Muddy Waters — Sons And Fathers

by Bart Bull
published in Sounds,August, 1977(excerpt)

There isn’t anybody in the room that he doesn’t outweigh by 40 years. What album? somebody wants to know. Muddy rears back and shouts it —"Hard Again!” — his voice cuts through the cigarette smoke like an electric fan. One of the more truly drunken musicians wants to know if the title means what it says. Muddy rolls off another big laugh, a boomer. “Hell, I look like it, don’t I? Sometime it do and sometime it don’t!”

Another one of the acolytes crouching at his feet asks “You’re a grandfather now, right?”

“I’m a great-grandfather now. I got two great-grandchi’ren. I got one of my big grandsons here with me -- where is he? Six foot somethin’ . . . I got four grandchi’ren and two great grandchi’ren . . . and a young wife! Woooooooo-oooooooo! Gahdamn right! I got a young woman! “

Muddy’s rollin’ now. He’s got the whole room entranced. “See, my wife passed in ‘73 and I got a young woman! Gotta keep playin’, boy! ‘She got ways like a baby child! Sleep with her hand open, not her fist doubled up!' Yessir! Ahh, boy . . . so young she still have milk on her breath! At’s a young baby! And I like her, too! I run home every time I get a chance, I’m on my way. Three days there, and that seem like a month! Ready to play again!”

Muddy’s son, who serves as his father’s road manager, has been moving in and out of the room through all this. A slender, dapper little man, he stops to watch the last few moments of his father’s impromptu performance, then turns away. In the grand tradition of sons and fathers everywhere he’s a little embarassed by the old man and his hi-jinks.

Aphorism 94; One of a series; collect the whole set!

I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. Or maybe not to the death, but at least until I start to feel uncomfortable. Which you could fix, really, by not saying stuff that forces me into this situation.

Fund Fight at the OK Corral

by Bart Bull; Washington Post, August 31, 1987

(There's a bit of a back-story that goes along with this one, from my brief but curious Post go-round. . . but hell, there's always a bit of a back-story with any decent piece of reporting.  Still, maybe I'll tell it sometime.)

TOMBSTONE, ARIZONA -- The marshal of Tombstone reaches down to his gun belt, runs his hand over the black leather loops that hold the cartridges in an orderly row. His dry fingers push bullets up against the loop, six of them, one after another. One after another, he pushes six bullets down.

The squad cars are parked with their bumpers backed up to the gate of the OK Corral, ready to roll. The southern Arizona sun is rising but the morning is still cool and quiet -- maybe too quiet. The fellow with his boot up on the bench outside the marshal's office asks, "So this is it?  Today's the day?"

Doc Holloway, marshal of Tombstone, the Town Too Tough to Die, just laughs from behind his sunglasses. "Today's the day." He pushes six bullets up, he pushes six bullets down. "Today's the day I head on down the road."The car he's leaning on has the marshal's star on the door, a five-pointed silver star just like the one on his shirt. The Tombstone marshal badges they sell in the souvenir stores that line Allen Street have six points and cost $2.25 apiece. And will Gerald (Doc) Holloway take that star of his off his chest today, the last Friday in August, his last day on the job, and throw it across his desk just like the marshals of the movies?

"I've spent 28 years in law enforcement," he says. "I'm going to leave this job like a professional, as a professional.  I'm just going to fade away."  He pushes his dark glasses back against his brown temples, going gray at the sideburns, and he smiles. "There was no controversy."

There was a controversy, and the newspapers covered it in full. Not the Tombstone Epitaph, however, which is a monthly that goes out to Old West history buffs -- the shootout at the OK Corral is still breaking news at the Epitaph, and has been since it hit the headlines on Oct. 27, 1881, the day after the bullets flew and the blood was spilled.  The controversy this time was only slightly clearer than the much disputed details of the set-to between the Earps and the Clantons.  Holloway asked the City Council for more deputies to support the three officers he had, and his request was ignored.  The marshal and the council had something of a verbal shootout in his office behind the Corral, and after nine months as marshal, Doc Holloway decided to set off toward the sunset.

"I hope you got some money out of 'em," his friend says over his shoulder, heading off to a car parked near the Corral's adobe wall.

"Hell, the City of Tombstone has lots of money," Holloway tells him. "They just spend it all on wooden sidewalks."

Mayor Alex Gandillos sees it a mite different. "I can understand Doc's feelings," he says, leaning on the counter of his print shop. "I think when you come to a town like this one, it's easy to think you're going to be semi-retired. But a small town like this has a lot of activities going on."

Vigilante Days have been over since the second weekend in August, but Wild West Days are scheduled for Labor Day weekend, and Tombstone will be without an official marshal to keep the peace. The job should be filled by Helldorado Days in mid-October, but you never know. The sign posted on the community bulletin states a particularly slim set of particulars. It reads: "Help Wanted -- Marshal" and lists a pay rate of $11.58 an hour.

Doc Holloway reckons his most notable accomplishment to be the elimination of abuse of Tombstone's criminal-information computer, but a man has to do a lot more than administrate to earn his eleven-and-a-half an hour. There was a manslaughter case not long ago -- four fellows were drunk and waving a gun and one ended up shot in the face. Those young shavehead soldiers from over to Fort Huachuca can raise a little more ruckus than the other tourists might care for, and the kids from the high school have been known to squeal out of the parking lot in four-by-four trucks going far too fast for a town full of sightseeing pedestrians.  And right now, that damn hand-painted motor home with the wagon wheels over the wheel wells that belongs to Roy McNeely ("Roy Mac -- the former marshal of Tombstone, now booking TV-Movies-Clubs-Commercials") is parked partway in a yellow zone right out on Allen Street.

But it's not Doc Holloway's job to worry about that, not after today. The mayor and the city clerk and the chairman of tourism had a little ceremony at City Hall about 10 o'clock or so, gave Doc the key to the city and a photo of himself in uniform with all their autographs on it. They're looking over applications now to fill his boots but they don't figure they'll make their decision for another week or so.  "A lot of these applications we get are from fellas who just want to say they applied for the job of marshal of Tombstone, you know," the mayor says. "And then they probably go around saying they turned the job down."

Doc Holloway has turned it down in any case, and now he's sitting on the rail fence next to the Blown Glass Shop, the heels of his cowboy boots kicked back against the wooden sidewalk.  It's high noon, nearly halfway through his last day as marshal of Tombstone, and the streets are filling with tourists.  From where he sits, he can see the sign painted on the second-story window over the Crystal Palace bar that says, "Virgil W. Earp, City Marshal." Mayor Gandillos comes tooling by in his 1949 Ford pickup, and the question arises: Is Doc Holloway going to hold onto that badge of his, keep it as a souvenir?

"They said I can keep it," he says.  Then he gets up and walks past the Blown Glass Shop's window display of six-pointed stars, $2.25 each.

Aphorism No. 93; (One of an Series — Collecty the Whole Set!)

 You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him think.

Guns N' Roses — Maybe The Only Great Band Of The '80s (from SPIN; December, 1988)

(One of the great advantages of living in LA in the 1980s, especially if you were West Coast Editor of SPIN or Vogue or Details — or hell, even if you weren't — was the whole hilarious buzzing hive of hair-bands swarming the Sunset Strip at night.  Not that almost any of the bands were any good, by my lights (always, always, always with the exception of Guns N' Roses, who were magnificent in decay long before they had been around long enough to decay, or won any actual success to destroy).  No, what mattered was the scene! The glorious unorganized scene blocking traffic on Sunset, the litter and the glitter and the purple spandex, the ripped jeans and the ripped fishnets under the skimpiest of skirts, the high-flying gravity-defying hair and underneath it all, paving the way by paying-to-play, a cluttered shag-carpet of flyers, of pastel gig posters. Literally — the sidewalk was solid flyers on any decent night, spilling and splattering across the westbound lanes of Sunset, which was pretty much at a complete halt anyway. The two ideal accessories any dude in a band aspired to posesss were a stripper girlfriend and a buddy who worked at Kinko's.)

In just the last few months, Axl has died of AIDS, OD'd on junk, and committed plain old simple suicide.  The kids who keep track of each fresh version of his demise are desperate, determined to believe in his death.  No matter how badly last week's rumor failed, they know this week's death-and-destruction story must be true.  If not, next week's is a sure thing.

A generation of kids raised to shut up and succeed hear Guns N' Roses as a whole new way to just say no.  They're right.  Guns N' Roses are the great band of the '80s, maybe the only great band of the '80s.  It looks to be okay with them if rock'n'roll is cemetary-bound, just as long as they can crash the after-party.

Placing style far in front of substance — exactly where it belongs — Guns N'R Roses flaunt a flash that jets them bast their peers. They look cooler onstage than everybody else, Axl dances way better than all the rest of the hair-rockers, Slash has that stupid stoned sheepdog thing of his cranked up past cartoonishness the original album cover offends everybody who can work up an excuse to be pissed off over it, their tattoos are a step above everybody else's, they spill liquor and cigarette ashes, they reek of sex and drugs and unspeakable acts.  They're personal friends of Traci Lords.

It would be infinitely stupid if it didn't work.  By rights, nothing should be as dopey as one more set of hairspray rockers, gang-banging all the usual cliches.  It may even be infinitely stupid, but their huge audience can feel just how powerfully these guys believe the cliches, how intent they are to live their lives by them, how ravenous their appetite for destruction really is.  The other bands of their ilk never seem to transcend their creepy need to please, never manage to seem much m ore than leather-clad yup-rockers, obsessed with record deals and management and Making It.  Guns N' Roses seem obsessed with Fucking It, whatever it may be.

Style counts big, make no mistake.  But let's say what hasn't been said: These guys are greater than style alone would allow, because the music is so wicked, so strong, so raw, so right.  Axl is a wiser singer than all the rest of his generation; the band swallows their influences whole.  Style counts big; something substantial lurks beneath.  "Welcome to the Jungle" is a grim definiton of the city thata defies descripton, as dead-on as the Doors' "LA Woman."  Raymond Chandler would have recognized its horror but there are no private dicks in this Hollywood.  "Sweet Child O' Mine," on the other hand, is the high-sucrose doggerel that teenage girls hope the cute boy from biology will be inspired to scrawl in their yearbook on the last day of school just before vanishing into dreamy summer — and as such, as doggerel and pap and powerful true sentiment, it's brilliant, moving, an unimpeachable hit, the song that will define the summer of '88 in ten million hearts.

If it's amazing that the great band of the '80s should arrive ion the guise of that great empty vessel of the '80s, the long-haired hard-rocker, it's only all the more surprising all the more fitting.  It's a little bit as though the Sex Pistols waited until everybody had short spikey hair and played fast and sloppy and wore ripped clothes with slogans and then, once things were locked in place and predeictable, emerged full-blown, fully-bloomed, terrible in their beauty and elegant in the absence of limits.  Every time Guns N' Roses llaunches into another commercial possiblility and then Axl shouts its chances right off the radio with one more "fuck off," with one more boast about drinking and driving, with all the band's will to be better than everybody else dat being bad, Guns N' Roses looks like all that's left of rock'n'roll.  And that's a lot.

Aphorism N0 91 — One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

Reporting costs; opinions are free.

Google Throws A Minstrel Show

In honor of B.B. King's 94th birthday, Google has re-animated the King of the Blues as the witless and unwitting star of a jaunty, gaudy minstrel show.  Jaunty and gaudy were and are essential parts of minstrelsy, of course, and so is authenticity.  And this is authentically and awe-inspiringly awful.

Go have a look, while it lasts.  The soundtrack is King's undying cover of "The Thrill Is Gone," the gorgeous one with perfect orchestral strings, the one that served to cross him over at long last to a white audience, an audience that mostly understood him as a guitar hero, rather than as among the very finest of singers of his time.  But as that song is minced to meet Google's needs, the animated King of the Blues is force-fit into those needs too, while fitting other needs that are far older and perhaps even stronger than the marketing urges of a 21st Century corporate leviathan.

The King sings, if only in the background, but he is absurdly voiceless in Google's cartoon, and his hands wave at the guitar just the way they wave in the air,  It is the timeless gesture of the blackface minstrel, spanking a banjo, slapping a tambourine, waving jaunty hands high over a face frozen in a grin.  Go watch it.  Go see.

This gaudy, jaunty, colorful cartoon!  So lively! So crude! So relentlessly happy! Rendered in the fauxlk-art primitivism that has become synonymous with patronization of black Americans at least since the arrival of the House of Blues chain of restaurants with nightclubs attached, this perky homage coincides sometimes with details of B.B. King's actual biography, while the blues king resembles B.B. King not the least.  But this thing's far greater concern, perhaps not realized by its creators, is the ferocious need of blackface minstrelsy to show itself, to show off, to show its face, and to own those who won't own up.

Thus, all in delightful faux-primitive cartoon colors, we are offered:  Plantation Shack; Bib Overalls; Country Church; Highway 49 Road Sign; grinning Street Singer (money flies to his feet!);Welcome To Memphis; WDIA & Beale Street; Bus bearing King's name; Map of the Southeast; blue-tinted Black Man with Guitar (minstrel hands waving in front of him); Lucille; Recording Studio; Vinyl Records swirl; grinning Fans, black and white, clutching records; Blues King's hand waves high in the air as he boards a Plane for Africa, grinning; his colorful Tuxedo changes colorfully as he plays Paris! Rome! Tokyo!; Blues King's Suit acquires minstrelsy's stripes as he opens Blues Club; B.B. King Boulevard; Now Leaving Memphis; Highway 61; Welcome To Indianola, Mississippi; B.B.King Museum & Delta Interpretive Center; white-haired, white-lipped King of Blues grins, waves his cartoon hands across his cartoon Guitar.

Go have a look at it, while it lasts.  It may well last, in its way, forever.  And then, perhaps, go have a listen — but elsewhere, please — to the version of "The Thrill Is Gone" that this minstrel show tries to harness, tries to share-crop, tries to borrow and return as damaged goods.  Go listen, or don't.  It doesn't matter whether you do or don't.  It will last forever too.
;

Merle Haggard, 1988, from SPIN

     Is Merle Haggard what country music is about in 1988?   Maybe not.  Randy Travis is having more hits, Dwight Yoakam is more visible, Hank Williams, Jr., Is louder — much louder — while k.d. lang is odder.
     But Randy Travis' third record wasn't nearly as strong as his first two, and while his singing style becomes more his own all the time, it still belongs to Merle.  And after suiting himself inside the Buck Owens sound, Dwight Yoakam did the honorable thing and dragged Buck out of retirement, introducing him to a younger audience that knew him only as that grinning specimen who used to host "Hee Haw," not as the creator of the hottest string of hit singles in country music of the '60s.  Hank Williams, Jr., is the most popular performer in country today, and in '88 he retired the trophy for Dumb.  If the South woulda only won the war — which war?  The war! — the lower half of the U.S. would be free to be as racist and jingoistic and dopey as Junior himself.  In one of the few moments of modesty in all of Junior's career, he declared himself president of his Arkansas of the minds rather than Most Confederate Emperor or Supreme Exhausted Ayatollah.  It was a hit.
     At least it wasn't bland.  Blandness, the common denominator of country musc for years, seems to have slipped off the charts and into history. (Sappiness and corniness, thank God, will be with us always.)  The newer the stars are, the more traditional they seem, leaving those who'd been trying to cross over by staying in the middle of the road looking ludicrous.
     And as Ricky Van Shelton and k.d. lang and the Judds and K.T. Oslin redefine country by renewing its long-hidden strengths, Merle Haggard goes, as ever, his own way.  His music has always been based on tradition, on all the jazz, blues and Western swing roots buried beneath country's surfaces, and he's only changed it to suit his own whims, not those of the marketplace.  Chill Factor, his current record, is a melancholy, craggy thing, a rare tone to hear in any kind of popular music, and it crackles like campfire embrers alongside an icy mountain.  Merle Haggard is country music in 1988, as tradition is rekindled in 100 fresh ways, and in the end, Merle Haggard is nothing but himself.

(This was one of those year-end wrap-up packages, with the staff of SPIN gathering their wits to declare what had defined 1988 — even though it was probably only mid-September.  I wrote one of the other prominent essays, on the sky-rocketing Guns 'N' Roses.  Later, standing around the Park Plaza Hotel at MacArthur Park, Axl told me "That was the craziest thing I ever read about us — I could never have written that."  Which I took as a compliment, I guess.)

Aphorism No. 82: One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!

The default of reporting is doubt.
Its corollary is wonder.

Aphorism No. 83; One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set

All reporting is "investigative reporting," or else it's publicity.

How Burt Reynolds Personally Invented Film Noir (Version Bronzage du Soleil) Late One Friday Evening On His Front Porch In The Everglades

Stick, starring Burt Reynolds, directed by Burt Reynolds
by Bart Bull
published in the Arizona Republic
(For almost exactly one year, I reviewed movies for the daily newspaper in my hometown.  It was weird, and weirdly fun, and weird too.  Seeing pretty much every movie that came out over the course of a year gave me the sense that the movie business was coming unstuck at the seams.  Which, I'd now say, it was.  Anyway, I did get to see Burt Reynolds' Stick, and for some reason, I was getting away with murder as far as movie-reviewing goes, so... 

 I'd hate to have anyone go see Stick on my say-so, but if you're even half-ass faintly interested in Burt Reynolds as a movie-star/phenomenon/entity/whatchyacallit, you can't hardly afford to miss it.

Not that it's any good, because Stick is one of the most inept, uncoordinated, disjointed, confused, and super-completely-confusing movies you'll ever pay to see. There are times when you're not going to believe that anybody could ever have released so limp a blimp, but there it is, stinking loudly from right off the screen.

Burt Reynolds is the director as well as his own movie's star — oh, and Burt Reynolds is indubitably the whole thing's auteur – lock, stock, and stolen hub-caps.  Everything about Stick is nothing, if not an dim reflection of his sensibilities; set in Miami [in the high-water moment of the massive cultural ascendency of Miami Vice] this movie keeps edging uneasily toward the Everglades, where a man's man can let his chest hair breathe, where his toupee may freely flap in the swampy breeze of his airboat's prop-wash. What works about Stick is not the plot or the characterization or the acting — it's the curious inadvertent obsessiveness that keeps oozing through all the gaps, like gooey gumbo mud between your toes.

Anyone who has ever spent time around Miami and its horny little sister Miami Beach knows that they can reek of evil.  They reek of evil, in the finest and most florid moments, like an orchid pinned on a debutante who lost her virginity to a brother-in-law who's currently looking after her family's fortune. As much and even more than Los Angeles, Miami is the perfect setting for a detective thriller and if Stick is too loose-ended to be very thrilling, it manages all the same to be extraordinarily evil. Shoddy and slapdash, as finely tuned as your boss's home movies from his vacation in Yosemite, Stick haphazardly manages to be a filmic landscape of the second humid circle of art deco hell.

I'd talk plot but I got lost only moments after the credits rolled and I'd defy you to do much better. This one's even more boggled a mystery than City Heat [Ex post facto historical note: City Heat was an equally or perhaps even more disastrous film, financially, aesthetically, and spiritually, from the previous Christmas, almost immediately buried deep in an unmarked grave, co-starring Burt and Clint Eastwood, who so clearly had such little time for one another that they barely appeared in any scenes together, which necessarily meant adding secondary characters attached to and orbiting each Star in order that they could each explain out loud what was going on in the plot since the Star under loud expository semi-cinematic discussion had last been seen in the picture long minutes or so before, which seemed, under the circumstances, especially with the added expositional dialog, like hours ago, or from a different decade's movie}; Osterizer ought to get a scriptwriting credit.  Plot doesn't matter here and neither does character because Reynolds is as thoroughly lost in his image as any screen actor has ever been. He has no idea at this point whether he's Gator McCluskey, or W.W. of the Dixie Dance Kings or the man who diddled Cat Dancing or Dan August or Stroker Ace or Smokey or the Bandit. He wears, at one point, the same zipped down wetsuit he wore in Deliverance; he wears, at nearly every other point, the same silly smirk he's worn every time he's done a movie with his acting skills set on cruise-control.

As for anybody else, they're uniformly atrocious. Charles Durning is Shelley Winters; Candice Bergen plays the smirking blonde debutant who looks like Candice Bergen; the greasers are greaseballs; the greaseballs are greasers.  It's greasy.  I'm near-positive that no more racist movie has come out of Hollywood in years, and I don't think it's any coincidence that it contains one of the greatest funniest and most cutting characterizations of a black survivor (excepting only Pryor and Murphy) that the screeen has seen since the '60s.

Early on, this thing feels like Burt sat out on the porch one Friday evening in Florida, getting drunk and throwing beer cans at flamingos while he watched Miami Vice, and and then and there decided to direct and produce his own segment of the show. While he was at it, he decided to guest star too, and then he forgot to include any of the show's actual stars in at all. By Saturday afternoon, he'd shot the basic footage; Sunday, he slept off his hangover. On Monday morning LA time, long after noon in the Everglades, he began making phone calls.

When the show's producers rejected his concept on the following Friday, he got drunk all over again and decided to turn the project into a full-length feature blockbuster, the kind of thing that would revitalize his whole career. Jerry Reed was busy in Nashville; Loni Anderson wouldn't return his calls; Tammy Wynette told him to get lost; Dinah Shore was golfing; Sally Field had an Oscar and didn't need him any more; Dom DeLuise was too busy taping GladBag commercials. Then came the final indignity: Pontiac refused to provide another Trans Am.

Nothing could stop him, no obstacle was too high. This movie was gong to get made. When he saw Glenn Frey's video for "Smuggler's Blues," he tried to get Frey involved. When Frey's manager Irving Azoff wouldn't return his calls, Burt hired a guy who looked a lot like Glenn Frey after about ten tequilas too many and stuck him in the movie. That would teach 'em.

He would make this movie, he would direct it himself, he would be the biggest movie star in America again, and the biggest director and the biggest dinner-theater owner in Florida too.

He thought about composing the score himself but decided the critics would say he was over-reaching. He'd personally witnessed the fall of Jackie Gleason, who'd once based himself in Florida too. It was too late to consider another man's mistakes.

Carol Burnett's personal assistant left a message on the answering machine that said she'd only do it if the location was in Hawaii. He considered it for a moment but he already had too much Miami footage from that first long weekend. If he had it all to do over, he'd have set it in the Okefenokee Swamp, and Stick would have been a runnin' gunnin' moonshinin' redneck devil-may-care detective. It was too late for that now. It was too late for a lot of things.

He established a film endowment at Tampa Community College; the first term's class project would be a documentary entitled The Making of Stick, Starring Mr. Burt Reynolds. Midway through the project, the 20-year-old coed producing the film quit to become a stand-up comic in Hollywood — the Hollywood in California, not the one in Florida. The documentary would never be completed.

As the studio head examined the rushes and rough cuts from Stick, they began to get nervous. "Burt looks like refried death," one let slip to Marilyn Beck. They threatened to shut the production down unless Burt submitted to a full physical examination. The results have never been made public but Stick, intended to be released last fall, was reslotted into the spring schedule to compete head-to-head, mano a mano with Fraternity Vacation and Cave Girl and Gotcha and Gymkata. There was a slim hope that Burt might still draw the crowds.

And when it was done, when it was all over, when it was released at last and attacked by the critics and ignored by audiences from coast to coast, he knew that he had won. He knew that he'd made a movie that was truly and completely decadent, that smelled as much of rot and corruption and depravity as Florida itself, that was as loose-knit as a lunatic's hit-list, that was as lost and out of control as Hollywood.

He was Burt Reynolds, after all, last of the real movie stars, and this movie was his own.

The Ladder of Success; a letter from Ted Hawkins

Booking No 6872-844
Terminal Annex
Los Angeles CA 90054

Dear Bart:

This will acknowledge receipt of the literature you sent me dated February 28, 1983. Thank you for the Mention you gave me in your year-end review listing. If that doesn't Make Me look good, nothing else Will. Especially the part where you put Me Up With Mr. Bruce Springsteen; that caused the people here to look at Me With their Mouth hung open, in surprise. I haven't had the pleasure of hearing Mr Springsteen sing before, however I've been told Many times that he is a great big super star. And is one of the best singers in the World. Are you sure you didn't Mean to Tie Me With some one else? Am I really that good? I remain humble.

I've got a private lawyer thanks to My Wife's begging, pleading and crying, she talked a private lawyer into excepting a retainer fee for $75.oo. The fee in full is $500.oo. He will allow us to pay him on time. I am very optimistic about the Outcome of the Whole thing now. All I need is an agent to assist Me in Causing the Album to become a periodical publication. The public is not buying the record fast because they haven't heard it. No Matter how good a record sound, if there's No one to push and permote it, It's going nowhere. Any agent knows that in Order to sell the Artist's records, One first has to sell the Artists. Thats the agents job. And I know Not the Whereabouts of such a person. I would perfer a femail for an agent rather than a Mail. I can relate to a Woman better then I can a Man, in Any Circumstances. I am More incline to take their advice quicker. During your daily Activities, if you stumble across one please inform Me.

Thank you for investigating regards to the lone that I asked from Rounder. But I don't need them now. I'll take care of it. I can't wait to read about Myself in Mother Jones. Thanks for sending the press clips. It Mean So Much to Me, to know that people are reading about Me in some parts of the World.

Very Truly Yours,
"Ted Hawkins"
Theodore Hawkins, Jr.

Aphorism No. 90; One of a Series; Collect The Whole Set!

The brain is not located on the tip of the tongue.

The Wise King (from "The Devil's Waiting Room — Fairy Tales For The Over-Grown" )

Once there was a wise king.

There may well have been a few others over the years, but really, not so very many. Let's face it — it's a tough gig.

This particular king, by the way, was not King Solomon, known worldwide for his wisdom, if mainly thanks to that notorious baby-splitting story.

Nor was he the famous Caliph Haroun Al Rashid (all his pals called him Al), who went in disguise among his subjects so as to better understand them, long before this was known as slumming.  (The term "dive bar," which would replace it, hadn't occurred yet, which meant that dive bars were still wonderful. And terrible.)

He wasn't the Twenty-Fifth Maharaja of Mysore, that great patron of art and culture, science and knowledge, who fooled the British into providing electricity for his people by putting 96,000 lightbulbs on his own palace. (It may have been 97,000. I forget.  Either way, it was a lot.)

He was most definitely not the Emperor with the new clothes, or merry old King Cole, or even Nat "King" Cole. And certainly not Elvis.

Instead, he was a just a comparatively unknown King, from a fairly obscure little country, and he didn't really get into the whole showbiz publicity schtick about making sure he was heralded far and wide for his wisdom. That in itself may have been yet another sign of his wisdom.

A big problem with wisdom is that it looks so much different than being smart. Being smart is something you can mark on test papers, although if you're a king, or a king-to-be, or a prince or a jack or something, they usually grade you a lot higher than you probably deserve. And then add a shiny stick-on star.

Meanwhile, this King — King Leonard; Leonard the Wise, though some local wags called him "Lenny The Learned" — leaned way over to the wise side, but inevitably that meant that not everybody in his kingdom was convinced that he was all that smart. There were some, in fact, who were dead certain that he was A Royal Dope. And you can understand how they might. There he was, The King, in charge of everything, supposedly, allegedly, apparently.  And then some controversy would swirl up, with everybody in the entire kingdom fussing and fighting and bickering and biting, and then. . . and then . . . and then would come the word that King Leonard's official response was: "No Comment."

This was one of the perks that come with being King. If he'd been a President, say, or even a President-For-Life, he would necessarily been forced to have sporadic occasional press conferences. And while many a President — and especially those darn Presidents-For-Life — has said "No Comment" at a press conference, or else had their Press Secretary hurl their own body on top of the microphone like it was a hand grenade, it really is a lot better to be a King, because everybody sort of assumes in advance that you're pretty used to having your own way, and not answering any questions you don't feel like answering and so forth. After all, it's not like you grew up with your mom, the Queen Mother, always demanding "So did you take out the garbage yet?"

Ah, but sometimes discretion is the soul of wisdom, or the better part of valor, or so they tell us, anyway. (And think about it — even by telling us, they're automatically breaking the rule of silence and discretion right there. How's that for a confusing conundrum, a perplexing paradox, a hunk of hypocrisy?) And one of the things that was most troubling to the wise mind of King Leonard was this question: Where is a King supposed to find a friend?

Because when you're King, hey, everybody's your friend. And if everybody's your friend . . . well, you can guess how it goes. I mean, it's nice and all — everybody bowing down low the minute you come back from the bathroom . . . but who's gonna tell you you've got a long trailing piece of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe?

Still, since King Leonard was indeed King Leonard the Wise, he made sure that he was surrounded by plenty of smart cookies. He had ministers and prime ministers and plenipotentiaries and counselors and privy counselors and courtiers and even an actual court jester, all of who were there to counsel and advise, to console and articulate, to clarify and observe.   Or just jest.  He even had a guy who was either a bishop or a cardinal — he wasn't sure which, since he didn't know which hat was which color, and also because everybody just called him Your Eminence, and plus, old Cardinal Bishop was so old he mostly just sat around snoring loudly, with that weird hat of his bobbling up and down. But he was handy to have hanging around all the same, because it meant that no one could say that King Leonard was committing any heresies or blasphemies or such, not with old Cardinal Bishop Whats-His-Name always on hand. What was his name, anyway?

Then too, the King always received really great advice from his Queen, Queen Leonora. And she too was quite wise, which was all the more remarkable since she and the King were actually cousins or something, once or twice removed. (Once very late night in bed, after a long dinner party, they figured out she was actually also the King's great-aunt.) Despite the fact that theirs had been an arranged marriage, they were really quite attracted to one another — there was just something tantalizing to both of them when they looked at one another. And because the Queen was always plotting to have her side of the family achieve more power and land and wealth and control and dominion, her counsel was genuinely rather sharp. So the King merely had to take certain things into consideration, and then generally — but not always — do the opposite. Or else take her advice and see what happened next. Within limits, of course.

The fact was, though, that no matter how many people surrounded him, from the time he woke up in the morning until the moment he and the Queen turned off the reading light in bed, King Leonard the Wise was highly, deeply, strongly, acutely aware that he had no friends. When you're the King, it's awfully tough to have any true friends, any real friends, because everybody you meet knows you're the King, and everybody either wants something, or else they just spend all their time staring at you. And if you want to shoot pool or play cards or go out for a few beers at the bowling alley, it becomes this big state occasion. And then  they always let you win. (Though in fact, and even wise King Leonard had to admit this himself, he was a pretty terrific bowler, with a consistently high average and his own personalized ball. It was purple, with kind of a marble-ized surface. And he had matching purple shoes — none of those stinky rental shoes for him, naturally. And naturally, everybody wanted him on their bowling team. But then,  of course, they always expected him to pay for the embroidered team shirts.)

I'm sure you can see how the whole No Friends thing was really quite a problem. Sometimes he felt like the closest thing to a close friend he had in life was his court jester, Frank, who was not really quite short enough to be officially called a dwarf. And Frank was actually the Queen's brother-in-law's older brother, so even there, there were complicated family politics. And, if truth be told, Frank wasn't really all that great a jester — he tended to tell the same off-color jokes a little too often, and he couldn't really juggle or tumble or do the splits. True, every once in a while, he came out with a real zinger, but it was usually at the expense of some prominent member of the court, and then there were all kinds of resentments to patch up over about who had laughed loudest at whom. But at least King Leonard could talk with Frank about sports, because Frank loved to bet and gamble and try to beat the point-spread. Oh, and the glory days of Las Vegas — Frank loved to talk about that stuff. For hours on end, it sometimes seemed like.

Every once in a while, quite late at night, King Leonard would wander down to the kitchen and attempt a friendly chat with the Royal Chef while trying to scrounge up a meatball sandwich. Preferably with pickles. But that was difficult too, because the chef was terribly nervous about loose talk with the King. After all, the King had an Official Food-Taster, whose job it was to see that the Royal Chef didn't poison the King, and the very nature of that whole deal made the chef nervous, as well as vaguely insulted.  Worse, the chef, who happened to be French, felt that the Official Food-Taster was both a philistine and a barbarian, with shockingly undeveloped tastebuds, an absurdly ignorant palate for wine, and a near-absence of aesthetic principle, with a name that sounded suspiciously German.   But to have suggested any of this would, of course, have laid him open to suspicion, so the chef held his tongue. Which is extremely difficult for any sensible chef, and all the more so for a French one, and even more so for a French chef surrounded by those who merely swallow to survive, rather than eat to live more profoundly.   There was so much the chef wished to say, but he held his tongue for fear of losing his head. So when the King would invade the kitchen in hope of rustling up a sandwich composed of loose leftovers — preferrably meatball, and hopefully with pickles, but whatever— what little conversation they achieved turned out to be immensely, intensely unsatisfying to both of them. As a side result, the king never learned the secret of how his chef managed to keep all those four-and-twenty blackbirds alive while they were baked in a pie. And he really did wonder about that one quite a bit sometimes. It would have been nice to know.

So there he was, wise as he could be, but perfectly free of any friends. How wise is a man who can't even succeed in making a single friend? It was the sort of thing that you think about on those nights when you wake up in bed, wishing you had a mere meatball sandwich, or even just half of one,  without pickles even, and then, before you know it, you're even hungrier to have a friend you can call, and they'll let you wake them up in the middle of the night. And to be a notoriously wise king, and not have either one, a late night friend or even just half a plain meatball sandwich with no pickles — well, it can make you feel a little foolish.  

It was on one of these very nights, with the Queen snoring away like a defective two-stroke chainsaw, that he made his decision. First of all, he was going downstairs to make himself his own damn sandwich. Then, tomorrow, the very next day, first thing, he was going to leave the Queen in charge of the kingdom while he went out there on his own, all alone, and made some close personal friends, the kind of friends who would stick by him through thick and thin, whether he bought the bowling team's shirts or not. The kind of friends who you could call late at night to bail you out of jail when you'd made the mistake of driving home after the office Christmas party. The kind of friends who you could barbecue with and when your wife made a big deal about having gone vegetarian, and how meat was murder and all that stuff, well, they'd just hand you another hot dog and make a point of loudly asking you if you wanted more "organic" mustard on it.  And then hand you another beer.

He felt a little bit like the great Haroun Al Rashid going off into his own kingdom in disguise. Although in fact, he wasn't actually in disguise — he'd just left his crown at home, on the arm of the throne, where he pretty much always hung it at the end of the day. But because he had always been so wise, he'd truly minimized the amount of publicity he'd received — although the damn tabloids were just so invasive! — and it was actually possible for King Leonard to go forth among his own people and mingle. Part of that had to do with the fact that even as kings go, he was pretty ordinary looking. And then there was the fact that his kingdom was sort of small, and tiny, minuscule, sort of Lichtenstein-esque or less,  and just like he and Queen Leonora, a lot of people were pretty closely related to one another, so one person looked pretty much like the next.

Leonard had  always felt that if he'd only been blessed with another type of job description that, well, he was... well, not to brag or anything, but he felt like he had a pretty darn dynamic personality. He started off having breakfast in a sort of funky little greasy-spoon cafe near the market-bazaar-zouk called Hamburger Dan's. And despite the size of the sandwich he'd nearly finished in the middle of the night, he was famished. He ordered doughnuts and coffee and orange juice, two eggs over easy with home-fried potatoes and bacon and wheat toast with extra butter — hey, why worry about cholesterol when the Queen was nowhere to be seen? — and after his second refill of coffee, he was feeling as wise and full and pleased with himself as he had ever been. It was then that he realized he'd forgotten his wallet.

It was only in process that he eventually realized that he'd never actually owned a wallet. He was the King, after all — King Leonard the Wise — and never once before in life had he ever needed a wallet. Or cash or credit cards or bank cards or traveler's checks or even a coin purse full of gold coins — though in fact there had been that one time when he had rewarded that bold dragon-slayer dude with a purse of gold coins, but it had been someone else, no doubt the Royal Treasurer, who'd put that whole presentation together, and had ordered the trophy.

Well, it was embarrassing, of course. But unless he wanted to blow his cover, and announce that he was King Leonard the Temporarily Broke, he had to just try and talk his way out of it. He made a big show of standing up and hunting around in his pockets for his wallet, but nobody, not the waitress or the cook, seemed to really care. When he tried to make his excuses, and then offer to wash enough dishes to pay for his meal, the waitress just smirked, and the cook said, "Aw, just go on and get the hell out of here — we don't need any more deadbeat dishwashers."

The waitress flipped him a quarter and said, "Play A-11 on the jukebox." It turned out to be "Beat It," by Michael Jackson, so he took the message and vamoosed. He kept the quarter.

Well, no matter what, at least he'd knocked back a big tremendous breakfast — which, as we all know, is the most important meal of the day.   Ordinarily, back at home in the palace with Queen Leonora, he had to limit himself to oatmeal and skim milk and maybe some stewed prunes, so he was already . . .  well, feeling his oats. First of all, he sauntered off into the bazaar to see what the regular folks, his own subjects, the common people, as it were, were up to, and as he did, right away, he saw there was a terrific argument taking place. Naturally, he joined the crowd gathering round the uproar. As you might suspect, the dispute seemed to involve a carpet, or maybe somebody who was supposed to be buying a carpet, or else clean a carpet, or something like that. Definitely a carpet was involved, or at least a rug. King Leonard the Disguised felt much less wise than usual, less able to sort things out with a simple stroke of his sword-like logic. First of all, the fight seemed to be taking place between two women, both of them rather comely and shapely and such and the crowd that had gathered all around them was now chanting, almost ritualistically, "Cat fight! Cat fight! Cat fight!" And King Leonard the Wise wasn't even sure which carpet the women were fighting over, though he had to admit that it made for very thrill-packed action.

King Leonard noticed Frank the jester in the crowd, but Frank hadn't noticed him, because he was trying to book some betting action on the little redhead at 2-to-1 before the cops came and broke it all up.  Even after the cops came and broke it all up, King Leonard noticed that Frank hadn't noticed him whatsoever, not at all. Maybe it was because of the King's  lack of crown.  When he was back in bed with Queen Leonora, that night, he wanted to mention it — and he especially wanted to tell her about the two good-looking gals wrestling and grabbing at each other's hair,  just in case it proved stimulating — but he decided it was better to keep things undercover, incognito.  Because he was kind of in the mood to get out and do it again, as soon as possible.

The next chance he got was nearly a week later, on the weekend, when things were a little slow around the palace.   He told Leonora, who had her reading glasses on, the ones that always made her drowsy, that he needed to run out for a pack of cigarettes.   She just sort of grunted at him and turned the page of the book she was reading, which was another in a series that usually featured a swashbuckling guy on the cover whose shirt was always bulging open as he embraced a buxom wench with hair even bigger than his.   Leonard was pretty sure he had the night off.

He'd never been out alone at night before, and this time he'd made sure in advance he had a wallet.  And this time he'd made sure the wallet had some money in it, although he'd had to make up a pretty shaggy story before the Royal Exchequer's assistant, a girl with thick glasses,  let him have some petty cash, and even then, she'd  made him  sign a receipt.   And looked at him funny.  (Though that might have been the glasses.)

No matter.  He was out of the palace, all alone and on his own, and the night was his.  Songs with lyrics about night began to play in his brain.  Even if they made no sense, they all had the word "night" in them somewhere, somewhere in between "Tonight's The Night" and "Because The Night" and "Boogie Nights" and  "Boogie Wonderland."  That last one was not entirely lyrically driven by the word "night," but it had just sort of segued from one to the other, the way songs  do in your brain.  And besides, he wasn't totally listening.  He had other things on his mind.

For instance, he wanted to get to know what his subjects did at night.  Or at least those subjects who hung out in the places that were still open at this time of night on the weekend, which were mostly bars and pool-halls and discos and nightclubs and outdoor taco-and-burrito stands and  fish-and-chips vans, and a few other places that were a good deal less reputable.  To be perfectly honest, after he'd had a few tacos and a beer or two to wash them down, it was those other places that he was thinking about investigating, the less reputable ones.  After all, once you thought about it,  it was awfully important that a truly wise king got wise to what was going on in his kingdom late at night on the weekends.  And, as we agreed at the very start, Leonard was a truly wise king.  He was feeling that way right now, in fact, there on Saturday night, all full of tacos and beer.  And wisdom.

Well, you can imagine.  It wasn't long before King Leonard the Wise had his wallet lifted.   

One minute he was ordering another round of drinks with exotic names and colorful paper umbrellas for these genuinely lovely and charming young ladies he'd encountered — all subjects of his, in fact, though he was very careful not to let them know who he really was, telling them instead that he was a simple television producer from Hollywood who happened to be in the neighborhood looking for fresh talent for a very important secret project — and the next moment, large men in tight black t-shirts were holding him upside down.   His wallet was gone, all the money that the Exchequer's assistant with the thick glasses had made him sign for was gone, all the girls with the colorful paper umbrella drinks were gone, and these large men — subjects of his, no doubt — were not doing a very good job of listening to him upside-down.   

King Leonard suddenly wished he was back home, at the palace, in bed, listening to Queen Leonora snore like a chainsaw.  Worse, even while they were holding him upside down by his ankles, he realized, among other realizations, that he was hungry again.  The tacos hadn't been anywhere near enough.  He really wished he had a meatball sandwich, at home, in bed.  At the moment, the pickles were almost beside the point.

It was then that King Leonard the Wise was miraculously transformed into King Leonard the Lucky.   Out of nowhere, out of the blue, out of the black of night, out of a door that actually led back to the kitchen, a door where he'd been having a brief smoke before going back in and supervising an almost entirely incompetent staff who were frying up all kinds of nasty little late-night dance-club snacks that would be served for an incredible mark-up, King Leonard's own Royal Chef raced up and began berating the black-shirted bouncers.  "How do think you do this with this King?"  the chef said.  "Do you hold a king downside up?  By his ankle?  By both of  his ankle?  Is this how you salute your king in this silly little stupid country?  In this silly little stupid disco?  With your bad lighting and absurd little stupid snack menu?   Pfffaahhh....."  And this last part, this last expression, was by far his most vehement statement.  And by far the most effective. Upon hearing it, the black-shirted bouncers automatically, instantaneously, simultaneously dropped King Leonard the Wise directly on his head.  Which, while it made a sort of harmonic bonging noise, definitely was far nicer than what black-shirted disco-bouncers usually do once they're holding you upside down. 

Well, it all worked out better than it might have, really.  King Leonard was so grateful to his Royal Chef that he didn't fire him for moonlighting at a disreputable clip-joint disco on the weekends.  And that really helped create a spirit of trust, and respect, and you might even say friendship between the two of them.   King Leonard, ever so much wiser than he'd been before he went to the disco late on that fateful Saturday night, learned that he was probably best off staying safely inside the walls of the palace whenever possible, and not mingling, messing around, or mixing himself into the curious affairs of his subjects, who seemed to have ways of settling their own affairs that were more direct than his own, if perhaps not always as wise.   And he and the Royal Chef developed an actual friendship of sorts, one that was based on mutual respect for their own strengths, and their own weaknesses.  Oh, it's true that once King Leonard did ask the chef, after they'd been hanging out in the kitchen one night a little too late, to share the secret to the whole four-and-twenty blackbirds staying alive in the pie recipe,  but the chef was simply too wise to tell.  Even to the King.  Even to a good friend,  Even to a good friend who happened to be his boss.  I'd tell you the secret, but I know how you are.  You'd tell.

by Bart Bull
for Tom Wolfe;  Thanks, dude. 

Aphorism No. 84; One of Series; Collect the Whole Set!

A guideline for future CIA directors:

Torture is immoral when you do it to me.

When I do it to you, it's just fine.