The Unauthorized Autobiography of Me. Section Eleven. Hobo Days.

 

It was at Van Cleve Park where they

held Hobo Days each summer.

I went with my sister Sue Ellen

every year from 1959 until 1965.

Our hobo costumes were judged

and awarded prizes.

I never won an award,

but Sue Ellen did every year.

Mom dressed her up as a 'cute'

hobo, with long eyelashes,

dirty white gloves, and a 

long empty plastic cigarette holder --

a la Phyllis Diller --

and put a black soot beard on her, too.

I got to chomp on a stale pink bubblegum cigar;

which was pretty good compensation 

for never winning anything.

Even better,

I was allowed to wave around 

an empty whiskey bottle,

courtesy of Aarone's Bar & Grill

where my dad worked.

We each had a sawed off broomstick

with a red bandana bundle tied to the

end, to heft over our shoulders.

The bundle held a peanut butter

and jelly sandwich to tide us over

until dinner.

The mirror cracked in half

when it came to hoboes

and others grouped with them

sixty years ago in America.

There was Weary Willie and

Freddy the Freeloader --

lovable and comic characters.

But then there were the cutthroat

demented dark figures under the viaduct

that mom warned us about --

if they caught you wandering

around the railyard

they would remove an arm to

roast over a kerosene drum fire.

They were filthy, crawling with lice.

I was never to take the bus to Nicollet Island,

in the middle of the Mississippi River;

it was a land where men drank Cold Duck

in one gulp while sitting on dirty stone stoops

in front of flop houses.

My parents barely escaped the Depression,

and their message to me was clear:

the homeless and disenfranchised,

who didn't make it out of the Depression,

were not human enough for compassion.

Either laugh at them or keep them far away.

I'm still dealing with that cruel falsehood today.

**************************

This piece so offended @markgmaurer of the Wall Street Journal

that he requested to be removed from my poetry

email list.