I also remember the coffee-colored river. It seemed to flow out of a childhood storybook, peaceful and familiar, continue its sluggish way beneath the moon and the stars and the tropical sun, and then pick up force and become that opaque uncontrollable thing roaring in your ears, blinding your eyes, rushing relentlessly round the bends of understanding, beyond the banks of imagination.
MAD COWBOY DISEASE
n The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain observed, "They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce." Twain didn't mention it, but they also spell better than they smell. All in all, very little seems to have changed since his time. There's nothing like a trip across the old herring pond to make you glad that you live in the good ol' USA.
I knew that early March wasn't the best time to be a cowboy in Europe, yet I felt I had to honor a commitment I'd made to address an event in London with an unfortunate title: "Murder at Jewish Book Week." Everyone told me it was sheer idiocy to travel overseas with the triple threats of war, terror, and customs inspectors taking away my Cuban cigars. Yet, strangely, it wasn't courage that compelled me to go. It was simply that I was afraid at that late date to tell the lady I was canceling.
The flight was nine and a half hours long. It seemed as if almost every passenger besides myself was dressed in some form or other of Middle Eastern garb. One young man who spoke English was wearing a Muslim prayer cap and robe over a University of Texas sweatshirt. He told me there was really nothing to be concerned about. "You have gangsta chic," he explained. "We have terrorist chic." I found his calm analysis oddly comforting.
I was totally jet-lagged when I arrived at London's Gatwick Airport at 6:55 in the morning. My ride into town was arranged by Robert MacNeil of the old MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. The day before, I'd been filming a PBS show with Robert in Bandera and had warned him about crossing the busy streets of the little cowboy town. "It'd seem quite ridiculous," I'd told him, "for a cosmopolitan figure like yourself to get run over in Bandera." MacNeil just said that he didn't want the headline to read "Kinky Friedman Sees Man Killed."
As I walked the cobbled streets, visited pubs and restaurants, played songs, and did interviews with the BBC, the subject of President Bush and Iraq popped up often, sometimes acrimoniously. I found myself defending my president, my country, and my cowboy hat. Soon I was going on the preemptive attack myself, calling every mild-mannered Brit who engaged me in conversation a "crumpet-chomping, Neville Chamberlain, surrender monkey." After a while, I realized the futility of this approach and merely told people that I was from a mental hospital and was going to kill them.
Bright and early the next morning, my journalist friend Ned Temko took me on a quest for Cuban cigars, which are legal in London, if expensive. Everything is legal in London, if expensive. Phil the Tobacconist mentioned that Fidel Castro personally supplies Cuban cigars to Saddam Hussein. "I wouldn't write about that," said Ned. "George W. might nuke Fidel." As the three of us entered the walk-in humidor, Ned revealed that he'd once covered Iraq for the Christian Science Monitor in the late seventies. "Saddam's a thug with an excellent tailor," Ned said.
"I know his tailor," Phil said. "He's right down the street, in Savile Row."
Meeting Saddam's tailor is almost as special as meeting Gandhi's barber, but I felt I had to try. Ned, my Virgil of Savile Row, led us down the winding streets to a discreet-looking row of shops where tweeds were being measured for dukes and dictators behind closed shutters. Maybe it was the cowboy hat and high rodeo drag that prevented entry, or maybe it was simply the lack of an appointment, but at the designated address, no one came to the door. My outfit did get an enthusiastic response, however, from a group of city workers repairing the street nearby. They stopped what they were doing and sang cheerfully together, "I'm a rhinestone cowboy!"
"Since we didn't see Saddam's tailor," Ned said, "why don't we try to meet Tony Blair?"
"Jesus," I said.
"That's what the Yanks may think," said Ned. "Over here, they're about to crucify him."
Twenty minutes later, we were standing next to a Wimbledon-style grass tennis court hidden in the heart of London. "We may be in luck," said Ned. "There's Mike Levy." Levy,
Ned explained, was a former record producer who'd given the world early-seventies glam rocker Alvin Stardust. "What's he done for us lately?" I wanted to know.
"He's Tony Blair's tennis partner," he said.
Levy was in a hurry, and it didn't seem likely that Blair had played tennis that morning. Still, ever the innocent American, I stepped forward as Levy was climbing into his roadster.
"Anything you'd like to say about Tony Blair?" I asked.
"Yes," Levy said. "He needs to work on his backhand."
On my last night in London, I walked through the fog until I came to the most famous address in the world, 221B Baker Street. On the door was a small bronze plaque that read "Visitors for Mr. Sherlock Holmes or Doctor Watson please ring the bell." I rang the bell, walked up one flight of seventeen steps, and suddenly I was standing in Sherlock Holmes's living room. There was a cheery fire in the fireplace. Holmes's violin stood poignantly nearby, along with the old Persian slipper where he kept his Turkish tobacco. And in the room were Japanese, Russians, Africans, people from seemingly every nation on earth, all bound together by a common, passionate belief that Sherlock Holmes was real. It was, I thought, a perfect United Nations.
The next morning I was waiting in line at the airport to board a plane back to the States. Behind me was a proper British couple with a shy little girl clutching her teddy bear and staring intently at my hat. "Ever seen a real cowboy before?" I asked.
"No," she said. "But I've seen a cow."
CLIFF HANGER
n the night of December 17, 1998,1 clung precariously to life, sanity, and a sheer cliff-side overlooking an angry sea. My only companions were lizards, iguanas, and the pale light of the Mexican moon shining like a white, luminous buttock in the mariachi sky. I'd been staying just outside Cabo San Lucas at the mansion of my friend John McCall, had taken a solitary pre-dinner power walk on the beach, and had been swept out into the ocean by a freak wave. The undertow, which killed a person that same night, swept me hundreds of yards away from the beach and deposited me at the base of a steep cliff. I tried to scramble up, but I found myself trapped between the tide and the darkness. As the water pounded ever higher along the black, crumbling landscape, intimations of mortality flooded my fevered brain. Like Arafat after his plane crash in the desert, I vowed to be a different kind of person if I survived. I thought of my mother and my cat, both of whom had gone to Jesus. I realized that I might now be seeing them sooner rather than later.
I also thought of what a bothersome housepest I'd turned out to be for my generous host, John McCall. McCall, who is also known as the Shampoo King from Dripping Springs, could afford to be generous. He runs the beauty supply company Armstrong McCall and, as he once told me, is a "centimillionaire." For those of us who can't count that high, it means McCall is worth a hundred million dollars. Even with inflation, that's not too bad. "Shampoo," says McCall, "makes people feel good about themselves."
As I held on desperately to the cliff, I took some comfort in knowing that McCall had more money than God. There was no way, I figured, he would allow his favorite Jewboy to die an untimely death without launching a land, air, and sea search. As I shivered in the darkness, I listened for helicopters that never came and resolved that if McCall wasn't thinking of me, I would think of him, thereby goosing him into action.
I thought of how McCall had been through hell a couple of times and come out laughing at the devil. In 1990 he himself had almost gone belly-up. Medical experts diagnosed him with deadly lymphoma and pointed the bone at him, giving him only weeks to live. Yet incredibly, McCall had a dream aboard an airplane in which the cancer turned to water and disappeared. When he went in for his next examination, the cancer was, in fact, gone. The doctors had never seen anything
like it, but of course, that's what they usually say. Either that or you'll never walk again. McCall did, indeed, beat the first cancer, and when it returned years later, he beat it again. In the interval, just to keep in practice, he survived a plane crash in Alaska.
Now, as I clung to the cliff, soaking wet and shivering in the predawn moonscape, I hoped some of McCall's vaunted luck would rub off on me. What I didn't know that fateful night was that McCall was not really looking for me at all. It wasn't until later that morning, when he discovered my passport, cash, and cigars still in my luggage, that he swung into action. By this time I was dehydrated, delirious, and waving frantically to every fishing vessel I could see, many of whom waved back cheerfully or held up their catch of the day. Because I was trapped, ironically, on a private beach beneath luxury homes, they had no idea that the date on my carton was rapidly expiring. But McCall knew how to launch a major campaign. Soon the FBI, CIA, and DEA were involved, Don Imus's private jet was standing ready in New York, PI Steve Rambam had been consulted, and a large blowup of my passport photo, which strongly resembled a Latin American drug kingpin, could be seen on flyers on every telephone pole, hotel, hospital, morgue, and whorehouse in the greater Cabo area.
I, of course, knew none of this. I just kept concentrating on McCall, hoping I was getting through. I visualized a world traveler with a large wad of cash he calls "whip-out." I pictured a mysterious magnate who happily worked as a roadie selling T-shirts on my recent concert tour of Europe. A man
"Basically what I hear you saying, Mr. Smith, is help."
who makes huge donations to worthy causes almost always under the name Anonymous. A man who invites the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders to his birthday parties, which he often doesn't attend himself. A man with a gazillion-dollar home outside Austin that is known as the Taj McCall. Yet money, I reflected, never seems to make people happy. As McCall himself once told me, "Happiness is a moving target."
Late in the afternoon, my hopes were fading. If I survived, I vowed, they could give me a goat's head and I'd dance all night. Once again I began stumbling upward, lost in the rocky landscape, trying to find a way to the top of my upscale death trap. Suddenly, while climbing a steep ledge, I was miraculously plucked from my precipice by an intrepid band of Mexicans who were rappelling downward. They had been working on Sly Stallone's house, and McCall had commandeered them.
Fortunately, they knew exactly where to look: The same thing had happened to another person just weeks earlier. Sly was not home at the time, but McCall was waiting at the top with a warm hug and cold cerveza. To paraphrase my father, it felt almost good to be alive.
That night, after ocho tequilas, I asked McCall what took him so long. He explained that he didn't take my disappearance seriously at first. McCall remembered a conversation the two of us had had several years earlier when we toured the Australian Outback. We had discussed how easy it would be for a person to disappear if he wanted to. McCall, in other words, was convinced that my absence was staged, quite possibly as some kind of publicity stunt. I'd never been averse to a little publicity, of course. I just didn't want to die from exposure.
Some days later, without pulling any punches, McCall finally revealed to me the thing that might have been the toughest blow of all. "The real tragedy," he said, "is that you were fifteen minutes away from making CNN."
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON IN SAMOA
obert Louis Stevenson's dark, gypsy eyes always reminded me of Anne Frank's or Elvis's or those of some other hauntingly familiar death-bound passenger of life. They seem to burn with a fever, like embers from that borrowed campfire that provided heat and light to Stevenson's work and to his life. A piece of spiritual trivia, which some may find poignant and some may find stultifyingly dull, is that RLS, during the last five years of his life, possessed the only working fireplace in Samoa. Still, it was not enough to warm his shivering Scottish soul.
What, you might ask, does a cowboy know about Robert Louis Stevenson? What could someone from Texas, where we have wide-open spaces between our ears, possibly hope to accomplish by hectoring the people of Scotland regarding their worst legal scholar and greatest literary lighthouse keeper? We'll see.
In the meantime, we can all agree that heroes are for export. In America, for instance, we often have to remind ourselves that JFK is not just an airport, RFK is not just a football stadium, and Martin Luther King is not just a street running through the town. RLS is another set of initials representing a man who aspired to inspire before he expired and, by any account, succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. But just like many New Yorkers hardly notice the Statue of Liberty, Stevenson, perhaps understandably, may be old news to some of you. Yet RLS and the Statue of Liberty have this in common: They've both managed to shine their lights for a long time now, and mankind has managed to follow these beacons through many dark and stormy nights of human history. When we get to the destination, of course, we usually discover that it's only Joan of Arc with her hair on fire.
Writing fiction, I've always believed, is the very best way of sailing dangerously close to the truth without sinking the ship. Stevenson did this as well as anybody when he was alive and, incredibly, in this age of attention deficit disorder, still appears to be going strong. His spirit seems to transcend the time he never had and the geography he never got enough of. I have followed his footsteps, like a spiritual stalker in the sands of the South Seas, and everywhere I went it was almost impossible to believe that more than a century has passed since he was bugled to Jesus.
One of the things that makes Stevenson so enduring and appealing is that before he hit the literary big time, he was, for many colorful, quixotic, heartbreaking, bohemian years, a jet-set gypsy. Today we probably would have thought of him as a homeless person with a sparkle in his eye. Guesthouses he was summarily thrown out of now bear his name. There is a rustic area in Northern California where he wandered in deep despair and aching loneliness on a donkey, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, like some Joseph looking for a manger. He fell off the donkey into a canyon bed and, in a weakened state of a fragile life, no doubt would have perished forgotten if he hadn't been discovered by two teenage boys. The rustic area is now known as the Robert Louis Stevenson National Forest.
In 1889, Stevenson, aboard the ninety-four-foot schooner the Casco, departed San Francisco, sailed the South Seas, and, seven months later, arrived safely at the harbor in Honolulu. He was beginning the mortal coda of his life. He was thirty-nine years old. He had five years left to live and die in the paradise of his choosing.
The beautiful thing about inspiration is that it travels so well. Stevenson's trip to Samoa had been deeply influenced by his reading of Herman Melville, whom Stevenson, like almost everybody else, assumed was dead. Melville wasn't dead, however, he was just not currently working on a project. He was living out his last days as customs inspector #75 in New York. Moby Dick had already been out for almost forty years and could still only be found in the whaling sections of bookstores. "The important books," Melville had said, "are the books that fail." When he died in 1891, the New York Times misspelled his name in its obituary. By then, of course, Stevenson was safely ensconced in Samoa.
In the time he had left, Stevenson's family grew, from his wife, Fanny, her son, Lloyd, and his mother, Margaret, to spiritually encompass almost the entire Samoan people. He had a romantic, some might say misguided, view of the Polynesian race in general. He believed they had the brains, beauty, and spirit of the ancient Greeks, and that if the world would leave them alone, they would blossom and flourish, becoming the centerpiece on the table of modern civilization. Needless to say, this was not a view shared by the Americans, the British, or the Germans, all of whom had designs on Samoa.
Thus it was that Stevenson found himself supporting a local chieftain named Mataafa, a rebel Robin Hood who stood squarely in the way of the powers that be. By this time RLS was already a beloved cultural icon in Samoa. In the mountain of almost a million words he piled up over his l
ifetime was the Samoan translation of his South Seas story "The Bottle Imp." It was the first fiction any of the Samoans had ever read in their own language, and many of them, perhaps quite correctly, concluded that fiction might just be another way of telling the truth. Many Samoans, indeed, came to believe that the real bottle imp resided in the big safe in the big house on Stevenson's plantation, Vailima.
Stevenson was soon accorded the accolade Tusitala, or The Storyteller, a title of great spiritual importance in Samoan culture. There was probably a bit of Lord Jim and a bit of Don
Quixote in Stevenson's relationship with the native islanders, not to mention a scrap of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely and a shard of Gullible's Travels. But this was as it should be, for Stevenson, like the Samoans, was a childlike, romantic, exuberant spirit, and he fit into paradise with the same awkward grace that he fit into the limbo of the white man's world.
RLS might have been the only white man on the planet who believed that Mataafa could be king of the Samoans and that it was important for this to come to pass. It was in this spirit that Stevenson interceded when Mataafa and his followers were captured and imprisoned, gaining the freedom of most of the political prisoners. In gratitude to Tusitala, these Samoans, who by nature instinctively despised manual labor, built a road from Apia, the capital, to Vailima. They named it "The Road of the Loving Hearts" and it still stands today as a monument to Stevenson's humanity.
You can drive this road, as I did some years ago, all the way to Vailima, which is now a beautiful museum and library. You can also climb the nearby Mount Vaea, which I did as well, stand amidst the windy majesty of the glittering Pacific, and commune with the lingering presence of RLS. On the side of his tomb, two verses are inscribed from his poem "Requiem":
What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World Page 13