jackassworld

My father’s best friend on this planet is Jackie Gilbert, and these two together are quite a pair. I often compare them to Jack Kerouac (Sal Paradise) and Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) in On The Road, with outlaw country and western in the place of jazz. My father is the storyteller, Kerouac, and Jackie is his “gasoline”, Cassady. I mention On The Road but it is more distinctly southern than that. They are Cormac McCarthy at his absolute best: southern gothic masterpieces. But they have one thing on their side that separates them from fiction—the truth.

Jackie has led an unbelievable life. He first ran away from home as a young child on the back of a donkey because he wanted to go to Texas and become a cowboy. Ha ha ha… Needless to say he didn’t make it to Dallas, but that sense of adventure never left him. He has hitchhiked all across the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Africa. He was a damn good pro middleweight fighter who fought on the same cards as Sugar Ray Robinson. He worked a very, very brief time as a cop in Sevier County, joined the carnival as a motorcycle daredevil, and was a self-taught explosives “expert” (you can imagine the results). He is also a licensed flight instructor who taught my father how to fly, and a crop-duster who crashed over fourteen times in his career.

My father was a magnet for larger than life characters. They were drawn to him and he to them. He employed most of them at his tire company in the Mcannally Flats, at the time Knoxville’s roughest section. There was Big Sam, Big George, Leroy White, SD (Super Dick), Ass-Kicking Robert, and Woodrow Wilson “Boxcar” Johnson, Jr.—just to name a few. And the ones that didn’t work for him came there to hear my father’s stories. Once dad finished with his oratories, that’s when the pranks would begin. He would stage fake gunfights at Christmas parties, make his employees Ex-Lax milk shakes, or send them letters from the “VD clinic” telling them they had contracted a venereal disease. It never stopped and to this day neither has my father—or Jackie for that matter. Although they are on in the years, that fire still crackles and pops. The flame is a little lower now, but it burns just as bright.

Here is an interview Dimitry Elyaskevich and I did with my father Phil Clapp and his best friend Jackie Gilbert in September of 2008. It’s a story of friendship and two lives lived to the brim. I hope one day mine will measure up, but that’s just a fantasy. These two are the originals and I am just a fawning copy.

Love,

Phil Clapp’s son, Johnny Knoxville