Let Me Off at the Top!: My Classy Life and Other Musings Read online

  “Go in peace, Ron Burgundy,” my new friend Kokenta said. “Your name will forever be sung in our epic songs. Your deeds will not be forgotten by the jackalopes! Make haste. The breakfast buffet ends at eleven thirty.” And off the thousand jackalopes went, racing into the desert. I have not seen one since. But, yes, they have seen me.

  My experience with the jackalopes was deep and life altering. I began a journey of new understanding in relation to the Animal Kingdom as a whole. Baxter, my very best friend and dog, was my constant companion and guide through this new consciousness. I am a sensitive man unafraid to express my feelings. I have been known to cry from time to time. I’ve never made it through the movie One on One with Robby Benson because I get too choked up. It’s so very emotional. If you haven’t seen it, do so, it’s a real treat. A young college basketball player with great one-on-one skills is forced to play in a system of offense and defense that severely constricts his style. It’s torturous to watch. The overbearing coach, played by G. D. Spradlin, simply won’t let the kid create on the court. Whatever you do, don’t tell me how it ends. I have never seen the ending and I doubt I ever will. The waterworks start flowing as soon as I hear the Seals and Crofts song “My Fair Share” and because of my loud sobbing, almost screaming really, I am always asked to leave the theater. Annette O’Toole plays a bitchy but softhearted tutor—Oh boy … I’m having a hard time getting through this right now! Forget I brought up the movie One on One. It’s just too damn emotional for me to even write about it.

  My point here is simple. I am a sensitive man. I’m not afraid to pick a flower or delight in a butterfly or go for a skip. I care about the world around me and all of its creatures. Now when I see a manatee or a dingo or a hyena or a toucan or a giraffe or a leopard or a tortoise or a cow or a baboon or a Gila monster, I have no desire to kill it. Take the wild baboon for an example. If you run at a baboon with your arms waving, yelling with your shirt off, which I have done, the animal will see it as an act of aggression and run full speed right at you. His only thought will be how to get at your face and tear it off so he can eat your head meat. I don’t speak baboon. I confess I don’t speak any animal language. However, Baxter can communicate with almost all of God’s creatures and I can converse with him. On that particular safari when I ran out to a baboon to play a joke on him I was nearly torn to shreds. He was feet away from chewing off my whole face when Baxter barked out, “No, proud race of ape! He is your brother!” To which the baboon responded, “This thing is no ape!”

  Baxter would have none of it and he said to the baboon, “He is an upright ape, no more dignified than you, great baboon, but simply one that can drive a car and uses small sharp knives to cut the hair on his face.”

  “Why is he running at me?”

  “The human man is not smart. He does not understand basic body language.”

  “He could have gotten killed,” the baboon warned. (All of this conversation was related to me later by Baxter on the plane ride home.)

  “I have had to save him many times from all sorts of animals in the Animal Kingdom,” said Baxter.

  “I don’t understand, what’s in it for you?”

  “He puts dry dog food in a bowl for me.”

  “A devil’s bargain!”

  “He is my friend. I sleep with him when he has not ‘scored.’ I sleep with him often.”

  “What is your name?”

  “My name is Baxter and his name is Ron Burgundy.”

  “Well, Baxter, you tell your friend Ron Burgundy not to run at baboons the way he did. It’s weird.”

  “I shall relate that to him. You are a gentle soul.”

  “And you are a wise dog. Go now. I am hungry and I will want to eat either you or the Ron Burgundy.”

  “We will take our leave. Can I smell your red butt?”

  “Of course.”

  An animal that understands that you respect him, from the fearsome white shark to the impulsive and grumpy bear, will be more willing to treat you with respect.

  Over time I have come to understand the Animal Kingdom as one great hierarchy. The noble eagle sits at the top. He is God’s greatest creation, soaring through the skies with magnificent splendor and grace! His watchful eye looks over us all. I am in awe of the eagle and I believe one day when the skies fall and great chasms of doom open up to swallow mankind, it will be the eagle that rescues and guides those of us worthy (that would be me and my news team for sure) into the next land. I have several wood carvings of eagles in my home for this reason. One of them has a removable head and a hollowed-out body where you can hide some keys or half pencils like the kind you get at a golf course. If the noble eagle is at the top of the Animal Kingdom, then surely the lowly sea otter is at the bottom. They are the dumbest, most stupid animals out there. I can’t even imagine what kind of hell we would be in for if the sea otter ever took control of the world. Simply put, they would ruin it. I don’t hate them but I sure wouldn’t trust them with maintaining order. Baxter confided in me once that talking to sea otters was like talking to aerobics instructors. I don’t doubt it. They are self-centered and boring and all they want to talk about is fish. Meanwhile Baxter tells me that most eagles think like ancient Greeks with minds sharper than Socrates’. Baxter has also told me on several occasions that eagles intimidate him. His small dog brain is no match for the cerebral majesty of the eagle.

  As a kind of sidebar I would like to say wild eagles do not make great pets. I was offered a wild eagle by a Russian I had come to know through the world of high-stakes archery. We both had an interest in falconry. (I have owned several world-class falcons over the years.) This man—I will call him “Glavtec” because he would definitely not want me to reveal his true identity—had six bald eagles in the trunk of his car that he was trying to unload. He was in to me for a lot of archery money. I REALLY wanted one of those eagles but I knew it was illegal to own a bald eagle in this country. I decided if I kept the eagle inside my house no one would be the wiser and I could have my cake and eat it too. I threw the eagle in a pillowcase and took him home. Well, day one the eagle tore up everything in my house. Day two he scratched up Baxter and me pretty badly. Day three he got caught in a fan and while trying to rescue him I got scratched up worse than before. Day four he sat on the couch almost lifeless, watching TV and possibly contemplating suicide. Day five he began working on a strategy for escape. Day six he was polite and even ate dinner with us at the table. Day seven he allowed me to place a small Uncle Sam hat on his head and posed for a picture with me and Baxter in our red, white and blue swimsuits. Day eight I taught him to drive a miniature fire truck in a comical way and he looked like he was enjoying himself. On the ninth day Baxter and I decided to take our new best friend for a walk on the beach. The minute I opened the door he flew away. He had been planning it all along! He was just playing with me to get free. Ingenious! He still, to this day, attacks me when he sees me. I’m forever watching the skies. He truly is a magnificent bird.

  Where does man fit in this great chain of being? I’ll tell you. Right between the narwhal and the puma, and that’s pretty close to the top, my friend. I would say humans are positioned maybe a hundred or so animals from the top. Pretty good considering there are more than a thousand animals. Things like cheetahs, hermit crabs and salmon are definitely higher than us, but then donkeys, parrots and daddy longlegs are below us. It really puts things in perspective when you come to understand the science of the Animal Kingdom and where we as humans stand within it, or Human Positionology, as it is known in science circles. I try not to lord it over the dumber lower animals, like horses and woodpeckers, because I always know there are more intelligent animals, like the squirrel and fruit bats, that can look down on me! Through my experiences with the jackalopes and my understanding of the great chain of being I have become a friend to all nature. I no longer hunt for pleasure. I don’t condemn those who do. Champ Kind, my friend and an award-winning sports journalist, kills, on average, aro
und five to six hundred animals a year. He loves to hunt. He would hunt caged chickens if it were legal. Maybe he does anyway! I know every year he goes off on his annual hunting trip to some secret island with a group of men known only as the Dark Watch. I don’t know what they hunt. I don’t want to know. I say live and let live, which might not be what they say at all. Funny situations.

  Finally, I want to say a word about cats. They are wonderful!

  ABOUT WOMEN

  Over the years I’ve had an ever-evolving understanding of the female sex. I credit Veronica Corningstone, my wife, my lover and my sex partner, as the lady who changed my views on women. Before I met Veronica I had some antiquated ideas of how women should conduct themselves in the world. For the longest time I didn’t like seeing a woman in the workplace unless she was getting me coffee or bending over or both. Often I would put a cup of coffee on the floor and ask a woman to get it for me. I know it sounds crazy but I wasn’t sure women could read. When I saw them typing I just assumed they were copying shapes or making noise for no reason. I didn’t know if women knew how to count money. I thought women had underdeveloped brains like the brains of softheaded people. Then there was the whole idea of menstruation. It made no sense to me and science didn’t seem to have any answers. How could a person dying of blood loss be allowed to work in a man’s office? Frankly I’m still having problems with this one. The science just isn’t there yet. We need greater study in this area but I’m willing to concede women should be allowed in the workplace alongside men. I can laugh at some of the naive things I used to think, but much of it you could write off because of the times. The times were different. Before 1970 women were here on this earth to cook food and give men boners. You certainly couldn’t associate them with delivering the news. There was the whole credibility problem. I wasn’t alone in believing that women could not be trusted. I once bet Edward R. Murrow that a dog would anchor the news before a woman, and I believed it. Women were considered nothing more than sex objects. They were valued more for their legs, their butts and their tits than for anything else. Times sure have changed! Heck, now in television news and I guess just about everywhere else women are respected for their brains. Appearance means very little! Go figure! When I see a woman walking down the street in high heels and a short skirt I no longer drool like a hungry zombie. I think to myself, “Hmmmm, I wonder what kind of brain that foxy mama has?” Veronica did that to me. She’s got brains, all right, and I married her for that reason. Of course Veronica also just happens to have a grade-A dumper and some first-class tits.

  For many years I was asked to attend sensitivity training. I got hit with sexual misconduct suits left and right, at least twenty a year for a while. My hands were always leaving me and going places. I stood too close to women. I used words like boobies and knockers and jugs and jigglers and melons to compliment my coworkers. At one point I was told by my lawyer that it was safer if I never talked to women. But of course that is ridiculous. My old-fashioned transgressions aside, I do know a lot about the ladies. Without being modest, I’ve found that women cannot keep their hands off me. It’s true. I’ve slept with more women than six Wilt Chamberlains. I’ve made love to women in the same room—heck, in the same bed—with Wilt. Wilt and I have—oh no I won’t; that’s a story for a different kind of book. Besides, the young women we were with that night, Tracy Karns and Debra Sanlinger, may not want me to tell that story. It’s pretty dirty.

  Suffice it to say I’ve learned quite a lot about the fairer sex over the years just through experience alone. If you add to that my extensive reading in scientific journals and my interviews with great lovemakers like myself and Geraldo Rivera, you could say that I’m probably the world’s greatest authority on the subject of women. I could write a whole book just about women. Someday I will, believe me. It would have a bunch of pictures—not just nude women either. They would be on horseback or in cocktail outfits or wearing cheerleading dresses. I would show them in natural settings like offices and beaches, or maybe even on the farm. Each woman in the book would talk about her favorite things, like what turns her on and what her measurements are, stuff like that. Then I would have pictures of these women in their underwear, probably just so you could see a little bit more. After a few photos of the women in their clothes I would then have nude photos of them. Maybe one part of this book I’m thinking about could have a special unfolding-page section in the middle that gives you a big picture of one of the women completely naked. I don’t know! The book is not fully formed in my mind just yet. Perhaps if I had chapters about stereo equipment and new suit styles it would be helpful for men too. I bet a guy could put a book like this out every couple of months! I would sure read it. My point is I know an awful lot about women.

  Women on the whole tend to be more emotional than men. I may be the rare exception. I’m more better at emotional stuff than women. I’m actually more better than women at a lot of stuff. I can balance a basketball on my finger for more than twenty seconds. I bet I can run faster than most women. Cheetahs are the fastest mammals on earth. I know how to spell Mississippi backward—what am I doing? This isn’t a contest. Anyway, women turn on the waterworks for just about any reason but mostly for manipulation. No one likes to see a woman cry and women know it. They use the crying thing all the time to get what they want. It starts when they are babies and doesn’t stop until the dirt is shoveled over them. For whatever reason men stop using tears at around seven years old and start using their brains instead to control their surroundings. In scientific terms women’s cranial development is said to be retarded but their powers of manipulation are far in advance of most men’s by the time they are five years old. This is basic developmental stuff, by the way, and you could read it in any journal of human development. There’s a special “manipulation gene” in women that has been discovered or will be discovered. This gene, which surely exists, controls the crying and lying sections of the frontal cortex lobular section of the brain. It allows women to trick men into all kinds of situations.

  A woman’s sneaky and underhanded manipulation can take many forms and can be quite cunning and subtle. Here’s a standard conversation I might have with my wife and glorious sexual partner, Veronica.

  Ron

  I was thinking about going out with the boys tonight, maybe having a few drinks?

  Veronica

  Sounds fun.

  Ron

  Just me and the boys.

  Veronica

  You need to get out. You’ve been working very hard.

  Well, you can see how infuriating this kind of subtle manipulation can be! Every word is so well chosen to cause pain. It’s like they control your mind! I once wore a motorcycle helmet with a dark shield on a date with a woman I thought was trying to control my mind. I was too afraid to take it off for fear she might try to change my plans using manipulative word combinations and crying. I literally could not hear or see her the whole date. In the end it worked out. We made sweet and long-lasting love but I stayed inside the helmet so as not to let her connect to me and my mind.

  Of course, for most of the women in my life I didn’t need a helmet to protect me from their controlling ways. I have an automatic shutoff switch inside my brain that lets me listen to a woman speak without hearing a word. For about a ten-year period, up until I was smitten with Veronica, I used the time that women spoke to me as a chance to think up songs or poems or make up new games. It was a valuable use of my time. A woman would come up to me and maybe start a sentence like “Ron, I need to speak to you.…” If she was serious I would nod and look concerned and say “Okay” and “Right away” every so often, but inside I was off thinking about something else, something fun. I made up the game Piddly-Woop while some woman was talking to me. It’s a complicated but fun game for the whole family.

  I’m not going to lie, I heard this a lot from women throughout the sixties: “Are you listening to me?” A lot. So to be honest I’m not sure I perfected my “shutoff swit
ch” method. I know that my colleague Champ Kind has never listened to a woman talk for more than eight seconds. He shuts off and just smiles and waits for them to stop moving their mouths. If you asked him I don’t think he could remember two sentences a woman has said to him. It’s remarkable really. For him it’s like they don’t even exist as speaking animals.

  Looking back on it, I think plenty of women thought maybe I was rude. It didn’t really matter though. In those days there were so many women who wanted to make it with a number one News Anchor that it was just the law of averages. The way I figured it, if I batted one for twenty, that would make for a batting average of fifty. Those are Hall of Fame numbers, my friend, Hall of Fame.

  As a Hall of Fame ladies’ man (an institution I am lobbying to create, by the way), I don’t think anyone in the world would mind if I gave up some of my secrets for how to meet, bed and marry the woman of your dreams.

  HOW TO MEET, BED AND MARRY THE WOMAN OF YOUR DREAMS

  Courtship is as old as the earliest days of fire. Men have forever pursued females in poetry and song and with feats of daring. Little has changed from those early days of courtship. We gentlemen still recite poems and sing and try to outdo other men for the hearts of women. I often dream of the medieval days, when men wearing robes made of thick woven carpet lifted heavy goblets of wine and sang to their paramours. Even though the great banquets and royal feasts of olden days are long gone, I feel like I would have been right at home in their giant halls. I’ve often imagined myself atop the turret of some noble castle on the Rhine with my falcon, Leander, perched on my arm. I think in a past life I was maybe a baron or possibly an earl and that I had many lands and great wealth and an eye patch. I was known throughout the region as a generous landowner but ruthless when I had to be. I could be quite swift with justice but I was never accused of being unfair. If you’ve seen my dining room in my house, then you know it’s a passion of mine to imagine such things. I’ve commissioned murals on the walls of my dining room with scenes of me throughout history. A local artist by the name of Vincent St. Vincent-Pierre was paid handsomely, perhaps too handsomely, to illustrate me in heroic situations throughout time. While dining at the Burgundy house, guests enjoy rich oil paintings of me as an explorer on a clipper ship sailing for the New World. They can turn their heads and I’m represented as a proud slave in the Roman Colosseum, having just vanquished a lion! St. Vincent-Pierre also portrayed me as a noble savage who first lays eyes on Lewis and Clark from a bluff high above the wide Missouri. Guests often comment on the painting entitled Justice for All, where I am standing with my arm around my good friend Nat Turner in a field of bloodied and hacked white slave owners. It’s really quite a room! On the ceiling, above the table, St. Vincent-Pierre painted his masterpiece, Veronica and me making love in the nude as a panoply of exotic animals look on in wonder. It’s the room I’m most proud of in my house. I suspect the room will be carefully dismantled when I pass and donated to the San Diego fine arts museum. Look at me! I was supposed to be talking about courtship. There I go again. The problem I’m discovering while writing this chronicle is that I’m just too darn interesting!