Over the years, our professional relationship (meaning, he called whenever he was coming to town and needed a little advance press) turned into a personal one (meaning, I now call him when I need a favor). I've smoked pot with Kinky and Wavy Gravy in a Dallas hotel room, gone to dinners with him and his parade of beautiful young girlfriends, asked for and received and ignored advice about career decisions, and laughed at jokes staler than the smell of one of his ever-present cigars. ("The Germans are my second-favorite people," he's fond of saying, "My first are everybody else, hee hee hee hee.") I am convinced that my wife believes--half the time, at least--she married the wrong Texas Jewboy. When she invited The Kinkstah to our wedding in 1997, I think she was hoping he'd show up as the groom.
Last time I saw the man was in June: I'd asked him to speak at the annual Association of Alternative Newspapers conference in Phoenix, to talk about "the art of writing," or some such bullshit. Instead, he made a few decidedly un-PC jokes (available on his new CD Classic Snatches from Europe, a comedy-and-music routine performed with old pal Little Jewford), read from his book Roadkill ("In the early '50s, when I was a child, I spat as a child, I shat as a child, and I wore a funny little pointed hat as a child," he began, adding, "Now that's great writing"), and stuck around an extra hour so he could sign books for the normally bored Birkenstocks in the hotel dining hall who still have posters of George McGovern hanging above their beds. They didn't want to laugh, but they did; they didn't want to beg for autographs, but they did. They didn't want to love Kinky, but they did.
