CURSOR HOME PAGE   POSTED APRIL 12, 2000-- EDITOR'S NOTE: See previous installment about Budd Rugg's disappearance. What I Know About the Disappearance of Budd Rugg, and A Bit Regarding My Relationship With the Young Man. By Mr. Claude Peck I HAVE HAD the pleasure of knowing Budd Rugg since he was a young pup. His mother bought a house right across the street from my own home in Falcon Heights –it must have been 1965 or thereabouts. My wife had recently left me for a big shooter down at the American Legion, and I was drinking a bit in those days. I hit it off with Mrs. Rugg straightaway –there wasn’t anything funny going on, mind you, but I would occasionally take her and little Budd for dinner at the Mr. Steak. Budd has always struggled with a weight problem. I think the kids at school gave him a pretty good needling about his weight, and it was clear enough that he was what we would call in my day a "Mama’s boy." Be that as it may, Budd had a tremendous appetite, and he’d eat the scraps right off our plates when his mother and I were finished with our dinners. I’d have to say that Mrs. Rugg was petite, but Budd was a big young man right from the get go. I used to try to get him interested in sporting events and outdoor activities –I like to fish now and then—but he’d have none of it. I remember I used to stop by their house sometimes and Budd would have an old pair of his mother’s panty hose pulled clear up to his armpits and he’d be doing calisthenics along with Jack LaLane on the television. He got more self conscious about his weight as he got older, and I do believe that he wore a girdle from the time he was in junior high school. Mrs. Rugg never learned to drive, apparently, and she and Budd took the bus everywhere. If I was around I wouldn’t hesitate to offer them a ride, and often enough I tagged along with them. I know Budd’s mother has lost patience with his fascination with the television personalities and such, but I have to say –and I’ve told her this myself many a time—she has only herself to blame. For as long as I could remember that woman was chasing people from the television and radio stations all over town, and dragging young Budd right along with her. She adored old fellows like Bud Kraeling and Cedric Adams, and I have no doubt she would have hit Joyce Lamont over the head with a shovel if it would have made it possible for her to change places with her. Now I’ll come right out and say that I don’t have any use for any of these people in the media. I never have. I’ll make up my own mind, thank you, and I don’t believe a damn thing any of these two-bit four-flushers says or writes. The whole pack of jackasses is rich as Rockefeller and not a one of them has worked an honest day in their life. I used to tell Budd all the time that I wouldn’t walk across the street to see this Paul Douglas character even if he was vomiting $100 bills like a broken cash machine. Many years ago I had the opportunity to cross paths with a fella who was then a big shot on the TV news. You’d recognize his name. He had the mouth of a drunken sailor and the morals of an alley cat, and I don’t have any reason to suppose that he was much different from the rest of his ilk.
It’s nothing but a dirty rotten shame, and I
felt it was shameful that Budd wasted all his time chasing after these media fools when he
couldn’t even hold down a job of his own. I wasn’t afraid to tell it like it is,
and Budd got an earful from me on more than one occasion, I can assure you of that.
I’m fond of the boy, and he knows it; I do believe I am the closest I think it’s clear that a mother’s love can make a boy soft. I know Mrs. Rugg did the best she could, but I also felt that she was guilty of egging him on in his craziness. From the time he was a very young boy he insisted he was going to be a film star, and his mother never did a thing that I could see to discourage him. Now, certainly many young people harbor unrealistic dreams at some point in their childhood, but they grow out of them. Mrs. Rugg allowed Budd to persist in these dreams of his beyond a reasonable or realistic point. When he couldn’t get even a small part in the high school production of "Bye, Bye Birdie," his mother went right ahead and helped him stage his own production in the garage. Budd, of course, was the star of the show, and most of the other actors were neighborhood kids half his age. I have to admit that I was one of perhaps two dozen people who were roped into paying three dollars to watch Budd make an ass of himself. At some point he must have realized that he wasn’t going to be a film star, and I guess he latched onto these media types as some kind of poor substitute. I’m not going to pretend that I’m a psychiatrist, but I’m sure they have all sorts of official names now for the things Budd was and is. And the bottom line is that he got mixed up with a bad crowd, and now he’s gone. I don’t have all the details of what it was exactly that led up to Budd’s disappearance, but I can tell you that Mrs. Rugg had gotten involved in some sort of women’s group –one of these deals where the gals sit around and tell each other their problems and that kind of thing. Someone from church got her into this thing, and she told me some months back that these other women were telling her it was time for her to cut the apron strings with Budd, so to speak. He could never hold down a job for more than a few months, and he always knew that he could turn to his mother for money, and he did. I believe that she fairly consistently paid his rent and bought his clothing and other things along those lines. I had been advising Mrs. Rugg for years that she needed to allow Budd to assume more responsibility, and I thought it was a good thing that she seemed to be finally getting up the nerve to give Budd a little shove. I felt it would be good for both of them in the long run. I had never known Mrs. Rugg to take a vacation, and I guess she made up her mind to travel to visit her sister in California over the Christmas holidays. She hadn’t seen her sister in many years, apparently, and when she announced her intentions to Budd –and made it clear that she intended to travel alone—I understand there was quite a dust-up. I believe that was the last she heard from Budd. When she returned from her trip and discovered that Budd’s phone had been disconnected and he was missing, well, you can understand that the poor woman was in a terrible state. I was frankly surprised to learn that Budd had actually been writing some kind of media column on the world wide web –I don’t know anything about that sort of monkey business, but I had assumed that this was just another of his stories. When his colleagues in this venture let Mrs. Rugg know that they had recently received a package from Budd postmarked Omaha, I immediately agreed to drive there at Mrs. Rugg’s request and have a look around. I felt I would be looking for a needle in a haystack, but it was the least I could do, even though my legs aren’t worth a diddly-damn anymore and I have a difficult time getting around. Next: Mr. Claude Peck reports the surprising findings from Omaha. |
Every one of these
television types is scrubbed up unnatural and busy talking out of both sides of their
mouth. They love nothing so much as the look of their own self in the mirror and the sound
of their own voices, and that should be plain to anybody with eyes to see. And show me a
newspaperman and I’ll show you a fellow born to do nothing but drink and spill lies.
Radio people aren’t much better near as I can tell –damned fools paid to run
their mouths and stir up trouble. The fellas at work all seem to get a big kick out of
this Barnard character on one of the local stations –this buffoon likes to make fun
of people and run down those less fortunate. And this here is a fellow who weighs 300
pounds and is dragging around a backside the size of a Volkswagen Beetle! I read about him
in the newspaper! That’s what you call the pot calling the kettle black,
wouldn’t you say? 
thing to a father
figure he has known. It is one thing to have pictures of real stars like Jack Palance and
Loni Anderson hanging on your walls, but when it is people from the local newspapers and
television news programs, well, good Lord, there’s just something not quite right
about that. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, but I’ll be blunt and say right here
that I think Budd needed help.