Books: Joe’s Journey

MIDNIGHT COWBOY by James Leo Herlihy. 253 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.95.

Joe Buck is Texas-born and New Mexico-bred, strong in the trousers and weak in the head. At 27, he imagines himself a sort of composite TV cowboy and spends most of his time riding mattresses. Somehow he decides that riding conditions are better in the East: “The men there is just faggots mostly, so the women got to buy what they want.” As the book begins, he is heading for Manhattan with mounting hopes.

Joe’s journey inspires a mixture of emotions. On the face of it, the book is a comedy of copulation. At another level, it is a study of human suffering and insufficiency. To Herlihy, most men are either wolves or sheep, and their emotional relations are a monstrous travesty of love. The wolves need love so fiercely that they murder rather than admit it; the sheep need love so pitifully that they would rather be devoured than ignored.

Adolescent Fantasy. Joe Buck is a sheep. Son and grandson of prostitutes, he loses his mother when he is seven and is fetched up by “Gramaw.” At 17, he meets a girl named Chalkline Annie and makes the scene on a pile of old carpets in the storeroom of the neighborhood movie house. After that, “the persons, female and male alike, who were so eager to avail themselves of his splendid body never appeared to notice that it was inhabited by Joe Buck.”

Neither does Joe. The poor scared creature lives a life of adolescent fantasy. “In his thoughts he went walking down Park Avenue. Rich ladies looking out their windows swooned to see a cowboy there. A butler tapped him on the shoulder, an elevator whirred him up to a penthouse, a golden door opened into a large apartment carpeted from wall to wall with soft brown fur. Madame was wearing scanties covered by a sheer black negligee. Quivering with desire, she threw herself onto the soft floor. He took her. The butler handed him a signed check on which the amount had been left for him to fill in as he chose.”

Fateful Friendship. But to Joe’s profound dismay, his daydreams do not come true. No fur-lined apartments, no nymphomaniacal millionairesses. Pretty soon he runs out of money and sells himself to a homosexual schoolboy—who takes his pleasure but then cannot pay. Too gentle to take revenge, too stupid to see what is coming, Joe sinks into demoralized destitution. But in the depths he finds a friend, a bright-eyed young cripple named Ratso, and for the first time in his life he is happy. Not for long. The cripple dies of general debilitation, and as the book ends Joe sits staring vacantly at the little twisted corpse. “And then he put his arm around Ratso. He knew this wasn’t doing Ratso any good. It was for himself. Because he was scared now, scared to death.”

There is something patronizing and Chaplinesque in this scene: a touch of the pathetic and the grotesque that ungratefully suggests an author condescending from an arrogant altitude upon the lives of the absurd little people he has consented to consider. But the grotesquerie, more often than not, is magically imaginative, and the little people are accorded minute examination and archetypal significance—if not full human being. Joe Buck is a Job in boob boots.