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known, so if anybody brought a friend to my room, I'm sure they were warned
before they came in—”Don't say the 'N-word' and don't smoke tobacco.”
Looking back on it, the tobacco rule led to one of my grossest ego wipeouts.
It happened when I had the writer Kinky Friedman 25 up to visit in Room 723
after I moved up there. Now, I was friends with Herbert Huncke, the old Beat
writer. Huncke wanted me to meet Kinky Friedman. I was a Southern guy and I
was always drunk and always talking shit, and evidently I had impressed Hun-
cke and his friends with my Southernality. So these guys thought I might want to
meet Kinky Friedman.
I knew who Kinky Friedman was. I knew about his band, Kinky Friedman
and the Texas Jew Boys. I knew that he also wrote detective novels. I had even
read some of them, but books are like toilet paper to me—use 'em and consume
'em—and to be honest, I thought he was a hack as a writer. I was just a pompous
little ass. So finally Kinky Friedman came up to my room.
In all of his books, Friedman mentions that he doesn't like people who won't
let him smoke cigars in their houses. And here I am, the guy who will only let
people smoke weed in his room at the Chelsea. If people smoked tobacco—I
didn't care if there was a blizzard outside—they had to go out on the balcony. So
when Kinky was in my room, I wouldn't let him smoke his cigar, but then I went
ahead and rolled this big fat joint and lit it up. It killed him.
We got into a disagreement about the history of my room. Kinky took issue
with my saying that 723 had been Janis Joplin's room. But Stanley Bard him-
self told me that Janis had lived in my room. Stanley also told me that one night
someone painted, “Janis, you are the best fuck I ever had,” on 723's door. This
someone had been pissed at her
And then, later on, in one of his books, Kinky Friedman made a point of say-
ing that Janis Joplin's room at the Chelsea was some other room, not my room,
723. Which is definitely not true.
In this way, Kinky got his revenge on me. After I read that, I always felt like
writing him a letter.
The ironic thing is that now I smoke cigarettes. About a pack a day.
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