Nelson wanted to write. He had experimented with tales of the underworld at university: a criminal pimp, a woman about to get out of prison trapped by a jealous inmate who planted a gun on her, a farm boy corrupted by the city. Nelson’s ideas of the underworld were vague—what did he know of corrupted farm boys other than the ones in Carl Sandburg’s poem, being lured by painted women under the gas lamps? The only farm boy Nelson knew was Gerson, drearily uncorrupted, crawling under cars at the stifling Kedzie Avenue garage. Nelson tried to talk to him about what he had learned in college. Surely the nation’s economic collapse was all a sign that capitalism was not working. What about people sharing in the profits they had created—why was the Hoover administration doing so little to help? Nelson had read British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald’s The Socialist Movement and probably thought he was just talking to himself, but Gerson surprised him.
“Oh, the old man,” Gerson responded, recalling Nelson’s idolized grandfather, “he used to talk about the Social—how do you say it in German—the Socialisme” (pronouncing it in French).
Nelson did not understand either. He was just twenty-two, and had hope. As Calvin Coolidge had helpfully advised, “The final solution of unemployment is work.” So he tried for newspaper jobs for most of the rest of that year. He came up empty at the Chicago papers, which were struggling—two went under in that decade. He went to the City News Bureau of Chicago, the wire service that was the training ground of Front Page playwright Charles MacArthur and later, Nelson’s friend Kurt Vonnegut. Anyone could work for City News—it was considered a stepping-stone into the city’s newspapers. But in 1931 even City News was cutting expenses. On the wall of the copy room was a discouraging cartoon: a diploma-clutching youth is confronted by an editor who snarls, “And what, may I ask, is a school of journalism?” Nelson was told that the list of applicants was already so long there was no point in even taking his name, but they would take it anyway. The young woman who wrote it down promised, “I’ll phone you as soon as we have an opening.”
“To other applicants, I sensed, she merely said, ‘We’ll phone you,’” Nelson joked later about his false sense of optimism. He waited around, and when the young woman came back from lunch, she told him to go home. He recalled spending the rest of the sunny summer afternoon at the Little Paris burlesque on South State Street, where the girls would shimmy with beaded feathers barely covering their breasts.
He thought he had found something up north—an editor at the Minneapolis Journal put him to work writing headlines for a week, to fill in for someone who was out of town. “Well, sit down and try your hand,” the editor said. Nelson worked for a week or so, boarding on credit. He did what he was taught at the University of Illinois, writing all the headlines in capital letters; this made him look like an amateur. Dean Murphy hadn’t known everything, after all. When Nelson asked for his check, he learned there wouldn’t be any. The editor told him. “I just wanted you to get some experience.” This was not that uncommon in those days—a reporter could work at a paper for a month before getting on the payroll. But Nelson was running out of patience. That University of Illinois genuine certificate of editorial competence was starting to look like a gimmick, proof that he had gotten something out of his four debt-ridden years. Nelson’s less loved sister, Irene, now working for a music publisher in New York City, sent him the money to pay off his YMCA bill and come home.
Still wearing his dark college graduation suit with a tie and a high-collared white shirt that made him look like a minister, Nelson started hitching rides in the autumn of 1931 along Route 66, the long highway that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. Dust was blowing up from stubble cornfields—the yellow earth was cracked from two dry years. Some of it was traveling dust, brought in from the ecological disaster gathering speed in Kansas and Oklahoma. He hitched through the Ozark countryside of Little Egypt in southern Illinois, waiting at roadsides, squinting at the sun through the spreading branches of magnolia and pecan trees. Nelson tried a few downstate newspapers, with no luck. There were eight million unemployed; in another year, there would be twelve million. “I would have been very happy to have a little desk, with a newspaper or a magazine, any sort of a job,” Nelson said later. “Unfortunately, there were no jobs in journalism. I never went voluntarily into the world of pimps and thieves and wandering people—I was pushed into it.” Like other Depression refugees, he kept moving south and west, by highway and freight car, away from the coming northern winter.
The idea of hoboing and riding the rails was romantic in the 1950s and 1960s, when Jack Kerouac wrote about it. It was a path to adventure in 1891, when a teenage Jack London swung onto his first car. There had long been a hobo culture in the United States, starting with cowboys and other seasonal workers who harvested grain and picked apples. It used to be almost entirely male—a hard life, prone to terrible injuries, freezing winters, scorching summers, subject to railroad bulls with clubs and tramps who preyed on working hoboes. But there was also a sense of fellowship—hobo jungles were community centers, where meals and stories could be shared. Hoboes left signs for each other on fence posts and barns along the trail—a drawing of a comb, for example, meant a dog with teeth. But by the 1930s that culture was disintegrating from the sheer weight of numbers. In 1932 up to two million Americans were on the move, hitchhiking and jumping freights. Route 66 was so full of hitchhikers that there was competition—one traveler boosted his appeal with a sign that said Give Me a Ride or I’ll Vote for Hoover. The boxcars were packed with economic refugees. “There were whole families riding together, mother, father, couple of kids in their rags, laying in the car, with runny noses, crying,” remembered hobo Bill Quirke. “There was nothing for them at home so they left.” At least two hundred thousand of the transients were teenagers—fleeing from homes where there was not enough food for everyone.
There were also more women on the road than ever, rising to one in twenty in the Depression, up from one in two hundred before the 1930s. They wore overalls and flannel shirts to ride the trains, and many kept one good dress protected from the coal dust in a bundle, to get work in towns as typists or file clerks. In Nelson’s novel A Walk on the Wild Side, Kitty Twist is rescued from being crushed under the wheels by Dove grabbing her overall strap with his teeth. As with black versus white vagabonds, the police and the courts were tougher on girls than on boys. Sexual pressure was used on girls—sex with the brakeman could be used for a ride on the train, or with a policeman to avoid jail. Or sex was taken without payment. In Nelson’s Somebody in Boots, a hobo brags about having the unexpected good luck of finding a drunken woman in an empty cattle car. There were also good manners in odd places—Nelson remembered how a policeman once came onto a train, cursing the hoboes, and was surprised to find a woman. He apologized with southern gallantry for his rough words. “We never use language like that in front of women down here,” he told her.
With all their genteel pretenses, the southern states were the hardest on wanderers. Southern towns were prominent in hobo warnings about which places to avoid. “Beware Beaumont, Greensboro … look out for one-armed Mike Bingo’s Hole … steer shy of old Seth Healey, dressed like a Bo but carrying a gun and hoselength in Greenville; but the worst place of all is anywhere in Georgia.”
Blacks huddled in the same cars as whites, who harassed them. Irony was thick in the boxcars. Black and white refugees from a common enemy fought each other for a space in the straw. In Somebody in Boots, the vagrant Cass keeps reminding his police captors that “Ah’m not no nigger,” as if that made the quality of his wretchedness more refined.
Nelson found that boxcars were the easiest to ride—the hard part was getting on, because you had to board while the train was moving, and then grab on to a metal side rail, feeling the motion pull savagely at your arms and knowing how badly it could end. Sometimes they’d go too fast; sometimes a traveler’s grip failed him. The carnage was astounding. On just the Missouri Pacific railroad in 1931, 114 r
iders were killed and 221 injured on trains traveling between Illinois, Texas, and Louisiana. The other hard part was getting off—to get water, or food, or work—out of the reach of the railroad bulls. Far worse than riding inside boxcars was clinging to the rods underneath cars, where one slip could leave a rider crushed under the wheels. Also terrible were the open gondolas carrying coal, and the refrigerator cars, or “reefers,” carrying meat or produce. In one of Nelson’s grim early stories, “Lest the Trap Door Click,” a cocky youth is warned by an old hobo to beware of riding the reefer, since he might get locked inside and freeze or suffocate. The kid, who like Nelson has a bachelor of science degree from a state university, scoffs, figuring the reefer is no worse than other cars and certainly no colder than the Texas desert at night. So he takes a reefer, the door clicks shut softly above him, and he spends hours in torment, clinging to a frozen steel grating while holding a delusional dialogue with the oranges rolling out of his reach. “It is so cold in the reefer, so dark and cold.”
Climbing off the train outside of town, Nelson walked into the French Quarter of New Orleans in the early morning, with the sunrise lighting the pastel pinks, blues, and yellows of the houses, with their lacy wrought-iron balconies. The benches in Lafayette Park were filled with homeless men—he would need to get there earlier if he wanted a place to lie down. It took hard work and planning to be poor. Exhausted and grubby, he bought a po’boy sandwich for a nickel in the market, and watched a muscular black man cutting the heads off turtles and stacking them in a pile, an image he used in A Walk on the Wild Side. A store advertised Coke for a nickel, so Nelson went in. A pretty girl emerged, topless, and said Coke was ten cents. Nelson did not question the markup and drank his pop, standing rigidly, eyes fixed straight ahead.
This look of wide-eyed innocence wouldn’t go unnoticed in New Orleans, and up came a Dixie Fagin. A long, lopsided man from Florida, wearing a straw hat of dingy yellow, he was eager to know this college boy, still in his frayed and grubby graduation suit. Wouldn’t Nelson like to make some money? Of course he would—Cokes cost more than expected. The man said his name was Luther, though Nelson doubted it. Aliases were common on the road—call me Tex, call me Swede. Florida Luther introduced Nelson to another Luther, from Texas, who had a steel plate in his head from a war injury, and the trio agreed to share a seven-dollar-a-week room on Camp Street.
Nelson took odd jobs, washing dishes, mowing lawns, setting bowling pins, and selling door-to-door. One job involved selling subscription orders for the Standard Coffee Company; the lady of the house would be offered a pretty red tin coffeepot as an incentive. But there was more to it than that, explains a hustler in A Walk on the Wild Side. “Heed the housewife’s woes, boy. Give heed to her trials and little cares. Make her joys your joys, her tears your tears.” This would ensure she did not understand how much coffee she would have to buy to finally own the pot. One lonely housewife talked so long that Nelson blacked out in the sticky, southern heat. Nelson doesn’t talk about it in memoirs and interviews, but he was a handsome youth known through life for a strong sex drive, so it is possible he offered a few New Orleans women more than a willing ear. In A Walk on the Wild Side, Dove’s attempt to retrieve a coffeepot turns into farcical sex on a rocking chair.
Another door-to-door route selling skin lighteners and hair straighteners did not bring in much. One night in New Orleans, Nelson remembered sitting around a dim electric bulb like a campfire, sharing thin soup enlivened with a single piece of ham. Everyone knew the man serving the soup would keep the ham for himself. But he slipped somehow, and the meat landed in an old visitor’s bowl. Nelson remembered the terrible sense of loss.
What happened? That was the question on all the thin faces around him, all these native sons. He heard it in everyone’s talk, from the boxcars, from the jungles, from the women on back porches yearning for brightly colored coffeepots. I always worked hard, my family worked hard. We’re not bums. I fought in the war. I worked on the railroad. I went to college. I had a farm. I saved my money, and the bank lost it. If we worked hard, weren’t we supposed to rise? He heard stories colored in every shade of desperation—of babies dying and wives leaving, of fathers committing suicide and crops that wouldn’t grow, of nonunion factory jobs that burned lungs or crushed fingers, of mothers and sisters gone mad.
Hunger breeds larceny, and one of the Luthers landed on a scheme. He had somehow acquired a thousand certificates from a beauty shop, offering a shampoo and a finger wave—the sculpted style popular in the 1930s and tricky to do at home. In small print the certificate would explain that the service cost $3.50, but Nelson and the Luthers would say it was free, and ask for just a quarter for a courtesy charge. Sometimes they would run into some sharp soul, standing with her arms folded at her mosquito-netted back door, wondering if this was not too good to be true. Then she’d be told to just go ahead and call the shop—but there weren’t many telephones in the poorer New Orleans neighborhoods. The salesmen would make sure there was no telephone by checking the backyards for a phone connection ahead of time. The lady would be told that if she did not want the certificate, her neighbor would, and then who’d get that marcel wave? It was a lovely con—the mark would go to the parlor and find it was not free, while the salesmen could take the quarters and fill up on po’boys and bananas. Nelson tells the beauty parlor story in several places, and gives the sales job to Dove in A Walk on the Wild Side. Nowhere does he express remorse for cheating poor women, though this was certainly a more shameful scam than the Swedish penny con pulled by his grandfather. This shows a bit of coldness in Nelson, but also the desperation of the times, when people were doing all kinds of odd things for money, from hanging upside down to exhausting themselves in dance marathons. He had his own worthless certificate from the University of Illinois tattering in his pocket.
The marcel wave caper ended when somebody made the mistake of trying to sell certificates again on the same block. He was beaten up by a couple of vengeful husbands—being cheated of a quarter was a big deal in the early 1930s. It was time to leave town.
In August 1932 Nelson took off in a boxcar for East Texas, where he bummed around the booming oil town of Gladewater, still hoping for white-collar work. An oilman named Isidor Achinofsky took time from his derricks to give Nelson a handwritten note of introduction, asking the recipient to give Mr. Nelson Abraham a job on a local newspaper. But nothing came of the note, which Nelson saw as the man’s way of getting rid of him. So Nelson kept traveling west to the Rio Grande Valley, where there were oranges and grapefruits to pick at seventy-five cents a day.
Nelson was still traveling with Florida Luther, who was full of ideas and thought they could do better than picking fruit in the tropical Texas sun and hoping for a better job at the packing plant. Luther had found an abandoned Sinclair station near the town of Hondo. A hand-painted sign by the local Lion’s Club warned speeding drivers, This Is God’s Country Don’t Drive Through It Like Hell. The disintegrating station itself did not see much traffic, speeding or otherwise—it was in an overgrown grapefruit grove, hung with mesquite vines, with deer, snakes, and wild hogs going in and out, and swarms of mosquitoes. Nelson and Luther visited a Sinclair agent and suggested fixing it up. The agent agreed, and Luther explained humbly that his handwriting was no good, so Nelson should sign for a hundred gallons of gas, as “this lad here got more knowance ’n I’ll ever have.” Nelson was proud of his “knowance,” so he signed. He was joined on this adventure by his old Roosevelt High School and Uptown Arrows friend Ben Curtis. Nelson lettered the sign for the station using his high school Spanish: Se Habla Espanol in red paint.
But Luther had another angle besides the gas. The station would be a shelter while they made their fortune selling black-eyed peas, bought cheap from Mexican farmers, then shelled and packed and sold in Mason jars to the Piggly Wiggly. They would be the black-eyed pea kings of Texas. Dripping sweat, Nelson shelled peas “till I was nearly blind,” a burlap sack of produce
on one side, on the other a stack of Mason jars glinting in the South Texas sun. He watched snakes and lizards crawl among the tree stumps, and swarms of white and black butterflies flutter down and then away again. Nelson likely practiced his road stories on Ben, improving the timing, sharpening the descriptions, and rubbing his hand back and forth through his damp hair, which stood up wildly all over. He kept a Spanish-English pocket-sized dictionary on hand, in case of customers. They sold an occasional gallon of gas. But when Mexicans arrived at the station, they wanted liquor, not gas, and laughed at the pea shelling—weren’t peas as common as cactus? As grass? What else were these idiotic gringos doing out there in the brush if not running a still?
There was no newspaper, so Ben and Nelson had to wait until Luther came home in the evening from his mysterious pea-dealing excursions in an old Studebaker. Bonnie and Clyde were still free, Luther told them as they ate another meal of black-eyed pea mush or tomatoes. That was good news, but where was the pea money? They hadn’t sold a single jar. One night, lying awake in the humid dark, Nelson heard a noise outside, and woke to see Luther and another man with another car messing around with some kind of device by the gas pit. Standing quietly in the shadows, Nelson finally figured out he was being set up—Luther was siphoning off the gas Nelson had signed for, and those peas were never going to get sold. The pea farmers would come looking for the money they were promised, and Nelson would be the one to take whatever punishment they would give. Indignant over being swindled, Nelson poured water, honey, and other detritus into the pump that still had gas in it, to ruin what was left. Feeling like a fugitive, he took off south to El Paso, with a few dollars stuffed into his shoes.
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