White Trash (Fishin' With Pudge & His Pa)

Raisin' Up Catfish: Thirty-seven

Cypress Swamp: Mississippi Delta, 1972

Pudge was white trash. There’s really no other way to put it. His daddy was a cursing, farting, belching, stubble-faced drunk. His momma had run off years before, with someone, though no one could seem to remember who. Having spent a bit of time around Pudge’s old man, that news didn’t much surprise me. Nor could I blame her. Humor Jimpson was no bonnie prince and definitely no Don Juan.

Pudge, both resourceful and whang-leather tough, had more or less raised himself from the time of his mother’s sudden departure. He’d been nine then. He sputtered that out one day when he was taking a cigarette break; still carrying it, still hurt. When I came to know him at sixteen and a half, he was more than a little rough around the edges but not in any way that he seemed particularly keen to notice. His clothes were always stained, buttons missing, hair always shaggy, matted and greasy. His reptilian lips were endlessly chapped and peeling, and he’d lost one upper front tooth already with several others threatening to abandon the scurvy ship any day.

Strangely, I got the impression young Pudge fancied himself as rather stylish.

He pretended to be proud never to have made it past sixth grade, though I questioned his sincerity on that claim; he bragged, just a little too boisterously, if you get my meaning. Claimed he’d only made it that far because the teacher didn't want him dragging the rest of the students back for yet another year, as if that had somehow made him even more of a celebrity, more dangerous and exotic. Attention is attention, I guess. We all crave a bit.

But here’s the deal; what Pudge Jimpson lacked in schoolhouse learnin' he more than made up for in backwater savvy, a knife’s edge of survival skills earned early and hard. He was hungry and alert, and blessed with a Delta shit-ton of sandy, redneck grit. Pudge could be a damned hard worker in spurts and was always a source of unexpected laughter, but Bone knew better than to try to employ him full time cuz as soon as he had a few bucks in his pocket he lost interest in work rather quickly.

Still, for a just few days, or one time even a week, when extra hands were needed, Pudge Jimpson’s were the first ones Bone generally called upon. Even before Sweetback.

First time I met him I thought he was the nastiest, most insolent little shit I'd ever met, all attitude, foul language …and rotting teeth. Only later did I come to understand that all that noise was mostly just for show.

He smoked Kools and drank and swore with such alacrity I'd have guessed him a time worn jail-bird of twenty-five or thirty, but for that smilin’ face. That sweet little cherub’s mug and fop of greasy, curly hair just didn't fit the rest of him. Scrub him up, cut his hair, put him in some decent clothes and tape that nasty yap of his shut and he'd have passed for a pudgy twelve-year-old. There was little mystery in how he'd gotten his name.

Among Pudge’s more offputting traits was his affinity for displaying his whiteish-pink, stretch-marked belly with that protruding, dangerous-looking ‘outie’ button, caressing and patting it like a watermelon, letting it droop, naked and sallow between the sides of his unbuttoned shirt and over his belt-less, stained, cotton work pants.

He didn't eat all that much that I ever saw but the sonuvabitch could swill a six-pack of beer in about as many heartbeats. Obviously he had enrolled, long before in his daddy's school of warthog charms and hard knocks, fully intending (or so it seemed), to graduate with drunken honors.

We went fishing once on a lazy Saturday, just Pudge, his whiskered, scab-nosed, old pappy and me, down on some shady, muddy creek at the edge of a cypress swamp. Nothing much else going on in Comfrey that day, far as I knew and without the use of Vernon’s truck, I’d have been stuck at the boarding house with the sisters and Buddy all day, otherwise.

Mom had called and left a message with Mrs. Simms, late Thursday afternoon saying that she wasn’t gonna be able to make it down to get me that weekend. Can’t remember what reason Mrs. Simms recited, but it didn’t much matter. I figured whatever it was, was a lie. Mom had a hot date. That was almost a certainty.

When I mentioned during load out on Friday morning that I’d be staying in town over the weekend, Pudge brightened, then invited me to come do a little ‘swamp fishin’ with him the next day. Said he and his daddy were going to their secret spot for buffalo and bull-cats; ‘nigger fish,’ he whispered, conspiratorially, leaning in close so Zak and Mose wouldn’t hear him. Classy guy.

Racist overtones notwithstanding, going fishin’ in a Mississippi swamp had high adventure written all over it for a restless kid with an entire dull weekend staring him in the face, especially with a couple of scrappy, mudbug, locals who kept themselves in vittles by setting’ trotlines in such places. Only an idiot would have said no to such an invitation, and I was no idiot.

In retrospect, though, I might have been. The idiot part, I mean.

All these years later I can report without equivocation that for a while that day I felt I was probably gonna die, the voluntary, back seat, idiot hostage in their Mississippi Delta version of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, rattling and fishtailing all the way out to that secret fishin' hole.

Strangely, my hosts didn’t seem worried at all. Instead, they were grinnin’ a couple’a rotten-toothed, ‘shit-eaters’ (grins), at the unfolding day and laughing their asses off. Watching me bounce and squirm, and slide back and forth across that damned vinyl seat sweating like a pig was entertainment. Shootin’ devious glances at one another. Deliberately testing the outer limits of my un-Southern, white-boy cool.

I clench up just a little still, thinkin’ back on how I’d voluntarily climbed into the back seat of that busted down, red car, knowingly placing my life in the sloshy, inebriated hands of fetid ol’ Humor Jimpson on a sultry, Saturday morning when I really should’a been singin’ hymns in church.

What the hell kind of name was that anyway, Humor? Somebody’s idea of a joke? That, at least would have made it seem a little bit funny. But the way that crazy sumbitch drove those washboarded, gravel roads was anything but a joke, foot mashed down to the rusted-out floor board, inhaling generous swigs of engine exhaust, road dust and piss-colored hooch. He steered, one hand on the wheel, yelling over the road noise and laughing out loud while a half-empty mason jar rode steady in his lap, sloshing over, occasionally onto his grimy pants as we fishtailed around a corner, adding even more stench to an already stinking car.

Humor’s filthy, red, mid-sixties Plymouth Valiant was no joke either, a real piece of workmanship. No muffler, a ‘lost the key,’ hot-wired ignition, bugs smeared so thick on the cracked windshield that he had to actually stick his head out the side window to navigate certain trickier stretches of road when driving toward the sun. I doubt he’d ever considered washing the damn thing. Probably would have fallen further apart if he had. That much grime and squashed bug must have some cohesive effect.

I sat alone in the back seat amidst a decade's worth of faded candy bar wrappers, discarded cans, bottles, and a well-worn Playboy magazine (almost certainly purchased for the articles). Next to me rode a beat-up, two dollar, styrofoam cooler, full of ice, beer and a coupla’ RC Colas for ‘the virgin,’ the new moniker I'd been given by the old man when we stopped at a crossroads grocery and Pudge told him I didn't drink beer. The cooler’s filthy, Styrofoam lid squeaked and squawked in time with the shimmying front wheels, making a damnable ruckus.

Maybe that’s why Pudge and his pappy always talked so loud; that damn car. I completely missed the punchline to most of their redneck jokes as we drove.

Pudge and I held a bundle of cane poles against the car's chalky roof, yelling fish stories back and forth, above the engine noise and machine-gun barrage of flying gravel. Tying the fishing poles up there, like washing the windshield would have been way too much like planning ahead. I held on, best I could and didn’t say a word in complaint. I was already picturing that drunken old fart slitting my ‘virgin’ throat with his fish gutter if I ticked him off during this little, shared boondoggle, and since we were journeying farther and farther from town and into his backwater kingdom, I carefully avoided his moonshine-yellowed eyes and gripped those poles as if my life depended on it, trying not to think too much about my imminent death.

They say a mean dog can sense your fear.

Finally, a dozen gravel roads and airborne crossings later, we slowed and turned onto a two-track that headed us back through a weedy field and into the shady cover of trees that hid us from the road, arriving at the promised swamp-creek hideout I’d been trying to picture since being invited the day before.

Pudge and the old man immediately split up, heading off in different directions to check their trotlines from their Thursday evening set. I followed Pudge at a timid distance, watching apprehensively as he crept down under a big, snakey looking willow and began pulling a heavy line toward the bank. At its far end, maybe forty or fifty feet out, a mud stained bleach bottle bobbing and dancing toward him, until he reached the section where baited hooklines were attached with swivels in three-foot intervals. Most of the hooks had been cleaned of their baits, which Pudge had varied with no apparent rationale. Some had held rancid bacon or a chunk of salt pork, while on others, a chunk of cut up bream or crawdads, and others yet, a putrid-smelling concoction of unknowable ingredients called Catfish Charlie. Something for every taste, I guess.

Pudge’s trotline offered up only one sixteen inch catfish in its entire length and that, I guessed, long dead. It was a little grey, stiff as a plank, and cloudy-eyed. I wouldn't have eaten it, but when I said as much Pudge rolled his eyes heavenward in disgust and disbelief saying it looked just fine. He tossed it at me then to hold while he rebaited the line.

As the half-filled bleach bottle arched up and outward toward the muddy, far shore, momentarily pulling both line and re-baited hooks taut over the water, Pudge tossed a look of satisfaction my direction and started back for the car. “Kersplashhhh!”

“Nice throw!” I nodded, meaning it.

Humor’s trotline had fared somewhat better. As we rounded the battered Plymouth he looked up and grinned through cigarette smoke, nodding toward a smallish, stiff bass, weighing maybe a pound and a half or two, and an air-gulping, seven or eight pound, whiskered channel cat laid out on the grass beside him. He acted like a proud father, squatting there on his grimy haunches, reducing a fifty-cent block of ice to shards with a rusty pick.

Once the fish were iced and he'd scrambled the big one's brains with the ice pick, we each grabbed a couple of cane poles and spread out along the shady bank to see what else we might tempt to swallow a hook.

Finally …familiar turf and something more to do than just watch.

I had been fishing for catfish since I was ten or eleven and was anxious for the chance to wrestle a few out of the murky depths and prove myself worthy. Nid and Charley, a young Thai couple who'd lived in our basement in Memphis back when my baby sister, Bonnie was still just an infant needing a sitter, used to take me with them to the river on their days off. I served as their white, English-speaking ambassador, interpreter, safety net and guide, and gladly helped them catch as many of the whiskered bottom feeders as possible. They liked the smaller ones.

Nid’s favorite food from the old country was fish-head curry. Something about those ugly whiskered faces staring up out of a spicy, red stew carried her to the brink of rapture. It was tasty, I have to admit but I never could bring myself to eat one of the heads or even endure having one looking up at me from my steaming bowl. Fortunately, they never pressed.

Once Pudge and I had baited up and set out our poles, I fell right into the laid back rhythm of things; staring into murky water, swatting horseflies and mosquitoes, and telling meaningless lies like one who knows what fishing is meant to be.

It was strange to feel like one of them so soon, to have some common bond of understanding and weirdly …values, developing between us. After that taunting, hellscape of a ride to get there and Pudge’s constant, arrogant bluster at work, I would never have guessed I’d feel so much at ease.

Golden hours slipped past atop the murky, brown waters that transported them, languorous whispers and gurgles in swamp-scented air. While Pudge and I lay there dangling our feet in the slow, cool current sipping cool drinks our wildly different histories and backgrounds counted not one whit. Fishing made us brothers of a sort …and equals. I had never seen him so quiet and calm.

I was not nearly so intimidated by their white-trash world after that day and they were not nearly so intent on taunting me or putting me cruelly in my place.

By mid-evening the shadows had stretched nearly into the next county and nighthawks, bats and chimney swifts had begun plying the deepening skies above us in earnest. When we finally packed up and headed for home we had a full stringer of fish among us, a dozen fat crawdads and the quiet, tenuous beginnings of a new friendship.

They dropped me off at the sisters’ well past sunset. Pudge's old man left the pepper-voiced engine idling while he came around to unlatch the wired trunk. Handing me the two fry-pan sized fish I'd decided to present as a gift to the sisters, he grinned through tobacco stained teeth and whiskers, cuffed me playfully along side the head and joked, "Guess you ain't such a bad deal after all, city boy."

Then the two of them waved like old friends and drove off into the encroaching night.

Careful what you think you’re better than, Davey boy. Careful who you look down upon and call white trash. Listen up first and hold your damn tongue. Spend a bit of time in their world. Step into their muddy shoes. We all come from somewhere. We all have our reasons for becoming what we are.

Pity the fool who can’t enlarge his views, cursed, the soul who won’t acknowledge another’s good.

© David E. Perry. All rights reserved.

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When I was fifteen I lived in a boarding house in Mississippi during the summer and worked, seventy and more hours each week …on a catfish farm where I earned just a dollar an hour. The work was honest, if the circumstances surrounding it were not. My mother was dating the fish farm’s married owner. His wife wrote and signed my paychecks every week. He knew I knew. I knew he knew. I was both liability and oddity, a hard worker trying like hell to be worthy of my paycheck rather than the nuisance brat of some fancy piece of tail.

It was complicated.

Though some chapters of Raisin’ Up Catfish will be only be available to paid subscribers, this one is available free to everyone. If you would like to read others of the thirty chapters from this unfolding memoir published thus far, please click on Raisin’ Up Catfish at the top of this page, or in the menu bar at the top of my Substack home page.