Chapter 3

I often marvel at the faculty of memory in man. As I sit at my desk, retrospectively recalling incidents of my earlier years, it seems that no moving picture of those incidents could portray them more clearly than than does my mental vision. Each incident recalled seems to forge a link in an unending chain of other incidents whereby they all become so interrelated that the picture as a whole becomes merely the past. Of conversations I remember little or nothing, but every trivial act of my life up to the time I was thirty-five stands out as clearly as the sun to an astronomer, once I mentally envision the locality in which it occurred. Of my later years, the less said the better. I am unable today to recall details of seemingly important events that happened a few years or even a few months ago. Of such peculiar stuff is memory made . . .

When we awoke the next morning, Curly seemed kinder than ever. We ate the rest of the food he had hidden, and he continued teaching me the tricks of Trampdom and told me much of tramp lore. Tramps, I learned, comprised three categories, the aristocracy of which was the non-thieving class to which he belonged. They were the most numerous and subsisted almost entirely by begging, or mooching, as he termed it. They were mostly habitual drunkards who found this mode of living the only one by which they could satisfy their craving for alcohol, as they were wholly incapable of earning a living in the ordinary pursuits of life. Curly was different from most in that he was a periodic drunkard; he would, he told me, sometimes go as long as six weeks without drinking, during which time he would save what money he could. Then he would rent a room in a cheap lodging house and, after laying in as much alcohol as his remaining money would buy, he would stay drunk until it was all consumed. He asked me to promise that during such sprees, which usually lasted from four days to a week,I would stay with him, and this I said I would do.

The next class of tramps, he termed "Yeggs". Like the first class, they adopted monickers, but they seldom kept punks with them to do their begging. They were for the most part burglars, safecrackers, shoplifters, and holdup men, whom he termed respectively "mooners", "petermen" or "soupers", "boosters", and "stranglers" or "sappers". There were two kinds of mooners, those who specialized in house burglary and mostly confined their thefts to money, jewelry, and other small articles which could be peddled, pawned or fenced; and thosewho burglarized stores, stealing principally such things as revolvers, pocket knives, tools, shoes, silk stockings, paisley shawls, etc., that could be disposed of in like manner.

The petermen confined their operations to the opening of safes, generally by sealing the bottom and side cracks with putty and then pouring "soup" (nitroglycerine) into the top crack and placing blankets, mattresses, or other available padding material around the safe to deaden the sound of the explosion. The "soup" was obtained by soaking sticks of dynamite in hot water until they disintegrated; when the water cooled, the nitroglycerine floated to the top and could easily be skimmed off.

Boosters usually worked in pairs. One would enter a small shoe or clothing store manned only by the proprietor or one clerk. He would ask to be shown an article of merchandise and, while he was examining it, his coworker would enter the store, with his coat - usually a long one - draped over his left shoulder. He was the one who actually did the "boosting"; the first man being known as the "stall". The booster would make a pretense of examining the merchandise displayed on a counter or rack and, while the merchant's attention was distracted by the stall, he would slip under his coat such articles as he could safely conceal, say something to the salesman about returning later, and walk out of the store, to be followed a few minutes later by the stall, who had given some excuse for not buying. The booster's coat, of course, was securely pinned to his shoulder. There were several variations, one being the use of a longish box wrapped in paper and apparently securely tied with string, but having one side which was an outward-opening panel which could be lifted while articles were placed in the box.

Stranglers worked in pairs and usually wore sneakers. They would get behind the intended victim. and one would throw his left arm around the victim's neck - "strongarming", it was called - while the other frisked the victim's pockets. Sappers mostly worked alone, sneaking up behind and hittiug their victim over the head with a short piece of garden hose filled with wet sand or fine birdshot. This would render the victim unconscious long enough for the sapper to make a thorough search and his getaway. The police termed it "sandbagging"."Gaycats", holdup men who used "gats" (revolvers) were rare in those days and were not cordially received in the realms of Trampdom.

We stayed in that town for several days. In addition to our food, I was able to mooch two or three dollars a day. Part of that went for the makings of mulligan for other tramps who drifted down to the jungle and shortly moved on.

About the third day that I was there, I began to itch in my crotch and along the insides of my legs. Curly noticed me scratching and made me remove my short pants, which he turned inside out. He found what he expected- several large lice, or "crumbs", and a number of small white bodies in the seams which he called "nits". He told me we would have to boil our clothing, and sent me up town for a couple bars of soap. When I returned, he had a five-gallon can half-filled with water on the fire, and proceeded to shave a soap cake into it. I told him how I used to help my mother kill bedbugs by just touching them with a cotton-wrapped stick dipped in benzine, and suggested we try that method first. He agreed that it was worth a try, and sent me up town for a quart of the fluid which, when applied to the trouser seams, killed the lice instantly and the nits as well. Curly was elated. He went over every part of our clothing with a handkerchief dipped in benzine, and washed out my much-soiled blue gingham shirt,with soap and water. After we had taken a bath in the nearby stream, our clothing, except for my shirt, had dried out enough to be worn again. Strangely, in all my later years of tramping, I was never able to get more than a very few tramps to adopt my system of delousing

Early in the evening on the day of our departure for Louisville, a couple of tramps came down to the jungle. They asked Curly who he was, and one of them gave his monicker as "New Orleans Frenchy" and his companion's as "Cincinnati Red". About four o'clock Curly told me to start mooching our supper and, as I was leaving, Frenchy called to me and said, in effect, "Listen, you damned punk, don't forget to bring back enough for me and Red."

Curly was furious. Though not a big man - he was about five feet eight and weighed about 150 pounds- he jumped to his feet and advanced toward Frenchy, calling him a God dammed French C.S. and threatening to beat his head off if he tried to order me around. Frenchy backed away and procured from somewhere a long-bladed knife; then he advanced toward Curly, cursing and vowing that he would have a "skud" out of me before morning. That threat was about the vilest insult one tramp could offer another. Disregarding the knife, Curly rushed Frenchy and landed two or tree blows to his head, knocking him down. The knife fell from his hand and I ran aand picked it up, and threatened Red with it when he tried to stop Curly from jumping up and down on Frenchy's face. I grabbed Curly's arm and begged him to stop, calling his attention to the blood running out of one of his sleeves.He stopped then, and took off his coat and shirt to investigate the wound. The knife had gone cleanly through the outer muscle of his left arm near the shoulder and, though bleeding freely, it was evident that no artery had been severed. Red tried to apologize for Frenchy, but Curly paid no attention to him. We bound up his wound as best we could and went up town, where we located a surgeon who stopped the flow of blood, sterilized the wound, applied bandages, and let us out of his office without asking for a fee. We had supper in a restaurant, and by ten o'clock we were on a freight rambling toward Louisville.