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A Chapter from
Waiting for Nothing
Chapter 1
I pass a restaurant. In the window is a roast chicken. It is brown and fat. It squats in a silver platter. The platter is filled with gravy. The gravy is thick and brown. It drips over the side, slow.
I stand there and watch it drip. Underneath it, the sign says: “All you can eat for fifty cents.” I lick my lips. My mouth waters. I sure would like to sit down with that before me. I look inside. It is a classy joint. I can see waitresses in blue and white uniforms. They hurry back and forth. They carry heavy trays. The dishes stick over the edge of the trays.
There are good meals still left in these trays. They will throw them in the garbage cans. In the center of the floor a water fountain bubbles. It is made of pink marble. The chairs are red leather, bordered in black. The counter is full of men eating. They are eating, and I am hungry. There are long rows of tables. The cloths on them are whiter than white. The glassware sparkles like diamonds on its whiteness. The knives and forks on the table are silver. I can tell that they are pure silver from where I am standing on the street. They shine so bright.
I cannot go in there. It is too classy, and besides there are too many people. They will laugh at my seedy clothes, and my shoes without soles.
I stare in at this couple that eat by the window. I pull my coat collar up around my neck. A man will look hungrier with his coat collar up around his neck. These people are in the dough. They are in evening clothes. This woman is sporting a satin dress. The blackness of it shimmers and glows in the light that comes from the chandelier that hangs from the dome. Her fingers are covered with diamonds. There are diamond bracelets on her wrists.
She is beautiful. Never have I seen a more beautiful woman. Her lips are red. They are even redder against the whiteness of her teeth when she laughs. She laughs a lot.
I stare in at the window. Maybe they will know a hungry man when they see him. Maybe this guy will be willing to shell out a couple of nickels to a hungry stiff. It is chicken they are eating.
A chicken like the one in the window. Brown and fat. They do not eat. They only nibble. They are nibbling at chicken, and they are not even hungry. I am starved.
That chicken was meant for a hungry man. I watch them as they cut it into tiny bits. I watch their forks as they carry them to their mouths. The man is facing me. Twice he glances out of the window. I meet his eyes with mine. I wonder if he can tell the eyes of a hungry man. He has never been hungry himself. I can tell that. This one has always nibbled at chicken.
I see him speak to the woman. She turns her head and looks at me through the window. I do not look at her. I look at the chicken on the plate. They can see that I am a hungry man. I will stand here until they come out. When they come out, they will maybe slip me a four-bit piece.
A hand slaps down on my shoulder. It is a heavy hand. It spins me around in my tracks.
“What the hell are you doin’ here?” It is a cop.
“Me? Nothing,” I say. “Nothing, only watching a guy eat chicken. Can’t a guy watch another guy eat chicken?”
“Wise guy,” he says, “Well, I know what to do with wise guys.”
He slaps me across the face with his hand, hard. I fall back against the building. His hands are on the holster by his side. What can I do? Take it is all I can do. He will plug me if I do anything.
“Put your hands up,” he says.
I put my hands up.
“Where’s your gat?” he says.
“I have no gat,” I say. “I never had a gat in my life.”
“That’s what they all say,” he says.
He pats my pockets. He don’t find anything. There is a crowd around here now. Everybody wants to see what is going on.
They watch him go through my pockets. They think I am a
stick-up guy. A hungry stiff stands and watches a guy eat chicken, and they think he is a stick-up guy. That is a hell of
a note.
“All right,” he says, “get down the street before I run you in.
If I ever catch you stemming this beat, I will sap the living hell out of you. Beat it.”
This chapter ends well for the narrator. He goes down the street and asks at a restaurant if they'd trade work for food. The manager says no, but a customer buys him a dinner and gives him enough to get a place to sleep that night.
It is night. I am walking along this dark street, when my foot hits a stick. I reach down and pick it up. I finger it. It is a good stick, a heavy stick. One sock from it would lay a man out. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would lay him out. I plan. Hit him where the crease is in his hat, hard, I tell myself, but not too hard. I do not want his head to hit the concrete. It might kill him. I do not want to kill him. I will catch him as he falls. I
can frisk him in a minute. I will pull him over in the shadows and walk off. I will not run. I will walk.
​
I turn down a side street. This is a better street. There are fewer houses along this street. There are large trees on both sides of it. I crouch behind one of these. It is dark here. The shadows hide me. I wait. Five, ten minutes, I wait. Then under an arc light a block away a man comes walking. He is a well-dressed man. I can tell even from that distance. I have good eyes. This guy will be in the dough. He walks with his head up and a jaunty step. A stiff does not walk like that. A stiff shuffles with tired feet, his head huddled in his coat collar.
This guy is in the dough. I can tell that. I clutch my stick tighter. I notice that I am calm. In the crease of his hat, I tell myself. Not too hard. Just hard enough. On he comes. I slink farther back in the shadows. I press closer against this tree. I hear his footsteps thud on the concrete walk. I raise my arm high. I must swing hard. I poise myself. He crosses in front
of me. Now is my chance. Bring it down hard, I tell myself,
but not too hard. He is under my arm. He is right under my arm, but my stick does not come down.
Something has happened to me. I am sick in the stomach. I have lost my nerve. Christ, I have lost my nerve. I am shaking all over. Sweat stands out on my forehead. I can feel the clamminess of it in the cold, damp night. This will not do. This will not do. I’ve got to get me something to eat. I am starved.
I stagger from the shadows and follow the guy. He has a pretty good face. I could tell as he passed beneath my arm. This guy ought to be good for two bits. Maybe he will be good for four bits. I quicken my steps. I will wait until he is under an arc light before I give him my story. I do not have long to wait. He stops under an arc light and fumbles in hi pocket for a cigarette. I catch up with him.
​
“Pardon me, mister, but could you help a hungry man get - ”
​
“You goddam bums give me a pain in the neck. Get the hell away from me before I call a cop.”
​
He jerks his hand into his overcoat pocket. He wants me to think he has a gun. He has not got a gun. He is bluffing.
​
I hurry down the street. The bastard. The dirty bastard. I could have laid him out cold with the stick. I could have laid him out cold with the stick, and he calls me a goddam bum. I had the stick over his head, and I could not bring it down. I am yellow. I can see that I am yellow. If I am not yellow, why am I shaking like a leaf? I am starved too, and I ought to starve. A guy without enough guts to get himself a feed ought to starve.
​
I walk on up the street. I pass people, but I let them pass. I do not ding them. I have lost my nerve. I walk until I am on the main stem. Never have I been so hungry. I have got to get me something to eat.
Critics compared Kromer’s terse prose and bold depictions to Upton Sinclair and Ernest Hemingway’s war stories.
Glimpses
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Tom and Janet Kromer built this house in Alameda, New Mexico and lived there 25 years. The “Kromer House” is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
You can examine Tom Kromer’s reviews and other material, at www.Kromerarchive.org,
Charlie Bowen wrote Tom Kromer's story because Tom fascinates him. Charlie is a retired journalist, a musician and an educator. After about 20 years with the Huntington newspapers, he has been a freelance writer for three decades. He co-founded The 1937 Flood (the band, not the natural disaster) with the late David Peyton. He is a part-time journalism professor at Marshall University.
Charlie even wrote and recorded a song about Tom Kromer, to the tune of Farther Along, in the style of Woody Guthrie. He found great videos to go with it. Watch and listen at this link.
Tom Kromer
"Today, Waiting for Nothing is hailed as a classic American account of life in the Depression, and Kromer is something of a literary legend."
In 1929, Tom Kromer had just turned 23. He was out of work and had to drop out of Marshall. The Great Depression had begun. With no jobs around his Huntington home, he decided he'd try his luck out west. He set out to hitchhike, but after a full day without a lift, he got a better idea.
“A freight train pulled to a stop beside the road. I crawled into a boxcar,” Kromer recalled, “and I never again voluntarily took up the responsibilities of hitchhiking, but always aligned my interests with the interests of the railway companies. They generally got me where I wanted to go, which was never more definite than ‘east’ or ‘west.’”
Young Kromer was among the first wave of Americans who took to the roads and rails in the desperate days following the stock market crash. Tom left the green hills of his native West Virginia to find work in the golden wheat fields of the Great Plains.
No such luck.
“There were no jobs in Kansas,” he wrote. “The combine had come, and I got my first taste of men trying to buck a machine. I also got my first taste of going three days without food, and walking up to a back door and dinging a woman for a handout.”
​​​​​​​Kromer spent the next five years drifting back and forth across the country: five years of soup lines, flop houses, panhandling and hobo camps, jail cells and boxcars.
“Sometimes I would stay in a town for four or five months doing odd jobs for a room and something to eat,” he wrote. “Most of the time I slept and ate in missions, dinged the streets and houses and used every other racket known to stiffs to get by.”
​
According to The National Heritage Museum, “During the Great Depression, 1929-1939, over 250,000 young people left home in hope and desperation and began riding freight trains or hitchhiking across America. Most of the them were between 16 and 25 years of age.”
A book came out of these years.
Waiting for Nothing was composed of bits and pieces “scrawled on Bull Durham papers in box cars,” Kromer said, and in the “margins of religious tracts in a hundred missions, jails … and on a few memorable occasions actually pecked out with my two index fingers on an honest-to-God typewriter.”
Kromer’s brutal, unromantic account of life on the road in the Depression shows readers the raw truth of what it took to survive on the road in the dark days of the 1930s. His New York publisher marketed the work as a novel, but Kromer said, “Save for four or five incidents, it is strictly autobiographical.”
Published in early 1935 by Alfred A. Knopf, the book sold for $2 a copy. Today, Waiting for Nothing is hailed as a classic American account of life in the Depression, and Kromer is something of a literary legend.​
During the Depression, hundreds of thousands rode the rails, looking for work.
Men washing dishes and helping a family with their garden
in exchange for food and maybe a place to sleep.
No stranger to hard times
Critics compared Kromer’s terse prose and bold depictions to Upton Sinclair and Ernest Hemingway’s war stories. The Nation magazine said the book's incidents were, in turn, “grim, repellent, touching, humorous, ribald, tragic.”
​
At the time, the New York Times recognized the “sheer power of the ghastliness and horror of the narrative” of life on the road.
​
Some reviewers criticized the book’s simple, unadorned structure — “fragmentary sketches,” one called them — but none doubted its authenticity.
​
Later on, he would profoundly influence Milton writer Breece Pancake, who admired his writing style and subject matter and tried to incorporate them in his own writing.
​
In his life and writing, Kromer was focused on depicting the realities of life for poor and dispossessed people. He was himself no stranger to hard times.
​
​He was the first of six children of a poor Huntington working class family. His father, Albert, was a Russian immigrant who worked in coal mines at age 8. Tom grew up hearing that his grandfather had been crushed to death in a mine accident.
His father later worked at Huntington’s Owens Glass Bottle Co., a job that likely contributed to his lung cancer. After his death at 44, his wife took his job at Owens. To help support the family, Tom dropped out of Marshall College and taught several years in mountain schools.
​
By 1928, Kromer was back at Marshall, taking journalism classes and working a night job to pay his way. His main teacher was a legendary professor named W. Page Pitt.
​
In feature writing class, Pitt suggested that Tom dress in shabby clothes and go undercover onto Huntington streets to beg for money, to get a sense of what it was like to live “on the fritz,” as they called it at the time. Tom successfully pitched his story to Huntington’s Herald-Dispatch. It was published in March 1929 under the headline, “Pity the Poor Panhandler; $2 An Hour is All He Gets.”
​
His readers were just months away from October’s stock market crash. In less than a year, $2 an hour would seem like a fortune, and life on the street was anything but easy.
The market crash sank Kromer’s college career. He became what he called a “tramp of circumstances,” living through days his pre-Depression self could never have imagined:
​
— Hopelessness. He would stop even bothering to ask for work, because he despaired of hearing people laugh at the idea.
— Hunger. In the numbing indignities of soup lines two
blocks long, he watched men huddled against cutting winds for hours, waiting for a simple meal.
— Violence. Always there was the terror of being beaten by strangers in the boxcars or by the railroad police — the
“bulls." He learned his own capacity for violence.
At one point, Kromer’s protagonist contemplates mugging a man with a stick, planning how to hit him to lay him out without killing him, then frisking him in the shadows. He can’t bring himself to do it.
— Squalor. Remembering rescue missions, flop houses, abandoned buildings and sidewalks, Kromer wrote of living in places where large sewer rats scurried across the floor and drunks fought, vomited and urinated in the darkness.
In an afterword to a later edition, Kromer spoke of an overpowering sense of loss and a blurring of his past. “My life is spent before it is started,” he wrote. Death, he added, “at times seems a more welcome outcome than continued survival.”
A chilling dedication opens Waiting for Nothing: To Jolene, Who Turned Off the Gas. We don’t know who Jolene was.
He finished Waiting for Nothing while he worked 15 months in the California Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). At the time, he called the book Three Hots and a Flop, hobo slang for meals and place to sleep.
At the CCC, he met Marcy Woods, a painter. Marcy’s wife, Hazel, knew renowned muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens. She sent him the manuscript. Steffens appreciated the story’s realism and encouraged Kromer to keep polishing. Later, he recommended it to literary agent Maxim Lieber. Things happened quickly. Lieber landed a publishing contract for Kromer with Alfred A. Knopf. The publisher renamed it Waiting for Nothing, to capture the overriding mood of the story — and rolled it out in the spring of 1935.
A British edition was released later that year, with an introduction by an important new Kromer fan, the celebrated author Theodore Dreiser. The British cut one of the raciest chapters from the book.
Perhaps because it was the end of the Depression, and people didn't want to think about it, the book sold modestly. He was also up against serious competition. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie and Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet and John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flats and It Can’t Happen Here were published the same year.
Despite Waiting’s modest sales, Kromer was hopeful, because of its critical acclaim. Then once again, bad luck struck. The English publisher decided that part of this realistic new novel was a bit too realistic. They opted to censor an entire chapter, citing British obscenity laws.
​
Back in America, whatever celebrations Kromer and his friends were planning for the book’s launch were derailed, Tom was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Soon he could no longer withstand the demands of physical labor. He had to leave the CCC camp and he worked his way back home,
across the country, hopping freights back to West Virginia.
Reunited with family in Huntington, Tom happened to meet an old Marshall classmate. Thomas Donnelly was preparing to take a teaching position at the University of New Mexico.
Noting that New Mexico’s climate might be gentler for a TB sufferer, Donnelly persuaded Kromer to come with him. He even arranged a scholarship for Tom to study journalism at the university.
Soon after starting classes, Tom began coughing up blood.
He was admitted to the hospital. There, he met the woman
he would marry. Janet Smith had come to Albuquerque for treatment of a rheumatic heart condition. Fellow patients, she and Tom grew close.
The two built an adobe house on a lot in Alameda on the north side of Albuquerque. They lived there for the next quarter century.
Tom began work on a second novel, Michael Kohler, based
on his grandfather’s life as a coal miner. He told friends the new book would center on West Virginia’s mine wars from 1912 to 1921 and give readers a critical look of wealth
disparity between the workers and coal operators.
He wrote a half dozen chapters, and prepared a synopsis,
then submited it in an application for a Guggenheim Fellowship he hoped would provide financial support for
him and Janet. He wrote to Theodore Dreiser that “I’ve been bedridden with tuberculosis since the publication of my book, a year of this in a sanatorium." Word of his failing health spread. Maxim Lieber, his agent, wrote Tom that he was “shocked to read of your latest illness and the form it assumed.”
Lieber was excited about the new book project. A splendid idea,” he said. He was eager to submit it to competitions by publishers like Houghton Mifflin and Little Brown.
But it was not to be.
Kromer’s Guggenheim application was turned down. Tom was too sick to finish Michael Kohler. He adapted a section into a short story for American Spectator, edited by playwright Eugene O’Neill and others. In December 1936, Kromer’s last published article, “A Glass Worker Dies,” based on his father’s death, appeared in Lincoln Steffens’ Pacific Weekly.
In the mid-1940s, Janet gave up a writing job at the Albuquerque newspaper to devote more time to his care. In 1945, she started a magazine, Janet Kromer’s Shopping Notes, which she continued for the remaining 15 years of her life.
Janet died in November 1960. Tom continued to live in their adobe home until his West Virginia family persuaded him to come home. Shortly after his wife’s death, Tom suffered a nervous breakdown. From 1963 until his death six years later, he lived quietly with his sister and their mother in a modest house. Kromer died of a heart attack in 1969 at age 62. He is buried in Huntington’s Spring Hill Cemetery.
​​
Others carry on his legacy
​
He left behind a legacy of fictional realism that heavily influenced Breece Pancake and other prominent West Virginia writers. Breece Pancake’s biographer, Tom Douglass, wrote that, “In the 1980s, Breece Pancake began compiling the unpublished manuscripts of Tom Kromer, whose writing he had discovered in the fall 1976 and which now deeply influenced his own. He had planned several trips to West Virginia University where Kromer’s manuscripts are
collected. He had contacted the Kromer family.
After Pancake’s death, Arthur Casiato, a Pancake classmate, and James L. West, completed the Kromer project, published by the University of Georgia in 1986. Casciato said Breece Pancake taught Kromer in his classes and carried his copy of Waiting for Nothing around campus, urging people to read it.
In 2018, Marshall University English professor Stefan Schoberlein stirred up a Tom Kromer revival in Huntington.
Schöberlein, who teaches Appalachian literature at Marshall, discovered Kromer after moving to town. On Sunday walks in Spring Hill Cemetery, he usually walked past Tom’s grave.
He heard a public radio reading about Kromer from the West Virginia Encyclopedia. Schöberlein connected the name to the grave he had seen during his walks.
He asked around and found that Tom Kromer was unknown in the town where he was born and died. He read Waiting for Nothing. “I was blown away,” he said. He created an Appalachian literature class featuring Kromer.
He urged his students to explore Kromer’s world and contribute to the writer’s re-emergence. His students built an extensive web site, www.Kromerarchive.org . Still online, it includes a podcast, a Kromer driving tour, an audio reading of his work, and a driving tour, among other things.
Kromer’s life story is riddled with “What ifs.” What if he had lived longer? What if Guggenheim had accepted his application? What if he'd been well enough to write several books?
​​​​