There were plenty of factors that led me to leave the Twin Cities, but most of them are private, embarrassing, and none of your
business
POSTED OCTOBER 30, 2000-- YOU HAVEN’T HAD a world-class out-of-body experience until you’ve walked into a Pump and Munch just outside Sioux City, Iowa and seen your grainy black-and-white xeroxed photo tacked to a bulletin board and labeled with a bright red felt-tip pen: RUNAWAY. Budd Rugg has had just such an experience, and bless my dear mother for choosing a now unrecognizable yearbook photo, my thin, smiling face framed by feathered bangs made lustrous by liberal applications of Sun-In. For many months I encountered my old visage hanging all over the tri-state Siouxland area, and the experience was oddly thrilling and terrifying at the same time, even though the efficacy of the posters –and my resemblance to my
old self—was further diminished by one of the most disastrous and humiliating experiments in the history of facial hair.
Budd Rugg needed to get away, and I suppose it’s fair to say that I left in a huff. There were plenty of factors that led me to leave the Twin Cities, but most of them are private, embarrassing, and none of your business; ‘nervous breakdown’ is a handy enough catch-all, and I suppose that works. Suffice it to say that if I was 14 years old I could write a harrowing account of the last year of my life and sell it to Scholastic or some other such publisher of harrowing, first-person accounts of runaway children at peril. Not that you care, mind you. Not that you even exist. But now I am back nonetheless, thanks to the efforts of many kind people who are certainly far too exhausted by my behavior to be properly grateful.
And the truth is that I have never in my life really wanted to go anywhere, and in the end I didn’t truly succeed in getting very far away. I spent the last ten months within 300 miles of the Twin Cities, and I think I learned many of the hard lessons that trolls and little rabbits and other such adorable wanderlings learn in all the old storybooks. There really is no place like home.
There is absolutely no media worth losing sleep over anywhere in Iowa, South Dakota, or Nebraska.
For several months I drifted around the area local residents insanely call the “Siouxland Empire.” I got a job in a Subway shop in Sioux City for a few months, and shared an apartment with a pompous sixth-year junior college student who fancied himself something of an armchair psychologist and referred to himself as a “speculative fiction enthusiast” in the advertisement I answered. He smoked a pipe, read comic books, and played chess on his computer. He also condescended to psychoanalyze me at every opportunity. Whenever he would retire to the couch with one of his books about Martians I would explore the internet for news of my media heroes in the Twin Cities, and I was delighted when I discovered that I could actually listen in to a live feed of Paul Allen and Jeff Dubay’s KFAN show. This never failed to infuriate my roommate Dennis, and he would ridicule me –and worse, the hosts—at every opportunity.
“Even your obsessions reveal an inferiority complex,” he huffed one afternoon. “I cannot for the life of me understand your fascination with this drivel. One might reasonably argue that in a just world one of these gentlemen would be selling cars, and the other parking them.”
Needless to say I couldn’t live with such a boor for long, and, responding to an ad in the local newspaper and lying prodigiously on the application, I left Sioux City for a job at a small AM radio station in Seney, Iowa, where for six months I lived in squalor with an aspiring ‘go-go dancer’ who went by the name of Exstacy. Now Budd Rugg is and has been many things, but I am not, and have never been, decadent. Exstacy sat around the apartment all day in her underwear, drinking chocolate milk through a straw and painting her toenails. One morning I woke up and there was a naked man on my couch who was using a half-empty pizza box for a pillow, while Exstacy sat at the kitchen table eating Cocoa Puffs with a plastic fork. We had no television, and I could never use the computer because Exstacy and her “manager” were always downloading naked pictures of her on the internet.
At the radio station where I worked I screened calls for the daily “Swap Shop,” an afternoon program where area folks could call and offer to trade a litter of spaniels for a toaster. The host was a big, fat fake cowboy who yelled a lot and rang a cowbell and called himself “Cowboy Buck Bulla, your Siouxland Rock ‘n’ Roller.” The station format was so schizoid that you were likely to hear Tony Orlando and Dawn followed by “King of the Road” (the Swap Shop theme song) followed by the Backstreet Boys.
I was so lonely and miserable that I almost tried to write poetry. Forget all that “Field of Dreams” nonsense; Iowa is the place where dreams go to die. My lovely landlord, Adele, ran what is surely the most pathetic health food store in America, Just For the Health of It, a neglected little closet on Main street where she sold (or, actually, didn’t sell) things like V-8, Dannon yogurt, barbecue corn nuts, vitamins, books about
wicca, 
and paint-by-number portraits of the Virgin Mary. My heart went out to her as she sat there alone every day with her lumpy terrier, scratching away at word search puzzles and smoking cigarettes. The whole town was so devoid of celebrity that if someone like Southwest Journal publisher Terry Gahan were to show up at the local café Budd Rugg would have needed a welder’s helmet to keep from going blind. Paul Magers, Randy Meier, or even City Pages’ boldface barfly Britt Lindsey would have caused power outages for 100 miles around.
Poor Budd Rugg did nothing but pine. I saw my media heroes everywhere I looked, and in my dreams. Earl from the grain elevator? Clamp his face in a vise for a week and give him a pair of glasses and he was the spitting image of Tony Berlin. One day at the Ben Franklin store I was fooling around with a Wooly Willy toy –that thing where you manipulate metal shavings to create hair for bald, fat-faced Willy—and I realized that I had, with the most careless and half-hearted of efforts, crafted an uncanny portrait of Dan Barreiro. I knew that it was time to come home when I woke up one morning with an astonishing revelation: if you crossed Captain Kangaroo with Mr. Green Jeans you would get…Nick Coleman! A week later I was boarding a Greyhound bus in Sioux City, bound once more for the Twin Cities.
And how much has changed in Budd Rugg’s long absence! Amelia Santaniello had a strapping baby boy –the adorable Sumo Sammy! James Lileks sired the Dionne Quintuplets (or so it seemed)! A cub reporter straight out of the Hardy Boys, Chip Scoggins, appeared in the pages of the StarTribune! Tom Lyden burglarized a pugilist’s automobile! Dark Star has grown so thin that he has to wear skis in the shower! Mike Mosedale found a microwave oven in an alley! And my dear mother had hip replacement surgery and,
she claims, almost died. God only knows how much I’ve missed, and how much I’ve missed each and every one of you! I’ve barely been back a month and I’ve already discovered Pioneer Press casino columnist David Hawley! And Breaking News to Harris Faulkner: Budd Rugg has a plan! Let’s have lunch!
To all of my dear friends in the local media I can only say how good it is to be home. I’ve learned my lesson. We have loads of catching up to do, so please send any and all treasured information and scandalous gossip to buddrugg@cursor.org.