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

tell you right now," said the golf pro, "your stance is too wide."
    After writing a number of mystery novels and traveling extensively with Willie, the idea crossed my dusty desk to write a book with him as a central character, set the scene aboard the Honeysuckle Rose, and let the bus take the story wherever the hell it went. This meant I would be exchanging my New York loft with the cat and the lesbian dance class above for Willie and his crew. Willie had never been a character in a murder mystery, but he thought it might be worth a shot, so to speak.
    We crisscrossed the country together. As the song goes: "Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other." Willie sang, played chess, and smoked enough dope to make him so high that he had to call NASA to find his head. As for myself, I smoked cigars, drank a little Chateau de Catpiss, played chess with Willie, and wrote down many things at all hours of the day and night in my little private investigator's notebook. Along the way, I went to many of Willie's shows. Wandering around backstage at a Willie Nelson concert is a bit like being the parrot on the shoulder of the guy who's running the Ferris wheel. It's not the best seat in the house, but you see enough lights, action, people, and confusion to make you wonder if anybody knows what the hell's going on. If you're sitting out in front, of course, it all rolls along as smoothly as a German train schedule, but as Willie, like any great magician, would be the first to point out, the real show is never in the center ring.
    Backstage at any show has its similarities, whether it's Broadway or the circus or the meanest little honky-tonk in Nacogdoches—the palpable sense of people out there somewhere in the darkness waiting for your performance, or being able to pull a curtain back slightly and experience the actual sight of the audience sitting there waiting to be entertained by someone who, in this case, happens to be you. It's the reason Richard Burton vomited before almost every live performance of his life. It's part of the reason George Jones took Early Times, Judy Garland took bluebirds, and many a shining star burned out too soon. Standing alone in the spotlight, up on the high wire without a net, is something Willie Nelson has had to deal with for most of his adult life.
    One night at Billy Bob's in Fort Worth, I was standing backstage in the near darkness when a voice right behind me almost caused me to drop my cigar into my Dr Pepper. It was Willie. "Let me show you something," he said, and he pulled a curtain back, revealing a cranked-up crowd beginning to get drunk, beginning to grow restless, and packed in tighter than smoked oysters in Hong Kong. Viewed from our hidden angle, they were a strangely intimidating sight, yet Willie took them in almost like a walk in the trailer park.
    "That's where the real show is," he said.
    "If that's where the real show is," I said, "I want my money back."
    "Do you realize," Willie continued in a soft, soothing, serious voice, "that ninety-nine percent of those people are not with their true first choice?"
    He looked out at the crowd for a moment or two longer. Then he let the curtain drop from his hand, sending us back into twilight.
    "That's why they play the jukebox," he said.
    Willie's character leapt off the stage and onto the page. I don't know if you'd call it Jewish radar or cowboy intuition, but during my travels with Willie, a story line began to evolve. He would be at the center of one of my most challenging cases. There wasn't a butler to do it, but Willie did have a valet named Ben Dorsey, who'd once been John Wayne's valet. This provided some humorous commentary, since Willie wasn't an enormous fan of the Duke's. Willie preferred the old singing cowboys. Of John Wayne he once said, "He couldn't sing and his horse was never smart." (That kind of talk never failed to irritate Dorsey and usually resulted in some sort of tension convention.) Other real characters who