One way or another for almost fifty-five years, wherever I traveled in the world, Lottie and I managed to stay in touch. I now calculate that when Lottie sent me birthday cards in Borneo when I was in the Peace Corps, she was in her early sixties, an age that I myself am now rapidly, if disbelievingly, approaching. She also remained in touch with my brother, Roger, who lives in Maryland, and my sister, Marcie, who lives in Vietnam. To live a hundred years on this troubled planet is a rare feat, but to maintain contact with your "children" for all that length of time, and for them to have become your dear friends in later years, is rarer still.
For Lottie did not survive one century in merely the clinical sense; she was as sharp as a tack until the end of her days. At the ripe young age of ninety-nine, she could sit at the kitchen table and discuss politics or religion—or stuffed animals. Lottie left behind an entire menagerie of teddy bears and other stuffed animals, each of them with a name and personality all its own. She also left behind two live animals, dogs named Minnie and Little Dog, who had followed her and protected her everywhere she went. Minnie is a little dog named for my mother, and Little Dog, as might be expected, is a big dog.
Lottie is survived by her daughter, Ada Beverly (the two of them have referred to each other as "Mama" for at least the past thirty years), and one grandson, Jeffery. She's also survived by Roger, Marcie, and me, who live scattered about a modern-day world, a world that has gained so much in technology yet seems to have lost those sacred recipes for popcorn balls and chocolate-chip cookies. "She was a seasoned saint," a young preacher who had never met her said at her funeral. But was it too late, I wondered, to bless the hands that prepared the food? And there were so many other talents in Lottie's gentle hands, not the least of which was the skill to be a true mender of the human spirit.
I don't know what else you can say about someone who has been in your life forever, someone who was always there for you, even when "there" was far away. Lottie was my mother's friend, she was my friend, and now she has a friend in Jesus. She always had a friend in Jesus, come to think of it. The foundation of her faith was as strong as the foundation for the railroad tracks she helped lay as a young girl in Liberty Lottie, you've outlived your very bones, darling. Yours is not the narrow immortality craved by the authors, actors, and artists of this world. Yours is the immortality of a precious passenger on the train to glory, which has taken you from the cross ties on the railroad to the stars in the sky.
By day and by night, each in their turn, the sun and the moon gaze through the window, now and again reflecting upon the gold and silver pathways of childhood. The pathways are still there, but we cannot see them with our eyes, nor shall we ever again tread lightly upon them with our feet. Yet as children, we never suspect we might someday lose our way. We think we have all the time in the world.
I am still here, Lottie. And Ada gave me two of the teddy bears that I sent you long ago. As I write these words, those bears sit on the windowsill looking after me. Some might say they are only stuffed animals. But, Lottie, you and I know what's really inside them. It's the stuff of dreams.
KILLING ME SOFTLY
hy would the author of a successful series of mystery novels featuring himself as the central character want to commit literary suicide by killing off his hero? Is the author, who happens to be named Kinky Friedman, subconsciously jealous of the fictional fame garnered around the world by the character, who also happens to be named Kinky Friedman? Have author and character melded into a psychotic, schizophrenic entity so clinically ill as to obscure the difference between important clues like cocaine and horseradish? Both of us are glad you asked. The truth is, by the time you've written your seventeenth mystery novel, if you ain't crazy, there's something wrong with you. If you happen to be your own main character, it tends to be even worse.
There are some things that the two of you may have in common, of course. You both may smoke Cuban cigars. You both may drink Jameson Irish whiskey. But, after a time, the bad outweighs the good. It doesn't take long to discover, for instance, that the real you and the fabricated you both seem to lust after the same kind of woman. Once a woman's imagination has been captured by a fictional heartthrob, the flesh-and-blood version has a hard act to follow. I'm not the first novelist who's felt the need to kill a character better known and better regarded than he is.
In 1893 The Final Problem recorded the passing of the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes. The man who offed Holmes was the same man who created him, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Why did it have to end this way, with Holmes and his archenemy, Moriarty, representing the forces of good and evil in the world, struggling in each other's grasp, then plunging to their deaths at Reichenbach Falls? Was Conan Doyle weary of his celebrated sleuth, or was the author in such a petulant snit about being eclipsed by his invention that he murdered him in a fit of literary pique? Or did Conan Doyle destroy Holmes because, as Oscar Wilde famously wrote, "each man kills the thing he loves"? The difference between the artist and the murderer, Holmes himself once said, is that the artist knows when to stop. My latest mystery, Ten Little New Yorkers, will also be my last. It's not that I'm fresh out of mad nights or candle wax or typewriter ribbons; it's merely that I'm running low on the desperation that makes a writer good in the first place. The mystery field, one quickly discovers, is as narrow as it is deep: The elements that are essential to a mystery are the same ones that often keep it trite and limited. As an author, you're constantly trying to fool the reader without cheating him. Your best writing is rarely about smoke and mirrors or the corpse in the library. More often it deals with the dreams of a detective who wonders if there's life before death. The mystery of life, in other words, is a greater and more compelling story than the cheap, dog-eared mystery of death. Life is hanging on tight, spurring hard, and letting 'er buck. Death is merely letting go of the saddle horn.
When I wrote my first mystery, Greenwich Killing Time, in 1984, I never dreamed the series would continue for more than twenty years. Long before that, I suspected, the reader would tire of my cleverness. I hoped, naturally, that there would be more than one reader, and in time my hopes were realized.
Today my mysteries have been translated into more languages than there are books in the series, including, recently, Russian, Hebrew, and Japanese. I can't imagine what these people think when they read them. Then again, I can't imagine what I was thinking when I wrote them.
In Ten Little New Yorkers, Manhattan is victimized by a string of vicious murders. Not much of a plot, you might say, but when you've written as many of these boogers as I have, you begin to understand why plots are for cemeteries. And speaking of cemeteries, it was clearly time to plant Kinky Friedman and his colorful band of flatulent friends. If I didn't kill him soon, I knew I ran the risk of becoming a literary hack—a bitter, jaundiced, humorless, insular, constipated prig, like most successful authors. I preferred to stay the way I'd always been: obliviously well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Having decided to do away with Kinky Friedman, one nagging question remained: Which Kinky should I kill? The character, with his bizarre behavior, tediously eccentric mannerisms, and cloying colloquial language, was now locked in such a hopelessly convoluted love-hate relationship with the author that it might require dental records, or maybe a rectal probe, to tell them apart. The last guy with an invention named for him was Dr. Frankenstein, and everybody knows what happened there. I had created a monster, so now I had to destroy it. So Kinky the cat-loving, cigar-smoking amateur sleuth meets his maker at the end of Ten Little New Yorkers. I had no choice; it was spiritual self-defense. Much like the great Holmes, the fictional Kinkster dies in a fall from a bridge while grappling with the murderer. While his death is liberating to me personally, it does not gladden my heart. In an odd sort of way, I was almost starting to like the guy.
If you happen to be a frustrated fan of the fictional Friedman, I can only say that even Conan Doyle was eventually forced by pressure from his readers to bring Holmes back to l
ife. If, indeed, I hear the literary community clamoring for Kinky's return, I may have to follow suit. Sometimes, in my dreams, I think I hear them beginning to clamor. When I wake up to the nonfiction world, however, I realize it was only the sound of one hand clapping.
FICTIONAL CHARACTERS KILLED OFF BY THEIR CREATORS
herlock Holmes: one of the best known and most universally recognizable literary characters in any genre.
Sherlock Holmes was a fictional detective of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who first appeared in publication in 1887. He was created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes lived in London and was famous for his genius at solving the most difficult cases with his brilliant use of deductive reasoning and keen observation skills. He had a profound knowledge of chemistry, was a competent cryptanalyst, and was skilled in boxing, swordsmanship, clever disguises, and the violin. Holmes disliked contemplating anything that would clutter up his memory and get in the way of his detective work. He had a flair for showmanship and enjoyed staging dramatic endings to his cases for the benefit of Watson or Scotland Yard. Holmes described himself and his habits as "Bohemian." Holmes' friend and biographer, Dr. John H. Watson, said that Holmes's only vice was an occasional use of cocaine and morphine.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in "The Final Problem," which appeared in print in 1893. After resisting public pressure to resurrect Holmes, Conan Doyle brought him back to life ten years later and continued to write Holmes stories for a quarter-century longer.
Chewbacca: Del Rey publishing company won the license to the "Star Wars" books from Bantam a few years ago and decided to launch a new series called "New Jedi Order," based on George Lucas's Star Wars universe. Fantasy writer R. A. Salvatore was chosen to write the first novel in the series, Vector Prime. In this book, he killed off Chewbacca, the beloved Wook-iee partner of Han Solo. Lucas gave his approval to Chewbacca's death, but it ignited a storm of controversy from Star Wars fans. Despite this, the book went on to be a best-seller, and Salvatore was subsequently picked to write the novelization of Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones.
Hercule Poirot: For more than half a century, Dame Agatha Christie was the foremost British writer of mystery novels. Her books have been translated into every major language and her two creations, Detective Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, are world famous. Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective created by Dame Agatha Christie, first appeared in the novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920. He was the main character in more than thirty novels and fifty short stories. Despite Poirot's popularity with her fans, by 1930 Agatha Christie found Poirot "insufferable" and by 1960, she felt that he was a "detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep."
Still the public loved him, and Christie refused to kill him off, claiming that it was her duty to produce what the public liked, and what the public liked was Poirot. In 1975 a year before her own death, Christie killed off Poirot in the novel Curtain: Poirot's Last Case. Poirot died from inevitable complications of a heart condition; by this point in his life he was wearing a wig and a false moustache, and also seemed to be afflicted by arthritis.
Captain America: The alter ego of Steve Rogers, he was a superhero in the Marvel Comics universe. Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, Captain America was one of the most popular characters of Marvel Comics's predecessor, Timely Comics; he made his first appearance in December 1940, a year before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. With his sidekick, Bucky, Captain America faced Nazis, Japanese, and other threats to wartime America. He remained popular throughout the forties but by the early fifties, sales dropped off and Captain America eventually disappeared after 1954. He returned in 1964 when it was explained that in the final days of WWII, Captain America fell from an experimental drone plane into the North Atlantic Ocean and spent decades frozen in a state of suspended animation. During the 1970s, the hero found a new generation of readers as leader of the all-star superhero team the Avengers.
In April 2007, Captain America's alter ego Steve Rogers was shot by a sniper outside of a federal courthouse and later died at the hospital. The character's death was reported on major news outlets like CNN and the Associated Press. His death came as a blow to ninety-three-year-old cocreator Joe Simon, who said, "It's a hell of a time for him to go. We really need him now."
TALENT
ike the tides, the seasons, and the Bandera branch of |the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Texas Book Festival is coming around again, allowing us to meet authors we love, hate, or very possibly, find a little ho-hum. I always look forward to the book festival because it provides me with the spiritual soapbox to give advice to other authors, an audience that, predictably, has never learned to listen. Conversely, I've never learned to pull my lips together, so the system works. My advice to authors, and the misguided multitudes who want to be authors, is a variation on a truthful if sometimes tedious theme. "Talent," I tell them in stentorian tones, "is its own reward. If you're unlucky enough to have it, don't expect anything else." These wise words, of course, come from a man who's spent his entire professional career trying to eclipse Leon Redbone.
My theory is that in all areas of creative human endeavor, the presence of true talent is almost always the kiss of death. It's no accident that three of the people who were tragically forced into bankruptcy at the end of their lives were Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, and Mark Twain. It's no fluke of fate that Schubert died shortly after giving the world the Unfinished Symphony. You probably wouldn't have finished it either if you had syphilis and twelve cents in your pocket. Or how would you like to have died at age twenty-nine in the backseat of a Cadillac? If you're Hank Williams, that's what talent got you. But what is talent? And why would anyone in his right mind want it? As Albert Einstein often said, "I don't know."
In fact, talent is such a difficult quality to identify or define that we frequently end up losing it in the lights, relegating it at last to the trash bin, the cheap motel, the highway, the gutter, or the cross. Indeed, if you look with an objective eye at the New York Times Best-Seller List, the Billboard music charts, and the highest-rated network TV offerings, the one thing they seem to have in common is an absence of original creative expression, i.e., talent.
My editor says I'm one of the most talented writers he knows. The problem is that even if I have talent, I don't know what it is—and if I did, I'd get rid of it immediately. Then I'd be on my way to vast commercial success. Talent, however, is a bit like God; you never see it, but there are moments when you're pretty sure it's there. So because I can't clinically isolate it, I'm stuck with all my wonderful talent, and the most practical thing I can do is start looking for a sturdy bridge to sleep under or a gutter in a good neighborhood.
If you have a little talent, you're probably all right. Let's say you're good at building bird houses or you play the bagpipes or, like my fairy godmother, Edythe Kruger, you do an almost uncanny impersonation of the duck on the AFLAC commercial. These kinds of narrow little talents have never harmed a soul, nor kept anyone from living a successful, happy life. It's when you're afflicted with that raw, shimmering, innate talent-talent with a big "T"—that you can really get into trouble. Remember that Judy Garland died broke on the toilet. Lenny Bruce also died broke on the toilet. Jim Morrison, just to be perverse, died fairly well financially fixed at the age of twenty-seven in a Paris bathtub. Elvis also died on the toilet, but definitely he wasn't broke. Along with a vast fortune, he had well over a million dollars in a checking account that drew no interest. Who cares about money, he figured, when you've got talent? I myself was a chess prodigy, playing a match with world grandmaster Samuel Reschevsky when I was only seven years old. It's been downhill from there. These days I find myself constipated most of the time and I never take a bath.
They say it takes more talent to spot talent than it does to have talent. Conversely, it's easy to know when it isn't there, although someone without talent rarely notices its absence. Some friends of mine had a b
and once, and they went to audition for a talent scout in his office. The talent scout said, "Okay, let's see what you can do." The leader of the band began to pick his nose while playing the French horn. Another guy started beating out the rhythm on his own buttocks while projectile vomiting on the man's desk. The other two members of the band jumped simultaneously onto the desk and began unabashedly engaging in an act too graphic to describe here. "I've seen enough," shouted the talent scout in disgust. "What do you call this act anyway?" The French horn player stopped playing the instrument and stopped picking his nose. "We call ourselves," he said, "The Aristocrats."
Another example of what might help define talent takes us back to Polyclitus, the famous sculptor in ancient Greece. Poly-clitus, it is said, once sculped two statues at the same time: one in his living room, in public view, and one in his bedroom, which he worked on privately and kept wrapped in a tarpaulin. When visitors came by, they would comment on the public work, saying, "The eyes aren't quite right," or "That thigh is too long," and Polyclitus would incorporate their suggestions into his work. All the while, however, he kept the other statue a secret. Both works were completed at about the same time and were mounted in the city square in Athens. The statue that had been designed by committee was openly mocked and ridiculed. The statue he'd done by himself was immediately proclaimed a great transcendental work of art. People asked Polyclitus, "How can one statue be so good and the other so bad?" And Polyclitus answered, "Because / did this one and you did that one."
So what can you do if you don't have talent? To paraphrase Claytie Williams, you can relax and enjoy it. Any no-talent fat boy can make it to the top of the charts, but it takes real talent,
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