What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World (18 page)

WILD MAN FROM BORNEO

 

any years ago, in a faraway kingdom called The Sixties, when doctors drove Buicks and ecstasy couldn't be bought, there lived a man named John F. Kennedy. One day he stood on the lawn of the White House, pointed at a group of ragtag young Peace Corps volunteers, and said, "You are important people." And, indeed, time has proven the wisdom of his words. Forty-one years and more than one hundred countries later, the Peace Corps is a shining example of Americans working for the good of the world.

Little did I realize in 1965, as I drank coffee at the Night Hawk restaurant on the Drag in Austin and contemplated joining the late JFK's dream team, that I would soon be eating monkey brains in the jungles of Borneo. At the time, I was a Plan II major at the University of Texas. There was nothing practical about graduating with a degree in Plan II. About all you could do with it was leave town with the carnival or join the Peace Corps. After much soul-searching, I opted for the one that would look best on my resume.

I soon found myself in Syracuse, New York, in about twelve feet of snow, in Peace Corps training. My only friend was a guy named Willard who smoked nonfiltered Camels and, during the first night's mixer, promptly ran out onto the dance floor and bit a woman on the left buttock. Since these were the good old days before political correctness, Willard was not sent home ("deselected" was the term then in use) and went on to distinguish himself setting up a law school in Africa.

I did not fare quite as well as Willard, however. As part of my training, the Peace Corps sent me on a two-week "cultural

empathy" junket to Shady Rill, Vermont, where I lived with a family so poor that they brushed their teeth with steel wool. After returning to Syracuse, I learned Swahili and was interrogated at great length by Gary Gappert, a supercilious, pipe-smoking psychologist who felt that I might not be fully committed to the goals of the Peace Corps because I had a band back in Texas called King Arthur and the Carrots. Soon, much to my chagrin, I was the one the Peace Corps had chosen to be deselected.

I traveled about the country like a rambling hunchback, hitchhiking from place to place, singing Bob Dylan songs at truck stops. The truckers were not pleased. They enjoyed my behavior only marginally more than Gary Gappert had. Yet I had not abandoned my dream, and eventually I landed at another Peace Corps training program, this time in Hilo, Hawaii, where I was, at long last, hailed as a golden boy. It was also where I learned Malay, a language I can now speak only when I'm walking on my knuckles.

Ultimately I was sent to Borneo, where I wore a sarong, built compost heaps, and earned eleven cents an hour as an agricultural extension worker. My job was to teach people how to keep their heaps from falling over on top of the Kinkster. Somehow I managed to avoid the fate of one of my coworkers, who had to be airlifted out of his hut and back to the States by a shrink in a helicopter.

By the time Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated, I'd gone native. I'd taken to spending a lot of time at a Kayan longhouse fairly deep in the
ulu,
or jungle, up the Baram River from the little town of Long Lama. The Kayans were a spiritual people, but they were also rather serious party animals. They had a traditional combo that might have even been stronger than a John Belushi cocktail. It called for chewing betel nut until your lips turned blood red, smoking an unidentifiable herbal product in a jungle cigar, and then drinking a highly potent homemade rice wine called
tuak
that would have made George Jones jealous. The Kayans, like a tribe of persistent mother hens, would push this combination on every guest, and it was considered extremely bad form to turn down their offering. Accepting their largesse, however, would invariably lead to projectile vomiting. The Kayans had no perceptible plumbing, of course, so you'd simply vomit through the bamboo slits of the porch, or
ruai.
If, after being sick, you continued drinking tuak with them, the Kayans considered you a man and, even more important, a friend. The only time the Kayans found my behavior socially unacceptable was once when, after an extended harvest celebration, I accidentally vomited on the chief.

As a Peace Corps volunteer, my mission was to preserve the culture as much as possible while attempting to distribute seeds downriver. In two and a half years the Peace Corps failed to send me any seeds, so I was eventually reduced to distributing my own seed downriver, which led to some rather unpleasant reverberations. I was well aware that the Kayans, though now a gentle people, had once been headhunters, and I did not want an atavistic moment to occur in which my skull might take its place along with dozens of others in the hanging baskets that festooned the ruai. But while I supported the indigenous culture, the missionaries were constantly at work to destroy it. They encouraged the Kayans to cut off their long hair, throw away their hand-carved beads, and dance around the fire singing "Oh! Susanna." I've got nothing against "Oh! Susanna"—only against the missionaries who told the people to bow their heads and pray long enough so that when they looked up, their traditions were gone.

In a few short years, I was gone too. But all Peace Corps volunteers keep a little town or a little tribe deep in their heart, though they may have left it many years ago and many miles away. I remember fishing at night by torchlight with the Kayans in the Baram River in a small wooden boat called a
prahu.
Everybody got drunk on tuak and had a great time, though the Kayans never caught any fish. Of course, that wasn't their intention. The Kayan word for "fishing," in fact, means "visiting the fish."

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."