There are three distinct categories of men without. They are at the bottom rungs of the social ladder, beginning with the town drunk in a tiny village, all the way to the Industrial Revolution wasteland. They’re known as hobos, tramps, and bums. I refer to the homeless. You’ve seen them everywhere and likely ignored their plight. Some people like to call them the unhoused. Any way you view it, on the surface, they all look like bums, but there are numerous subtle differences. As the vast homeless population grows every year, they’re somehow made to seem quaint and harmless by poverty deniers and others whose glib, self-serving rejection panders to those without. The Great Depression is an example of how the homeless grew into a separate, unequal population living in shabby shantytowns called Hoovervilles, named after President Herbert Hoover. Hiding out in hobo jungles, they sprung up, dotting the countryside near train stations, stockyards and slaughterhouses.
There were plenty of men wandering the country’s city streets, but there weren’t many female hobos. Two “boyettes” as they were called, come to mind. Boxcar Bertha, aka Bertha Thompson, was the queen of hobo-rabble-rousing union organizers for the Wobblies of the IWW. Salt Chunk Mary, a character in Jack Black’s 1926 novel, You Can’t Win, is rollicking and humorous. A cautionary tale about life traveling across the landscape of the American migration west in the late-1800s to the 20th century and spilling over into the 21st century’s schizoid culture. The film Emperor of the North, made in 1973, depicts the struggles of a hobo, played by Lee Marvin, along with his young roustabout apprentice, acted by a young Keith Carradine. Riding the rails with a personal vendetta and battle of wits dodging the train dick conductor part portrayed by Ernest Borgnine, who throws them off the train at every turn. Like a real-life combo with Woody Guthrie on steroids battling the greedy bigot landlord Fred Trump. Or perhaps Tom Joad telling his ma he’ll be there for the down-and-out people in The Grapes of Wrath.
There are other names for the less fortunate: sleazeballs, pimps, hop-heads, yeggs, guttersnipes, junkies, bag ladies, winos, street punks, urchins, etc. There’s a litany of stereotypes about the crazy types of street people, labeled misfits. To give the public a melancholy glimpse into the evolution of hapless romantic cartoons that display lovable hobos, or humorous little tramps, made famous by Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or Emmett Kelly, the circus hobo clown is called “Weary Willie.” It’s not necessarily true that money buys happiness, luxury, or easy-living handouts for spare change by panhandling. Lorenzo the Tramp had a local morning television show for kids. He did a dance called the Lorenzo Stomp to the tune of the Boots Randolph instrumental hit “Yakety Sax.” He claimed he wore the same beat-up fedora hat for the 17 years his show aired.
It’s true that nobody suffers like the poor. If you doubt it, ask any street-type survivor on the hustle, sleeping rough, traveling light. They inhabit soup kitchens and flophouses, bug- and vermin-infested, mostly dirty types with empty pockets, a well-worn toothbrush, and maybe a change of underwear if they’re lucky. They suffer the humiliation of constant degradation, high anxiety, and manic depression from living alone on the streets with a never-ending lack of money or shelter. They wander lonely railroad tracks talking to themselves, spending days searching the city for food, a flop house, or a skin cage to lay down their heads, if only for a night. The poor don’t have leisure time to think about the class differences that exist, separating the privileged from the less fortunate. They don’t think about baseball, the president, or Taylor Swift. They don’t give a damn about the Olympics. The problems are obvious and flourish today in the un-American diorama. A lost society of the perpetual vagrant has always had a place in our collective cultural consciousness. From the Tenderloin in San Francisco’s Mission District to Skid Rows, from the Bowery of NYC to every major metropolitan area and rural towns in between them.
The hobo is top-shelf when you compare them to tramps and lowly bums. A hobo will travel cross-country, riding the rails, to find work. A tramp will hop a train too but chooses to do nothing when given a choice. Tramps will begrudgingly work, if necessary. The bum will neither travel nor work, dependent exclusively on the charity of handouts, soup kitchens, salvation ministries, or whatever they can steal. A pie from the windowsill or chicken from the hen house. There’s nothing more discouraging than witnessing someone eating out of a trash can or dumpster. Sitting quietly in a soup kitchen, they are forced to listen to a Christian sermon before eating a bowl of cold soup and stale bread.
Hobos have a secret code of conduct, symbols, and markers to follow on the road. Bums, on the other hand, don’t give a damn for anyone or anything other than their next meal or a brief respite from bad weather on the road. There’s nothing worse than walking into a McDonald’s bathroom to discover a bum washing their private parts or, worse, two bums having bum sex. I’ve seen worse. Bums will fight all comers and each other for a bottle of booze or a few cigarettes.
There were plenty of times in my younger days when I was a wanderer. I was called a tramp, a hobo, and even a lousy bum. My parents, in their misguided old-world tough love, among others, mostly bad employers paying minimum wage for shitty jobs, in their pompous superiority shtick, told me I was a bum who’d never amount to anything. I took it to heart because eventually I became the very thing they said I was. I managed to survive those carefree bum years in spite of the odds or the fate of unfeeling gods. Often dangerous, unpredictable, and sometimes cruel. I finally arrived at a loving home with a beautiful wife and family. Now, those bum days are long past. I fit in perfectly with my new life. I'm just glad and happy to be living well now. It’s the sweetest revenge for any old drunken bum.