Bum Fighting

Bum Fighting is the name K. William Hodges gives to a short-lived fad in his city during the late 1980s: paid fights between homeless men staged for spectators who wagered on the outcome and cheered them on. His memory of the business is not incidental background. Watching daytime television in retirement, Hodges recognizes a related appetite for conflict in programs that turn people’s distress into entertainment, while his own repeated handling of a gun makes violence an increasingly intimate presence in his daily life.

The late-eighties spectacle

Hodges remembers Bum Fighting as a transient fever that had occupied the city for a summer. The city’s three newspapers published editorials about it; by the time of the narration, two had disappeared and the third was struggling. The fad’s brief public prominence contrasts with the more enduring question it leaves him: why do people gather to watch others suffer, and what happens when that suffering is turned into a saleable show?

The operation had a straightforward commercial design. Promoters paid two homeless men thirty dollars each to fight at a specified time and place, spread word of the event, and charged spectators twenty dollars a head. One of the sites Hodges remembers best was the service area behind Bam Ba Lam, a strip club on the East Side. Internet advertising was not yet widespread, so the events were promoted by word of mouth. Once an audience assembled, the business relied on its willingness to watch, wager, and urge the combatants on.

Hodges and Pete Huntley had broken up one such gathering with more than two hundred spectators. Some watched in evening dress and jewelry; many placed bets and followed the odds. The men in the fighting were intoxicated and unsteady, and the audience laughed, cheered, and encouraged them. The scene’s social contrast is central to Hodges’s recollection: spectators could treat the event as a lark, while the men whose poverty made them available for it were the ones being used as its spectacle.

A model for daytime television

Hodges watches a daytime talk show almost every weekday after retiring from the police force. In his comparison, the televised conflicts resemble the old fights, but the commercial machinery has changed: diet pills and insurance companies sponsor the action, and the participants are called guests rather than contestants. He supposes they leave with more than the thirty dollars and a bottle of Night Train that the fighters might have received. The difference is not that the show lacks humiliation, but that it has been made legal and respectable enough to air as ordinary entertainment.

The program’s format reinforces his analogy. The host presents a succession of combative guests, and the studio audience applauds; later segments feature a judge who receives petitioners impatiently and a family psychologist whose methods make guests cry. Hodges’s descriptions are contemptuous, but his comparison identifies the common structure he sees: conflict is arranged for an audience, distress keeps the show moving, and commercial interests profit from attention. The old gatherings were openly illicit and ended when police intervened; the television version has no need to be broken up.

Retirement, the revolver, and the remembered violence

The memory of Bum Fighting occurs within a portrait of Hodges’s retirement routine. He sits in his La-Z-Boy with beer and television, and his father’s Victory revolver rests on the table beside him. His former service weapon, a Glock, has been unloaded and put away in a bedroom safe since his retirement ceremony. The .38, by contrast, holds sentimental significance for him, and he repeatedly picks it up and looks into its barrel.

That handling has become more than casual familiarity. Hodges has, on a couple of occasions, put the revolver between his lips to consider what it feels like to have a loaded gun there. He thinks of this as getting used to it, and privately imagines that if he could drink successfully he might postpone acting on the impulse for a year or two. His thoughts turn to alternatives such as gardening, birdwatching, or painting, but the prospect of physical decline and dependence, prompted by the story of retired officer Tim Quigley’s stroke, offers no reassuring escape. The gun and the television occupy the same small domestic space: one presents violence as entertainment, while the other makes the possibility of self-destruction immediate.

The comparison’s wider significance

Hodges’s recollection connects the public spectacle of Bum Fighting to a wider pattern of turning other people’s hardship into a source of amusement or profit. The comparison does not make the old fights and television identical: one was a paid, illicit contest broken up by police, while the other is a legal show supported by advertisers. What links them in his mind is the audience’s appetite for conflict and the transformation of human distress into a consumable performance.

The motif also deepens the account of Hodges’s post-retirement isolation. His memory of a crowd laughing at vulnerable men is set against his own solitary afternoons, during which he watches similar forms of staged distress and handles a loaded revolver. Later, after receiving a threatening message, he wonders whether the person targeting him could have seen him putting the gun in his mouth. The possibility makes his private routine newly exposed, connecting the danger he poses to himself with the danger he suspects from outside. Bum Fighting therefore functions both as a remembered social phenomenon and as a lens through which the novel examines spectatorship, exploitation, and Hodges’s unsettled relation to violence.