FOREWORD

I first read You Can’t Win in 1926, in an edition bound in red cardboard. Stultifiedand confined by middle-class St. Louis mores, I was fascinated by this glimpse of anunderworld of seedy rooming-houses, pool parlors, cat-houses and opium dens, of bull pens and cat burglars and hobo jungles. I learned about the Johnson Family of good bums and thieves, with a code of conduct that made more sense to me than the arbitrary, hypocritical rules that were taken for granted as being “right” by my peers.

A. Johnson pays his debts and keeps his word. He minds his own business, butwill give help when help is needed and asked for. He does not hold out on hisconfederates or cheat his landlady. He is what they call in show business “good people.”

Re-reading the book fifty years later, I felt a deep nostalgia for a way of life thatis gone forever. Scenes and characters emerge from the pages, bathed in the light of past times:

This young gay cat starts bad-mouthing Salt Chunk Mary and old George - a railriding safecracker with two fingers missing from crimping blasting caps - says to him: “‘You were a good bum, but you’re dog meat now’, and shot him four times across the fire at a hobo jungle, and I could feel the slugs hit him. He fell down with his hair in the fire.” Turns out Salt Chunk Mary is George’s sister. Sister or not, the gay cat was out of line to talk against a woman like Salt Chunk Mary, Mother of the Johnson Family ....

Half a century later, I was to use characters and scenes from the Good Red Book, quoting the prose of Jack Black from memory, occasionally word for word, and when you can remember a passage of prose after fifty years, it has to be good.

A two-story red brick house down by the tracks in Junction City, Idaho ... Salt Chunk Mary, Mother of the Johnson Family ... train whistles cross a distant sky.

Mary keeps a pot of pork and beans and a blue porcelain coffee pot always on the stove. You eat first, then you talk business, rings and watches slopped out on the kitchen table. She names a price. She doesn’t name another. Mary could say “No” quicker than any woman Kim ever knew, and none of her no’s ever meant yes. She kept the money in a cookie jar, but nobody thought about that. Her cold gray eyes would have seen the thought and maybe something goes wrong on the next lay. John Law just happens by, or John Citizen comes up with a load of double-zero into your soft and tenders.

And the Sanctimonious Kid, soft-spoken and sententious: “It’s a crooked game, kid, but you have to think straight. Be as positive yourself as you like, but no positive clothes, and no off calibers like 41.” The Sanctimonious Kid was later hanged in Australia for the murder of a police constable.

Jack Black dedicates You Can’t Win to “that dirty, drunken, crippled beggar Sticks Sullivan who picked the buckshot out of my back under a bridge at Baraboo, Wisconsin.” Sticks was a Johnson.

Looking back over the years, I remember the Johnsons .... the old Mexican druggist who filled a morphine Rx after ten shits had snarled it back at me: “We do not serve dope fiends!” Yes, I remember the Johnsons, and I remember those of another persuasion. As a wise old black HOMOSEXUAL said to me, “Some people are shits, darling.”

And likely to remain so. A basic split between shits and Johnsons has emerged. I see the world as a stage on which different actors are assigned to different roles. Joseph Conrad arrived at a similar concept. Of course, any Johnson does do shiny things at times. But he knows enough to regret such actions. It is very rare that a hardcore shit acts like a Johnson. He simply does not understand what it means to be a Johnson, and is irrevocably committed to a contrary viewpoint. A direct confrontation of the shits and the Johnsons could be as drastic as the conjunction of matter and antimatter: POOF! No reconciliation, no agreeing to disagree, is possible.

Jack Black calls his book You Can’t Win. Well, who can? Winner take nothing. Would he have been better off having spent his life at some full-time job? I don’t think so. He has recorded a chapter of specifically American life that is now gone forever. Where are the hobo jungles, the hop joints, the old rod-riding yeggs, where is Salt Chunk Mary? Where is the Johnson Family? As another thief, Francois Villon, said,
“Where are the snows of yesteryear?”

In the words of poets and writers, in the pictures of painters.

- WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

excellent. I recited the words in my head as though i were garrison keillor.