Today is opening day of the National Hobo Convention, a.k.a. Britt Hobo Days in the town of Britt, Iowa. The Convention was first held there in 1900, but first became an annual tradition in 1934, making it both 124 and 90 years old depending on you how look at it. (It's actually several decades older than that, it's just that they weren't held in Britt until 1900).
Mind you, this is not a gathering of Hobo Clowns, or Tramp Comedians. Nowadays, a convention of those could scarcely fill a booth in a diner. It is a genuine convocation of men and women who live the life: unhoused migratory workers, drifters, and solitary wanderers who go from place to place, living job to job. The traditional mode of transportation was to ride the rails by hopping freight trains, a practice that became common in the years following the Civil War, although I'm not sure how possible that is nowadays (ask my friend Jeff Seal -- he's actually done it!) I can see a modern updating in something like the book and film Nomadland.
H.L. Mencken, in his American Language provided some helpful definitions of related concepts, although I don't know how hard and fast they are, and the wider public scarcely makes these distinctions: a hobo travels but knuckles down to work along the way. A tramp travels, too, but doesn't work unless he absolutely has to. (But since, like everyone else, he absolutely has to most of the time in order to eat and replace his deteriorating clothes, the distinction is more theoretical than real). By contrast to each of these there stands the bum, roughly equivalent to a vagrant or panhandler, which is more of an urban concept. This person remains in whatever town he's in and lives by scavenging and begging.
Outsiders use these terms pejoratively, but many who live the life by choice have traditionally used them with pride. It is for those who live the life involuntarily due to circumstances (bad luck, economic conditions, mental illness, drug habits) that other outsiders have coined such purportedly sensitive euphemisms as homeless, houseless, unhoused persons, and so forth. In the wider public, the term hobo has come to be regarded humorously, as something from another time (though clearly it still applies to some people). Tramp and bum are both employed widely with intent to insult. The former has perhaps become more associated with sexually promiscuous women. The latter has become recognized as impolite among decent people, although it is still used from time to time to insult someone who isn't a literal street person but more of a moocher who doesn't work. This too is growing old fashioned; the word is more commonly employed nowadays as a verb, as in to bum a ride, or bum a cigarette.
Americans love to crow about freedom, but there is no greater indication of the contradictions in our culture than the love-hate relationship the culture seems to have with these people. Most Americans have inherited and abide by some version of the Puritan Work Ethic, and seek an existence that chains them to jobs, social ties, material acquisition, and ongoing obligations like mortgages, and car payments. At a day to day level, the people who are hooked into this (i.e. most people) regard those who've chosen another way to live as pests or scourges.
And, yet, at the same time, they envy and romanticize the other way of life. I certainly do, and that is the point of this post. I associate hobos and tramps with Gypsies (now known as Roma and similar names) and Bohemians and travelling show folk. Some American figures who've either lived the life or celebrated it in art have included Joe Hill, Harry McClintock ("Big Rock Candy Mountain"), Woody Guthrie, Jack London, Charlie Chaplin, Carl Sandburg, John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, and Dave Van Ronk, and just about every folk and country singer. Movies that celebrate or explore the life have included Hallelujah, I'm a Bum (1933), Sullivan's Travels (1941), Boxcar Bertha (1972), Hard Times (1975), and Ironweed (1987). There was a great episode of Mad Men, where a hobo stops at young Dick Whitman's family farm and gives his stepfather a bad rating on a fence post in hobo code, the real life hieroglyphic system drifters used to use to warn or mollify their brothers on the trail behind them, almost as a kind of hobo Zagat's.
Hobos also have a code of ethics, passed and unaltered since the national convention of 1889. You can look it up, I won't clutter the post with all 16 points here. It was very savvy of the hobo union to implement this, though, if only as a p.r. move. Needly to say, rootless people are traditionally harassed by police, railroad security guards, and other local authorities. They are regarded with suspicion and prejudice, associated with thieves, rapists, and serial killers. Be honest, don't you regard them that way? But then be even more honest with yourself: characterizing an entire class of people with the worst among them is literally what prejudice is. It's that very tendency among settled people that turns off some individuals to mainstream society itself and motivates them to live outside it.
Rule #1 in the Hobo Code of Ethic is: "Decide your own life; don't let another person run or rule you."
This is big stuff, this is existential. This is the place where I am going to veer from the cultural to the personal, for my own inclinations are what draw me to this topic in the first place, and you will find hints and more than hints not just on this blog but in my first two books. In No Applause I mentioned that I had run away at the age of five with an imaginary bindlestiff on my shoulder, hoping to replicate the adventures of Dorothy and Professor Marvel, Huck and Jim, and the Duke and the Dauphin. I was lured by romance, but I was also driven away, by controlling, ill-tempered parents who hated their lives. As I grew, I observed what made them miserable and took note of it and internalized it. They were working people, we were lower middle class, but they were nonetheless, like most modern people, the slaves of THINGS. They lived to serve their debts. Their entire lives were spent in thrall and obligation to objects that didn't make them happy, a house, a car, furniture.
The knee jerk reaction of most people -- you, probably -- will be some version of "But you need those things!" And the hell of it is, YOU DON'T! Who told you that you DID? I have NEVER had ANY of those things, not to speak of. I have never sought them or worked for them. I have accidentally had vehicles (in both cases foisted on me by my father), and (to get very personal) the moment I chose to flee my first marriage was when at my wife's instigation we began to look at homes to buy. I WILL NOT be a slave to that shit! And when we broke up and my wife found an apartment for me, though I had an excellent job at the time, I acquired no furniture to fill it with. I threw a mattress on the floor, with a spare mattress for my kids when they stayed over. I bought a cheap portable tv and some second hand cheap book shelves so I could get my large library out of boxes and that was IT! And a couple of years later, when I lost the excellent job, and a couple of ones after that, and settled into working at an off-off-Broadway office position that paid me $300 a week (in NEW YORK!) I lived on that income and chipped away at my book advance and lived quite satisfactorily that way for years.
And I loved it! I learned that for about $1.50 you could get turkey parts at the supermarket. I'd live on that and potatoes and canned vegetables and forty dogs. Some days to save the $3 subway fare I would walk the 5-7 miles to work on the Lower East Side from my home in the Italian section of Williamsburg and back. For fun I'd walk to my best friend's place over in Bushwick. While his room was always spotless, and the apartment he shared with two musicians was groovy, his neighborhood made mine seem like Fifth Avenue. Sometimes we'd splurge on Chinese food, or Kennedy Fried Chicken, where you'd push your money through a slot in the bullet proof glass and they'd dispense the greasy meal through an armored door, as though we were in quarantine and these were MREs.
This is a secret I am revealing to: you can live outside this materialistic culture. I once wrote an essay for The Brick revealing the real true fact that I have never owned anything worth more than $700, and it remains true to this day. (Full disclosure: at the present moment, I have a partial stake in both house and a car, but I made no effort to obtain them and do nothing to maintain them. I have never driven the car). If this information startles you, it's because, like many in the artistic community, I live a double life. Periodically over the course of my work I meet with TV people, or movie people, or Broadway people, etc or get major media attention for my work. But on the back end, my existence is one of genteel poverty. It is an existence very much like that described by Jonathan Ames in The Extra Man. You find a way to fake the glamor. I know I'm far from alone among New York's artists who live this way, who choose to live this way, but, man, is it ever a secret. It's untalked about. It's regarded with shame. WHY? We chose to make sacrifices in order to make art, and if you call yourself an artist, or a thinking person, or a human being, and DON'T make sacrifices, to me, THAT is what is worthy of shame.
I am envious of some Americans, but it's not the ones who live for the shit in their houses and their driveways. I am envious of my friends who are circus performers and burlesque performers, who are true to themselves and get to live on the road. Writers are generally stuck in a monastic cell, but on occasion I've gotten to poke my head out and make my own kind of lecture circuit. Like the hobos I'm celebrating today, I take a back seat to nobody when it comes to hard work. I have literally worked 24 hour days! But it's got to be the work I want to do and on my own terms.
If you're curious about that National Hobo Convention, their website is here. (Of course they have a website! This is 2024!)
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