TRAMPS LIKE US, by Joe Westmoreland
When the narrator of Joe Westmoreland’s semi-autobiographical novel “Tramps Like Us” was a kid in small-town Missouri in the early 1970s, he heard Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” on his transistor radio and “was sure he was singing to me.” A few years later, also on the radio, he heard “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo,” the saccharine hit by Lobo, and it struck him where he lived because the song is about hitting the road. Joe — the narrator shares his name with the author — knew he wanted out, and here was a song about being free. “It was my call,” Westmoreland writes. “Only there was no ‘you’ and no ‘Boo.’ Just me.”
Despite its title, lifted from Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” and despite the paragraph above, “Tramps Like Us” isn’t primarily a music novel. Here’s what it is instead: an epic, moving and ebullient gay road-trip novel, set in the 1970s and early ’80s, that doesn’t have a pretentious bone in its body. It reads like an avid, feverishly detailed letter that the author wrote and mailed directly to readers, the way Lou Reed spoke to him over that radio. Over the course of the book, those readers become his friends.
When it was first released in 2001, “Tramps Like Us” fell, to borrow David Hume’s famous metaphor, stillborn from the presses. It was issued by a tiny Manhattan publisher, Painted Leaf Press, and its release party coincided with 9/11. In an afterword to a new edition, out this month, Westmoreland writes: “My book was forgotten. Even by me.”
Its reissue is one of this summer’s earliest literary tent poles. A book this perceptive but amiably unpolished, that pops as if in Kodachrome colors, that deals out tablespoons of American simplicity and horniness and delight, might seem like a small thing to look for, but it’s a big thing to find. It made me feel I had my left hand on the wheel of a car, and the right on the radio dial.
“Tramps Like Us” follows young Joe, who hitchhikes and takes buses and uses “drive-away” car services, over the course of more than a decade. (It’s one of those rare books in which the author authentically seems to be the same age as his character at every moment.) He moves from the heartland and away from his physically abusive father down to Florida, where his sister is working as a go-go dancer, up to Atlanta, further up through Baltimore and Manhattan, across to Chicago, down to New Orleans for several footloose years, then out to San Francisco, at the start of the AIDS crisis, for several more. He loses his virginity, finds his people, gives his heart away a handful of times (“I fell in love if sex was still good the third time,” he comments late in the novel) and has some of the keys to existence handed to him.
I began this review with music because it floods the novel in a particularly credible manner. Joe embraces it all, if it lifts him up. He goes through phases, punk and New Wave. He feels a kinship with people who are into certain artists before anyone else, including Blondie and (!!) Gino Vannelli. He hears Grace Jones singing “La Vie en Rose” on a jukebox and he starts singing along, quite certain that the lyrics are “Put me on hold.”
Reading “Tramps Like Us” I was sometimes put in mind of Alan Helms’s terrific 1995 memoir, “Young Man From the Provinces,” about being a member of the “Silent Generation” of gay men in the 1950s and early ’60s. The book had mind-blowing blurbs on its jacket, including one from Edmund White calling Helms “the most famous piece of ass of my generation.”
Like Helms, Joe is sexually coveted, especially by older men. Each is, in Helms’s phrase, “a golden boyman.” Youth and beauty are the sort of currency that will buy things and open doors. (Here’s a typical glimpse of Joe: “I was wearing my Bermuda shorts, clear plastic ‘jelly bean’ sandals and a T-shirt that had a big red heart on it and said in bold print FLORIDA IS FOR LOVERS.”) Yet these books differ in crucial ways. One is in terms of social class.
While Helms wrote about gay high society (he lost a Rhodes Scholarship because of his sexual orientation), Westmoreland’s narrator attended only junior college and has few illusions about his trajectory in life. He’s a romantic, up for whatever pleasure is to be grabbed in the here and now. As Eileen Myles points out in her insightful introduction to this reissue, his name is perfect because he’s such a regular Joe.
On the road, early in the novel, Joe and his traveling companion are hassled by cops and by creeps and threatened with beatings. A friend gets arrested; Joe’s wallet is stolen. In a not-untypical scene, they enter a Los Angeles bus station to look up cheap motels in a phone book. They end up at a bathhouse, the first one Joe has been in. He tries to sleep on a mat in the “orgy room,” with porn movies playing at high volume nearby. There’s comedy here, but also a wide-eyed sense of wonder — he’s Alice tripping ambivalently through the looking glass.
When this novel is out on the road, it can feel like Stephen King’s “The Stand,” albeit if all its characters really, really wanted to get laid. The novel settles down in New Orleans for a year or so. This is where Joe first sees men with glitter in their beards and learns about crawfish, coffee spiked with chicory and that city’s insinuating aura in general. Then it’s out to San Francisco in 1979, the year after the Jonestown suicides and not long after Harvey Milk’s murder. Joe lives in several apartments and finds long-term lovers, while never entirely giving up his interest in vast sex clubs, the kinds of places where there are “cans of Crisco for lubricant placed conveniently throughout the warehouse.”
The story slowly becomes heavily peopled, in the manner of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City novels and Alison Bechdel’s early comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.” Friendships build and dissolve. Westmoreland kisses one scene off another as if he were shooting pool. But “Tramps” has a darker edge, provided by its characters’ heavy and sometimes debilitating interest in heroin. When AIDS appears on the scene, it’s an emotional landslide. Nearly everyone we’ve come to know is forced to stare it down.
“Tramps Like Us” is a young person’s novel, a beautiful one that took me back to a time in my life when I read to learn about the world, before the internet and great television took over much of that job, and I was drawn to rambling souls because I too wanted to (and did) haul out maps and flee my hometown with one uncertain thumb in the air.
It’s an approachable minor classic, one that packs in vastly more life than many more serious novels do. You end up wishing that it existed as a mass-market paperback, so that you could sneak-read it under a desk at school or try to carry it in your back pocket. (You would fail; the book is thick.) It is a novel that tastes life at first hand; it’s a palate cleanser for jaded appetites.
TRAMPS LIKE US | By Joe Westmoreland | MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 361 pp. | Paperback, $19
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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