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

  Let me tell you a story about a four-year-old boy playing with his new slingshot in his backyard in Iowa. The boy got pretty good at it. He could hit cans fifty feet away. He could hit tree branches and street signs. Well one day he took aim at a bird seventy-five feet away and he hit it. The bird fluttered and fell from the tree. The boy was elated. He killed a bird with his slingshot! He was a great shot. He ran over to it and there it was on the ground. It didn’t move and wasn’t going to move ever again. It had no future. It was that easy; the boy had stopped it from being a bird. He thinks about that mockingbird every day. I’m as conservative as the next guy when it comes to suits and cocktails, but not letting a gay guy be who he is is sort of like killing a mockingbird. That’s my opinion on the gays.

  Other than those few things I would say our country is perfect. Sure, you could complain about Wall Street hoodlums stealing our pensions and inflating our real estate, which I do in a later chapter; you could whine about oil prices going through the roof and athletes hopped up on steroids. If you wanted to you could complain about the toxic amount of food we eat and the decline of the public school system. The cost of higher education is going through the roof. Children are spending too much time on gadgets. That’s gotta have some sort of effect on something and it makes for good complaining. I like to complain about the fact that there are not enough horse pictures at the movie houses anymore. The three-piece suit is nearly extinct and no one seems to care! These days bartenders often forget a drink on the house. There’s been a dangerous backlash against polyester. There needs to be more shows like Night Court on television. If I see any more tattoos I’m going to go berserk. You could wake up every morning and start complaining, but then you would just sound like the “News Anchors” on cable news today. No, we live in the third-greatest country in the world and we should be pretty proud of it. I know I am. I wouldn’t mind it if there were a few less old people.

  WHAT KIND OF BREATH TURNS A WOMAN ON?

  Hot breath on a woman’s neck and face is an aphrodisiac. That’s a scientific fact that researchers have proven—not that I needed some Murgatroyd with a lab coat to tell me that a hot, humid whisper delivered inches from a woman you’ve just met in an elevator or on a buffet line can often seal the deal without the usual handwork. The secret, however, is not in the force of the exhale or the distance; no, the secret is in the breath itself. What kind of breath turns a woman on? I’ve made a bit of a study of this over the years and here are my top seven food combinations for effective hot breath. There’s just no way these won’t work. Let’s say you’re a hairy little man, like an Armenian or a Greek, and on top of that you have one of those dog faces common among Slavic people and Corsicans. To further complicate matters you’re sweaty and your penis looks like a burnt marshmallow in a bird’s nest. You, my friend, are a big zero, but fear not; this hot breath stuff will work! Not every time. Sometimes it will have the opposite effect of what you’re going for. Here’s my list of recipes for effective sensual breath.

  RECIPE 1: “THE DRIED-UP RIVERBANK”

  Thick, musty, lonesome and dangerous, that’s the smell and feeling of a dried-up riverbank. Women are terrified and turned on by it. How to capture it all in a breathy whisper? Simple. Shrimp dipped in stale beer and hot mayonnaise. Let it sit in your mouth for no less than five minutes; work it into your teeth. This one works from a long way out. Try it in a room full of women and see if any react—more than likely those who do won’t be classy but they’ll be moved by a memory long since buried that only the rancid smell of dried mud can recover. If that memory is a pleasant one—and often it is not—you are in business, my friend.

  RECIPE 2: “THE FOREIGN ELEMENT”

  If you’ve ever been to Europe, which I have, five times for pleasure, then you know the smell of a European café. It’s absinthe and rich tobacco with a hint of an old-world standing urinal. It’s a delicious smell that when delivered the right way can turn a frozen ice queen into a nonstop volcanic eruption of hot love fluids. But who’s kidding who? Absinthe is expensive. Here’s a way to get that same scent in your mouth on a budget. Take an onion. Let it sit in an open can of motor oil overnight. Put it in a blender with stale cigarettes and coffee grounds and drink. Voilà! European bar. If you can whisper a few words of French, like mise en scène, or gently sing an Edith Piaf song a few inches from her nose, that adds an extra element of continental spice. Some women find this irresistible. Others resist it, but stay with it; they give in eventually.

  RECIPE 3: “THE EARTHY GARDENER”

  Cabbage, broccoli, beans and raw bacon. This one is about timing. Once this hits your gut you have about fifteen minutes to go to work before the farts set in. I would describe the smell as “stomachy dirt,” like blowing a fan through compost. I’ve had some luck with loose women with the Earthy Gardener, but then they were pretty loose, so it’s hard to say if it really works. Give it a try! Treat every day like a prison break!

  RECIPE 4: “SEVEN-CHEESE SAMURAI”

  Just as it says. You eat seven different cheeses. Any kind will do but make sure you’re eating at least a pound total. This one poses its own challenges. Women smell it coming from a mile away, making it harder to get in tight for real close breathing unless you employ the tactics of the samurai warrior. You need to keep your breathing to a minimum. Bring your heart rate down to a legally dead state. It helps to be hiding in a dark corner or under a desk or behind a filing cabinet. You must not move at all until the woman is absolutely within close range. Then the sleeper awakens and blows … seven cheeses right at her face! It’s a winner. Believe me. It has an effect.

  RECIPE 5: “THE ROADKILL”

  Find some roadkill and eat it. I haven’t even tried this one but I know it would work. I just know it. Let me know if you do try it. It’s gotta work.

  RECIPE 6: “THE ANIMAL LOVER”

  Who hasn’t seen a beautiful woman come to her knees at the sight of a cute puppy? Oh how I’ve envied that puppy from time to time. Sometimes the envy gets to the point of really pissing me off. I remember a cute little basset hound puppy in particular who stole the attention of a woman I was interested in pursuing. I was as steamed as I ever get. I waited for the lady to get out of earshot and I laid into that puppy with every curse word my mouth could make. I hate curse words in general but that little dog got two earfuls that day! I had to lift the little guy’s ears just to scream my anger right into his little dog head. Somewhere out there in the world there is a basset hound walking around with some very real psychological issues. I hope he eventually got some therapy. I’m really a friend to dogs, just not when they get between me and my own animal desires. Anyway … what is it about dogs that gets the ladies? Can’t be their looks, because most dogs look like a pork roast with eyeballs. (Please, Baxter, do not read this!) Anyway I realized women love dogs because of their breath. “Eat a bowl of dog food, Burgundy,” I said to myself one night, and so I did, and sure enough it was like cheating. Women go nuts for dog breath. (As an aside I should mention women in their late twenties really go for baby’s breath. That’s just a biological fact. I tried to find this breath—I ate jars and jars of baby food, cans of sweetened baby milk, even asked a woman to pump some breast milk for me, but no luck! You just can’t get baby’s breath unless you literally get a stomach transplant from a baby! Who would allow you to do that? I’ve befriended some very suspect “doctors” in my day but I doubt a one of them would feel comfortable replacing my stomach with a baby’s stomach! Oh well, lucky babies! Sex appeal is wasted on the young!) When it comes to dog food I go right for the hard nuggets right out of a forty-pound bag. A handful will do you for the night. Word to the wise: If you’re stealing the food from your own dog, be sneaky. Baxter put it together over several weeks that I had been taking his food and he confronted me directly. It was not pretty. We argued. Then he waited until I went to sleep and he bit my foot. He later told me he was so mad he would have bitten my face if it weren’t for the fact th
at my face feeds us both. What a dog!

  RECIPE 7: “THE EXECUTIVE”

  Well, here it is, my favorite and a sure winner. I don’t leave the house without the Executive because it’s just a no-nonsense heavy breath that when gently whispered into any woman’s face will drive her nuts. Sardines and an old cigar. Yep, it’s that simple. I keep a tin of sardines and half a stale cigar in my inside vest pocket at all times. The cigar provides the weight and the sardines provide the spice. It’s like a gentle breeze blowing over a garbage truck, just enough to say, “I’m here and you are in for a heck of a night … a heck of a night!”

  MY NEIGHBOR: NEW DEVELOPMENTS

  Just an update on the whole war I’m having with my neighbor Richard Wellspar. He borrowed my leaf blower and didn’t return it. Baxter and I snuck into his backyard and I did indeed empty out my two garbage cans into his pool. The whole operation went off without a hitch. Baxter is a true professional. The next morning, who do you think is standing at my front door? Yep, Richard Wellspar, idiot! So he very calmly asks me if I know anything about the garbage in his pool. Well, I’m nothing if I’m not fast on my feet. I’ve spent a whole lifetime in the news game, where you have to be on top of it at every minute. I looked him square in the face and said, “It’s not mine and I didn’t do it.” He looked confused. He showed me a wet Publishers Clearing House letter addressed to me. I was caught off guard for a second. Of course, all of the junk mail had my address on it! Ooooh boy, that was not smart. Baxter should have said something! Anyway, I came back at him with this: “Richard, here’s the deal. This is something you should know about this neighborhood. You’ve only been here a few years, so how could you be expected to know this? Also you are a pool salesman or something and this kind of stuff is outside of your area of expertise. I’m a newsman, so I know just about everything. There are feral cats around here and they will take garbage cans and throw them in pools. Pretty standard stuff, really.” He just said, “Okay, Ron. By the way, I am a money manager. I’m not a pool salesman.” Then he walked away. Once again, nothing about the leaf blower! Incredible! I am beside myself.

  THE BIG TIME, OR WHEN I KNEW I HAD MADE IT

  My face is buried in a wine-soaked pillow. Slowly my left eyelid lifts to reveal a dark corner of the room. There’s a naked body there slumped over itself, sleeping, maybe dead. Stale wine fills my nostrils. I take it in and it feels safe. I know that smell and I like it. I like what it says about my current predicament. I’m too brain-soaked to move fast. I say to myself, “Take it in, Ron. Enjoy the mystery.” Something weighs on my leg. It’s hefty, like the stale wine smell in the room.… Hold up … wine smell? Is this a distillery? Did I pass out in a distillery? I’ve passed out in distilleries before. It doesn’t look like a distillery, although I’ve been in some inventive distilleries. People make distilleries out of anything—toilets, gas pumps, refrigerators, showers, swimming pools. My dear old friend Gus Cranshaw operated a distillery out of a converted mail truck. He painted it up to look like the current mail trucks you see today and me and him would drive around Dallas picking up mail and reading it while stoned on “Cranshaw’s Crazy Juice.” That was Dallas in the late fifties. You could get away with stuff like that then. It was a lawless town.

  Cranshaw was an aeronautical engineer with a Ph.D. from Stanford but by the time I met him he had lost 90 percent of his thinking capacity—still a hoot, just had no ability to reason. It didn’t matter because almost all of the mailmen in Dallas in the fifties were slower people and alcoholics. Reports of mail theft were common. I went back to Dallas in ’71 to do a puff piece on Roger Staubach. Cranshaw was alive and well but he only had about fifty words left to his vocabulary. As the newly elected postmaster general for the greater Dallas–Fort Worth area he was asked to speak frequently and he confided in me that it was no easy task. Somehow he had retained the word thermal, either from his days at Stanford or maybe from his work on his distillery, and with only fifty words to work with the word thermal came up often, as in “I smell a thermal coming,” “Look at that thermal,” “We got us a thermal,” “Us thermal look good, thermal.” He was later elected six times to the state legislature with the slogan “We gonna go thermal!”…Back to my current predicament. Maybe there’s a body decomposing? Is it fermenting flesh? I know that smell, mold mixed with infection and dead skin. Am I in the Tarantula’s Lair again? Is this Venezuela? A moment of fear surges through my usually calm disposition. For one second I am paralyzed with heart-stopping terror. Horrendous memories strike at me like coiled snakes jumping at my face, but just as quick I fight them off. No, Ron, those days are over. Look around the room. There are no guns, no cameras, no demonic symbols painted on the wall. You play it safe now. Cool down and take it easy.… Maybe I’m in some kind of whorehouse. It’s too small for a whorehouse. Stop guessing! Slow it down, Ron. Slow it down. Let the mystery unfold. Back to the weight on my leg. I can feel the smooth skin on my haunches. It’s sensual. Hello, Mr. Hammersmith (one of the many names I give my penis). He has awakened, bloated with wine and memory and possibility. “Now is not the time for you,” I say out loud. It may be the place but it is not the time. I will admit, Mr. Hammersmith has no real sense of time or space. He’s his own agent, bound to no rules made by man. Nature is Mr. Hammersmith’s lawgiver and even she grants him free rein within her strict code. For I have witnessed Mr. Hammersmith defy nature many times, taunting her with his insolence like Odysseus yelling back at Cyclops, full of hubris. Mr. Hammersmith has thus taunted nature with many unnatural acts and yet Mother Nature loves her impish man-child. I envy Mr. Hammersmith. He’s not bound to reason. I’m talking about my penis, Mr. Hammersmith. No, he’s an epicurean all the way. His morning bloat is pure joyful defiance! He’s a rascal and I love him for it!

  Unfortunately I have a head—a head filled with brain cells—and I am intrigued by the mystery that surrounds me. What is that weight on my leg? Do I have the muscle control to lift my head and look or should I continue to sleuth it out like the newsman that I am? It’s a female leg. I’m fairly certain of that, although there are men who shave their legs. World-class swimmer and nine-time Olympic gold medalist Mark Spitz shaves his legs to lose the aquadynamic drag that body hair might cause in the water. I asked him one time in a candid on-air interview if he felt more like a woman without the hair. He didn’t know how to respond to the question so I rephrased it like this: “Does shaving your legs make you feel sexy, more feminine?” Again, he laughed but did not understand what I was getting at. Here is a transcript of my interview with Mark Spitz from that point on.

  Ron

  Come on, man.

  Mark Spitz

  Are you serious?

  Ron

  I’m an anchorman with sterling credentials.

  Mark Spitz

  You want to know if shaving my legs for my sport makes me feel more like a woman?

  Ron

  Does it?

  Mark Spitz

  You’re an idiot.

  Ron

  I would think it would go a long way to putting you in touch with your feminine side. Do you wear dresses ever? Maybe a wig?

  [Long stare-down]

  Ron

  Are you not comfortable with wanting to be a woman?

  [Something begins to agitate Mr. Spitz]

  Ron

  I’ve seen men up in San Francisco in heels and dresses that I swear to God you would think are women. I did. I thought they were women.

  [Mr. Spitz nods his head]

  Ron