Kinky Friedman is a bit of a mystery. "Kinky" refers to his hair, which he describes as "a Lyle Lovett starter kit," and "Friedman" comes from his father Tom, a psychology professor at the University of Texas.
It might therefore be more sensible to have interviewed the father (or the hairdresser), given that Kinky has successfully blurred all remaining lines between fact and fiction to the point where this interviewer has no real idea to who he's talking.
A country singer turned best-selling crime writer, the mysterious Friedman constantly refers to himself in the third person as The Kinkster and invokes the names of his characters as if they are real people. The difficulty is that they are, in fact, real people. His latest novel Roadkill, for instance, features Kinky Friedman sharing an adventure with no less than country singer Willie Nelson. And yes, Nelson, is his friend in real life also.
The result is that nobody really knows where Kinky Friedman stops and where Kinky Friedman begins.
The Kinkster first acquired notoriety as the performer of rather idiosyncratic country songs. His band, Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, had a specialist rather than a mass following. Songs with titles such as Ride 'Em Jewboy! and They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore were probably destined never to be mainstream US hits. Nevertheless, his very particular appeal and impeccable Texan credentials led to an undoubted cult status and earned the admiration of his many influential acquaintances, from Kristofferson to Dylan, with whom he toured as part of The Rolling Thunder Revue.
When a second career as a very successful crime writer suddenly blossomed, Friedman left New York and moved back to Kerrville, Texas to live in a trailer along with two cats, a dog and an armadillo called Dilly - or so he says.
"I'm the oldest living Jew in Texas who doesn't own any real estate. There are other Jews in Texas but there's not too many of us. I did run for justice of the peace down there in 1986 but my fellow citizens returned me to the private sector. My manifesto was that if you elected me as the first Jewish justice of the peace I would reduce the speed limit to 50. I think politic's loss has been literature's gain. I hadn't planned on being a writer but I'm happy if everything turns out to be a financial pleasure. But then I guess I've never really been happy. I think a happy American produces nothing great. My personal goals are merely to be fat, famous and financially fixed. But as The Kinkster always says, money may buy you a fine dog, but only love can make it wag its tail."
The story is that Friedman was in actual difficulties in the mid-1980s. He was still performing but his many references to Jameson and what he calls "Peruvian Marching Powder" give some indication of his life in Greenwich Village. His redemption story is that, one night, he rescued a mugging victim, pinned her assailant to the ground and made the papers as a something of a hero. And so was born Kinky Friedman, crime writer. As he put it himself: "Hank Williams fell out of my nose and told me to stop doing drugs." His first book, Greenwich Killing Time, was published by Faber and Faber and Friedman decided to stay in his Texan trailer and keep on writing. He probably likes Texas.
"I always say it's no disgrace to come from Texas - it's a disgrace to have to go back there. The people there have a lot of wide open spaces - between their ears, most of them. It's an incredibly diverse place which is very progressive as well as very backward at the same time, which always makes it interesting.
"The further away you get from it, the more significant everything becomes. America has become very homogenised and trivialised and every town looks the same, pretty much. There's a bunch of chain stores and chain people everywhere you go. That's a little disappointing to The Kinkster. The Irish are terrific in that sense. They have walked their own road which is always nice. They have been fiercely independent even when it didn't make any sense. Still, I think Texas is more independent than most places - it's got a lot of spiritual elbow room."
Many books followed including Armadillos & Old Lace, Elvis, Jesus & Coca-Cola and The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover and they sold well around the world. Among his most loyal readers is President Clinton, who last year invited Friedman and his father to the White House and, according to Kinky, tried to set up a movie deal for The Kinkster.
Friedman, an aficionado of the Cuban cigar, allegedly reminded his host that he remained a good American - he was not, by smoking the cigars, supporting the Cuban economy. He was simply burning their fields.
Of course, whenever you get into satire it's always dangerous territory. Americans don't respond too well to humour as I see it. To use a rodeo term, they're a little slow out of the chute. They like John Grisham or McDonalds or whatever sells 80 billion. For some reason my books have been doing well in a lot of different languages - about 17 or 18 languages. They are best-sellers in places such as Germany and of course the Germans are my second favourite people - and my favourite is everybody else. "I think I'm a bastard child of twin cultures. Being both Texan and Jewish keeps you on the outside looking in and I've always thought that was a great vantage point if you're going to be a writer."
The playfully disillusioned Friedman is sharply critical of most things and yet you're never entirely sure he means it. He has, over the years, upset more than one concerned minority, and his apparent cynicism about most things means he only takes questions half seriously and responds with only half serious answers. There are one or two subjects, however, which do seem to raise a certain genuine passion. Garth Brooks is one of them.
"I refer to him as the Anti-Hank. A lot of the people that I love and admire, and are important to most of us, are people who died broke and disenfranchised from their society. Everybody seems to want brand names these days and so I cherish my cult status such as it is. Look at people like Jesus Christ, Van Gogh, Emily Dickinson, Ann Frank and Hank Williams. A lot of these people didn't quite make it in their own time and there's not a Garth Brooks in that whole bunch. It's all about brand names now and I don't think there's any way back from that kind of thing. I think it's the worst treachery that America has foisted on the world. I don't know if we started it or not but it's Elvis, Jesus & Coca-Cola."
These days, Kinky Friedman has moved out of the trailer and into the house from which his father runs a summer camp for children. A tribute CD is in the making, featuring Friedman songs as sung by Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and others and yet another book is ready to go. Entitled Blast From The Past, it will go back 20 years to explore the early days of the Village Irregulars - the real-life characters who hang around The Lion's Head (now The Monkey's Paw) in Greenwich Village.
Whether these people are real or not seems entirely irrelevant to Kinky Friedman. Back in Kerrville, armed only with the last typewriter in Texas, he remains committed to the belief that none of these considerations is in the least important.
"I think there's a fine line between fiction and non-fiction and I always attempt to erase it if at all possible. That's because I'm disappointed in people and I always have been. I mean, Ghandi loved people but it's almost as if he didn't live at all if you look at what's happening in India and Pakistan.
"I see the lives of people I admire. People like Oscar Wilde. I mean, his life towards the end was as miserable as possible. I think there were over 900 sermons preached against him in America alone and he was a guy who thought some things were so important as to be taken seriously. Lenny Bruce was another. We just keep marching across the millennia for thousands of miles towards a beacon of light and when we get there it's just Joan of Arc with her hair on fire."