Kinky's Cure for the Hiccups

[Harry Edwards]

COMMENTARY: JOHN KELSO
The Kinkster knows how to cure your hiccups

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John Kelso/AMERICAN-STATESMAN
(enlarge photo)

Kinky Friedman basks in his winnings. Well, he didn't win anything but 
his own $120, which he had offered to Danita Horner for a hiccup.
?

	
Tuesday, August 30, 2005


Writer Kinky Friedman is the first Texas gubernatorial candidate to 
reveal a health care plan: ending hiccups in the Lone Star State in our 
time. Like every other major problem, all it takes is throwing money at 
it.

It was last Tuesday around 11 in the morning when the Kinkster and I 
walked into Conchita's Mexican Cafe in downtown Kerrville, about 100 
miles southwest of Austin.

Inside Conchita's, Danita Horner, the 17-year-old waitress, was 
battling a persistent case of the hiccups. She had been struck with 
them shortly after getting out of bed about four hours earlier.

"Basically right as soon as I got up when I got in my car I got bad 
hiccups," said Danita, a musician who between hiccups plays guitar and 
sings.

Conchita's is a small place, so you could tell where Danita was at any 
moment in the restaurant by listening to where the hiccups were coming 
from. Hiccup ? she's in the kitchen. Hiccup ? she's behind the counter. 
No, wait, here she comes, back into the dining room.

After a couple of minutes of this, Kinky said in a commanding voice, 
"Come over here. I've got a cure for those hiccups."

Danita walked up to our table. Kinky pulled his wallet out of his pants 
pocket. Then he took out six $20 bills, and spread them on the table 
like a hand of cards.

"One more hiccup, and it's all yours," Kinky said. At this point I'm 
thinking the guy was a philanthropist about to be out of a quick $120.

Danita stood there, smiling and blinking, looking first at Kinky and 
then down at the cash, while trying desperately to fire off just one 
more lousy hiccup. And why not? One hiccup, $120 ? that's a pretty good 
payday. But she couldn't do it. Her hiccups were gone, and there would 
be no payoff. All of the hiccups apparently had been shocked out of 
Danita by the prospect of a wad of bills.

"It just kind of overturned my hiccups instantly," Danita recalled. In 
retrospect, Danita says, she had mixed emotions over her hiccups 
disappearing. She was glad to be rid of them. But she wanted the money, 
too.

"A little bit of both," she said. "I tried as hard as I could, but it 
just couldn't come out."

Kinky says he's used this method five or six times and that it's worked 
every time. He remembers getting the idea from an old Kerrville cowboy 
named Grady Tuck. Kinky points out that how big an offer you have to 
make to run off the hiccups depends on the financial status of the 
hiccup sufferer. You get a server in a small Mexican food joint, and 
$120 covers the freight. But if you've got some high roller hiccuping 
all over the place, maybe it takes the keys to a Land Rover.

So what does this tell us about Kinky? For one thing, it tells us that 
he had just been to the bank in Kerrville to make a withdrawal. 
Otherwise he wouldn't have had $120 in his wallet.

While in the bank, Kinky introduced me to the teller as Ernest 
Hemingway. The next day the teller asked Kinky, "Your friend Ernest 
Hemingway who came in here with you yesterday. He's a writer, too, 
isn't he?"

"Yes, he is," Kinky told her. So today in Kerrville there's probably a 
bank teller walking around telling everybody in town about how she met 
Ernest Hemingway last week.

Another thing it tells us about Kinky is that he's got $120 he can 
afford to lose. And it also tells us that he's a Texan who's not afraid 
to take risks. Now I'm wondering if he has a cure for the hives.