A Lying Dog Has No Fleas
December 18, 1998

I was makin' my livin' playin' rock n' roll/ She was lookin' at his portfolio/ Now I know why she don't pick up the phone/ She's out on the town chasin' Mr. Dow Jones/ Stockbroker took my girl . . .

Somewhere back in time, I went to the jungles of Big Cypress. I kind of liked the place. I got high trying to stay alive, dreaming of the girl I left behind. After a while, though, she wasn't accepting any more collect phone calls. She stopped wiring me cash. Something was terribly wrong. "She was hangin' out in them smoky bars, smokin' them big Don Kilmo cigars . . ."

Next thing I know, I'm driving for what seems like an eternity back up that ol' rebel highway, with my heart pounding through my chest, my sweaty hands locked in a white-knuckled death-grip around the steering wheel, my foot in the carburetor and that hammering homicidal theme banging in my brain: "She told him all my secrets/ Now he knows where to tread/ That stockbroker thinks he's in the black/ Well I'm gonna put him in the re-e-ed!"

Finally, I passed a sign that read STARKANSAW 210 MILES. With less than two hours to go, I kept chanting that mantra: "Stockbroker took my girl. Stockbroker took my girl. Stockbroker, stockbroker. Stockbroker, stockbroker. Stockbroker took my girl . . ."

My train of thought was rudely interrupted by the wailing sireen of the House of Blue Lights in my rear view mirror. Great. Not only was I going two times the speed limit, but my license had been revoked months ago. That would mean automatic jail time for ol' Raiford Starke. I pulled over to the side of the road.

The deputy walked up: "Where's your license and registration?" "Uh, I don't have any," I said. "You what, boy ?!" His face was turning as red as his neck. " Don't you got any ID? Empty your wallet!"

I emptied my wallet all over the hood of his car. He picked up a folded piece of paper - a printout of my Florida driving record. He looked like he was ready to blow a head gasket: "You got outstanding tickets all over the dang place!"

My mind was racing like a North Carolina bootlegger. All I could think of was being locked in a cold dark cell with Mike Tyson's double gnawing off my ear. Before I knew it, words were leaping out of my mouth: "Please sir, I got to get home to see my mother. She's dying, and she might not last through the weekend. I promise I'll show up in court. I've just got to see my mother one more time."

The deputy was silent "What she got?" he said. "Cancer."

I couldn't believe what I just laid on him, but I was desperate. The deputy was silent again. Then he looked at me. There was more silence followed by a long, agonized sigh.

"Okay, Mr. Starke, I'm going to give you a ticket for speeding - 65 in a 55 mile-per-hour zone. And then I'm going to let you go and pretend like I never saw you drive away. And, one more thing Mr. Starke." He said with a flinty stare, "if you're lying about your mother just to get out of going to jail . . ." His eyes got even colder: "then you're a rotten S.O.B. I'll get you again another day!"

The officer drove away, and this rotten S.O.B. made it back home to Starkansaw where my mother, alive and well, served me apple pie and ice cream.

Years later, just last week, that "incident" resurfaced in a strange place - Room 2141 of the Rayburn Justice Office Building in Washington D.C. I had been subpoenaed as an "expert witness" on behalf of my old bandmate and frat buddy Bill "Bubba" Clinton. The subject was "the truth." I willingly poured out my guts to the Judiciary Committee, explaining how I really didn't lie to the deputy that day."

"Well, how can a baldfaced lie be the truth? " Chairman Henry Hyde pressed me. Quite simple: "First of all, if we accept the premise that all of us, from the day we are born, begin to die until we finally expire, then you could say that I was telling the officer the truth when I said my mother was dying. Similarly, since most of us have no idea when we will actually die - i.e. you could get hit by a truck and die tomorrow for all you know - then I was actually truthful when I told the officer my mother could be dead by the weekend."

Then I went into the American Heritage Dictionary definition of "cancer," described in that book as as "a pernicious, spreading evil." "Now some of us may look at something like television as a 'cancer' on society," I told the Committee. "Since television has been a part of the Starke family household as far back as I can remember, one could say I was also being truthful when I said my mother had cancer, since she did actually own a TV set at the time."

"But isn't that dancing on the head of a pin? Isn't that semantics or verbal gymnastics?" Chairman Hyde asked me.

"No Mr. Speaker," I said "it's the truth. And the truth always lies . . . wherever you can find it."

I looked around the room at all the slack-jawed committee members. The silence was deafening. I could hear the President's lawyer David Kendall whisper a thumbs up in my ear, "You really put that one out of the park, kid."

Then I heard Rep. John Conyers' slow moving voice. "Uh-h . . . Mr. Speaker . . . I move . . . that we make "Stockbroker Took My Girl" . . . by Mr. Starke here . . . a part of the Congressional Record."

From the back of the room, a familiar voice yelled out: "Your honor, I object."

I cringed. It was my old bandmate Pete from Sunset Beach. He pushed past the guards and grabbed the podium. "That's a lie. Mr. Starke did not write that song. I wrote it."

I stood and confronted him. The cameras were clicking away. "Stockbroker took MY girl, pal," I reminded him. "Your girl ran off with some bird man."

"Yeah, but I wrote those verses," Pete shot back. "Raiford Starke you're a liar."

I looked around the room and spoke past Pete, to the world in general. For this was another fat one coming across the plate. I swung: "Well now, my friend, you may have written some of the verses, but I wrote the song. That's no lie. I didn't say I wrote all the verses, did I? A song is a collection of verses. As the assembler or builder of the song, I am the songwriter. You sir, call me a liar but in fact YOU are a thief. A thief of words. You stole words you did not own from the English language and fashioned them into verses that in and unto themselves have no conceptual meaning until they are assembled into a song by the songwriter. Me!

"Mr. Speaker. We have a conflict here. There is friction in the air. This is a clear case of TRUTH being stranger than friction. Please have this man removed from chambers."

Sad. They carried Pete out kicking and screaming.

"Home run," the President's lawyer winked at me. Then he picked up the phone and I heard him say, "Hey Bill Bubba, your guy Starke is really comin' through for us. I'd like to put him on staff as a . . . uh . . .a presidential truth consultant. We can learn from this guy."

-- Raiford Starke is a bluesman living in Fort Lauderdale.

© December 18, 1998, The Seminole Tribune