From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- “Down And Out In America-Part II”

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Hazel Dickens performing Bob Dylan’s Only A Hobo.

Only A Hobo by Bob Dylan

Lyrics

As I was out walking on a corner one day
I spied an old hobo, in a doorway he lay
His face was all grounded in the cold sidewalk floor
And I guess he’d been there for the whole night or more

Only a hobo, but one more is gone
Leavin’ nobody to sing his sad song
Leavin’ nobody to carry him home
Only a hobo, but one more is gone

A blanket of newspaper covered his head
As the curb was his pillow, the street was his bed
One look at his face showed the hard road he’d come
And a fistful of coins showed the money he bummed

Only a hobo, but one more is gone
Leavin’ nobody to sing his sad song
Leavin’ nobody to carry him home
Only a hobo, but one more is gone

Does it take much of a man to see his whole life go down
To look up on the world from a hole in the ground
To wait for your future like a horse that’s gone lame
To lie in the gutter and die with no name?

Only a hobo, but one more is gone
Leavin’ nobody to sing his sad song
Leavin’ nobody to carry him home
Only a hobo, but one more is gone

Copyright © 1963, 1968 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1996 by Special Rider Music

*******
I woke with a start that dreary late October night, early morning really from the look of the lightened sky, last cold night or so, before drifting south then heading west to warmer climes for “winter camp.” Yes, I had the routine down pretty pat back then. Summering in the Cambridges and then wintering in the Keys, or in some Pancho Villa bandito arroyo in desert California, maybe Joshua Tree. But just that minute my summer was interrupted by a loud sound of snoring and short breathe coughing from some fellow resident who had parked himself about twenty feet from my exclusive turf.

Hell, I didn’t mean to tease you about my itinerary (although the gist of schedule was real enough, damn real), or about my mayfair swell digs. The fact is that back then I had been in kind of a bad streak and so sweet home Eliot Bridge right next to the Charles River, but not too next to Harvard Square had been my “home” of late then while I prepared for those sunnier climes just mentioned. Those last few previous months have been tough though, first losing that swell paying job “diving for pearls” at Elsie’s, then losing my apartment when the landlord decided, legally decided, that six months arrears was all that he could take, and then losing Janie over some spat, and getting so mad I “took” a couple of hundred dollars from her pocketbook as I went out the not-coming-back door that last time. So there I was at “home” waiting it out.

I had a pretty good set-up under the bridge, I thought. Far enough away from the Square so that the druggies and drunks wouldn’t dream of seeking shelter so far from their base. But close enough for me to try to panhandle a stake to head west with in rich folks Harvard Square (although apparently the rich those days preferred to tithe in other ways than to part with their spare change to, uh, itinerants). And, moreover, the bridge provided some protection against the chilly elements, and a stray nosey cop or two ready to run a stray itinerant in order to fill his or her quota on the run-in sheet.

All that precious planning had gone for naught though because some snoring be-draggled newspaper strewn hobo had enough courage to head a few hundred yards up river and disturb my home. There and then I decided I had better see what the guy looked like, see if he was dangerous, and see if I could get him the hell out of there so I could get back to sleep for a couple more hours before the damn work-a-day world traffic made this spot too noisy to sleep in. Besides, as is the nature of such things on the down and out American road (and in other less exotic locales as well), he might have other companions just ready to put down stakes here before I am ready to head west.

I unfolded my own newspaper covering, folded up my extra shirt pillow and put it in my make-shift ruck-sack, and rolled (rolled for the umpteenth time) my ground covering and placed it next to my ruck-sack. No morning ablutions to brighten breath and face were necessary this early, not in this zip code. I was thus ready for guests. I ambled over to the newspaper pile where the snoring had come from and tapped the papers with a stick that I had picked up along the way (never, never use your hand or you might lose your life if the rustling newspaper causes an unseen knife-hand to cut you six ways to Sunday. Don’t laugh it almost happened to me once, and only once.).

He stirred, stirred again, and then opened his eyes saying “Howdy, my name is Boulder Shorty, what’s yours?” (He later told me he that he had never been to Boulder, could not have picked it out on a map if he was given ten chances, and was six feet two inches tall so go figure on monikers. The way they got hanged on a guy was always good for a story in some desolate railroad fireside camp before I got wise enough to stay away from those sites, far away.) I told him mine, my road moniker, “Be-Bop Benny.” He laughed, muttering about beatniks and faux kid hobos in thrall of some Jack London or Jack Kerouac or something vision between short, violent coughs.

Funny about different tramps, hobos, and bums (and there are differences, recognized differences just like in regular society. We, Boulder Shorty and I, were hobos, the kings of the river, ravine, and railroad trestle.). Some start out gruff, tough and mean, street hard mean. Other like Shorty, kings, just go with the flow. And that go with the flow for a little while anyway (a little while being very long in hobo company) kept us together for a while, a few weeks while before that short violent cough caught up with old Shorty (you didn’t have to know medicine, or much else, to know that was the small echo of the death-rattle coming up).

In those few weeks Boulder Shorty taught me more about ‘bo-ing, more about natural things, more about how to take life one day at a time than anybody else, my father included. About staying away from bums and tramps, the guys who talked all day about this and that scan they pulled in about 1958 and hadn’t gotten over it yet. About guys who took your money, your clothes, hell, and your newspaper covering in the dead of night just to do it, especially to young hobo kings. And staying alone, staying away from the railroad, river, ravine camps that everybody talked about being the last refuge for the wayward but were just full of disease, drunks and dips. (I let him talk on about that although that was one thing I was already hip to, a river camp was where I almost got my throat handed back to me by some quick knife tramp that I mentioned before about disturbing guys).

Yes, Boulder Shorty had some street smart wisdom for a guy who couldn’t have been past forty, at least that’s what I figured from the times he gave in his stories. (Don’t try to judge a guy on the road’s age because between the drugs or booze, the bad food, the weather-beaten road, and about six other miseries most guys looked, and acted, like they were about twenty years older. Even I, before a shower to take a few days dirt off and maybe hadn’t eaten for a while, looked older than my thirty years then.) But most of all it was the little tricks of the road that he taught and showed me that held me to him.

Like how my approach, my poor boy hat in hand approach, was all wrong in working the Harvard Square panhandle. You had to get in their faces, shout stuff at them, and block their passage so that the couple of bucks they practically threw at you was far easier to do than have you in their faces. Christ, he collected about twenty bucks in an hour one day, one day when he was coughing pretty badly. And a ton of cigarette, good cigarettes too, that he asked for when some guys (and a few gals) pled no dough. It was art, true art that day.

Or about how a hobo king need never go hungry in any city once he had the Sallies, U/U good and kindly neighbor feeding schedule down. No so much those places, any bum or tramp could figure that out, and wait in line, but to “volunteer” and get to know the people running the thing and get invited to their houses as sturdy yeoman “reclamation” projects. A vacation, see. Best of all was him showing me how to work the social service agencies for ten here, and twenty there, as long as you could hold the line of patter straight and not oversell your misery. Tramps and bums need not apply for this kind of hustle, go back and jiggle your coffee cup in front of some subway station, and good luck.

[He also taught me the ins and outs of jack-rolling, what you would call mugging, if things got really bad. Jack-rolling guys, bigger and smaller than you but I’d rather keep that knowledge to myself.]


Funny we never talked about women, although I tried once to talk to him about Janie. He cut me short, not out of disrespect I don’t think, but he said they were all Janie in the end. He said talking about women was too tough for guys on the road with nothing but drifter, grifter, midnight sifter guys to stare at. Or looking too close at women when on the bum was bad for those longings for home things when you couldn’t do anything about it anyway. Although he did let on once that he was partial to truck stop road side diner waitresses serving them off the arm when he was in the clover (had dough) and was washed up enough to present himself at some stop along the road. Especially the ones who piled the potatoes extra high or double scooped the bread pudding as acts of kindred kindness. One night near the end, maybe a week before, time is hard to remember on the meshed together bum, he started muttering about some Phoebe Snow, some gal all dressed in white, and he kind of smiled, and then the coughing started again.

I tried to get Boulder Shorty moving south with me (and had delayed my own departure to stick with him for as long as I figured I could get south before the snows hit) but he knew, knew deep in his bones, that his time was short, that he wanted to finish up in Boston (not for any special reason, he was from Albany, but just because he was tired of moving) and was glad of my company.

It was funny about how I found out about his Albany roots. One night, a couple of nights before the end, coughing like crazy, he seemingly had to prove to me that he was from Albany. I had mentioned that I was mad for William Kennedy’s novels, Ironweed and the like, that had just come out a couple of years before. He went on and on about the Phelans this and that. Jesus he knew the books better than I did. He say that is what made hobos the intelligentsia of the road. Some old Wobblie folksinger told him that once when they heading west riding the rails on the Denver & Rio Grande. When holed up in some godforsaken library to get out of the weather hobos read rather than just curled up on some stuffed chair. Yes, Boulder Shorty was a piece of work. He was always saying stuff like that.

Then one morning, one too cold Eliot Bridge morning, I tried to shake his newspaper kingdom and got no response. Old Shorty had taken his last ride, his last train smoke and dreams ride he called it. I left him there like he wanted me to and like was necessary on the hobo road. I made a forlorn anonymous call to the Cambridge cops on my way out of town. But on those few occasion when I pass some potter’s field I tip my fingers to my head in his memory, his one less hobo king memory.

The Ghost Classmate-For P., North Adamsville Class Of 1964

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Arlo Guthrie singing a song made famous by his father, Woody, Hobo's Lullaby.

Peter Paul Markin comment:

Every once in a while I am reminded that it has been more than 45 years since we, the Class of 1964, went though the hallowed halls of the old school, old North Adamsville High School. In 2010, when this is written, those of us that went to North Adamsville Junior High School (now Middle School) are facing our 50th anniversary since graduation. Those who went to Adamsville Central get a year's reprieve since your junior high school days extended into ninth grade for some reason, but your day is coming.

Next year will mark 50 years since we all merged together, or those of us on the river side of the Waterview Street border line that separated us from the unspeakable, unfathomable, unlamented, savages of Adamsville High School unlike the genteel intellectuals and their hangers-on who were privileged to go to North, to form the Class of 1964. To mark the occasion I have written a little something.

Or rather Frankie Riley (Francis Xavier Riley, officially), you remember Frankie, the king hell king of the North Adamsville school boy be-bop night and resident king corner boy at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” (no further explanation necessary on the phrase, I hope.) has told me a story that I have written down here. I wrote it but it is strictly Frankie’s take on the thing, just like in the old days when I was his unpaid, unappreciated “scribe” and “go-for.” Christ that mad man owes me big time, big time indeed, for “creating” his legend almost out of whole cloth and he has been soaking up the glory ever since. Some day if there is any justice in this sorry old world the real Frankie story will be told, no fiction, and no holds barred.

If you don’t, don’t remember Frankie that is, I have written a few stories that you can peruse at your leisure. Frankie, just to give a quick "thumbnail" sketch of his doing after high school did not wind up in Walpole State Correctional Institution (now Cedar Junction if you have been out of town for a while) as everybody in North Adamsville, except his corner boys, well except me anyway, expected, graduated from college, went to law school and became a successful lawyer and leading behind-the-scene bigwig in state Democratic Party politics. Go figure, right. There were a few “bumps” along the way but overall he came out of things, as per Frankie usual, without a scratch. That last part, that part about his politics, is important because as a good “politico,” a good bourgeois politico as I would call him (holding my nose while saying it but he knows my position so it’s okay to say that) Frankie always kept his ear to the ground about the doings in North Adamsville, and about his fellow 1964 classmates. The following tale, although not as light-heartedly written as some of my earlier screeds, my earlier Frankie-influenced tales, I believe, makes a point that is worth thinking about.

****
Not everyone who went through our old high school, our beloved, misbegotten North Adamsville High School, survived to tell the tale, or at least the way the tale was suppose to be told, or how they wanted it told. Moreover, we, as a class, after over 45 years, are long enough in the tooth to have accumulated a growing list of causalities, of the wounded and broken, of the beaten down and disheveled. This story, short note really, is going to be about one of our classmates who got lost in the shuffle somehow and it is only here, and only by me [meaning Frankie-PPM] that he will get his epochal struggles voiced. I will not mention his name for you may have sat across from him in class, or given him what passed for "the nod" in the hallway back in the day, or had something of a 'crush' on him because from pictures of him taken back then he certainly had that 'something' physically all the girls were swooning over. Let's just call him, as the title suggests- the ghost classmate (and in the interest of saving precious space in order to tell his story, shorten it to “GC”).

Now I will surprise you, I think. I did not know GC in our school days; at least I have no recollection of him from that time. And you know I knew, as a class officer and as resident king hell king of the Salducci’s Pizza parlor corner boy be-bop night as goofy Markin likes to describe me (and not half-badly at that, come to think of it) I met him, or rather he met me, when we were in our early twenties in front one of the skid row run-down "hotels" (okay flophouse) that dotted the low-rent (then) streets of the waterfront of San Francisco. My reason for being there is a tale for another day, after all this is GC's story, but rest assured I was not in that locale on vacation, nor was he. [Frankie, as he will freely admit now had a drinking/drug problem, a 12-step-sized problem-PPM] Ironically, at our first meeting we were both in the process of pan-handling the same area when the light of recognition hit him. After the usual exchange of personal information, and assorted other lies we spent some weeks together doing, as they say, “the best we could.” Then, one night, he split taking all his, and my, worldly possessions.

Fast forward. A few years later, when I was in significantly better circumstances, if not exactly in the clover, I was walking down Beacon Street in Boston when someone across the street on the Common started to yell my name. Yelled it out, to be honest, in a way that I would usually look down at my shoes, or elsewhere, to avoid having to make any sign of recognition. Well, the long and short of it, was that it was old GC, looking even more disheveled than when I had last seen him. After an exchange of personal data and other details, including a fair representation of lies on both sides, I bought him some dinner. At my starting to be “old haunt”, the Parker House, just to show the swells and ward-heelers I was still a “man of the people.” [PPM, don’t say a word- FXR] The important thing to know, however, is that from that day until very recently I have always been in touch with the man as he has descended further and further into the depths of the skid row ethos. But enough of the rough out-line, let me get to the heart of the matter.

I have left GC's circumstances deliberated vague until now. The reader might assume, given the circumstances of our first meeting, GC to be a man driven to the edge by alcohol, or drugs or any of the other common maladies that break a man's body, or his spirit. Those we can relate to, if not fully understand. No, GC was broken by his own almost psychotically-driven need to succeed, and in the process constantly failing. He had been, a number of times, diagnosed as clinically depressed. I am not sure I can convey, this side of a psychiatrist's couch, that condition in language the reader could comprehend. All that I can say is this man was so inside himself with the need to do the right thing, the honorable thing, and the 'not bad' thing, that he never could do any of those. What a terrible rock to have to keep rolling up the mountain.

Here, however, to my mind is the real tragic part of this story, and the one point that I hope you will take away from this narration. GC and I talked many times about our youthful dreams, about how we were going to conquer this or that "mountain" and go on to the next one, how we would right this or that grievous wrong in the world, and about the need, to borrow the English revolutionary and poet John Milton's words, to discover the "paradise within, happier far". [This last part is strictly PPM, I would not be caught dead reading poetry, not damn English poetry-FXR.] Over the years though GC's dreams got measurably smaller and smaller, and then smaller still until there were no more dreams, only existence. That, my friends, is the stuff of tragedy, not conjured up Shakespearean (blasted Englishman) tragedy, but real tragedy.

Hobo's Lullaby
by Goebel Reeves

Go to sleep you weary hobo
Let the towns drift slowly by
Can't you hear the steel rail humming
That's a hobo's lullaby

Do not think about tomorrow
Let tomorrow come and go
Tonight you're in a nice warm boxcar
Safe from all the wind and snow

I know the police cause you trouble
They cause trouble everywhere
But when you die and go to heaven
You won't find no policemen there

I know your clothes are torn and ragged
And your hair is turning grey
Lift your head and smile at trouble
You'll find happiness some day

So go to sleep you weary hobo
Let the towns drift slowly by
Don't you feel the steel rail humming
That's a hobo's lullaby

©1961,1962 (Renewed) Fall River Music, Inc. (BMI)
All Rights Reserved.