I never thought much about the real "New York Ratso". In the back of my mind I knew he was a real person, but he was most vivid to me as one of Kinky Friedman's Vandam Street Irregulars, a guy who kibitzed with Kinky while dining on "pawk" at Big Wong's.
Today I was under the weather and turned to my underused Netflix subscription to watch Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song. And lo! There was Ratso, dressed very much as Kinky described him sharing very incisive and insightful reminiscences about Leonard Cohen and his music.
After immersing myself in Kinky Friedman's mystery novels as anodyne for my homesickness for OLV and its vanishing neighborhood, I reflected on how often Kinky mentioned Jesus, sometimes as blasphemy and sometimes in biblical reflection. I thought that Leonard Cohen ambitiously scaled the slope to the sublime and that Kinky Friedman stumbled up the other face of that peak, the one with the trail marked "Ridiculous." Well, I don't know if they met in real life. If they did I have no idea whether they liked each other or not. At any rate, Leonard and Kinky are now brothers in song at the summit. Larry "Ratso" Sloman spent considerable time with both and still walks this earth. That is a comfort to me.
Yeah! Sometimes I take a break from trying to hold on to churches and parishes.
No comments:
Post a Comment