What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World (20 page)

WATCH WHAT YOU SING

"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."

A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC

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

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.