"My client objects to the endless delays in this trial. Attorney fees alone, he says, are becoming increasingly painful to bear."
like that of the brilliant American composer, Stephen Foster, to die penniless in a gutter on the Bowery. But with or without talent, you might ask, how can hard work and perseverance pay off in the creative field? Why are you asking me? Who the hell knows? In this day and age, just as the tortoise is finally crossing the finish line to win the race, he'll very likely see three men in suits and ties, standing there with their briefcases. "Hello," they'll say. "We're the attorneys for the hare."
STRANGE TIMES TO BE A JEW: NOTES ON MICHAEL CHABON'S LATEST NOVEL
s Meyer Landsman, Michael Chabon's detective in The Yiddish Policemen's Union observes early in this tome, "These are strange times to be a Jew." Not one to flail the passive horse of Judaism forever, Chabon is merely intimating that down through history the times have never been quite as strange as the Jews. And one of the strangest of them all is, of course, Michael Chabon.
I'm sixty-two years old but I read at the sixty-four-year-old level. Nevertheless, at 432 pages, the book looked to me to be the kind of thing only a mother, and I use that word loosely, could love. Maybe a spiritual invalid might have the time, inclination, or reason to read it, I thought. Was it a great existential work of art or simply a case of Northern Exposure meets The Emperor Has No Clothes? Read on, gentile reader, read on.
When someone takes a simple idea and makes it complex, that is what we call an intellectual. When someone takes a complex idea and makes it simple, that is what we call an artist. Chabon assuredly is an intellectual, but is he an artist? Sherlock Holmes, whom Chabon professes to greatly admire, once observed that the difference between the killer and the artist is that the artist knows when to stop.
Great artists, in my reckoning, have always been out-of-control forces, invariably intertwining passionately their lives with their art. Examples are van Gogh, Mozart, Charles Bukowsky, Hank Williams, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Stephen Foster, Allen Ginsberg, etc., etc. The fact that most of them were seen as tragic figures was no accident; it is merely one of the elements of their greatness. Bob Dylan once wrote that even above life, he prized madness. Contrast this with Chabon's almost primal pursuit of a "stable writing environment." Tell that to Franz Kafka.
But I suppose that I can overlook the fact that he's a script doctor for soulless Spiderman sequels and that he received a Pulitzer Prize from the same kind of crazy, tall Norwouija boards who gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat and Jimmy Carter. Hell, my hat's off to him for just being able to write with four kids in the house.
Okay, so I'm reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union at gunpoint and I'm starting to like it. Chabon, with the lush skills of an F. Stop Fitzgerald, describing the deserted lobby of the flophouse hotel, the sad, old sofas and "ashtray charm," where Landsman has been living since his marriage went to hell. There's a "dead yid in 208," murdered during what appears to be a party-of-one chess match. So Chabon has his detective talk to the night manager about chess, Landsman admitting to having "no feel for the middle game." "In my experience, Detective," said the night manager, "it's all middle game." In spite of Chabon's unspoken, possibly unwitting, kinship with Flaubert, who claimed he lived to pour a few more buckets of shit upon mankind, this is great stuff.
If the slivovitz-swilling Landsman lives in a strange time, it is playing out in an even stranger place—the fictional Yiddish frontier district of Sitka, a Jewish homeland carved from Alaska after World War II. (Chabon borrowed the idea from a long-forgotten but real wartime proposal of FDR's.) The Palestine experiment failed early, in Chabon's telling, so in place of Sabras in the Jewish iconography, he offers "Polar Bears." Even lobs a sly dig at Israelis when he writes of the Sitkans, "By now they were all staunch Alaskan Jews, which meant they were Utopians, which meant they saw imperfections everywhere they looked." Their temporary nation is nearing its sixty-year expiration date, and a new Jewish expulsion looms as the story opens.
In true noir fashion, "rogue cop" Landsman finds himself drawn irresistibly into pursuing whoever killed his chess-whiz neighbor, who turns out to have been a junkie and the son of a separatist Hasid rebbe. Also in true noir fashion, the higher-ups want him off the case. Landsman's investigation—in the company of his half-Tlingit, half-Jew partner—wraps him in the tassels of orthodox gangsters, international conspiracies about the impending "Reversion" of Sitka, and the allure of his sexy boss, who happens to be his ex-wife.
It's the easiest thing in the world to poke fun or parodize the field of detective fiction. Many highly successful mystery writers do it every day without even being aware of it. I respect Chabon for respecting the genre. Mysteries and mystery writers seem to have always been regarded by the critics as the stepchildren of literature. Yet here, in The Yiddish Policemen's Union, the timeless, glorious game is afoot: the reader ten steps ahead of the detective; the author ten steps ahead of the reader. On a truly seminal level, whether the critics notice it or not, The Yiddish Policemen's Union works as a mystery novel. There's a bit of John D. MacDonald here, a lingering hint of Dorothy Sayers. But in many ways the book is an homage to Raymond Chandler, who believed that plots were merely excuses for the characters to go places and say things.
Chabon clearly believes in the genre, as well he should. After all, mysteries afford us resolution; life itself rarely does. There's an obscure quote of Chandler's from one of his letters that I'm sure hasn't escaped detection by Chabon's micro-meticulous, mental hospital research. Chandler says, "The business of fiction is to recreate the illusion of life." Chabon does this as well as anybody.
Finally, J. D. Salinger once obliged a character to say, "Cleverness is my wooden leg." This may indeed be true of many writers and many Jews, but it's especially true of Chabon, who wears his yellow star on his wooden leg. This is not a bad thing.
It means Chabon is not an impotent, neurotic Woody Allen-Seinfeld-type of Jew, but a crazy Jew with all the elements of greatness who's never afraid to take a crack at the big dream. His Landsman is a brawler, a union man, toughing it out a continent and a world away from the skinny, self-loathing intellectuals who, when not writing, are busy in therapy sessions with Woody Allen's shrink.
Jackie Mason, whom I admire intensely, reports that older Jewish ladies come up to him after almost every show. Like reform harpies, they whisper in his ear, "Too Jewish. Too Jewish." Mason never listens to them. I hope Chabon doesn't either.
Oh, yeah. The more I read The Yiddish Policemen's Union, the more I believe I might finish it some day. Right now I'm reading it at almost a remedial pace, savoring it like an unfinished symphony. I'm even starting to like Chabon. If I ever run into him I'll have to tell him to take some of my critical comments with a pillar of salt. But then again, as Raymond Chandler himself once said, "If you like the book, never meet the author."
DON'T FORGET
n the dead of the night I started to write. If the editor wanted more pages, I'd give him more pages. If the agent wanted more action, I'd give her more action. But first, I felt it was necessary to write an homage to Clyde and Fox. As characters, I had them down cold by now, I thought, and certainly I could complete the novel out of my own imagination, which is what every reader would believe it to be anyway. I did not need any longer to faithfully chronicle their ridiculous little hobbies and adventures out of the whole cloth of their existence. They were characters and I was the author. I could make them do or say anything I wanted now. Maybe Clyde had been right all along. Maybe I was destroying them. What an odd occupation I had, I thought wryly. I was destroying them to create them. But it had to be done. And yet, I missed them. I realized, almost wistfully, that I might never see them again.
I started with Fox, hearing his voice in random past conversations, empathizing with his nuthouse background, getting inside his head. I felt like Faulkner, throwing the story to the winds. I felt like McMurtry, writing two hundred pages of
boring shit before I really got going. I felt like J. D. Salinger, who only mixed interpersonally to get inside the heads of real people, then cut them out of his solitary life and nailed their hearts and souls to the page with a million typewriter keys. I felt like Fox and I felt crazy like a fox and I felt nothing. So, I said my farewells to Fox by writing a sort of soliloquy in his voice and putting him back in a mental hospital.
A mental hospital is not always as romantic a place as it's cracked up to be. You always think of Ezra Pound or Vincent van Gogh or Zelda Fitzgerald or Emily Dickinson or Sylvia Plath or someone like that. Not that all the above-mentioned people resided in mental hospitals. All of them probably belonged there, but so do most people who don't reside in mental hospitals. I know Emily Dickinson never went to a mental hospital, but that's just because she never went anywhere except, of course, for brief walks in her garden with her dog, Austin. If she'd ever gone into a mental hospital and talked to the shrinks for a while, they never would have let her out. She might've done some good work there but that would've been her zipcode for the rest of her life.
Now you take van Gogh, for example. He lived in one with a cat and did some good work there. They put him in for wearing lighted candles on his hat while painting "Night Cafe." Today, was in Ashville. But before Zelda came along to screw things up I was commenting on the fact that mental hospitals are far more sad and sordid places than you'd think, seeing as all these colorful, fragile, famous, ascetic people populate them. I mean it isn't all van Gogh and his cat. I mean there are men following you with their penises shouting, "Am I being rude, mother?" in frightening falsetto voices. People in mental hospitals are shrieking like mynah birds all the time. Or masturbating.
Now Dylan Thomas was a good one. He used to masturbate a lot but I don't think they ever put him in a mental hospital, though God only knows he belonged there. And speaking of God only knows, Brian Wilson undoubtedly belongs there, too, except what would happen to the Beach Boys if you put Brian Wilson in the nuthouse? I mean the only one of those guys who was really a surfer was Dennis Wilson. And you know what happened to him? He drowned. Ah well, the channel swimmer always drowns in the bathtub, they say. But I suppose I've come pretty far afield in this tawdry little tale that the shrinks would assuredly call a rambling discourse. But if getting to the point is the determinant of whether or not you're crazy, then half the world's crazy. Trouble is it's the wrong half. I mean whoever said anything important by merely getting to the point? Did guys like Yeats and Shelly and Keats who, by the way, all belonged in mental hospitals, ever get to the point? I mean what's the point of getting to the point? To show some shrink with a three-inch dick that you're stable, coherent, and well grounded?
And I haven't even gotten to Jesus yet. Sooner or later everybody in a mental hospital gets around to Jesus, and it's a good
thing that they do because I'll let you in on a little secret: Jesus doesn't talk to football coaches. He doesn't talk to televangelists or Bible Belt politicians or good little churchworkers or Christian athletes or anybody else in this god-fearing, godforsaken world. The only people Jesus ever really talks to are people in mental hospitals. They try to tell us but we never believe them. Why don't we, for Christ's sake? What have we got to lose? Millions of people in mental hospitals who say they've talked to Jesus can't all be wrong. It's the poor devils outside of mental hospitals who are usually wrong or at least full of shit and that's probably why Jesus never talks to them. Anyway, you can probably tell by the fact that I'm not employing any paragraphs and the fact that I'm not employing any paragraphs and the fact that I'm not employing any paragraphs and the fact that this little rambling discourse tends to run on interminably that this looks like a mental hospital letter itself. If that's what you think, you're right, because I am in a fucking mental hospital as I'm writing this tissue of horseshit and it's not one of those with green sloping lawns in that area between Germany and France that I always forget the name of. Hey, wait a minute! It's coming to me. Come baby come baby come baby come. Alsace-Lorraine! That's where the really soulful mental hospitals are.
Unfortunately, I'm writing this from a mental hospital on the Mexican-Israeli border and I'm waiting for a major war to break out and they don't have any green sloping lawns. They don't even have any slopes. All they have is a lot of people who talk to Jesus, masturbate, and don't believe they belong in here. It's not a bad life, actually, once you get the hang of it, unless of course you hang yourself, which happens here occasionally, usually on a slow masturbation day. Anyway, the reason I'm telling you all this is that I really don't belong here. I've told the doctors. I've told the shrinks. I've even told a guy who thinks he's Napoleon. The guy's six foot tall, weighs two hundred and fifty pounds, and he's black, and he thinks he's Napoleon. I probably shouldn't have told him in the first place. But the funny thing is he's right. I don't belong here.
The other day a woman reporter came in here from the local newspaper to do some kind of expose on the place and she interviewed some of the patients and one of them was me. I told her I was perfectly sane and I didn't belong in here. She asked me some questions and we chatted for a while and then she said that I sounded really lucid and normal to her and she agreed that I really didn't belong in here. Then she asked me since I seemed so normal what I was doing here in the first place and I told her I didn't know I just woke up one day and here I was and now the doctors won't let me out. She said for me not to worry. She said when she finished her expose on my condition, these doctors would have to let me out. Then she shook my hand and headed for the door. About the time she turned to open it I took a Coke bottle and threw it real hard and hit her on the back of the head.
"Don't forget!" I shouted.
A TRIBUTE TO ME
sually you have to be dead before famous musicians pay homage and record your songs. Did you really think I would wait?
God and country being what they are, you usually have to go to Jesus before anybody gives you a tribute album. The late Townes Van Zandt, who was the precise weight of Jesus at the time of his death, now has about ten of them. Jesus, of course, has more. But when Jesus was alive, He was relatively uncelebrated and totally broke. That is why, directly following the Last Supper, He told the waiter, "Separate checks, please." True greatness is rarely recognized when it walks among us. It almost always dies in the gutter or, occasionally, in the back of a 1952 Cadillac, as Hank Williams did. Talent is invariably its own reward. As Bob Dylan once told me, "When you die, they let you off the hook." The leopard of humanity never changes its spots.
I'd been thinking about a tribute album to myself for a long time, but I didn't want to have to die to get it. I didn't want to be too successful either. If you're too successful in life, you'll never get a tribute album. Someone like Garth Brooks, the anti-Hank, is so commercially viable that probably no one will remember his name by the time he wakes up in hell next to Oscar Wilde. And that's the way the Lord wants it. The Lord doesn't want people singing Garth Brooks songs to their grandchildren. He wants them to sing the songs of the guy who died in the back of the Cadillac, or the songs of Willie Nelson, or the songs of Stephen Foster, who died on the Bowery in New York City. Or, I decided, the songs of the Kinkster, which is why some of you are now holding in your hands Pearls in the Snow: The Songs of Kinky Friedman.
How exactly did that fine record—picked as a spotlight album of the week in December by Billboard—come to be? Glad you asked. In the early seventies, along with my band, the Texas Jewboys, I traveled the land annoying many Americans with songs like "The Ballad of Charles Whitman" and "They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore." I thank the Lord we didn't have a big hit because instead of getting a tribute album, I'd be playing Disneyland with the Pips. About two decades later, once I had enough decent (or indecent) songs and my career had gone so far south that people thought I was dead or wished I was, I knew the time was right for a tribute to me.
The first thing I needed was a title. Every tribute reco
rd requires a classic-sounding, moderately pretentious title. Fortunately, I had a number of them. The top contenders were Ridin' 'cross the Desert on a Horse with No Legs, Strummin' Along with Richard Kinky Big Dick Friedman, Come Home, Little Kinky, and Don Imus's rather facetious suggestion, Hillbilly Has-Beens Sing the Hideous Songs of Kinky Friedman. The title eventually chosen came from a conversation I'd had in the eighties with my friend Timothy B. Mayer, who's since gone to Jesus himself. Tim was lamenting the fact that my more sensitive songs had been overshadowed by obnoxious, outrageous ones like "Ol' Ben Lucas (Had a Lotta Mucus)," which I wrote when I was eleven years old. Tim said that the best songs I'd written had been lost over the years like "pearls in the snow." He told me this when we were both out where the buses don't run on a snowy New Year's Eve on Martha's Vineyard and I was urinating on a house and shouting, "It's going to be a power year for the Kinkster." (It wasn't.)
Fast-forward ten years or so. I was in Nashville hanging out one night with seminal Music City deejay Captain Midnight and Kacey Jones, formerly the lead singer of Ethel and the Shameless Hussies, when Kacey asked, "Whatever happened to all those beautiful songs you wrote?"
Paraphrasing Sammy Allred, I answered, "Nuthin'."
"Well," she said in a voice fraught with irritating gentile optimism, "why don't we do something about that?"
"Why don't we just get a drink?" Midnight said. As fate would have it, we did both.
Since Hank Williams was working a package show with Johnny Horton and Faron Young, we decided that the best centerpiece for our aural table would be Willie Nelson. We sent Willie a dozen vintage Kinky songs from which he was to select one tune to record for us. We waited for the gestation period of the southern sperm whale, but nothing happened. When a tribute album gets off to this kind of a slow start, the honoree can often become somewhat dispirited. I thought that possibly my own precisely timed country music death might increase interest in the project.
What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World Page 9