I will say this: In all my years at j., and all the years before, I have never, ever had more fun interviewing anyone than the time I called Kinky Friedman at his compound somewhere in the hills of Texas and he answered the phone with a brusque “Start talking.”
I remember him saying that he didn’t want to be remembered for annoying audiences nationwide as the founding member of Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys or as the author of his dozens of books, “but for my salsa.” While complaining about how insular Americans have become, he noted, “A lesbian never meets a NASCAR driver.”
If you didn’t read about it first in the New York Times, New Yorker or various other well-respected publications not hailing from New York, “The Kinkster,” as he refers to himself — like Rickey Henderson, Friedman likes to speak about himself in the third person, though he’s not nearly as arrogant or as good a base-stealer — is running for governor of Texas this year.
And, as he reveals in his latest book, “Texas Hold ‘Em,” a somewhat inconsistent compilation of his wit and wisdom, he pledges “as the first Jewish governor of Texas, to reduce the speed limit to 54.95.”
Friedman’s official gubernatorial slogan is “Why the hell not?,” but he really and truly appears to be serious about this candidacy. Now, in addition to being Texas’ first Jewish governor, he’d also be the first who has written extensively about his cocaine use (though likely not the first cocaine user) or the first governor to have been voted Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year by the National Organization of Women following his little ditty “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed.”
But, to those who look at the examples of Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger and wonder if America needs another celebrity governor, Friedman assures them his candidacy will be different: “I’m a Jew. I’ll hire good people.”
Even an hour on the phone was enough to know that Kinky Friedman is a diabolically clever and funny man; just printing a transcript of his interview will make any writer sound clever as well. So it came as a bit of a disappointment that “Texas Hold ‘Em” is funny, but hardly uproariously funny.
Large swaths of this book are taken up with lists of Texas trivia — an agonizingly long glossary of Lone Star prison slang, a list of Texan innovations and minutiae such as the fact that the largest urban colony of bats in North America is in Austin under the Congress Avenue Bridge. That’s nice to know, but one hardly needs a humorist of Friedman’s caliber to deliver statistics like that (or that the largest-ever oatmeal cake was baked in Bertram, Texas, in 1991; it was 333 layers, weighed 333 pounds and served 3,333 people).
Some lists, in fact, devolve into Jeff Foxworthy territory — i.e. “You know you’re from East Texas if your television has 897 channels, but you don’t have indoor plumbing.” Well, you know you’re a j. reader if you don’t have any books by Foxworthy and you probably can’t discern between the myriad regions of Texas.
There are some laugh-out-loud passages in this book — Friedman matter-of-factly noting that any proper Texan will match his truck to the color of his Beretta 9 mm handgun is one. But the most memorable chapters are odes to his parents, who ran a summer camp on a ranch (where he still lives), a visit with a likely innocent man on Texas’ death row and an intimate portrait of his good pal Willie Nelson.
Friedman is gifted — how else could he come up with the gem “I never say f—k in front of a C-H-I-L-D”?
Sadly, that line wasn’t in this book.
“Texas Hold ‘Em” by Kinky Friedman (218 pages, St. Martin’s Griffin, $13.95).