Between 12 and 1 p.m. on April 18, 2017, 69-year-old Tay Yong Kwang weaved through the crowd at Singapore’s Woodleigh MRT station carrying a bag of flour. As he walked, he dropped the white powder on the ground in 30-to-50-foot intervals inside the rapid transit bus and taxi station on Upper Serangoon Road. He and two other men began at Aljunied Road and planned to continue around 5 miles to Serangoon Gardens.
They never made it.
One-hundred-seven police officers, 20 Singapore Defence Force and 15 SBS Transit personnel swarmed the station after receiving a call about a suspicious substance. Much the same as the U.S. public safety campaign “See Something, Say Something,” Singaporean media had been emphasizing the importance of reporting to authorities anything that could be dangerous. The station master did, and an army of first responders arrived to shut the station down and investigate. The whole thing lasted 3 hours and 15 minutes and inconvenienced more than 1,000 travelers.
After pleading guilty in court to creating a public nuisance, Kwang was fined $1,000, the maximum allowable amount under Singaporean law. Deputy Public Prosecutor Tang Shangjun argued that the fine was necessary to send a message to others that leaving unattended items or substances in busy, public places would not be tolerated.
Kwang and the other two men with flour were part of the Seletar Hash House Harriers, a 36-year-old men’s club based in Singapore. They were playing a running game.
***
Hashing is a non-competitive running and drinking game inspired by the adult version of a centuries-old British pastime called hare and hounds. There are thousands of clubs, called kennels, and tens of thousands of hashers around the world. Tim “Magic” Hughes, a hash historian and one-hit wonder in the United Kingdom as part of Bern Elliott & the Fenmen, laid out how the game was played during its early days in On-On! Hash House Harriers 1938-1988, A Golden Jubilee:
Hash trails were laid out by two Hares. They used 4″ square white paper off-cuts… Paper simply stopped abruptly to represent lost scent… It began again within a defined radius depending on the terrain. Calls were simple: ‘On!’ or ‘On here! (old boy).’ False trails were also used to confuse the pack of hounds. They acted as back-checks allowing the slow runners to catch up with the leaders. There were no checks as such marked with a cross. Nor were there circles, arrows, ‘on-ins’ or other unnecessary marks.
Circles are done at the end of a run to reward or mock the hares and punish anyone who broke hash etiquette. Punishment, it should be noted, is a down-down, in which the violator is asked to chug the rest of their drink at the center of the circle. If they fail to get it in one go, they must pour the remainder on their head. The down-down is also used to honor participants for doing excellent work. Arrows indicate the direction of the trail and never lead to false trails. On-in is a marker that indicates the end of the trail is near. The game has evolved over the years and many new symbols have entered the fray. Fortunately, I didn’t encounter any of those on my last run.
***
Members of the Indianapolis-based IndyScent Hash House Harriers gather around a sport utility vehicle in the back of a Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen parking lot on the southeastern edge of the city. It’s 6:30 p.m. on a Friday in October, about half an hour before the run is set to begin, and people are already drinking cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer in the area between the parking spaces, the restaurant’s Dumpster and a grassy field between the lot and a Kroger Marketplace. Off in the distance, a stand of trees provides a clue about where the course will take us. A couple of people have dogs – a black mutt that looks like a Labrador retriever, though much smaller, and a chihuahua. Some are clad in knee-high socks and shorts or sweat-wicking shirts and skin-tight elastic pants. Many wear braided twine necklaces and bead bracelets. One man has glowing vines strapped around his midsection like a vest.
As people arrive, they walk to the back of a nearby vehicle. There, Cuntpletely Forgettable takes their money. It’s $6 to participate in the run so the club can cover the cost of PBR, bottled water and Chips Ahoy! cookies. After they’ve paid, they sign their names in a log, though they don’t provide their real names. Instead, they write a moniker given to them by the rest of the club. Names like A Ray of Fucking Sunshine, Four Finger Tamale Tugger, Big Ol’ Box of Cocks, Return of the Son of the King of the Goblin Cock, and Lawrence of the Labia. They sign in so Cuntpletely Forgettable can keep track of the regulars – the “wanks who keep cumming” – and the new folks who haven’t earned names yet. It usually takes a few runs before a name is bestowed upon someone. Until then, they’re Just Roberts or Just Sarahs or Just Whatever-Their-First-Name-Is. Participants don’t provide their last names – the club isn’t interested in who they are when they’re not there.
A big Latino man with a chihuahua who discovered hashing while serving in the military and stationed in Guam tells me his name is La Drone. “Do you speak Spanish? That means ‘thief’ in Spanish. I borrowed a beer from the hash one time. That’s a pretty simple one.”
“Mine is Jacoochie,” a brunette woman in her 40s says. “It had something to do with a jacuzzi. Honestly, whatever comes up in your mind is way more fun than whatever it was that led to my name.”
Vibreaker, a young blonde woman with a medium-small black Labrador-like dog who has been hashing for about three years, earned her tag from an unfortunate incident with a vibrator about which she declines to go into detail. Jewbacca, a funeral director, got his because he’s Jewish and the kennel was briefly obsessed with giving people Star Wars-themed names. Most people from that period have moved on to a galaxy far, far away from the hash.
“Almost every one of us don’t know their so-called ‘nerd names’ or ‘real names,'” La Drone says and Jacoochie confirms. She has no idea what his real name is.
Jacoochie, a nurse, isn’t running tonight because she has to watch her children. She and her husband Camo Tow, a stocky engineer with a short white beard just months from retirement, are old hat in the Indianapolis kennel – they’ve each been coming for about 10 years – and often in charge of coordinating its bigger events. Camo Tow’s annual November run, the Torque Your Turkey hash, is a food drive during which people can avoid the usual fee with a donation of canned goods to the food pantry where Cuntput volunteers.
Despite not knowing each other’s real names, hashers do form friendships and get to know each other over time. It’s inevitable, and sometimes those friendships go off the trail and into muggle life.
“Most people, if you do it enough, you become close friends with them,” Camo Tow says. “They know you by your personal name. They know more about you. You hang out socially outside of the hash. I have tons of friends outside that I met through the hash that we socialize outside of the hash. Normal shit. We go out to dinner. We go out for drinks. We vacation together. Our kids play together.”
But that’s not why Camo Tow has sunk a decade into the hash.
“I love the camaraderie, I love the nonjudgmental piece, I love the trails, I love to go into places I never would’ve thought of going before. Right? They’ll take you into an area where there’s homeless people along the river. They’ll take you to a place you’ve driven by before, but you never thought about getting out of your car and going down there. You go to the places that are different, maybe scary, maybe not-so-scary. That’s what I like.”
The drive to explore.
“Yes. To go to places I’ve never been to before.”
Jacoochie, Camo Tow, and by extension, their children are travel hashers. That means the first thing they do when they take a trip is find the kennels local to the area. Clubs aren’t always an option for family time – some, like IndyScent, impose age restrictions – but many are. That’s how their whole family ran through the bush in Cambodia and on the narrow streets of some of Europe’s oldest cities. Both say it’s the best way to meet the locals, as well as any expats that might be around, and see more than the tourist traps.
It’s a widespread practice in the community.
“I’ve been all over the Midwest,” Vibreaker says. “I usually hash here, but I’ve been to St. Louis and Lexington, Louisville, BloomingFools (a kennel in Bloomington, Indiana), up to Wisconsin, Chicago. Mostly, I stay here. I don’t like the big party hashes, the big events. That’s just not my jam, so I usually stay around the people I know.”
There are three visiting hashers this evening. They’re from Dayton, Ohio; Washington, D.C.; and Zurich, Switzerland. The woman from Dayton travels through Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana hashing on a regular basis. It’s not her first time running with IndyScent. The man from Washington, D.C. is an immigrant to the United States from Paris, France. He’s driving home and visiting kennels along the way after attending a biannual hashing event called the InterAmericas Hash that draws thousands to its host city. The man from Zurich is on a business trip. Like Jacoochie and Camo Tow, he has hashed all over the world.
***
The first kennel was founded by Alberto Stephano Ignatius “G” Gispert in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. G, the son of Catalan immigrants and a first-generation Briton, discovered the game paper chase, or hare and hounds, while working abroad as a branch manager for an accounting firm in 1937. He introduced a colleague, Ronald “Torch” Bennett, to the game soon afterward, but both were back in Kuala Lumpur the next year, which was much too far away to keep playing.
G, who was later described by one of his contemporaries as “not a particularly athletic fellow” and “roly poly,” missed the game badly. One evening while drinking with his buddies at the Selangor Club, he suggested they start a group of their own. Torch was wild about the idea. Cecil H. Lee and Frederick “Horse” Thomson comprised the rest of the leadership for the first kennel, known as the mother hash to Hash House Harriers around the world. They called themselves the Joint Masters of the Hash House Harriers, named in part for a restaurant that they derisively called the hash house. The club enjoyed about a dozen regular participants thereafter.
The exact date of the first run is a bit muddled, but it’s believed to have been on a Friday night in February 1938. According to a note from John M.B. Duncan, a former secretary for the Kuala Lumpur Hash House Harriers, “following an excessively indulgent party at the Selangor Club on Friday night, G decided to haul his ample frame around the sports field, thus hoping to balance out the law of increasing supply and diminishing output. Gradually others followed suit…”
Regardless, the mother hash didn’t last long. World War II arrived when the Japanese Empire made a push into the region in 1941, rudely cutting into the hashers’ free time. G would be killed during the war in 1942, just a day after serendipitously encountering Torch and Lee in a trench in Singapore. The hash didn’t resume until Torch revived it in August 1946. Four years later, during an especially hairy period in Malaysian history, the club was forced to register with the government and define its rules. Then-secretary Don Kennedy wrote that its objectives were:
- To promote physical fitness among its members;
- To get rid of week-end hangovers;
- To acquire a good third and to satisfy it in beer;
- To persuade the older members that they are not as old as they feel.
A second club began meeting in Singapore in 1962. From there, the game began its trek around the world. By 1992, there were 1,191 clubs in 138 countries with a combined total of more than 60,000 members. Today, the number of clubs tops 2,000.
According to La Drone, hashing didn’t arrive in the United States until around 1977 when a kennel was founded in Newport News, Virginia, by some military guys. “The Midwest was the last place to get it,” he says. “It’s literally everywhere… even in Afghanistan and those places where they’ve got to be careful where they’re going.”
He’s not kidding. There have even been clubs in Antarctica, but none are active today, according to the Hash Heritage Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to tracking the spread of hashing and preserving its history.
The Indianapolis kennel was founded in August 1999 after Trojan Whore moved to the Circle City from Orange County, California. It has completed 766 runs since.
***
Almost everyone has some kind of headlamp for the night ahead. I forgot mine, so Cum On Ride This Train, a petite brunette woman with a pixie haircut in her late 20s or early 30s, offers to share hers. She says I’ll have to walk, though, because she’s not in this thing to run through briar bushes and who knows what else. Cuntput is the lead hare and he’s notorious for putting the hounds through hell.
“If he says it’s three miles,” 13-Inch Cock Tower tells me, “It’s six.”
This time, he says it’s four, so we could be looking at an 8-mile trek through God knows what.
The unreliable distance isn’t the worst part, the hounds complain. The real problem is shiggy – the briars, brambles, branches, burrs, mud, and whatever else turns a leisurely jog into a horrid slog. Cunput loves shiggy and water crossings and long distances. Bring extra shoes and socks, Big Ol’ Box of Cocks advised me a few days earlier, saying what you wear during the hash might end up soaked.
Everyone gathers in a circle for the chalk talk ahead of the run. Cuntput explains the symbols he plans to use. He’s made a few examples by the Dumpster for anyone who wants to see. Once he’s finished telling us what to look for, he heads toward the woods to begin laying out the course. Meanwhile, the virgins – first-timers – and visitors identify themselves. If they’re virgins, they also tell the group who brought them. Hash etiquette doesn’t apply to people who’ve never been on the trail, but sometimes the people who brought them suffer down-downs for the transgressions of their ward. The newbies will end up chugging a drink either way. All this gives the hare time to get a head start on the hounds – about 15 minutes – before they begin the chase.
Dime-sized clumps of flour lead us into the parking lot of a Hilton Garden Inn. As we, 30-some-odd people, walk toward the hotel, a police car drives by and turns into the lot ahead of us. It parks facing the group and 13-Inch Cock Tower becomes wary. He says he had an encounter with a dubious cop when he was a hare once. The officer saw a bunch of cylinders of flour in his car while it was parked somewhere and didn’t quite believe it wasn’t cocaine. It took some convincing, 13-Inch Cock Tower says, but he eventually let it go.
“The worst that happens is they ask what we’re doing,” he goes on. “We say we’re a running club and, usually, that’s enough.”
Though IndyScent has roamed through a tunnel that stretches from Stadium Tavern to Monument Circle underneath the downtown area and another through the knot of interchanges connected to I-465, they’ve never created the chaos that Seletar Hash House Harriers did that day in April last year. We’d see another police car at a beer check just past the shoulder of County Line Road and down a hill. They just shined a light on us while Camo Tow showed off the yellow tow straps he found on the trail and 13-Inch Cock Tower worried about the off-color misogynistic jokes two guys were telling each other. He kept telling them to come off it, but they ignored him.
Back at the Hilton hotel, once we got off the concrete, we trudged through mud that was clearly intended as a run-off area into the woods. There was no trail, so fallen limbs and living tree branches were in the way until we emerged from the woods and into a field of neck-high plants. Some of them are thorny, most sticking burrs to our socks, shoes, pants, shirts, hats, flesh, tonsils, afterlives, and so on. I held some limbs back for Cum On Ride This Train to pass and she reprimanded me. “No chivalry on the trail,” she says, so I let the branches fly the rest of the night.
We moved through the tall flora single file, then back into the woods for a moment, only to pop out into a brittle cornfield that hadn’t yet been harvested. Among the ears of corn, I asked Vibreaker to take some pictures with her cell phone. She made some attempts but couldn’t see much over the heads of hashers in front of her. She only had one hand because she was walking her dog, so 13-Inch Cock Tower, who’d been a professional photographer for years, gave it a shot. He took a few and squinted into the phone’s display.
“These are garbage, man,” he tells me, before handing the phone back to Vibreaker. “There’s not enough light.”
We continue zigzagging over I-65 and out of the woods for an hour and a half before the hare leads us back to concrete. It’s around 8:30 p.m. and, here we are, a few dozen people walking through a complex of townhouses. Some of us periodically yelling, “Are you?” to the leaders, trying to make sure we’re still following the trail. After a while, we cross I-65 again and land on the edge of the campus of Franciscan Health Indianapolis. Our run is confined to a perimeter road on the shore of a retention pond. There’s a walking path and, as we pass by, a nun in full habit takes notice.
“What are you guys doing?” she asks.
She doesn’t sound upset but genuinely curious. Vibreaker looks back as she passes her to answer.
“We’re a running club,” she says, laughing, as she enters another muddy patch of tall grass. Just as she didn’t elaborate on her name, she doesn’t tell the nun any more than that.
The squishy earth belches beneath our feet. Cum On Ride This Train says we should be getting close to the end. Surely, we are. Maybe. It’s Cuntput’s trail, so who knows, really? With each step, her confidence lessens. Still, it’s not as bad for us as it is for some.
We round a bend to see a Jeep connected via a long tow rope to a silver Ford F-150 pick-up truck. A man in a tank top and baseball cap is standing helplessly to the side of the truck as the Jeep tugs it from the swampy terrain’s clutches. Someone who’d taken two PBRs at the beer check hands the truck’s driver one. “You need this more than I do,” he says and presses it into the man’s hand.
The on-in is a few minutes ahead. We can see the Hilton Garden Inn from there. The visitor from Washington, D.C., is talking to Desperate Lay, a short, rectangular man with black button eyes and a round face, about sleeping arrangements. He has to hit the road early in the morning to get home or his wife will be furious. Slippery Digit, the Swiss man who assures me that it’s his most important digit that’s the slippery one, complains that this club doesn’t run like his mother kennel in Zurich. He expected a workout but is having fun meeting people anyway.
A long walk on the shoulder of County Line Road takes us back to the Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen where we started. It’s about 10 p.m. when we get back – three hours after we left – and there’s more to do.
***
“There’s too much shiggy when a fucking Ford F-150 gets stuck in it,” the visitor from Washington D.C. yells, smiling, after Desperate Lay calls for etiquette violations. Cuntput obliges him with a down-down.
This is the circle – the time to wrap up the run, mock people for their behavior, (dis)honor the hare and the virgins, and sing bawdy hashing songs. Sometimes, if the time is right, hash names will be given out, too. Tonight, no one earns a new name.
Cum On Ride This Train claims that someone else committed an act of chivalry on the trail, someone other than me, but the accused doesn’t drink.
“Alright, we need a stunt liver over here,” Desperate Lay, one of IndyScent’s masters of ceremonies, or religious advisors, says. “Does anyone want to volunteer to help this poor soul?”
A tall man in cowboy boots and a ballcap makes the sacrifice.
Desperate Lay mistakes me for a virgin, which takes me by surprise, even though I’ve never ran with the group. I’m saved from a down-down when Camo Tow reminds him that I ran with Bloomingfools. So, he calls both real virgins into the circle. One fails to finish her drink and she pours the backwash-half of her beer onto her hair, which is pulled back into a taut ponytail. Some of it penetrates to her scalp, but most falls onto her gray hoodie.
The religious advisor invites visitors to share a song from their mother kennels to wrap the hash. Slippery Digit belts out, “Germans have a sense of humor / They just choose not to use it.” He sings a longer, slower variation of a hashing standard called “Put Your Left Leg Over My Shoulder.” Everyone joins in the second go-around. Then the circle breaks, and the hounds disappear into the on-after.