Midnight Cowboy

In some ways, it was unfortunate for author James Leo Herlihy that his novel
Midnight Cowboy
was adapted into the landmark film of the same name starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. Although the film, which won several Oscars including Best Picture, certainly brought the rising author a new level of regard and notice, its almost legendary status in the history of American filmmaking has somewhat overshadowed its literary progenitor. This is especially unfortunate since Herlihy’s work is considered by many to be one of the best American novels published since World War II.

The novel’s protagonist is Joe Buck, a nalve young Texan who decides to leave his dead-end job and find a grander, more glamorous life in New York City. The city, of course, turns out to be a much harder place to conquer than Joe expected, and he soon finds his dream compromised. Buck’s fall from innocence and his relationship with the crippled street hustler Ratso Riuo form the novel’s emotional nucleus, and the unlikely pair is one of the most sensitively-drawn and complex portraits of friendship in recent literature.

The focus on male friendship is in fact a longstanding motif in American literature: Twain’s Huck and Jim, Melville’s Ishmael and Queequeg, Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, and Kerouac’s Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity are some of the notable examples. Herlihy’s Joe Buck and Ratso Riuo continue this venerable tradition in their unique, starkly-drawn fashion.
Midnight Cowboy
also takes a well-deserved place among a group of distinguished American novels that write-often with unnerving candor-about people living on the “margins” of society: Nathaniel West’s
Miss Lonleyhearts
, John Fante’s
Ask the Dust
, Kerouac’s
On the Road
, and William Burroughs’
Junky
, to name a few.

Midnight Cowboy
, written by Herlihy with a unique mixture of severe realism and sensitivity, may well prove to be the best and most durable of these accomplished works of fiction.

In his new boots, Joe Buck was six-foot-one and life was different. As he walked out of that store in Houston something snapped in the whole bottom half of him: A kind of power he never even knew was there had been released in his pelvis and he was able to feel the world through it. Brand-new muscles came into play in his buttocks and in his legs, and he was aware of a totally new attitude toward the sidewalk. The world was down there, and he was way up here, on top of it, and the space between him and it was now commanded by a beautiful strange animal, himself, Joe Buck. He was strong. He was exultant. He was ready.

“I’m ready,” he said to himself, and he wondered what he meant by that.

Joe knew he was no great shakes as a thinker and he knew that what thinking he did was best done looking in a mirror, and so his eyes cast about for something that would show him a reflection of himself. Just ahead was a store window. Ta-click ta-click ta-click ta-click, his boots said to the concrete, meaning power power power power, as he approached the window head on, and there was this new and yet familiar person coming at him, broad-shouldered, swaggering, cool and handsome. Lord, I’m glad I’m you, he said to his image—but not out loud—and then, Hey, what’s all this ready crap? What you ready for?

And then he remembered.

When he arrived at the H tel, a hotel that not only had no name but had lost its
O
as well, he felt the absurdity of anyone so rich and hard and juicy as himself ever staying in such a nameless, no-account place. He ran up the stairs two at a time, went to the second floor rear and hurried into the closet, emerging seconds later with a large package. He removed the brown paper and placed on the bed a black-and-white horsehide suitcase.

He folded his arms, stood back and looked at it, shaking his head in awe. The beauty of it never failed to move him. The black was so black and the white so white and the whole thing so lifelike and soft, it was like owning a miracle. He checked his hands for dirt, then brushed at the hide as if it were soiled. But of course it wasn’t, he was merely brushing away the possibility of future dirt.

Joe set about removing from their hiding place other treasures purchased in recent months: six brand-new Western-cut shirts, new slacks (black gabardines and black cottons), new underwear, socks (a half dozen pair, still in their cellophanes), two silk handkerchiefs to be worn at his neck, a silver ring from Juarez, an eight-transistor portable radio that brought in Mexico City without a murmur of static, a new electric razor, four packs of Camels and several of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, toilet articles, a stack of old letters, etc.

Then he took a shower and returned to the room to groom himself for the trip. He shaved with his new electric razor, cleaning it carefully before placing it in the suitcase, splashed his face and armpits and crotch with Florida Water, combed a nickel-sized glob of Brylcream into his brown hair, making it appear almost black, sweetened his mouth with a fresh stick of Juicy Fruit and spat it out, applied some special leather lotion to his new boots, put on a fresh, seven-dollar shirt (black, decorated with white piping, a shirt that fit his lean, broad-shouldered frame almost as close and neat as his own skin), tied a blue handkerchief at his throat, arranged the cuffs of his tight-thighed whipcord trousers in such a way that, with a kind of stylish untidiness, they were half in and half out of those richly gleaming black boots so you could still see the yellow sunbursts at the ankles, and finally he put on a cream-colored leather sport coat so soft and supple it seemed to be alive.

Now Joe would appraise the finished product. During the grooming process, he seldom looked at his total image. He would allow himself to focus only upon that patch of face being covered by the razor at a given moment, or at the portion of the head through which the comb was traveling, and so on. For he didn’t want to wear out his ability to perceive himself as a whole. He was in some ways like a mother preparing her child to meet some important personage whose judgment will decide the child’s fate, and so when all was ready and the time had come to assess the total effect, Joe Buck would actually turn his back on the mirror and walk away from it, roll his shoulders to get the kinks out, take a few deep belly breaths and a couple of quick knee bends, and crack his knuckles. Then he would slouch in a way that he thought attractive and that was his habitual stance anyway—most of his weight on one foot—get hold of a certain image in his mind, probably of some pretty, wide-eyed adoring girl, smile at it with a kind of crooked, indulgent wisdom, light a Camel and stick it into his mouth, and hook one thumb into his low-riding garrison belt. And now, ready for that fresh look at himself, he would swing his eyes back onto the mirror as if some hidden interloper beyond the glass had suddenly called his name:
Joe Buck!

On this day of the trip, Joe liked especially what he saw: liked the sweet, dark, dangerous devil he surprised in the dirty mirror of that H tel room. Beyond his own reflection he could see the splendid suitcase lying on the bed, and in his hip pocket he could feel the flat-folded money, two hundred and twenty-four dollars, more than he’d ever at any one time owned before. And he felt most of all the possession of himself, inside his own skin, standing in his own boots, motivator of his own muscles and faculties, possessor of all that beauty and hardness and juice and youngness, box-seat ticket holder to the brilliant big top of his own future, and it was nearly overwhelming to him. Formerly, and not so long ago, there had confronted him always in mirrors a brooding and frightened and lonesome person who was not at all pleased with himself, but he was gone now, put out of the way entirely, while Joe beheld the new. He could not have borne one more scrap of splendor without buckling under the wonder of it, for even as it was he felt that if he savored for one more instant the incredible good fortune of being himself in this time and place and on the move through it, he might easily wreck it all by weeping.

And so he gathered up his possessions and left that H tel for good.

Over the door of the Sunshine Cafeteria was a big yellow sunburst with a clock (twenty to seven) set in it, and on the face of the clock it said
TIME TO EAT
.

As Joe approached this place he saw enacted in his mind the following scene:

He goes into the Sunshine. His employer, a pink man in a soiled gray suit, is just inside the door holding his pocket watch in his right hand and shaking the forefinger of his left at Joe. “You’re due here at four o’clock, four to midnight, understand?” he shouts. Customers stop eating and look up. Joe Buck takes the pink man by the ear and leads him past the astonished diners and into the scullery. A number of cooks and counter girls and dishwashers pause in their work to watch as Joe shoves the pink manager against the dishwashing machine. Joe takes his time lighting a cigarette, lifts a brilliantly booted foot and rests it on a dish crate. Then, exhaling a puff of smoke, he says, “They’s something about that dishwashing machine been bothering me. Been bothering me a long long time. Yes it has. What I been wondering is whether or not that dishwashing machine would fit up your ass. Now bend over.” “What? What? Bend over? Are you crazy?” the pink man protests. Joe remains dangerously still, looks out from under dark eyebrows: “Did you call me crazy?” “No, no, no, I only meant—” “Bend over,” says Joe. The man bends over and Joe sees a billfold sticking out of his hip pocket. “Believe I’ll take my pay,” he says, removing the money, “plus help m’self to a little bonus.” He stuffs a great wad of money into his jockstrap and walks out of the place, all eyes upon him, wide open and profoundly impressed. But no one dares follow or in any way impede his exit. In fact. just to play it safe, the pink man himself remains bent over for several days after Joe has gone.