Wallace Creek runs through Echo Hill Ranch, which has been property of the Friedman family for over half a century now. A hundred years before that, the land belonged to “Bigfoot” Wallace, a legendary pioneer and Indian fighter who rode with Colonel Jack Hays and his Texas Rangers. “How’d he get his ranch?” is a common question in Texas. A not uncommon answer, true in Bigfoot Wallace’s case, is “he took it.” There’s a story about Bigfoot Wallace and how he got his name (mistaken identity), and a lesson (myth resists change): Bigfoot wore size nine. 

Stories about Bigfoot Wallace, Flacco the Lipan Apache Chief, Stephen Austin, Sam Houston, Jack Hays, and the founding of the republic of Texas are all part of the mythologized history that nourished Richard “Kinky” Friedman growing up on Echo Hill Ranch in the heart of the Texas Hill Country. On the far side of Wallace Creek, across from the lodge where Kinky lives and where he grew up, there are hundreds of Neolithic artifacts — arrowheads and spearheads, skinning knives and scraping stones — distributed at work sites up and down the creek, the remnants of a Comanche manufactory. 

Earl Buckalew, the wrangler at Echo Hill Ranch for decades, now deceased, had a grandfather who was kidnapped by Comanches; in the 1970s, Earl still “ran ’backs.” Meaning, Earl ran a crew of Mexican illegals who he contracted out for seasonal work on local ranches at a fraction of the cost of legal US workers. Running ’backs persisted into the 1970s as an informal, illicit, widely employed extension of the government’s “bracero program” — originally intended (cough) to assist with the “perennial shortage of agricultural laborers.” Woody Guthrie wrote a song about those laborers, which Kinky sometimes sang, called “Deportee”: 

“The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon / a fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills / Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves? / The radio says, ‘They are just deportees.’” Woody’s song helped to end the bracero program.

Kinky and I sat on the lawn in front of the lodge one afternoon in the late 1970s. From where we sat, sipping iced tea, Kinky smoking a cigar, we could see two wetbacks pouring a concrete gazebo foundation in the Texas sun. In a year, there’d be no more “wetbacks” — for now, Earl called a break. “Chinga them tools,” said Earl, and distributed handfuls of generic unfiltered cigarettes. Kinky, situated next to the author on a deck chair looking down on the scene, said, “Sometimes I feel bad, sitting up here lounging — while 100 yards away those ’backs bust ass in the blazing sun for eight dollars a day and generic cigarettes.” He reflected. “But then I think, ‘Fuck ’em, if they tried to do our jobs they would have OD’d on cocaine ten years ago’” 

Kinky is a country singer-songwriter, a “detective” novelist, a Jew, and, though he once ran for governor of Texas, not a politician. The occupational hazards of professional musicians don’t change much. Down Highway 16 a few miles from Kinky’s ranch, in Bandera, is Arkey Blue’s Silver Dollar Saloon. On the jukebox is a song Arkey Blue recorded called “Too Many Pills.” Horror film viewers may recall it as the song “Leatherface” listens to in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. 

Richard Kinky Friedman billed himself as the first “full-blooded” Jew to ever play the Grand Ole Opry. Since 1925, an appearance on the live country music radio show from Nashville has conferred a certain status on country music performers, punching their hip-tickets and bestowing an obligation to uphold the great (but undefined) traditions of country music. An appearance on the Opry insured bookings at little clubs back in the hills where the people taper off into possums. It seems reasonably likely Friedman’s claim is true; for sure, no previous country performer referred to himself as “a Hebe from the heart of Texas” and took to the stage at the Lone Star Café in Manhattan with a star of David blazing on his back, as his fiddle player, Sweet Mary, played the theme from the movie Exodus. 

Kinky’s half asleep right now in the front room of the lodge at Echo Hill Ranch, his feet resting on an ottoman. An unattended monitor on the wall by the door to his office plays Fox News. Kinky doesn’t pay much attention to Fox News or to politics anymore. The parts of the brain affected by Parkinson’s disease, which Kinky has suffered from for several years but was only more recently diagnosed with, causes progressive problems with movement, memory, and attention. In Kinky’s case, it generates prolific, sometimes frightening visions or hallucinations. Kinky lives in Dreamtime now, his interest fluctuating between his inner and outer worlds. 

The headlines of an apocalypse-themed advertisement play across the monitor screen, with phone numbers and website directions about how and where to send the money. 

“ARE YOU GOING TO HEAVEN OR NOT?”

“(Now You Can Know For Sure)”

Kinky’s not interested. He’s got enough on his plate right now. Despite his illness, he’s finishing work on a new collection of songs recorded with the help of Texas musicians and friends like Willie and Bobbie Nelson. Country musicians are, as a rule, more concerned with sentiment than with ideology or the afterlife, and that’s true of Kinky. Musicians want audiences, and audiences shape performers by their desires. The power in the relationship is with the audience, but managing that desire, knowing how to use our yearnings to turn us around and take us to an unexpected place of beauty, belongs to the artist. A song that can do that for people is what songwriters call a mountain. A mountain might be a commercial success or not, but it has a huge impact on anyone who hears it. 

The front room of the lodge at Echo Hill where we sit is dim in winter’s afternoon light. Shadows of hummingbirds checking the feeders hung under the porch eaves flit back and forth across the room. Carlos, Kinky’s burly medical attendant, checks on Kinky. “Kinky need to go pee-pee?” he asks. Such are the indignities of age.

Kinky talks about mountains. “‘Rapid City’ was a good song. ‘Sold American’ was a mountain.” Townes Van Zandt, a famous Texas songwriter, wrote a bunch of mountains, like “To Live is to Fly,” but never had a big commercial success until late in his career, when a song Townes wrote called “Pancho and Lefty,” was recorded by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard and became a huge hit. Kinky ran into Van Zandt in Austin and asked him if the money had changed his life. Townes said, “It came too late for me, man. I’m a spinning ghost.”

When Kinky’s in Dreamtime I like to sit with him and parse the content of the visions he sometimes shares. Kinky will ask, “Do you see those people over by the fence?” Sometimes individuals stand out. A mean-looking fat guy makes faces. Sometimes Kinky can change the position of his head, and the people resolve into hats — or fence posts, or shadows thrown by memories. Sometimes the visions persist, and they can become menacing, but mostly they are not. When Kinky’s working on a song, as he almost always is, he ignores the visions, writing in a small notepad, noting a line or phrase, crossing out a word, scratching another into unintelligibility. Songs are always in progress, sometimes for years.

Kinky knows his song “Ride ’em Jewboy” is a mountain, though most people’ve never heard it and never will. The first time they met, in the 1970s, Bob Dylan played and sang “Jewboy” to Kinky, then handed him the guitar. “Oh great,” said Kinky. “Is this a hootenanny? Am I supposed to play one of your songs to you now?” 

Kinky, visiting Washington, DC, years ago, tells me he found himself at a urinal beside Dick Cheney. “You’re not the most famous person I’ve pissed next to,” Kinky told him. “Who was?” the former Veep wanted to know. “Bob Dylan,” Kinky told him. 

“Lucky he didn’t blast you in the face with a quail load, Kingster,” I said to Kinky at the time, referencing the former vice president’s tragic hunting accident involving Texas lawyer Harry Whittington, whose deeply moving apology for being shot in the face is preserved to this day on YouTube.

It’s impossible to be the sentimental romantic that Kinky is without being at the same time deeply cynical about relations between the sexes. Behind the ribald lyrics, the loutish poses, the ideological provocateurs, an innocent is concealed — the “Gandhi-like figure” who insists on the reality of romantic love and assumes it the most fundamental of things, despite the seeming superabundance of evidence to the contrary.

Kinky’s dogs rearrange themselves on the chairs and sofas like shift workers, or patrons in a seedy nightclub, entering and leaving by a speakeasy hatch in the screen door. “Where’s Sophie?” Kinky asks after his half-blind spaniel, who died months ago. When Winston Spencer Randolph Churchill Friedman, a short-legged, tubular dog, comes wagging up in Sophie’s place, Kinky gives “Winnie” half his enchilada. “‘Wild Man from Borneo’ is a mountain,” he remarks, and I agree.

At this point in life, Kinky eats lightly but frequently, feeding like the hummingbirds whose local operations he has supervised for years, fueling migrating and resident flocks with sugar water and numbered red dye from a rank of feeders on the porch just outside the screen door. For years, tiny birds with iridescent wings of purple and gold have mobbed the ranch feeders. At night they’d disappear, leaving Kinky and guests to sit, cigar smoke drifting on night air, drinking whiskey, waiting for the Queen of the Night cactus to flower in the garden beside the patio, which it does, only at night, once a year.

Jack Black, the burglar, not the heavyset comedian, wrote a book titled You Can’t Win, in which he mentions “the Johnson Family,” a semi-mythic society of righteous people to be met in unlikely places and in all walks of life. William S. Burroughs further elaborated the Johnson myth, describing an un-secret secret society with no membership rolls, no hierarchy, no dues, dogma, meetings, newsletters, or ritual regalia. “In this world of shabby rooming houses, furtive gray figures in dark suits, hop joints and chili parlors, the Johnson Family took shape as a code of conduct,” says Burroughs in The Adding Machine. He explained, “To say someone is a Johnson means he keeps his word and honors his obligations.... He is not a malicious, snooping, interfering self-righteous trouble-making person.”

Johnsons, in Burroughs’s version of the myth, are everywhere and always opposed by “shits.” Shits are mean, malicious, meddling persons. “Who,” Burroughs says, “can’t mind their own business because they have no business to mind, any more than smallpox virus.” The mark of a basic shit is that they have to be RIGHT. And to be RIGHT they have to make someone else WRONG. 

I don’t know what sort of Jew Kinky is. He’s a stage Jew on stage, just like he’s a stage cowboy on stage. But he’s a Jew and a cowboy offstage too. I can only attest that the maître d’ at the Carnegie Deli would shout “GIVE HIM LINEN!” when Kinky came in. For a Jew, that is roughly equivalent to a cowboy appearing at the Grand Ole Opry. Kinky is the only “full-blooded” cowboy afforded linen service at the Carnegie Deli in New York. 

Still, the Carnegie’s flattery was way the hell up in gray midtown, in banker and mobster territory. Kinky preferred Chinatown. He loved a Cantonese dive on Mott Street called Big Wong’s. Kinky’d arrive for his first or second lunch and all the waiters would gleefully scream to the restaurant at large: “Kinky chi-sin! Kinky ho-cau!” as they showed us to a table. Kinky never cared too much how he got an audience initially. Once in possession of the crowd’s attention he knew what do to with it. When Big Wong’s waiters cried “Kinky is crazy, Kinky is smelly” in Cantonese, Kinky would wave his cigar, deprecating the attention. “Don’t go putting me up on a pedestal now,” he’d tell the waiters in a booming Texas accent audible to every diner and dishwasher in the place. At least a few of them would attend Kinky’s show, on Saturday nights at Lone Star Café, at the corner of 5th Avenue and 13th Street. 

Not all of the musicians who played the Lone Star Café in the era when Kinky Friedman was the house band were Johnsons, but one who was was Paul Butterfield, a blues harmonica player from Chicago. One dark night at 2 AM Butterfield called Kinky. “Butter” had been up for three days and just exited a Harlem shooting gallery with enough cash to make it back to his place — but he’d been mugged, he said, and was MIT* at a phonebooth outside a bodega on 121st Street.

Butter told Kinky he’d been walking down the street when a man began to follow him, and when he got close, Butter heard him say, “I gotta piss on you.” It was after 1 AM. The weeknight streets were deserted. Butter sped up, and the pervert kept after him, kept saying he gotta piss on him. Butter crossed the street, dodged into a bodega, hoping to shake the degenerate, but the guy followed him into the store. As Butter collected his cigarettes and change, the man was standing right behind him. Inside the bodega, Butter could hear him more clearly. “I got a pistol on you,” the man said, to Butterfield’s relief.

Outside the bodega, Butterfield pulled the last of his cash from his pants, about $18 he thought, and gave it, almost gratefully, to the mugger, who allowed him to keep the change to call Kinky.

Kinky, a Johnson, immediately agreed to come rescue Butterfield, but insisted he check his pockets again for overlooked cash before he’d take a cab up there. A careful search produced $850, to Butterfield’s shock and delight, stashed in one of his 23 jacket pockets. Butterfield delightedly apologized for waking Kinky unnecessarily and no doubt went back to where he’d been for some more of what he’d had. It would kill him a year later, in Los Angeles. 

As we sit in Dreamtime, in the dim light of the lodge’s front room, old friends seem nearby and Kinky’s in conversation with them. One of them, Tim Mayer, who died in ’88, wrote a song that seems intended for now, “Gemini Junction.” 

Well I’ve got to move on now to Gemini Junction
And that clock full of good times awaiting me there.
Lord, I hope that I find it this side of the Jordan
and if I don’t — well it won’t be like I didn’t care.

There’ll be mountains to pass full of many a hazard,
where riders lose heart and horses go lame,
there’ll be rivers to cross and a terrible desert,
but I know where to go. It’s the way that I came.

There’s a man in the moon over Gemini Junction
and the Mexicans call him primero ladrone
what that means, I believe, is the thief who’s forgiven:
I should think that he’ll wink when he sees I’ve come home.

I’ve dreamed of that man with the stars all around him;
I’ve dreamed of a dawn that would quicken the dead,
but I’ve dreamed far too long — It's time that I found them,
Or went bust. So there’s just one more thing to be said:

I’d admire to see you in Gemini Junction
and I’ll send you a letter if I ever get there;
It’ll say “What a day for my love to come calling!
My best to the rest. I’m enclosing your fare.”

(*MIT is Johnson family distress code, meaning “Man-in-trouble.” It is also used by female Johnsons.)