What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World (24 page)

It was during this time of harmony and bonding that the fate monkeys struck again. Goat, who now was "wee-wee-weeing" to use his term, and letting the possum out approximately every five minutes, received yet another blow to his fragile physical constitution. Goat came out of the guest house one morning singing, "It's a double possum morning, Baby left me without warning sometime in the night." His mood seemed upbeat and positive. When I returned from town later in the day, he appeared almost as depressed as I had been since his arrival. He informed me that, during his fitful slumbers the previous night, a spider, apparently, had bitten him on the anus.

This amused me greatly, which only plunged my evacuee into deeper, darker depression. He took his Indian knife and cut up half of my aloe plants and applied this natural elixir directly to the spider bite. This Native American remedy soothed the wound but apparently only temporarily. Goat then proceeded to pillage what was left of my Jameson Irish whiskey, applying equal portions both rectally and by mouth. He claimed the healing process had begun, but in the morning I noticed the level of my Listerine bottle had dropped precipitously and the cap was loose, causing me to spill the rest of it over myself and the floor, and causing me as well to curse my evacuee, who'd just rounded the corner carrying a large flagon of Kona coffee and leaving, I noticed, a very small amount left in the pot. His spider bite was doing much better, he reported.

Any housepest will get on your nerves after two years. Particularly if the person has been a victim of what must certainly be considered one of our country's greatest modern tragedies. My evacuee indubitably did his best, not only cooking for the Friedmans but also serving up great New Orleans-style meals for both of us as well. He labored in the important task of West Coast Underassistant Hummingbird Man, helping his host with his only hobby, feeding the hummingbirds. You can't ask much more of your fellow man.

It wasn't Goat's fault that many times when I looked at him I saw before my very eyes, myself, a very clever form of identity theft. He would sit in my chair, drink my whiskey, smoke my cigars, watch my TV, wear my clothes, answer my phone, all the while talking about or performing bodily functions at rapidly increasing intervals. As for me, I would play a little desultory eight ball by myself and watch my life pass before my eyes. Having a man of the cloth living with you for a two-year stint, a man who drinks ten times as much as you, a man who incessantly vocalizes his sexual desires concerning Angelina Jolie, a man who often speaks in the argot of the gutter, can be an unnerving and eye-opening experience. But the same man recently buried a dead hummingbird with a full traditional ceremony poignant enough to very possibly bring a tear to the eye of any abiding Christian or Native American, and, in this case, one Jewish cowboy.

T
hen came the day, early in the summer of the second year, when Goat received an offer he couldn't refuse. He had been invited back to New Orleans by Xavier University to teach a course in—what else?—the Black Mardi Gras Indians.

Goat is gone now, and, I must say, I almost miss him. And I do sometimes wonder what might have happened if things had been the other way around. I do know that ours is a friendship that has been tested by time, adversity, and the fate monkeys. There may, however, be yet one more test to come.

Someday soon, Goat and I are planning a book tour together. He'll be promoting his new novel, a dark, disturbing book about Hollywood and witchcraft called
Shallow Graves
(available on Amazon.com). I'll be flogging my latest masterpiece, a dark, disturbing book about the Texas governor's race titled
You Can Lead a Politician to Water, But You Can't Make Him Think.

Will it be like old times when Goat and I get back together? Who knows? All I've learned is that it's okay to think you're a cowboy just as long as you don't run into someone who thinks he's an Indian.

CHANGE, PARDNERS

never thought I'd see the day when I’d miss gun racks in the back windows of pickup trucks, but I almost do. I miss the old Texas Hill Country, where Adolph Hofner and the Pearl Wranglers performed at outdoor dance halls under the stars. I miss the days when cowboy shirts never hacl buttons and coffee with a friend was still a dime. Many of the stubborn, dusty, weather-beaten little towns, roads, trucks, jeeps, people, and animals are gone now. If I could, I would surround this magic kingdom with the fragile, freckled arms of childhood and keep it the way I remember it.

All through the fifties, the Medina post office had a sign on the wall that read
DO NOT SPIT ON THE FLOOR
. Today, of course, it would be unthinkable for anyone to spit on the floor; that would be almost as verboten as smoking. Medina is a small, dry town in a wet county that, to paraphrase my father, has been slowly dying for more than one hundred years—that is, until now. After standing strong through droughts, fires, and floods, Medina, along with much of the heart of Texas, is finally experiencing something that may change it forever. And as Joseph Heller once warned, "Every change is for the worse."
I'm referring, of course, to the fact that the whole world seems to be moving to the Hill Country. Some folks in Kerrville are celebrating getting a Home Depot, while yuppies in Houston and Dallas are running away from home as fast as they can. Where are they going? You've got it. "They all want a home, far away from the dome where the Cowboys and drug dealers play. "Trade the smog and road rage for the stars and the sage'— that's what them developers say."

Texas Highway 16 from Kerrville to Bandera is one of the most beautiful drives you can take on this planet. By day, you'll travel through rolling hills, past green valleys and wooded canyons, over sparkling creeks, and under blue skies. By night, the stars will shine even brighter than all of the above. The hills protect us, and the canyons keep us cool in the summer, and the animals go about their secret business as they did before any of us were here. Yet even the natural beauty of the land registers in our consciousness only as another theme park of the modern mind.

There is a phenomenon that sometimes occurs around small towns like Medina that some call the "hidy sign" but I call the "Medina wave." A driver encountering another vehicle on the highway will casually, effortlessly raise his index finger from the wheel in a brief salute, acknowledging the other driver, the countryside, and life in general. The other driver, unless he's new to these parts, will respond in kind. Occurrences of the Medina wave diminish as you reach the outskirts of the bigger towns, disappearing almost completely as you travel farther, or at least that's how it used to be. With so many new people in the area, the custom is vanishing like the fast-moving tail of a comet. These days, you're just as likely to see drivers saluting each other with their middle fingers.

Like it or not, the peaceful, scenic, bucolic Hill Country is being dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. The old-timers, who once worked the land, who drove horses and carts over these hills, who still give directions by the bends of the river, now sit in little coffee shops in little towns and watch the parade of progress. The folks from the big city are escaping the madness, believing they are making a new life for themselves in the wilderness, possibly not realizing what the old-timers already know: that sooner or later, no matter where you go, you always see yourself in the rearview mirror.

Though the Hill Country has always been warm and friendly to newcomers, tradition demands that you be born here or dead before you're truly accepted. My family has owned and lived on the same ranch on the outskirts of Medina for fifty years, yet many of the locals still refer to it as the old Sweeney place. The Reverend Sweeney was a circuit preacher who lived here in 1921, drove a Model T Ford, and kept meat down in the well for refrigeration. In the twenties the Sweeneys traded the ranch for a restaurant in San Saba that went belly-up. Several years ago, five generations of Sweeney women came through on a road trip, and a lady close to ninety gave me a message to give to my octogenarian friend Earl Buckelew. She said, "Tell John Earl the little Sweeney girls came by to say hello." Rivers run deep in the Hill Country.

Yet some things go on as usual. Utopia has a new restaurant called Garden of Eat'n. Bandera continues to be the hell-raising Cowboy Capital of the World, with the Silver Dollar still featuring live country bands and sawdust on the floor, and the Old Spanish Trail still serving a chicken-fried steak as big as your hat in its John Wayne Room. The cedar choppers have all but disappeared from Ingram, and the disgruntled dentists

"I think if I had it to do all over again, I'd sit on this chair frontwards."

 

keep pouring into Hunt. Some people brag about the new Kerrville Wal-Mart, but others are just as proud of a local institution with a memorable moniker: the Butt-Holdsworth Memorial Library. And back at the Medina post office, a Volvo has just driven up with a bumper sticker that reads "Free Tibet."

And the old-timers, like old dogs in the sun, are vaguely aware of traffic jams and conservative little towns like Fredericksburg now transmogrified into shoppers' paradises. Meanwhile, in hillbilly heaven, Slim Dodson sips his coffee, remembering a time long ago when the neighbors asked him why his cats were always going into their garbage cans. He told them, "They wants to see the world." Earl Buckelew is there, too. He recalls once showing some acreage to a guy from the city who wanted to know if the land was any good for farming or livestock. "No," said Earl. "All it's good for is holding the world together."

COMING OF AGE IN TEXAS

ooking at the stars in the Texas sky, you couldn't tell the difference between now and then. But it's there, all right. It's the difference between a picture you carry in your wallet and a picture you carry in your heart. But hearts can be broken and wallets can be stolen and you know you've grown up when you realize how far you are away from the stars.

In the early fifties, however, when I was a child, I spat as a child, I shat as a child, and I wore a funny little pointed birthday hat as a child. I knew what every little kid knows about Indians, which, in a purely spiritual sense can often be considerable, and of course absolutely nothing about ex-wives. When I grew up and was finally released from the Bandera, Texas, Home for the Bewildered for rhyming words too frequently, I knew a little more about Indians and still absolutely nothing about ex-wives except what Alden Shuman had once told me: "They'll stick with you through thick."

As far as Indians go, which is usually a good bit farther than ex-wives, I've collected about a million arrowheads over the years and made frequent visits to the Frontier Times Museum in Bandera, which is just down the street from the Bandera Home for the Bewildered. As well as countless Indian artifacts, the museum features a real shrunken head, a two-headed goat, and many other weird and arcane objects that delighted me as a child, and because of a rather unfortunate state of arrested development, continue to hold the same fascination for me now.

Children, it has always seemed to me, have a greater inherent understanding of many things than adults. As they grow up, this native sensitivity is smothered, buried, or destroyed like someone pouring concrete over cobblestones, and finally replaced by what we call knowledge. Knowledge, according to Albert Einstein, who spent a lot of time, incidentally, living with the Indians when he wasn't busy forgetting his bicycle in Princeton, New Jersey, is a vastly inferior commodity when compared with imagination. Imagination, of course, is the money of childhood. This is why it is no surprise that little children have a better understanding of Indians, nature, death, God, animals, the universe, and some truly hard-to-grasp concepts like the Catholic Church, than most adults.

Now, with the eyes of a child, I lit my first cigar of the morning and focused softly on everything that wasn't there. I'd survived half a fucking century on this primitive planet where the pecking of poison parakeets in the Northern Territories of Australia was the very least of our worries. I cast my mind back to when I was seven years old, sitting like Otis Redding on the dock at the deep water at Echo Hill Ranch in the Texas summertime. It was there and then that a rather seminal experience occurred in my young life, a small thing actually, but as Raymond Chandler often observed in his final stages of alcoholism: "Tiny steps for tiny feet." It was the first time I'd ever seen a man's testicle, unknowingly suspended, almost like a Blakean symbol, outside the lining of his fifty's-style bathing suit.

The man was named Danny Rosenthal, a nice man with a moustache and a cheery smile who probably had had his own problems then but, of course, as a child, these were not known to me. Danny Rosenthal was a friend of my father's and the only problem that I could see that he had at the moment was that a singular large, adult testicle was trapped like a dead rat outside the lining of his bathing suit. Danny Rosenthal was totally oblivious to this matter but it delighted me as a child, and because of a rather unfortunate state of arrested sexual development, continues to hold the same fascination for me now. Danny Rosenthal's testicle, indeed, hangs suspended like a sun over the happy memories of the last days in the lifetime of my childhood.

You don't see people's testicles hanging out of their bathing suits much anymore. Styles have changed, people have changed, the world's a different kind of place, they say. Instead of looking up at things we now spend most of our time looking down on them. Another reason we don't have Danny Rosenthal's testicle to kick around anymore is that people don't appear to have many balls these days. Balls, like imagination, seem to shrivel with age.

As far as Danny Rosenthal is concerned, I believe I remember my father saying that he stepped on a rainbow some years back. If that is indeed the case, I'm sure he's now swimming in the sky with his wayward testicle relegated in the way of all flesh to the shadows on the walls of Hiroshima. I've never told anyone about this small incident of a small child, least of all Danny Rosenthal, but I'm sure he's long past the mortal stage in which social embarrassment might have been incurred. I believe God watches over every testicle, even those that sometimes, quite involuntarily, stray from the herd. I believe that all of us will some day be swimming in the sky with Danny Rosenthal, or at least wind up in a bar somewhere singing Jimmy Buffet cover songs.

To my left and to my right the phones were now ringing. I puffed on the cigar a bit longer, then half dreamily picked up the blower on the left.

"Are you
there?"
said a voice.

"Where else would I be?" I said.