The Man From Glad and the mattress (pp. 500–501)
My father lay face-down in the mixture of the rectangle’s thick dust and the material he’d brought up from his upset stomach. […] My father’s professional wig had detached and lay scalp-up in the mixture of dust and stomach material.
Context
The chore ends with the father collapsed — "taken really ill," vomiting up his peppered tomato juice into the dust under the bed, then fainting face-down over the frame his weight snaps in half, bottom in the air, wig detached and lying scalp-up in the mess. And the son watches from a careful distance, noting the regular wet breathing, the bubbling dust, "examining my prone father." The narrator has already told us this is routine — "It was not too uncommon for my father to be taken ill shortly after coming home from work" — so the collapse of the drinking, performing father is a thing the boy has learned to observe rather than feel, cataloguing the wig and the gastric material with the same flat attention he gives the bed frame. This is the dipsomania of 020 and 049 shown at its origin, one generation back, through the eyes of the son it will pass to.