Hobo Lifestyles #7

Happy Holidays

by Tyler Carey

As I left work on Wednesday, the week before last, a fella was busy hanging a snowflake made of Christmas lights off the side of a lamppost in front of my building. It wasn't even Halloween yet - we still had 24 hours to go until the madness of the Village parade, and the suburban spree of kids begging for candy at every door. Sure, daylight savings time had come, so all the commuting hordes were heading home in darkness, but still it seemed odd to fill that void with Christmas lights already. It was about fifty degrees. That's not Christmas in New York weather; that's Christmas in San Francisco weather.

Walking to Penn Station, I passed some cloaked department store windows, where decorators would work for the next few weeks to transform Fifth Avenue into miles and miles of Victorian imagery, all in the name of commerce and the Christ child. I even saw a Salvation Army volunteer tolling a bell. Jesus, it's early to celebrate Your birthday, isn't it? I was determined that if Christmas was going to be shoved down my throat, I'd do it on my own terms, in more Christmassy surroundings.

If you take the tunnel west out of Manhattan, you can pick up Route 1 in northern New Jersey. At that point, it's just strip malls, industrial parks, and the occasional suburban stretch. It meanders northwards through Connecticut and the rest of New England, finally landing in Maine. It's one of those amazing roads that really connects the whole country. I wouldn't be at all surprised that if you kept taking it north you might find a bypass to Greenland or something.

I spent an idle few days staying with some friends in the Bangor area. It was wonderful - a little bit of snow, a lot of good food, and the removal of any responsibilities. I was welcome to just doze in an armchair listening to Studs Terkel on the radio, with a copy of some book I had no intention of reading, splayed open on my lap. A coon cat curled at my feet kept nibbling at my slippers as I napped.

The early signs of winter aside, there was no Christmas being hocked up there. It's an extraordinary season, but stretching Christmas all the way up to the gates of Halloween is kind of like whoring it out. Come the day after Thanksgiving, though, may the devil take the hindmost. That's when I cut my tree, deck my halls, stuff my stockings and fill my belly with eggnog (with a good jigger of Captain Morgan's to cook the eggs...). It's usually a good thirty days of debauchery. Yee-haw, Skippy.

The more I unwound in Maine, though, the more my thoughts went back to New York, and inevitably to the Great Hoboes. We've expanded greatly since the 'zine started as a pipe dream in Brewsky's on East Seventh Street in June. There are now Great Hoboes of New York as far away as California, Colorado, Boston, Maine… We've even been getting readers from abroad and from the Navy. The breadth of the project is quite something. And I think that geographical distance is part of what makes this so interesting. Not all of our pieces are about New York, but there's a New York attitude to everything on the site. By that, I mean the utilitarian can-do independence that has fostered great artists, writers, musicians and thinkers back to the days of the Dutch. How many other cities have seen such movements, events and people as The Harlem Renaissance, the Abstract Expressionist movement, the burgeoning of folk music in Greenwich Village, the Stonewall riots, Yiddish theater, the Algonquin Roundtable, Walt Whitman, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, and Lou Reed?

What we do at the Great Hoboes of New York is important. We try new things, we try not to imitate, we try to build upon those who have gone before us… We share our successes with our friends, we try to include others in our projects… That's very New York. We're all in this together, from tag-team bar crawls, to editing each other's pieces, to going to each other's shows, to taking friends in when they need a night in the city, or putting them up on a couch in Maine, when they need a weekend's escape from the city. This is no mere circle-jerk of artists, writers, musicians and thinkers. This is a community - a movement of sorts. Thanks to all of you for making it what it is.

When the season is right, I want to wish you all a Happy Holidays.

Tyler M. Carey
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, The Great Hoboes of New York
December, 2002