Who Are These Boxcar Boys and Girls?
Looking back at it, it seems to me that I was blown here and there like a dead leaf whipped about by the autumn winds…
Jack Black – his middle name was Chisel.
A bleak background! Crowded with robberies, burglaries, and thefts too numerous to recall. All manner of crimes against property. Arrests, trials, acquittals, convictions, escapes. Penitentiaries! There may even lurk an old corpse, compounding the endless felonies we know about, quietly decomposing in some hectic corner of life on the run. Poetic to imagine that when Jack’s memoir appears in 1926, the blood of his anonymous victim cries out, like a harbinger of doom. You Can’t Win – millions would need convincing.
Then, as if happy to oblige, high-flying markets and banks crash in the depths of economic hell. 250,000 teens flip freights to nowhere. Poverty-stricken lives cursed and criminalized, creeping under an alias, moniker, or road name; a long, hard slog, the fury of wronged youth. All this and more rises from Jack’s unerring pen – as if his cronies, mendicants, whores and highwayman, were jettisoned up from their graves, casting about for answers to that eternal question.
Who are these boxcar boys and girls?
Rod-riding vagabond rebels with a new harmonics, a battle cry meant to kill the flunky in our blood. Echoes of Jack whose scream pursues us still. Subversive visions fly willy-nilly, spewed like lava from the Depression’s man-made inferno, when Warner Bros releases Wild Boys of the Road in 1933. All we wanted were yachts, bassoons, polar bears, and not this bright, pure light that finds us squirming, a slatternly mob quick to turn copper – here we cringe before little Frankie Darro, reflected in his now innocent, now murderous eye. Each eye tells its own story. As one glowers, the other laughs with that third of a nation lamented by FDR.
Hear us? Hurling raspberries against Law and Order instead of bricks a thousand electric tongues – mortal affront to the Chicago School of Radio Elocution. Hobo songs resound amid hoi polloi in rags, anarchic ballads to class war and those who fight back, a million knights parading ring, ring, ring from this Automat of the Damned. Proof that all graves are deep and shallow at once, jungle buzzards, gay cats ALIVE! Today and every day, refugees traverse eons just to serenade us by the roadside, gab faster than light, a message on the Vitaphone – that sly old tramp who says to Frankie…
You got an army, ain’t ya?
Children maimed, jailed, raped by grownups… and not one mother’s son of us can stay abreast of this linguistic desperation… jaw-cracking locomotion…train-whistles recalling Boxcar Bertha’s mighty womb, our own past – drunks – punks – whangs – fitzies – shakies – crawlers – hypos – oh, revenant spirits of history made flesh, your descendants beg greasy nickels and swipe crooked dimes – Under, around, over our soggy Hoover Blankets, we hear your lingo and rejoice.
Here in front of the screen’s threshold amid stars veering towards us, stars schooled not to soar but to lurch, vaunting that unmistakable touch of the gutter. Our national license to chisel. Crooked minions dreamed by a dizzy pug, zigging zagging trek into razzmatazz – deep inside this bare desperate hole instinctively and all at once, America shuffles weak-kneed and grateful to the All Talking Picture, which, if it cannot summon happiness can wheedle a shade of the emotion into sound. When the district attorney in Midnight Court says, The Law! The Law is a device for defeating Justice! suddenly… hot coronets soar…
Our allegiance is to each other.
Yes, one great Legion of the Lost yammering against cops and railroad dicks. Let’s bathe in fine exhalations, the fast talk of Etherian bums. Our dead are homeless and hungry – there will be an uprising soon we can feel it. A dream waking up to itself, the victim of an old hustle known as The Question Mark Show. No refund on this carnival attraction, which promises nothing and, then, delivers it. A mysterious banner invites us to step behind the curtain (whereupon we find three dead shrubs, or a half-eaten sandwich).
Yet a solitary traveling stranger had come to warn sleek fops and smeared up girlies that the end was seriously nigh. Chumps sacrificed to the “?” and carny talkers in pinstripes. A nation bamboozled by its own palaver. There, melting in the gray dawn, our vertical life of airshafts and elevators. Giving way to lowered horizons, railroads and dimes. It was almost enough to make “crazy” nostrums like socialism attractive, this spectacular wallop. One of history’s little gags, as if the stranger’s unexpected climb from the underworld had been timed to amuse. Dark humor indeed, tattooed all over his antediluvian flesh, carved by the knife of hop, torture, countless division towns…
As if to pursue Jack’s immortal cipher, bobbing on the sea of time, we plunge from middle-class gentility right down to scrabble-assed poor overnight. Depression Babes of the 1930’s flung naked – a world pregnant with yeggs right there to meet and greet us… Just as some future Crash will spawn yet another Age of Chiselry… and… who knows what else… Hate poems even more splenetic and dangerous than ours?
by Daniel Riccuito