What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World by Kinky Friedman Page A

produced a record of mine in Nashville in 1974 (and sang backup with Waylon Jennings and Tompall Glaser on "They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore"), he and I were still only close enough for country dancin'. Of course, we'd come from different backgrounds. Willie had picked cotton in the fields as a kid in Abbott. For entertainment and income from local farmers, he'd go out with a little homemade paddle and kill bumblebees; he would come home looking like he'd just fought fifteen rounds with God. Willie grew up never having much money or much schooling and got married and divorced about ninety-seven times. All he ever wanted to do was write songs and sing them for people and maybe get one of those cars that roared down the highway with the windows rolled up in the middle of summer, indicating that the driver could afford that ultimate symbol of success; air-conditioning.
    By the time Willie finally got that car, it was about ten minutes too late to make any difference, but he did get something else far more important: He got a bus. In fact, he got three buses. The one he lives in and calls home is known as the Honeysuckle Rose. The way I first really got to know Willie was by traveling with him aboard the Honeysuckle Rose. It's a floating city unto itself, with "floating" the operative word. Even the secondhand smoke has been known to make casual visitors mildly amphibious. (There is no truth, incidentally, to the widely held belief that Willie needs the other two buses to carry all the weed he smokes on the first bus.) By contrast, my own country music career never quite reached the tour-bus level. The closest I came was a blue Beauville van, out of which the Texas Jewboys poured like a thousand clowns at every honky-tonk, minstrel show, whorehouse, bar, and bar mitzvah throughout the South, to paraphrase Jerry Jeff Walker. The Beauville, like my career, was not a vehicle destined for vastly commercial country music stardom, though it did have at least one good quality: It broke down in all the right places.
    Also unlike Willie, I came from an upper-middle-class home, which is always a hard cross for a country singer to bear. I got a guitar as a young teenager in Houston, and like Townes Van Zandt, the first song I learned was "Fraulein." By then Willie and his sister, Bobbie, were already playing in beer halls on Saturday nights and in church the next morning. By the time I had my bar mitzvah, Willie had sold Bibles and written "Family Bible," which he also sold, reportedly for fifty dollars.
    Willie never went to college, but I graduated from the University of Texas's highly advanced Plan II liberal arts program. Then I joined the Peace Corps and worked in the jungles of Borneo, while Willie continued writing, singing, marrying, divorcing, struggling, and smoking. Like I said, I don't really know what Willie and I have in common—other than the fact that we're both pretty fair bumblebee fighters. Probably it has to do with what Johnny Gimble, the great country fiddle player, told me once aboard the Honeysuckle Rose. He said that when he was a kid he'd told his mother, "Mama, when I grow up, I'm gonna be a musician." His mother had answered, "Make up your mind, son, because you can't do both."
    If Willie had been Rosa Parks, there never would have been a civil rights movement in this country because he refuses to leave his soulful locus at the back of the bus unless it's to go onstage or onto a golf course. Golf is a passion with Willie, and it's the one aspect of his life I find stultifyingly dull. As I once told Willie, "The only two good balls I ever hit was when I stepped on the garden rake." Willie, of course, responded to this news with a golf anecdote. He told me about a woman who'd recently come off his golf course at Briarcliff, went into the pro shop, and complained to the golf pro that she'd been stung by a bee. "Where'd it sting you?" asked the pro. "Between the first and second holes," she said. "Well I can