The Legend of Boneless Bud Gundy

Boneless Bud Gundy was born below the Baltics — somewhere near Lithuania, in the foothills, near the mountain. The story on Wikipedia, which has existed for a long time — that his parents were Cuban counterrevolutionaries and that Bud’s birth and formative years took place in Havana — appears to be one of many instances of Bud’s mythmaking. While it is true that Bud emigrated to Canada as a kitten and it is true that his parents did not come with him, there is no evidence to suggest that the emigration was forced after the arrest of his parents by the Cuban Dirección de Intelligencia. 

No, it is much more likely that a newly-formed Bud found his way south to the Adriatic and from there onto a ship and that, through a series of happy accidents and lengthy naps, eventually found his way above deck to see the mud-brown nowherenesses of the upper St. Lawrence River gliding slowly past the barge. Boneless Bud has always been an animal of powerful opinions (as anyone who’s ever come near him with a brush or a nail-clipper can attest), but on this particular Thursday in this particular wet land, Bud must have been in an acquiescent mood. The barge docked in Toronto, Canada; and so did Bud.

What we know for a fact is that Bud was shortly mistaken for another cat of the same name; and that he quickly traded his shoestring life (he had been living in a discarded pizza box, making himself flat and small by pushing his ears back against his skull whenever he fancied a nap) for one of High Luxury. What happened to the other cat — the other Boneless Bud Gundy — isn’t known; we can only speculate. So, too, can we only speculate about the life and experiences of Our Bud, had the happenstance switcheroo never taken place. The other Boneless Bud Gundy might perhaps have lived this long, or perhaps not; perhaps proven a fine friend, or perhaps not; perhaps had opinions of his own, all of them unexpressed. As for our Bud, well, he took to the High Life, less like an animal born to it — less like royalty — and more like a junior striver in the mailroom who proves unexpectedly adept at faking life as an executive in between shifts, just by changing his suit. Quickly establishing himself as a semi-feral democratic Emperor with a quick temper and sharper claws, Bud ruled all that he surveyed just like he did everything else: solidly.

A word on mass: Boneless Bud Gundy was gigantic. A creature of great density, as though his molecules were simply packed more closely together than other forms of catmeat; this gravitic surety gave him one of his most powerful advantages, which was the ability to plant his paws and remain unmoved, regardless of what pressures, inertiae, or even coarse insults were leveraged against him. As much as all around him were drawn to Boneless Bud Gundy by the same vortex of emotional dynamism that pull underclass teenage girls to “the bad boy,” Boneless Bud quickly learned that he could Decide, and make his decisions stick; just as he, Bud, could stick himself to the ground he had chosen.

And yet — though this nuance did not become clear until much later — Bud Gundy was, as the name implies, thoroughly Boneless. He had not a single bone in his entire corpulent form; even his teeth were an optical illusion made of fear, rather than mineralized tissues. He carried his great blubberous mass through an ingenious pulley system of cord-tough muscle and the sheer force of Bud’s imperious will. While it was speculated that Bud could run, no one ever saw him do it. Bud moved instead like a freight train on low speed; a military tank, crushing the rubble beneath his treads as he surveyed a conquered town.

The less said of Bud’s early career in organized crime, the better. Bud took great pains to erase all memory of these years, both from the official record and from the minds and memories of the people and cats around him; he was known to react irascibly (read: violently) to anyone who suffers to utter the name “Mr. Shnuzz” in his presence. (We can remind the reader here, tentatively, that “Boneless Bud Gundy” is not Bud’s real name; rumours that his birth-name was “Ruben” have not been substantiated.) To further complicate matters, while Bud continued to tour under his “official” stage name of Boneless Bud Gundy (usually with his one-man folk music act, for which he played the juice harp), he also became a published author of crime fiction following his retirement, under the pen name of B.F. Gunch. And what of the (now notorious) YouTube clip that seems to show Bud lounging before a self-made shrine in his private apartments — a shrine labelled simply “Gus Land?” A character named Gus headlines several of the B.F. Gunch paperbacks; but if these novels — about a cabal of evil cats who use other cats’ litter boxes — bear any clues to Bud’s licit and illicit activities, it is best to only speculate privately, and never ask.

One thing can be substantiated, however: throughout at least the second half of his life, Boneless Bud Gundy had a single overarching objective, which was to outlive the roommate he called “the Lady” and, upon her demise, drink her blood. He was otherwise fond, or as fond as Bud ever became, of “the Lady,” and spoke kindly of her when she was not present. But so too did he practice using his six-inch talons (which, unlikely any other solid mass in his body, were real, and quite deadly) to ensnare the Lady’s hands, forearms, even feet and toes, and to bring them to the slavering maw that appears more nominally in the nightmares of the unrighteous. While Bud never (or at least, while it can never be proven that he ever) took direct action to cause the death of his companion, his Bud-like confidence in his own longevity seems, itself, to have been the entirety of his strategy. For a beast who could be so profoundly demanding, one of the great qualities of Boneless Bud Gundy, which has gone largely unremarked, was his almost monklike patience. I believe we can say that Bud was possessed of a quality like certainty, which substantially restricted his anxieties about various questions of what would and would not come to him in time. Bud was, by any measure, not an anxious animal; he believed in himself, and his vision of the world, and he had the claws, should more direct action be needed to enforce the measure of his will.

In his sixteenth year, Boneless Bud Gundy declared himself the Mayor of the unremarkable Canadian hamlet of Niagara-on-the-Lake, and began touring the back-gardens that immediately surrounded his mansion-house, to maintain strong relations with his own (although this is the wrong word, here) “electorate.” In confrontations with local dogs and a woman he only referred to as “Mrs. Neighbour,” Bud evinced the kind of genteel steeliness of a career politician. He no longer signed records or the dust jackets of his books, but could be convinced to conduct a reading for the grandchildren of local seniors, if he was provided his nominal fee (a tube of Catit Chicken Recipe, which Bud would smoke like a jumbo cohiba). Moving his bedroom, office, and leisure area to the ground floor of his residene — Bud was becoming less and less interested in the mechanical operation of flights of stairs — Mayor Gundy would hold court for occasional callers but otherwise preferred to nap and, twice daily, visit the salad bar for refreshment. 

But one night when the last of the summer air was whistling gently over the faux-riche contours of the new builds, I caught Boneless Bud Gundy sitting on a window sill, looking out over the neighbourhood as the suns set. It had been years since Bud had leapt to anything like such a height; though his paws had remained wide and meaty, his hind leggies had shrivelled into rude sticks, scarcely able to maneuver Bud’s gargantuan hindquarters into the litterbox for his daily manufacture of poop. How he got up to the sill that night, I’ll never know. 

But I will tell you, because I don’t think he’d mind, that when I saw Bud gazing with satisfaction upon the world that he had made, he turned to me and said, for the first and only time, “Being a Bud is pretty terrific.” And then he returned his eyes to the world.

For Burt