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

  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.

  THE END

  I loved that homemade pipe flute. Dizzy Gillespie used to make me get up onstage with him and play that thing until my mouth would bleed. Maybe I’m misremembering this part. I’ll fact-check it one more time before I finally commit it to paper though. Dexter Gordon, Art Blakey, even the older guys, Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, came by. Hey, I get it, if you don’t want to believe any of this I can’t blame you. Anyway, I picked up a little something from each one of these jazz masters—you know what? I think the whole “jazz flute” stuff should stay out of the novel, come to think of it. It’s too ridiculous even if it did really happen. I will simply say this: Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan taught me, an eleven-year-old boy, the rudiments of jazz improvisation in the alley behind Pinky’s Inferno one night in Haggleworth, Iowa. That’s solid enough information that is very believable. (I have no idea if this is going to hurt or help my credibility here, but just down the alley from us Jack Kerouac was getting a blow job from Allen Ginsberg. More than likely this can be corroborated in their own writings. Those guys wrote an awful lot.) With all these hep cats coming through Haggleworth in the fifties I became the source for their drug habits. I had an in with some of the dealers in the area and I would score smack for the musicians in exchange for music lessons. I quickly learned to cook it so they could fix up before their sets. Forget it. This sounds impossible to me. I know what happened but none of this reads real. I’m just going to go with this: I have a passion for jazz flute. I got it from somewhere. It’s part of who I am. There.

  When my brothers and I weren’t beating on each other we would roam the streets looking for any other kind of fun we could get into. These days you would call us a “street gang” but in those days it was just considered horsing around. The regular folks of Haggleworth, when not scared of falling into the hot ground below their feet, were quite comically terrified of the Burgundys. There was a saying around Haggleworth that mothers told their children. It went somethin
g like this: “Eat your vegetables or the Burgundy boys will beat the living shit out of you.” Silly really. Men would sometimes refer to a black eye as a “Burgundy.” Derrick Burgundy, the second-oldest of my brothers, did do acts of violence that transcended the usual fun boy stuff and he was gunned down by a posse, which absolutely nobody had any objection to … but that was only one Burgundy in eight who was a bad egg. Our reputation as town bullies didn’t mean much to us. We just laughed it all off and had a good time. The only townsfolk who were not scared of the Burgundys were the Haggleworths. They were the only other prominent family in Haggleworth and because of their last name they felt they owned the whole town. It was nonsense of course. Shell Oil owned Haggleworth. (That’s why there was no real government or police or any order whatsoever. It was the reason why my father, a strict Darwinist, loved the town.) But the Haggleworths erected a museum in honor of their founding father. Some of them still practiced their pious religion of penis worship, but for the most part they were an uncultured, rangy bunch of derelicts who ate cat food and lived in caves. Some others lived on Willow Street in large Victorian houses. They did manage to build one impressive building downtown, a great big marble and granite Roman-looking thing. It was a sort of clubhouse and harkened back to a more forward-looking time in Haggleworth when money was flowing into the city from foreign investors and sex perverts. They called this huge building “the Courthouse.” They even carved the name “Courthouse” into the stone above the door. No one recognized it as an actual courthouse unless you had to pay a ticket or get a marriage license. Shell Oil certainly had no use for it. And no Burgundy ever stepped foot in it as far as I know.

  The Haggleworths really stuck their noses up at the rest of us … which was laughable really, because they were descended from whores mainly. A Burgundy, upon encountering a Haggleworth in the street, would make a point of reminding the Haggleworth of his or her ignominious lineage with something pithy like “How’s it going, son of a whore?” To which a Haggleworth might come back at a Burgundy with something like “When was the last time you took a bath?” (It was a fair blow as we never took them growing up.) Then a little boxing might ensue and depending on the number involved in the conflict some more pushing and shoving, and then usually a kind of riot would break out with fires and broken glass and such. Totally predictable small-town-type stuff. A bygone era really. Apple pie. Fishing villages. I had a lot of respect for the Haggleworth boys and girls. They could fight like devils. Many nights after a riot I would find myself limping home because they had gotten the best of me. I can laugh about it now. Heck, I laughed about it then.

  And then there was Jenny Haggleworth. She was simply a dream. Every boy in town was in love with her. She was the kind of girl that if you saw her at the malt shop, your heart just stopped—fiery red hair, long legs, the softest hands, like two dove wings. Her eyes were like enchanted emeralds. She was a cross between Rita Hayworth and Grace Kelly, and me being twelve years old I was head over heels in love with her. She was twenty-eight and had a job in the mining office.

  Because she was a Haggleworth and I was a Burgundy it was a forbidden love but one that I knew I would risk. I also knew that if ever my secret was revealed the whole Haggleworth clan would chase me down and throw me into Dutchman’s Dungeon—a fire pit so deep and terrifying that years later when the Army Corps of Engineers were called in to cap it off they turned tail and ran out of there faster than baboons running from a ghost lion. To this day its location isn’t on any map and is a well-kept government secret. I know how to get there, of course, as does anyone who grew up in Haggleworth, but we have all signed a presidential oath of secrecy demanding that we never reveal its whereabouts. Among many others over the years I took noted tennis legend and feminist Billie Jean King up there one night with the intent of throwing her in. I was steaming mad at her—I still am but I’m not a murderer. Billie Jean King knows the whereabouts of Dutchman’s Dungeon; so do famed quarterback Roman Gabriel and legendary funnyman Dicky Smothers and many more. Jenny and I would meet in a small clearing in the woods that was unknown but to her and me. The sunlight splashed through the leafy canopy of maple and oak, dappling spots of light on a quiet glade no bigger than a bedroom. It was our hideaway. We talked and held hands, and occasionally I was rewarded with a kiss from her soft lips. I lived for those kisses. I saved our correspondences, which one day I will publish as The Love Letters of Ron Burgundy and Jenny Haggleworth. I think mankind would benefit greatly from reading them, with the disclaimer that these are the simple yearnings of a twelve-year-old boy addressing his love sixteen years his senior. Here are just a few exchanges.

  Dearest Jenny,

  Each hour I spend away from you is another hour in torment. I cannot bear the distance our hearts must suffer! Purgatory knows no pain like the agony of our separation. My minutes are filled with anxious longing for a mere glimpse of your beauty. The ruby ringlets in your hair, like ribbons adorning a Christmas gift, await my unfurling! A poem I write to you! “So soft the cheek, so smooth the shoulders, the liquefaction of your clothes rippling over your huge boulders.” Ron Burgundy, Haggleworth, Iowa, 1952.

  I must see you. Until then, my heart beats only for your answer.

  Your love servant, Ron Burgundy

  Ron,

  Got your letter. Meet in make-out woods after work.

  Jenny

  PS: Bring gum

  Sweet Jenny,

  I am beside myself with joy! Your encouraging words of our anticipated reunion and our innocent pleasures have placed me in a transcendent mood! God surely works a spirit through every living being and only love can open the window to its ebb and flow. I shall wait upon the hour in joyous anticipation. Your thoughts of shared love shall remain forever locked in my bosom awaiting a key that only you possess. Oh, Jenny Haggleworth! How the name itself floats and flutters like a butterfly over the fields of flowers. Our reunion cannot come fast enough. Not even Mercury himself with winged foot could bring about our conjoining with the speed my heart so desires. I am forever at your mercy and your undying worshipper, Ron Burgundy.

  Ron,

  Might be late. Gotta get some oil for my car. See ya.

  Jenny

  PS: Bring gum

  Pages and pages of suchlike correspondence poured forth from the two of us. Volumes of letters, enough to fill at least forty leather-bound books. Some years back I saw an advertisement in the popular fashion magazine Jiggle for a book-binding device. It came with leather sheets, needles, high-test threading and plans for a build-your-own press. I don’t know what I was thinking! I’m all thumbs when it comes to crafts! Many of you may recall I did the news with my hands bandaged for a three-month stint. I explained on air that I had rescued a child from a hospital fire. We found a baby and a mother who needed a couple of bucks and set up a story, all in good fun. What really happened was that I tried to bind those letters with that complicated binding setup! I tore up my hands pretty good. I got a chuckle out of that.

  Eventually the lovers were discovered. In a town of three hundred it’s hard to keep a secret. The Haggleworth clan found out I was diddling their sister and I was jumped and roped and dragged behind Jenny’s car as she drove through the streets of Haggleworth. These were lawless days when men took it upon themselves to impose justice. Jazz great Erroll Garner was in town doing a two-week stint at Pinky’s Inferno. He saw me being dragged through town and went off to get my brothers. I guess their hatred for the Haggleworths was greater than their hated for me, because pretty quickly all eight of the Burgundy boys were in town. A verbal back-and-forth rapidly escalated to a situation where the National Guard was called in. Some people were burned pretty badly, that I do remember.

  After the bloodiest day in Haggleworth history, Jenny and I agreed it was best to take some time off. She left town one night with jazz great Thelonious Monk and then was married to Jack Paar for a while. I can’t say for sure why Jenny Haggleworth, a twenty-eight-year-old model and
Miss Iowa, was so infatuated with a twelve-year-old boy, but I had a couple of theories. One was pretty basic. At twelve I was already beginning to show signs of the future girth for which I would become somewhat legendary. I could see, looking down into my pants, something I would enjoy looking at and talking to for many years to come. Some women have called it Pegasus, after the winged horse of Greek mythology. The Lord Jesus Christ works in mysterious ways when he hands out lower body parts! Some men are blessed with extraordinary length but not much girth. Others have been awarded great girth but less length, and then … there are a select few who are granted the whole wonderful package, girth and length. I’m one of those guys who got just the girth. I wouldn’t trade it for nothing—except more length. I know for a fact Jenny was transfixed by my reproductive parts because in some of our more tender and romantic moments she would yell out, “Show me that stack of pancakes!” or “Gimme that can of beans!” My understuff was and has been a source of great pride for me but not my greatest. If I had to guess at what body part Jenny Haggleworth and a million other women were attracted to most I would have to say it was my hair.