Kinky Friedman

Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned by Kinky Friedman is classified as a Mystery novel at library. There are no homicide detectives struggling to find out who done it, but there are two mysterious characters, Fox and Clyde. Mischievous might be a better word or kooky NYC characters.

When Fox is late for a birthday party he says it is "...an occupational hazard of a homeless man without subway fare." There is a lot of humor in the novel and I thought it said in jest. Later Fox speaks about a new character, Teddy, that he met "some years back" and "Teddy was in and out of the homeless shelters."

Walter is enamored of Clyde, wondering about the relationship between her and Fox: "Maybe she'd met him in his homeless days and literally taken him off the streets...".

A woman vomiting on a sidewalk after drinking Starbucks coffee laced with ipecac was ignored by people entering & leaving the establishment, "...as if she were a homeless person or a dead body lying in their way." I ignored a body lying on the sidewalk a few weeks ago. The man was lying next to a building at alley entrance on the other side of Anaheim. I assumed he was homeless. Seeing homeless sleeping just about anywhere around Long Beach or passed out drunk in the middle of sidewalks, I think, is the reason people simply walk on by without much of a glance.

Pranksters complicated things further by stopping up toilets and compromising sugar and creamers which caused either diarrhea or severe stomach cramps. "Now they'll discover firsthand a little bit of what it's like to be homeless." I wondered if Friedman has experienced homelessness or simply has a fine understanding of what it is like to be homeless.

A "...group of homeless people..." agreed to create a "diversion" so that Clyde & Fox could pull off their latest prank.

Another elaborate prank involves Donald Trump and a party at "the Old Armory", now a homeless shelter. When I first moved to Long Beach, the Armory was used as a homeless shelter. Perhaps it was only a Winter Shelter; at the time I did not know much about local homelessness.

The novel is a first person narrative and Walter suggests "If you've never been to a homeless shelter, maybe you should go." Or maybe not! He thinks he has "...underestimated the true nature of the plight of the homeless...", "...like most well-intentioned but severely sheltered people." I found, at times, that even people whose job is to help homeless, are rather clueless as to "the true nature" of homelessness.

Walter is suffering from writer's block. Meeting Clyde and Fox, becoming involved in their pranks, unblocks him and he resumes writing "The Great Armenian Novel". Neither the title, classification or book jacket blurb had me thinking I would be reading about homelessness and mental illness when I checked the book out of library. Can not say I learned anything new about writer's craft, but interesting ~ author character being a novelist.

Walter says "If Mozart, Kafka or Van Gogh were alive today, they'd probably be living in a homeless shelter."