Let Me Off at the Top!: My Classy Life and Other Musings (2 page)

Judging by what I have written here I can say with all confidence she heard my plaintive cries that raw night up on that tourist trap of a peak in the San Bernardino Mountains.

Now, I’m not going to lie, a searching evaluation of who I am has been an ordeal, not just for me but for those closest to me. It’s been hard on my wife, Veronica, and Baxter, my dog, and for anyone who lives within screaming distance of my house and for law enforcement personnel. I went all in on this quest for self-discovery. William Thackeray Thoreau once said, “Desperate men lead lives of quiet songs that are left unsung when they do end up in their cold tombs.” Something like that. Anyway, the point is you only go around once and you really need to go for the gold!

I can tell you this: There were a lot of people out there
who didn’t think it was such a good idea to write a book. I know stuff about certain people and let’s just say that sometimes knowledge can be dangerous. When word got out I was writing a “tell-all” book there were attempts made on my life! This is serious business. Most men would have run for the hills. Not me; I welcome the challenge. There is a chance I may have to go into hiding after this book comes out. I can’t say where I will disappear to but more than likely it will be my cabin I purchased with George C. Scott’s cousin. Its location can never be known. Scott’s cousin is never there and it’s less rustic than you think, with a pool table and full bar as well as a washer-dryer combo, and it’s within walking distance to the Big Bear Lake general store.

Death threats are an occupational hazard of course for us anchormen. I’m very comfortable living each minute with the expectation of being attacked. It’s been many years since JFK told me he used to enjoy Marilyn Monroe from behind while Joe DiMaggio looked on in the corner. The main players have all left the stage, so perhaps now is the time to speak out without fear of reprisal. Maybe telling the truth is more important than any danger I may face. Then again, maybe the truth has nothing to do with it. Maybe I just don’t like it when people say, “Ron, you can’t write a book, you don’t have the courage,” or “Ron, you can’t write a book, you don’t know how to type,” or “Ron, have you ever even read a book?” It’s the naysayers who get me. I like surprising people. I always have. I think everyone in the world took it for granted that I would not have the balls to write this book. I’ve got the balls, big hairy misshapen balls in a wrinkly sack. This book is a testament
to my giant balls. If you want some feel-good story about how to live your life, then go look elsewhere. This book is a hard-hitting, no-holds-barred, unafraid account of my exceptional life with some words of wisdom thrown in for good measure. You won’t find a lot of fluff here. If you’re looking for fluff to take to the beach, check out the Holy Bible. This ain’t that book.

So who am I? That’s what this book is about. Over the next eight hundred pages (unless some bitch of an editor gets ahold of it with his clammy hands and snotty nose) I will let you in on a very big secret: my life. Of course some of it isn’t such a secret. Some of it you know already. I’m a man. A News Anchor. A lover. Husband. A friend to animals on land and at sea. A handsome devil. A connoisseur of fine wine. I have one of the classiest collections of driftwood art in the world. I can throw a Wham-O Frisbee if I have to, but I prefer not to. I love the outdoors. Nature drives me nuts. I make pancakes for anyone who asks. I take long nude walks on the beach. I play jazz flute, not for business but for pleasure. I’m a world-class water-ski instructor. I don’t care a lick about the fashion world, although they seem to care an awful lot about me. My best friend is a dog named Baxter. I’m quite famous. I’m a history buff. I collect authentic replications of Spanish broadswords. I smoke a pipe on occasion, not for profit but for pleasure. I’ve been known to sing out loud at weddings and funerals. I’m a collector of puns. I have over three hundred handcrafted shoes of all sizes. I don’t give a damn about broccoli. I believe all men have the right to self-pleasure. I carry a picture of Buffy Sainte-Marie in my wallet and I’m not
even Catholic. My favorite drink is scotch. My second-favorite drink is a Hairy Gaylord. I’m affiliated with at least a hundred secret societies; some of them, like the Knights of Thunder, will kill you just for printing their name. I adore tits. I will never be persuaded to try yogurt. I’m allergic to fear. Other men have fallen in love with me in a sexual way and that’s okay. I have mixed feelings about bicycles. My handmade fishing lures are sought after by fly-fishermen the world over. I’ve never been one for blue jeans. Sandals on another man have been known to make me vomit. My Indian name is Ketsoh Silaago. My French name is Pierre Laflume. I can never tell anyone about what happened in Youngstown, Ohio, one January night. There are no other people who look like me on this planet; I’ve looked. Babies, bless their souls, give me the creeps. I own a chain of hobby stores in the Twin Cities I have never seen. I once ate a ham dinner and then realized it was not ham. People tell me I look like Mickey Rooney. Woody the Woodpecker cracks me up every time. That’s the basic stuff; now prepare yourself for the journey—the journey into an extraordinary life.

The story we were told as children went something like this.… On June 27, 1844, Joseph Smith, the great Mormon martyr, and his brother Hyrum were killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois. In the middle of the mob was a smooth opportunist named Franklin Haggleworth. Haggleworth was on his way to Keokuk, Iowa, and the Mississippi River to cheat people out of money. As the mob grew outside the jail where Smith and his brother were held, Haggleworth stirred up the crowd with anti-Mormon slogans and songs. Up to that point the crowd had been a peaceful assembly of reasonable people willing to discuss whether Smith or his brother had
transgressed any laws. Haggleworth saw an opening. With his honey-tongued skill for oratory he was able to cajole the law-abiding citizenry into a frenzied pack of murderers. Within minutes of his opening his mouth, the crowd stormed the jail and shot the two brothers. Haggleworth ran off to the Mormon camp to report the sad news that their leader had been shot. Feigning sympathy with the now-distraught Mormons, he produced a dirty dinner plate and proclaimed Joseph Smith himself had given it to him right before his death. According to Haggleworth it was the last plate given to Smith by the angel Moroni. But unlike the plates Smith “translated,” this new plate had never been translated. Pretending to read the plate, a fairly crappy piece of pottery that sits in the Haggleworth Museum to this day, he told the crowd that a new religion would be born out of Mormonism—a new religion dedicated to worshipping the penis of Mr. Franklin Haggleworth. He went on to explain that this new religion required up to twelve but no less than three women “who didn’t have to be virgins because that seemed kind of overused” to frequently see to the needs of his ever-demanding penis. For the most part the men and women in the Mormon settlement were not convinced of Haggleworth’s “vision.” But try and remember—this was a strange part of American history and folks were dropping everything to follow men with heaven-born plates. There were nudist colonies and polygamist silverware-making colonies and people going to séances left and right—not like now, when reason holds sway. This was a wildly superstitious time and so it should come as no surprise that eight women of various ages believed the plate and followed
Haggleworth up the river to worship his penis. He landed on a bald, shale-covered scrap of earth not far from the river in northeastern Iowa. Because it could not be farmed Haggleworth was able to buy the property for a dollar and fifty cents. Three days into the new colony, tragedy struck. A great famine overtook the settlers, so the angel ordered Haggleworth to send some of his women to the river to worship other men’s penises for money and food. It worked! Haggleworth was in business! A steady stream of boatmen beat a path to Haggleworth’s church of penis worship over the next thirty years. Haggleworth lived to the ripe old age of forty-eight and died with a boner. That’s what we were told anyway growing up in Haggleworth.

About ten years after Haggleworth’s death, the Valley Coal and Iron Company bought the town for seventy-five cents and began mining for coal. Although the company changed hands many times over the next fifty years, Standard Oil of Iowa took over the operations in 1922 and successfully mined forty miles of intersecting tunnels of coal beneath the town. In 1940, the year I was born, Latham Nubbs flicked a half-chewed, still-lit stogie into the street outside of Kressler’s Five and Dime and the town of Haggleworth caught on fire—a fire that still burns to this day. Deadly carbon monoxide gas and plumes of hell-spawned black smoke appear and disappear at random. The smell of sulfur, literally the smell of Satan himself, permeates the air, sending visitors and lost strangers to emergency rooms all over the state. In 1965 the governor of Iowa, Harold Hughes, condemned the town and relocated its remaining twenty-eight residents.

I was born into a simpler time. Environmental concerns wouldn’t come into play until hippies and weirdos started crawling the earth. For us, growing up in Haggleworth, the fires were a way of life, a hazard like any other. The smell went unnoticed because it’s what we knew. The black smoke rising from the hot earth was a daily reminder of the hell pit below the surface. I was born into this town of three hundred hardheaded Iowans whose only way of life was mining, and of course drinking and burning to death. Mining was especially hard because of the fire, and drinking wasn’t any easier, also because of the fire. The more you drank alcohol, the more likely your chance of igniting yourself. It was a cruel irony, but the only way to stave off that horrible impending feeling of one day burning to death was to drink more … a vicious circle, really, but one we enjoyed with gusto.

In this carefree community the Burgundys were a proud clan. Claude and Brender Burgundy had eight boys. I was the last one born. The plain fact of the matter is we all hated each other equally. There were no alliances within the family. It was every man for himself. The day I was born was the day I received my first sock in the face. My brother Lonny Burgundy smacked me the first time he saw me. I couldn’t speak yet, as I was only a few minutes old, but I do remember thinking to myself, “So that’s the way it is.” I grew to like the uncertain anticipation of being pounded on by my older siblings and by the occasional explosion of fire that jumped up out of the earth. In grade school, my best friend, Cassy Moinahan, and I were walking home when a sinkhole opened up and down he went into the fiery pit that was Haggleworth
just below the surface. His screams of pain could be heard coming through the floor of the hardware store for two days. I came to recognize a kind of fluidity to life that has stayed with me from those early days. Every man takes a beating and every man gets dumped back into the earth … so why cry about it? Right?

My father, Claude Burgundy, was a learned man, educated in Oxford, England. He came to Haggleworth out of a deep respect for its unlivable conditions. His wife, and soul mate for life, Brender, was all class with tits out to here. I didn’t much care for either of them but they were my parents and I loved them both dearly. On Saturday nights they went dancing over at the Elks Lodge. They never missed a Saturday night at the lodge. Just as soon as they were out the door it  was every Burgundy for himself. Fists, chair legs, frying pans, railroad spikes—whatever was lying around the house we used to pummel the other guy. We all had our tricks. Horner set traps all over the house. Lonny carried a whip. Bartholemew welded himself a whole medieval suit of armor. Jessup had attack dogs. For me it quickly came down to Jack Johnson and Tom O’Leary, the names I gave my left and right fists respectively. With Johnson I was able to fend off most of the blows, but with O’Leary I could mete out my own share of pain. By the time I was ten years old even my oldest brother, Hargood, knew to keep away from O’Leary’s leaden punishment. Johnson had them on their heels quick but O’Leary was the one that put them to sleep. Even to this day I’ve been known to call on O’Leary to clear up an argument or end some nonsense.

Years back I was in New York City and I found myself in a tricky situation with professional blowhard Norman Mailer. He and I had occasion to mix it up from time to time and I always had no problem stuffing his face back in his shirt. But he caught me off guard on this occasion. We were at Clyde Frazier’s place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Mailer must have been waiting in a broom closet for me for more than an hour when he jumped out and began whacking at me with a hammer. I took as many blows as I could until I unleashed the Ole Doomsday from Dublin, Tom O’Leary. That was all she wrote for Norman. He probably took the nightmare of my knuckles to his grave. No sir, I’ve never been afraid to resort to fisticuffs. Not my first option, mind you. I’ve stepped on too many loose teeth to want anything to do with violence … but if it comes my way I know what to do.

It wasn’t all fistfights and terror in Haggleworth. There were many days and nights of pure unabashed fun. For instance, for some unknown reason that really makes no sense at all, Haggleworth had the finest jazz supper club west of Chicago. It was called Pinky’s Inferno. It made very little sense—it’s almost unbelievable really—but there it was, a jazz club in a town of three hundred in the middle of nowhere. At age eleven I got a job as a busboy in Pinky’s and a passion was born in me—a passion so strong I feel it to this day whenever I make love to a woman or see a sunrise or smell thick-cut Canadian bacon cooking, or whenever I report the news. It’s a passion for jazz flute. It all started for me in 1951 at Pinky’s Inferno. Diz, Bird, Miles—they all came through Haggleworth, unbelievable as that sounds, to play at Pinky’s.
Even typing it now seems stupid. I was there at the time and I still want to fact-check this. I made my first flute out of a length of steel pipe my brother Winston tried to beat me with. Winston was my least-favorite brother, and that’s saying a lot. He would beat you while you slept—clearly against the rules, but he didn’t care. He was a union strike buster for many years before he was brained by a rock. Now he sells pencils in a little wooden stall in downtown Omaha. I buy twenty every Christmas. They say hatred and love are two sides of the same golden coin.