Hobo Jesus
I met the hobo-Jesus in 1938, two weeks after I got out of a short stint in prison for defrauding the mayor of St. Louis (or Mr. Louis, as the city was called back before it was canonized in 1944)So I rolled out of prison in Missouri and wandered down to the train tracks after using the fifteen bucks I had to get myself a pocket knife, a large polka-dotted handkerchief, a tin cup and several cans of beans and soup. Well equipped (I’d be halfway to Reno before I realized I had neglected a spoon- I had to steal one from a clothesline) for the hobo lifestyle, I set myself up for a trip across the great nation I had lost touch with during my six-month incarceration.Within a week I had found some pleasant traveling companions- Shoebox Pete, Weedy John Smokey, Not-A-Hobo Mark Hobo, Sweatstain Luke, Stainsweat Pauly, Tomas “and his lies” O’Boyd, and a handful of other smelly, dirty guys with bindles and shivs.
Before long, we were rolling across the Rockies in a boxcar full of back issues of Highlights magazine, smoking some of Weedy John Smokey’s finest sock grown fungal-enhanced super-dope and talking about the typical hobo subjects- booze, soup and economic theory. When properly baked, Weedy John was fond of telling stories. None of us ever believed a word he said, but we were all bored with Highlights so we crowded around and listened, pausing occasionally to urinate out the open boxcar door, or as us hobos called it, Performing an Experiment in Fluid Dynamics.
Anyway, John started telling the story of a hooker he new back in Intercourse Pennsylvania. She called herself ‘Intercourse’s Favorite Daughter’ and charged on a sliding scale depending on how much she liked your business card. Her brother, it turns out, ran the town’s only design and print shop. She was good at her job, and he was terrible, so when word got out that she preferred his bland but colorful work, his business skyrocketed. The suspicion that she was also related to the local gossip columnist was never proven, but she did end up marrying the local divorce attorney, having personally been the inspiration for the sharp increase in the town’s divorce rate. She, her husband and her brother ended up retiring quite comfortably.
As John was finishing up his story, and pulling out his torn, yellowed and stained business card, (Professor Emeritus, Hobo-American History, it said), our train pulled into some stop, and after a couple minutes, our boxcar door slid open a crack. We were laughing about the hooker from Pennsylvania and her mustache (The mustache doesn’t really enter into the story, but she had a big, curly one) but we stopped when that door slid open a bit. A scrawny dude with a big beard poked his head in the door and asked if we minded another passenger. He had a big bottle of wine under one arm, so we figured it was time to make a new friend and invited him in. He pulled his lanky frame into the box car, and plopped down his sack. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I am Maurice, the nephew of God, and the lord of the hobos.” Then Tom And His Lies threw a can of tuna at Maurice and knocked him unconscious.
He woke up a couple hours later and offered us some wine. He said nothing about the can or being the nephew of God, just rolled over, sat up and said “gentlemen, how about some wine?”
Then we were all friends. Maurice ended up traveling with us into Mexico, somehow acquiring a new bottle of wine at every stop. Tom never took to Maurcie, but booze buys a lot of friends, and Maurice always had some to spare.
Before long it was Maurice who was picking the direction for travel; north out of Mexico, Rancho Cucamonga, Walla Walla, Kalamazoo, Sugartit, Beebeetown, Pippa Passes, and all the funniest town names in America. Once, in Monkeys Eyebrow, Arizona he saved a kitten from a tree, and bandaged a small opossum’s broken tail. As he finished the bandaging he said “and blessed are the marsupials, for they shall inherit the earth.”
Things took a downward turn when Judy Stinko got arrested in some South Dakota hellhole. He got caught breaking into houses to eat goldfish. He always said he preferred goldfish to any other seafood and liked them best “fresh from a life of indulgence,” so he always stole them from rich fat kids.
Anyway, Judy Stinko, self-centered bastard that he always was, decided to save himself by figuratively throwing Maurice under a bus (something he had literally tried in Yeehaw Junction a couple months prior). He told the angry small town sheriff that Maurice was the ringleader of an international gang of hobo house burglars and safecrackers. It didn’t take much evidence to get Maurice arrested.
The trial was swift, the judge was the guy whose house Judy Stinko had broken into and Maurice was sent to prison and swiftly beaten to death when he tried to heal the rift between the Bloody Smile Gang and the Shitstain Devils.
Without Maurice and his endless supply of wine and doughnuts, the fun was gone from the hobo life. We had lived the easy life for long enough that dumpster diving had lost its appeal. So we packed up and headed home. I went back to Cincinnati, where I was briefly mayor, then into safecracking. Weedy John Smokey went back to Pennsylvania to teach. Sweatstain Luke and Stainsweat Pauly opened a dentist’s office, Tom and His Lies kept up the life until he was killed by a polar bear during a long ride north. I don’t know what happened to the other guys, the hobo life doesn’t offer much opportunity for correspondence, but I miss Maurice to this day.