Hobosity: The Condition of that Which is Both Extremely Awesome and Homeless

Likely you have turned a blind eye to the issue of homelessness as so many others have.  Don’t feel bad, you’re just casually callous.  Most of us are.  Why, at the FunnyCrave office we hired a one armed secretary just so we could invite her to join our medicine ball catch league and laugh at her misfortune.  She can’t catch a medicine ball!  It’s way too big for someone with one arm to manage!

Anyway, back to the homeless.  America, and the world at large, has a fascination with the homeless.  If you lose your home in a natural disaster it’s tragic.  Hopefully Larry David will invite you to live with him.  If you have no home because after you got back from Nam the government turned it’s back on you, and then when you turned your back, assuming the government was ignoring you, it turned back for a sec because you weren’t looking and then quickly pantsed you and sodomized you and then turned back so fast that when you turned around again to see who fucked you in the ass the government wasn’t even in the same room anymore, it’s considered your fault.  Get a job, ya bum.

The internet is rife with hobo humor.  Some heartless pig even wrote this juvenile guide to hobo identification, likening the homeless (many of whom suffer ills of the mentus) to big game animals, or perhaps brightly colored birds.   Of course, there’s also the video series known as bum fights and, because you know it has to exist somewhere, vagrant pornography.  Bums in Action is all about bums.  In action.  Sometimes even in bums (in this case being anus).

With all of this going on, what love to the homeless get?  Aside from illicit sex on that porn site, that is?  Lucky for you, FunnyCrave is intimately familiar with the homeless life (not intimate like that site, per se, just that some of us live in boxes) and we are ensconced in the rich, lively history of the vagabond.  One might even say steeped in it, like warm, comforting bum tea (which is, of course, hot tap water taken from a public rest room).  With that in mind, let’s cast aside our preconceived notions of bumhood and journey back through days of yore to visit some of hobo history and come to appreciate the thrill of those who have contributed to hobosity.

African Plains – 65,000 BC

A young chap named Mung had been living in a rather spacious hollow with others of his clan.  They hunted wild beasts and wore their skins for warmth and by and large life was good except that no one lived past 40 and most of what you ate would try to eat you as well.  Mung’s father had died that way.

On a particularly dreary morning as Mung was out with a sharpened stick looking for a meal, something peculiar occurred.  Ung, Mung’s woman, was seduced by Dung, Mung’s neighbor and long time hunting companion.  Thus, when Mung returned, he found he had been usurped.  Bugger.  After a brief scuffle to assert dominance in which Mung was bashed about the head and shoulders with a rock, he was turned out of his long-time home and became the world’s first hobo.  From then on he could be found just outside the spacious hollow where he would take donations of fur scraps and wildebeest meat.

China – Xià Dynasty

A man named Wu, feeble and unable to work and support himself at his father’s trade (circus midget), lost everything with the death of his family at the hands of angry Chinese vampires ad ninjas and whatever other crap plagued ancient China.  Now homeless, Wu was reduced to begging for things like rice and kung fu lessons.

Wu, accustomed to the shiftless life of a circus brat, did not take a shine to the panhandling ways of other transients and happened upon an ingenious solution.  Taking a pen to parchment, Wu wrote “Homeless – Please Help” and propped the sign behind his pointy, Chinese-guy hat.  It literally blew the minds of everyone.  Literally.  The whole village died from head explosions.  However, the next village over took it much better and the result was that while other panhandlers wasted precious hobo energy trailing about after the well to do, Wu sat back and watched them read his sign and put offerings of spare change, rice and, of course, kung fu, in his hat.  The first true “bum” was born.

Macedonia – 330BC

A travelling bard named Demetrius is plying his trade by a crowd of nobles gathered in town to speak with Alexander the Great about his conquests and the Persian Empire.  As Demetrius plays some manner of old ass guitar or sitar or lyre or whatever, the nobles prattle on about politics and whoring, the sorts of things that consume Republicans these days.  Nearly an hour passes before Demetrius realizes that there’s no such thing as being a busker – he’s just a hobo in denial who can carry a tune.  The acceptance of shame is suddenly married to homelessness.

Constantinople – The Roman Empire

Claudius Invictus had been living in the back alley behind a bar/brothel for a couple of years, living off of discarded bread and a hearty broth known as ‘whore’s grog,” and had routinely been harassed by shiftless philosophers, dirty Praetorians and the general sort of riff raff that populated the Roman Empire during the height of its crapulence.  A simple man who had fallen on hard times, and not one prone to violence or physically capable of defending himself anyway, Claudius had to resort to his brains for help.

One morning, after being harassed by a group of children due to the feces encrusted on the cuffs of his pants, Claudius found his muse and inspiration struck.  Claudius rose to his feet and began yelling incoherent, profanity-laden nonsense.  He yelled about the government trying to steal his independence from out of his ass, he yelled about Germanic whores and their wooly undercarriages snapping off the hands of men and he yelled about the way in which sea shells are prone to steal cutlery.  And the people stopped and they stared and when Claudius got close, they backed away.  The crazy hobo rant had been born and to this day is still the hobo’s most powerful weapon, next to unbearable stench and/or kung fu.

Calakmul – 700AD

Tajoom K’ab’ Hix had carved out a corner for himself at the foot of his city’s great pyramid where he panhandled and tried to amuse tourists in exchange for handfuls of Mayan gold which, at the time, was about as worthless as Canadian money is today.  He had a monkey that would do simple tricks and he also would tell bawdy limericks and sing bawdy songs.  Rumor has it the monkey was quite bawdy as well.

As hobos went, Tajoom was fairly unremarkable and very little he did set him apart from the generations of hobos who came before him or even those he worked alongside, although he was somewhat better at avoiding being sacrificed to various serpent/volcano/jaguar gods than some others were.  The only significant thing about the hobo Tajoom K’ab’ Hix was that he was not a hobo at all.

Tajoom had been raised to be a potter and had tried to make a living selling ceramics.  However, in a land where people use gold to wipe their ass and howler monkey gods demand you eat the heart of your enemy in battle, few people give a rat’s ass about pottery and Tajoom’s livelihood suffered as a result, to the point where he generally only made decorative vases in which one could store uneaten portions of enemies’ hearts.  However, pretending to be homeless provided him with a far more luxurious lifestyle.  Thus, Tajoom became history’s first fraudulent hobo.

Paris – 1226 AD

Phillipe La Poubelle is infamous.  While King Louis IX may be the most talked about person in all of France right now, there is nary a citizen alive who doesn’t know of Phillipe.  Known to wander the entire city in an extra large coat, accompanied by a donkey laden down with trash, Phillipe cannot and will not let anyone pass by without screaming at them.  But more notable are the stories.

Due to Phillipe’s aggressive nature and stench he is mostly left alone, but stories of the fortune kept on his trusty donkey are legendary.  People as far away as the Aegean swear that Phillipe La Poubelle is the richest man in France.  Truth be told, the only thing kept in the many packs cover the donkey’s back are old baguettes and saucy, dark ages pornography but that doesn’t change the fact that Phillipe La Poubelle was the first “secretly rich” hobo.

Agra – 1690 AD

Akbar Shirazi had been in the War of 27 Years for 9 years.  At that time it was called the War of 9 Years.  Having run afoul of a camel and dislocating his back, Shirazi was sent home and discovered his wife had left him for another man, his house was gone and his job had been outsourced to someone in China of all places.  Shirazi had nothing.

Taking to the streets; embittered, angry and fully schooled in a variety of ways to kill people, Shirazi begged for scraps to stay alive, mostly while muttering directionless threats under his breath and wearing his military uniform, the only thing that still meant something to him.  To others he appeared to be a stark, raving lunatic of an ex-soldier and was, by and large, scary as shit.  Without realizing it, Shirazi had, quite against his will, become the first scary ex-soldier hobo that no one wants to get close to who got screwed by everyone he ever knew when all he was trying to do was help.  Raw deal, dude.

Russia – 1788

Viktor Vladmirovna Ivanenko had a rough life.  His father had been a borscht farmer and his mother was a borscht farmer’s wife (which was a legitimate profession in Russia for at least 100 years).  Unfortunately, despite the prosperity of Catherine the Great’s reign, there wasn’t an increase in demand for borscht and the family fell on hard times.  In order to ameliorate the financial difficulties they faced, Viktor’s family sold him to a travelling circus where he was to dress as a bear and dance.  His pay was doled out in peanuts.  Literal peanuts.

When he was old enough to go out on his own, Viktor discovered that while Red Square was certainly well trafficked and a seemingly decent stomping grounds for a beggar, the fact was that Russia was cold as shit and there really wasn’t any good place to ply your trade when you have to sleep on the ground.

One day, around the public vodka fountain, Viktor happened to be chatting with some other hobos and noticed that one, Boris “The Stank” Stankoloff, for all his offensive odors was both remarkably hirsute and rather toasty.  Decorum be damned, Viktor thought, and he hatched a plan.

That very night, Viktor, Boris and a dozen other hobos set up a tiny tent village by the river.  And so was born the first official hobo shanty town.

New Orleans – 1816

Xavier Montplaisir spent his early life as an apprentice hooch maker, brewing up whiskey and assorted spirits for the French Creole folks until the War of 1812 killed off a good portion of his customers, supply chain, employer and desire to do business in places where muskets are in abundance.

Born into a hard life in a rough part of the world as it was, Xavier’s one outstanding talent, aside from a thoroughly patronizing accent, was double jointedness of such extreme creepiness that circus folk would be envious.  Then they’d slither back to their circus holes to eat lizard eggs and plot revenge on the surface dwellers.

While panhandling, homelessness and general poverty were not unheard of at the time, Xavier was not about to leave well enough alone and simply settle for the scraps everyone else was subsiding on, especially with all the bloody vampire attacks in town.  Melding his own special brand of greed and ingenuity together, Xavier happened upon an idea that would revolution begging for years to come.  He pull his legs up under himself, sat on a board with wheels on it and pretended to have no legs.  It was sly.  It was brilliant.

Los Angeles – 2001

The City of Angels finally lives up to its name after lo these many years when a young, would-be producer happens upon two men fighting over half a bagel.  The men?  Marvin “Stinky” Friedman and Luke “SkidMarks” McGraw.  Stinky and Skidmarks, known to frequent various alleys and underpasses in the greater Los Angeles area, had a tenuous friendship, made all the more tenuous by both men’s’ even more tenuous hold on reality.

The bagel incident was only one in a string of disagreements the two men routinely engaged in, caused by both real and imagined indiscretions.  The end result was always fisticuffs but this was the first time such a thing had been witnessed by a man looking to make a buck.  A man who, upon witnessing the spectacle, saw one single compound word flashing over and over in his head “BumFights.”

Within a year the first BumFights movie had been shot and marketed with several sequels to follow and numerous legal troubles including the videos being banned in several countries.  None of the filmed footage showed the two original friends, however, who held no ill will towards each other and to this day will still slap the living shit out of one another for a bagel or, in some cases, because dogs told them to.  Marvin “Stinky” Friedman and Luke “SkidMarks” McGraw, the inspirations for homeless exploitation reality programming.