Drifters

They live!

Possibly a fair amount of the homeless population?

Is this what you want, OP?

They make good eatin.

They are now called homeless meth-heads, and instead of moving around looking for work, they camp out in the cities that provide the most free services so they don’t have to work like the rest of us. The short answer to your question is that they all live here in San Francisco, where they have lovely places to shoot-up, free needle exchanges, free food, unfettered access to drugs of every kind, and toilets, aka doorways, sidewalks, elevators which they, of course, never have to worry about cleaning.

These are the liberal policies of an all Democratic big city. I am getting a bit tired of all this social service money spent obnoxiously. It attracts people like flies who have no business in these big cities except for the free goodies from taxpayers which is never enough for them as they continue to use drugs and commit crimes. Social Services should be re-examined carefully and re-built from the ground up.

Are drifters different than gypsies, tramps, and thieves?

I don't think they were the same as homeless at all. They usually drifted from city to city, working odd jobs.

They all meet "Under the Boardwalk" where they "Save The Last Dance for Me."

See what I did there?

I once heard an interview with someone who'd written a history about Hobos. He said that in the old days, "A hobo is a migratory worker, a tramp is a migratory non-worker, and a bum is a non-migratory non-worker".

So there are still drifters around today, I don't know if anyone's offering them work under the table, or if they just live off homeless services. I saw a lot the last time I visited the far northern California coast, men and couples hanging around on the sidewalks with backpacks instead of shopping carts, hitchhiking on the highways. There, and Portland, Oregon.

R10 ... interesting definition breakdown, I can see it.

favorite bad film of all time

R7, No, but we hear it from the people in the town right before they lay their money down.

Stephen King always writes about drifter types who float from city to city taking crappy jobs and then moving on. He loves that character type it seems.

Instagram was invented, and the hot hobos are selling their bodies or some service.

It sounds like a lot of them wanted to leave ties from their past and/or identity behind. I think that would be tougher in today's interconnected digital world.

Am I in this category?

Yes, just go to any city in the western US. I don't think you will find many doing "odd jobs" unless you mean drug running and prostitution, though. Day laborers do the odd jobs now, not white drug addicts.

They work as roofers, drywallers and other low skill construction jobs.

Often, they leave a string of baby mamas all over the country and drink beer by the case load.

But Biff! You’re a DRIF-TAH!

Ha, makes me think of the fairly recent Touched by a Hobo thread. I can't find that in the search function. It was hilarious.

Clearly OP has not been to a city recently. Yes the drifters are still here.

[quote]They usually drifted from city to city, working odd jobs.

R8 Do 'odd jobs' exist anymore? What would they be and how would they get them?

Liberal policies regarding the homeless are a fucking joke. Enough is enough. Time to bus these people to facilities. No one wants them piling up like rats on our city sidewalks and streets.

Go away MAGAt Troll Freak R24.

As if... every diehard liberal in nyc, la, and sf feels the same way. And no — none of us vote republican. So eat a dick r25.

I thought about doing this at one point. My mother died and left me a small inheritance and I was going to just hit the road and make my way west staying in fleabags and living as cheap as possible. Then reality struck me and I realized it was a really dumb idea.

R24/R26, "the turd," thinks that being homophobic somehow is appropriate when someone points out its inhumane trolling over the homeless.

R26 needs to live on the street. For the three seconds it takes for a truck to roll over him.

[quote]Ha, makes me think of the fairly recent Touched by a Hobo thread. I can't find that in the search function. It was hilarious.

Say no more, here's your link.

FWIW, as you know, the DL search feature is now useless. To find an old entry, GOOGLE "Datalounge" and the subject you want; in this case, "Datalounge touched by a hobo."

You're quite welcome.

The true drifters these days are probably day laborers.

r26 yes by all means help the poor but can't we put them on an island or something?

I vote dem for prez, but yet can't stand liberal homeless policies and think open methodone clinics promote drug use. Sue me. I one of the sane people on the left.

I am sick of the ultra liberal policies in the big cities, which does not make me a Republican. The ultra libs have destroyed the cities for people who obey laws. The low life criminals and mentally unfit get away with so much, leaving the rest of the population at risk for their safety. It is very hard on people.

Jesus, how’d this thread turn into a Tucker Carlson monologue?

[quote]Stephen King always writes about drifter types who float from city to city taking crappy jobs and then moving on. He loves that character type it seems.

He's certainly familiar with the danger in walking along the side of a lonely road...

Grifters, yes. We live in a griterocracy!

r33, you might not like to hear this given that you seem to be 1) an American and 2) someone who doesn't value human life very highly, but the easiest way to combat the problems you mention is, believe it or not, to give these people homes.

You probably would agree that the homeless represent a huge burden on taxpayers currently. Well, it's cheaper to give these people homes in the long run. Crazy, I know.

My brother Clayton was a hobo. He traveled all over the country with his friend Doug who always bent over backwards to help him out.

I’ve met cyclists, ski freaks, and music festival followers who arrive in a city, work a season or two, and then zoom off to wherever.

Amazon used to have a bunch when they were building out fulfillment centers - people who would live anywhere for the differential pay plus per diem.

Drifter sex is the best sex.

Back in the day I knew people who would work in restaurants in Provincetown, or Montauk and in the fall head south to Key West or Puerto Rico to work. Were they drifters?

r39 the ski freaks are a thing. Park City is FULL of rich 20 year olds who go from hill to hill and work as bartenders, waitresses etc. and ski and snowboard all day. Then they go south in the winter and surf, or they go to Chile to that resort in that bowl. It's a life I can see as being fun but utterly brainless and dull after a while.

There was a whole series focussed upon the one occupation that highlighted Michael Landons wavy hair and nut hugging blue jeans.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeekkkk, very few of these men are hot

R42, that reminds me -- some of the older guys (meaning older than the college kids and international students they work with) who work for National Park concessionaires probably count as semi-drifters. They shift from park to park seasonally or work odd jobs around the country. They definitely have stories to tell.

The old Unsolved Mysteries always had stories about drifters

R46 Here's a case, still unsolved, about a mysterious drifting hitch hiker. He got picked up by a nice college student studying medicine, murdered him, then stole his car and identity. He's never been identified.

"backpackers" is another term. I was once too and we'd get a hostel or a room and hang out.

R48, I think backpackers are pretty different -- young and hippie-ish and broke (I was one, too). I don't know if drifters are hippie-ish or have that wide-eyed desire to see the world. I think they want to hide and be left alone.

Here's how you can tell a backpacker wants 20 bucks to blow him a drifter will let you do it for free.

R47, that's a scary one. I wonder why so many drifter types end up on the west coast?

Their music is still around!

T`here are the well off drifter gays who bounce around between LA, SF, and NYC with a maybe a few years in a major European city then back to on of the aforementioned 3. They can be very gregarious in public but are typically loners.

"I wonder why so many drifter types end up on the west coast? "

Temperate climate. If you have no place to live indoors, you want to be in an area where being outdoors won't actually kill you. How many people try to live out of shopping carts in Phoenix or Maine?

Which reminds me... how bad is the homeless problem in FLorida?

They now offer housing to homeless in CA.

The photo at OP looks like it's from an Unsolved Mysteries reenactment.

R7, yes, Cher, they are different. You and your parents are Gypsies, tramps, and thieves. The 21 year old boy you picked up just south of Mobile is a drifter.

Are there still people who ride the rails?

Papa was a rodeo, mama was a rock 'n' roll band,

I could play guitar and rope a steer before I learned to stand.

Home was anywhere with diesel gas, love was a trucker's hand.

Never stuck around long enough for a one night stand -

Before you kiss me you should know, papa was a rodeo

Drifters rarely seem to meet a good ending.

Does Naya Rivera count as a drifter now?

Obey

r61 no she is counted as a floater

R5 beat me to it.

After being raped by these "humans" for so long, we are ready to move to a Red State. Fuck Blue welfare nanny states.

If you aren't part of the solution, you are the problem.

Why are you blaming the cities? The US Constitution, as interpreted by the courts (and many of the judges are Republicans) protects individual rights.

Stop with the easy, cheese-y and incorrect attempt to blame politicians. They are limited by what they can legally do. In 2018, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a landmark ruling. It said that if a city doesn't have enough shelter beds available, enforcing a camping ban like Boise, Idaho's violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Here ya go op

R65 Clearly doesn't understand all the social programs local politicians enact to enable drifters, i.e., homeless, i.e., druggies, etc. in the year 2020.

Someone who speaks in easy, cheese-y terms is clearly stupid.

I read a book about hobos a few years back and there was a fair amount of gay sex. Apparently older hobos would teen hobo wanna bee under their wings and they have the older hobos sex in return. They called the younger guys punks

R58 according to some there are. I heard a creepy interview with a guy on a podcast called where is the line where he recalled spending time as a train hopper and witnessing someone being beaten to death. Apparently it’s a lot of violent younger people

You'd see characters like that, "drifters", in movies a lot, especially westerns. They were usually depicted as coming into town, taking some kind of work, making an impression on the townspeople, and then moving on, sometimes leaving a woman (or child) heartbroken. They were supposed to be "romantic" characters. But that was the movies. Men like that in real life are generally pretty creepy and frequently mentally ill. And work? Most of them don't do anything; they get drunk, get high, panhandle, shit and piss in public, smell like a dung heap and make nuisances of themselves. No, real life drifters are not romantic characters.

It's always kinda sad when they also have a pet dog. I hear that sometimes they just tell the dog it's on a really long walk.

The guys on Route 66 could be considered drifters, I guess. they traveled from city to city, picking up temp jobs. There was almost always a fistfight at each location.

My great-grandfather was a drifter. Left a wife and 2 kids behind in the 1920s (condemning them to grinding poverty) and made his way around the country working construction jobs. Got married at least twice more without bothering to divorce the first wife, a trick that landed him in jail on bigamy charges. When he got out, he married AGAIN (legally, as by this time my great-grandmother had divorced him). He made his way out to LA and worked as a carpenter for one of the movie studios. Died of a heart attack in the 1940s and was buried out there.

Nobody back home missed him: He really was a piece of shit. But occasionally, I watch an old movie from that period and wonder if Great-Grandpa Harry helped build any of those sets.

*Great-Grandpa LARRY. Not that it affects the point of the story.

There is a new breed of drifters. They live in everything from DIY converted vans to decked-out super-expensive Class A RVs.

The great writer Jack London drifted around the US for a few years, and told stories of the brutality of cops who threw him in jail, beat the crap out of him, and kicked him out of their towns, only to have it happen again and again. Their was nothing cool or romantic in a Hollywood sense. What a myth.

This thread just REEKS of hobophobia.

I found out later in life that my grandfather was a hobo in the 1910s for about 3 years. He went from Maine all the way to Minnesota and Iowa riding the rails before he came back. He had troubled teen years with a nasty stepmother which probably made him want to get out of town. He married at 26 and had 12 children. My parents, aunts and uncles are now mostly gone, so I never learned much more, but would have loved to hear his story.

Is this the hottest drifter in cinematic history?

Today we call them homeless people, OP.

In a way, I qualify

Here is a drifter in recent news:

Drifters travel frequently around northern New Mexico towns.

They smell putrid and one doesnt have to be very close.

Roddy Piper was SO HOT in They Live. A real masc man's man with a soft side. He's the only drifter I would ever fuck!