The early Years

I was born on April 26th,1972 at 10:57 A.M. to parents Butch and Dixie Rud. Whenever I tell people what my parents names are they always find their names amusing. Amusing in a good way. I think when you hear the names Butch and Dixie there seems to be an idea that instantly gets formed about who they are before you actually know anything about them. I love my parents. They love me. We’ve had our struggles and our good times but at the end of it all they’ve always had my back. Always. I’ll get more into my parents a bit later and with more detail because they deserve that. For now let’s get back to me. It’s my damn book after all.

We lived in a mid sized northern suburb of Minneapolis called “Coon Rapids”. I grew up and spent my entire childhood in a house on Raven Street. From that standpoint my life was stable and consistent. I always had food in the refrigerator, clothes on my back, and a roof over my head. My parents worked hard to provide for me and my brother. From the outside looking in we were your typical middle class family. Back when there was actually a middle class.

I don’t have a lot of memories from when I was an only child. I really don’t. The only clear memory I have before my brother came along was of me at my daycare center. The daycare center was about a half mile from our house and run out of a church. It’s where I spent my days prior to kindergarten while my parents were at work. I guess it was fine. Like I said I don’t remember much. My biggest memory was of me on the playground in the afternoon waiting for my dad to pick me up everyday. I remember very clearly him walking outside to the playground at about 4:30. He always had on a flannel shirt and carried a beat up black lunchbox. I loved that time of day back then. It was the time when your Dad was the strongest guy on earth and he was my hero. I don’t remember conversations with him from those days but I remember those flannel shirts. They were thin and worn. In high school my dad gave me a few of those flannels and I literally wore them until they could no longer function as a piece of clothing. To this day my favorite shirts are my flannels. A Minnesota boy and his flannel shirts. Weird.

In those days my dad worked for a company that, from what I remember, sold and delivered drywall. I think...I know they did something with drywall. Anyways, he was blue collar all the way. He came home covered in white dust from the drywall and always seemed very tired. My dad worked harder than anyone I knew. I’ve always admired him for that. After picking me up from daycare our evenings went pretty much like this; we’d get home, Dad would mix himself a drink and read the paper at the kitchen table. I think that was his winding down time after a day of lugging around sheetrock. After his decompression time, if it was summer, he went out and mowed his lawn. He was meticulous about his lawn. It always looked immaculate. He’d mow and then water the grass. If he wasn’t mowing then he was washing our cars. I remember him and I washing cars in our driveway listening to WDGY, which was the local classic country radio station. I didn’t care for country music back then but as I’ve grown older I really love it. Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash...The classics. I absolutely despise what passes for country music these days but my love for classic country originated from those car washing days in the driveway of that house on Raven street.

My dad was never really a deep talker. Most of our interactions were based on him showing me how to do something around the house. Sure he would ask how my day went and I would answer, “fine” but beyond that I don’t recall having many deep conversations with my dad. That trend has been consistent right up until today and I think part of the conflicts my dad and I had growing up were due to us never really talking and connecting on a deeper level. I’ll get more into this in a bit.

He did, however, show me how to do a lot of useful things. I learned how to change oil on our cars, how to mow, how to snowblow our driveway, how to build a deck, and how to use just about every kind of power tool there is. I’ve helped him build sheds and tree houses in our back yard. I’ve helped paint our house. My dad was extremely handy. He can make, and has made, just about anything out of wood. He’s made me tables, CD racks, and bookshelves to name just a few. Over the years he must have remodeled every room in our house at least three different times. I asked him how he learned how to do all the things he knew how to do and he said, “By doing. By making mistakes and figuring it out”. To this day that is a core belief of mine. I make mistakes and I learn from them. In fact I think that most of the things we consider mistakes are really just opportunities to learn. I’m fairly certain my dad had no idea that I carry that belief with me and that it came from him. He used to say that my brother was more like him and I was always more like my mother, which is true to a point but I have a lot of my Dad in me. For better or worse.

Anyways, back to our evenings. Somewhere around 6pm is when my Mom would get home from work. It was rare that my dad cooked so my mom would get home and start dinner. We always had dinner together at the table. Looking back it’s a little thing that I appreciate they did for us. We gathered as a family and talked about our day. It was those times when responsibility was ingrained in me. When I was old enough I was expected to help with dishes and contribute. I’ve tried really hard to instill those same traits in my kids. We all live under the same roof and are expected to help out with the things that make a household run smoothly.

After dinner I would disappear somewhere and play with my Hotwheels, or my Star Wars toys until it was bedtime. My dad would sit in his recliner and watch TV and usually was asleep in that chair by 9pm. I honestly don’t remember what my mom did during that time. I do remember her knitting a lot. She made afghans and quilts. She was always very handy with a sewing machine as well. More than a few times she made my halloween costumes. She also made my parent’s square dancing outfits. Yes, my parents square danced. Butch and Dixie the square dancers. Do si do and allemande Left. You can’t make this stuff up. Anyway, Mom knits while dad sleeps in the recliner. What’s more middle America than that?

I don’t know what my mom did for work back then. I want to say she was a secretary. I’m embarrassed to say but I don’t really know. I know after my brother was born she stayed home for a bit and even cared for some other kids in the neighborhood. I’m assuming she got paid for it but again, don’t know for sure. Like I said my memories aren’t real clear prior to my brother being born.

My mom was the glue that held everything together. I could write a book on her life and the things she went through before she became my mom. My dad would be completely lost without her. Now days my parents are getting to that age where mortality is becoming a real thing. This might sound bad but I hope my dad goes before my mom does. I say that for his sake, not mine. I don’t know that my dad could get by without her. I know my mom could make it without dad. Of course she would miss him and grieve his death immensely but she is the strongest woman I know and in the end she would be ok. My dad? I’m not so sure. He relies on her more than I think he even realizes. Wow, that got a bit dark there for a minute....Enough about that.

***Note, when this chapter was written my dad was still alive. Sadly he passed in April of 2021. More on that later.

Things get more clear after my brother Matt was born. My most vivid memory was shortly after he came home from the hospital. I remember a bunch of friends and neighbors standing gathered around our kitchen table, Matt was in a car seat or some kind of portable baby seat on top of the table. Everyone was standing there admiring him and congratulating my parents on a job well done. I clearly remember standing on the outside of the circle. I couldn’t see my brother through what seemed to be at least a dozen people.

My name “Ryan” means Little King. I was almost 5 years old at this time and I remember thinking, “Here we go. I’m no longer the little king around here anymore”. That was long before I even knew what my name meant. That moment was incredibly lonely. It was a brief moment but that feeling is very lucid. I felt like everyone had instantly forgotten about me. You’d think by my description of this event that my parents went on to favor my brother and I became the forgotten child. That’s not true though. They never played favorites and life went on in our middle class suburban home with 2 kids, two cars that fit nicely in the two car garage, in that three bedroom house on Raven Street.

I didn’t like my brother very much when he was a baby. I didn’t like how he cried. When he cried he made this sound, “Nang! Nang!”. It was irritating. As he got a little bit older and into elementary school I still saw him as an irritant. I don’t remember being outright mean to him (he may disagree) but outside of general sibling rivalry I think our relationship back then was pretty normal. I was a huge professional wrestling fan back then and I do remember practicing a lot of moves on him. So Matt, if my suplexes, piledrivers, and DDT’s caused you any lasting emotional or physical damage I apologize. But your willingness to take that punishment helped me achieve my goal of becoming one half of the world tag team champions. You heard me. I was a “professional wrestler” for a very brief time. More on that later.

My best memories from ages 5-12 are of me playing kick the can with the neighborhood kids, watching The Dukes of Hazzard, wandering through the woods that were right down the street from our house, and riding bikes with my friends up to the corner store to buy pudding pies. There were a ton of other kids on my street. To our left lived Chad Gross. He was a few years older than I was and he was the kid that taught me all the cool swear words. My last name is Rud but pronounced /rood/. Like “Oh My, stop being so rude.” So next store to the Rud’s lived the Gross’s. I always thought that was funny.

On our right lived the Cocherals. They were a very large family. They had seven kids. Some were in elementary school, some in Junior High, some in high school, and the oldest (Mike) had already graduated. Gives you an idea how spread out they were. Their father passed away when I was around 9 or 10 I think so that left their mom Diane raising all those kids alone. I remember one daughter, Dawn, getting so mad at me once she threw a lawn jart at me. Not sure what I did to piss her off but thankfully her aim was shitty. Dawn was also my first kiss...sort of. For the sake of all involved I won’t share that story here.

There was another Cocheral daughter, Dana, who was quite older than me. She babysat me and Matt but she would also have me over and we would listen to KISS records in her bedroom with her boyfriend at the time, Greg. Music was always a very consistent presence growing up. Greg, I would learn, wasn’t a very nice guy. I remember him yelling at Dana quite often and he was always borrowing my dad’s tools for whatever shitty car he was working on at the time. He was also very lackadaisical about returning those tools. This drove my dad crazy. Dana also got me out of a fist fight in 9th grade. If my memory serves me right she also got me out of the back of a cop car that day.

I got into a handful of fist fights growing up. I guess I just thought that was the way things were handled. I wasn’t abused or taught to settle things with my fists. In fact my dad never laid a finger on me in anger except for the one time I totally deserved it which I’ll tell you about later. Anyways, I don’t know why I got into fights, I really don’t. If I had to guess I think hormones, emotions, and puberty weren’t things I handled very well.

The fight that Dana got me out of started for reasons I still can’t quite remember. It started on the bus on the way home from school. I was 15 and would sit in the back of the bus. Reese Levitt was a kid that lived a few blocks over and was 13 or 14. Despite being younger he was bigger than I was and a hard core punk rock kid. He looked quite intimidating, studded bracelets, leather coat, Misfits t-shirt, spiked colored mowhawk, the whole nine yards. He got on the bus that day and thought he should sit in the back. Me being the stubborn kid I was probably told him to fuck off and it escalated from there.

Back then fights were rarely spontaneous things. There was a build up. If you were going to fight someone you agreed upon a specific place and picked a day that the fight would take place. This allowed the word to spread and for a crowd to gather to watch the fight. The situation with Reese was no different. We decided we would fight the next day where the bus dropped us off at the end of Raven Street. A bunch of kids, who normally didn’t ride our bus, rode our bus that day and there was quite the crowd gathered to watch us go at it. How it typically went was the crowd made a circle around the two combatants creating somewhat of a ring. There were chants of, “kick his ass Ryan” or “Fuck him up Reese!”. I don’t remember the exact chants from that day. What I do remember is, before a punch was even thrown, Dana running down the street yelling, “Ryan! Knock it off! Go home right now!” I don’t recall exactly what I said to Dana but it was along the lines of it was none of her business and to stay out of it. That was when the cop car arrived.

I’m guessing another neighbor saw the crowd and the fight that was about to happen and called the police. The officer put Reese and I in the back seat. I don’t remember what he said exactly but he was very calm and asked us what we were fighting about it. We told him why we were going to fight and he told us how stupid that was and asked if we were really going to fight about something so absurd. After a few minutes of discussion he had us shake hands and get out. I think Dana helped convince the cop to let us go. She then walked me home. Reese and I never actually fought that day. No punches were ever thrown. I’m not sure who started the rumor but somehow the story got told that I completely kicked his ass that day. I didn’t start that rumor but as is usually the case the rumor got circulated.

After high school I remember running into classmates who would mention to me how I “kicked Reese’s ass that day”. People who weren’t even there. I always told them the truth. After that day Reese and I were always cool with each other, friendly in fact. I remember a few times even sharing my seat with him in the back of the bus. Strange but that was how it went back then. You can almost beat the shit out of each other one day and the next you’re buddies. Years later I learned, through social media, that Reese died in 2004 at the age of 31.