Hobo’s Lament-With Yip Harburg’s Brother, Can You Spare A Dime In Mind

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

 

It must have skipped generations, skipped generations in the greater Kelly clan  (of the Kellys from Northport about sixty miles south of Boston via County Cork to give the family line a bit) since Lance Kelly’s father (Lawrence) was just a guy who worked in a machine shop when there was work, plenty of overtime when there was plenty of work before the shipyards or rather the shipyard owners decided “flags of convenience” and low-wage overseas “shipyards of convenience” were the way to make profits jump and don’t give a damn investors happy in the first stages of the de-industrialization of America back in the late 1950s, early 1960s, and “the best he could” when there was no work as the family (parents and five sons) slid down the mobility pole to the projects before Lance grew to maturity. Yeah, Lance’s father was just a guy who took life’s blows in silence (and with a secret promise not revealed until after he passed away a number of years ago when Lance’s mother, Delores, let it be known at his memorial service that whatever else happened he said would not be like his own father and fritter away, his words, his life chasing after rainbows like his own father, Lamont (or women as we will get to in a minute). 

But that wandering thing, that need, that compelling need to hit the road, the road west mainly and nothing could stop the urge grabbed his son Lance just as hard as it did his old grandpa (and Lance’s younger brothers, Kenny and Prescott, for a little while when the high arc of the 1960s craziness light show and dark night  held many in its sway which would not have happened otherwise and has not really happened since as the road got weary, the travelers even wearier, in fact got dangerous once the “bad trip” drugs got the best of them, and kids today are clueless about such things as hitchhiking the world on a lark, driving some Neal Cassady dream fast ass car, souped-up if you or a buddy knew how to do so (cherry Hudsons, Chevys, flanked hot rods), racing flat out against the closed-in American frontier washed Pacific, real cheap gas and truck diner stops filled with carbohydrates, hell, take the freaking bus if you had to in order to get out of some Moline dead-ass town and, hell too, would rather bike than get a driver’s license, Jesus).

Hell, maybe that kind of thing, that wandering thing, is in the genes, what do they call it now, the DNA, and the generation skipped, in the Kelly clan father Lawrence,  maybe like some tee-totaller alcoholic father histories gets skipped not because it is not in the DNA but because there was a revulsion against what the father before did, or did not do, and the subsequent male line rebelled against that wanderlust night under railroad steel stars and it was left for the next run of the male line to get the “itch” (or female line but here we are tracing wandering descend in the male part of the line when such wandering if not socially approved in many quarters as least was viewed as “sowing oats” before settling down to the grind, wandering too at a time when such hoboing was not “lady-like,” and now is far too dangerous in most areas of the world except for the foolhardy venturesome, male or female (without an armed escort as Lance would say today thinking back on the chances he and his brethren took).

Well the hell with that soft-shell “theory” on this wanderlust thing except for academics who thrive on such leavings, who speak of societal ill-adjustments, of not being devoured properly by the modern machine life, of being, get this, in step with modern responsibilities. Yeah, let’s leave that to the academics who on every possible media outlet take the “talking head” life out of the generations who did take to the road whether to sow oats, chase some big cloud puff social dream, or just to get out of the cramped spaces in their boxed-in lives, and who have tried to fit the whole thing into some psychic ozone box of malcontents and malcontented-ness. And are still trying three-quarters of a century later long after the Great Depression Okie/Arkie dust bowl treks have vanished in the desert and more than one half a century after the teen angst, teen alienation of the post-World War II “moody” have bit their own pieces of dust.

That the “hell with theory” is what “Boston Blackie” Kelly, born Lance Kelly already mentioned above if you need a legal name, or Jasper Griffin, a name that he gave when some roustabout copper or railroad bull came up to that third freight car on the line, the one with settled hay built for comfort, and drew a billy-club bead on the “residents” said one night in about 1974 to the assembled audience around the camp-fire in the “railroad jungle,” the hobo jungle on the Southern Pacific line along the desperately dry arroyo outside of Gallup, New Mexico. Although the “speech” could have been given in the Sally [Salvation Army] Harbor Lights refuge on Larimer Street in Denver, ditto the South End in Boston, along the railroad tracks out in Westminster, California where a lot of veterans, Vietnam veterans mostly,  his “brothers” and the truth of that nobody doubted, when Blackie, let’s call him Blackie, to keep it short, a name he picked up from some re-run 1950s television series and it stuck, stuck hard once he started with those Boston dropped “r’s” out West where they thought he was some Englishman, first started on the road when he had his moments of not being able to deal with the “real” world coming back and wound up a “brother under the bridge for a while.” Yeah one of those guys, guys that Bruce Springsteen immortalized in a song of the same name, “brothers” trying to keep it together as best they could, trying to keep invisible to a world that was not watching anyway.

A long while as it turned out and now Iraq and Afghan guys who can’t adjust worth a damn either keep themselves together as best they can along the abandoned Union Pacific trunk line (Lance forgot which line since they all intersected at various points out in the end of the world and since some have been rekindled by fast unfriendly trains let’s leave at that), next to the Potomac River down in Washington with the desperate homeless (Jesus, guys without a decent bedroll against the sweats and against those young soldiers running their asses off by the Arlington National Cemetery), the mentally disturbed and the those Congress let fall between the cracks, under the Golden Gate Bridge in Frisco Town with a newspaper for a pillow and the ships honking in the harbor responding to that eternal fog horn coming out of the Japan seas, under the railroad bridges in half the back alley towns in America, call them, Quincy, DeKalb, Council Bluffs, Grand Island, Cheyenne or beat down Hartford (but watch out on that last site the Connecticut staties are bastards who like swinging first and letting god separate out the injured from the rest).

Blackie this dusty Gallup night, his second in camp since jumping the rails was explaining how he got the road “bug,” explaining why he had to wander the roads of America once the limits of Northport where he came of age in the 1960s over in Massachusetts crashed in on him. (And after that hell-hole Vietnam War Army stuff but that didn’t give him any traction since most of the guys in the “audience” were veterans of some battle, if only the battle of the bottle). Of course a lot of guys, hell, Blackie himself when he was on the “con” would be the first to tell you in all “candor” a million stories, would tell a million candid stories to get a little dough, maybe a pack of cigarettes, a cup of coffee, whatever he could hustle (and the success of the story depended on how much rotgut whisky, wine or one in a while out on the West Coast dope, mostly marijuana but occasionally hash or some fresh opium some new “brother” brought back and cut up for the brethren, he had consumed to smooth over his story or make it go bust if he over indulged). So while the heads of the stew-bums, drifters, grifters, midnight sifters, ropers, dopers and just plain crazy were nodding in orchestrated agreement more than one guy who probably would have been floored if you had named that look they were giving this way, was looking askance at this brother who had just rolled in from Phoenix on the late Southern Pacific the day before and was warming the boys up with his tale of woe like a lot of new guys do to act like they fit in. Not knowing that around Gallup anyway every wanderer is welcome until he is not welcome which means that he has pissed off Railroad Shorty the “king of the hoboes” in the Gallup precincts designated by his brethren as such couple of years back. (In a bi-annual congress of hoboes, tramps and bums all with equal votes to confer that title although the title always went to the top hobo in an arcane selection process worthy of the regular Congress.)                

But Blackie after grabbing some hard-bitten stew ladled out of a big vat and being poured a canteen full off bitter end coffee by “Kitchen Charlie,” a lamed-up guy but harmless who like the chuck-wagon cooks who couldn’t cowboy anymore back in the Old West times was reduced to serving them off the arm to the thirty or so tramps, bums, and hoboes that Railroad Shorty had given his stamp of approval to, wanted to tell his story (by the way there are differences among those three classes of  brethren acknowledged as such even in “jungle” society mostly having to do with trust-worthiness and sociability although those road gradations are not germane here and so will be passed over). Just from the way he kind of ambled up to the subject of how he got on the road when he arrived he had been asked by “Red River Rob” how long such a young fellow had been on the road every tramp, bum, and hobo within hearing distance knew he had some back agony to get off his chest. Maybe, the speculation among the brethren went before this “speech” since he was a young guy centered on some “woman trouble” what the permanent residents, or what passed for permanent there, called a Phoebe Snow story (named after an ancient railroad station advertisement of an ethereally   beautiful proper Victorian vestal virgin young lady in purity white used to promote passenger train fares once the railroads solved the coal-dust that settled on everything that moved problem), which was always bound to get a hearing since almost every guy at one time whether he could remember it or not had some “woman trouble” that drove him to the roads, would get a tearful hearing if the story was played right or the brethren were in a forlorn mood.

While Blackie was warming up to his subject a couple of older guys, guys who have not been with a women since they invented them from the look of them were eying Blackie for maybe some bedroll time (the great unspoken homosexual acts of the women-less road wanderers just like in prison, boarding school, and other women-less locales so in general no cause for an uproar unless knives came into play), but watch out boys though for while Blackie looked like meat he cut a guy up six ways to Sunday in Westminster when he though the wiry Blackie could be had for the taking although that would mishap would not be part of Blackie’s story this night, no need since it was obvious from the time he arrived the previous morning Railroad Shorty had taken a shine to him, was treating him like a long lost son so those leering red eyes will be warned off, or else. 

Blackie had told the brethren earlier before he shouted out that “the hell with theory” blast that his grandfather Lamont Kelly, road moniker “Night-Train Bill” which a couple of the really wizened older guys kind of nodded at the mention, nodded like maybe they had run into him back in the 1890s when Night-Train tired of the no job, no nothing soup-line East decided at age nineteen to “ride the rails” to “sleep under the steel stars” as he called it years later when he related his story to Blackie one night when he was in his cups and reflecting on that long ago lost youth. Yeah, that was the wanderer part, the genetic part inherited from those forbears hearty and hale enough to manage the voyage on the “famine ships” in the 1840s when Ireland artificially went hungry (there was plenty of food according to the legend but the bloody British wanted to “thin Ireland out” for the sheep or goats or whatever it was they wanted to feed proper, feed proper except Irish people make of that what you will) and headed to the “promise land,” the “land of milk and honey” and it was for a while until the hard times of the 1890s, that big economic depression that some guys might have read about in school if they had gone that put  a crimp in every working household. And so Lamont had set out to the west to make his fortune some damn way.           

Blackie laughed as the crowd in front of him began to drift off in place or got fidgety and began to move until he said that was Night-Train’s front story, the story for kids and that he would push to respectable society in Northport and true enough but if you wanted to know the real reason that he headed West she had a name, one Minnie Callahan. The crowd settled back down now that the kid was getting to something they could ponder. Naturally what did the trick was when he described Night-Train’s fair lass, all long and slender, with well-turned legs (as Lamont said he knew first hand Blackie added), skin like milk, green eyes and long, very long red-hair tied up in braids and that description got every man in camp thinking about his own Phoebe Snow, maybe even those two guys who looked like they hadn’t been with a woman since they were invented. But it wasn’t to be between Night-Train and Minnie, you see she was married, married and intended to stay married to the son of one of the big cranberry bog owners for which the town of Carver a few towns over from Northport  was famously known. All she was thinking of was a “fling” (that was not what she called it nor what Lamont called it because they didn’t call it that in those days but every men knew what Blackie was getting at). At the beginning that was all Lamont was looking for too. But Minnie was always on his mind, and he was always plotting ways that they could be together. But she dismissed him and his half-cocked runaway to the West and settle in some anonymous town plans out of hand, said that if he did not like the situation she would end the relationship. And so one night Night-Train packed his rucksack and headed down the road to catch a Boston and Maine freight, and kept on moving, moving west until he ran out of land around rural ocean front Carlsbad down in Southern California. Made a name for himself telling his tale of woe before campfires like the one Blackie had the “gab” on.

Blackie soon stopped that Night-Train story because he could tell that his audience was wilting a little, anxious to get to whatever Blackie’s woes were. [Blackie would not tell them, and had no plans to, that Night-Train once he heard that Minnie had moved to Beacon Hill in Boston with that cranberry king’s son headed back to Northport and eventually got married to Catherine Riley and had his father, Lawrence, the one who stayed in the ship-building machine shop business as long as it lasted from the time he got out of vocational school until that folded and he did “the best he could” including  seasonal stints as a “bogger” in the cranberry bogs which caused no end of embarrassment for Catherine and the kids since the “boggers” were the lowest of the low, and four other children.]

Sensing the restlessness setting in again he sighed and said that he too had headed out on the road because of a woman, Laura Perkins (although he did not give her last name), all long and slender, with well-turned legs (as he knew first hand Blackie added), skin like milk, green eyes, and long, very long red-head and that description got every man in camp once again thinking about some lost in the mist of time Phoebe Snow. But here is where Lamont’s story and his depart. See Laura, a college student at Boston University whom he had met one night in a bar in Kenmore Square and they had hit it off from the first, had gotten pregnant, had wanted to keep the baby and get married and Blackie less than a year back to the “real” world from Vietnam and having trouble adjusting on his own wanted no part of the set-up.  One night Blackie packed his rucksack and headed down the road to Cambridge to catch some trucker heading west at the big depot adjacent to the Mass Pike, and kept on moving, moving west until he ran out of land around Westminster down in Southern California where that “band of brothers under the bridge,” guys who also had a hard time adjusting welcomed him to the alternative world they were trying to create until the “Chips” [California Highway Patrol] busted the camp up one night. So he started heading back east, maybe to New Orleans if things worked out.

As the campfire’s light flicked and men started yawning for the sleep of hard road under the steel stars more than one of them probably though back to some similar situation that drove them to the road, maybe they couldn’t stand being cooped up in their own Northports, maybe tired of paying child support, grew tired of being dunned by the rent collector and six other kinds of collectors, maybe hated the nine to five world, maybe got thrown out when he spent the paycheck at some men’s bar, each man had his own story, his own reason for grabbing a moniker, for not leaving a forwarding address, and lived now, as some song-writer said on “train smoke and dreams.”          

 As Blackie turned down his own bedroll one wag yelled out, “Hey, Blackie you know maybe it isn’t that wandering that is the DNA stuff you were talking about but going after flaming red-headed dolls with well-turned legs that had the men in your family in a lather. What do you think?” Blackie didn’t answer but thought-“Yeah, the hell with theory.”