What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World (7 page)

SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES

 

hen I was a child I spoke as a child and, believe it or not, I smoked as a child. At the tender age of eighteen months, when my mother's back was turned, a prescient if somewhat perverse uncle surreptitiously substituted a cigar for my pacifier. Don't know if I should thank Uncle Eli or not but sixty-one-and-a-half years later I'm not only still smoking, but I've started my own cigar company. I named it Kinky Friedman Cigars or, as it's become increasingly and affectionately known throughout Texas and the world, KFC.

Though smoking in general is currently being attacked from all quarters, I have no qualms about becoming the George Foreman for my product. I strongly believe smoking cigars can yield at least three positive effects—reducing stress, increasing longevity, and irritating the hall monitors. From time to time, of course, as the situation dictates, I still resort to the pacifier. This draws the occasional rude comment one might expect but truthfully there's not that much difference between a good cigar and the time-honored pacifier. After a liftetime of smoking I only have one or two taste buds left. But I can assure you, those little buds are having one hell of a party.

Simply to suck on a cigar these days is practically tantamount to making a political statement. Politicians and bureaucrats at all levels of government have failed so disastrously at resolving the issues that matter to most people, i.e. health care, education, immigration, political reform, energy costs, property taxes, utility bills, criminal justice issues, environment, toll roads, etc., that all they seem able to do is tax tobacco and pass ever-more-stringent smoking regulations. In other words, the combined might of our government appears only capable of criminalizing trivia. You'd think George Washington crossed the Delaware expressly to keep Kinky Friedman and his cigar at least twenty feet away from the entrance to Katz's Deli.

As founder of Kinky Friedman Cigars, I am, of course, well aware of some people's concerns regarding the use of our product. But more laws and more regulations are not the answer. Folks, we're turning our beautiful country into nothing more than a condo association. Rules, regulations, and political correctness are strangling the best thing America has to offer— freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom to be who you are. If you own a bar and want to have smoking, you should be able to put a sign on the door, "Smoking allowed."

If you don't want smoking, you put up a sign, "No smoking." Maybe you have a bar and you don't want drinking. That's fine, too. If you're gay, you can go to a gay bar; if you're straight, you can go to the Jewish Singles Purim Party. This is the way America should be.

Instead, we have a Houston city councilman explaining why he voted for a city-wide ban on smoking in bars. "What if I want to bring my kids to the bar?" he said. Common sense is up in smoke, folks. Meanwhile, misguided zealots behind draconian smoking regulations quite often fall back on the argument that, "It's for your health." They haven't noticed, apparently, that whenever you see a ninety-year-old geezer, most of the time he's still puffing a stogie. On the other hand, you almost never see a ninety-year-old smoking a cigarette. This is because we cigar smokers religiously follow the wise example of Bill Clinton. We don't inhale. That's why my message to young people is, "Cigarette bad—cigar good."

Unfortunately, not everybody's fired up—no pun intended— about my new venture. For example, one person recently contacted the Web site with the following message: "It is sad to see an icon turn into a whore."

"I don't care what you call me," I wrote back. "Rick Perry calls himself a public servant. Al Sharpton calls himself a civil rights leader. Besides, whores usually tend to hang around with a better class of people than icons." I am waiting, with bated smoke-rings, for his response.

The other folks who aren't too happy with Kinky Friedman Cigars are some of the big cigar industry Goliaths who don't like seeing little Davids sharing their shelf-space in Texas stores. Nevertheless, after only a matter of months as a small, start-up company, my friend and now CEO, Little Jewford (He's a Jew and he drives a Ford), has filed the following report: "We've moved more than 100,000 sticks in the last quarter. You're on track to become the Famous Amos of the cigar world!"

While being the face of the company seems like fun, I knew we still needed some brains. For that, I tapped a true cigar professional, Sean Robinson, to be president of KFC. Sean traveled to the jungles of Honduras and there, amidst machine guns, tarantulas, and beautiful women rolling beautiful cigars on their beautiful thighs, he befriended a man named Nestor, the king of the Cuban cigar-makers, who promised to create a special new blend for Kinky Friedman Cigars.

When Sean returned, he had several small darts in his back, compliments of the Mosquito Indians, and five new lines of cigars—The Governor, The Kinkycristo, The Texas Jewboy, The Willie (which has a little twist on one end), and The Utopian, the only cigar in America benefiting animal rescue. Profits go to Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch. You can get all these cigars at good cigar stores everywhere or you can order sample packs and boxes right off the Web site, kinkycigars.com.

What else do you guys have to offer? you may be wondering. Well, I'll share a little trade secret with you. Sean, Nestor, and Gary Irvin, our chief tobacconist, are currently developing three new lines: The Clinton, a replica of the Cuban Montecristo I once presented to Bill at the White House; The Kinky Lady, with the butt (of the cigar, that is) dipped in honey; and a brand new cigar, the blend of which, I am told, enhances the flavor of tequila.

Now I'm sure there are those who will be casting asparagus upon the Kinkster, but I promise you my words are not hazardous to anybody's health. I'm just saying that God's not going to honk your horn until He's good and ready. So you might as well find what you like and let it kill you.

Now don't get me wrong. I admire Lance Armstrong and his work fighting cancer, and I consider him a friend. I respect anyone with sincere and genuine intentions regarding the welfare of all people. What I object to are these officious little boogers who use health as a smoke screen to empower their agenda and themselves. What I want these people to put in their pipes and smoke is this: Spain, Portugal, Israel, Japan, Korea, Italy, France, and Greece all have more smokers per capita than the U.S. They also have lower rates of lung cancer and heart disease. What can we conclude from this? Speaking English is killing us!

THE NAVIGATOR

ecause I'm the oldest living Jew in Texas who doesn't own real estate, and given my status in general as a colorful character, there are those who profess to be surprised that I ever, indeed, had a father or a mother. I assure you, I had both.

For many years my parents owned and directed Echo Hill Ranch, a summer camp near Kerrville where I grew up, or maybe just got older. I remember my dad, Tom Friedman, talking to all of the campers on Father's Day in the dining hall after lunch. Each summer he'd say essentially the same words: "For those of you who are lucky enough to have a father, now is the time to remember him and let him know that you love him. Write a letter home today" Many years have passed since I last heard Tom's message to the campers, but love, I suppose, has no "sell by" date.

When my father was a young boy growing up in the Chicago of the late twenties, his first job was working for a Polish peddler. The man had a horse and cart that was loaded up with fruits and vegetables, and Tom sat on the very top. Through the streets and alleys of the old West Side they'd go, with the peddler crying his wares in at least five languages and my father running the purchases up to the housewives who lived on the top floors of the tenement buildings. There were trolley cars then and colorful clotheslines strung across the sooty alleys like medieval banners. My father still remembers the word the peddler seemed to cry out more than any other. The word was
kartofel.
It is Polish for "potato."

In November 1944 my mother, Minnie, gave birth to me in a manger somewhere on the south side of Chicago. (I lived there one year, couldn't find work, and moved to Texas, where I haven't worked since.) And all this time my father was far away fighting for his country and his wife and a baby boy he might never see. Tom was a navigator in World War II, flying a heavy bomber for the Eighth Air Force, the old B-24, also known as the Liberator, which, in time, it was. Tom's plane was called the I've Had It. He flew thirty-five successful missions over Germany, the last occurring on November 9, 1944, two days after he'd learned that he was a brand-new father. As the navigator, the responsibility fell to him to bring the ten-man crew back safely. In retrospect, it's not terribly surprising that fate and the powers that be had selected Tom to be the navigator. He was the only one aboard the
I've Had It
who possessed a college degree. He was also the oldest man on the plane. He was twenty-three years old.

After each successful mission it was the custom to paint a small bomb on the side of the plane; in the rare instance of shooting down an enemy plane, a swastika was painted. When one incoming crew, however, accidentally hit a British runway maintenance worker, a small teacup was painted on the side of the plane, practically engendering an international incident.

Tom was a hero in what he still refers to as "the last good war." For his efforts, he received the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with three Oak Leaf clusters and the heartfelt gratitude of his crew. Yet the commanding officer's first words to Tom and his young compatriots had not been wrong. The CO had told them to look at the man on their left and to look at the man on their right. "When you return," he'd said, "they will not be here." This dire prophecy proved to be almost correct. The Mighty Eighth suffered a grievous attrition rate during the height of the war.

After the war Tom and Min settled in Houston, where Tom pioneered community action programs, and Min became one of the first speech therapists in the Houston public schools. In the late fifties they moved to Austin, where Tom was a professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas. It was in 1953, however, that my parents made possibly their greatest contribution to children far and wide by opening Echo Hill Ranch. My mother passed away in 1985, but Tom, known as Uncle Tom to the kids, still runs the camp.

Like most true war heroes, Tom rarely talks about the war. My sister, Marcie, once saw Tom sitting alone in a darkened room and asked, "Is everything all right, Father?" To this Tom replied, "The last time everything was all right was August 14, 1945." That was the day Japan surrendered.

On a recent trip to O'Hare Airport in Chicago, I commandeered a limo and drove through the area where Tom had grown up. There were slums and suburbs and Starbucks, and the trolley cars and the clotheslines and the peddler with his horse and cart were gone. "Kartofel," I said to the limo driver, but he just looked straight ahead. Either he wasn't Polish or he didn't want any potatoes.

Today Tom lives in Austin with his new wife, Edythe Kruger, and his two dogs, Sam and Perky. He has three children and three grandchildren. He eats lunch at the Frisco and still plays tennis with his old pals. He did not, as he contends, teach me everything I know. Only almost everything. He taught me tennis. He taught me chess. He taught me how to belch. He taught me to always stand up for the underdog. He taught me the importance of treating children like adults and adults like children. He is a significant American because by his example, his spirit, and his unseen hand, he has guided children of all ages safely through the winding, often torturous courses of their lives. One of them was me.

Tom's war is long over. Indeed, the whole era seems gone like the crews who never came home, lost forever among the salt-shaker stars. And yet, when the future may look its darkest, there sometimes occurs an oddly comforting moment when, with awkward grace, the shadow of a silver plane flies inexplicably close to my heart. One more mission for the navigator.