Kinky Friedman

If my family of origin has a patron saint, it is country singer, detective fiction writer, and failed gubernatorial candidate Richard Samet “Kinky” Friedman, of “Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys” fame. His 1973 debut album, Sold American, loomed large in our household, drawling amiably from the speakers in my father’s car and from the kitchen stereo, as my parents, sisters, and I puttered to and fro, our paths sporadically intersecting and then diverting, each of us immersed in our individual affairs. At night, the sticky chorus of “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” would clank in my head as I observed my teenage beauty rituals or dawdled on math homework.

I rarely listened to country music, but our family calibrated itself to my father’s preferences, and he loved Kinky. So, we listened together, snickering over the brazen, hyperarticulate lyrics. “If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s an ethnocentric racist,” proclaims the narrator of “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews…” having walloped said bigot “right square between the eyes.” At the height of his career, The Kinkster, as the singer refers to himself, reveled in an aesthetic one might describe as Semitic Cowboy Flamboyance—he wore brocaded Western button-downs, chunky belt buckles adorned with the Star of David, and to this day, he rarely emerges in public without a plump cigar between his lips—but neither the scope of his music nor his demeanor leave room for speculation: He wants us to know that he’s a real goddamned man of a man who can best any “redneck nerd in a bowling shirt” who dares to spew hateful bile.

I bought Kinky’s performance with the immediacy of a girl who, despite herself, believed her father was always right. He seemed to me a righteous defender of the oppressed, a politically enlightened troubadour. And despite my disinclination towards the genre, I gradually developed fondness for his music. I was endeared by Kinky’s gravely, avuncular voice, the genial manner in which he pronounced each syllable, as if he were making it comfortable before its release. And his Jewishness, a novelty in the arena of country music, made my own tenuous connection to the identity feel more robust. My father, too, is Jewish, albeit non practicing. It was my late mother, a semi-ambivalent Catholic, who spearheaded all religious-adjacent traditions. We celebrated Christmas and Easter, but our familial cultural consciousness was dominated by the likes of Mel Brooks and, of course, Kinky.

Every celebrity is to some extent a work of fiction, but the domestic associations that forged my attachment to Kinky rewrote him entirely. I knew little about him, besides what I gleaned from his lyrics, or what my father told me, and I was not inclined to educate myself. At the time, he sufficed as a vessel, assuming the same attributes of reassuring, stalwart masculinity that my father possessed. Evacuated of sexuality and—knowledgeable fans will raise an eyebrow— controversy, this anodyne Kinky inhabited my girlish delusions as an affable myth, a bar mitzvah-ed Santa Claus with swagger and a penchant for puns. But Santa Claus isn’t real, and neither was my Kinky Friedman. I was simply content to be the last to know.

Recently, after many years of neglect, I returned to Sold American. I revisited my favorite songs from the album, and then turned on the sixth track, “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed,” which I had apparently disregarded in my adolescence, either because I didn’t take it seriously or because I suspected that it might rupture my Righteous Kinky narrative.

It does not take a vibrant imagination to guess what kind of song bears this title, and if you know Kinky’s music, you’re already familiar with it. In sum, Kinky takes aim at “women’s liberation,” which in his estimation has encouraged “mean-hearted harpies” to “[break] all the laws / Tearing up their girdles and a-burning up their bras.” The music video features comedian Ruth Buzzi being violently dragged around a kitchen and hurled in bed by hulking, denim-clad brute. The jokes are cheap, and the premise boasts a level of nuance befitting a sloth. I then read that in 1973, the National Organization for Women decorated Kinky with their “Male Chauvinist Pig” award, largely in response to the song. Altogether these discoveries were disappointing — but I’m a grown woman, and misogyny is rarely surprising. Why, then, was this stupid song bothering me so much?

Decades have passed, and yet I remain invested in Kinky’s goodness. I cannot so easily discard my mantle of familial idols, tenderly burnished since childhood. This affinity is, too, symptomatic of puppyish impulses that I have not outgrown. Whenever I admire a person of cultural prominence, I am beset—or dogged, as pun-loving Kinky might suggest—by the urge to know whether that person is Good. Would they gently, but firmly steer a small child, separated from their parents in a crowd, to a place of safety? Will they, when faced with adversity, meet challenges with grace and courage? Are they, in other words, the person I am attempting to be?

It’s an irksome tendency, one that feels parasocial and childish, as if I’m hunting for auxiliary parental figures. But my attachment to Kinky is fundamentally childlike; it thrums with an electric current of daughterly love. In youth, we often struggle to accept moral complexity in those we love, even as we begin to perceive it in ourselves. We might balk at the sordid evidence: vicious one-liners that make us cackle, fresh gossip, savored with wicked, epicurean delight. Growing up, I steadied myself with the promise of my father’s uncomplicated goodness, and I aimed at Kinky that same needy love.

I am, without a doubt, neurotic about my affections. It takes little investigation to uncover Kinky’s misogyny, or his studied efforts to offend; nonetheless, I embarked on a doomed pursuit for signs of his moral rectitude. Unfortunately for me, Kinky delights in verbal transgressions; he has structured his public identity around an eagerness to say what he claims others will not, out of politesse. “I’ve always said that bigots need to be entertained too,” he told High Times in a December 1979 interview. In a 2016 interview with journalist Jarrett Bellini, he opened his remarks on Donald Trump’s appeal with a smug disclaimer, “Now, this might be racist, I hope it is…” (It was).

Perhaps I ought to have stopped my inquiry here. But I thought that if I were saying goodbye to Kinky, as it had become clear I must, I should first give him a solid close read. Why not apply the paranoid reading skills so diligently cultivated in graduate school to some of his detective fiction, and get to the bottom of Kinky’s breezy misogynistic cruelty? Pen in hand, I proceeded with the committed eye of a diagnostician, hunting for evidence that could make Kinky’s excuses.

I read Greenwich Killing Time (1986) and A Case of Lone Star (1987) in which a minimally fictionalized Kinky turns gumshoe detective, solving grisly New York City murder cases with a supporting cast of mostly real-life characters. One might call the works semi-autofictional: The instigating event which inspires this Holmesian pivot—Kinky saves a woman from a mugger in Greenwich Village—actually occurred in the 1970s, when he was living in the City. Moreover, the books consistently draw on his personal history, from his chess-playing skills to his music career. In A Case of Lone Star, he even plays a gig at the titular Lone Star Café, where he once served as a regular act (the bar closed in 1989).

Cumulatively, the books made for moderately propulsive diversion, but they yielded no surprises. Kinky approaches fiction with the same assertions of chauvinist heterosexuality that characterize his music. His prose yearns towards Raymond Chandler: one is intermittently surprised by an elegant flourish (“[All] lawyers sound…like life never quite touches them,” he writes in Greenwich Killing Time), but too often, it stumbles over its tryhard machismo. Kinky sleeps with women; sometimes he suspects them of murder; and now and then he makes a joke about assault. “She had a sort of little happy-sad, expectant smile on her face,” he writes of one future murder victim. Perturbed by her demeanor, he feels the urge to “knock it off with a right cross.” Greenwich Killing Time concludes with a hysteria diagnosis that makes me wonder if Kinky had lately read Lady Audley’s Secret or was dabbling in Freud. He is, too, enduringly preoccupied with the number of “homosexuals” who may be in his midst, whether barside or on the Village streets. I had once assumed that Kinky Friedman didn’t take himself especially seriously, but as I read, his anxiety seemed to usurp mine. Gradually, I accepted the fruits of my research and grew distracted by Kinky’s contorted definition of masculinity, which as best I could tell consisted of cigars and Jameson, noncommittal sex, cowboy hats, and casual bigotry.

Theoretically, the question of individual goodness strikes me as a red herring: an essentialist myth that belies the moral primacy of choice and deed. I understand humans as assemblages built from the sum total of our actions. Based on his actions—the ones to which I am privy—Kinky is not recuperable, not for me, anyway.

But theory didn’t undergird this search; it was a process catalyzed by base emotional instinct. At age 38, I’m still trying to reconcile the chasm I sometimes encounter in an alluring personality, yawning between the good feelings they rouse and what I think comprises human decency. Seeking out these exterior models of virtue suggests that I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking for—that I’m in no position to assess my own goodness, or anyone else’s. I don’t know what degree of moral clarity or practiced benevolence would entitle me to such a position. I think of my father, who I believe is good, and who believed fatherhood entailed acting as an arbiter of integrity. He did not offer up Kinky in this vein, but so total was his influence that, oftentimes, I could not share in his interests without an acolyte’s solemnity, as if his chosen cultural relics were each a lesson in appropriateness.

In 2007, months after graduating college, I attended an event for Kinky Friedman’s then most recent book, You Can Lead a Politician to Water, But You Can’t Make Him Think, the publication of which followed his unsuccessful 2006 campaign to become governor of Texas. Later that night, I sent my father an email about the experience of hearing Kinky speak, and briefly meeting him: “He really struck me as a cool guy—very genuine and kind-hearted,” I wrote.

To be sure, I had no reason to think otherwise. Kinky was nice to me, and we took some silly photos together. Then I skipped away, cozy in these surface-level apprehensions. Surely I was already writing in my head the email I would send my father, proud that I could reinforce Kinky’s place in the family’s popular culture pantheon. I never read the book that he signed for me. What more did one need to know about a cherished family icon?

Postscript

On June 27, sometime in the afternoon, an acquaintance sent me a message over Instagram. “Did you see the news about Kinky?” she asked. I had not. But Kinky, whose celebrity was always modest, seemed unlikely to make headlines at 79 years of age unless he had done one of two things typical of white male geriatrics: died, or decided, yet again, to run for political office.

It was the former. According to one of his close friends, Kinky had been suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, and he died from related complications. I shared the news with my father and sisters by way of family group text; briefly, they each registered their disappointment. I don’t think that anyone’s day was ruined by this information, which seems reasonable. My family has known vastly more intimate losses in recent years; one must preserve one’s heart. But I am sad, sadder than I expected to be. It will take me time to suss out what it is I believe I have lost.

Goodnight, Kinky, you scoundrel. I thought that I was saying goodbye to you on my terms. It might be easier if I knew the terms had been yours, instead.