Jeremy Lybarger
Joe Westmoreland’s 2001 picaresque road novel chronicles a young man’s zigzagging search for queer belonging.
Tramps Like Us, by Joe Westmoreland,
MCD, 361 pages, $19
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Queer life finds itself in crowds. Growing up amid the pesticidal greenery and Biblical first names of my little town in the Midwest, I dreamed of New York, a city I knew only from sitcoms. There, I imagined, was the luxury of anonymity, of sex without entanglement, of inconsequential liberation. Contrary to current rhetoric, I didn’t want to feel seen. I wanted to be invisible. I wanted to fuck without hassle. I wanted to use drugs and stay out all night and never grow out of it. In the city, I thought, something like life would finally begin.
A similar sentiment animates Tramps Like Us, a fictionalized memoir by Joe Westmoreland first published in 2001 and newly reissued. Joe, our young narrator, drifts around the country, trading the poisonous familiarity of suburban Kansas City for the debauchery of Miami, New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. His is a coming-of-age story that grafts roughly a quarter century of gay existence—from casual pre-Stonewall hedonism to the ghastly depredations of the AIDS crisis—onto the shaggy armature of a road novel. Thematically, this form suggests how impermanent queer self-discovery is, a constant jaws-of-life procedure attended by losses, reversals, cliff-hangers, and narrow escapes.
“We were all refugees from one kind of torment or another and could never go back home,” Joe says. “Home was something in the future that had yet to be created, not someplace in the past.” His own family torment is particularly tough. His father—a local bureaucrat with a “cardboard voice” who looks like “fat Elvis minus the sideburns”—regularly molests Joe’s two sisters. His mother, a Lauren Bacall look-alike, knows of the abuse yet feels helpless to intervene. Young Joe runs away more than once but always returns. In his landlocked bedroom, he gets high by huffing PAM vegetable spray and masturbates to the smutty stories and errant cocks in his dad’s copies of Playboy and Penthouse.
Once Joe graduates from high school and joins his sister in Florida, the book shifts into a footloose picaresque. He hitchhikes or Greyhounds from Miami to Key West to New York to Chicago back to Kansas City, sampling America’s gay underbelly along the way. It’s a world of covert seduction and seedy propositions, as when a freelance reptile hunter offers Joe a gig performing in porn. These early chapters are rife with men who treat Joe primarily as sexual prey but also with spontaneous benefactors, like Bud, an older photographer in New York who lets Joe crash with him. He introduces the kid to gay bars in the Village, perhaps hoping to demystify all the cowboys and leathermen cruising around in those heady days of early Gay Lib. “I was afraid if I went in I’d turn queer and I didn’t want to be a big fag with everyone laughing at me,” Joe confides, although he finally decides gay bars aren’t so degenerate after all.
The theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once noted that “metropolitan destinies” are the founding narratives of modern gay identity. To abandon the provinces for the promiscuity and adventurism of the city is to enact a corresponding psychic leap from isolation to sociality, from inheritance to self-invention. Tramps Like Us demonstrates the extent to which queer life in America is bound up in migration and the urban demimonde. “I couldn’t deal with my old friends,” Joe says about coming back to Kansas City. “I’d seen too much. They hadn’t seen anything.” What Joe saw was what the French writer Didier Eribon calls “a phantasmagoric ‘elsewhere’ for gays,” a shadowland of perverse opposites where exile equals freedom, friendship equals family, and, later, sex equals death.
Joe’s interlude in the “elsewhere” of New Orleans exemplifies the novel’s charms and shortcomings. The atmosphere of the Big Easy is sketched economically: meals of crawfish and jumbo shrimp; afternoons boggy with humidity; nights riotous with roaches and rotgut. There’s a sweetness to some of the vignettes here, as when Harold, the dishwasher at the restaurant where Joe works, stages a drag rehearsal in his apartment. But the prose also has a flatness that accentuates the tedium of playing bystander to someone else’s buzz:
We were all so high at one point that we forgot where we were going . . . Then it clicked, oh . . . we’re going to the Parade to dance . . . The Parade was more crowded than I’d ever seen. We were all blown away, both from our drugs and the amount of people. The bar was so packed I could hardly move. I felt lost anyway from being so high. I loved it. Everyone was soaked with sweat . . . Between being with my friends, being so high, and being surrounded by so many sexy men, I felt like this was the closest thing to heaven I’d ever experienced.
Passages like this remind me of the trite, marshmallow candor that proliferated on LiveJournal years ago, or those Sunday mornings when a hungover roommate would recount his stupid antics of the night before. There’s something depressing about intoxication rendered in such flavorless language—perhaps it’s an awareness of how fleeting and nontransferable life’s pleasures really are.
Where this rote narrative voice (this cardboard voice) succeeds is in the book’s final stretch: the San Francisco era, in which the drugs get harder and the lives abruptly shorter. The book’s native mood of transience gives way to grudging adulthood. Joe now has close friends, a steady paycheck, a mercurial boyfriend, and an apartment of his own. But the idyll (if that’s the word) won’t last. AIDS hits the city with the shock of last call, although it takes a while for the horror to sink in. (The book’s initial, arguably more arresting, title was How I Got HIV.) The pages describing the piecemeal disintegration of Joe’s friends—the hospitalizations, the vigils, the denials, the fumbled goodbyes—are the book’s most gutting. Here, the simplicity of the prose matches the quotidian anguish of the moment:
An ominous silence swallowed up the entire room. I got a big whiff of rubbing alcohol from a container on the bedside stand that was wedged between my chair and Felipe’s bed. The dial on the IV machine whirred around and around, steady and rhythmic. . . . I stared at the clear sugar water and medicine solution dripping from a plastic bag into a tube and on down into Felipe’s body.
Even now, it’s impossible to fathom the cruelty faced by young men, some barely out of their teens, forced by circumstance to become caretakers and custodians to their terminal friends. After each loss, the survivors rush to discard the shameful detritus of a queer life: porn, art, books. Such a final act crystallizes the meaning of a true friend: someone who throws out your dildo before your parents can find it after you die.
“The price of the ride was listening to people talk,” Joe says about hitchhiking. I feel the same way about this book. As a narrator, Joe can often be too banal and passive for my taste, but he can also be vulnerable, and sympathetic, and appealingly horny. His story is a valentine to queer friendship, which saves his life and breaks his heart, the way love always does in the end.
Jeremy Lybarger is the features editor at the Poetry Foundation. He has written for the New Yorker, Art in America, the Paris Review, the Baffler, the Nation, and more.