A Cowboy's Lament

I saw it coming a couple of years ago, when Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson started getting popular with friends of mine who had never been west of the Mississippi or south of the Smith & Wesson line. I should have seen it coming even before that, when fancy restaurants started letting in people wearing expensive suits made out of denim. I knew it was too late when I started seeing regular ads for cowboy boots and hats in The New Yorker.

This year, I read where sales of Western clothes are up to, like, three and a half billion dollars. I said Western clothes; what I mean is faggoty-elegant stuff like $80 Roy Rogers--type gabardine shirts that designers like Ralph Lauren are pushing in chrome-plated boutiques, complete with satin tuses in decorator colors. And it's getting worse instead of better; with the arrival of the movie Urban Cowboy, the world is leaning very close to that greatest of all mind-boggling disasters: country disco.

Before you know it, every single big-city pimp, pusher, fag, fop and dude--not to mention all the lawyers and used-car salesmen--will be trying to look like some kind of damn cowboy come to town. I suppose it's a matter of free enterprise, but all this Western-fashion crap has gone and blown my cover. Leave it to the city folks to ruin the best thing that us simple rednecks, hillbillies and shitkickers had going.

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Without trying to explain the important social, cultural and regional differences between rednecks, hillbillies and shitkickers--or their subclasses of stump-jumpers, clodhoppers, hayseeds and hicks--let me explain that city people and country people have always envied each other without admitting it. That is why so many hillbilly songs are about mansions and Cadillacs and wine, and why so many city people are hot for John Denver and country roads they've never been on. That is also why Southerners get laughed at in the North and why Northerners have always gotten rich--or shot--when they've gone down South. Culture envy. Being from Texas myself, I can stand back from all this regional strife and objectively analyze the situation.

The situation is historically simple:

During the late Colonial period, the conflicting economic interests of urban and rural America began manifesting themselves [Typesetter: Delete 1000 words.--Ed.] until the moral issue of slavery became a symbol of political [delete 1500 words] Fort Sumter ... Appomattox ... during the Reconstruction period [delete 2000 words], but the wounds of the Civil War continued to fester [delete 3000 words] as a result of the rapid population shift during and after World War Two. With Northern industry's discovery of cheap, nonunion labor in the Sun Belt [delete the rest].

Nevertheless, the South managed to retain its image as a carefree land of good ol' boys given to benign rowdyism (unless provoked into violence by meddling Yankee do-gooders) and the West, likewise, its image as a national preserve of frontier-style manliness. (Northerners will believe just about anything, and the Marlboro ads helped a lot.) To this day, your provincial New Yorker thinks Texas is an eternally happy land of legal guns and cheap gasoline, when its real virtues are the chicken-fried steak and honest-to-God barbecue; but I don't want to get off the subject.

Further confusing the city folks is the country/Western dualism created by the movies and TV. On the one hand, the man in the hat and boots is gallant, generous, loyal, honest--the kind of fellow who'll pull your car out of the ditch and get suckered by big-city jackals from bar girls to con men. On the other hand, he's no pansy: Behind the wheel of a 70,000-pound tractor-trailer rig, he can turn your economical, energy-efficient, ecologically sound Volkswagen Rabbit into a cow pie; in a bar, he can heave your miserable little citified ass through a plate-glass window and never get arrested or sued; at a fancy cocktail party, he'll come on like a country bumpkin and go home with your giggling girlfriend. Your average city hoodlum should never pull a gun on such a man, unless he has the front sight filed off to reduce the discomfort when the barrel is thrust up his rectum.

When I left Texas fresh out of college to take a job in New York, I didn't know any of this. (Didn't have a TV and hated cowboy movies--cows, too, for that matter.) I wore boots and a goofy hat because that was all I had and I didn't know how long the stupid job would last; figured I'd save up for a couple of months, then buy me a suit and regular shoes and learn to drink martinis like other folks. I was just about as sophisticated as the Midnight Cowboy, if not quite so desperate.

It was during those first two months that I learned what a great act I had going. In grocery stores, little kids would point and say, "Momma! There's a cowboy!" And momma would blush and chatter apologies, to which I'd respond, "Don't think nothin' of it, ma'am. He shore is a cute li'l feller." Cabdrivers would give me gratuitous advice on how not to get ripped off by other cabdrivers. I soon learned that, with my hat and my Texas accent, I could ask any stranger for street directions and, if I wasn't careful, the sumbitch would personally guide me there so I wouldn't get myself lost, meanwhile talking my ear off.

Bus drivers were nice. Cops were nice. Even Adolphe, the crabbiest old fart ever to run a neighborhood delicatessen, started being nice after I served as his interpreter for some Deep South airline stewardesses who were shacked up in my apartment building. I was in the deli when one of them tried to order some sliced high-yem. Adolphe snorted, "Vot? Vot's dot? I got none!"

I interceded politely and whispered, "Mr. Goldman, she vants some hem. Like for hem sendvitches."

"Yah, yah, hem ve got, vy don't she say so?" I was fast becoming bilingual.

The same language barrier had already got me a time or two. At a Wool-worth's, I tried to buy a tie, like in necktie, and was directed to the toy department. I knew about thutty-thutty Winchesters but not toidy-toid streets.

But by and large, my hat, boots and accent were worth their weight in good Texas bullshit and I soon figured out why. Every poor bastard in New York has had to develop paranoia, aggressiveness, impatience, callousness and general obnoxiousness just to survive in that frigging jungle. You go to the aid of a heart-attack victim, the sucker's liable to bite you on the leg or take you to court. Any stranger who says "Good morning" either has a knife or wants to explain how the Communists have a secret power transmitter set up to fill people's minds with dirty thoughts.

Consequently, most New Yorkers are absolutely bulging with pent-up goodness and have no safe place to dump it. Except on some idiot in a cowboy hat who doesn't know uptown from down-town and therefore constitutes no threat to their personal safety and who might even help them out if that creep on the corner decides to make his move.

Well, hell. I'm not as stupid as some people think. By the time I reached Chicago--nearly ten years later, by a circuitous route that was very, very interesting, but my editor says no--I had my shitkicker act down pat. Plus my hat, boots, Texas driver's license, Texas license plates, the works. In either polite Chicago society or Chicago traffic, I could do nothing wrong. A quiet after-dinner belch only signified my enjoyment of the food--and my indifference to effete social conventions. An illegal left turn only reminded cops of how loose and simple life must be in Texas, where an officer of the law presumably is not spat upon or shat upon and doesn't have to account for bullets or bodies.

The mere fact that I treated all police officers with great respect didn't hurt none, either. All I ever got was fatherly lectures: "Son, up here you have to pay very close attention to those signs on the traffic-signal posts.... Up here, you should always carry a bond card, so you don't have to be taken to the station and have to post cash bond."

Me: "A bond card, sir?"

Cop: "You know, a bond card, like from a motor club, so you don't have to post cash bond if you're out of state. This time I'll let you go, but be sure to get yourself a bond card."

Me: "Wait, sir. Maybe I've got one here. I got a whole bunch of cards...."

Cop: "Those're charge cards! We don't take American Express. There's a difference. Ask somebody. Look, just go on. Go home. Go back to Texas."

Me: "Officer, I really appreciate----"

Cop: "Just get the fuck out of here, please!"

Me: "Yessir."

Down deep inside, big-city police officers are good people. They really hate to arrest some obsequious, down-South dipshit whom they assume to have the proper fascist and racist attitudes, plus respect for authority, and who are therefore no threat to society. Works every damn time.

Nearly every time. Watch out for young rookies who haven't had proper supervision or enough experience. One nearly gave me a ticket for drinking beer while driving. I got off by explaining that in Texas everybody drives with a can of beer between his legs just to keep his balls from overheating, at which (continued on page 218) A Cowboy's Lament (continued from page 102) point he rolled his eyes and started the "up here" lecture.

But cowboy drag served me even better in other ways, like making me impervious to "street crime." I soon discovered I could boldly walk through dangerous neighborhoods at any hour and it was the muggers and punks who crossed to the other side of the street. These characters may be dangerous, but they also watch TV; they know that anybody stomping along in three-quarter heels and a rolled-brim cowboy hat is either too dumb to pour piss out of his boots (old Texas saying), and therefore might well put up a fight, or so tough and ornery that he might just bite your nose off and spit it in your face. Such an idiot might even have a rocket in his pocket and be so countrified that he doesn't know it's against the laws of God, Chicago and the state of Illinois to blow the shit out of some bad-ass who tries to take your money.

The smart mugger feeds all this information into his computerlike mind, comes up with a negative cost-benefit readout and decides he's safer to hit on the turkey in the plaid sports coat or the baby-blue leisure suit (sometimes not realizing that those are the very fashions favored by stylish off-duty cops). The point is, the average decent law-abiding citizen doesn't have reason to fear the Western type, who never makes trouble first, but your successful mugger always must have a healthy fear of the unknown.

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That's all over now, thanks to social change--starting when a bunch of dope-fiend flower children decided to protest the Vietnam war by driving up the price of Levis. Greening of America, bull shit! Stirred up the hyphenated ethnics is all they did, and then put that nitwit Nixon in the White House to restore law and order. That was one hell of a price to pay to put down a piss-poor revolution that could easily have been handled by a few middle-aged duck hunters armed with shotguns and bottles of Wild Turkey. By screwing around with denim, the youth movement only destroyed the fabric of American society.

Demoralized by Vietnam, scared by the hippies, disillusioned by Watergate, Americans by the millions rejected the urban political establishment and sought leadership in the form of a straight-talking, beer-drinking, common-sense country boy--Billy Carter--whose brother was the closest thing on the ballot. Then, when Southern-fried politics didn't pan out (took Carter three years just to straighten out old Billy), the country turned to the West, taking care to stop short of California, which is west of the moon and east of the sun ("Have a nice day!").

So who's West? Not Reagan or Brown, the Captain Nemo of the last century and the Captain Kirk of the next, both from the land of Nixon. Not Connally--Texas is Southwest, Connally's too real, and everybody remembers L.B.J. The answer is Ralph Lauren, the fashion designer; that's who's West. I'll explain.

Ralph Lauren may, in fact, be the former Ralph Lifshitz (stop sniggering) from the wide-open spaces of the Bronx, but so what? He wasn't a Harvard fop when he turned Okies into Ivy Leaguers in the halcyon days of the Sixties, nor was he an English country gentleman when he peddled his Polo line of trendy tweeds to effete Easterners looking for some compromise between the Brooks Brothers business look and patched-bottom proletarianism.

Lauren didn't have to be a bona fide cowpoke to spot America's desperate psychological need for a fix of gun-fighter fantasy. He saw it and came up with a fashion for the times--shitkicker chic. He was riding a trail blazed by various antifashion heroes from hippies to country-music outlaws, heading up a posse of equally tough hombres like Calvin Klein, Geoffrey Beene, Gloria Vanderbilt and Jordache (who could be male or female or both--not that it matters).

Now, I got to admit that it does take real guts to go whole-hog shitkicker chic. I'm not sure myself whether I'd rather wear a rhinestone-infested turquoise denim jacket with silver-tipped lizard-skin cowboy boots or look down the barrel of a gun. Come to think of it, I know some Texas roadside taverns where you'd likely be doing both.

That is not because your average shitkicker is intolerant of gaudy Western-wear as such--hell, look at your truly hard-core hillbilly singers, whose outfits would stop the heart of a charging Brahma bull. No, it's because your average shitkicker is intolerant of pansies, fops, dudes, Yankees, weirdos, Communists, ethnic minorities and certain species of plants and animals. Plus some kinds of rocks, that's why.

And that's also why people in cowboy hats and boots always got treated so well up North. Northerners haven't been able to indulge their prejudices and act basically stupid since the Civil War; ever since winning, they've had to set a good example for the vanquished foe, and look where that got them: traffic jams without pickup trucks. (I'd elaborate on the influence of John Wayne movies since the Great Depression and the blurring of regional differences by television, and the resulting confusion over who can wear what style of hat, but, again, my editor won't let me.)

Personally, I understand and accept all that's happened. I just think it's goddamn pitiful to see the streets of New York and Chicago and probably Boston (ain't been there yet) crawling with effete intellectuals and fashion-conscious celebrities wearing store-bought superstyled cowboy hats sprouting peacock feathers, and trying to walk in pointy-toed high-heeled boots made of genuine simulated wart hog. Even if these suckers are screwing up my act, it's their right, after all. Free damn country, and I've been tolerant all my life.

It's just that one can't be a very successful fraud once the market becomes saturated. Wear cowboy gear in Chicago anymore and the cops no longer figure you for a helpless hick or a redneck kindred spirit; they take you for a dope dealer or an A.C.L.U. lawyer. And all the girls think you're queer. As for formerly respectful punks and the muggers, now they chase you down the street just to steal your hat. Shee-yit!

Until this trend blows over, I've decided to moth-ball my spiffy Texas lids in favor of old snap-brim fedoras from the Salvation Army. I don't know if I look much like Cagney or Bogart, but with my matching Thompson submachine gun, I still get lots of room on the bus.