Rubbery Dmitry, the Mad Monk Holds Steady

Black Lightning Strikes The Trees - Photo by J. Scott, 1996

His life was preordained to be one of privilege, wealth, and luxury. He was conceived on March 2nd, 1918 in St. Petersburg, during a riot on the first anniversary of Tsar Nicholas II's abdication. Of course, not everything that's preordained actually comes to pass, and before he was born, Dmitry Kalashnik's parents had lost everything that they couldn't fit into two suitcases, fled the Russian revolution in the dead of night, and washed up on Ellis Island. He was born on Christmas Eve - over two weeks late, and "very large."

Things went a bit downhill, from there. Just before little Dmitry's fourth birthday, his father, whose only marketable skill had been investing and counting money, succumbed to being run over by a streetcar (as so many future hoboes' fathers were). His mother, who hadn't known a minute of work of any kind, back home, stretched her late husband's meager life insurance as far as it would go, but after two years, it was gone. She could bake, and her pirogi were the talk of their neighborhood, so she was able to find work in a bakery, and she followed the shop's owner when he relocated to Pittsburgh in 1928. She married him not long after that, and for her, life began to resemble life, again.

We all know what happened next. The global economy melted into the fire and burned into a stinky smoke, Dmitry's mother and step-father lost their home and moved into a tiny apartment, and focused all of their energy on keeping their sweets and pirogi shop alive. The boy rebounded for a while, but finally left home in 1930, barely eleven years old, and survived as best he could the competing ravages of homelessness and puberty. 

While he learned to live outside, eventually becoming a full-fledged hobo, albeit a terribly young one, his mother learned to live without him, relying on her faith to paint a mental picture of him that wasn't crushingly tragic. In St. Petersburg, she and her first husband had been among the last of the Russian Orthodox Buddhists, and she had spent Dmitry's formative years working to instill in him the values of the great teacher. As she absorbed the sermons of her new husband's American Catholic priests in Pittsburgh, she prayed that she had set her son upon a decent path.

A lifetime later (10 years), having rebounded a dozen times from a dozen different horrors that would have sent lesser men to their whimpering deaths, Rubbery Dmitry, The Mad Monk held steady. He had next to nothing of his own, and that suited him fine. His life was simple. He was walking and riding the rails of freedom and migrant labor, and he was relatively content. He remembered neither the scripture, nor the teachings of Buddha - save for the lessons of stillness, from the latter. "Be still," he heard his mother whisper, "be still."

Life screamed at him to run, or to fight, or to run, fighting into the abyss of the horrible nothing, but he forced himself, shaking, to be as motionless as possible. He mentally reread the headlines of the day - Jews being rounded up and sent to camps, where there were reports of mass slaughter. War machines. Troops here, talks there, fleets, riots, death tolls, more talks, rumors, smoke, blood... 

He practiced his Buddhist breathing. He realized that he hadn't paid nearly enough attention to the lessons on breathing. He shrugged and tried to fake it until he made it, and he breathed all wrong. The world had gone mad, and it was all over essentially nothing, and the opposing forces were sworn to keep fighting until well beyond death, because the other side was so deeply, ungodly WRONG, and that, as they say, was that. 

Rubbery Dmitry, The Mad Monk closed his eyes. He thought. You might say he prayed. You'd be wrong, but forgiven for saying that. He heard his mother again - be still. He snorted, for although he knew exactly what it meant to be still, he had yet to master - or even honestly attempt - the art of being still. 

He took a deep breath, told all of his personal woes - as well as those of the universe around him - to give him a minute, and searched for stillness.

And it stopped. All of it.

And he heard his mother say, "Good, good. Steady... Now what?"

Achilles Snail-Hair the Buddha

The devastation of the Great Depression reached virtually every person in the United States.  The rich lost their riches, the middle class became destitute, and the poor turned to dust and blew away.  The financial impacts were obvious, immediate and overwhelming, but there were a number of other losses.

One non-monetary, but equally destructive, loss experienced by millions of Americans was that of faith.  For every penniless bum and wandering hobo who prayed his or her way through the Depression, there was one who found no solace in religion.  For some, God was deemed to have died.  For others, the higher power had turned its back on them.  Many more simply abandoned their faith, concluding that they had been on their own all along.

The rampant faithlessness among the nation's hoboes makes the life of Achilles Snail-Hair the Buddha one of the more surprising of the stories I've uncovered to date.

Achilles' path from a normal life to hobodom was unremarkable.  He was the only child of young Greek immigrants.  His father, a grocer, was accidentally crushed to death under a truckload of honeydew melons when Achilles was five.  Before he turned thirteen, his mother was gone, as well.  She was a hairdresser, and was giving her son a "snail do" when she badly burned her hand on a hot iron curler.  The wound became infected, and within two weeks she had succumbed.  From there, Achilles, who kept the snail hairdo for the rest of his days, went quickly from odd jobs to blah blah blah to hobo.

He had been raised Greek Orthodox, but there was little room in his difficult vagrant life for such strict and solemn worship.  As the 1930s - and Achilles' twenties - dragged on, his faith waned.  He kept mostly to himself, but when he met other hoboes, he was always warm, cordial and quietly friendly.  He grew wise.  He made no enemies, but many lifelong friends. 

None of this is what makes his story stand out.  What was unique was the way people sought Achilles, now called Achilles Snail-Hair the Buddha, for words of wisdom, hope and enlightenment.  He was respected for his gentle, sage advice and insights, and loved for his genuine compassion and love for all of his fellow humans.  His reputation grew, but as it did so, it turned into something it shouldn't have.

He was thought to be some kind of enlightened spiritual leader, a preacher, a Buddha, but the fact is, he had almost no faith left.  He was just a really sweet little man, with a strong belief in the goodness of his brethren.  If you asked him a question, he would smile thoughtfully and give you the answer.  He was also short, and had a plump, round belly that protruded as though he might be a mannish-looking mother-to-be.  In Hobo Nation, a quiet, wise, friendly man who looked like the Buddha was assumed to be a Buddha.

He was frequently found sitting as the Buddha sat - on Jefferson Rock, high above Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.  He made his home, so to speak, in the thick woods along the Shenandoah River, and lived out his years, content with his scarce material necessities.  He continued to serve as the secretly-faithless spiritual teacher to a generation of the wandering poor along the B&O, happy to be of whatever help it was that he was being. 

Yet another writing prompt, "PLUMP," from my friends at STUDIO 30 PLUS.