Formal Introductions

Rawkin Ken 

Pleased to meet you.

I was christened William Kennedy Burchenal in Clearwater, Florida, and I’m sticking with it, though I haven’t always. I have been called Rock Bottom, Will Bell, Jurgen Ramonasson, and Virgil Mountebone, but most of my friends call me Ken. I currently make my home in Austin, Texas, though it’ll probably be a couple decades before the natives stop treating me like a yankee.

I started talking when I was seven months old, but wasn’t very good at it for a few months. Since I was a big baby, people out the world assumed the slobbering, babbling oaf my little Mama was hauling around on her hip was retarded. Sweet, but pretty slow for a kid that looked almost two. Things have changed. I can talk pretty good now.

I was told as a kid to be proud I was born a “Florida Cracker” because the first settlers of the state drove mule teams and were famous for their dexterity with whips. This seemed manly and righteous to me. It wasn’t until I had traveled by myself some when I was fifteen that I found out what everybody else in the world thought crackers were. Dr. King had been shot a few years before by what I now recognized as a crazy cracker; crackers have few and generally ugly teeth; crackers spit more than they swallow; crackers are perverts who screw their siblings and marry their cousins.

All this left me with a decidedly ambiguous attitude toward my culture of birth.

Cracker? Yes, I confess I love moss, the insistent kick of a 12 gauge, phallic architecture, being polite, even before a fight, one stoplight co-op towns left behind on the old road, Co’Cola and peanuts in a sea-green bottle, Hee Haw, the nobility and integrity of Robt. E. Lee, the hair of Andrew Jackson, and South o’ the Border sombrero ashtrays. I regularly say “y’all” and “fixin” and “yonder” without irony.

Cracker? Perhaps, but: I haven’t personally killed any animals but rats, fish, and the occasional squirrel since I was in my teens; I haven’t told a racist joke since second grade when I made a classmate cry; okra is disgusting unless heavily battered and deep fried, and then it’s merely tolerable; all pickled pig parts should be thrown to the cats; I will eat the tail but I ain’t sucking any more heads; I can’t take more than ten consecutive minutes of traditional bluegrass, even when I know it’s brilliant; I have a truck, but it’s a Mazda; I know a whole bunch of four syllable words that weren’t adapted from the Native American words for “dark river” or “the hill next to the big hill” or some such; I don’t know any preachers by name, and I can no longer recite the 12 steps of A.A.

Every night from the time I was six until I grew pubes, I went to sleep to the local radio station, WFLA. All through my childhood, AM radio stations – at least in the South - played Hank, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Loretta, Bobby Gentry, Glen Campbell, the Man in Black, but also Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Sergio Mendez, Petula Clark, Martha and the Vandellas, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Streisand, and Otis Redding, right next to Chuck Berry, Dylan, the Beatles, Stones, Doors, Herman’s Hermits, Hendrix, and Slow Hand. It wasn’t till later that I was able to tell the pop from the not; I had no reason to take Dylan more seriously than the Cowsills or the Beatles more seriously than the Monkees. I see this as an asset, otherwise I wouldn’t still know the lyrics to “The Ballad of the Red Baron.”

The first song I learned how to play was “Down in the Valley,” the second was “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and I wrote the third. It had something to do with taking someone – I’m guessing a beautiful baby – to a “picture show” to win her “sweet lovin’.” I was eleven and hadn’t seen a naked breast except in National Geographic, but I was sure that I wanted to do something in the dark with someone willing.

I have been a dishwasher, lifeguard, dope dealer, teacher, psychiatric orderly, cowboy, roofer, desk clerk, pizza chef, paperboy, caterer, landscaper, creative consultant, recording engineer, cyber entrepreneur, and a sailor. I have sold knives, pianos, water purifiers, ideas, songs, and time. I owe the IRS 50k and the student loan administration a hundred large. I have a guitar that spends a lot more time in pawn than on stage. I inherited some money about ten years ago, bought a house and some stocks and have been broke ever since. Yesterday I was paid $12 an hour to pull rotten fascia off an apartment building; last week I was paid $100 for singing my songs. Today, I am between engagements, but something will turn up, namely the next semester and another couple hundred units of America’s future.

I have raised three children, married two women, buried loved ones, earned a PhD, burned down a gas station, saved a 200 pound Canadian woman from drowning, swam with wild dolphins, sharks, and mantas, seen real magic, looked into the wrong end of a pistol, sold blood for money, had the same pair of Red Wings since I was eighteen, shot rapids, stop lights, and junk, been forgiven for unforgivable wrongs, made and lost ten grand in a month, slept in the Plaza 5th Avenue and in my asthmatic Impala and in a bed roll above the high tide line. I don’t understand how someone could have a favorite color. I fly in my dreams, but always close to the ground. I am both more and less boring than I seem, like everyone else.

Enough of this; more later.

Pleased to meet you.