Blind Buck and "Woozy," the Invisible Seeing-Eye Dog - A Fable That Happens To Happen At Christmastime

Can you see me now?

The rails and ties were covered in frost, and the wood smoke from every chimney in Hancock permeated the icy Maryland air. Buck lifted his face to the morning sun, which he could feel but not quite see, and inhaled deeply the scents of a new winter. There was a hint of pine, courtesy of the garlands that the town had draped from lamp post to lamp post, the length of West Main Street.

"Smells like Christmas, Woozy," he said quietly, to the German shepherd that no one ever saw. "It's a big day. How are you feeling, buddy?"

Woozy woofed in agreement with whatever his master had just said, then resumed racing in blurry, nausea-inducing circles on the sidewalk. He didn't even slow down to barf, this time.

Buck sniffed the air again, and frowned. "Oh, for Pete's sake, Woozy. That is just foul. Settle down."

Woozy settled down, which here means continued to run in circles, almost slowly enough to be seen.

"Slow down. I swear, you must be part greyhound," Buck said, with a smile and a slight shake of his head. "Are we still on West Main? We need to turn left on Pennsylvania, then it's another left in three blocks, got it? And please, no more vomiting. I'm already nervous enough. I don't need to worry about your perpetually upset stomach."

Blind Buck was, in fact, nervous. He hadn't deliberately interacted with a non-hobo in at least six years, and he was about to give it a final try. It was December 24th, 1937. Buckley "Blind Buck" Conrad, now over ninety percent blind, on account of his aggressive early-onset cataracts, was shambling through Hancock, Maryland for the first time in about a dozen years - assuming you don't count the time in 1933, when the sheriff paraded him up and down West Main Street in shackles, as some sort of warning to other hoboes not to show their soot-caked faces on this town's fair streets, lest they suffer a similar fate.

Woozy, the invisible seeing-eye dog - who was technically not invisible, but merely very hard to see because of his tendency to run in impossibly quick circles around his human - paused for a nanosecond and poked Buck in the calf with his nose. Buck knew that this meant, be still; there's an authority figure looking our way, so he stopped walking and pretended to be entranced by the nearest shop window. While he performed his fake browsing, his mind took a break, and replayed some of the steps that had led him from admiring this store window as a child to faux-admiring it as a homeless, nearly-blind drifter.

Step one: He was a round-faced little boy with candle-lit blue eyes, staring slack-jawed at the toy tanks and assorted cowboy hats and "Indian" headdresses in the shop window at the corner of West Main and Pennsylvania, clutching his mother's hand, trying in vain to keep her from moving further along the Christmassy thoroughfare. 

Step two: His shell-shocked (whatever that meant) father, slumped in his chair trying to listen to the radio while his desperately drunk and equally unwell mother berated him with passionate, incoherent nonsense. Nine-year old Buckley made himself as small as he possibly could - though not small enough.

Step three: Seven years later, fearing for his life - and that of his broken, inert father - he packed a sack full of pants and shirts and bread and apples, and fled. His father's final words to him were, "You, you can save; for me it's too late. Go, son. But for God's sake, see a doctor about your eyes, first."

Step four: On the run from a gang of high school boys in Richmond, each stride a scorching reminder of the bruises and malnutrition he had endured. A dog bit him, removing a small chunk of calf muscle. He momentarily lost track of where he was, and why he was remembering all this stuff, but Woozy stepped gently on his foot, which meant, focus, boss. 

Steps five through nine: Frostbite took two of his toes. He lost his bindle sack - twice. He sprained everything. The Great Depression was felt literally everywhere. His mother had died (no word on how), and his father now sat in a veterans' home, incessantly asking everyone he saw if they knew when his son would be coming.

Step ten: Buck, now nearly blind and almost as broken as his old man had been when he returned from the War To End All Wars, decided to save his pop, and in the process, with any luck, himself. Woozy bonked him in the other leg, which meant, the authority figure is moving on - let's go...

"I'm going, I'm going," Buck muttered. "Don't rush me." He walked slowly, following Pennsylvania Avenue for one block, two blocks, and three, feeling the pavement with his thin cane as he shuffled forward. Woozy confirmed Buck's intuition, and indicated that it was time to turn left, by racing in spectacularly, invisibly fast counterclockwise circles around him whacking the backs of Buck's legs with his tail on each pass. Buck smelled the canine upchuckery almost before he heard it. "Oh, come on, Woozy..."

He stopped in front of the veterans' home, reached down and patted his trusty German shepherd on the head. Woozy woofed, embarrassed at the public display of affection, and resumed his hypersonic racing about. Buck took a deep breath, felt his way through the front door, and informed the first blurry person that spoke to him that he was Morris Conrad's son, and he was there to wish him a merry Christmas.

"And a very merry Christmas to you, as well," came an ancient, tired, gravel-filled voice from just beyond the fuzzy reception area. "I've been waiting for you. I told you he would come," he nearly shouted to the rest of the room. "I told you!"

"Merry Christmas, Pop," Buck said. "Woozy old boy - this is my Pop. Say hello." The dog opted instead to continue running in tiny circles on the front porch of the veterans' home.

"Yeah, yeah - Merry Christmas - we've covered that," the elder Conrad laughed, "So... where are we headed?"
 

Why Hidalgo, The Devil Stick Artiste, Was Not

"...People are stupid."

What's in a name?  For most people, nothing.  For some, everything (see: John Fitzgerald Rockefeller Carnegie Getty).  For the American hobo of the 1930s, a name could make or break you, and so much of that equation was out of your personal control.  Such was the case with Hidalgo, The Devil Stick Artiste.

He was a hobo to be reckoned with, they said.  He was fiendish and evil and made of the darkest, blackest magic.  They said.  He'd just as soon jam a rusty blade in your gut and mutilate your innards as he would say hi.  It was said that he could manipulate a devil stick so deftly as to render it invisible, creating a hole in the universe through which Satan himself could speak, luring unsuspecting victims like a carnival barker.  Hidalgo was considered so dangerous that several cities had placed old-west-style bounties on his head.  Naturally, one of those towns was Indianapolis, where stupidity and ugliness were worn proudly.

Sadly, as was sometimes the case with our list of the poor 700 Hoboes, Hidalgo's name was all wrong - or at best, terribly misunderstood.

He was not, in fact, "a Mexican," nor was he named for any "Spanish devil," as it was supposed he was.  His parents, émigrés from France, had met in a Parisian library in 1897 when, hoping to read about the great American mustang named Hidalgo, they both reached for the same newspaper.  They married immediately, and sailed to New York that same year.  When their son was born, there was only one name that would suit him.

Hidalgo's father was killed by poison gas in 1916, defending his native France.  "Mother died soon after," Hidalgo would later recount, "of sadness, and rickets."

As for Hidalgo's skills in the dark arts, his devil-conjuring, and so forth, these attributes of his persona were the products not of exaggeration, but of pure ignorance and speculation.  

Devil sticks were simply batons, used by jugglers.  For juggling.  Hidalgo was indeed a "devil stick artiste," but not in the way that jugglers were devil stick artists.  He did not *USE* devil sticks; he couldn't juggle and had absolutely no aptitude for manipulating the sticks.  No - sorry, conspiracy theorists - he *MADE* devil sticks.  He carved them, usually out of walnut or cherry wood.  He was called "artiste," on account of his Frenchness, and the fact that his sticks were masterfully carved.

Nothing more.  

He was actually a very nice hobo.  Kept to the code, shared and worked and helped and everything - even went to church, when he could get away with it.  But he spent his days, from 1930, when he first joined the hobo nation, to his death of exposure in 1938, fleeing misinformed persecution, because people didn't know what his moniker meant.

It is said that his dying words, in the snow and freezing rain of Lexington, Kentucky, were, "People are stupid."


Prompted once again by my bloggy people at Studio Thirty Plus, this week I went with FIENDISH, although as you have just read, not really.

An Armistice Day Wish From Rear Admiral JF Grease Pencil

Rear Admiral JF Grease Pencil never served in the military.  His father was a US Navy Captain who served - and died - during the Great War.  James Franklin "JF" Happ was born in Annapolis, Maryland within a few seconds of the official 11/11/18 armistice - the end of the first world war. His mother gave JF the nickname "Rear Admiral" during the boy's toilet training.

Through his formative years, sharing his birthday with Armistice Day, and growing up with the ghost of a brave father he never met, JF learned a deep and abiding respect for the uniform and those who wore it.  JF's mother taught him to thank his friends' fathers for their service, and he did - long before he even knew what that meant.

So in 1932, when his mother was killed in an owlery collapse, and fourteen-year old JF hit the road with his hobo uncle, he took his appreciation for his country's veterans with him.  Every November 11th, he made sure he found his way to the war veterans or Armistice Day memorial of the nearest town, said a prayer, and left a note and some of his best lint.  He did this every year from 1932 until 1940, when he was crushed to death under a load of scrap metal while sleeping in an open gondola near Atlanta.

One of these notes survives, and is on display in the National Hobo Museum on the National Mall in Washington, DC - or it will be, if I can ever get the Smithsonian people to answer my emails:

Dear Veterans of America's wars,

I never knew my father.  I've been told that he was very brave, and I've met some of the men who served with him, and they cry when they talk about him, so I suppose he was a special man.  I knew some kids in school whose dads also never came home.  It's very sad.

Now, I have some wishes.  On this Armistice Day of 1939, I wish my father were here, so that I might shake his hand and say thank you.  I wish I could thank everyone on his ship - in fact, everyone who fought in the war to end all wars.

More than that, I wish you didn't have to do what you do.  I wish you didn't have to go where you go.  I wish with all my heart that my country had no use whatsoever for your sacrifice and your set of skills.  But the simple fact is that you are needed - you go and you do and you sacrifice because it is necessary.  

One of my dad's men once told me that most of them can't stand being called heroic - or even brave - so I'll just say, as I do every year...

Thank you all.

Respectfully, 
Hobo Rear Admiral JF Grease Pencil

Yes, I know that's a schooner.  I like the flag on it.

     

The Recalibration of Billy Creak Knees

Train Robbery - Cumberland, MD. 
Photo by Joe Scott

Some of the tales I heard from old Buck Mope were a bit on the tall side.  Others were utterly ridiculous.  The story of Billy Creak Knees was neither of those things, but it is still one of my favorites.

Born in Philadelphia in 1899, Heiko William Bowie was the only child of Cassandra and Günter Bowie.  His father was a master tailor from Germany, and his English mother kept the books.  Early on, he had designs on a career in law.  He was the first in his family to finish high school, but his parents' pride turned quickly to heartbreak, when at age 17 he enlisted in the Army and was hastily deployed to the front lines of the Great War in France.

He did what most boys did, over there.  He witnessed hell.  Unlike nine of ten guys in his unit, he survived.  He was shot - twice - but spent only a few days in a field hospital before being hurled back in the direction of the enemy.  When he returned home in early 1918, it was immediately evident to his parents and friends that there would be no college, no law degree, no life of security and professional achievement.  His achievement was that he had survived the bullets and shrapnel of the war, but at an incalculable cost.

He drank, he whored, he fought, he even found his way into an opium den, once.  He got arrested.  Soon, he withdrew completely into his post-traumatic private hell.  They called it shell shock, and that was as good a name as any for what was going on in young H. William's brain.

One late-winter morning, a dissatisfied customer strangled his father to death with a tape measure, and bludgeoned his mother with an adding machine, when she tried to intervene.  She clung to life in a coma for a week before succumbing.  William had held it together for his father's funeral, but the thought of seeing his mother buried overwhelmed him, and he ran.

His first year as a hobo was much like his time in the trenches of France, in that he just barely managed to survive it.  He acquired the moniker Billy Creak Knees, although he was so immersed in his pain and hopelessness that he didn't learn it until years later.  In those early, lonely days on the rails, his despair kept potential hobo friends at bay.  On three separate occasions, he stood in the middle of the trackbed before an oncoming train, and three times he leaped to safety at the last conceivable instant.  He didn't much care to be alive, but he did not want to be hit by a train, either.

"Can't say for sure what pulled Billy Creak Knees from that black pit," Buck Mope told me, shaking his head.  "Some say it was the sight of those trains, coming for to pulverize his mortal body.  I heard it might have been breakin' up that Western Maryland robbery that turned his life around.  Silver Jacket Man said he found God.  Could be, could be.  But me - I think he just woke up one day.  Smelled the air, heard the birds, all that.  Did the math and saw alive greater than dead.  Who knows?  But turn he did."

Billy Creak Knees became what was known as an expert hobo.  He could start a fire in seconds, cook anything into an edible entreé, avoid cops and dogs, rather than engage them, and talk strangers into hiring him for a wide variety of day jobs.  He scrawled hieroglyphic poetry on bridges, sheds, and boxcars, inspiring his brethren to hold their heads high, live with honor, work hard, and survive. 

I asked Buck how Billy met his end.  I was used to hearing about the wretched fates of so many of his hobo acquaintances, but this time, I was simultaneously disappointed and relieved.

"Billy Creak Knees - far as I know, he still alive," Buck shrugged.  "Must be about a hundred-eight, now.  All I know for sure is he learned to love the road, and mentored every reckless young 'bo he could find.  Heard a rumor back in the seventies - they said he was working for Amtrak, tellin' stories for tourists.  Don't matter to me.  He survived.  He found hope where there was none.  That's what he did."