The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic by Kinky Friedman Page B

day, in the summer of 1966, he climbed the Texas Tower with his trusty hunting rifle and shot forty-five people. I wrote a song about him, and in just a minute I’m going to hum a few bars.
    But first let’s take an analytical look at why Charles climbed the tower and I wrote the song instead of the other way around, with me climbing the tower and Charlie writing the song. Because I believe it could very well have been the other way around. All of us have a little bit of Anne Frank and a little bit of Hitler deep down in our souls, and whether you live in Austin or Boston, you’ve got to be careful how you adjust your carburetor. I’m just saying we’ve got to kind of watch it because there’s a little bit of Charlie in us all. It helps, of course, if you’re not an Eagle Scout.
    Why is this important? Well, it’s probably not. Probably nothing’s important. But what I was trying to say before I began hearing voices in my head is that I believe there is something in the mindset of the Eagle Scout that provides an excellent breeding ground for the future mass murderers of America. Maybe it’s just that while the rest of us were desperately trying to extricate ourselves from a turbulent and troubling adolescence, the Eagle Scout was assiduously applying himself to the narrow, maddening craft of knot-tying. It’s my theory that in a universe of Eagle Scouts, you’ll find an extremely high proportion of psychopaths. I can’t prove my theory or establish a statistical link between Eagle Scouts and mass murderers because I don’t have a computer. Nor am I likely ever to have one. I think computers are the work of Satan.
    Of course, I’m wary of more than just Eagle Scouts and computers. Another pet theory of mine deals with people who have the name “Wayne.” I believe we should keep an eye on these folks. Most of them are up to no good. The problem, I contend, begins at birth when the father, invariably a fan of John Wayne’s, blithely borrows the name for his son. The son obviously cannot live up to the John Wayne lifestyle, and this causes a deep guilt to fester in the young little booger and one day he swerves to hit a school bus. Examples of the Wayne Phenomenon are legion: John Wayne Gacy, Elmer Wayne Henley, John Wayne Nobles, Wayne Williams, Michael Wayne McGray, Christopher Wayne Lippard, Dennis Wayne Eaton, and Wayne Nance, merry mass murderers all.
    John Wayne, of course, was not from Texas, but he acted like he was. Texas has always had a lot to brag about, and one area of which we’re particularly proud is the many mass murderers who were born in the Lone Star State. There’s Richard Speck, who killed eight nurses in Chicago (he was a sick chicken, then he took a turn for the nurse); Charles “Tex” Watson, Charlie Manson’s executive butt-boy (never trust a guy named “Tex”); and Henry Lee Lucas, who killed about 400 million people but can’t remember where he buried the bodies. Occasionally, Texans get a bit overzealous and we brag about murders that aren’t even our own, so to speak.
The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre,
for example, is loosely based on an incident that took place in Wisconsin.
    But Charles Whitman was definitely one of our boys. (Charles Whitman, Charles Watson, Charles Manson— might be something here.) Anyway, Charles Whitman was one of the world’s first modern mass murderers. On the surface he was an ex-Marine, married to some kind of university sweetheart, I believe. I myself once dated the former Miss Texas 1987. I, of course,
was
Miss Texas 1967.
    So one day Charlie just climbed the tower and killed all these people. As a Texas Tower guard once told me: “It’ll happen to you.”
    THE BALLAD OF CHARLES WHITMAN
    by Kinky Friedman
    He was sitting up there for more than an hour,

Way up there on the Texas Tower

Shooting from the twenty-seventh floor.

He didn’t choke or