I remember dropping off at Shakey Ray’s Cook Shack for the last time.  

It was near the end of Ray’s life.  By that time he had stopped shooting eight balls and smoking crack. 

Ray had an interesting story that is worth telling. My complete biography of Shakey Ray will be published on Kindle in the spring of 2024. I’ll cover a few highlights. 

Ray started off as a chicken sexer in southern Arkansas, then had a sudden epiphany at age 17 and drove himself to the Culinary Institute of America up in Hyde Park, New York, where he graduated in 1971. 

Instead of telling me stories about his chef training, on my last visit, he preferred to talk about his drive to New York that year. He recalled taking the back roads on the way up and hitting all of the road side mailboxes he encountered with a baseball bat.  They were putting off a magnetic pulse, he said.  He was pretty sure he had gotten every one of them. 

After chef school he was seized with an undercurrent of depravity and for a few years hooked up with a guy named Bob.  Bad Bob, he called him. Not Dirty Bad Bob, the Mexican, but the original Bad Bob.  They commenced to stealing cars, after which they would run them out of gas and then set them on fire. Ray’s memory was that when the cars were engulfed in flames Bob would throw down a prayer rug and pray this prayer: “May the divine Vishnu whose momentum none can stop, bless us for all of our well-being.” Apparently Bob was bad but he wasn’t all bad. 

Ray had a habit of wearing sunglasses twenty-four seven. One time I asked him if he could see anything at night and he explained, “the big show is going on inside of my head.” No doubt his artistry was wrought from the lunacy.  

Later on in life there was a subsequent bout with bad chemicals which led him into his self described “constructive anguish” period. He emerged from this phase as a window licker and then moved on to a job as a fire watcher and fish squeezer. By that time Ray’s co-hort Bad Bob had turned good but had gotten a job committing suicide. 

Anyway, Ray went on the invent the steptronic transmission for Ferrari and the Bogan Diode before he invented Stormy Night Frog Leg Pate’ which launched him back into the food shack realm of cheffing and made him eternally famous.  

One night while  wrestling an alligator turtle in the river Ray got sucked into a whirlpool.  His son, Schmetterling, a vegan jogger who had invented byaldi vegetables and the Hilary Clinton Nut Cracker, jumped in after him.  They both perished.  

Noops Bogan, Ray’s second cousin, an anemic, well dressed musician and chef who is a former member of Kinky Friedman’s band, “The Texas Jew Boys,” took over the cook shack following Ray’s death. 

Most people are unaware that Noops wrote Kinky’s hit song, “They Don’t Make Jews Like Jesus Anymore” or at least he claims he did.  The Noopster rocked the culinary world recently when he originated a new pig snout scrapple that happens to be featured in this month’s issue of Food and Wine magazine.  Check it  out.