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The Material Curlby Dave MaassKinky’s mini-mercenaries came from China, arriving in Texas on 20-foot pallets like grunts on the beaches of Normandy. They are a 12,000-strong Judeo-Hick action-figure army, ready for deployment at $30 apiece. Each doll is a foot tall, molded from cheap plastics, torso stuffed with integrated-circuit organs, and a 25-catchphrase arsenal that spews forth from a washboard belly. Batteries included. The Kinky Friedman gubernatorial campaign invested $45,000 in the dolls. So far, they’ve sold 10,000. Do the math: that’s $255,000 in profit. Yes, profit. E-commerce fuels his campaign: online merchandise with a 200-percent markup. In the first half of the year, the Kinky “store” generated more than $515,000 for the campaign, and several hundred thousand more since, $200,000 in September alone. “That’s basically paid our overhead since day one,” said Kinky’s campaign manager Dean Barkley, who was part of the successful push to get another third-tier celebrity, Jesse “The Body” Ventura elected governor in Minnesota. “Obviously it’s tailored after, I would say, rock ’n’ roll or country-western merchandise,” he said. “That’s the background Kinky’s come from; the band scene and the merchandising that goes on there, with T-shirts and albums and everything else.” He added, “Whatever we thought would sell, we marketed it. And we’ve done a dang good job.” Any response, Kinky Doll? Kinky Doll: Kinky’s just another word for nothing left to lose. And that’s all Perry left me-e-e. We get it, though Kinky’s campaign-finance report didn’t show a pay-out to Kris Kristofferson through ASCAP. For the moment, we’re done shrieking about contributions, who took how much from whom. It’s time to look at how they spent it this year. As of September 28, Perry dropped more than $500,000 on private charter flights. Chris Bell sponsored the pro-LGBT Human Rights Campaign for $800. Grandma Strayhorn bought herself several dozen turkey-sandwich box lunches at Apple Annie’s in Austin. Kinky’s the most interesting of all. In July, he was third in both contributions and expenditures, but comparing the size of Kinky’s campaign-finance reports to, say, Strayhorn’s, is like comparing “Gravity’s Rainbow” to “The Crying of Lot 49.” Some of the largest and most numerous expenses were for merch: That’s where they getcha. The Kinky Friedman franchise existed long before he threw his Stetson into the ring. The campaign strategy has been to turbo-inject his established merchandise system with hundreds of thousands of campaign dollars. Kinky paid his label Sphincter Records (owned by collaborator Little Jewford) 60 G’s for CDs, DVDs, and labor. From January to September, he gave his signature salsa distributors about $200,000 to handle his distribution. He bought $400 worth of cowboy gear from his ex-college-roommate’s outfitters in Houston. (But not his stogies. “I don’t know where he gets his Cuban cigars, and I don’t ask,” Barkley said). It’s a perpetual-motion device — the more merchandise he sells, the bigger he becomes, and the bigger he becomes, the higher the demand for his merchandise. Hell, collectible dealers are already hawking the Kinky Doll on eBay for as much as $56 a pop. (Of course, the buyers are morons who don’t know that the campaign’s website’s currently running a $10-off clearance special). In other words, you could say it’s the products that sell the man, and it doesn’t matter what came first, man or merch, chicken or egg. When the campaign’s over, win or lose, Kinky will land sunny side up. Care to explain, Kinky Doll? Kinky Doll: Money can buy you a fine dog, but only love will make him wag his tail. If Kinky loses, he’s not going to leave with his tail between his legs. Although his standard response is that he’ll retire in a “petulant snit,” that’s not exactly true. He’s working on an album, and five days after Texans go to the polls, he kicks off the promotional tour for his new book, “The Christmas Pig,” about a mute, clairvoyant, idiot-savant, nativity-scene-painter’s friendship with a talking pig. Some folks would see that as a bit inappropriate and not just because he’s Texas’s most famous Jew (Yes, Kyle, it can be fun to be a Jew on Christmas). That explains why, unlike his music, Kinky’s been very careful to keep his literary sales completely separate from his campaign. Kinky Doll, do you think your supporters will buy your book, or feel exploited as a market? Kinky Doll: I’m running for governor, not God. That’s not exactly true, either. “One of the things we’re talking to him about is doing a book called ‘What Would Kinky Do?’ and just have him talk about all the hot issues of the day with his inimitable answers,” Kinky’s nonfiction editor at St. Martin’s Press, Diane Reverand said. She’s also very adamant that the campaign is not an elaborate publicity stunt; he’s genuine about winning and they aren’t yet planning for a campaign memoir. Nevertheless, with a late release for the novel, his fiction publisher Simon & Schuster barely mentions his detective novels and is selling “The Christmas Pig” on Kinky’s maverick politician image. He’s a hot property now, Reverand said. “His core market for his fiction is there, and they’ll read anything he writes, they’re so devoted,” Reverand said. “But once he decided to run for office he became really a national figure and people who had never been exposed to him are suddenly seeing him interview on ‘60 Minutes’ or they’re reading a seven-page profile of him in The New Yorker, and they’re captivated and fascinated.” Can you comment, Kinky Doll, on any of this, or your seven MySpace pages? Kinky Doll: I don’t know how many supporters I have, but they all carry guns. Dave Maass: Are you threatening me? Come back when you’ve got a Guy Juke tee-pee for my bunghole. #
by Dave MaassAmong the citizenry of Phoenix, Arizona, there are only two sentiments for Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio: you either love the tough son of a bitch or loathe the sick bastard, and there ain’t nothing in between. Dubbed “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” Arpaio’s brought back the chain gang, installed webcams in jail intake, and forced inmates to wear pink underwear and eat green bologna. He’s best known, though, for his outdoor tent jail with a neon “Vacancy” sign hung from the overlooking watchtower. Back in early November, Bexar County Commish Tommy Adkisson took a long detour from his road to re-election to visit Arpaio’s “Tent City” at Estrella Jail. It’s a magical place where inmates, wrapped in intentionally humiliating pink thermals under robber-striped scrubs, can bask in the sun from their bunks in 25-man tents, saving taxpayers millions and millions of dollars. That week, Bexar County’s jails were operating at 97.5 percent of their capacity, making the county the third-most-crowded jail system in Texas among counties with more than 1,000 detainees. Adkisson’s opponent, Larry Click, and the Express-News speculated that Adkisson’s interest in tent jails was a tough-on-crime gimmick, and doomed to failure because of two major obstacles: a state law banning all but temporary tent jails, and the Bexar County Sheriff’s office, which hates the idea. Rather than petering out now that Adkisson has been re-elected, the tent-jail idea is still rolling along. Representative Phil King, a legislator from Parker County, has pre-filed a bill to allow the Texas Commission on Jail Standards to approve permanent tent jails. The idea, according to one of King’s aides, is further bolstered by Cameron County’s recent approval of its own $15,000-$20,000 tent facility to house 48 inmates. For Adkisson, tent jails are first and foremost a tax-payer relief measure. Inmates currently cost the county $40 a day; with a population hovering at 4,000 that’s $58 million annually, excluding medical expenses. Tent jails wouldn’t necessarily reduce the daily expense, but instead save the county from building costly new brick-and-mortar jails. The lobby of Arpaio’s Estrella Jail has a poster that tells visitors not to complain about the conditions, and instead think about our soldiers in Iraq, followed by images of fully geared soldiers sleeping under trucks or in grave-like foxholes. Phoenix’s incredibly mild winter weather makes Tent City preferable to the accompanying indoor facility, according to a jail tour guide. And indeed it is a choice: an inmate can choose to live in fresh-air tents and join a work scheme, or else live indoors. Estrella jail administrators have no qualms about escorting visitors directly through the middle of the three male units, which houses 800 inmates, and the 200-inmate female unit. The inmates walk freely between their tents and the indoor dayroom, where they can eat, shower, and store their personal effects in lockers; guards watch from the safety of surveillance towers. Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union take issue with this portrayal, claiming Tent City doesn’t meet human-rights standards, particularly in terms of inmate safety, vermin infestation, and temperature control (inmates may not prefer the tents during the 110-degree-plus summers). Nevertheless, the facility enjoys widespread support in Phoenix, and helped Arpaio win multiple re-elections. Adkisson’s selling his idea with contradictory pitches. On one hand, he denounces our current jails as luxury resorts for criminals for whom incarceration is calculated into the cost of doing business. Adkisson’s catchphrase (repeated half a dozen times during our interview): “Six to 10 percent of our jail population, which is about 400 inmates, go [to jail] for three square meals, air conditioning, color-cable television, and medical attention in a secured setting.” He added: “I think the lower-echelon criminals that go into a tent jail may have a very sober moment to reflect on what they’re doing and say, you know, this really sucks.” On the other hand, Adkisson claims inmates actually love Arpaio’s Tent City, going so far as to suggest that female inmates think to themselves that the sheriff is “the father we missed having when we were raised.” The Bexar County Sheriff’s jail administrator, Deputy Chief Dennis McKnight isn’t having it. A switch to tents, he says, would require renegotiation of employee contracts, and represents a significant decrease in detainee safety. Besides, he asks, where the hell would they put the thing? “We’re not in the punishment business here, for the most part,” McKnight said. “We’re in the ministering business, which means we take care of them, protect them, keep them in good shape.” McKnight say there are too many pre-trial detainees and probationers in his jail. He’d like to see the time between arrest and court appearance cut from seven days to one, and judges should use other tools at their disposal. For example, electronic monitoring: Although the Sheriff’s office has 60 devices, only 29 are currently being used. Adkisson and McKnight agree the real problem lies in our judicial system, in which judges are elected rather than appointed. “I understand that judges have to have the appearance, at least the public persona, of being law-and-order minded, because if they don’t they’re not going to get re-elected,” McKnight said. “The citizenry generally says put the bad guy in jail and keep him there, get him off my street. So at this point what do they do? They put him in my jail.” Adkisson describes the public mindset more explicitly: “‘Lock and Sock’ is what Texas is famous for. Just throw ’em in jail. Jail ’em! We love jail. It’s right up there near sex. We just loooove jail. We LOVE it. Because you know what? Out of sight is out of mind.” If Sheriff Ralph Lopez’s office continues to oppose permanent tent jails, Adkisson says he hopes Adult Probation Chief Bill Fitzgerald, who also visited Tent City, will pick up the cause. A probation facility may allow them to bypass the Commission on Jail Standards. McKnight would be happy with that. “I’ve long said you can build whatever kind of facility you want for probationers, and I have suggested we build [live-in] facilities for probationers because it’s cheaper, it’s more efficient, and the taxpayer gets more for his buck,” McKnight said. Judges may even order offenders to pay their own way as a condition of probation, he says. Fitzgerald’s office opened a new drug-treatment facility on Tuesday, but when the Current called the idea of a tent facility was news to them. Fun Fact Statistically speaking, as of November 1, the Karnes County Jail was the most overcrowded in the state, operating at 125 percent of its capacity. It held 15 instead of the 12 detainees it’s designed for. “I think that night we had a few drunks sleeping it off,” said one Karnes County Sheriff’s employee. #
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