Abyss, cesspool, charnel-house withal, predominant in all London’s stuff about his time on the road is a swagger, an exuberance, a coruscation of adventure. It is this Melvillean spirit - never fully realized, considers Feied, who believes there could have been a Moby Dick of the boxcars, given a writer of its author’s genius ‘pursuing his elusive dream across the thousands of miles of heartland track, linking up with all the lost places at the terminus points of trunk lines, riding possum-belly across the Rockies, being ditched in Florida cane brakes or at the end of a logging line and then going home to write a symbolic epic of hobo existence’ - which, diminuendo, has continued to beguile young Americans.
It is striking how often a similar start has been narrated by those putting their hobo years down on paper, how the railroads’ hatchments branded themselves hotly on the imagination, much as did the navigational charts brand St Exupery’s: ‘… the green and brown and yellow lands promised by the maps; the rosary of resounding names that make up the pilot’s beads.’ Chaplin recalls: ‘There was always activity in the yards even when the gates were up. There were slow-moving, ever-puffing switch engines, the continuous bumper-together of uncoupled cars. There were block after block of “empties” along the tracks with names of strange cities and far-off places.’ Tully’s Beggars of Life has the classical opening: as a boy he loitered near the marshalling grounds of Van Wert County, Ohio. He ‘met hoboes there, who nonchalantly told me strange tales of far places’. One day, near the trestle outside St Mary’s, he gets into conversation with a one-eyed youth on his way through from California who urges Tully to chuck in his factory job and take to the road.
‘All you’re doin’ here’s eatin’,’ he says. ‘You kin git that any-where. A stray cat gits that. Besides, you’re learnin’ somethin’ on the road. What the devil kin you learn here ?’
Tully snags his first ride on a freight to Muncie, Indiana, and shelters from a snow-storm in a sand-shed where a flock of hobos are heating coffee on a stove and eating their ‘lumps’. One says: ‘It takes a lotta guts for green kids to beat it on a day like this. I’d beat it back home if I was you till the bluebirds whistle in the spring.’
But Tully cannot wait for the bluebirds’ call because to him, as in the case of London, the talk of the ragged young rovers is more bewitching by far. ‘I came in over the Big Four today from Saint Louie. I wanta make it to Cincy an’ beat it South.’ ‘It ain’t bad in New Orleans. A guy kin allus git by there.”
So Tully goes on, hoboing around Kentucky and Indiana, through to Chicago, and then out on a mail train to Omaha - the beginning of twenty years of jungles, jails and a thousand American towns passed through on manifests, in coke cars, through rain and frost spreadeagled flat on the top of a passenger coaches. At length, Tully concludes: ‘Tramping in wild and windy places, without money, food or shelter, was better for me than supinely bowing to any conventional decree of fate. The road gave me one jewel beyond price, the leisure to read and dream … voices calling in the night from far-away places …’
The nimbus of glamour had not receded when Anderson was investigating the hobo more than twenty years later: ‘A visit to the “jungles” reveals the extent to which the tramp is consciously and enthusiastically imitated. Around the camp fire watching the coffee pot boil or the “mulligan” cook, the boys are often found mingling with the tramps and listening in on their stories of adventure. To boys the tramp is not a problem, but a human being and an interesting one at that.
‘He has no cares nor burdens to hold him down. All he is concerned with is to live and seek adventure, and in this he personifies the heroes in the stories the boys have read. Tramp life is an invitation to a career of varied experiences and adventures. All this is a promise and a challenge.’
Anderson has his definition of wanderlust: ‘… a longing for new experiences. Its expression in the form of tramping, “making” the harvest field, roughing it, pioneering, is a social pattern of American life.’
He cites two cases personally encountered: ‘S. who is nineteen years old has been a wanderer for nearly four years. He does not know why he travels except that he gets thrills out of it … When he can outwit the “bulls” he gets a “kick” out of it. He would rather ride the passenger trains than the freights because he can “get there” quicker, and then, they are watched closer. He likes to tell of making “big jumps” on passenger trains as from the Coast to Chicago in five days, or from Chicago to Kansas City or Omaha in one day. He only works long enough in one place to get a “grubstake”, or enough money to live on for a few days. He says that he knows that he would be better off if he would settle down to some steady job. He has tried it a few times but the monotony of it made him so restless that he had to leave.
‘In the case of W., who left home at sixteen, he was the oldest of a family of five boys and three girls … Most of his letters were boastful. He told of prospering and he moved from place to place often to show the other children at home that he could go and come as he pleased. He traveled in different parts of the country and from each part he would write painting his experiences in a rosy hue. He succeeded in stirring up unrest in the hearts of the other boys … All five boys left home before they were sixteen. Only one returned home. The others roamed the country following migratory work. The father always blamed W. for leading the boys away … He was the idol of the rest of the children and they left home to follow in his footsteps.’
Long before the government began its feeble and half-hearted efforts to recapture those unknown divagating numbers there were many admonitions to young people. Often written by reformed hobos they exhorted the tempted to ignore the voices calling in the night.
In the early 1900s there was a considerable volume of subterranean news-stand literature, smudgy little booklets in wavery type printed by back street jobbing firms in Seattle or Oklahoma City or Butte, whose tone was that of Temperance holy horror but which in fact were an early version of lid-off journalism. Always here was an inverted glorification of the hobo’s vocation or fate effected by ‘exposing’ its vileness and degeneracy, much as the more stridently edifying Victorian tracts against loose-living could hardly have failed to stimulate the appetite of the normally lusty.
Typical of this idiom is Benson’s Hoboes of America pamphlet in which he loudly warns boys - and ‘hoboettes’ too - not to ‘satisfy your travel urge by beating your way’ and he alerts them: ‘STOP, LOOK AND LISTEN! Among the millions or so of men and boys on the road every summer can be found parasites, defectives, imbeciles, jail-birds, perverts, morons and such of every description.
‘But - your pride is apt to keep you at it - until it is too late, and you eventually become a chronic tramp or hobo. Wait until you can PAY your way - and travel like a man - with your head up - chest out and so you will enjoy travel life without the dangers and the risks I have truthfully enumerated.’
He appends this sombre poem:
The Road today has lost its charm -
It’s a road that’s filled with pain!
It’s to be feared with real alarm,
With misfortunes in its train I
For a while - it may thrill you -
And you’ll follow it with a smile -
But the end of the road may lead you to
Untold regrets - at its ‘Last Mile’.
Even more bloodcurdling are the writings of Livingston (or ‘A No. 1’, as he signed himself) and who claimed to have been on the road with Jack London. In 1910 appeared the first of his hobo paperbacks, Adventures of ‘A No. 1’, and this was followed a year later by Hobo-Camp-Fire-Tales, with the sub-heading (which must straight off have eliminated an entire potential jungle readership) STRICTLY MORAL NO STALE JOKES NO LOVE AFFAIRS. In 1912 he produced the most enthralling of all his works, a booklet with a rancid orange cover bearing the sketch of a gigantic locomotive hurtling down upon a tattered gadabout with a stick and bundle, and a famished-looking vulture on an adjacent signpost marked DEATH. This
sold for twenty-five cents, and was entitled The Curse of Tramp Life by ‘A No. 1, The King of the Hoboes, Who Traveled 500,000 Miles for Only $7.61’.
The sixty-one cents must alone have been enough to prick the reader’s curiosity to the extent of forking out twenty-five cents yet it is difficult to stifle one’s disappointment upon finding inside a full-length photograph of a gentleman of ramrod respectability, looking rather like a retired cavalry colonel, with sensitive cowlick hair-do and a brisk parade ground moustache.
‘In presenting this, my third tramp story, to the public,’ begins the author of The Curse of Tramp Life, ‘I do so with the assurance that this book is absolutely suited to be read by the most delicate child as well as the most dainty lady, has not a single objectionable word or phrase written here. It tears to shreds the glamor thrown over this miserable existence by romancing writers. Primarily its object is to prove to boys and men of restless dispositions that by their heeding the “Lure of the Wanderlust” they not only wreck their own futures but very often the lives and happiness of their parents.’
In a further prefatory address, A No. 1 addresses the reader: ‘Will you please do your share to assist humanity at large and the railroad companies especially to solve the tramp problem by explaining to every boy you find at your door asking for a lunch what a fool he is, trying to lead all his days, the life I am attacking in this book, from my personal experience as a tramp. Can you not take the time and patience and do by him the same as you would pray some other person to do by your own son, brother or relative, should he run away from home, leaving behind him a broken hearted mother to mourn while waiting perchance for a return of that ever same wandering, wayward boy, who had knocked at your door? THE AUTHOR.’
Yet more preamble, ‘To Every Young Man And Boy’ begins the next page, ‘who reads this book the author has led for over a quarter of a century a pitiful and dangerous life of the tramp gives this well meant advice. DO NOT jump on moving trains or street cars if only to ride to the next street crossing because this may arouse “wanderlust” besides endangering undoubtedly your life and limb.’
How deadly is this streptococcus, poised to worm into the bloodstream of every lad who as much as lifts his boots from the neighbourhood sidewalk? Lethal. ‘Wandering once it becomes a habit is incurable so Never Run Away, Stay At Home. AS a roving lad there is a dark side to a tramp’s life.
‘A tramp is constantly hounded by the minions of the law; is shunned by all humanity and never knows the meaning of home and friends. To tell the truth, it is a pitiful existence … And what is the end ? It is an even ninety-nine chances of a hundred that the end will be a miserable one - an accident, an alms house, but surely an unmarked pauper’s grave.’
The actual story, up to which all this has been leading, is magnificent melodrama, up among the McGonagall and Amanda Ros summits of banality.
‘But look!’ it opens. ‘There upon the hill amongst the majestic oaks, in the upper story in the left wing of the Manor, a lighted lamp was moving from room to room.’ The lady of the manor, Mrs Braxton, enters the library and holds the lamp up to a painting of a ‘handsome, manly boy of about seventeen … her runaway son, Buford’. She spends some time sobbing, then ‘suddenly with a loud thud she falls heavily in a dead faint upon the floor’. In a drawing Mr Braxton crouches praying at her bedside: ‘Oh God! Bring back our wandering boy before his mother loses her mind.’
The author introduces himself in Chapter Two. He is leaning against a lamp-post in Cleveland, listening to a nagging inner voice: ‘Get out of this, A No. 1, this is no place for you … Go where you hear real noises, the pounding of the wheels, the clicking of the rails.’ The author continues: ‘Thus the voice whispered, implored, then threatened. I, too, like so many others, had become ensnared by this strange something, the “Wanderlust”, so subtle and yet so strong, that whosoever follows its call more than once, always stays its victim.’
Wanderlust wins. Later he is huddled on a train ledge in the gale of wind and smoke. ‘I fully realized the pitiful existence I was leading … hiding like a hounded criminal risking every moment, my liberty, limbs and life - a slave of the “Wanderlust”!’
All the tramps A No. 1 encounters are with extraordinary unanimity also writhing anguishedly in the grip of the ‘Wanderlust’, and all with the barest excuse deliver confessions of a turgidity one suspects seldom reverberated within a boxcar. One, the Kentucky Kid, slides off at the end of a run from Cincinnati, saying: ‘Good-bye, Bo, Good-bye the “Road”, and the cursed “Wanderlust”, it’s “Home sweet Home” and mother after this for me.’
Another, California Dan, repining for the death of a comrade who has ‘greased the rails’ - been squashed into extinction - says: ‘In the cars, under the cars, even upon this “Path of Blasted Hopes”, this cursed “Wanderlust” collects its uncanny dues from our ranks’ and he plods off whistling Home, Sweet Home.
Towards the end of his rambling reminiscences the narrative is unexpectedly wrenched back to its original motif. By an amazing coincidence A No. 1 finds himself the fellow casualty of a train wreck in hospital with a bandaged lad - yes, Buford Braxton.
A No. 1 tells him: ‘Buford Braxton, your darling mother is waiting with open arms for you this moment… old Aunt Dinah and all the other faithful darkies are yearning for your return … tell her that you do not wish to end your days an outcast, despised hobo, but instead will take your place again in the world as Buford Braxton of Braxton Manor?’
A No. l’s eloquence works: ‘Hardly had I spoken that last syllable than he threw his arms around my neck and amid loud sobs begged me to bring him back to his mother. I asked him to join me in a silent prayer to God for Him to help us to reach Kentucky in safety.’
Someone was double-crossing someone. After the interlude of a year or two following his delivery of Buford back to mother and the faithful darkies A No. 1 drops in at the manor, but Buford isn’t there: he is up in the cemetery.
Says his mother: ‘Buford could not resist that monster he has so often called in our presence the “Wanderlust”. Every so often he would almost rave, until he had another fling at the road … Our pleadings were in vain. Once too often he went, and they brought him back to us in a pine box - killed under the cars by the “Curse of Tramp Life” - the “Wanderlust”.’
One cannot doubt the sincerity, nor the basic truth, of A No. I’s grisly and harrowing tale, yet somehow his text is anticlimactic. Although Buford from his hospital cot hints at some unpleasant experience with a jocker named Railroad Jack, he does not admit to having done worse than beg for him. And either A No. 1 managed by miraculous rectitude to remain sterling and chaste during his twenty-five years on the bum or he is holding back, for he admits to corruption no more heinous than submission to a bit of light-fingered snitching, an implied oath or two uttered within his hearing, and suffering five days in the county chain-gang in a ‘zebra-striped suit of shame’ for trespass.
Preposterous though A No. 1 succeeds in making it sound, perhaps wanderlust is the aptest condensed term for the compulsion which has been disturbingly active in American life and which cannot be explained by a moving streetcar, nor by hearing other boys boast of their travels, nor by economic straits alone. It is the restlessness of that pioneer who saw with agony that the bark was peeling off his fence-rails and there he was still in the same place - the search in the mind for God’s Country.
The spirit had already entered literature long before London and Tully and A No. 1 hit the road, even before the railroads were accessible to absentees. It was there in Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain’s ‘Odyssey of Adventure on the Mississippi’ published in 1884, ‘the symbol of a little boy who ran away from home because he did not want to be civilized’.
Parkes sees Huckleberry Finn as a profoundly melancholy book because it marks the point at which American individualism began to succumb to defeat. It was written as the old uninhibited freedom of the frontier was rapidly vanishing and the outrider
American was being overtaken by all that he had spurned, and implies that ‘civilization, with all its restraints and its hypocrisies, is an inevitable process to which the individual must finally conform; to assert oneself against it is impossible, and to attempt to run away from it is infantile … It represents the transition between the folk hero of agrarian and frontier America, who believes in self-reliance and seeks to assert his will against his environment, and the folk hero of industrial America, who is the victim of social forces he cannot hope to control. Mike Fink is in the process of being transformed into Charlie Chaplin.’
18 Sex and the single man
I’ve hiked and hiked till my feet are sore
I’ll be God-damned if I hike any more
punk to jocker in The Big Rock Candy Mountains
Many Americans have, as we have seen, attempted the ‘infantile’ solution: they ran away from ‘civilization’ and often when not much more than infants. And the particular function which these child tramps fulfilled in the hobo netherworld is one which has seldom been examined frankly and directly: the role of the punk.
Punk in tramp terminology is a catamite or young male ‘wife’ of a sodomite, also known as a lamb or ‘preshun’, a shortening of apprentice. It cannot be doubted that the call of the illusory wild, together with the thrust of home hardship from behind, drove a large number of juveniles on to the road, but nor can it be doubted that many were victims of a basement white slave traffic, deliberately lured away by hobo homosexual hunters.
Hard Travellin Page 21