Tramps Like Us
by Joe Westmoreland
(Painted Leaf Press) $17.95

There's lots of sex and drugs and rock and roll in this book. There's car theft and nights in the slammer and skanky old men who prey on kids and girls who work as strippers and boys who disco-dance all night and do poppers and drink till they puke. These are not the kind of things I think of when I think of "purity." And yet, I kept getting a feeling of purity throughout Joe Westmoreland's autobiographical first novel, Tramps Like Us.

Westmoreland's writing, which has appeared in publications like Dennis Cooper's Discontents anthology, Eileen Myles' The New Fuck You, and Cliff Chase's Queer l3, has always been direct and unpretentious. The first-person narrator in those early short pieces was a curious, wide-eyed naïf. It was relatively easy to accept that the narrator of those short texts could maintain his sweetness. It is a real achievement to see how this same, more fully developed narrator, who is named Joe, is able to go through all the shit he does--from a difficult l960s childhood through a druggy life on the road until the start of the AIDS epidemic--and still retain his basic goodness. Though some of the dialogue is stilted, most of the writing is transparent and clear.

Here's how the book starts: "I ran away from home the first time when I was four years old. My family lived in a small town in the middle of Missouri, the Heart of America. It was l960... I wanted to be able to go somewhere, but I didn't know where." Right off the bat, you know this book is about trying to escape your past, about making a home with a family of friends, about not knowing how to maintain it. It's also about the darkness at the heart of America and the oddly positioned half-generation too young to take part in the big political movements of the '60s and too old to buy the materialism of the Reagan '80s.

This feeling of rootlessness--of being lost wherever you are, of not really wanting or being able to settle down--has fueled great travel narratives from Matsuo Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North to Homer's Odyssey to Kerouac, and it's also at work in Westmoreland's book. The first-person narrator (who is, like the author, named Joe) buses, hitches, and drives from Missouri to Miami, Key West, New Orleans, San Francisco, New York. He sleeps in trucks, abandoned buildings, smelly hotels, flophouses, and on the couches of friends of friends. In a lesser artist's hands this material could fall into cliché.

Fortunately, Westmoreland is not just another imitator of Dennis Cooper or Dorothy Allison. Although the narrator Joe is knocked around by his father and can't stop the old man's sexual abuse of his sisters, this story does not become just another catalogue of abuse. In Florida, Joe meets a creepy guy who offers him a job bringing snakes back from Mexico to sell in the U.S. As Joe is hemming about this possible job, the guy offers him a different "job"--co-starring with him in a porn flick. The guy puts the pressure on Joe about the film, but ends up merely giving the kid a ride to the bus station. In New York, Joe meets an old fag who says he'll show him the sights if they can stop by his apartment first, so he can drop off his things. They do go to the apartment and the guy drops off his things--and that's all he does. Then he shows Joe the sights from the Empire State Building to Joe's first gay bar. These encounters are remarkable because of how the people don't take advantage of Joe.

Westmoreland's narrator is a lonely, vulnerable person whom we remain interested in not because horrible things happen to him, but because he is receptive and open and good. Joe is no longer an innocent by the end of this story. He's lived through fear, humiliation, and the death of friends, but somehow, amazingly, he is able to keep looking for true love and a home.