Free Generations and Other True Stories by Bryan Woolley

within forty-eight hours.”
    So this is Kinky Friedman, legendary band leader, singer, composer, author, amateur sleuth of uncanny skills, appreciator of cats….
    The Kinkster’s dressed in black jeans, black boots, a black belt heavy with silver conchos, a black tuxedo jacket, a purple shirt, and a black cowboy hat adorned with a silver band and several feathers. One of the feathers, he points out, looks like two feathers that have sprouted from the same quill. “The feather of the emu,” he says, “the only bird that can do that.”
    We saunter to the baggage carousel in company with Lenore Markowitz, who calls herself an “author escort.” She has been hired to ferry Kinky about the Dallas area in her Suburban during his tornado-like tour of local media and bookstores, flogging his new mystery novel, Armadillos and Old Lace .
    The book’s something of a Lone Star literary event for Kinkster fans, for it’s the first of his seven whodunits to be set in his native state instead of New York City’s Greenwich Village and environs. A serial killer is murdering little old ladies in the Hill Country, and it’s up to the Kinkster and several real-life “Kerrverts,” as the author calls residents of Kerr County, to stop him.
    In all the Kinky mysteries, most of the characters are based on the author’s friends, neighbors, and relatives, and they’re called by their real names. Kinky feels free to do this, he says, “because there is very little innocence to protect.”
    The cast of characters in Armadillos and Old Lace includes Pat Knox, who defeated Kinky in his effort a few years ago to become a Kerr County justice of the peace; Frances Kaiser, the county’s female sheriff; and the author’s own father and sister. He even drags two dogs, a cat, several children, and an innocent armadillo into his plot.
    â€œI’ve been a fan of yours for a long time…” I say, intending to elaborate. My fandom, I’m about to tell him, dates back nearly twenty years, to the days when Kinky and his band, the Texas Jewboys, were riding the crest of the urban cowboy bizarreness, singing Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed at the Lone Star Cafe in New York. The song had the same effect on the feminists of the day as a sharp stick poked into their nest has on wasps.
    â€œA man of impeccable taste,” Kinky interrupts. He has spotted an emergency exit and darts through it to the sidewalk outside and relights the Honduran butt, leaving Lenore and me to watch the carousel for his bags and guitar.
    It’s about noon when we arrive at his hotel, and his room isn’t ready yet. “This is a horrible inconvenience for the Kinkster,” he mutters. He checks his bags with the bellman and changes out of the tuxedo jacket into an iridescent little number that might have come from a garage sale at Hunter Thompson’s place. It shimmers soft-neon reds and greens on a field of black.
    While a dose of enchiladas and tacos at El Fenix is restoring the Kinkster’s good spirits, I ask him: “Did you get another cat?”
    As Kinky readers know, his cat is an important character in all his novels. But his sixth book, Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola , contains a moving epilogue in tribute to Cuddles, who died in January 1993 at age fourteen.
    It’s immediately evident that Kinky doesn’t want to talk about Cuddles. He says he had three cats and still has two of them, plus two dogs, at Echo Hill, the family ranch and children’s camp near Medina, Texas, where he grew up and where he lives now.
    â€œThe cats are wonderful cats,” Kinky says. “The dogs are wonderful dogs. But Cuddles…Cuddles was the first cat I ever had. She’s the one who lived with me in New York. She was my best friend. She fought the drug wars with me. She put up with me during the period that I was flying on all kinds of herbs and