Knuckleheads (8 page)

One day that caddying summer it was about ninety thousand degrees. The air was broth. I got sent out in a threesome with Gordon, all ladies who couldn’t play to save their lives. They’d hit the ball twenty feet on the ground and then spend two minutes setting up and waggling and addressing the ball, and then hit it twenty feet again. The bag I was carrying was enormous and filled with golf balls and two umbrellas and even a sweater and an extra pair of shoes. The round was hot and endless and with three women and all that waggling, my boner was continuous and painful. In the middle of the fourteenth fairway, I was done. I couldn’t carry that condominium of a bag one more foot and I dropped it a hundred-and-fifty yards from the green and sat down and hung my head. I couldn’t have cared less if my bank account never grew another penny, I’d had it.

Gordon didn’t hesitate. He walked over, scooped up the beastly trunk like it was somebody’s mini change-purse and shouldered it. For the next hour-and-a-half, he carried all three bags, handed off clubs, and raked traps for all three women. All I did was pull pins. At the end of the round, practically in tears, I apologized to him. He called me a retard and told me to shut up. Then he gave me a third of his tips, the only tips I ever got. “Buy yourself some gum,” he said. “Your breath stinks.”

We are nineteen under par as we stride up the eighteenth fairway. Everybody in the tournament has heard rumors about our phenomenal round. Foursomes who’ve already finished and all the firm’s executive partners are clustered on the clubhouse balcony overlooking the green. They cheer lustily and raise beers in salute as Lisa, Natalie and Gordon all hit their second shots within six feet of the hole. We will have three adorable options from which to choose to putt for our inevitable birdie. We will finish twenty under par, at least a dozen strokes better than any other team. No one has ever dominated the tournament in such breathtaking fashion. Our status will be upgraded to mythic. My two eagles will be stitched forever into the firm’s historical fabric. I no longer have to worry about being let go. I will be named an associate soon enough, and perhaps one day, a partner.

Two eagles. Two lucky shots in one day, the right day, and it feels like I’ve found a catch-release net for every failure of my former life. I can scuttle free forever from the kingdom of loserdom. The bag on my shoulder has never felt lighter. I could walk another eighteen right now. Hell, another thirty-six.

Lisa and Natalie talk animatedly to each other as they wait for me to line up my shot. It’s symbolic, really, my shot. Academic. Nobody expects me to do anything. I’ve already done more than enough to earn my spot in the record books.

“Can you handle your end?” Gordon says to me as I pull out my nine-iron. “Because I think there’s a kind of I’ll-do-it-if-you-do-it thing going on here. Lisa wants to go for it, trust me, but she wants Natalie to be complicit in the bargain. If Lisa’s gonna cheat on her boyfriend, she needs a moral accomplice. She doesn’t want to accept sole responsibility.”

“Have you forgotten I’m engaged?”

“Have you forgotten you’re not married yet? If you don’t go for it today, Eugene, when will you ever?”

Gordon’s bald dome is baldy sunburned. I admire the man for refusing to bow to the elements and wear a hat, but his skull nevertheless resembles a maraschino cherry. It’s somewhat difficult to understand how Lisa can be attracted to him. There was a time when Gordon was beautiful, but this is not that time. Still, if Gordon says he’s in with Lisa, I believe him. I also believe him about what he says he needs me to do. This scenario has developed over four hours on a golf course, and if Gordon knows any damn thing at all, he knows his way around a golf course.

Nancy and I met at an awful Indian restaurant. We were both eating alone on a Saturday night. I ate chicken tandoori while reading a murder mystery. She had a vegetarian curry and didn’t read anything. My food was bland, wooly in my mouth, blocky like chunks of tree-bark. We left at the same time and as I held the door for her on the way out, she also looked unsatisfied with her dining experience. I took a risk and said the one charming thing I’ve ever said in my life, before or since. I said, “Hey, I don’t know about you, but there’s a terrific Indian restaurant nearby. You hungry?”

She countered with sushi and we did that, and later, we were in her apartment and the kissing was less tree-barky than the food, but not by much, and she said, “I’ve been hurt a lot. I’m a hurt person. Will you hurt me too?”

“Not on purpose,” I said and, at the time, believed.

This last shot is difficult.

There’s a yawning ravine in front of the green. It’s roughly thirty yards wide and if it swallows your ball, you will never find it among the brambles growing in its throat. It’s true my shot doesn’t matter and that I’ve already contributed enough to my team, still, most of the firm and all my bosses are watching from the clubhouse balcony. If I tank the ball into the brambles, on some level I’m still a loser. I don’t have to get the ball close to the hole, I just need to hit it solid enough to fly the hazard. I just have to be respectable. A respectable shot of a hundred-and-ten yards. I can do that.

“You gonna come through for me?” Gordon asks me again. “Hold up your end?”

“Shut up,” I tell him. “Your breath stinks.”

I swing without paying much attention to what I’m doing. My arms are loose and flowing through contact and the click of club on ball is pure. It’s another perfect shot. Every eye on the balcony zeroes in on it. The ravine sighs in resignation as the ball floats toward the flag. For a second, it looks like it might bounce and roll into the hole again for a third eagle, but nobody’s that lucky. It scoots, then slows, and finally settles about four inches from the cup. A tap-in for birdie. The roar from the balcony is loud and long, the applause lasts for a minute at least.

I doff my hat and bow.

Natalie and I are in the basement of the clubhouse. In a small office that’s empty except for a wastebasket with a handful of cough-drop wrappers and a grayish table pushed up against one wall. It’s as if no one has decided yet what to use the office for. Natalie leans back against the table. I lean into her. Her golf shirt is on the floor and her bra is of a lace and smell that Nancy will never achieve in this lifetime. Gordon and Lisa disappeared an hour ago. “What would you do,” I ask, “if in the middle of a round somewhere, your caddy gets so pissed off at you he throws your clubs into a pond?”

“That would never happen,” Natalie says. “I treat my caddies well.”

Her breath has been overwhelmed by the scotch. It is sweet and leafy, a summer forest at night, a bacchanalia. It is lush and fertile and way beyond the out-of-bounds marker and I think my tongue tastes the same way. Nancy would understand why I’m doing this, which will only make it hurt more when she finds out. I will lie to her, but I will also want to brag. It will be up to her to decide if she still wants to settle for me, and my lawyer’s instincts tell me she will. It will not make her feel better when I tell her this is only a one-time deal, something special for me, kind of like a tip.

Yes, a tip is what this is. I performed well on the course and now I am being tipped.

I take Natalie’s nipple into my mouth. It is alive. I am alive. Her stomach is a steam of fresh-baked bread, warm and gold and rising toward my cheek, my fingers. “Twenty under par,” I say, as she unbuckles my belt.

Her hand holds me and demonstrates the authority of her grip. “This is not something we’ll be telling the rest of the firm about,” she says.

No, it isn’t.

UNDER THIS SHIRT IS SKIN, and under this skin is heart, and under this heart, is nachos, my own full plate with diced jalapeños and the six of us—my two brothers, my sister, my parents and me—heading out to dinner in Mamaroneck on Saturday nights.

It was a twenty-minute drive, the inside of the station wagon warm, dark, fluid, a womb. We’d park for free on the street atop a hill a couple hundred yards from the restaurant, and walk down through a metered parking lot. Often, I held my mother’s hand, or my little sister’s thin fingers, but what burned was the anticipation of nachos. My own platter. And not a heaping mound of cheese-sauce and fake salsa slop, but a dozen individual chips, each with its own slather of freshly melted cheese, refried beans and a bold jalapeño in the center, juicy and staring, like an eyeball.

The back of the restaurant’s menu taught me Mexican history I never learned in school, tales of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa zooming across the countryside on horseback, shooting rifles and liberating farmers from the heel of fat and greedy landowners. Beneath the restaurant’s faux stone arches, my parents would split a pitcher of Sangria, a quarter-chunk of lemon floating on the surface like a rowboat. A Mariachi trio circulated across the dining room’s smooth ceramic floor and when the three men hovered near our table, my father slipped them a few dollars to play “Guantanamera.”

No dining experience will ever compare to the ecstasy of that one, for years the only full meal I’d eat each week during wrestling season. My mouth would start to water sometime late Wednesday afternoon as I thought of the warm car-ride, the trek through the parking lot, and, at last, the restaurant’s stiff high-backed chairs. Then, minutes after we were seated, the hot metal platter would swoop over my left shoulder and land in front of me, sizzling.

It was always worth it, those nachos. That first tentative nibble of the cheese’s soft goo, then the crisp of the chip’s mildly resistant crunch, the combined flavor filling my mouth with an explosive surge. It was worth the grunt and sweat of a week eating little but lettuce, ice cubes, and raspberry jelly on whole wheat. It was worth the desperation that came with learning how to break down an opponent’s base with a sharp arm-chop, knock the kid off-balance, and dig his shoulder and face—nose-forward—into the mat.

Under that desperation was Danny Rowton.

We called him Danny Rotten. He called himself that too, and bit the alligators off chests of preppy golf shirts worn by kids whose asses he could kick. Which was pretty much every kid who wore that kind of shirt. Which was pretty much why I never wore that kind of shirt. In front of a lunch-line of sixth graders, he once broke the arm of Timmy Anders—a semi-retarded kid—snapped it like a wish-bone, apparently for no other reason than he wanted to hear the sound it made when it splintered. Word had it that, at thirteen, he stole a car when he was drunk and crashed it through a police roadblock, killing a cop and shattering his own collarbone. Whether or not the story is true, it’s why I joined wrestling. So I could learn how to apply pressure to Danny’s already once broken collarbone and, if he ever tried to mess with me, crack that fucking thing all over again.

Under that fear was the paralyzing notion there were two sides of town, and I lived in the wrong one—the soft cheese one. The other side, where Danny lived, was Battle Hill, so named for the bravery of George Washington, who allegedly held the high ground there and beat the Redcoats back to their tea and crumpets. Perhaps in that tradition, perhaps because of its proximity to the train station, kids who lived on Battle Hill grew up tough and restless in cramped homes with well-worn rugs and the only television in the living room, the only telephone hanging on a wall in the kitchen. Kids from Ridgeway—my side of town—attended Hebrew school and played ping-pong in their spacious and finished basements. But not me.

Under our living room, the uncarpeted dampness held a light bulb without a fixture and a beat-up bench-press. I calloused my hands there, banging my head to AC-DC and Zeppelin, ten sets of ten every other day until no wimp-ass alligator shirt could contain my bulging pectorals. Shoulder-blades pushing into the bench’s sweat-stinking vinyl, I shaped my vision around the bar cutting into my hands, a cold iron line that blocked my view of the ceiling. The only sight I could conjure as I breathed in and out through my reps, was Danny, hand over hand, scaling the rope in our middle school gymnasium, pulling himself all the way to the top where—incredibly—he held on with one hand, and with the other inked his name onto the support beam with a Sharpie.

He scrawled his name everywhere at that middle school—just the first name, Danny, in five aggressive capital letters, the Y at the end winding backward beneath the two Ns and terminating in a downward pointing arrow so it looked like the tail of the Devil.
Danny
on the backboards in the parking lot.
Danny
on the heating and cooling vents.
Danny
on the drinking fountains and bathroom stalls.
Danny
on the fire-alarm boxes and
Danny
on as many desks in as many classrooms as he could possibly inhabit. It was art and it was vandalism and it scared the shit out of the rest of us who believed Danny could be anywhere, at any time, ready to ink his name into your face with his fists and to add to his legend by kicking your ass.

He was fond of wearing a black t-shirt, emblazoned with the slogan “Death to Disco,” a sentiment I could not understand back then, a year before AC-DC, Zeppelin and the bench-press. I was immersed in the gleeful throes of just discovering disco, celebrating the fun of its party-hard back-beats with an unconquerable ear-to-ear grin. I boogied down at Bar Mitzvah receptions, my penny-loafered feet spinning like propeller blades. My clip-on tie whipped back and forth with the crazed energy of a boy who knew Danny would never be invited to the Jewish kids’ dance, and who also was beginning to understand that those bra-straps bumping out of the backs of the strapless dresses the girls wore portended something wondrous, some glorious hint of a future worth knowing.

Danny disappeared for a year after seventh grade, a vanishing that birthed the rumor of the stolen car, broken collarbone and dead cop. I spent the mysterious interval of his absence convinced he’d return any minute, feeling him like a ball of jagged teeth lurking in my head, ready to pounce and chomp on my chest. I discarded Donna Summer for Eric Clapton and pumped up in the basement, wanting to take full advantage of every moment Danny wasn’t ubiquitous with his Sharpie. I got busy growing amusement-park dizzy on first kisses, and trembling a little too much to let my fingers do anything but graze the outside of the beckoning bra-straps.