Pick-Up by Charles Willeford
Pick-Up is a genuine underground classic and an incendiary bulletin from the urban underbelly of mid-1950s America. It was first published as an unnoticed paperback original. Following a difficult and nomadic former life that had brought him from Depression-era hobo camps and soup kitchens to wartime battlefields, it was Charles Willeford’s second novel.
Pick-Up is hardboiled literature at its most pessimistic, the unflinching tale of two lost and self-destructive drifters seeking to make a home for themselves in the back streets of San Francisco—a lady fleeing domestic abuse and a failed painter working as a counterman in a shabby cafe. The book’s preferred title, according to Willeford, was Until I Am Dead. Its grim portrayal of life on the edge is plagued by rape, racism, alcoholism, suicide, and unavoidable poverty, but it is also laced with tenderness and compassion that have been maintained overall odds in a society that gives its misfits and outcasts few opportunities to flourish. Pick-Up is confirmed to be what critic Woody Haut has dubbed “a razor-sharp narrative that rips open the genre” by the film’s concluding twists and brutal turns.
Pick-Up by Charles Willeford
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The protagonist of the novel is an alcoholic who toils away at greasy diners on Market Street, a part of downtown that I am very familiar with. He encounters a terrible alcoholic woman who kind of makes me think of the tragic dame in that Paul Newman film The Hustler. The woman uses lipstick to write her suicide note to Newman in a mirror. Anyhow, Willeford ends the story with a startling revelation that gives the entire story a fresh perspective. These two drunks manage to live, barely, drinking and fighting. Although it doesn’t have a great conclusion, this odd little book that is hidden inside the dimestore novel subgenre is incredibly interesting.
There are numerous fictional works by Charles Willeford. Iconoclastic, unique, unyielding, unsentimental, and nonjudgmental are just a few of the qualities I would use to describe Willeford’s extremely particular style of narrative telling. Pick-Up is no different. But even for Willeford, this is a really odd novel. The lives of a man and a woman, both alcoholics, who are barely surviving in post-World War II San Francisco are described in the first half in stark, realistic detail. This is the most brutal and unrepentant aspect of Pick-Up.
One man’s story of his firsthand encounter with the criminal justice system makes up the second half of the book. And by that, I mean the prison, the legal system, and forensic psychology. Aside from the fact that the criminal justice system detailed here is unlike any other system of its kind in the United States or anywhere else. This section of the book presents people, locations, and events in a surrealistic way. This book lacks the sardonic comedy that permeates the majority of Willeford’s previous works.
