What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World by Kinky Friedman Page B

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 band 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,

    "My client objects to the endless delays in this trial. Attorney fees alone, he says, are becoming increasingly painful to bear."

    like that of the brilliant American composer, Stephen Foster, to die penniless in a gutter on the Bowery. But with or without talent, you might ask, how can hard work and perseverance pay off in the creative field? Why are you asking me? Who the hell knows? In this day and age, just as the tortoise is finally crossing the finish line to win the race, he'll very likely