“A Bumdog in Maui” by Robert Gilman an unpublished article August 2008

“Bumdog.”

“What? Im sorry, did you say your name was Doug?”

“No. Buuuumdoooog. Like a bum on the street, then a dog.”

“Oh. Ok.”

And that was my introduction to the Bumdog. Another one of the divine eccentrics that our isolated piece of the paradise has drawn to itself.

As his name declares he is a bum. Or homeless depending on how politically correct you want to be. The first thing you notice about him is his stature. 6’4 and bone thin, he gives off the aura of being much larger. His large bald head is decorated on the sides by shoulder-length dreadlocks. Yet despite his name he doesn’t immediately strike one as homeless. Although he is scruffy, and his sandled feet are caked with red dust from the back roads of Kihei, and in the heat and humidity he is noticeably unshowered, to me he’s not much worse then my chiropractor. And what dispels any sense of homelessness is his voice, its intonation suggesting a high level of education. Then there is his cell phone and new 160 gig iPod. And thats even before he pulls out his top of the line Apple Macbook Pro laptop.

But homeless bum he most definitely is. He sleeps in the Kihei kiawe swamps every night until the sun wakes him in the morning and he starts making his rounds.

We’re in Foodland this morning where Bumdog is stocking up on his staple diet : Kraft pepper jack cheese, whole wheat bread, Lays Salt and Vinegar potato chips and Cherry Coke.

“Since the Kraft cheese doesn’t have much actual cheese in it, you can keep it in your backpack for days before it goes bad,” he explains.

At the sight of him in their line, the checkout women cringe and rub their noses, and as I look around I see other people in the store staring at him. I mentioned it to him when we get outside.

“Yeah I know. Its why I avoid people as much as I can. Every time I hit a new town I try to figure out where all the back roads are and pretty much stick to them.”

We make it down to the beach, sure enough traveling the least traveled paths, to a secluded spot where we sit on the rocks and talk, while Bumdog shuffles the cellophane wrapped cheese slices and bread together into eight sandwiches, that he puts back into the plastic bag, and jams into his backpack for later.

*************

Bumdog (he refuses to say his real name because he says only the police and his family call him by it. “So when I hear someone call me by it I immediately tense up.” ) was raised in Los Angeles by a single Puerto Rican mother (his father whom he never knew, was a Black American). Nothing particularly special separated him from the rest of crowd he grew up with. Then at 14 he broke his hip playing basketball. He had to drop out of school for a year while he recovered, but afterward simply refused to go back.

His mother was an adult education enthusiast. She would buy books for her classes on anthropology, history, art, sociology, photography and metaphysics, which Bumdog began to go through.

With all the information he could absorb through his mother’s books, the local library, and PBS television college courses, he self educated himself in every subject he became aware of: philosophy, physics, astronomy, sociology, literature, as well art and film esthetics.

He says of his teenage years. “My goal was to be the modern day Aristotle. Creating a grand unifying theory for everything: art, psychology, music, physics etc., except instead of Aristotle’s Triangle logic, I wanted to based it on the chaos and superstring theories. But I really only understood the outline of all the subjects I was learning. The details escaped me. I knew a lot of stuff, but I lacked any kind of discipline or training to do anything with it. Thats how I developed this manic depression. All these possibilities in front of me but I didn’t know how to put them into action. I didn’t know what to do, except to wait around for something magical to happen.”

One firm decision he made during those formative years was that he wanted to be a bum. It was a combination of the repulsive thought of being someone’s paid worker slave, as well as the childhood appeal of simply lying down on the sidewalk and watching the world go by. Learning the lives of the Buddha, Lao-Tzu, early Jewish and Christian ascetics, as well as reading books by Steinbeck, Kerouac and Bukowski, gave him “the intellectual justification for this otherwise insane bent in my brain.”, as his MySpace page declares.

At 22 he finally left LA to bum around the country, traveling across the United States. Then he was in England where he stole antique fireplaces, in Paris he sold tourists fake drugs. He traveled through Spain with a German demolition driver, and bummed his way through Morocco, getting kicked out town after town because he was believe to be a CIA agent. He ended up back in Spain where he broke into houses with an Israeli crime partner. Eventually he was expelled all the way back to Los Angeles for being too poor in the poorest country in Europe.

Along the way he wrote short stories that he would often lose soon after he wrote them. Although he wanted to continue traveling, events continually kept him in LA. Much to his mother’s consternation, he stayed homeless simply drifting through the Los Angeles Byzantine underground . Around this time he picked up his nickname Bumdog in LA County Jail after describing his travels to his fellow inmates.

“They used the name to make fun of me. But I liked it, and just kept it.”

At one point he fell into a job working at a furniture store.

“It was good money. Plus I was sleeping on the property, so I had all this money I wasn’t doing anything with.” With the $1500 he saved he decided to self publish a book where he collected all the writings that had survived his travels. He called it “Sketches Of Nothing By A Complete Nobody”.

“I had enough money to get an apartment. I was gonna get a computer and buckle down and seriously start writing. But it didn’t work out that way. I got the apartment in order to write, but I was working all the time to afford the apartment. I became the worker slave I had always sworn never to become. Along with the whole lifestyle of it: Id work, eat, sleep, get up and work again.”

He planned on completing all his unfinished writing, but he says all his spare time went to downloading music and porn.

“I even got cable. I didn’t write, didnt even read any books. Didn’t have to think at all. I used to just sit there feel my brain atrophying. It was magnificent because I had never experienced it before. I thought ‘So this is how the average everyday Joe Slob lives, eh?’ Its not so bad, all these years Ive been too judgmental. After two years I had downloaded all the music I wanted, and all the porn I could get without a valid credit card.”

At which point he let the apartment go and found himself back on the streets. Was it hard to live back on the streets after two years with a roof over his head?

“I didn’t even feel it. A house is not a home to me, its just shelter from storms. When there aint no storm, they’re useless to me. It was actually quite comfortable knowing it don’t effect me.”

Back in his element, his brain started to work after its long hiatus. He began reading and writing all over again. While sleeping in the back of the Downtown Playhouse, he hounded the theatre owner to let him put on a play that he called “Masturbation Theatre and Other One Act Ejaculations on Stage”.

“It didn’t have anything to do with ‘masturbation’, it was actually a parody of an acting class I used to sit in on.”

Originally reluctant, the owner eventually relented and gave him one night to do his thing. Unable to find any actors, at the last minute he made it a one-man play. Pulling people out of the audience randomly to fill in parts on stage.

“It was a disaster. 13 people showed up. And when I was finished there were only 6 people left.”Bumdog says, shaking his head at the memory “but it did a great deal for my overall confidence. Because I now learned I could be a complete failure and be thoroughly humiliated, and still survive it.”

With his newfound confidence he then moved up to the next level in failure and humiliation. Sleeping in a parking lot downtown and with $2.88 in his pocket, he declared to all his friends in a mass email that he was now going to make feature length motion picture, that he was going to write, direct, produce and star in, all while he was still homeless.

“I was thinking about Andy Warhol films, of him filming people eating, shaving or sleeping for nine hours. Except this would be of a bum and three days of me just bumming around LA.” He named it after his book “Sketches of Nothing By a Complete Nobody: The Movie”.

His major problem was finding people to borrow cameras from, as well as someone willing to loan him a computer to edit footage on. If he was able to overcome these hurdles, he believed it would only take him 11 days of straight filming to shoot his planned 107 minute film.

However the adventure proved far more daunting then he could have possible guessed. After two and half years he only had 30 minutes of it finished. He vlogged the whole 30 minutes onto YouTube.com in order to maybe get some support for it. It didn’t work out like that, but one piece of the film, that was also a video for Bob Dylan’s “Its Alright Ma (Im Only Bleeding)”, has garnered 130,000 hits to date.

On the verge of simply giving up, he found himself the recipient of the Downtown Artist Grant for $5,000. With it he bought his Macbook Pro laptop and a high-end video camera. He finished the rest of the film over the next six months, and laid his claim to being The Homeless Ed Wood Of The New Millennium .

What was the finished product like?

“It was horrible. I felt like crying it was so bad. Three years of my blood and soul, and it was completely unwatchable. But hell, at least I did it. Not many people can say they made a whole feature film by themselves. And certainly not many bums.”

With the film finished it was the last thing holding him to Los Angeles, “I was finally free to travel again.”

He left for Santa Cruz first and spent a couple of months there, which he really liked, but it was also really cold. And a friend had earlier invited him to Maui. So it was a matter of choosing to spend the winter in Santa Cruz, or Maui.

The person who invited him was one of those Kiheifornians who have either fell in love with Maui, or are running away from something in California. His friend was the latter.

“I figured I would stay with him a week. Back in LA he was a short little shit talker, but every time he got in trouble he had a crew he ran with that protected him. But one by one, his whole crew went to jail, so people were like ‘Well all your boys are in jail. How bout talking some shit now punk?’ Thats when he got a one-way ticket to Hawaii. In LA he sold weed, but without his crew he’s here in Maui cleaning toilets for a living.”

After their falling out Bumdog moved into the local swamp, and was able to get some work with his video editing skills. The most interesting job he acquired was teaching a 58 year old bulimic man video editing.

“I told him I wouldn’t work for him unless he gave me a big advance, because Id rather dig into garbage cans for food, then work for someone, then have to beg to get paid.”

He was paid a big enough cash advance to buy himself a new iPod, as well as buy his mother one for Mother’s Day. He ended up making a short documentary on the man, Spencer Marx, an heir to the Marx Toys fortune. In the documentary Spencer has squandered all his inheritance and is now down to his last two hundred thousand dollars, which he is rapidly burning through with his spending habits and bulimia. The documentary’s eight days charts Marx, at first levelheaded assessment of his situation, into an extreme manic state where he extols the virtue of Ekhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now”, then into depression which triggers his violent bulimia, and back into a manic state again. At the end of the forty minutes he is told that he has taken his bulimia too far and if he doesn’t get help he has only 2 months to live. He called it “Crazy on a Ship of Fools”. But his subject, after viewing the film didn’t much care for the sight of himself projectile vomiting into the toilet on camera, and decided not to continue.

Since then Bumdog has been trolling around Kihei making cheese sandwich, and cherry coke money by selling the DVDs of his movie out of his backpack. “After they give me the money I tell them ‘no refunds’.”

What are his plans?

“In James Joyce’s ˜Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man he writes ˜I go now to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.’ With that in mind I would like to do videos for the local music scene and also maybe getting work with the Hawaiian Nation movement. Both of them are involved in voicing those things which people haven’t until recently been able to express. The most important contribution of the Hawaiian national movement has been giving the people the words to what they’ve have known all along in terms of the political situation, but never been able to articulate. And the local hip hop and reggae scene are doing the same thing except they are articulating Maui’s culture in the color and form of sound and words. Id like to…”

He suddenly stops and gives me a look, as though he doesn’t think Im interested in what he is trying to say. He smiles and shrugs conversation into another direction.

“Other then that my next stop is gonna be Thailand, then India.”

He looks up into the ocean’s western horizon, towards future experiences.

“I like to do things at my best, but its been my life’s lesson that if I don’t do something at my worst, then it wont get done at all.”

Robert Gilman has lived in Kihei for over 30 years, he is also filmmaker, who has taught film at the Maui Community College, as well as being a former film reviewer for the Maui Times.