What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World Read online

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  A Message from the Author

  Introduction

  PART I * Advice on Life, Death, and Everything in Between

  Unfair Game

  Arrivederci Melanoma

  A Pocket Guide to Mullets

  The Five Mexican Generals Plan

  Bring Him On

  Epilogue

  Strange Bedfellows

  I Don't

  Zero to Sixty

  Tennis Anyone?

  Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

  PART II * My Personal Heroes

  The Navigator

  Don Imus Died for Our Sins

  Animal Heroes

  Tangled Up in Bob

  Poly-Ticks

  Two Jacks

  Hero Anagrams

  Ode to Billy Joe

  The Back of the Bus

  Lottie's Love

  PART III * Advice on Writing

  Killing Me Softly

  Fictional Characters Killed Off by Their Creators

  Talent

  Strange Times to Be a Jew: Notes on Michael Chabon's Latest Novel

  Don't Forget

  A Tribute to Me

  What Would Kinky Read?

  Questions From a British Journalist—1999

  Does Not Compute

  PART IV * Advice on Going on a Journey

  Texas for Dummies

  Never Travel with an Adult Child

  How to Deliver the Perfect Air Kiss

  Let Saigons Be Bygones

  Wild Man from Borneo

  Mad Cowboy Disease

  Cliff Hanger

  Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa

  Watch What You Sing

  PART V * Advice on Coming Home

  A Little Night Music

  God's Own Cowboys

  Shoshone the Magic Pony

  The Hummingbird Man

  How To Handle a Nonstop Talker in a Post-9/11 World

  Social Studies

  Gettin' My Goat

  Change, Pardners

  Coming of Age in Texas

  Romeo and Juliet of Medina

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to George Witte and Terra Gerstner at St. Martin's Press, and David Vigliano, agent. Thanks, also, to Sage Ferrero and Max Swafford.

  As for the rest of the world, I simply offer the Reverend Goat Carson's Native American Thanksgiving prayer: Thanks for nothing.

  A MESSAGE FROM THE AUTHOR

  Regarding the Artist

  he art and illustrations for this book were created by the world-famous, widely syndicated, often praised, often vilified, paralyzed genius, John Callahan. How does he come up with the ideas? I told you. He's a fucking genius. But how, might you ask, does he actually draw the illustrations? I'll let Callahan tell you in his own words: "I clutch the pen between both hands in a pathetic, childlike manner that endears me to millions of conflicted fans around the world."

  The author is highly gratified that the illustrations for this book are the creations of the brilliantly sick John Callahan, one of the few modern American artists worthy of the name. Callahan's work is imbued with a rare, primitive, visceral integrity that often creates in me a mild state of sexual arousal.

  There are a number of instances, indeed, when Callahan's art so perfectly mates with my prose that it is cause for celebration, and, perhaps quite understandably, causes many to masturbate like a monkey at the zoo.

  John Callahan also writes songs. Many people like to sing and record John's songs. He has recently released a new CD that contains one of my favorite Callahan tunes, "Purple Winos in the Rain." As Waylon Jennings once told me, if I had a session tonight I'd cut it. Unfortunately, I haven't had a session in almost twenty-five years, unless you want to count a recent session with a large Bulgarian masseuse.

  What Would Kinky Do?, liberally decorated with Callahan droppings, should provide an entertaining diversion for the many among us who suffer from suicidal depression and whose lives are spiraling downward into tailspins of despair. Others, suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder, may find John Callahan's offerings enjoyable as well. And as for the rest of us? What the hell. Somewhere in all this horseshit there's got to be a pony.

  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.

  ARRIVEDERCI MELANOMA

  was just a small boy when our family dentist in Houston told my father it was imperative that he have his wisdom teeth taken out immediately. Fifty years later, my dad had them removed. My old-timer friend Earl Buckelew once told me he never paid any mind to cholesterol. "Hell," he said, "when we were growin' up, we didn't even know we had blood." My own attitude toward health matters has been pretty similar. In Hawaii and Australia, I've rarely bothered to apply suntan lotion unless it was to a shapely pair of legs obviously not belonging to me. In other words, I never gave much thought to saving my own skin. Then, things suddenly got serious as cancer.

  Before my typewriter and I drown ourselves in intimations of morality, let me say for the record that I'm not a hypochondriac,

  "My technique for rectal examination is somewhat different in that I'm gay and have no arms."

  nor do I believe every word a doctor tells me. I've always possessed the two qualities that Ingrid Bergman claimed were essential to happiness: good health and bad memory. (At least I think it was Ingrid Bergman.) The fact is, sometimes if you ignore what a doctor tells you, everything will be fine. Other times you can answer that knock on the door and it's an old man with a scythe selling Girl Scout cookies.

  At any rate, when I was in Austin a few months back, I noticed that parts of my anatomy were beginning to resemble those of an ancient sea tortoise. My Kerrville dermatologist, Fred Speck (I always thought Dr. Speck was a good name for a dermatologist), has a rather long waiting list, so I went to a new guy, Tom Yturri, a physician's assistant recommended to me by a doctor friend of my fairy godmother's. When I showed Yturri what was troubling me, he waved his hand and said it was nothing, but he did find two or three other little spots that piqued his curiosity. He brought in another guy, Dr. Kevin Flynn, who was wearing a rather elaborate pair of scuba goggles, and they studied the spots together.

  "We'll do biopsies on these three," Yturri said at last.

  "Let me guess," I said. "Whether you do two or three depends on how far behind you are on your boat payments?"

  Yturri chuckled dryly. He did the biopsies fairly painlessly, putting each specimen into a separate little bottle like Dr. Quincy used to do on TV. Quincy was a coroner, of course, so his patients rarely made wisecracks.

  "We'll call you in a few weeks," Yturri said. "Don't worry. It's probably nothing."

  That was when I started to worry—and for good reason. Four days later, Yturri called to say that the spot on my shoulder was a melanoma. Very bad. The spot under my right eye was something that sounded like a "Sasquatch," which I'd always thought was an abominable snowman. Also very bad. Both of them, along with my wallet, had to be surgically removed right away. The spot on my right arm, apparently, was benign.

  Why me? I'd never been perfect, but at least I'd been Godfearing enough to avoid going to temple. And what the hell was a melanoma, anyway? Like most Americans, I had no idea, although I knew I didn't want one. Fortunately, Roscoe West, formerly of the Texas Jewboys, was my housepest at the ranch that weekend. His brother, he said, had once had a melanoma. "Is he still with us?" I asked.

  "No," Roscoe said.

  "I see," I said, as I swallowed my cigar.

  I also talked with people who knew someone with a melanoma who'd survived and had never been visited with skin c
ancer again. All this put me through some rather wild mood swings, at times causing me to feel almost at death's door. I'd tell friends about my situation, and they'd say, "Oh, I'm so sorry." This response did little to lift my spirits. At other times, however, I found myself in a surprisingly good mood. Fighting cancer, I thought, might help lend focus to my otherwise unstructured life. It might give me something I'd never really had before: a hobby.

  On the day of my surgery, I met with two doctors: Aravind Sankar, from India by way of Los Angeles, and Patti Huang, from Taiwan by way of North Carolina. I came from Northwest Austin by way of pickup truck. "This ain't what's going to get you, Kinky," Dr. Sankar assured me. "The melanoma is very superficial."

  "So am I," I told him. "But I don't want to die before the next Yanni concert."

  In a small bed in a small room, wearing a hospital smock, I watched a young nurse try to put a needle in my arm for the IV. A fifteen-year-old from a local high school was standing by taking copious notes.

  "Damn!" I said, after being jabbed repeatedly to no avail.

  "Please don't curse," the nurse said officiously.

  "What the hell?" I said, paraphrasing my father. "I can't say 'damn' in front of a c-h-i-l-d?"

  I was angry. The one thing I didn't need was a young person who couldn't put in an IV giving me a morality lecture just moments before I was to be wheeled into surgery. Luckily, a major tension convention was avoided. Another person came in, put in the IV, and before I knew it, I was in the operating room.

  Dr. Huang would be cutting on my face, apparently, at the same time that Dr. Sankar would be carving up my shoulder. Dr. Sankar introduced me to the anesthesiologist, whom he referred to as "the bartender." After that, it all seemed like a normal evening at the Continental Club. Later, Dr. Sankar told me that I'd really cracked up the operating room as I was coming to. Evidently, someone had asked me a question about my having been in the Peace Corps. My response, according to the good doctor, was that my penis had been cut off in Borneo.