Tramps Like Us

There is a good deal of wonder in Tramps Like Us, Joe Westmoreland's engaging, accessible and only occasionally monotonous first-person novel, a work of fiction that reads like a memoir while functioning like a travelogue. Ripping through a series of fevered gay scenes, mainly in underground New Orleans and San Francisco, and briefly in Florida, Kansas City, and New York, Westmoreland's nose for telling detail is always keen, even as his narrator's stays buried in an endless supply of heroin, coke, and whatever other drugs he can get his hands on, along with a non-stop catalogue of frantic sex, dead end jobs or simply joblessness. Combine these trappings of a wasted life with the raging humor evident on nearly every page of this book, and you have a brilliant mix.The United States of the 70s and 80s that comes across in Tramps Like Us is a relatively easy place for the aimless, good looking, young men and women who fill its pages, so it's especially fitting that Westmoreland let's his characters' actions speak for themselves. It's admirable also that there's a minimum of authorial comments and editorializing, though Westmoreland does spend a great many words on his own thought processes -- as his drug-addicted narrator, who it's impossible ultimately to separate from the author-would be prone to do.And it's only initially disconcerting that episodes seem to bog down as if with no discernable trajectory, because it's not until the book's last quarter - and the onset of the AIDS epidemic - that one sees, horrifically, that there has been an ongoing and unspoken direction. What happens to the narrator and his circle, who are not passive so much as resolute in their addictions, does have a cumulative effect. Details do not merely agglomerate: they evince meanings greater than the sum of their parts.If you're young enough to have missed these turbulent years and this lifestyle (no doubt persevering somewhere), this book may be a welcome and probably rude eye-opener. If you simply don't want to believe that people ever lived as hedonistically and unapologetically as they do in Tramps Like Us, you will be amazed and probably appalled. But you won't begrudge the read.

What got to me most about this book is the author's absolute pureheartedness, despite the hell he's been through. (It's obvious that this is a memoir, despite the disclaimer.) To grow up middle class in the middle west in seeming normalcy, but actually with a psychotic tyrannical father who rapes one's sisters and a mother who does too little too late--and then to maintain one's goodness, well, that's a real achievement, that's something we really should take note of. In that sense, this book reminded me of Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot" because it's about someone who remains good in a world of evil.

This is a wonderful book in the American picaresque tradition, a great read that I couldn't put down. Westmoreland's clean, straightforward, often lyrical prose and deadpan humor carry the reader along on his journey through the America of the mid-70's to 80's. It's a tender reminder of wilder times, told by a narrator who you can't help but love whether you're gay or straight, male or female, or ... whatever!

What a wonderful book. Honest, funny, poignant, and ultimately full of the sorts of things that sees a thinking person to actually come through rough experiences to some sort of peace. If you ever wanted to read "Candide" hits America in the late 70's and early 80's this is your book. Joe Westmoreland really has something here. Highly, highly, highly recommended.

Written in limpid, resonant prose, TRAMPS LIKE US gives us an epic vision of gay life in America. Westmoreland is a generous-hearted writer, and I was moved by the pure, quiet and powerful intensity of his vision. There's a timelesness about this novel that one only finds in books that are instantly recognizable as classics.