The other night I got home from a rather extended road trip and found that lightning had struck the dish, which meant I couldn't watch Matlock. I figured I'd listen to a little music, maybe some Beethoven or Roger Miller. You can imagine my chagrin when I walked over and discovered that the cat had vomited on my CD player. Now I was forced to take the fifth on Beethoven. It was Roger and out. Without even the rudimentary elements of technological input in my life, I was truly back to the basics. There was nothing to do but think. Nothing to do but dream. Nothing to do but remember.
I recalled a small incident that had occurred earlier that afternoon when I'd walked into one of those OfficeMax places in Kerrville like a mad scientist, searching desperately for a cartridge that might mate harmoniously with the last typewriter in Texas. Of course, I didn't find it. As I was leaving in a snit, I saw an old-timer entering the place, carefully clutching what is now considered an antique, a hand-levered calculator. He was a tiny man with a long white beard and a crushed straw hat on his wizened head. He wasn't getting a Dell. He was just hoping that the young techno wizards at OfficeMax could repair his calculator.
"It's not even in the catalog!" the tall, impossibly young salesman crowed almost joyously. Other employees crowded around to voice similar expressions of amazement bordering upon ridicule over this piece of machinery that had once been a workhorse of American business. "This belongs in a museum!" they laughed. But it wasn't a museum piece to the old man, who carried it protectively out into the parking lot. I looked up at the garish chain store in the ugly strip mall in the little town that was growing increasingly similar to every other town. Something there is that doesn't love a mall, I thought. Something.
Back at the house that night, with the cat vomit slowly drying on the CD player, I sat back and lit up a cigar. I blew a smoke ring. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't bad. I remembered how my old pal Wavy Gravy used to salute mistakes and imperfections. He said that's what made us human. Meanwhile, that obnoxious kid was back on TV, smiling satanically at me like some adolescent Ronald Reagan pitchman, telling me I'm getting a Dell. I don't want a Dell. I just want a typewriter cartridge. And the next time that kid says, "Dude, you're getting a Dell," I want a windmill to fall on him.
TEXAS FOR DUMMIES
ll my adult life I've been in the practice of giving advice to people who are happier than I am. I'm sure, like most born-again Texans, you're probably thrilled right now about moving here. Oh, you've no doubt heard stories about the wide-open spaces being mostly between people's ears, but you didn't believe them. Now, the prospect of being a Texan may make you happier than 95 percent of all dentists in America, but that doesn't mean you're going to fit in. Remember, happiness, like Texas, is a highly transitory state.
But maybe you've really set your ears back, and you're hellbent on becoming a real Texan like John Wayne, who was from Iowa, or George Walker Bush, who is from Connecticut, or Molly Ivins, who is from California, or Jerry Jeff Walker, who is from New York. In that case, the least you can do is follow these few simple rules of the road for all modern Bubbas and Bubbettes. This, my fine-feathered foreign friend, is friendly advice, freely given. Follow it—or get the death penalty.
1. Get you some brontosaurus-foreskin boots and a big ol' cowboy hat. Always remember, only two kinds of people can get away with wearing their hats indoors: cowboys and Jews. Try to be one of them.
2. Get your hair fixed right. If you're male, cut it into a "mullet" (short on the sides and top, long in the back—think Billy Ray Cyrus). Or you can leave it long on top and cut it short on the sides and back. When you take off your cowboy hat, you'll have what I like to refer to as the Lyle Lovett Starter Kit. If you're female, make it as big as possible, with lots of teasing and hair spray. If you can hide a buck knife in there, you're ready. Grooming tip: If you can't find curlers big enough, use empty Dr Pepper cans.
3. Don't make the most common mistake all non-Texans make when they come down here—confusing Amarillo with the armadillo. Amarillo is a town in the Panhandle full of people who don't like being mistaken for armadillos. They're very conservative politically. The armadillo is a gentle creature. It tends to be much more middle of the road.
4. Buy you a big ol' pickup truck or a Cadillac. I myself drive a Yom Kippur Clipper. That's a Jewish Cadillac-stops on a dime and picks it up.
5. Just because you can drive on snow and ice where you come from does not mean you can drive in a Texas downpour. When it rains hard, stay home. If you have to drive, get on the highway, move into the fast lane, and go no faster than thirty-five miles per hour. If you have to drive at night, watch out for the deer. Only hit the ones with huge antlers because they make the best wall hangings. Christmas gift tip: Make you a nice fur coat with antlers and give it to your mother-in-law.
6. Don't be surprised to find small plastic bags of giant dill pickles in local convenience stores.
7. If you hear a redneck exclaim, "Hey, y'all, watch this!" stay out of his way. These are likely the last words he will ever say.
8. Remember: "Y'all" is singular, "all y'all" is plural, and "all y'all's" is plural possessive.
9. Texans have a strange way of talking. Get used to it. In my experience, I've always heard the word "Jewish" pronounced with only one syllable, such as, "He's Juush." When they pronounce the word "Jew," of course, it's invariably with about eleven syllables. An example of this would be: "She married a Jeeeeeeee-wwwwwwwww!"
10. Don't call it "soda" or "pop." It's all Coke unless it's Dr Pepper.
11. Don't pet the dog standing in the back of the pickup no matter how small or how cute. All truck dogs are dangerous weapons. But a dog that is not in the back of a pickup is another story. We Texans love our dogs.
Like we always say: "Money may buy you a fine dog, but only love can make it wag its tail."
12. It is now legal to carry a concealed weapon in Texas. As a result, crime has gone down. An unfortunate side effect, however, is that there are now about 18 million ambulatory time bombs any place you go just waiting for Dustin Hoffman to pound on the hood and shout, "I'm walkin' here!" As for myself, I don't carry a weapon. If anybody wants to kill me, he's going to have to remember to bring his own gun.
13. Everything goes better with picante sauce. No exceptions.
14. Be sure you have a favorite football team. Be sure it is the Dallas Cowboys.
15. Don't tell us how you did it up there. Nobody cares.
NEVER TRAVEL WITH AN ADULT CHILD
obert Louis Stevenson once said: "To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive." This is particularly true, of course, if you've lost your luggage. In the fall of 1985, realizing that it's sometimes best to leave life's excess baggage behind, my father and I finally agreed upon something. We decided to take a trip together to Australia.
Our publicly stated purpose was to put to rest once and for all two eternally vexing questions that have troubled mankind down through the centuries: Does water swirl counterclockwise in Australian toilets? And do Australian dogs circle counter clockwise three times before flopping down in the dust? Possibly a phone call to friends in Sydney might've helped resolve these matters, but, like all hopeful travelers, we wanted to find out for ourselves.
It is never highly recommended for a father and his child to travel together upon such an extensive journey, particularly if the child is almost forty-two years old and both father and son derive from a small, ill-tempered family. If indeed this is the case, human buffers are definitely in order to keep a peaceful pilgrimage from boomeranging into a rather repellent tension convention.
When you ask people if they'd like to go to Australia, they invariably tell you it's the dream of their lives. They'd love to go, they all say, but, fortunately for Australia, most of them never do. They cling perversely to that tar baby that is the quiet desperation of their lives. If they have the time, they don't have the money. If they have the money, they can't spare the
time. Few of the folks we talk
ed to realized that time is the money of love. What they did realize, apparently, was that traveling halfway around the world with Dr. Tom Friedman and his son, Kinky Friedman, could make for an extremely unpleasant experience.
After searching the American countryside high and low, Tom and I at last came upon two brave souls who stood ready to accompany us on our father-and-son odyssey. One was Earl Buckelew, an old-time rancher and neighbor of ours who hadn't been outside of Medina, Texas, in more than fifty years. Earl was old enough to be a member of the Shalom Retirement Village People, but youthful in spirit and more vigorous than many men younger than he, Tom and myself included. Earl was one of the last real cowboys I've ever known.
The other candidate for the journey was my longtime journalist friend from New York, Mike McGovern. McGovern was a large half-Native American, half-Irish legend who rarely had much trouble getting into trouble. He was, however, not without charm. McGovern, reportedly, had once combed his hair before meeting a racehorse. Taken together, I'd always felt that McGovern and I just about comprised one adequate human being.
The four of us taken together, however, comprised a new, rather reckless, dangerously unstable entity. McGovern, ever the adept headline writer, dubbed our little troupe The Four Horsemen of the Antipodes. Earl did not know what the Antipodes were, but he was beyond doubt the only one of us who could really ride a horse. I preferred two-legged animals and I myself wasn't entirely sure what the Antipodes were, either. McGovern told me to look it up when I got home, but I soon discovered the meaning when I found myself in the outback riding 'cross the desert on a horse with no legs.
The flight to Australia takes just a trifle longer than the gestation period of the giant sea turtle, but there are always at least three full-length movies to divert the passengers. After each movie, Earl Buckelew, still wearing his cowboy hat, asked the flight attendants, whom he consistently called stewardess, whether they were male or female, how much time was left in the flight. Every time he asked, it seemed they always gave him the same answer: "About eight and a half hours."
A flight of this length gives you a chance to get to know yourself and your companions a bit more than you might've wished, but somehow we managed. My biggest problem was a satanic little baby sitting directly behind us who kept deliberately sneezing upon me. Tom's road-to-Damascus experience came when he learned that through some mix-up all that was left for his lunch was a vegetarian meal. He promptly became highly agitato, but I'm pleased to report that he did settle down after about eight and a half hours. "This is exactly what I didn't want to happen," he told the mother of the small infant behind us, whereupon the child maliciously sneezed upon me again.
McGovern made do with many little bottles of vodka, teaching the flight attendants and other privileged passengers how to make a rather arcane drink called a Vodka McGovern. By the time we crossed the international date line, he was so high he was starting to get lonely. I was cookin' on another planet myself. Earl captivated almost everyone he talked to and he never stopped talking once we left the States. They'd never met a real Texan before, one who'd driven an actual horse-and-wagon, sheared sheep, broken wild horses, built houses with his own hands, and especially one whose own grandfather had been captured by the Comanches. It was a good thing Earl was delighting these people, I thought, because I had pretty well run out of charm, and the baby behind me was now locked in a terrible rictus of unpleasant hiccupping. As for McGovern, he was singing "Waltzing Matilda" with a nun from Syracuse, New York. As they tell you down under: "No worries, mate."
It's probably just as well that the images of our first days in Australia, having percolated within my gray-matter department for many years, seem now as only bright pieces of a mosaic in my mind. Even when you're there, there is a faraway, ephemeral, On the Beach-like quality to Australia that has nothing to do with how heavily monstered you are when you arrive. It's something you see embodied in ancient Aboriginal paintings, all of which were created with a series of dots of color. You can see these paintings in some Sydney gallery, but when you fly over the outback and look down at the landscape, it is precisely and uncannily similar in style and detail to the Aboriginal art. Back when the paintings were made, of course, no Aboriginal had ever flown in an airplane. In fact, the first person to ever fly an airplane in Australia was an American— Harry Houdini. And about the only feat Houdini never attempted, as far as we know, was to draw Aboriginal paintings.
Houdini, however, would definitely not have been challenged by the old hotel we stayed at that first week in Townsville on the Gold Coast. There were no locks on any of the doors. The hotel was a sprawling affair that looked like an old set from "Gunsmoke," with a pub downstairs and a wide veranda encircling the entire structure. Tom and Earl shared the singular honor of having the only room in the place with a bathtub and toilet. I asked Tom whether he would mind monitoring whether the water swirled counterclockwise in the toilet, but, for the moment, he did not seem entirely committed to the project.
Later that night, down in the open-air pub with drunken Aussies throwing darts across the bridges of our noses, McGovern and I were drinking Cascade beer from Tassie (Tasmania) and listening to a British tourist bellyaching about his bad luck. He'd hit a kangaroo in his Land Rover and, not wanting to miss a photo op for the folks back home, had taken the dead body, dressed it up in his jacket, knapsack, and sunglasses, and leaned it against a nearby gum tree. He was taking the kangaroo's photo when the animal, apparently only stunned, suddenly bounded away with all his money and his passport.
"Now I'm stuck here broke and getting bitten to death by the bloody flies," he complained.
"Serves you right, mate," said one of the locals. "First you run down one of our 'roos. Next thing, you'll be swattin' our flies."
Before our daunting journey into the vaunted outback, the Four Horsemen spent a few relaxing days sailing on a forty-two-foot yacht along the Great Barrier Reef. Our hosts, Piers and Suzanne Akerman, were both excellent sailors, which made up for McGovern and myself, who spent most of our time pouring large amounts of Mount Gay rum down our necks and spitting up on the vessel's rather ornate brass compass. At night we watched the Southern Cross, the most beautiful of constellations, roll from one side of the cathedral sky to the other. "Makes you wonder," said McGovern, "what God might've done if He'd had a little money."
At one point, we dropped anchor and went ashore onto Hamilton Island, considered to be one of the most exclusive travel destinations in the world. Not only did we feed kookaburras by hand, we saw many animals that neither Dr. Seuss nor Earl Buckelew had ever dreamed of. There also appeared, however, to be another kind of animal—a fairly large herd of American businessmen. Tom Friedman confessed to being mildly disappointed. "We've come halfway round the world to this fabled, exotic island," he said, "only to discover an Amway convention."
Several days later, our gutsy little group set out on a secular pilgrimage to the outback. We had three major objectives in undertaking the trek. One was to prove we could do it. Two was to develop a firsthand understanding of the aboriginal culture. Three was to get the hell away from the Amway convention.
In my twin roles as Virgil leading Dante into the concentric circles of hell, and as official biographer for the Four Horsemen (which was far more tedious), I devised a helpful little list of things a tourist would require to make the trip safely. I also included a list of items an Aborigine would require making the same trip. As an educational service to the reader, the two lists are provided forthwith.
The tourist needs the following things to survive in the outback: sturdy hiking boots, large canteen with emergency supply of fresh water, first-aid kit, two-way radio, flashlight, tinned foods of every variety under the sun (that's why they need to be tinned), broad-brimmed hat with hole punched in one side of the brim for two-way-radio or walkie-talkie antennae, gun and knife for protection in case you meet someone as crazy as yourself, current map of the area (though nothing's changed since Banjo Pat
erson wrote the lyrics to "Waltzing Matilda" in 1895), and emergency phone and fax numbers so that you can contact the nearest koala bear with a pager (though, of course, they're not really bears), and antisnake and antispider venom, (though if you're bitten by the redback spider it's curtains on opening night). The female redback eats her mate, incidentally, during mating. The male redback, according to Piers Akerman, has a corkscrewlike procreative device. This may account for the female redback's behavior.
If you're bitten by the taipan snake, I'm afraid there won't be time to upgrade your software. The taipan denatures the blood, breaking it down totally and instantaneously. The taipan, the Aussies say, can kill a horse in half a second. That concludes the list of items the tourist needs to survive in the outback.
The Aborigine's list of necessities is much shorter, of course. In fact, it contains only one item: a stick.
What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World Page 11