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

pay medical and dental bills for his punch-out victims and offer them free patronage at his strip club. With Lee Harvey Oswald, however, this beneficence was not in evidence. According to Friedman, Ruby was utterly without remorse over Oswald's death, delighting in the bags of fan mail he received in his prison cell.
    In time the mail petered out and, not long after that, so did Ruby. He died a bitter man, possibly the last living piece in a puzzle only God or Agatha Christie could have created. I didn't really blame Ruby for being somewhat bitter. The way I saw it, he had actually accomplished something in killing Oswald. He'd helped one neurotic Jew, namely myself, come up with a pretty good name for his band.
    Years after Ruby had gone to that grassy knoll in the sky, my friend Mickey Raphael, who plays blues harp with Willie Nelson, tried to get a gig at Jack's old strip club. At the time, Mickey had a jug band, and though he found the place to be redolent of Ruby's spirit, he didn't get the gig. "I thought you guys liked jugs," Mickey told the manager.
    Thus is the legacy of one little man determined to take the law into his own little hand. And so they will go together into history, a pair of Jacks, one dealt a fatal blow in the prime of his life, the other dealt from the bottom of the deck; one remembered with the passion of an eternal flame, the other all but forgotten. Friedman notes that Ruby wept for Kennedy. Chet Flippo, in his definitive book Your Cheatin' Heart, tells of Ruby's friendship and loyalty a decade earlier toward another one of life's great death-bound passengers, Hank Williams. Ruby, according to Flippo, was one of the last promoters to continue to book Hank as the legend drunkenly, tragically struggled to get out of this world alive. He was also one of the few human beings on the planet who knew Hank Williams and spoke Yiddish.
    Was Ruby a slightly weather-beaten patriotic hero? Was he a sleazeball with a heart of gold? Was he, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, just another Joseph, following a star, trying to find a manger in Dallas? My old pal Vaughn Meader, who in the early sixties recorded the hugely successful The First Family album

    satirizing JFK, probably expressed it best. After flying for most of that tragic day, oblivious to the news, he got into a taxi at the airport in Milwaukee. The driver asked him, "Did you hear about the president getting shot?" "No," said Vaughn. "How does it go?"

HERO ANAGRAMS

    Bob Dylan: Bland boy—nobly bad

    Hank Williams: Sank all whim

    Willie Nelson: I swell online—nine oil wells

    Oscar Wilde: Cowards lie—lad cries ow

    Father Damien: Renamed faith

    Jack Ruby: Back jury

    Arthur Conan Doyle: Can try unload hero

    Sherlock Holmes: Hell mocks heroes

    Billy Joe Shaver: Behave, sir jolly—shy jovial rebel

ODE TO BILLY JOE

     
f Carl Sandburg had come from Waco, his name would have been Billy Joe Shaver. Back in the late sixties, when Christ was a cowboy, I first met Billy Joe in Nashville. We were both songwriters, and we once stayed up for six nights and it felt like a week. Today, he's arguably the finest poet and songwriter this state has ever produced.
    If you doubt my opinion, you could ask Willie Nelson or wait until you get to hillbilly heaven to ask Townes Van Zandt, who are the other folks in the equation, but they might not give you a straight answer. Willie, for instance, tends to speak only in lyrics. Just last week I was with an attractive young woman, and I said to Willie, "I'm not sure who's taller, but her ass is six inches higher than mine." He responded, "My ass is higher than both of your asses." Be that as it may, you'll rarely see Willie perform without singing Billy Joe's classic "I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train," which contains the line "I'd just like to mention that my grandma's old-age pension is the reason why I'm standin' here today." Like everything else about Billy Joe, that line is the literal truth. He is an achingly