What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World (10 page)

TWO JACKS

On November 22, 1963—the fateful day that shook the world, the day that caused Walter Cronkite to shed a tear on national television, the day that belied Nellie Connally's encouraging words, "You can't say Dallas doesn't love you, Mr. President," the day that gave Oliver Stone an idea for a screenplay—I was a freshman at the University of Texas, sleeping off a beer party from the night before. Indeed, I slept through the assassination of John F. Kennedy like a bad dream and, upon waking, retained one seemingly nonsensical phrase: "Texas Cookbook Suppository."

It was only later, once I'd sobered up, that I realized I'd been sleeping not only through history class but history itself. I'd also slept through anthropology class, where I'd received some rather caustic remarks from my red-bearded professor for a humorous monograph I'd written on the Flathead Indians of Montana. I'd gotten an A on the paper, along with the comment, "Your style has got to go." But I realized that he was wrong. Style is everything in this world. JFK's style made him who he was. Even dead, he had a lingering charisma that caused me to join the Peace Corps. Yet it was the style of another man in Dallas that was to change my life, I now believe, even more profoundly. I'm referring, of course, to that patriot, that hero, that villain, that famously flamboyant scoundrel, Jack Ruby

Like the first real cowboy spotted by a child, Ruby made an indelible impression upon my youthful consciousness. He was the first Texas Jewboy I ever saw. There he stood, like a good cowboy, like a good Jew, wearing his hat indoors, shooting the bad guy who'd killed the president and doing it right there on live TV. Never mind that the bad guy had yet to be indicted or convicted; never mind that he was a captive in handcuffs carefully "guarded" by the Dallas cops. Those are mere details relegated to the footnotes and footprints of history. Ruby had done what every good God-fearing, red-blooded American had wished he could do. And he was one of our boys!

Ten years later, in 1973, with Ruby still in mind as a spiritual role model, I formed the band Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, which would traverse the width and breadth of the land, celebrated, castigated, and one night nearly castrated after a show in Nacogdoches. None of it would have happened, I feel sure, without the influence of Jack Ruby, that bastard child of twin cultures, death-bound and desperately determined to leave his mark on the world. While many saw Ruby as a caricature or a buffoon, I saw in him the perfect blending of East and West— the Jew, forever seeking the freedom to be who he was, and the cowboy, forever craving that same metaphysical elbow room. I, perhaps naively, perceived him as a member of two lost tribes, each a vanishing breed, each blessed, cursed, and chosen to wander.

In the days and months that followed the assassination, as Ruby languished in jail, the world learned more about this vigilante visionary, this angst-ridden avenging angel. Ruby, it emerged, was indubitably an interesting customer. He owned a strip club in which the girls adored him and in which he would periodically punch out unruly patrons. This cowboy exuberance was invariably followed by Jewish guilt. Josh Alan Friedman, a guitar virtuoso who is as close to a biographer as Ruby probably has, notes that Jack was known to pay medical and dental bills for his punch-out victims and offer them free patronage at his strip club. With Lee Harvey Oswald, however, this beneficence was not in evidence. According to Friedman, Ruby was utterly without remorse over Oswald's death, delighting in the bags of fan mail he received in his prison cell.

In time the mail petered out and, not long after that, so did Ruby. He died a bitter man, possibly the last living piece in a puzzle only God or Agatha Christie could have created. I didn't really blame Ruby for being somewhat bitter. The way I saw it, he
had
actually accomplished something in killing Oswald. He'd helped one neurotic Jew, namely myself, come up with a pretty good name for his band.

Years after Ruby had gone to that grassy knoll in the sky, my friend Mickey Raphael, who plays blues harp with Willie Nelson, tried to get a gig at Jack's old strip club. At the time, Mickey had a jug band, and though he found the place to be redolent of Ruby's spirit, he didn't get the gig. "I thought you guys
liked
jugs," Mickey told the manager.

Thus is the legacy of one little man determined to take the law into his own little hand. And so they will go together into history, a pair of Jacks, one dealt a fatal blow in the prime of his life, the other dealt from the bottom of the deck; one remembered with the passion of an eternal flame, the other all but forgotten. Friedman notes that Ruby wept for Kennedy. Chet Flippo, in his definitive book
Your Cheatin' Heart,
tells of Ruby's friendship and loyalty a decade earlier toward another one of life's great death-bound passengers, Hank Williams. Ruby, according to Flippo, was one of the last promoters to continue to book Hank as the legend drunkenly, tragically struggled to get out of this world alive. He was also one of the few human beings on the planet who knew Hank Williams
and
spoke Yiddish.

Was Ruby a slightly weather-beaten patriotic hero? Was he a sleazeball with a heart of gold? Was he, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, just another Joseph, following a star, trying to find a manger in Dallas? My old pal Vaughn Meader, who in the early sixties recorded the hugely successful
The First Family
album

satirizing JFK, probably expressed it best. After flying for most of that tragic day, oblivious to the news, he got into a taxi at the airport in Milwaukee. The driver asked him, "Did you hear about the president getting shot?" "No," said Vaughn. "How does it go?"

HERO ANAGRAMS

Bob Dylan: Bland boy—nobly bad

Hank Williams: Sank all whim

Willie Nelson: I swell online—nine oil wells

Oscar Wilde: Cowards lie—lad cries ow

Father Damien: Renamed faith

Jack Ruby: Back jury

Arthur Conan Doyle: Can try unload hero

Sherlock Holmes: Hell mocks heroes

Billy Joe Shaver: Behave, sir jolly—shy jovial rebel

ODE TO BILLY JOE

If you doubt my opinion, you could ask Willie Nelson or wait until you get to hillbilly heaven to ask Townes Van Zandt, who are the other folks in the equation, but they might not give you a straight answer. Willie, for instance, tends to speak only in lyrics. Just last week I was with an attractive young woman, and I said to Willie, "I'm not sure who's taller, but her ass is six inches higher than mine." He responded, "My ass is higher than both of your asses." Be that as it may, you'll rarely see Willie perform without singing Billy Joe's classic "I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train," which contains the line "I'd just like to mention that my grandma's old-age pension is the reason why I'm standin' here today." Like everything else about Billy Joe, that line is the literal truth. He is an achingly honest storyteller in a world that prefers to hear something else.

Thanks to his grandma's pension, Billy Joe survived grinding poverty as a child in Corsicana. "
Course
I cana!" was his motto then, but after his grandma conked, he moved to Waco, where he built a resume that would've made Jack London mildly petulant. He worked as a cowboy, a roughneck, a cotton picker, a chicken plucker, and a millworker (he lost three fingers at that job when he was twenty-two. Later he wrote these lines:

Three fingers' whiskey pleasures the drinker Movin' does more than the drinkin' for me Willy he tells me that doers and thinkers Say movin's the closest thing to being free.

I believe that every culture gets what it deserves. Ours deserves Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura and Garth Brooks (whom I like to refer to as the anti-Hank). But when the meaningless mainstream is forgotten, people will still remember those who struggled with success: van Gogh and Mozart, who were buried in paupers' graves; Hank, who died in the back of a Cadillac; and Anne Frank, who had no grave at all. I think there may be room in that shining motel of immortality for Billy Joe's timeless

works, beautiful beyond words and music, written by a gypsy guitarist with three fingers missing.

Last February Billy Joe and I teamed up again to play a series of shows with Little Jewford, Jesse "Guitar" Taylor, "Sweet" Mary Hattersley, and my Lebanese friend Jimmie "Ratso" Silman. (Ratso and I have long considered ourselves to be the last true hope for peace in the Middle East.) Pieces were missing, however. God had sent a hat trick of grief to Billy Joe in a year that even Job would have thrown back. His mother, Victory, and his beloved wife, Brenda, stepped on a rainbow, and on New Year's Eve, 2000, his son, Eddy, a sweet and talented guitarist, joined them. Hank and Townes also had been bugled to Jesus in the cosmic window of the New Year.

I watched Billy Joe playing with pain, the big man engendering, perhaps not so strangely, an almost Judy Garland-like rapport with the audience. He played "01' Five and Dimers

Like Me" (which Dylan recorded), "You Asked Me To" (which Elvis recorded), and "Honky Tonk Heroes" (which Waylon recorded). He also played one of my favorites, which, well, Billy Joe recorded:

Our freckled faces sparkled then like diamonds in the rough

With smiles that smelled of snaggled teeth and good ol' Garrett snuff

If I could I would be tradin' all this fat back for the lean

When Jesus was our savior and cotton was our king.

Seeing Billy Joe perform that night reminded me of a benefit we'd played in Kerrville several years before. Friends had asked me to help them save the old Arcadia Theatre, and I called upon Billy Joe. Toward the end of his set, however, a rather uncomfortable moment occurred when he told the crowd, "There's one man I'd like to thank at this time." I, of course, began making my way to the stage. "That man is the reason I'm here tonight," he said.

I confidently walked in front of the whole crowd, preparing to leap onstage when he mentioned my name. "That man," said Billy Joe, "is Jesus Christ."

Much chagrined, I walked back to my seat as the audience aimed their laughter at me like the Taliban militia shooting down a Buddha. It was quite a social embarrassment for the Kinkster. But I'll get over it.

So will Billy Joe.