I Had the Right to Remain Silent...But I Didn't Have the Ability

by Ron White

  “Not. Spring forward, asshole!”

  There is one piece of legislation floating around right now that I endorse publicly, and with all my heart. I believe if you’re a convicted sex offender in this country, when you get out of prison, you should have to put a sign in your yard or on your door that says you’re a convicted sex offender. Because I don’t give a fuck about your rights anymore.

  And I’d also like to know where to get those signs, because I’d like to keep some kids out of my yard.

  “Don’t go in Mr. White’s yard, he’ll fuck ya. Is that a Ferris wheel?”

  I’ve talked about my cousin Ray before. And there’s no two people on the planet that are less alike than he and I.

  I’ll give you an example. He’s a homophobe. And I can’t believe I’m not gay. That’s how far apart we are on the food chain.

  Now, I’m not gay, but if you ever come to see me live, take a look at the fuckin’ shoes I wear. The reason I say that is who knows how things are gonna turn out in life?

  And the reason I say that is from the time I was nine until I was thirteen, I was raised by my grandmother. And my grandmother and her family moved to the Panhandle of northwest Texas at the turn of the last century in a covered wagon. Very poor, very rural people.

  And as a child, I would just have to look a little bit sick, and my grandmother would start cramming things in my ass.

  She had an anal thermometer from the 1800s the size of a rolling pin. And the only way she had to take my temperature was to shove this huge antique glass rod into my butt.

  And suppositories—gigantic ass pills. I don’t know where she got them. She would take these gigantic pills and shove them in my butt.

  And enemas, she would stick a hose in my ass and pump hot water into my bowels. And I hated it.

  At first.

  Then I was like, “I feel dizzy, Grandma. Was that my fever breaking?”

  We were living in a podunk little shit town. And there’s nothing to do, right?

  Well, the year I lived with her that I turned thirteen, I figured out something really fun to do. And my grandma caught me in the bathroom, just a-doin’ it.

  And my grandmother, bless her heart, was a very religious woman. And she came up to me later and said, “It says in the Bible, young man, that it is better for your seed to fall in the belly of a whore than on the ground.”

  I was like, “Well, it’s tough to argue with that kind of logic, Grandma. You got fifty bucks?”

  My grandmother had some kind of special radar when it came to me and sex. ’Cause the first time I ever had sex in my life, that somebody else was involved in, my grandmother caught me in her garage having sex with this girl.

  And my grandmother said, “One of these days you’re gonna be standing side by side with the Lord, watching your life pass before your eyes, answering for each and every one of your sins. And what are you gonna say to him, young man, when this little episode turns up?”

  And I said, “I’m gonna tell him: ‘Watch this, here comes the good part. I was only fifteen, but I was throwing some dick in this one, wasn’t I? Look at that right there. That sumbitch could go.’ ”

  I was talking to Cousin Ray one day, and he said, “Man, this world would be better if there weren’t so many queers.”

  And I said, “You know what, the next time you have a thought, let it go. We’re all gay, buddy. It’s just to what extent are you gay.”

  He goes, “That’s bullshit, man. I ain’t gay at all.” I’m like, “Yeah, you are, and I can prove it.”

  He goes, “Fine. Prove it.”

  I’m like, “All right, do you like porn?”

  He goes, “Yeah, I love porn, you know that.”

  I’m like, “Oh, do you only watch scenes with two women together?”

  He goes, “No, I watch a man and woman making love.”

  I’m like, “Oh, do you like the guy to have a small half-flaccid penis?”

  He goes, “No, I like to see a big hard, throbbing—” “Do you like chocolate?”

  7

  BACKSTAGE: THE ADVENTURES OF SEÑOR WHITE

  The opening shot is from high overhead. We’re looking down at a ditch at the side of a dirt road in Mexico. Zoom in a little, there’s somebody laying in the ditch. Closer. It’s me. Passed out, no shoes, empty bottle of scotch in my hand.

  And my voice-over says, “I’ve always loved Mexico.”

  That was the first scene of a pilot for a sitcom that Fox produced in Los Angeles in the winter of 2003. It was gonna be called Señor White. And what it was about was my real-life experiences running a pottery business in Reynoso, Mexico, along the border from McAllen, Texas.

  Now, because of its advantageous location, Reynoso was a considerable trans-shipment point for illegal drug traffic. Not that there were many drugs to be had in Reynoso itself. The cartels didn’t want some petty local action interfering with their pipeline; they wanted a nice quiet town to run their shipments through. And if you stayed out of their way, they never gave you a second thought.

  That said, it was also true that “tragic accident” was a very popular category of death in Reynoso. And anyone who interfered with the drug trade was a likely candidate for it.

  “Look there, now, isn’t that a pity? Five bullets to the back of the head. What a tragic accident.”

  How I got to be in the pottery business in Reynoso, Mexico, is that I was living with this woman I couldn’t stand on Lake Lyndon Baines Johnson, just northwest of Austin, Texas. And she couldn’t stand me either, like all the women I was involved with in that part of my life. I’m gonna call her Phyllis, so I can tell you what happened.

  Now aside from my relationship, living on Lake LBJ is nirvana, I’m in my fucking heaven. I got a house, not a great house at all, but it’s a lake house. It sits right on this cove of Lake LBJ, which is a twenty-two-mile-long lake on the Colorado River that LBJ had dammed up. And he just happened to own three thousand acres right on the side there. So he flooded his neighbors’ land, and now he’s got beachfront property. That’s a lucky coincidence there.

  It’s good to be the king. You can adjust some shit: “Well, there should be a pond here, I think.”

  Johnson City is near there, and you can tour LBJ’s childhood home if you want. I did, and halfway through the tour when they said his wife’s name I went, “Ladybird. Oh, I thought Larry Bird lived here. When I didn’t see a basketball hoop outside, I was wondering, How’d he get so good?”

  Phyllis was kind of an artist-craftsperson—she wasn’t making any money. But my career was going pretty good. I was making $1,800 a week and airfare, and that was good, solid headliner money then. And I was banging, I was doing a good job, and I was popular with the club owners.

  The relationship has gotten to the point where I can’t stand Phyllis and she can’t stand me. But at the same time, I’m still wishing that it can work. I’m seeing these glimpses of things in the relationship that are not fixable, but I’m trying not to see them.

  She used to say, “I know you think I’m stupit.”

  “No, honey, I don’t think you’re stupid. At all.”

  But I’m making good money, like I said. And there’s not a lot of hassle involved. The Funny Bone at one time owned twenty-one clubs. So the majority of my year I could book with one phone call with the people who ran the Funny Bone clubs. They were my anchor gigs.

  But in the early ’90s the clubs weren’t doing the business they used to do. Some of the audience that got excited about going to comedy clubs in the 1980s, when the comedy club scene really exploded, were parents with kids and they weren’t going out anymore like they used to. So the club owners felt that squeeze, and sooner or later so did everybody who worked for ’em.

  The Funny Bone management tells me this year it’s not gonna be $1,800/week and airfare, it’s gonna be $1,500 flat. I told them, “Go eat a bowl of steaming fuck.” Which was fun to say, but expensive.

  ’Cause right about the
n comedy clubs were closing up all over. It wasn’t like I had all these alternative clubs to go play.

  So I needed my girlfriend, Phyllis, to get a job. We got a house payment, I got a $500/month payment on my custom van, I got $500/month child-support payment. And I just got my pay cut by a third or more when you figure in what I’m going to have spend on airfare.

  Now, I knew this guy who was related to people at Southwest Airlines. So I figured if Phyllis got a job with Southwest, I could fly for free and that would be worth another $1,400/month besides whatever her salary would be. Plus she’d be able to fly to see me on the road.

  I get her an application and fill it out with her. For hobbies, I had her put down that she was a middle-distance runner. I thought that’d be kind of unusual and memorable, make her application stick out.

  Now, I know she doesn’t want to go to work. I know she just wants to stay at home and potter around with her pottery. But we fill out the application, and she promises to send it in. Two months later, we still haven’t heard from Southwest.

  Now, I know my friends weren’t giving me a line. I know they’re ready to give her a job. And one day I take out the trash, and stuck to the bottom of the trash can I find the greasy application that she threw away.

  Now, not too long before this, she caught me fucking somebody else. There was a note left in my briefcase: “I’ll never forget the time we spent together. (signed) Michelle.”

  It might as well have said, “Ron, you left some of your things in my ass.”

  I figure Phyllis and I are even, because we lied to each other. I still didn’t admit I fucked this girl, which I had a hundred times. She was a girl I knew in Memphis from before I met Phyllis. I figured fucking Michelle was grandfathered in.

  Anyhow, Phyllis didn’t budge from her original position, which was, “I’m an artist. I have to do my art. That’s what’s really important to me right now.”

  “OK, sure, honey, I understand.”

  And what she was doing was not really being a potter. She was a mosaicist. She was taking an already-made bowl and doing mosaic tile application to it.

  And she was really making pretty stuff—she did have a good eye, and a creative design sense. But it took her forever to make these bowls. She took six months to make four bowls.

  She took those four bowls to a weekend craft fair, sold every one the first morning, made $90. Then she took another six months to make four more bowls to take to another craft fair to sell for $90.

  She’s bringing in $3.75 a week. That’s some cash flow there.

  The pay cut has made me sick to my stomach. I’m feeling like I’ve got to find some other way of making a living. And I’m kind of impetuous and don’t always think things out. I’m looking at this mosaic tile appliqué pot one day and I say to myself, “What somebody oughta do is go down to Mexico, hire a bunch of women to pop these things out, and have Phyllis orchestrate the designs.”

  I flashed on this vision of a big old adobe-and-brick building in a little Mexican town. And inside it’s got these great big timber posts and beams and rafters. And there are sweating pitchers of lemonade, and women making tortillas and barbecuing a goat.

  It’s a vision of paradise.

  The next day I drove down to Mexico. My ex-sister-in-law was living down in McAllen, Texas, with a Mexican girl, who knew a cop on the other side of the border in Reynoso, Mexico, whose grandfather owned a ranch that had been run for him by a woman named Irma Munoz from the time she was sixteen. Irma ran the whole operation. She not only took the cattle from the field to the slaughterhouse, she also took the meat to market and ran the market.

  Irma worked for this man until she was thirty-four. Then he sold all his ranches, except for one, which he gave to her, making her a fairly well-to-do woman until the peso got devalued. She and her husband are doing OK. He’s a big strong guy who built their house with his own two hands out of cinder block. And he’s got this cheesy operation bottling motor oil. He’s got a big tank and a bunch of plastic bottles that they fill by hand.

  They’ve got these Guatemalan guys working there who have escaped the civil war in Guatemala with machete cuts through their eyelids. They’ve been through the shit and have come to Reynoso to make the big money. That’s their El Norte.

  Now, by this time in her life, Irma Munoz is a big old fat lady, who is kind, sweet, smart, and confident. She’s a pillar of the colonia. The local women look to her for advice. She and her husband are important figures in the local church community.

  I told Irma my vision, I hired her, and she made it happen. Right around the corner was a tortilla factory that had been abandoned before it was ever opened. The fella who built it died in a tragic accident, which like I said was kind of common there.

  The place has got no windows. It’s been empty for ten years. There’s six inches of cat shit everywhere. Nothing works. I look at it and I’m like, “Perfect. This is the place.”

  Irma found the guy who owned it and arranged for us to rent it for $90/month, if we would do work on it. The next morning I show up with Phyllis, and Irma has hired five women and they’re already at work cleaning it up.

  Eventually we have eight women working there. We have it all cleaned up. We’ve run electricity in, we’ve run plumbing in. I’ve got an accountant. We’re running a legitimate business, Irma’s making the money she needs, and we’re paying the other women a decent wage. And Phyllis is the design director.

  It’s just what I pictured. We’ve got lemonade pitchers sweating in the heat in the workshop. I’m buying goat meat at the corner store. We eat lunch together. Every once in a while the local priest stops by, he blesses the place one day.

  I’m doing comedy gigs with Jeff Foxworthy on the weekend, because it turns out I’m not really selling this stuff, I’m collecting it. Everybody is starting to notice, we got a shitload of this stuff piling up.

  And the whole time, Phyllis and I are not getting along. It was vicious. She was a good cook, and we had great sex. So you wanted it not to be true.

  I found this local golf course called Compestre Golf Course, where I met these great men I played golf with three times a week. One of them had come to Reynoso when he was fourteen, after both his parents died in a tragic accident. He came to Reynoso with a dirty blanket and a sack of biscuits, and put three sons through medical school. And he doesn’t even see it as a big achievement.

  He started working for a brick factory. There were a lot of brick factories in Reynoso at the time, because Houston was booming and they were sending the bricks up there. Shitty fucking bricks, too, you could cut a hole through ’em with a quarter.

  He made $2/week. By the time he was twenty-one, he owned his own brick company. He was the first person in Reynoso to build big old rudimentary clay kilns and start firing his brick. The other brick factories were just making sun-dried adobes in brick size.

  At one time there were sixteen brick companies. Now there was one: his.

  When I’m on the road with Jeff, I can’t wait to get back. I’m having fun, I’m being respected by the colonia . It feels wonderful living in this community.

  But I don’t have the wherewithal to make the whole thing work. I’m creating an illusion. I’m going even more broke than I was before, funding this shit, because I love it.

  One problem we had was that putting mosaic tile onto clay pots created a product that was heavy and fragile, which is a bad combination. You want heavy and sturdy, or you can deal with light and fragile. But heavy and fragile sucks. Because you’re gonna run into some shipping problems. We found some places in California to take them on consignment, but they’re getting there in a million fucking pieces.

  Now, if we’d gotten this great packing equipment that I wanted, you could have kicked them to California and they’d be fine. Because you could blow liquid foam around them, and it’d be unbreakable.

  I was talking to the brick king about it. He showed interest in it, he thought we made beautiful stuf
f.

  And I just wanted to figure out how to keep my dream going and keep being part of this community Irma and I had created.

  Phyllis didn’t have the same feeling. She and the women working for us didn’t get along, and she wouldn’t take the time to try to communicate with them.

  Neither of us spoke a word of Spanish when we got there. But I learned some and spoke to people in Spanish as much as possible. It wasn’t good Spanish, but I could communicate a little bit. I also had a college student named Miguel as my interpreter, because I was doing business and I couldn’t just guess at things, and that slowed down my learning.

  Phyllis couldn’t be bothered. I started dreaming about a tragic accident. In my fantasy, an Exxon truck running a stop sign takes her out. She never feels a thing.

  The driver’s drunk, with a prior record of drunk driving that the company didn’t do a background check on. And I’m in court crying over my dead wife. It’s a $20-million case.

  By now I’ve got a compound full of this pottery. I’m filling up warehouses, but I’m doing it for love. The part that happened is the part I envisioned. I didn’t envision the other part: carrying the shit across the border and driving five hours to San Antonio to put it on consignment, shipping it to California in one piece, and a million other details that you gotta figure out if you’re gonna run a successful business.

  Phyllis is gaining weight. She won’t cook. She won’t screw me.

  I’m fucking everything I can fuck on the road. My weight’s way down. I’m running. I’m taking care of myself.

  It’s all casual sex, until I run into this old friend on the road, in her hometown. We go out to dinner right across the street from her apartment, and she introduces me to the waitress and says, “Ron is my sexual fantasy.”

  I’m like, “Oh.” ’Cause I never really considered it. I thought we were just good friends. “But now that you mention it.”

  So she and I go back to her apartment, and we’re making out on her bed, and I reach down to push her legs apart, and her leg falls over like a manhole cover that’s being held up by a watch spring. Wham. I got my hand down her panties, and then her roommate comes in and says, “What about your boyfriend?”