Chapter Four
At the end of a long gravel road, a couple of miles outside a town where children and men still point at airplanes, sits Cuddy’s childhood home. Like much of Nebraska, Cuddy’s hometown suffered at Mother Nature’s extremes and found itself constantly subject to mercurial temperature swings and a medley of thunderstorms and paralyzing blizzards, with the occasional town leveling tornado thrown in for good measure. The Nebraska Department of Transportation’s annual report concerning this area of the state was peppered with words like; sterile, barren, depressing, and in one particularly artistic turn of phrase, godforsaken. Here, the ceaseless winds denied gravity’s reign on the earth and plumb lines were no source of truth. Current theories on Nebraska’s ubiquitous obesity appear to be converging on the hypothesis that body-mass indices over thirty five, the morbidly obese, are a survival response to inclement weather, and not a disagreeable result of the all you can eat buffets at the Indian casinos to which the hordes flocked seeking any respite from this wasteland. Cuddy’s personality was forged by the climate he grew up in; loud, obnoxious and unrefined.
Cuddy was raised as the only child of a single parent, Mungo, who fled his Scottish homeland after firing a World War II howitzer he found hidden in an old barn on a dare and accidentally shelling his town. Scottish secessionists had hidden the canon for use in their planned uprising against England. About an hour after he’d bombed the town into near oblivion, having destroyed the constable’s office, the parish, the vicars home, and most of Main Street, the survivors crowded his property with pitchforks and lanterns and screamed of crimes against humanity. The survivors, comprised mostly of pissed off widows and orphans, chased him into the nearby craggy foothills where he spent his days hiding. When all looked clear, he lit out for the coast and took a steamer to America, where such happenings were more commonplace. Behind, he left his pregnant wife with whom he didn’t get on terribly well.
Mungo never elaborated on why he and his wife didn’t get along, but town gossip held that it centered on his wife’s position that Mungo not be allowed in their house. Since Mungo moved into her ancestral home, after their wedding, he had knocked a hole in the low ceiling with his head, tripped and flattened a wall thereby creating a three walled, lean-to like structure, and crushed a half dozen chairs while leaning back on two legs after supper. At nearly seven feet and 44 stone (620 pounds) Mungo, in his wife’s estimation, was simply not designed for indoor living.
When he landed in America, Mungo moved west until the wind stopped him, found cheap land, and took to pig farming. In a move that proved formative in Cuddy’s development, Mungo opted to build their home where the delivery truck dumped its load, which became immediately downwind of where the pigs dumped their loads. Directly west of the home would eventually sit a pigsty and a hundred pigs. Mungo was a penny pinching Scot, and the builder wanted an extra few dollars to deliver the building materials to the far end of the lot and upwind of the pigs.
Mungo built their home from the few building materials he could afford, field stones, and other found materials. The land upon which Mungo built was used by the county as the dumping grounds for spent tires. A couple of times a month, Mungo would find, scattered on the edge of his property, one, two, or on occasion an entire set of used tires. Over the years, Mungo filled the tires with dirt, wrapped them in green tarp, and stacked them against the side of the home. Even with the spent tires as reinforcement, the ceaseless winds pried the shingles from the roof and bowed the westerly facing walls inward.
Several months after he’d built enough of a home to live in, and nearly two years since he’d fled Scotland, Mungo reclined in a large Barcolounger when he heard a knock at the door. On the small thirteen inch black and white television that sat before him, Mungo watched a rarely televised shinty match; a highland sport best described as ice hockey on the lawn. Mungo rose, and as he crossed the room to answer the knocking the floor beams creaked loudly. From the home’s small windows that overlooked the flat, mostly treeless, land of central Nebraska, Mungo spied a brown Ford racing toward the horizon. As it went, the dust rose from its wheels, and it looked like a rocket car racing on Utah’s salt flats.
Outside the door, on the porch, he found a fat little boy picking his nose and looking up at him. Mungo assumed the note pinned on the lapel of the child’s coat would explain his appearance. He palmed the boy’s head with his left hand, as if it were a basketball, and pulled him up. Holding him by the top of the head with one hand, several feet off the ground, Mungo examined the lad at arm’s length. With his oversized ears, upturned nose and jowly face, the child looked like a piglet. Mungo took a long draw on his whiskey as he stared at the odd creature.
As Mungo moved the child closer to unpin the note, and simultaneously jostled his glass of whiskey to keep it from spilling, the child kicked Mungo squarely in the balls, which sat unprotected beneath his kilt. Mungo fell to the ground gasping for breath. Only once before had Mungo been felled, and that was years ago when he was struck in the temple with the business end of three and a half feet of hickory during a shinty match. As he spiraled downward, the child landed safely away from the fallen giant. The note fluttered to the ground. Blinded with pain, Mungo read the note with his head resting sideways on the ground and his hands clamped between his legs.
Mungo:
He’s your son. I named him Cuddy and he’s a mean little fooker. He’ll kick you in the balls if you give him the chance.
He’s widely regarded as a pox on our parish. The village pitched in, with the Vicar donating much of his retirement, to send him to you.
You didn’t kill anybody but the Constable’s still pissed, and it’ll be a while before you’re welcome back. Most of the buildings are rebuilt including the Post.
Write me.
The Wife.
Mungo’s heart swelled at the idea of returning to his much-loved Scotland. With the Post rebuilt, he made immediate plans to send a letter. Mungo penned the response in his head, while his balls ached from the kick.
Wife:
For Christ’s sake woman, are you sure you sent the right kid?
I’ve learned to live indoors. Send for me, when the time is right.
Mungo
As he stared dully at his father writhing on the ground, Cuddy spoke for the first time, “Haggis! I want haggis. I’m hungry,” and then began bawling, a strange squeal that stood the hair on the back of Mungo’s neck on end. A migrant worker at the property line hastily mumbled a prayer. In some parts of the world the pig-man is no joke.
Mungo raised Cuddy never to cheat at golf, not spill his whisky, and to avoid relations with the livestock. Even with those mores taken to heart Cuddy grew up a fat prick prone to scheming whose signature move was the burr shampoo. Popping up on the seat behind an unsuspecting classmate on the school bus, Cuddy rubbed handfuls of burrs into his bus mate’s hair. Once in they were nearly impossible to remove and usually had to be cut out. Cuddy’s third grade class picture featured a disproportionate number of kids, boys and girls, sporting buzz cuts. Their shorn heads adorned with pink band aids from where the farm shears nicked the scalp.
After a series of suspensions at the local elementary school, which centered on Cuddy’s love of the burr shampoo, Mungo began to have Cuddy tested for retardation. Mungo’s testing proved inconclusive with the doctors time and time again pronouncing Cuddy high functioning. The psychiatrists never declared Cuddy ‘normal,’ as Cuddy’s reputation had grown throughout the region and they were uncertain what he would do next. With their licenses at stake, the medical community’s consensus was to be conservative when deciding who might, and who might not, be rowing with one oar in the water.
Had a chicken not got the better of him, Cuddy would have followed in his father’s footsteps and become a pig farmer. On this day of note, Cuddy ran aimless through the plains chasing stray chickens. He was never quick enough to catch th
em, but tried until he grew dizzy and fell to the ground. As he closed in on a large rooster, near a truck loading pigs to take to slaughter, the rooster ran up the boarding ramp, between and under the pigs to the front of the carrier, and then hopped out one of the ventilation holes. Behind followed Cuddy. At the moment Cuddy realized he’d been outwitted, and tricked onto the truck, he heard the doors close.
Never an attentive parent, it wasn’t until Mungo had signed the paperwork and the truck was pulling away he noticed Cuddy staring mutely out the carrier’s ventilation holes. As the truck drove off, Mungo realized Cuddy was about to be sent to slaughter and screamed, “Stop the truck!”
The stifled guffaws of the truck driver haunt Cuddy’s dreams to this day. The result of all this was that Cuddy never outgrew the fear that one day he would again be mistakenly loaded onto the slaughter truck. This fear, and not the sense extravaganza that is pig farming, or living downwind of the pigsty, drove Cuddy from the family farm. And like the pigs that eyed the horizon line Cuddy sought his escape. He also vowed, at every opportunity, to eat his weight in chicken.
The years passed, and Cuddy grew to be of average height with disproportionately short, spindly arms and legs, and an ample belly. As Cuddy entered high school, he not only began to look like a pig, but to act like a pig. This strange transmogrification first became evident during Cuddy’s one and only football game when he appeared to run faster on all fours than on his feet alone. Handed the ball on fourth and goal, in a game with less than three seconds on the clock and his team up by forty points, Cuddy wedged the ball between his chin and chest and ran on hands and feet into the end zone. It was the only time Cuddy played in a game, and it served as the high water mark in his high school years.
As he ran, the opposing coach pointed at the abomination of nature, “Ain’t right. That ain’t right. Something wrong there.”
The opposing players nodded in horror and repeated their coaches’ words, “That just ain’t right.”
Cuddy earned below average marks through high school. However, it was after graduation that Cuddy’s business acumen began to shine. Cuddy honed his business skills, and raised the money to pay for college, as a vendor at the local, organic market. His father, rightly as it turns out, had been touting their pigs for years as organic. In Mungo’s case, organic pig farming was driven by his overall stinginess. It was cheaper to let the pigs run all over the county than maintain a pig house. Free range pigs could eat whatever they wanted, and antibiotics and growth hormone were costly. More often than not Friday night found Mungo and Cuddy racing their county’s back roads in a beat up Chevrolet sedan with a carload of snouts sticking out the windows, rear bumper dragging and sparks flying, as they worked to find enough pigs to take to the Saturday market.
Cuddy didn’t buy into the green movement and couldn’t understand why anyone would pay $9.88/lb for organic broccoli. He quickly realized he could buy cheap produce at the local Walmart, wrap a blue rubber band around it, and then sell it as organic at the Farmers’ Market for a tidy profit. Cuddy would have probably made a career of organic farming if he hadn’t gone a step too far and tried to sell locally grown organic coconuts for $27 each. By the time the farmers’ market banned him for life, Cuddy had earned enough money to secure entry into a third tier college located in the same neighborhood as G.O.D.’s pharmacy.
Packed, and with his son ready to head to college and leave Nebraska for the first time, Mungo surprised Cuddy with the announcement that he would be returning to his beloved Scotland. His father had received the letter for which he’d patiently waited fifteen years. The shinty team was down a player, the town rebuilt, and both the Vicar and Constable too infirm and senile to remember the cause of the infamous bombing. In the letter he’d received, his wife let him know it was finally safe to return.
Never an overly affectionate pair Mungo and Cuddy hugged and wished each other well. At the end of the short embrace Mungo handed Cuddy a thick manila folder. “These are the medical records be proven your high functioning. You may see need for them. It’s likely with your personality people will be confusing you for the small minded, but even if you were seeing a challenge with the math and the reading your scheming nature will serve you well in the moral morass that is the state of today’s business world.” With that, he handed Cuddy a tumbler of whiskey and heartily proclaimed, “Here's to the heath, the hill and the heather, the bonnet, the plaid, the kilt and the feather. When we're goin’ up a hill o fortune, may we ne'er meet a frien' comin' down. Alba gu brath! Scotland forever!”
Cuddy drank deeply and wished his father well, “Beannachd Dia dhuit. Blessing of God be with you.”
It was during his second year in college that Cuddy took a part-time janitorial job at G.O.D. and began his slow, labored ascent into management. Immediately upon graduation, with his business degree in hand, Cuddy switched from janitorial services into an entry level position in operations. It was Cuddy’s first foray into corporate America that did not require a name tag.
During the salad days of Cuddy’s career he frequented a downtown Chicago area affectionately referred to in local parlance as the Viagra triangle. Bounded by State, Rush, and Oak, the Viagra triangle was home court for aging lotharios trapped in loveless marriages, cougars and the ever present professional call girl. Cuddy loved the area for the endless free appetizers, offered as an inducement to keep the randy patrons in place as they sank $15 cocktails. Cuddy’s favorite, far and away, was the infamous Lobster Jaw.
The Jaw sported a fifty two foot “all you could eat” buffet and mechanical bull. It also featured the weekly Lobster Jaw contest, in which the patron with the most food dripping from their chin received a twenty five dollar gift certificate. Cuddy had twice won the contest, butter dripping in slow rivulets from his chin as he raised his arms in victory. He confirmed his victory when he hopped up and down in celebration, and onlookers found his golf shirt a yard short on the amount of fabric required to remain tucked in his pants and covering his pale and gelatinous belly.
Predictably, Cuddy met his wife Irene at the Lobster Jaw one Thursday in September as patrons ran from the building screaming. Swimming upstream, undeterred by the wave of humanity passing by him, Cuddy sought access to the buffet. In the scrum of humanity, as the customers ferociously jockeyed to exit the building, Cupid’s random arrow struck. In front of the buffet, riding the mechanical bull in a tube top and mini skirt, was Irene; a wall of jiggly meats and Rubenesque in her glory. She and her girlfriends smelled like day old clams.
Not a girl to be constrained by the trapping of undergarments, Irene’s angry, furry snail left a slick on the mechanical bull from which she could not be thrown. Her knees broke the plane above her head as the bull fell quickly from its high point. As she rode her watermelon sized boobs bounced up and down. First in stereo, with both up and both down, then in mono, with one up and one down. Then, abruptly, as the bull changed canter, they emulated a tennis match with one left, and one right, as they passed in the middle. It was this spectacle that had emptied the bar of all but Irene and her girlfriends. Cuddy stood spellbound near Irene’s girlfriends, who all knew Irene would ride until she grew bored. The bull wouldn’t get her off - literally. These large boned lasses all owned vibrators that bucked harder than this bull. Cuddy had never seen anything like this; Larry Flynt hadn’t either.
Seeing Cuddy from the bucking and rolling bull, Irene too felt Cupid’s sting and knew it to be love at first sight, or more likely double-sight as she was severely cross eyed with a wandering right eye. When the ride stopped, a full seven minutes later, Cuddy, Irene, and Irene’s girlfriends, stood in the bar with the buffet adventure before them. Six months to the day Cuddy and Irene married in a civil ceremony at City Hall. Celebrating back where it all began, after the nuptials, Irene won her first Lobster Jaw award, barely edging out Cuddy.
Irene grew up a big girl, with big hair and big
mouth, from a big state. A far cry from a rocket surgeon Irene went through life believing Alaska an island, given its boxed representation on the maps of the United States. Presented with a math question on her college admission test in which a triangle was shown with values for two of the three sides, and an X on the third side, she was asked to find X. She circled the X.
Irene met Cuddy the night she flew in from Texas for a girlfriend’s wedding. Responsible for appetizers she’d brought a ten pound bag of frozen shrimp on the plane, and stuffed it into the overhead bin. The same bin within which the bride had placed her gown and the bridesmaid’s their dresses. By the time the flight landed, a few hours before Cuddy laid eyes on Irene for the first time, the shrimp had melted, and smelly water dripped from the overhead bin within which the dresses floated in clammy brine. Having never been to Chicago Irene wouldn’t have guessed mechanical bulls survived the 1980s, she’d meet her soul mate at the Lobster Jaw, or that you could buy frozen seafood.
Confirmed suburbanites, the greatest loves in Cuddy’s and Irene’s lives are their pugs, Pugsly and Scootch. Theory splits into three camps on the magnetic properties of the pug; those that believe the pug’s physical and behavioral characteristic draw the zealot; those that believe the preponderance of costumes, clothing, and pug-centric events naturally select the over enthusiastic; and, by far the majority, those that believe people select dogs that most resembles them. Putting an exclamation point on the thesis that dog owners resemble their pets, and vice versa, they cut to the chase and selected brother and sister pugs. With its spindly legs, pot belly, upturned nose, and curly tail, it is the breed that most resembles a pig. To this day Cuddy’s annual Christmas card, featuring the dogs and owners in matching bejeweled holiday sweaters, haunts the internet as de facto proof, in the bloggers’ circles that vigorously debate these matters, that given enough time, man and dog, or man and pig, becomes indistinguishable.
To see the morbidly obese Cuddy as an adult is to see a pig’s genetic zenith. Dressed in the light pinks he favored (shirts and trousers), with his short, bristly hair and upturned nose, Cuddy resembled his animal doppelganger. His pig like laugh, a pitched, staccato squeal during which his head tilts slightly back and his ears wiggle, sounds like a rutting pig.
People meeting Cuddy for the first time often look around believing they are about to be the victim of some Hidden Camera or Punk’d tomfoolery. When they realize Cuddy is for real their pupils dilate in fear. The cleaning crew that worked late at night often spoke of the, “hombre de cerdo,” or the pig man – a terrifying violation of nature as Cuddy ran to and from the vending machine. Recently, the cleaning crews at G.O.D. had taken to wearing rosaries, and were in deep negotiations with their employer for a proper exorcism.
With his bullying and scheming nature, Cuddy has proven formidable in business. An instrument of blunt force, Cuddy believes anything can be made to bend to his will. He is certain that with enough pressure, he will become G.O.D.’s next CEO.