Let Me Off at the Top!: My Classy Life and Other Musings (5 page)

Of course, we never saw the nuns out of their habits and hats, except when they taught wrestling or during swim class, but other than those two hours every day they were as buttoned up as Eskimos in a snowstorm. I’m gonna admit it: When one of those nuns showered with us after wrestling practice there were more than a few boners on display. It wasn’t very
respectful of us but it was hard not to think of them as just ordinary women even though they had given over their lives to serve only Jesus Christ. Heck, we were all just boys with very little understanding of religious conviction. Lando Calrissian, the only African American (still getting used to saying it like that!), made a play for Sister Honeytits (I’m not making that name up. Why would I make that name up?) but that was the only instance I knew of such fiddling about. Lando was the star shooting guard for the Chewbacca Stormtroopers, so he was basically immune to punishment anyway. One of the sisters, Sister Vicky Vaginalicious (real name), did leave the faith and took up with my good buddy Wedge Antilles, but it was rare. These women respected the church too much to let carnal desire interfere with their calling.

Every year as part of a charity drive for the local hospital the nuns would do a fun pageant for the students and the parents. The students would make animal costumes and put on a show with singing and some kind of story. Most of the time I was a friendly raccoon or a squirrel and I showed off my flute playing. It was really a great night for the proud parents. Then the auditorium would start to fill up with mine workers and out-of-towners and we children would be asked to leave. The rest of the show was performed by the nuns, who would, for charitable reasons, strip off their habits for the night and, because they had sacrificed their lives to Christ, put on six-inch heels and colorful lingerie and do up their hair and look like real Italian movie stars! Most of them could have been Italian movie stars! Not one of them was less beautiful
than Sophia Loren in her prime. Imagine twenty-five basically naked young women in lingerie and heels walking back and forth onstage in a wonderful show of faith and charity and religious servitude. If they weren’t nuns you would have thought they were strippers! But of course they were nuns and no one could see them as anything else. For my own part, it was almost enough to make me a convert if my hatred of the Catholics had not been so irrational and visceral. Between the two shows we would sometimes get twenty to forty thousand dollars for the night in donations. The principal, Monsignor Morty Grossman, would sometimes have the sisters do the same “act,” as he called it, up in Chicago, where they would make even more money! The kids were never invited to Chicago or Memphis or Kansas City but the monsignor would always tell us it was a huge success when he would roll back into town in his limo. I may not look back on Haggleworth with much fondness but whenever I see a nun, despite my almost limitless and completely unfounded hatred for Catholics, I do remember those sweet, innocent and, I’ll say it, ridiculously sexy nuns at Our Lady Queen of Chewbacca.

Here’s something you might not have known about me: I was a joiner in high school. Flag Folders Club, Glee Club, Drama Society, Taxidermy Society, Friends of Jazz, Society of Mineral and Rock Collectors, Jolly Jesters, United Socialist Party, Freudian Study Group—I did just about everything. I went out for all sports and I loved them all, but basketball was
to me what horses are to twelve-year-old girls—some weird transferred sexual energy that really is more physically fulfilling than actual sex. Which is to say I just loved basketball. I did! I wasn’t too good at it though. I was a brawler more than a player. “Five Fouls Burgundy” is what they called me. I got put into games for one reason and one reason only—to foul and to foul hard. I wanted guys on the opposing team to look across half court and worry about whether I was coming in the game. Sometimes opposing teams did their best to eliminate me way before game time, because if they didn’t they knew I was going to come in and start throwing elbows. A team from the Quad Cities once tried to run me over in a parking lot a week before game time. If teammate Darth Blortsky wasn’t there to push me out of the way I wouldn’t be here today. Believe me, they ended up paying for their little prank on the court with some hard, hard, completely legal fouls. I got thrown out of the game that night! I was thrown out of every game, but not before I got my five in. I still hold the Iowa state record for most technicals in a season. Look it up.

We had a great team in ’57: a big Swede named Swen Vader at center; a nimble power forward named Luke Walker; Brad Darklighter was our small forward; a lightning-fast little Italian, Vinny Cithreepio, ran the point; and Lando Calrissian shot the lights out as our number two. Obiwan Kanobi, an exchange student from Japan, was always good for six points as well. We won state that year but were later disqualified, as a lot of those guys had played semi-pro ball in Brazil; some of them were in their thirties. Nowadays people check that kind of stuff out, but back then we had a lot of thirty- and
forty-year-old men posing as high school students. It was just something you did.

Okay, here’s something completely unrelated to this book but I’m not writing another word till I get this off my chest. It’s literally paralyzed me. I can’t work. I can’t sleep. I can’t do anything. My neighbor Richard Wellspar came over here last Wednesday and borrowed my leaf blower. It’s a Craftsman, so you can’t go wrong there. Anyway, I’m a good guy so I let him borrow it. I go back in the house and start writing again. I don’t even think about it for two or three hours, but then I see Richard out in his driveway and yell over to him, “Did you get a chance to use that leaf blower?” To which he says, “No.” If that’s not weird enough, it gets weirder. He then proceeds to talk about his new clients instead of keeping the leaf blower conversation going. He’s some kind of high-end pool salesman and he’s always talking about his customers as “clients.” Okay, so I go back in the house but I’m kinda miffed. I’m thinking, “When is he going to use the frickin’ leaf blower so I can get it back?” Sure enough, the whole day goes by and I don’t hear the leaf blower—then the next day, same thing. Well, now I can’t work. I’m just sitting in my living room in silence waiting to hear the leaf blower. The anticipation is unbearable. Why did he ask to borrow it if he’s not going to use it? Several days go by and now here we are! He hasn’t even used it. He borrowed it and never used it! It’s not about the
stupid leaf blower. I could go buy ten of them tomorrow! I’m doing very well thank you. I’m the kind of guy who will walk into a Sears and buy three suits, a vacuum cleaner and four new tires and think nothing of it! It’s about integrity! Being a good neighbor. The social contract. Anyway, I simply had to get that off my chest and now back to the writing! Not another thought about it.

My father, Claude Burgundy, was a natural-born News Anchor, as was his father and his father before him. Of course there was no television or radio station in Haggleworth, Iowa. Instead, every Friday night he would set up a desk in the Tight Manhole, an Irish bar where the mine workers drank and sang songs of misery. The oil company paid him to report on all the charitable and civic-minded projects they had in the works as well as hard-hitting news stories happening in Haggleworth. Because of his honest face and gifted speaking voice, men and women would come in from all the other bars in Haggleworth—the Dirty Chute, the Mine Shaft, the
Rear End, the Suspect Opening, the Black Orifice, the Poop Chute, too many to list here—all to listen to
The Shell Oil Burgundy Hour
. In Haggleworth it was the most popular show on Fridays at ten
P.M.
for years. It consistently beat out
Dragnet
and Ernie Kovacs in the local ratings. He would report high school sports scores, weddings, divorces, births, who was diddling who, but mostly good news about the oil company and their interests. I would come and watch from the front row and be transfixed by his smooth delivery and sharp tailoring.

One day, the fire that continued to burn under Haggleworth leaped over into tunnel 8, the most profitable tunnel in the whole coal operation. Unlike the fire that occasionally shot up from the earth and burned cars or dogs, this fire was getting in the way of profit and had to be contained. Men were sent down into the shaft to try and stop the fire, but it was no use. Eleven men died. The whole town was in a somber mood when my father got up to deliver the news. “Good evening, I’m Claude Burgundy and this is how I see it.” (That’s how he started every
Burgundy Hour
.) The bar was quieter than usual as they hung on every word. “Today, the Shell Oil Company of Iowa announced a new plan to bring multicolored blinking lights to downtown Haggleworth for the upcoming holiday season.” On a day when eleven miners had burned to death, and husbands and fathers of people sitting in that bar had died, the Christmas-light story was the lead. A woman in the back shouted something at my father. Another man called him a coward. He just sat there, taking insult after insult as he bravely continued on with a story about a precocious little dog that wore a hat around town that everyone loved. He reported
a story about a planned two-hole golf course. There was an in-depth interview with a woman who had won second place at the state fair for her lemon bars. It was great news and slowly people began to smile. When he got to his sign-off (“And that’s what happened this week in Haggleworth”) they were sad to see him go and could hardly wait for the next week’s news.

In a candid moment as we were walking home that night I asked my old man why he didn’t talk about the eleven men who had died or the culpability of the oil company or the environmental impact of this new deadly fire or the emotional damage many deaths could have on a small community like ours or even the plain fact that without tunnel 8 most of the town would be out of work. “Ron, sometimes people don’t want the truth. They just want the news.” I’ll never forget these sage words from my father. Up until that point I made no distinction between “truth” and “news.” I had thought they were one and the same! I was a boy of course and the world was just a kaleidoscope of butterscotch candies and rum cookies. I didn’t understand the reason for news until that day.

I knew from a very early age that I would be a News Anchorman. I had great hair, for one, which is 70 percent of the job. I also had the pipes. I was blessed with my father’s golden tones and melodious speaking voice. By the time I left Our Lady Queen of Chewbacca High I could read a document out loud from forty feet away without ever stumbling over a word. A photograph from shortly after my graduation shows me looking much the same way I do now. In fact at age eighteen I looked exactly as I do today. Women found me irresistible.
They still do find me irresistible. It’s worth mentioning but not so important to the narrative at this moment. I mention stuff like that not for vanity’s sake but because it simply needs to be said.

It was all lining up perfectly. Every year the National News Association of Anchormen, NNAA, sends out over a thousand representatives to find fresh new anchorman talent across the land. Prospects are invited to a brutal six-day camp to test their mettle through grueling challenges and photo shoots. It’s a make-or-break week for young anchormen. An anchorman scout traveling through Haggleworth noticed me in the eighth grade but was not allowed to talk to me until I graduated. (After it was discovered that Edward R. Murrow was paid illegally by CBS as a four-year-old without his parents’ consent, new guidelines were put into place to protect children from getting money.) By the time I graduated several scouts were interested in me. I was invited to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to the anchorman camp—the “Gauntlet,” as it’s known in news circles. The field that year was tough—my class alone had News Hall of Famers Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel and Jim Lehrer. Vance Bucksnot, who became the number one anchor for the Quad Cities, was there, as was Punch Wilcox, the legendary anchor for Salt Lake City’s KPAL. There was also Snack Reynolds (Austin), Brunt Harrisly (Columbus), Tink Stewart (Butte), Race Bannon (Minneapolis), Hit Johnson (Albany), Kick Fronby (Charlotte), Ass Perkins (Mobile) and Lunk Brickman (Boston). All of these men distinguished themselves with long careers for their respective stations, so yeah, it was very competitive.

The main goal of the Gauntlet was to test if you had the avocados for anchorman work. Could you hold your liquor? Could you tell the difference between bespoke and off-the-rack suits? Could you seduce women through a camera lens? Test after test of skills. Could you turn your head sideways to other news team members when speaking? Could you manufacture a laugh after reading a lighthearted story? Could you muster a knowing, disapproving head shake after a story of sadness? On and on for two, sometimes two and a half hours a day! If it were not for the fun diversions to be had in Williamsport I would have gone crazy! But fortunately Williamsport, Pennsylvania, is one of the wildest places I know. The key parties alone—and this is way before they had caught on around the rest of the country—were almost too decadent. I’m just going to assume that most people who live in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to this day moved there to engage in terrifyingly adventurous sexual activity. I mean, how else could you account for the reckless bacchanalia that happened in that town every night? As a small-town boy in a big city for the first time I was warned of some of the dangers, but no one prepared me for what went on in that town. Maybe it’s because it’s not on the main east-west highway, Interstate 80, or maybe because the town is sufficiently surrounded by vegetation, lending itself to an isolationist mentality. Whatever has caused the town to feel cut off from the rest of civilization has also ensured its disconnect from the laws of man. It is a town of pleasure-seeking animals only gratified by buttery foods and genital friction. It’s a wonderful place to be for a week and provides great relief from stress, but if you lived there,
as was borne out by the people I met, you were little more than a skin-wrapped blob of insatiable carnal urges. Many people in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, walk around town with their mouths open, their pants down and their dicks flopping around.