What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World (2 page)

INTRODUCTION

et us begin this ordeal with a fairly safe assumption: No human being who has ever lived in this world has ever taken good advice. Millions upon millions of people, however, have gladly and gratefully taken bad advice, foolish advice, pop advice, and glib advice. Why is this? No doubt it's partly because of the perversity of human nature. This notwithstanding, the other part, I believe, is because of the sanctimonious, constipated, pompous, smug, and self-righteous way that good advice is usually given.

This is the main reason most people reject good advice and instead ask themselves, What would Jesus do? Or, What would Ernest Tubb do? Or, What would Will Rogers do? In their time, these folks probably asked their own version of the same question. Jesus indubitably asked, What would My Father do? Ernest Tubb might have wondered, What would Jimmie Rodgers do? And Will Rogers no doubt asked, What would Mark Twain do? This way you avoid dealing with the sermonizing, patronizing, advice-giver altogether; you merely find someone you would like to be like when you grow up and cut right to the chase.

This is why I have assiduously avoided giving any direct good advice in this book. Had I attempted to do so, sure as hell, it would've been summarily rejected by you, gentile reader. Instead, I have tried to cleverly couch anything I deem to be good advice within a deceptive, deviously designed delivery system, i.e., humor, misdirection, and, of course, lots and lots of common Zen bullshit.

I have come to believe that good advice, like ragtag, weatherbeaten human wisdom of any kind, can only be delivered or received obliquely, accidentally, intuitively. Few of us want the hard truth these days anyway. Mankind never has wanted to deal with that. So if you want a religion that still makes you think you're a good Christian even though you own ten homes and fifty cars, you've come to the wrong book.

What would Donald Trump do? What would Bill Gates do? For answers, look at Columbus reaching the Bank of America. Look at the sad, narrow-casted, Starbucked world all around you. There are many people in the world today whom we would call important; there are precious few, indeed, whom we might consider truly significant. If your goal is to make a lot of money and have a lot of power and that's all you really care about,

"Well, it looks like the guests are beginning to trickle in."

you're a shallow, mean-minded, vacuous excuse for a human being and I don't want you reading this book anyway. Stop, before it's too late. You're wasting your time and my time and time is the money of love.

If, on the other hand, you're the kind of person who feels it might be nice to marry a prostitute, contract syphilis, kill yourself between two rows of corn, and leave a lasting legacy of love and truth and beauty, then you might ask yourself, What would Vincent van Gogh do? You might also ask yourself, Where did Vincent van Go? That one, I can answer for you. He went into the creation of what Emily Dickinson called "the thing with feathers that perches in the soul." That would be a little thing called hope. He also went into the unconscious construction of what we call "the still, small voice within." That would be our conscience, which may not be the voice of God but it's close enough for country dancin'. Finally, he went to the heart of all mankind's dearest, desperate, diaper-driving dreams.

By this time, it should be clear to most readers that this introduction, as well as the book itself, was largely ghostwritten by Mary Higgins Clark. I've got a lot on my plate right now and I can't be concerned with casting my soul into purgatory and hoping some three-headed dog will catch the frisbee. I want to live! I want to paint! I want to finish this fucking introduction!

So please, do not ask, What would Kinky do? Because that, my friends, depends on you.

 

UNFAIR GAME

 

ince I've forgotten the first half of my life, it's rather difficult for me to remember my childhood, but I do recall going hunting at the wise old age of seven for the first and last time. One night my four-year-old brother, Roger, and I went coon hunting near Medina with our neighbor Cabbie. Cabbie had an old coon dog named Rip, and Roger suggested that I kiss the dog on the nose. It was the last time in my life I ever took advice from anyone who is younger than I am. Rip bit me ferociously on
my
nose, causing excessive bleeding and even more excessive tears.

Eventually, the hunt proceeded with Cabbie navigating his Jeep down by a stream under a canopy of beautiful cypress trees. It was a dark, moonless night, and Cabbie told us to look up at the tops of the trees and squeeze the trigger when we saw a pair of eyes. This seemingly simple suggestion was complicated somewhat by the fact that God had chosen that night to envelop the Hill Country in a majestic cathedral sky from which stars peripatetically peeped out through the branches at little children, making it impossible to determine whether you were shooting a raccoon or a star. In the end my brother and I each killed a young ringtail, an animal officially recognized as a varmint by the county We collected a bounty of $1.50 apiece. We did not inquire back then, nor did the county ever tell us, what bounty they might have offered for killing a star.

Now, you might be asking yourself, "Why is this man sifting through the ashes of his childhood for a poignant hunting story now that hunting season is over?" The answer is that hunting season is never really over. Deer season may have ended, but that does not mean any of us are safe from an errant bullet fired by an errant bullethead. It only means that hunters have turned their cold sights from harmless Bambies and creatures that fly higher than their dreams to other prey. There is never a moment when a Texan cannot legally curl his finger 'round a happy trigger. Seasons have been decreed for white-tailed deer, mule deer, pronghorn antelope, alligator, dove, turkey, rabbit, javelina, quail, pheasant, squirrel, and yes, Virginia, that most fearsome of all predators in the wild, the lesser prairie chicken.

Today, however, I do not suffer hunters gladly. I realize, of course, that in a deeper sense all of us are hunting for something, and few of us ever find it. If we do, we often find ourselves killing the thing we love. As Oscar Wilde once so aptly described fox hunting: "The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible." And yet it goes on and on. Dressed in camouflage, the great white hunters sit in family restaurants, shiver in deer blinds, and swap stories sometimes proud, sometimes wistful, for the one that got away. As blameless as bullfighters and butterfly collectors, these men for all seasons continue to wage a one-sided war against creation. They hunt only, they say, to cull the vast deer population. They hunt only to teach kids how to hunt. These are the good reasons they give, but they are not necessarily the real reasons. The truth is a much more difficult animal to track. As an honest old redneck once told me about deer: "I just like to put the brakes on 'em."

Yet ours is not the only culture lacking enough culture not to practice such practices. In my own Peace Corps experience in Borneo, I lived for a time among a nomadic tribe of pygmies known as the Punan. One of the delicacies of the Punan is monkey brains, which I ate on a number of occasions. Monkey brains, perhaps not surprisingly, taste quite similar to lesser prairie chicken. The Punan use blowpipes to kill their game, but these seemingly primitive little people are not without their own values of sportsmanship. They do not shoot an animal until it has seen them coming, which gives their prey a fighting chance to flee. This is a foreign concept to those more civilized Texans who hunt elk from a helicopter.

Fortunately, only about 4 percent of all Texans are licensed hunters. This means that 96 percent of us are relegated to the unhappy status of moving targets. Once the hunters shoot the donkey in the farmer's field, they'll shoot our asses next. A great writer named Anonymous once wrote: "The larger the prey, the more corrupt is the soul of the hunter." This may help explain why so many big-game hunters suffer from erectile dysfunction and run the risk of ending up like Ernest Hemingway, who eventually bagged the biggest game of all, himself. If you live in the Hill Country, however, you're probably just proud to have survived another hunting season without getting your head blown off. This does not necessarily guarantee, of course, that you won't be shot in the buttocks by some bow-hunting nerd.