Elbow Grease: A hobo has to earn his keep.

Having found at least temporary shelter, I moved on to priority number two: earning a little money.  After all, I had been in France for several weeks and had been living almost exclusively off of a meager cache of cash and a little kindness from strangers.  Now it was time to earn some of the funds I was going to need.

I’ve done a lot of humbling—sometimes even humiliating—work in my life and I’ve almost always gotten far more out of it than the paltry pay itself.  I once found a gig in the classifieds for “deep sea fishing” in Alaska, which sounded like a dream come true (and they’ll pay me for that?, I thought).  It turned out to mean that I toiled away in a warehouse for 70 hours a week scaling, cutting and packaging fish that other people had caught on the high seas.

I learned two lessons during that job, both of which come in handy more than you’d think: first, “deep sea fishing” in the classifieds means fish-cleaning and second, fish-cleaning is a valuable skill; it was a lifesaver a year or so later, when a hobo jungle I was living in had nothing to eat, so the ten of us went down to the lake and caught three days’ sustenance, which I knew how to prepare.  That day, I was king of the jungle.

But even if hard work like my Alaskan adventure can teach you a lot, I’d much rather have a nice easy gig (a “candy job”, as we say) than something that actually takes effort, energy and exertion.  After all, the best job is one that’s so fun that it isn’t work.  So when I’d rather sit around playing my harmonica than go out and work, why not just take my harmonica and try to get paid for sitting around making noise?  Thus began my first quasi-employment in Paris, as a harmonica hobo.  I hit the Metro with my trusty sidekick Buddy, a Hohner blues harp, one of my few possessions in this world. 

I find the 1 and 14 lines to be too loud for good noise-making; you get too much competition from the train itself.  And some of the other lines don’t swing into enough touristy stops to get a good crop of change-jingling suckers.  So after a little trial and error, I found my line and stuck to it: the 4 line, from Réaumur Sébastopol to St-Placide, over and over and over again, back and forth all day long, until I’m out of steam and my pockets are weighed down with other people’s hard-earned cash.

Part of the magic of busking on the Metro is that if you have an original piece of music (not La Vie en Rose or Yesterday), then your listeners are refreshingly surprised every time, even if you’ve been playing the same piece for twelve hours straight—they have no idea.  As for what exactly to play on a harmonica, it’s easy to pick something familiar—maybe a little blues or country—but I prefer irony.  I choose a piece my audience has never heard on a harmonica, say Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture or maybe the theme song from The Simpsons.  Originality earns an extra euro here and there.

But the best part is that I don’t even have to play well.  What makes me the most money is my rumpled third-hand cowboy hat: when I play well without it, I make next-to-nothing; when I play poorly but wearing the hat, I rake it in.  This all just goes to show that what they’re paying for is exactly that, the show, not the music.  So on I play.  And then pass the hat.