Read Online The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic by Kinky Friedman - Free Book Online

slash or slit them,

Not our Charles Joseph Whitman

He won’t be an architect no more.
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    Got up that morning calm and cool,

He picked up his guns and walked to school

All the while he smiled so sweetly,

Then he blew their minds completely,

They’d never seen an Eagle Scout so cruel.
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    Now won’t you think for the shame and degradation

For the school’s administration

He put on such a bold and brassy show.

The Chancellor said: “It’s adolescent,

And of course it’s most unpleasant

But I got to admit it was a lovely way to go.”
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    CHORUS
:

There was a rumor about a tumor

Nestled at the base of his brain.

He was sitting up there with his .36 Magnum,
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    Laughing wildly as he bagged ’em.

Who are we to say the boy’s insane?

Now Charlie was awful disappointed,

Else he thought he was anointed

To do a deed so lowdown and so mean.

The students looked up from their classes,

Had to stop and rub their glasses,

Who’d believe he’d once been a Marine?
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    Now Charlie made the honor roll with ease,

Most all of his grades were A’s and B’s.

A real rip-snorting trigger-squeezer,

Charlie proved a big crowd-pleaser

Though he had been known to make a couple C’s.
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    Some were dying, some were weeping,

Some were studying, some were sleeping,

Some were shouting “Texas Number 1!”

Some were running, some were falling,

Some were screaming, some were balling,

Some thought the revolution had begun.
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    The doctors tore his poor brain down,

But not a snitch of illness could be found.

Most folks couldn’t figure just-a why he did it

And them that could would not admit it

There’s still a lot of Eagle Scouts around.
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    CHORUS:
There was a rumor about a tumor

Nestled at the base of his brain.

He was sitting up there with his .36 Magnum,

Laughing wildly as he bagged ’em.

Who are we to say the boy’s in—

Who are we to say the boy’s in—

Who are we to say the boy’s insane?
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    Although this chapter is about famous Austinites past and present, I would like to amend the category at the last moment because not all Austinites destined to be famous have achieved their fame yet. Some are merely en route, like this troop of Girl Scouts I met in Austin.
    THE FIRST TIME I went to a charity car wash, Richard Nixon was president. I think some high school cheerleaders were trying to raise money to go to a cheerleading camp in Fat Chance, Arkansas. My vehicle was a dusty green 1953 Plymouth Cranbrook convertible with a wolf-whistle and a Bermuda bell. I was hoping to have an overnight with a few of the cheerleaders myself. Of course, that never happened. Nixon would not have approved. Besides, I was a late-blooming serious.
    There were a great many things back then, no doubt, of which Nixon and society in general would not have approved. But life was different in those days—or maybe it was exactly the same, only we didn’t know it. It seemed, for instance, that none of my high school friends came from broken homes. Divorce was almost unheard of. Nobody knew what a single person was. And, certainly, no one I knew had a parent in prison. I don’t really think I was sheltered. I just think I was out to lunch. The second charity car wash of my life was held recently in the parking lot of the Hotel San José in Austin. I was driving a silver 1999 Cadillac DeVille that had once belonged to my father and had the distinction of being one of the few Cadillacs in Texas with a Darwin fish emblem. The vehicles had changed, and I had changed—the last thing in the world I was interested in was a fifty-eight-year-old cheerleader. The game had changed too, in this tale of two car washes. Whether we like it or not, at some indefinable point in time, we all forsake our childhood games and become players in the game of life.
    The girls at the second car wash were not high school