Let Me Off at the Top!: My Classy Life and Other Musings by Ron Burgundy Page A

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 providesthe 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 hereand 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 likea 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