The houseguest who wouldn’t leave

ims to have been the last man ever to dance with Judy Garland. The place was the Salvation club, in New York City. The time was late November 1968. Of course, the Rev. Goat Carson was not a reverend back then. He wasn’t even a Native American yet. He described the Judy Garland encounter as “dancing with a soft little marshmallow with legs.” Very soon thereafter she flew to London, last stop before booking a package tour with a chirpy group of bluebirds over the rainbow.

Unfortunately, Goat saved a dance for me. We first met in 1976 in L.A., where Goat got his name. It had been given to him a few years earlier, along with adult-size portions of smoke and mushrooms, by a medicine man named Yippee!, a Yaqui Indian from Acapulco. Yippee! took the then-21-year-old David Carson on a “vision quest” to show him that music was the power that would change the world. “You’re a Native American,” said Yippee!, and Goat told him truthfully that he was part Cherokee. That was good enough for Yippee! apparently, who then led the young Goat to the Sunset Strip, where he introduced him to the members of a band called the Doors and one called Iron Butterfly.

Somewhere in the middle of this vision quest, everything seemed to stop. Goat saw a light pulsating in his chest and realized that he was outside of time and body, watching himself in a movie. “I feel like I have the power to do anything,” he said.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“Then go on and try,” said Yippee!. “Your name will be Goat, and that will stand for ‘Go on and try.’” With varying degrees of success, Goat has ever since.

I had drifted out to L.A. myself, trying to get a record deal peddling a living-room tape of my band, the Texas Jewboys. Goat was living out of his car, parking it at night at Errol Flynn’s house. We met as a result of both of us hanging out with Bob Dylan. (Half the Free World was hanging out with Bob Dylan at that time.) Goat proved to be a visionary, a veteran soul imbued with a deep, mystical nature that often manifested itself precisely when the chips were down.

Eventually, I lost touch with Goat. We didn’t see each other for almost 23 years.

Two summers ago, I wasn’t even aware that Goat had moved to New Orleans or that he’d become an ordained street preacher. It would require an act of God to bring us together again. An act of God in the form of a woman. Her name was Katrina.

Thus it was that on Aug. 28, in the year of our Lord 2005, I received an urgent call from the man who was to become my personal evacuee for the next two years.

Goat showed up at my house in Austin in much worse shape than I’d expected. A complete emotional wreck, he walked in with nothing but the clothes on his back, a satchel containing various gris-gris concoctions, and a small bundle of sacred rabbit furs that were eaten by my dogs when I took Goat out for Mexican food. The next day we both watched New Orleans die on television.Goat had gotten out just in time.

I took Goat up to my Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch, near Kerrville, Texas, in high hopes that he might do some work with the animals. He shared some of their background, being homeless, stray, traumatized perhaps. I thought, This could be a cathartic experience. These hopes were dashed quite early, however. My evacuee, so he informed me as he proceeded to decimate my liquor cabinet, did not believe in work. The credo of his flock, the Black Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans, was “Always for Pleasure.” This did not bode well, I thought, but trying to tell a homeless person to go home is almost like trying to run for governor of Texas as an independent, which is what I was busy doing. In the days, weeks, and months to come, Goat seemed to become happier and happier while I began to wake up every morning in a dark, suicidal rage. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. Let’s go back to Early Times, and I don’t mean the whiskey. That was already gone.

If you’re going to be an evacuee, I told Goat, you’ve got to dress like an evacuee. We went through my wardrobe of eclectic, perhaps over-the-top items, many of which I’d hung on to for sentimental reasons. Almost all of them seemed to fit Goat well, so I said, “Take what you like,” and he did. He cut such a fine figure, indeed, that when the Kerrville Daily Times interviewed him, they put his large photo on Page One, wearing all of my clothes from head to toe, including rattlesnake boots with the rattlers’ heads still attached. I wasn’t really envious; it was just a bit unnerving watching Goat strut around the house in all his uncircumcised glory, drinking beer for breakfast in my favorite bathrobe (given to me by Miss Texas 1987) all the while singing “Big Balls in Cowtown.”

Then there was the matter of the telephone. Since I’ve always believed the Internet to be the work of Satan, the phone remained my lifeline to the world, especially in the heated last months of the gubernatorial race. Goat was monopolizing it like a one-man Jerry Lewis telethon. Not only were most of the calls and messages seemingly for him, but he was also racking up phone bills during all hours of the night calling his many musician friends and other members of the modern diaspora.

I hated to be an insensitive host, but I needed the phone as well. Cousin Nancy (of Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch) and I had been working frantically to save 24 greyhounds trapped in a New Orleans attic by rising floodwaters. Now Goat began a frenetic series of calls to Dr. John, Levon Helm, the Neville Brothers, and many other musical luminaries, telling them Kinky was bringing 24 greyhounds out of New Orleans. As Goat yapped on and on, I confess to have been basking somewhat in the sunlight of my good works. The truth, unfortunately, did not reveal itself for several more days, when Goat turned to me in my favorite Billy Joe Shaver T-shirt and asked, “When are the greyhounds getting here?”

“We’re working on it,” I said. “Cousin Nancy’s gotta make room at the rescue ranch for 24 more dogs.”

“The greyhounds are dogs?” said Goat, removing my reading glasses from his nose in astonishment.

“Yes, Goat,” I said patiently. “The greyhounds are dogs.”

“Jesus with jugs,” said Goat. “I thought they were buses.”

Things went downhill from there. The care and feeding of Goat became more all-consuming, tedious, and expensive with each passing week. Not that Goat wasn’t a soulful, talented, well-intentioned man, not to mention a man of the cloth. It was just that the cloth, in his case, was a little coarse. It was not unusual for him to drink a case of beer a day. At dinner parties and restaurants he would sometimes take his teeth out and make loud, obnoxious spitting and snartin’ noises into his hands, creating a New Orleans beatbox.

He often would endlessly describe sexual desires toward women in television commercials, and he was always providing running commentary on all bodily functions in colorful, though somewhat graphic, language, such as “letting the possum out.”

When Goat was not on the phone at my desk, he busied himself sitting in my chair, wearing a terrific Hawaiian shirt I’d forgotten I had, drinking beer, and watching the History Channel with almost pathological persistence. He moved so little, I worried, in fact, that Goat might himself evolve into a historical artifact. I had never personally been responsible for the health, education, and welfare of an evacuee, but still, I couldn’t see how sleeping, drinking beer, and watching the History Channel was ever going to get Goat off his ass and back to New Orleans.

It was time for tough love.

I assigned Goat the daunting task of being the nanny for my five dogs, the Friedmans. Some say the Friedmans are spoiled rotten, difficult, demanding dogs, but this is not precisely true. They are merely older dogs who, like older people, have become set in their ways. Soon the Friedmans could be seen following Goat like a flock over the hills and valleys of the ranch. Perky, Mr. Magoo, Brownie, Chumley, and Fly all seemed to be quite fond of Goat and to accept him, more or less, as their spiritual leader. Goat himself fed this religious fervor by dressing the part. Wearing my black Willie Nelson sweatshirt with the hood over his head and carrying a large staff, he looked like a cross between a biblical shepherd and the grim reaper.

It was during this time of relative harmony, though, that the fate monkeys struck again. Goat, who now was “wee-wee-weeing,” to use his term, and letting the possum out approximately every five minutes, received yet another blow to his fragile physical constitution. When I returned from town one day, he informed me that, during his fitful slumbers the previous night, a spider, apparently, had bitten him where the sun never shines.

This amused me greatly, which only plunged my evacuee into depression. He took his Indian knife and cut up half of my aloe plants and applied the natural elixir directly to the spider bite. He then proceeded to pillage what was left of my Jameson Irish Whiskey, applying equal portions both rectally and by mouth. He claimed that the healing process had begun, but in the morning I noticed the level of my Listerine bottle had dropped precipitously and the cap was loose, causing me to spill the rest of it all over myself and causing me, as well, to curse my evacuee, who’d just rounded the corner carrying a large flagon of Kona coffee and leaving, I noticed, a very small amount in the pot. His spider bite was doing much better, he reported.

Goat is gone now. Early in the summer of the second year, the day came when Goat received an offer he couldn’t refuse. He had been invited back to New Orleans by Xavier University to teach a course on—what else?—the Black Mardi Gras Indians.

I must say I almost miss him. Any house pest will get on your nerves after two years. Particularly if the person has been the victim of what must certainly be considered one of our country’s greatest modern tragedies.

Goat indubitably did his best, not only cooking at times for the Friedmans but also serving up great New Orleans–style meals for both of us. He also labored in the important task of West Coast Under-Assistant Hummingbird Man, helping his host with his only hobby, feeding the hummingbirds.

You can’t ask much more of your fellow man.

From a longer article published by Texas Monthly. Used with permission. All rights reserved.