(alternate title: At Least We Played White People This Time)
I’m not sure exactly where this game originated, but as kids we really enjoyed pretending to be homeless.
We never actually played this game outside of a home, of course – being outside at night is scary and dangerous, even in a town like Franklin where no one locks their doors and the biggest crime is some local teens trying (unsuccessfully) to hold up the old woman running the pizza place next to the convenience store. Oh, what sheltered lives we led as children.
Attire was “Hobo Chic”; layers upon layers of the clothes in my dress-up box. A mixture of old Halloween costumes, vintage squaredancing skirts and petticoats given to me by my grandmother (which I definitely should’ve taken better care of, I’m sure they’d be worth something now), and outfits from my many years of membership to a competitive dance team. Our food was the plastic hamburgers and hotdogs from my younger brother’s Fisher-Price My First Grill Set.
Armed with plastic food and ridiculous outfits, we would spend the night huddled together in a tiny Barbie popup tent on the floor of my unfinished basement. Since we’d spent so much of our lives sleeping underneath bridges and traveling by boxcar, we couldn’t read or write, and spoke with exaggerated southern accents.
One Hobos storyline I remember quite clearly is that of my friend from across the street in my neighborhood, Marie*. I was friendly with Marie and enjoyed spending time with her when my regular group wasn’t around, but she became a nuisance when she was invited to one of our sleepovers. She wasn’t part of the sacred inner circle.
I couldn’t not invite her to my sleepovers – she lived across the street! She might notice all the cars pulling up to my house and realize she was left out, and get mad at me and stop inviting me over to play computer games! Or worse…she might tell her mom, and then her mom would call my mom, and then I would be in trouble!
This is all to say that I had to invite Marie to my parties, even though none of us really wanted her there, and since we weren’t going to just abandon our games, we had to work her in as a character in a way that wouldn’t disrupt the storyline we’d so carefully outlined. She needed to be easily written out, but still add something to the plot of the game to maintain its quality.
So it was decided that Marie would play a kindhearted rich girl who discovered us Hobos living in the woods behind her family’s estate. She took it upon herself to teach us the ways of haute society, bringing us food, toys, and books that she took from her own collection. Marie was a proponent of the American Dream, assuring us that if we’d just pick ourselves up by our bootstraps, we could learn to read and write and eventually enroll in school.
But, of course, we wouldn’t have it.
Well, most of us wouldn’t. At a certain point, my friend Mary* was so inspired by Marie’s teachings that she decided to be adopted by her rich family.
(I should mention that this development was probably, in reality, made because Mary was tired and wanted to go to sleep, and this would make it easier to write her out of this part of the game. Mary was always the first to fall asleep at sleepovers. Like, she’d go to bed before 5 in the morning. Lame.)
The rest of us vehemently denied any luxuries presented to us by Marie, choosing instead to adhere to our Hobo roots and stay homeless and stupid. There’s a certain nobility in poverty. Especially when you’re just pretending to have no money and no education, and know that there’s no real threat to your own socioeconomic status in the real world.
I don’t have a desperate plea for forgiveness from judgment for this game. I’m guessing there aren’t any hobos reading this right now, since it’s not the Dust Bowl.
If you are a hobo and you’re reading this, first of all, congratulations on finding your way to my little corner of the Internet! I sincerely apologize for appropriating your culture as a child. Also, great job on the time-traveling from 1925 thing. Now, go ride those rails to a better life!
*names have been changed for privacy, yadda yadda yadda.
d i s c o m b o b u l a t o r i u m 