since my Dad and Grandfather were the same and they loved that rot gut moonshine that ruined their minds. That was the business they had, making and selling it, way up in the country. But I like living in town.
Now don’t ask me what I will do with the rest of my life. I am not fit to do much of anything else. I am good at being a drunk, people like to sit and talk to me and I can go up town and sit for hours talking. Mainly with a drink in my hand of course, but there are a lot of people to talk to like that. You would be surprised at some of the the things you hear about these people who are supposed to be respectable, the lawyers, doctors, undertakers, store keepers, and on and on. But I want to be respectable too, in my own way, even if I can’t work more than a few days without getting run off from whatever job I talked my way into. But I am working on getting a disability pension because of my condition. Maybe that is the ticket.
Sometimes I think I am the luckiest guy in the world. Doing exactly what I want to do, when and how I want to do it, with nobody to bother me. Except for that lady down at the Disability office. She is still bothering me.
Well, to get a disability pension you have to do all this paperwork and swearing you are telling the truth and on and on. I got Luther, one of the wags around town to help me with that because he loves legal stuff and thinks he is a lawyer or judge or something and is pretty good with words. So he helped me with the paperwork and gave me a ride down to the Disability office and talked all twenty miles down the river road driving me crazy.
So I was sitting there in the interview for my disability claim and a little worried about how it would go. The lady was just a little younger than me, nice enough and dressed like an old-fashioned school teacher, with what they call sensible shoes, and she pulls out this long form on a clipboard. I get a little more worried because every time in my life when somebody pulls out a clipboard I have been messed over one way or another.
She started in, “Now you know we don’t necessarily normally approve people with an elective behavior problem. That means if you are doing something harmful to yourself by choice we may not be able to help you. So if you are ending up with cirrhosis of the liver maybe you should be talking to a doctor, not me.”
Well right away I knew this might be some trouble so I sit straight up in that hard chair, and say, “But you know both my Father and Grandfather had liver problems so it might be just running in the family line.”
“Well, I am not here to lecture you about drinking, but were they both drinkers too?”
“I don’t know. I can’t say because they both passed away by the time I was a young boy. But maybe so from what I heard,” I told her.
“Is this condition of yours long term?”
“Only until it kills me,” I say with a little smile and hope she sees some humor in that. I don’t like dealing with people without a sense of humor. But she tilts her head a little like she is thinking, and raises up her eyebrows if you know what I mean, and it looked like she didn’t want to joke around on this.
“So how do you get money to live on because the numbers I see on the form don’t add up to enough to live on,” she asked me.
“Well”, I said, “I don’t need much because I stay with some family most of the time but I do need enough to live regular like most people. I do some handyman work around town for people because there are a lot of older people and older ladies by themselves who can’t keep up the houses. So a couple afternoons a week I go round and find little twenty or thirty dollar jobs.”
“But you don’t have a car to get your tools around, looking at your paperwork,” she said, “so what kind of work is this?”
“I use their tools or if it’s outside work their garden tools, and sometimes we just sit and talk, some about the work and some about other things,” I said.
So I could tell she was getting a little suspicious and I want to change the way we are going but it looks like we are too far along already, and she raised her eyebrows a little more and said “Are these mainly ladies we are talking about here?” And she looks at me funny and she can tell I am getting a little nervous.
Now the cat is too close to being out of the bag so I go, “Well, a variety of people actually and it depends on the job and the time of year. But we are only talking a couple times a week in the afternoon when they want me to come by and it is only maybe $50 or sometimes $100 a week.”
“Yes, I see” she said, like she has made up her mind on something and she’s writing really hard on the form on the clipboard, and looks up at me with a funny look in her eye, almost a smile, and said, “Well I never put anything like this on these forms before, but it sounds like I should put ‘Ladies home companion’ or whatever they call it these days”, with a little laugh. So I figured she did not really put that “Companion” stuff on the form.
So right there I knew I wasn’t in too much trouble and maybe I even saw her eyes get a little wide and big for a minute and that always tells me something.
I didn’t say a word but I started to sweat like a hog and you know hogs don’t sweat but this one did, and I wanted to get out of there.
“This may call for a home visit,” she said next, “especially since you say you live in someone else’s house. Do you have your own private entrance?”
“Yes, it’s a private place, and a visit would be fine,” I say, “but I hope we can get the disability done and everything set up before then.”
“I don’t think that will be a problem,” she says. And I got out of there fast. And the disability benefits thing is working out just fine. But that damned disability office lady is still bothering the hell out of me right to this very day.

THE END

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Jerry Mullins grew up in central West Virginia, and has lived in the Washington, DC suburbs in recent years. His work has recently been published in or is forthcoming from Columbia University Journal-Catch and Release, Wilderness House Literary Review, The Broadkill Review, Tower Journal, Indiana Voice Journal, Newfound Journal, Foliate Oak, and internationally Southern Cross Review (Argentina)