by Zev Chafets
Kinky still spends a good deal of his time in New York, where he has a more or less permanent retinue of admirers. Two of them are Steve Rambam (his real name), a Jewish private eye from Brooklyn; and Rambam’s assistant, Boris Shapiro, a human fireplug who was once a member of the Soviet combat karate team. In Texas, Kinky bragged that Boris could kill a man a hundred ways with his bare hands without leaving a mark. A few weeks later, I met Boris in New York and asked him to verify it. He pursed his thick lips, wiggled his hand to indicate the approximate nature of Kinky’s boast, and said, “Von hundred, von hundred and two.”
Tom Friedman had a luncheon date, and Kinky and I went out for a drive in Austin. After an hour or so of aimless cruising I noticed that something was missing—there was no music. “Don’t you have a tape deck or a radio?” I asked.
“Tell you the truth, I hate the sound of the human voice singing,” he said, and he seemed to mean it. Kinky still appears on stage from time to time but his musical career had been in a prolonged slump.
“You know, I’ve never seen you perform,” I admitted.
“Well, you don’t know what you missed,” he said. “I’m gonna take you back to Tom’s and show you a videotape of a show I did on Austin City Limits. It was a great gig even though it never got on the air. But I got the tape.”
The program featured a western-outfitted Kinky and his band doing a number of outrageous Friedman compositions, including “I’m Proud to be an Asshole from El Paso” and a particularly tasteless song about using a picture of Jesus for toilet paper. “That’s the reason they never showed this mother on TV,” Kinky explained superfluously.
Michael Stoff had invited us to a dinner party that night. Kinky had mentioned the party several times during the day, asking if I thought there would be any good-looking women there. But suddenly, as the time approached, he got cold feet. “I won’t know anybody except that asshole buddy of his,” he said plaintively. “Why don’t I just drop you off?”
“What’re you talking about? Everybody in Texas knows Kinky Friedman,” I said, and he brightened noticeably. “They do, don’t they? Hell yes they do, I’m a goddamned cultural icon. Shit, they’ll be honored to have me.…” Continuing in this vein, he changed his work shirt, squared the Borsolino he hadn’t removed all day (“That’s one thing Jews and cowboys have in common; we both wear our hats in the house”), and we headed for Stoff’s.
The party was already under way when we arrived. Most of the guests were faculty colleagues of Michael’s in their late thirties or early forties, dressed in tweedy university style. Judging by their names and faces, almost everyone was Jewish. Motown music played softly in the background as people chatted over homemade chili and paper cups of chilled chablis.
The mood was mellow, but Kinky was a study in truculent discomfort. He poured himself an eight-ounce glass of bourbon, stoked up a huge Jamaican Royale, and paced the room restlessly. From time to time he blew a cloud of cigar smoke at the assembled guests, who waved their hands to clear the air. I noticed, though, that no one asked him to put out the cigar.
As he wandered around, I watched the other men watching him. Although there was nothing physically threatening about him they gave him room, moving warily out of his path and stealing looks at him from the corners of their eyes. Despite the fact that he was the son of a colleague, a Jewish guy from Austin just about their own age, he seemed out of place, foreign. He had hung out in trailer camps and sung at the Grand Ole Opry, had gotten drunk and crazy, and bragged about it in public. There was something undomesticated and unpredictable about him, something that made the nice Jewish boys of Austin academia uncomfortable. A gentile country outlaw is one thing; but Friedman, with his hard eyes and defiant attitude, his knock-this-off Borsolino and stubborn insistence that being Jewish matters, was a far more threatening proposition.
Around midnight the party began to break up amid talk of Hebrew school car pools and soccer practices. I was at the door saying good-bye to several of Stoff’s guests when Kinky joined us. “I gotta hit the road, pardner. I’ll see you up in New York City,” he said in a loud, somewhat drunken voice. “We’ll have us a time up there, round up some chicks, and party.” Then, sure of his audience, he lifted one blue-jeaned leg, exposing a green alligator-skin cowboy boot with the name “Kinky” burned into the leather. “Pretty hip, ain’t they?” he demanded. “You ever see a Jew with them kind of boots?” And then he blew a last puff of Jamaican Royale at the guests and sauntered off.
Jewish misfits tend to be loners. Like Kinky Friedman, they stick out in a crowd, especially in the mainstream congregations and community centers of America. But there is one national organization, the Jewish Defense League (JDL), where misfits are not only welcome, they are in control.
The JDL was founded in the sixties by Rabbi Meir Kahane. In its early days it attracted a number of idealistic militants who saw it primarily as a neighborhood patrol group. But Kahane had bigger plans, and he led the organization in the direction of anti-Soviet violence, armed clashes with black nationalists, and loud confrontations with the Jewish establishment.
Kahane eventually moved to Israel, where he was elected to the Knesset in 1984. In America, the JDL splintered into various factions that attracted the increased attention of law enforcement agencies. In some cities, JDL splinters operate openly under various names; in others, they are a subterranean presence. In Detroit, for example, the organization has been officially disbanded, but while I was there I heard rumors about a secret chapter. The notion of a Jewish underground was intriguing, and I asked a reporter friend of mine to look into it. A few days later he called with a cryptic message. “Meet me in the parking lot of the Mexican restaurant on the corner of Nine Mile and Telegraph,” he said. “Three o’clock. I’ve got a surprise for you.”
When I arrived at the abandoned parking lot I found my friend slouched in the front seat of his car listening to Martha Jean the Queen on WQBH. “I’ve got you a meeting with the former head of the JDL,” he told me proudly. “His code name is ‘Dovid’—he asked me not to tell you his real name.”
I looked at the little shopping center across the parking lot and at the suburban moms whizzing down Telegraph Road in their station wagons, and I couldn’t help laughing. “Is this for real? Where are we supposed to be, Kiev?” The reporter laughed too. “Hey, what can I tell you? He thinks he’s underground, okay?”
A few minutes later a late-model T-bird cruised through the lot. “There he is,” my friend said as the driver signaled us to follow. He led us through a maze of ranch-housed streets, stopped in front of one, left his car, and climbed into the backseat of ours.
I had been expecting a cigar-chomping, Brooklyn-accented thug. But Dovid turned out to be a gaunt six-footer with a sensitive, puzzled face, a repertoire of barely controlled tics, and a nasal Detroit accent. He wore a very small black knit skullcap and carried a portable tape recorder. “I made a tape for you last night,” he said, handing me the machine. “Before we talk, just drive out by the lakes and listen to it, okay?”
“Is it going to self-destruct when I get done?” I asked, but humor was evidently not one of Dovid’s strong suits. “Nothing like that,” he assured me solemnly. “It was just easier to organize my thoughts this way.”
For the next half hour or so we cruised aimlessly and listened to Dovid’s rambling recorded account of his life in the Jewish Defense League. Most of it had to do with the internal politics of the organization, including a long description of an alleged plot to kill Meir Kahane, cooked up, according to Dovid, by rivals within the group. None of it made much sense, and after listening to it I still had no idea what Dovid had done in the JDL or if he was still a member.
By this time we were in Novi, a working-class township outside Detroit. When we drove past O’Shea’s Bar I suggested that we stop for a beer. Dovid agreed with a marked lack of enthusiasm. Bars are for gentiles and gentiles are the enemy, to be approached with caution and fear.
“Even a puny little gun like that?” I asked, and he looked wounded. “Hey, the greatest assassins in the world have used this weapon,” he said indignantly.
O’Shea’s was crowded with workingmen who had just come off the first shift at the Ford plant. We took a table in the back of the room next to the cigarette machine. Dovid, surveying the scene, was plainly uncomfortable. When the waitress came over he cringed as if he expected her to take one look at us and scream, “Kikes!” But she merely stood at gum-chewing attention, waiting to take our order. The reporter and I asked for draught Bud; Dovid, after hesitation, ordered a Coors. “That’s what the goyim drink,” he said knowingly after she left.
In a semiwhisper, Dovid began to talk about himself and his life in the JDL. He was born and raised in Detroit, in a non-Orthodox home. His wife is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. I knew from the reporter that he was out of work, a condition that Dovid attributed to harassment by the Detroit police department. To keep busy he runs eleven miles a day, practices karate (he has a fourth-degree black belt), and plays with his collection of guns, an arsenal that, according to him, is at the disposal of the Jewish people.
“Look, I’m a caring Jew. Okay, I’m not in the JDL anymore, but I still keep up, I still care. Why did I leave the JDL? The truth is, I left because I couldn’t handle Kahane. Every time he came to Detroit all he could talk about was how bad the Jews are, what the Jews are doing wrong. I mean, there are nine hundred trained Arab terrorists in this city, twelve thousand gun-carrying anti-Semites in the Aryan Nation out in Brighton, not thirty miles from here.” He looked around at the men drinking at the bar and lowered his voice to a near whisper.
“Listen, Jews need protection. They say it can’t happen here? What a laugh. But I want to tell you something: Israel’s not the answer, either. That’s just what they want—to get us all in one place and finish us off at once.”
A man approached the cigarette machine and suddenly Dovid raised his voice. “Yeah, she was really a great piece of ass,” he practically shouted, giving me a significant look. “She was really great in the sack …” The man didn’t seem to notice us at all, but Dovid went on about his imaginary conquest until the spy walked away with his Pall Malls.
“We had all kinds of people,” Dovid said, picking up the thread of his narrative. “There was a guy trained by the KGB in Cuba. We had another guy who joined because he wanted to kill all the enemies of the Jews in one day. I own ten pistols, I’m no pussy, but I couldn’t go for that, no way. You know what? We had a Jewish policeman in the JDL; hell, we had a federal marshal. And a couple of Israelis, including a guy who had once been in the intelligence corps. We’ve got a camp in Michigan, I can’t tell you where, and we do urban warfare and guerrilla training three or four times a week.”
“I thought you were out of the JDL,” I said. Dovid seemed momentarily confused. “I meant that there used to be a camp,” he said finally. “Maybe there still is one, I don’t know. Officially the Jewish Defense League doesn’t exist in Detroit, that’s all I want to say about it.”
“Come on, we both know it exists. Are you still in it or not?” asked my friend the reporter, his professional curiosity aroused.
Dovid seemed torn between caution and bravado. “I might know some people … look, I can’t talk about this. My life might be in danger, from other Jews. I mean, I’m not afraid to take risks. I infiltrated hate groups for the FBI. I’d have no remorse about killing someone who killed a Jew. I’ve been busted by the Detroit police many times, I’ve been harassed by the Oak Park and Southfield police departments. But when it comes to the JDL … I don’t want to say anything else. Period.”
At some level, most Jews feel uneasy about living in a world that allowed the Holocaust to take place. But federated Jewry has learned to live with its latent insecurity; the JDL has not. Its members belong to a tiny minority whose anger and anxiety cannot be appeased.
As a result, Dovid, who professes to be ready to lay down his life for his fellow Jews, is a pariah in the Jewish community. “The establishment in this city has called me a fascist, and that hurts more than anything,” he said, sipping his Coors. “I joined the JDL, most of us did, to be in a position to protect our fellow Jews. I see the Jews around here, all they care about is money, success. They don’t want to admit the dangers. They’re just like the Jews in Germany before Hitler. They aren’t able to defend themselves, and somebody’s got to do it. I’m prepared to die defending them and they call me a fascist, worse than Hitler. I just don’t understand them.
“You know, I don’t feel comfortable among Jews. I hate to admit that, but it’s true. In my opinion liberal American Jews can’t face reality. Even the Orthodox are living in a dream world. I consider myself to be an Orthodox Jew, but the Torah was written by God, not by rabbis, you understand what I mean? Nowadays, they even have women rabbis. Now how can a woman be a rabbi? They’re unclean. I even heard they’ve got faggot rabbis now. A faggot rabbi? I don’t even consider a man like that Jewish.”
Dovid finished his beer and looked at his watch. He may have been underground, but he still had to get home in time for dinner. When we reached the car he retrieved his pistol and put the yarmulke back on his head. Even fully dressed he seemed uneasy, though, and he kept looking out the back window until we were several miles from O’Shea’s.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I told him as we neared the suburban tract home where he had left his T-bird. “Since you feel the way you do about America, and being Jewish is so important to you, why don’t you just move to Israel?”
“Someday maybe I will. I’d like to,” said the former commander of the JDL in Detroit. “But I can’t right now. The truth is, my wife won’t go. She says it’s too dangerous.”
That night, in a bar across the city from O’Shea’s, I met Marty Gaynor for a drink. Like Dovid, Marty is a Jew with a gun; the difference is that when I found him, sitting at a Formica table sipping a Stroh’s, he was wearing his—a standard police-issue revolver. A small man with the powerful sloping shoulders of a linebacker, he sat watching two squealing legal secretaries shoot eight ball, his Detroit Police Department baseball cap perched on his head at a cocky angle.
We had met before, a few days earlier. My reporter friend introduced us over lunch in a restaurant in Greektown, not far from police headquarters. At lunch that day Marty shook my hand and took out a small notebook. “Could you please spell your name?” he said courteously, copying it down in a laborious hand. It was a cop’s habit, like sitting with his back to the wall, something I noticed he was doing again that night at the tavern.
I sat down at the Formica table and this time I took out a notebook of my own. Marty, whose fair skin, high cheekbones, and lopsided grin make him look a little like a young Moshe Dayan, regarded it with approval. He has been a cop for almost fifteen years, and he has a civil servant’s respect for the written word. The notebook meant I was serious, and he wanted to get something on the record right away.
“There’s one thing I want you to do for me,” he said. “If you write about me I’d really appreciate it if you’d use my real name, which is Goldfine, G-O-L-D-F-I-N-E. That was my grandfather’s name, he was a lawyer here in town, he used to represent the Purple Gang. My father changed it to Gaynor, but I consider myself a Goldfine, not a Gaynor.”
Marty, who is in his mid-thirties, grew up in Oak Park, a middle-class Jewish suburb on the outskirts of Detroit. Although he was raised among Jews, he realized from an early age that he was different from his serious-minded, well-behaved classmates. “I was a wild kid back then,” he said with rueful pride
. “Today I realize how much I missed in school, but in those days nobody could tell me a thing. You know, the older you get, the smarter your parents seem. But when I was a kid, I couldn’t see beyond my nose.”
In high school Marty was a suburban tough guy, who spent his days getting in and out of trouble at school and his nights drag racing up Woodward Avenue or looking for action in the parking lots of drive-ins along the strip. It was an adolescence that prepared him to become a criminal or a policeman. Marty chose the cops, joining the force shortly after graduating from Oak Park High.
Police work in Detroit is a dangerous profession—in the few weeks I was in the city, two cops were shot to death on duty—but Marty has never been intimidated by the violence. “The streets give me a high. I admit it,” he said. In his first few years on the job he was involved in three shooting incidents—one of them fatal. He took out his own notebook and began to diagram the cases, carefully explaining the circumstances, as if he were testifying at a departmental inquest.
“There was this dude named Leroy Larry,” he said, writing down the name. “He shot someone and then barricaded himself in an apartment house over by Olympia. He was in there with a rifle and I went in after him. I was carrying a forty-four Magnum and a .357.” Once again he wrote in his notebook, jotting down the calibers of his pistols. “We wound up in a shootout, and luckily I got him before he got me.”