My Daddy's Friend, Tom

Tom was my father’s closest friend when they both lived on Cedar Street in Powderly, Alabama, in the 1940s. In their late teens, when they were out on the town my father would often drink beer. Tom drank milkshakes; that’s not how I remember him.

I remember Tom as my Daddy’s friend with a drinking problem, a bad one. Tom started drinking a lot when he was in Niagara Falls, New York, supervising a roofing crew. Things did not go well, and he got in over his head financially. From what I remember, there were heavy rains and Tom could not make good on payroll and other expenses.

Reading this postcard that Tom and his wife Joyce sent my parents soon after arriving in New York, it seems that Tom was in good spirit.

Though she is already homesick, Joyce is comfortable enough with Tom’s that she would like the four of us to visit. I was five years old at the time of the postcard.

May 4, 1956

Hello Buddy and June,

How you like this little postcard? [That was a joke; the postcard was huge] We are a mile from Niagara Falls. We live on an island between Buffalo and Falls. Houses being built on Island. Canada just across river. We haven’t been over yet. Well I’ll stop for now. Joyce wants to write something. Drop us a line.

Tom

Hi Folks,

Sure wish you could come up here and see some of these sights. It sure is tough to find a place to live. I believe there is more people on this island than there is in Alabama. June it sure is lonesome up here. I wish you and the boys were here to keep me company. Write us.

Love,

Joyce

Their lives spiraled out of control quickly after that postcard was sent. My parent’s phone would sometimes ring in the middle of the night. Tom was usually so drunk that my parents could not understand what he was trying to tell them.

Six years later, after numerous separations, Joyce wrote Tom this note:

Friday Morning, June 17, 1962

Baby,

Since you won’t call me on the phone while you are sober maybe when you get this letter you will be. When you called the other night you wouldn’t have understood anything I told you, so I didn’t bother and besides daddy was listening to everything I said. And what I’ve got to say is only for you to hear. You ask me if I loved you. I love you more than anything or anybody in the whole world. I wish you would remember that. Don’t ever forget it. But when you are drinking you are a completely different person and I don’t know you. Will you ever see how I feel? Please try to. We’ve made such a mess out of both our lives. Why can’t we both try to build something together? If we could build a house and buy furniture and especially have a washing machine. That’s all I want out of life is you-- a house to keep and cooking for you. I could love you enough that you wouldn’t want anything else either.

You make good money when you work. It wouldn’t take long to do it if you would make your mind up to do it. As soon as Mama gets able to take care of herself, I’m gonna get a job. I can save $80 a month. So I can buy most of the furniture. You could get a lot of the material for a house at cost because you know so many people in the building business. Let’s please try.

I don’t want to live without you. Please show me you want something besides a bottle and old dark honkytonks and dirty women. God don’t like them so why should you?

I Love You—

Joyce eventually gave up on Tom and married someone else. Tom and Joyce never had children, so there was nothing that they had to discuss once she decided to leave him. My parents lost contact with Joyce in the early 1960s. If she is still living, she is in her 90s.

After a while, my parents could not remember how the letter came into their home. My best guess is that Tom brought the letter to them, asked them to read it, and then asked them for advice.

After Joyce left him for good, Tom drank even more than he did before.

He left the workforce and moved in with his mother in Powderly. When he wasn’t at home, he was usually drinking at the Bluebird Tourist Court on the Bessemer Super Highway. My parents must have talked about that a lot because for decades every time I passed the Bluebird and saw the sign with the flying neon bird, I thought about Tom.

When Tom was still driving in the early 1960s, he would sometimes take off on long road trips, and my parents wouldn’t hear from him until he got back to Powderly. I remember my father telling us “Tom will take off to California in a car that I wouldn’t trust past Bessemer.”

At some point, Tom eventually quit driving. He either couldn’t afford to keep a car on the road or lost his license— I don’t know which happened first. After that when he visited us, it was by taxi. Sometimes he would have the taxi driver stop at a restaurant on the way, and he would bring the food to our home to eat. I guess he didn’t want my mother to worry whether she should feed him or not.

Tom was well-behaved around us, but none of us will ever forget the one exception.

My parents with their business partner Raymond owned several fishing lakes that were open to the public. Raymond, my brother, my father, and I were at the boat launch of one of the lakes when Tom arrived, very drunk. Ranting and raving, he pushed a rental boat into the lake and crawled into it. He paddled the boat about one hundred feet out into the lake, stood up, and began rocking the boat. I was fourteen or fifteen years old and up to that time had never heard a grown man curse like he did from that boat. From the kind of language that he was using, some woman had done him wrong and made him very angry.

If Tom had fallen into the lake, he would have almost certainly drowned and possibly one of us would have drowned trying to save him.

We don’t remember how Tom made it back to the bank. We do remember that Raymond was very angry at Tom for causing the disturbance and looking back I guess that Raymond was afraid that Tom would hurt himself or someone else on his property. This might have been the first time that Raymond had seen Tom, so he didn’t love the man like my father did.

Tom had no fear, even though Raymond was threatening him with a posthole digger. Tom jumped on Raymond and they fought over control of the digger. Tom eventually grew too tired to continue the fight. We don't remember how Tom left the property. It’s likely that my father took him home and knowing my father he probably gave Tom some money.

After he sobered up, I doubt Tom remembered much of what happened.

He didn’t visit it us any less after the incident and he never mentioned the incident when he did.

During one of his visits in May 1969, my father mentioned that I had just graduated high school. Tom pulled out his billfold, walked over to me, and placed a ten-dollar bill in my hand. Tom hadn’t worked in years, so ten dollars was a very generous gift.

There was never any alcohol at our home during that time. My mother’s church had zero tolerance for it, and she was involved in church activities. I never saw Tom drink anything but coffee. At our home he always had a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. As soon as the taxi stopped at the driveway my mother would begin brewing a fresh pot of coffee. My mother wasn’t happy when Tom visited, but she knew how much my father cared for him.

Back then we were big wrestling fans. We had three front row center seats reserved for every Monday night at Boutwell Auditorium in Birmingham. One Monday night a taxi dropped Tom off just as we were walking out the door. My brother wasn’t going that night, so we had an extra ticket. My father told Tom, “Let’s go to the wrestling matches Tom.”

Just a few minutes after we sat in our seats, Tom said that he wanted a cup of coffee. Coffee wasn’t available at the auditorium concession stand, but Tom had to have a cup anyway. He left the auditorium and walked all the way downtown and found a place that served coffee. We didn’t see Tom again until just before the wrestling card was over. He didn’t behave or look like he had drunk anything but coffee.

The last time that I saw Tom, I was in my late twenties and married to Kathy. He looked much worse than he did before I left home to join the Army. He was so thin that he had to tie his belt into a knot to hold his pants up. My father was a big man at the time, but for some reason he had a new smaller belt in his closet, and he gave it to Tom. Tom smiled while my father helped him thread it through the pants loops.

About ten years Tom later Tom died. He was living alone in in his deceased mother’s home in Powderly, and it was days before the neighbors missed him.

My father pushed a lot of what Tom suffered out of his mind and even refused to acknowledge that alcohol was a major reason, if not the reason, that Tom died. My father blamed Tom’s death on the asbestos that he worked with when he was a young man. The rest of us knew it was alcohol, but we didn’t argue with him.

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This story has been edited for Vocal. The original story and more like it are here: The Life and Times of Bud Coleman of Jefferson County, Alabama: Book One: 1929-1978