I Had the Right to Remain Silent...But I Didn't Have the Ability (14 page)

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Authors: Ron White

BOOK: I Had the Right to Remain Silent...But I Didn't Have the Ability
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And don't ever let him spend the night at your house, by the way. Even if it's raining.
He spends the night at my house, and we get into the whisky deep, for no reason. It's a Tuesday night, we're just
glug-glug-glugg
ing away. We wake up the next morning, he gets on his tour bus and goes to who the hell knows where. I wake up with a living, breathing hangover that has its own soul.
I named it Chuck.
And I'm going through this house we just moved into, and I can't find one aspirin in the whole house. My head is exploding. So I gotta get in my car and face the morning sun, which I geared my entire career around not having to do. And I go to the store, and I go in, I buy some Excedrin.
I come back out to the car, and I pop a couple of them in my mouth. And I can't swallow them because my mouth is dry, right? I'm kind of choking on them, you know?
But luckily, in the seat where Larry was the day before, there's a Diet Coke bottle with about two fingers' worth in the bottom of it. And I unscrew the lid, and throw it back.
And slowly my brain starts to process information. Does Diet Coke make a wintergreen pudding product? Sort of a stringy wintergreen pudding?
And then it dawns on me, I'm drinking his fuckin' spit. I'm outside my car licking the grass to get the taste out.
The same thing happened to me later. Not the same thing, really, but the same kind of thing. I was on my way to the airport, and I stopped on the way for some iced tea with a wedge of lemon in it.
And I parked my car at the airport on the top floor of the parking garage, in the sun, and I'm gone for two weeks. I come back, and I get stuck in traffic on the way home. And I'm not even thinking, I just reach over and pick up this two-week-old remains of iced tea with lemon, and I chugalug it down.
And slowly my brain starts to process information. Is that lemon moss? Is that some sort of a citrus algae river product?
And I take the lid off the Styrofoam cup, and it's this nasty science experiment. And I open my truck door and throw up in the stalled traffic.
But oddly enough, two weeks later a rash on my nuts clears up. There's your silver lining right there.
I
get chastised publicly in the media for my position on the death penalty. To tell you the truth, they don't even know the half of it.
Because in the Scott Peterson case, I'd want to be the guy that sets the execution date. And I'd set it for one a.m. the day they set clocks forward. Just so I could walk in and go, "Well, looks like you got about another hour, Scott. . . .
"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 SENOR WHITE
T
he 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
Senor 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.

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