Let Me Off at the Top!: My Classy Life and Other Musings (20 page)

Throughout the rest of the nineties I turned more and more toward investigative news. I hosted an hour of television on PBS called
The Burgundy Journal
. The whole news team stayed together as we tackled big subjects well beyond our ken. We were out of our league over there on PBS. There were guys in the mailroom who knew more about the state of the world than any of us. So we told the news the only way we knew how: directly, forcefully and without substance. It was, as always, a hit. The highest-rated show in the history of PBS. Unfortunately the pay was ridiculous. Champ had more restaurant ambitions. Brick wanted to run around on grass and I was beginning to feel like an old man in a young man’s game. After about a half a year of
The Burgundy Journal
I retired from the news business and walked away on top—a champion and a winner, the number one guy of all time.

A couple of years later I received the highest honor any News Anchor can be awarded—the Golden Anchor. It was usually reserved for network anchormen, but it was only fitting that after a career unmatched by anyone’s I should receive this prestigious award. They all came: Cronkite, Jennings, Curtis, Brokaw, Rather, Sawyer, Mantooth, Couric, Lehrer. The room was filled with news greats. A lot of scores that had gone unsettled got settled that night. I wasn’t able to even get to my thank-you speech before a fight broke out between Rather and Koppel that then grew to a regular old-fashioned donnybrook. Tables flew, chairs broke, bottles were smashed, machetes
were drawn, shots were fired—it was the most fun I’d had in years. It seemed fitting that the night should progress into a good old-fashioned news fight. It seemed more fitting that in the end only four men were standing over the broken bodies piled up in the room. I looked around to survey the wreckage and a smile came to my bloodied face. There beside me was my old news team, triumphant again, standing tall and victorious over the battlefield.

As a father I’ve experienced many ups and downs raising a child. Parenting can give us so much joy. To see the wonder in a child’s eyes is as close to heaven as I’ve ever come. (I’m speaking metaphorically of course. Physically I’ve come very close to heaven, as I was on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro with game show host Gene Rayburn and Beatle Ringo Starr.) There can also be great dissatisfaction when it comes to children. I’ve had interactions with them that have left me feeling sad and alienated and hollow inside, to the point of wanting to kill myself. If you’re not careful a child can spin you into a suicidal drain from which only pills and sex and circus rides
can save you. Their brains are mysterious puzzles that confound all human reasoning. I’ve been very frustrated talking to children and I’ll admit it, I’m always a little terrified of them. If you get in a room alone with one you can’t help but start thinking about how irrational they are. It’s only a matter of time before you begin to wonder if they are going to attack you or start flying around the room or speak backward. I was locked in a room with a small girl one time who started to speak backward. I nearly fainted but summoned the courage to try and kill her. I was moving toward her with that intent when the child’s mother entered the room and stopped me. She explained that they were from Poland and the child was trying to talk to me in Polish. I guess they speak backward in Poland. My point here is that children say and do stuff that makes no sense. It can be very unsettling. I keep a candy bar in every room in my house just in case I’m left alone with a child. So how do you relate to a creature that lives by no rules?

Every summer for one week I run something called Camp Ronny. I get a bunch of poor kids from broken homes and bad neighborhoods and take them out into the woods for some hot dogs and sing-alongs. It’s my way of giving back. There’s only one rule at Camp Ronny, and that rule is, have fun! Many of the kids come from environments where they hardly ever just have fun. The first day I teach them some basic Boy Scout/American Indian stuff like making smoke signals and tying knots. Boys and girls just love this kind of outdoor fun. On the third day they are on their own. They have to make their own shelters, forage for food, make tools and fire. The little ones, in the eight-to-nine-year range, always have problems
with this, but eventually they get it. When they see I’m not going to help them they get it. Over the years we’ve had some close calls with some of the children and animals. Some nosey child welfare do-gooders have shared their opinions with me about Camp Ronny, but I’ll tell you what, many of these kids go on to become prominent wrestlers, stockbrokers, Realtors and bouncers. Do these children become part of our great social fabric that ties us all together? No, but that wasn’t going to happen anyway. What I’ve done is instilled in them a ruthless instinct for survival at all costs. Kids who come out of Camp Ronny are some of the scariest and worst citizens in the country. Famous alumni include Kenneth Lay, Sean Hannity, Junkyard Dog, King Kong Bundy, Paul Wolfowitz and Laura Ingraham. They may be hated and feared by regular Americans but they are survivors, and that’s what’s important.

If you can instill a little confidence in a child, then you’ve gone a long way to being a great parent. A ten-year-old will feel on top of the world if you can teach them to drive on a freeway. From what I understand the Chinese allow their children to operate heavy machinery making garments and fabricating car parts at a very young age. This must do gangbusters for their confidence!

Apart from that there’s not much more I can say about relating to children. Scientifically speaking the medulla oblongata of children is smaller than that of adults, and so that’s something I’m sure.

Weird development in the whole Richard Wellspar affair. I found my Craftsman leaf blower in my garage sitting on the workbench with a plate of cookies and a very nice handwritten note dated a month ago. Can you believe it? He must have returned it the day I lent it to him! What a goof. My bad. Sometimes life gets silly. Only in San Diego, folks, only in San Diego.

Don’t you worry, life’s pretty good for Ron Burgundy these days. It was touch-and-go there for a little while but counting my chips, I see I came out the big winner. When all is said and done I will walk away from the poker table of life richer than when I came in—except I will be dead, which in many ways is not richer than when I came in. Someone once said one day we all end up at the banquet of our own consequences. For many men that banquet is an unsettling and fitting end to a life of poor choices. For me I’m at the banquet of my consequences and there’s roast beef and mutton chops and red wine and cheeses and pancakes and a stack of Heath bars and creamed corn and succulent other foods like shrimp cocktail, hot dogs with sauerkraut, ravioli and three-bean salad,
to name a few more—ice cream too—anyway it’s quite a banquet, really, and it’s all consequences of a life well lived. But it didn’t feel that way a few years back and I’ll tell you why.

In 2004 I was basically retired. My day consisted of a round of golf with Merlin Olsen, a five-dollar lunch at China Buffet, some checkers with Captain Willoby Faloon, a few personal appearances and then home for dinner. If I was lucky, and frankly I’m always lucky, I got some you-know-what from Mrs. Burgundy. She’s still got it. Even at our advanced age we can still do stuff that would make a Nevada prostitute sit up and take notice. Anyway, that’s how a typical day went before the fall of 2004. Somehow through one of my many personal appearances I got involved with a gentleman by the name of Fast Eddy Keel. People in and around San Diego know the name and face of Fast Eddy as it appeared on many bus stop seats advertising home loans. He approached me early in 2004 with an opportunity too good for me to pass up. I’ve never been one to try and profit from my name unless there’s money in it, but here was a case that spoke to a particular passion of mine—namely building a high-end gated housing community. The Burgundy Estates, as they later were so named, was to be an ambitious housing development of fine homes heavily guarded and protected from the disintegrating social contract threatening our way of life. Each home would have fifteen rooms, including a screening room and a great room; a granite-topped kitchen; huge stainless appliances; a four-car garage; two swimming pools; a guesthouse; an indoor rock-climbing wall; an old-timey “make your own sundae” ice-cream parlor; his-and-her walk-in closets; koi ponds in every
room—in short, only the best! Not to mention all the gadgets and gizmos the world had to offer at that time. Land clearing and building started in the spring of 2005. Each house was presold at about $2.5 million. With thirty houses to be built Fast Eddy and I were looking at a nice tidy profit. I supervised some of the building myself. I designed the houses on cocktail napkins and scraps of paper. It was kind of an indulgence but I walked around the construction site with a hard hat on and really got to know the gang working on the houses. There was Jose, with his infectious laugh, and Hernandez the happy whistler, Manuel the prankster and Jesus and Raul and Pepe—just a buncha construction guys whose names I made up every day. Here I was, retired, in my golden years, and I should have been enjoying an easy chair and Turner Classic Movies, but instead I was hanging with the guys, pouring footings and slingin’ drywall mud. I really loved it.

One day Fast Eddy comes to me and says we should do our own financing. Now, I don’t have millions of dollars sitting around so the idea seemed too risky to me, but Eddy is one of those guys who has all the angles and he tells me how we could start financing the whole development with different types of loans and deferred payments. Before you know it Eddy Keel and I have a new business—Eagle-Eye Mortgage. Now, on paper Eagle-Eye had no assets whatsoever. There was only debt in the form of some questionable loans, but in 2005 debt of any kind meant one thing and one thing only—future money. In the very first year Eagle-Eye Mortgage had holdings worth two hundred million dollars. We quickly started buying up other loan operations all over San Diego and then
jumped on Liberty-Cougar, the biggest home lender in the area. The new company was renamed Eagle Eye Liberty and we now had holdings valued at nearly a billion dollars. Heck, I was happy to walk around the development site with the fellas and grab a cold one after a hard day of roofing, but things began moving very fast. Eddy Keel was quite the salesman. He used to walk into laundromats in San Diego and get guys with absolutely no income to sign home loans for half a million dollars. Was it ethical? Was it the right thing to do? Anyway, Eagle Eye Liberty became Red White and Blue Lenders and then just as quickly became the American Fund, which we leveraged to buy SoCal Homestead, which later became Yankee Doodle Mortgage, which merged with Betsy Ross Financial, which had just taken over Hearth and Home Securities and became Stars and Stripes Money Tree. By early 2007 we had the biggest home mortgage company in the Southwest, servicing Southern California and Arizona. We named the company the Loan Barn. You probably remember the TV ads we did with the jingle “Need a home but you ain’t got the dough? Down at the barn we never say no! The Loan Barn.” We paid Donald Fagen a boatload of money to come up with that jingle! Anyway in the spring of 2008 the Loan Barn was valued at eighty billion dollars. I still didn’t quite get it. I mean, I would often sit in my booth down at the Alibis with the work crew drinking my cans of Coors and think to myself, “Ron, all the money they keep saying you have is money that’s in the future. Does it make sense that people are spending future money in the present? Shouldn’t we wait till we get to the future to get the money and then spend it on futuristic stuff
like dino-bots and hover-cycles and phones with cameras?” I don’t know, call me old-fashioned but I like to see my money. I always had the news station pay me in stacks of twenties. I always bought my cars with stacks of one-dollar bills. When someone tells me I have eighty billion dollars, I say show me the stacks. Show me the stacks! Well, I don’t need to tell you what happened in the fall of 2008. All our future money was deemed un-moneyable. (That’s a word. No need to look it up.) We had nothing, and what was worse, the Loan Barn was being investigated for securities fraud, for overstating assets, for going around lending laws, blah blah blah blah, the list of infractions went on and on. When all those loan payments came due we had to come up with eighty billion dollars. That’s a lot of money. Fast Eddy Keel stayed true to his name and beat it fast. I believe he now operates something he calls a “party barge,” which is a boat full of deviants he takes out of Argentina into international waters for so many nefarious reasons it would sicken the reader to list them, but one of them involves cat glands and human scat. He called me one day—he spoke fast and maybe sounded a little paranoid—and asked if I wanted in on “the wave!” He kept saying “the wave.” And by “the wave” he meant did I want a party barge of my own. I said no and asked him where he was and told him that federal investigators had taken all my possessions and were looking for him. He said he had to go and then I heard some gunshots on his end and I haven’t seen him since.

Fortunately Veronica had squirreled away some money for us to live on and I played a hunch that put me on top once again. After all the politicians and egghead editorialists had
spun their wheels about what went wrong in 2008 I was in a heck of a lot of trouble. I found some slow-moving lawyers and set about “defending” myself but mainly stalling for time. The Loan Barn was indefensible—
predatory lending
and
fraudulent underwriting practices
were words being thrown around at the time—but I knew something all the Washington idiots didn’t know. I knew that places like California and Florida got so excited by future money that they would not be willing to give it up. They were, and are, so addicted to future money that they can’t give it up. Like any drug addiction, it would take a concentrated twelve-step program to cure Californians—heck, the whole country—of their addiction to future money. But in 2009 the country was at an all-time low. Every day a new commentator would come on TV with new gloom-and-doom scenarios. A lot of finger waving at consumers and Wall Street bankers and brokers. The home lenders took the brunt of the blame, and frankly we deserved it. Fast Eddy and I once loaned a five-year-old girl a million dollars just because we could! That money was on the books at 20 percent interest. Future money! If you listened to the facts, we wrecked Iceland, we wrecked Italy and we wrecked Greece. We almost took down Europe. It was worse than the Depression. And just like a repentant drunk, we felt really bad … for about a day. Then we got thirsty. Out of the shadows like stubborn little jackasses, a breed of News Anchor—I’ll call them “News Enablers”—started to whisper, “Hey, the economy isn’t so bad.” These guys, who called themselves reporters, began suggesting that the losses were overstated and that everyone panicked and that future money was good and real
and we could start spending it again. Well, as a student of human nature I saw this coming. We are essentially a country of ham-headed idiots. We love to forget about debt and go water-skiing. I think we all can agree it’s better to live in the beautiful fable of future money than live in a boring world like adults where we pay our debts. We are not adults. We are children, and it’s just more fun! About three years ago Californians started to buy houses again with money they didn’t have—the Loan Barn held on to so many bad loans and toxic assets that it seemed like nothing short of killing everyone involved would clean it up. But that didn’t happen. Instead I was able to unload the Loan Barn to a refi company called United American Yankee Liberty First National Mortgage and Security for the tidy sum of forty billion. Now they have all those risky loans on the books and they are valued at ninety billion dollars. The country of Greece has invested its entire pension plan in the company and just can’t believe their good fortune!