What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World
Page 14
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie
For glad did I live and glad did I die
And I laid me down with a will.
And these be the words you 'grave for me
Here he lies where he longed to be
Home is the sailor, home from the sea
And the hunter, home from the hill.
There is some special something about the way in which Stevenson passionately interwove his evanescent life with his incredible art that has caused the ensuing embroidery to seem to last forever. Like van Gogh, like Hank Williams, the work defines, sustains, and sometimes destroys its creator. Robert Louis Stevenson's magic is that he gives it to you.
Before he ever got to Samoa, while still in Hawaii, RLS befriended the young Princess Kaiulani and read to her often under their special banyan tree. Kaiulani, another death-bound passenger of life, was the last princess of Hawaii, soon to lose her kingdom, her poetic friend, and her own life at the age of twenty-three as the people of Hawaii and her royal peacocks all cried together. The banyan tree was eventually cut down by the rough hand of progress, but someone was wise enough to save a green branch, which now has grown into a beautiful tree gracing the playground of Princess Kaiulani Elementary School in Honolulu. Beneath the tree is a bronze plaque that bears a verse from a poem Stevenson wrote for her before she left for schooling in Britain.
Forth from her land to mine she goes,
The island maid, the island rose,
Light of heart and bright of face:
The daughter of a double race.
Her islands here, in Southern sun,
Shall mourn their Kaiulani gone,
And I, in her dear banyan shade,
Look vainly for my little maid.
Stevenson also visited the island of Molokai, shortly after the death of the great holy man Father Damien, whom he very much admired. While there he taught croquet to the leprosy patients at the girls' school. The ephemeral act of teaching croquet to young leprosy patients speaks like a living page torn from Stevenson's own short, afflicted life. As he left for the barge, the young students crowded along the fence to say goodbye. Had he not left then, Stevenson wrote, he would never have been able to.
And in Samoa to this day there is a traditional greeting sometimes given to ship captains and passengers who arrive by sea. Part of the native greeting is a question that translates into English in roughly the following manner: "Is Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson aboard your ship?" There is no easy answer to this metaphysical question. I would like to think, however, that the answer is "Yes, and he always will be."
WATCH WHAT YOU SING
was having a cup of coffee one morning in the hostility suite of the mental hospital when my editor called and suggested I write about the Dixie Chicks. I told him that by the time I finished writing about them, people would be asking, "The Dixie who?"
"No," he said. "They'll be a topic of heated debate for some time. Just ask your fellow residents."
So I did. I asked a 275-pound, six-foot-tall black man who was under the impression that he was Napoleon. "Sure," he said. "I loved the Dixie Chicks. They were cute and little and purple. They wiggled through a fence in Houston fifty years ago and were eaten by two dachshunds."
"No," I told him. "Those were the Easter chicks."
So I took the elevator up to my padded room in the van Gogh wing, where I live with my pet typewriter. But I wasn't sure what to type. I didn't know a hell of a lot about the Dixie Chicks, but I did know their agent, Dr. Kevorkian. I called him on a secure line.
"Hey, Doc," I said, "how are things goin' with the Chicks?"
"Great!" he said. "Not only are they riding high on the charts here in the States, but they're also moving into heavy rotation on the new country station in Tikrit."
"That's wonderful!" I said. "How's the tour going?"
"Fantastic!" he said. "We're selling out every date. And this summer we've been invited to open for Jerry Lewis on a tour of France."
"How do you explain the rather odd phenomenon," I asked, "of the Chicks going up on the pop charts at the same time they were going down on the country charts?"
"What," he asked, "do those country hicks know about music?"
By the time I hung up with the good doctor, I had an even more confused image of who the Chicks were. Was it healthy for me to be listening to their music? Were they trying to poison my values? Were they trying to poison my soup? I had to know the answer to that last one right away, because the sign in the lobby read TODAY IS TUESDAY, THE NEXT MEAL IS LUNCH.
At lunch I talked to a woman who was sitting at my table, and I asked her what she thought of the Chicks. "I'm going to an ophthalmologists' convention in Las Vegas," she said.
I asked, "Do you think they really should've told a European audience that they were ashamed President Bush came from Texas?"
The woman, in a far deeper, far more bitter voice, answered, "Mother Mary, full of grace, help me find a parking place."
"One more question, if you don't mind," I said. "Do you think the issue of freedom of speech comes into play here? I mean, surely the Dixie Chicks can say what they like onstage or off, but should they be held accountable for their behavior? Or, conversely, do you think bad behavior should be rewarded by a measurable increase of success in the marketplace?"
"I've eaten an appropriate amount for my figure!" the woman screamed in a frightening falsetto. She was becoming increasingly agitated. As an orderly took her away, I wondered whether she hated the Dixie Chicks or just didn't want Jell-0 for dessert.
I went back to my room after lunch in something of a petulant snit myself. I was starting to get a rather negative impression of the Chicks. No one in the hospital seemed to have heard of them. Was it possible that they didn't really exist at all? Could it be they were merely a figment of the American imagination? An abstract notion to which we all subscribed? A supreme being in whom we all believed? Were the Dixie Chicks God? "Blasphemous!" I thought. "Impossible!" Yet nobody seemed to know who or what they really were or stood for. And, I was forced to admit, they had pretty much risen from the dead. I bowed my head to pray.
When I looked up, the room was bathed in a strange incandescent, celestial light. Either I was in heaven or inside an old-fashioned jukebox. The Dixie Chicks were on my television set, singing to me in perfect harmony. The lyrics, as best as I can remember, went something like this:
We're sorry if we hurt the president's feelers But he wasn't nice like that Garrison Keillors We're not ashamed that we said what we meant Now tell us why you're a wig-city resident.
"That's what I want to know," I said. "The shrink claimed he put me in here because I believe I'm George Bush's rabbi. But I am George Bush's rabbi! I told that shrink, 'For God's sake, Hoss! You can't put George Bush's rabbi in a mental hospital! I'm ashamed that you come from New Jersey.' "
"We know how you feel," said the Dixie Chicks, who were now no longer on my television screen but standing in the padded room with me. "We've gone through something like that ourselves. You didn't do anything wrong. You were just misunderstood."
"Damn right!" I said. "I don't belong in here." "Of course you don't," said the Dixie Chicks. "After all, you're George Bush's rabbi, and he needs all the guidance he can get. Now, before we leave for our sold-out national tour, how'd you like it if we sang for you again?"
"Make it brief," I said. "The Pope's calling at two o'clock." And then they sang, and their voices were so beautiful and innocent that I could imagine what they must have been like when they were just three little girls growing up in the country, never dreaming that one day they'd be pestering the president and posing nude on the cover of a magazine. But I'll always remember the verse they sang to me. I think it's from some old gospel song:
Lord, we have sinned But who among us Ever really dances With the one who brung us?
"I'd like to thank all who made it possible for me to be here tonight."
eaving the frenetic ant farm that is now Austin, in this year of our Lord 2001, you can set your ears back as you head west on U.S. 290. Pretty soon you're in the rolling Hill Country, and you realize why they say Texas is a state of mind. It's nighttime, and the cowboy stars are shining; it could be any time and any highway. So you lose track of time and let it flow back; suddenly you're in the fifties. The fifties in Texas may not have been the Paris of the twenties, but how many different kinds of sauces can you put on a chicken-fried steak?
You're blowing through Dripping Springs, and the hills are dark shadows; the highway's just a ribbon in the hair of a girl you used to know. Maybe Hank Williams is on the radio. Actually, you're probably a little late for Hank since he died on January 1, 1953, en route to a show in Canton, Ohio. You can't blame him, really. Some people will do anything to avoid a gig in Canton.
Now Charlie Walker's on the radio with his hit song, "Pick Me Up on Your Way Down." Charlie now plays on the Grand Ole Opry. He says he used to own a club in San Antonio called the Old Barn, and that he booked Hank there for one of his last shows in Texas. It was also Hank's last birthday, September 17, 1952. Hank had the number-one song in the country, "Jambal-aya." Charlie says he paid him five hundred bucks—a lot of money in 1952. Of course, it's nothing today. The value of the dollar and almost everything else has tanked pretty severely since then. Even the stars shone brighter in the fifties. Maybe it's just when you're young they appear brighter—like objects in the mirror. You know you've grown up when you realize how far you are away from the stars.
Now you're flying past Johnson City, past the little town of Luckenbach, Texas, which would someday be a famous song. Now you're getting deeper into the Hill Country and deeper into the fifties. Man has not yet landed on the moon, but he's discovered the Moon Pie. Kennedy hasn't been shot, so nobody has to remember where they were.
The car moves like a patient brushstroke through the sepia night, through the towns of Fredericksburg and then Kerrville, sleepy and sprinkled with lights. The shadows of the hills are bigger and darker, and the same stars above you swear that she loves you, that she is your pretty fraulein. And hundreds of miles away to the west, across the aching emptiness, the land is fiat again, and a young Buddy Holly is setting out to prove that the world isn't square.
As you drive, he's probably sitting in his car staying up half the night listening to a rhythm-and-blues program out of Shreveport. It is 1951 in Lubbock, Texas, and it is the miles and miles of aching emptiness all around him, that spiritual elbow-room, that creates the climate for something new to strike the world like a Texas blue norther. Bob Wills and Elvis came through Lubbock in 1955, and not long after that Buddy was on his way past time and geography to that borrowed campfire that warms the world.
There were not going to be any happy endings. Hank would die in a Cadillac. Buddy would die in a plane. Elvis would die on a toilet. Bob Wills would die broke. Today, of course, we realize that none of them will ever die. But back in the fifties they were as alive as you and me; Cadillacs were getting longer, tail fins were getting higher; and dreams were getting as close as they ever do to coming true.
GOD'S OWN COWBOYS
ast weekend, Barry Goldwater, Chuck Conners ("The Rifleman") and James Drury ("The Virginian") were inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. Without taking away from this trio's status as fine Americans, one must wonder if the inductors might not have reached a bit spiritually in calling them cowboys.
Far be it for me to suggest that they were not cowboys, for cowboys come in all colors and denominations. My only contention is that the final arbiters of what is a cowboy should be God and small children, and I'm not certain they would have chosen this particular trinity. But let us explore this wandering trail together.
Though Spanish-speaking peoples, it should be noted, are quite often mean to bulls, they did give us the first rodeos in Mexico, in the 1700s. In fact, much of what was to become the cowboy derived from the Spanish vaquero. The first rodeos as we know them in the United States came about a century later and often featured black cowboys. The Cowboy Hall of Fame tells me that its "minority category" (in which all cowboys actually belong) consists of "two Mexicans, two black cowboys, one Native American, and no cowboys recognized as Jewish."
Tom Mix, who is a member, was said to be half Jewish, and Wyatt Earp was married to a Jewish dancehall girl—but close only counts in horseshoes. Being Jewish and having lived in the T^xas Hill Country most of my life, the only thing I've seen that Jews and cowboys seem to have in common is that both wear their hats indoors and attach a certain amount of importance to it.
One of the few real cowboys I know is a man named Earl Buckelew, who has lived all of his life in the heart of the Hill Country near Medina, Texas. For more than seventy-six years, Earl has lived on the land, ridden the range, and loved and understood horses. And, what is even rarer, he loves and understands himself. These days, Earl lives in a trailer and watches Wheel of Fortune. He was not inducted into the Cowboy Hall of Fame, but then, Nellie Fox hasn't made it into the Baseball Hall of Fame yet either.
The notion of the cowboy has always been one of America's most precious gifts to the children of the world. Indeed, the early cowboys, whether they drove down the Chisholm Trail or Sunset Boulevard, reached higher into the firmament than they might have known. When Anne Frank's secret annex was revisited after World War II, pictures of American cowboy stars were still fluttering from the walls where she had left them.
True cowboys must be able to ride beyond time and geography. They must leave us a dream to grow by, a haunting echo of a song, a fine dust that is visible for generations against even a black and white sunset. Today many children of the dust dream of becoming cowboys.
God bless 'em. Most of them probably won't achieve that difficult, poetical, impractical, but not impossible dream. Some of them, however, might just make it. I sure hope they do because I believe that within the soul of every cowboy shines a spirit that might just save us from ourselves.
SHOSHONE THE MAGIC PONY
happy childhood, I've always believed, is the worst possible preparation for life. Life is so different from childhood, it seems. The magic tricks have all been explained to us. The sparkle, we now realize, is all passive smoke and rearview mirrors. Maybe things were always this way, but I don't really think so. I think there was a time.
In 1953, when I was about seven years old, my parents took me to see Shoshone the Magic Pony. That was also the year that Tom and Min Friedman bought Echo Hill Ranch and turned it into a children's camp, providing thousands of boys and girls with many happy, carefree summers of fun. But although 1953 might've been a good year for the Friedmans and a good year for wine, it'd been a bad year for almost everybody and everything else. Hank Williams, along with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, had checked out of the mortal motel that year, quite possibly unaware that the other party had been there to begin with. Hank fried his brains and heart and other internal organs for our sins, using eleven different kinds of herbs and spices. Julius and Ethel, charged with spying for Russia, many thought falsely, were fried by our government and died declaring their innocence and their love for each other. Hank's songs declared his innocence and his love, inexplicably, for people. It is doubtful whether Hank and the Rosenbergs had anything in common at all, except that a small boy in Texas had cried when each of them died.
The boy had also cried the year before when Adlai Stevenson had lost the potato-sack hop at the company picnic to good ol' Ike, the Garth Brooks of all presidents, who turned out to be the most significant leader we'd had since Millard Fillmore and remained as popular as the bottle of ketchup on the kitchen table of America, even if Lenny Bruce and Judy Garland, who were destined to both die on toilets, like Elvis, remained in their rooms for the entire two terms of his presidency.
The kid had seemed to cry a bit back then, but fortunately, human tragedies of this sort neve
r cut into his happy childhood. When he grew up, he continued to cry at times, though the tears were no longer visible in or to the naked eye, for he never let human tragedies of this sort cut into his cocktail hour. But during his childhood, it is very likely that his parents noticed the tears. That may have been the reason they took him to see Shoshone the Magic Pony.
These days, as we peer cautiously out across the grey listless afternoon that is adulthood, we seek and we find fewer and fewer surprises in life. What dreams we have are veiled in memory, etched in regret. Our minds go back to yesterday street and the summertime of our choosing. Maybe it's 1953. Maybe it's a little rodeo arena near Bandera, Texas, where the loud-speaker had just announced Shoshone the Magic Pony. My father and mother, Tom and Min, were sitting on the splintery bleachers next to me and my little brother Roger. And suddenly, all our eyes were on the center of the arena.
Shoshone came out prancing, led by an old cowboy with a big white beard. He took the reins and bridle off Shoshone and the horse bowed several times to the audience. Shoshone had a beautiful saddle and a large saddle blanket that seemed to glitter with sequins of red, white, and blue. Then the old cowboy stood back and the music began. It was "The Tennessee Waltz." And Shoshone the Magic Pony started to dance.
It was apparent from the outset, even to us children in the crowd, that there were two men inside the body of Shoshone. You could tell by the clever, intricate soft-shoe routine she was performing, by the fact that she often appeared to be moving hilariously in two directions at once, and by the funny and very unponylike way she now and again humped and arched her back to the music. I was laughing so hard I forgot for the moment about Hank Williams, Adlai Stevenson, the Rosenbergs, and myself. Whoever was inside there was so good, I even forgot that they were inside there.