Building Chickee
April 17, 1998

I know there are a lot of people out there scratching their heads wondering what Raiford Starke is doing in this newspaper. I know the editor doesn't understand it, because she tells me every day.

Prisoners seem to understand me, but they have the time to go deep into the Starke psyche. Now, they tell me I've been on the Internet. All over the fruited plain. The Chinese are probably talking about me.

I've been doing some serious self-examination, lately. Actually, the editor told me to. She just handed this column back to me and said something about taking out the egotism. She called me an "ego-maniac!" Hey, leggo my ego! I can't help it. Is it just plain dumb luck that I've reached this high on the journalism pinnacle in so short a time? Or is it because I know the Chief?

I got to tell you folks: It's been a long hard road to becoming the icon that I am now. It's been years and miles of ketchup and crackers, Miracle Whip sandwiches, Spam and yams, pawning guitars and amps to pay the electric bills. I was so poor, I had a sign in the outhouse begging users: "Please Don't Squeeze The Corncob." That is the kind of life I've lived.

The two points I'm trying to make, folks, is ONE nothing in this life comes easy and TWO I got to fill up some serious space between the ads here and I'm suffering from writer's block. But just keep reading and you'll see I won't give up. In the Starke family, we always remember the words of ol' Great granddaddy Stalag Starke: "Don't give up when times is hard, boy. Persevere! Paul Revere! Persevere!"

In other words, Great granddady was saying, "You cain't run with the big dogs 'less'n you git off'n the porch."

I been jumping off porches all my life. Before I came to Seminole Country, I tried to make it everywhere: Steubenville Ohio, Branson, Missouri, the Poconos, the Catskills, Dollywood, Vegas, Hollywood - yeah, that's right I'm talkin' Tinseltown, USA; Babylonia, baby! In the 70s. I landed there with a television pilot idea of my own: "The Gator Wrestling Nun." Man I even had the theme song for it:

A long time ago, she fell into a habit She saw it lyin' in the swamp and knew she had to grab it Now don't let yourself be sadly mistaken 'Cause she never broke the vows she had already taken Now she's having fun, she's on the run, she's the one, she's the one The Gator Wrestling Nun.

They say Jerry Reed liked the song, and Burt Reynolds took a good look at the first script, but decided Sally Field would do better with wings on her habit. So, I got me a ticket to Breaux Bridge, Louisiana and tried that Cajun-Amish-Zydeco thing for a while, with my new band "Raiford Starke and the Magic Mamou Mennonites". Except for scoring a couple of regional hits with "Jambalaya Shoo Fly Pie" and "Don't Gum that Gumbo, By Gum!" the red bean gravy-train ran out of gas. I finally left town on my own accordion.

Then it was off to Nashville, where I became a regular at Tootsies' Orchid Lounge and the Plasma Alliance. I diligently made the rounds up and down Music Row pitching my songs hoping to land a staff songwriting job or get a sweet publishing deal. I even wrote another verse to the "Nun:"

She called up the Pope on the telephone line

She dialed his number: VAT39

She said,"Hey John Paul, I need a special dispensation Cause I'm about to become the next gator wrestling sensation"

John Anderson -- yes THE John Anderson -- took me aside and told me like it was: "Raiford," he said, in that familiar drawl, "You are way ahead of your time. You need to go off somewhere and be real quiet until the time catches up to where you are at." Oh, I understood perfectly. "I'm just an old chunk of coal," I remember saying to him as I left, "But you just wait John, I'll be a diamond some day."

On the way out of town, I went down to Plasma Alliance to pick up a few extra bucks for bus fare, but they stopped me at the front door. My donor card had been revoked. "Sorry son," the receptionist told me. "You just aren't I.V. League material anymore." I panhandled a quarter from a blind man and placed a collect call to my old friend Joe Don down in Big Cypress, Florida. I first met him at helicopter pilot school a few years before. I only stayed for one class because the instructor felt my fear of heights might get in the way of my schooling.

"You need to get down here," Joe Don said. "The Chief is looking for a guitar-player to help him out with his music. This could be a good gig for you. "

"What kind of music is it?" "Swamp music," said Joe Don. "You can work on the chickees in between gigs."

Man, I was there. Music and chickees. I mean that was life. I could just imagine those long, dark haired sweet Seminole chickees out there in the swamp. I could feel myself basking in the Florida sun, and I dreamed all the way on the back seat of a Greyhound bus, rolling down highway 41. I felt motivated.

Just as my friend had promised, the gigs were a little sparse in the beginning. There were none for weeks. I was given a spot on a worn-out couch in a three bedroom house on the Dania Cut-off Canal, not far from where Joe Don said the Chief was born at a chimp farm.

The second day I was there I was awakened at 7 a.m. to loud German marching music blasting from the stereo. I thought either General Rommel had landed in Dania or that big fat weatherman was finally kicking Bryant Gumbel's butt live on the air. I stumbled into the kitchen area. There, this intense jackbooted white guy with a military haircut and a fiendish sadistic grin on his face was standing: "Rise and shine, Raiford!"

It was Bryan, the chief's business comptroller at the time. I heard about the guy from my pal Jeremiah. He said Bryan was always making people work and laughing about it. In fact, he was laughing at me right now. My dander started to rise

I gave him my best John Wayne. It came out like Don Knotts with cotton-mouth: "What you doin' here, man?" "You said you wanted to work on the chickees, right?" My face lit up."Uh yeah, right, that's right. The chickees. Do I have time for a shower? When can we meet them?" "Meet them?!" Bryan laughed like a banshee. "Why you're more gung-ho than I am! Right this way . . . uh you won't need a shower. " Jeremiah was wrong. This was a great guy. Bryan led me outside to a small wooded area adjacent to the house, and pointed to what looked like twenty or thirty logs ranging in lengths of ten to twenty feet. "These are cypress logs." He handed me a hatchet and tool that was basically a 12 inch blade with a wooden handle at either end. "Start peelin' " he said. "Uh . . . Bryan, my man . . . where are the chickees?" Bryan looked at me real weird. He took me aside, away from the other workers. "The chickees are right here," he waved his hands over the logs and a tall pile of palmetto fronds. He spoke very slow to me. "They just aren't assembled yet. But that's what we do. By tonight we should have four chickees."

'Uh, I'm not into that, Bryan. One will be just fine," I said. But a sinking feeling was coming over me. A slow realization began burning into my brain. Life was not so good, after all. I was going to have to work for a living. I began scraping the logs. Pretty soon we were a crew of about 12 people in a couple of trucks hauling all this "chickee material" to Cocoa.

We reached the campus of Brevard Community College, where we erected a whole village of thatched roof dwellings on the shore of Clear Lake. When it was time to put up the "A" frame that shaped the roofs it took a tall person to stand all alone on a 2-by-6 cat-walk to hold together the ends of cypress poles nail them together. Guess who was elected for that job?

Standing on tippy toes, hammer banging the bar chords right out of my fingers, Bryan leaning against the truck laughing, Jeremiah telling me "I told you so," and not a single "chick" in sight, a depression settled over me. I had been perched on the brink of superstardom in Nashville, Tennessee and now I was impersonating my old Mexican friend Manual Labor. Suddenly, a short guy in an Indian jacket and bow legs drove up in a big truck. Singing "Kumbayah" and smoking a cigar, he walked around looking at the structures we had built.

"It's good," he said, puffing on the cigar. "Who's the tall guy?"

"That's Raiford Starke, Chief," Bryan laughed. "He came down here looking for chickees and he's done found them."

The Chief said some funny things that the editor won't allow in the newspaper.

"Tomorrow, we go cypress tree hunting." Bryan said as we left.

Sure, I thought. Sure. Maybe we'll even see the Gator Wrestling Nun. (Next Issue: Cypress Tree Hunting)

-- The views of Raiford Starke are not necessarily the views of this newspaper.

© April 17, 1998, The Seminole Tribune