by Gary Paulsen
“But you don’t have clubs. Do you even own a golf ball?”
Pooder snorted. “Mere logistics. I again call your attention to the nearly completely successful frog-altitude experiment.” He lowered his eyes and covered his heart at the memory of how not entirely successful the frog-altitude experiment had been. “Compared to the complications and danger of the frog-altitude experiment, how difficult can it be to procure some clubs and a ball and excel at hitting one with the other?”
And so Pooder worked on golf at the same time I continued working on varying my training procedures with SP and Carol.
There was, I realized when I reviewed my notes, no real lasting effect despite the abundance of soft-serve cones. SP, for instance, bought what he called “a whole wrapped brick” of boys’ size small underwear briefs—“they’ll stretch out and if we’re careful not to shrink them in hot water you’ll have underwear until you’re an old man”—during this time. He also bought a heavy-duty, commercial power belt sander that intermittently, independently, turned itself on. We didn’t know that’s why it had been on sale for so cheap until it suddenly roared to life, jumping away from a board and screaming after Carol, who had been napping in the shed and was explosively surprised. The sander flopped and bounced, and Carol barked, and it seemed to chase her until it hit the end of the cord and lost power, whereupon she turned and destroyed it. Like a skunk after chickens.
It was about then—when I was still thinking about how to make some actual money for the bike fund—that Pooder talked me into caddying at the local public golf course. “Guys will pay you to carry their clubs around and you can get big tips. Make some good coin.”
Which wasn’t true at the beginning. The golfers didn’t give big tips. Mostly they screamed at their clubs and the weather and the golf balls and the hills and slopes that ruined par and the sun in their eyes and shade that made them misread distance and and and … The game should be called Tiny White Frustration Ball with Fairway and Tee.
Interestingly, about halfway around the nine-hole course, the players had to shoot across a small pond near the tee, and almost none of the golfers seemed to be able to avoid hitting the pond.
They’d line up their swing and you’d hear the club hit the ball with a loud thwack! followed seconds later by the quieter sound of the ball plunking into the pond.
“I’ll bet,” Pooder said, eyeing the pond during a break as we drank water from a hose that watered the green, “that the bottom of that pond is covered with golf balls. Enough balls are sitting in that pond that I’d never have to buy a ball the whole rest of my professional golfing career.”
And so, later that night, we took a burlap sack and rode our bikes to the golf course and salvage-dived in the pond for balls. The bottom was thick mud, but by feeling down a bit with our bare feet, we found the half-buried golf balls and then we’d flop over and dive down—it was only five feet or so deep—and push our hands in the muck and grab for anything firm and round. After a few hours and who knows how much mud we pawed through, we had found just under three hundred golf balls.
Two hundred and ninety-six exactly, Pooder wants me to say.
Pooder, as well as being inventive and imaginative, is almost pure hustler. He figured that he’d only need, at most, four, better make it five just in case, golf balls to launch his career as a professional golfer, and so he hustled the club’s golf pro, who ran the practice driving range, to buy the extra two hundred and ninety-one balls off him for twenty cents apiece.
Fifty-eight dollars and twenty cents.
Even split in half it gave us each twenty-nine dollars and ten cents of pure profit.
In the form of real money. Not just stored energy in the form of services to exchange and/or barter for goods. And I thought—mistakenly, as it turned out—that I could use the fact that I earned extra money, real money, and not just energy-equivalent stuff to help convince my dad that it might be a good thing for him to do as well.
I brought what I thought to be the convincing information, i.e., the cold, hard cash, to my father’s attention.
Major oops.
“What you’ve got there,” he told me, “is probably enough that, with thoughtful spending at garage sales and the used-clothing store, might get you all your school clothes for the year if, you know, you shop carefully and, of course, not counting shoes and underwear, which you already have.”
Pooder, for once, agreed with me rather than siding with my dad. “Twenty-nine dollars and ten cents won’t get you a single decent T-shirt online, let alone at a store. You know, where they have to charge more because they have overhead to think about…” He was beginning to lean away from golf, as fall was coming, moving toward what he called “a solid career” as an economist.
And, of course, he was right and my dad hadn’t seen the appeal of cash in hand and the whole business sent me back to the drawing board, as they say, or, in reality, back to the pamphlet.
But first, my father accidentally tried to kill me.
THE HARLEY
I think it’s important to understand at this time in our story that, along with my attempting to reboot my dad, other parts of our life went on.
We ate breakfast and dinner, slept each night in our beds in the trailer, fed varying numbers of chickens and the two pigs, scraped up and bucketed parts of shredded skunks that Carol caught and killed, fished and gardened—just kept on just living.
For my father, part of that just-living thing was the continual hunt for what he called bargains, not at garage sales, but in the shopper news circulars that came to our mailbox every Wednesday and Friday. When he found what he considered to be a particularly good item, he would approach the owners and begin—Pooder’s definition now—the “attack of Barterman.”
My father loved to barter. To trade, as he thought of it, energies, abilities, knowledge. Trade everything he could so as not use money. “I have a widget,” he explained to me when I was very small, “and John Doe has an extra electric frying pan he doesn’t need, but he needs a widget and so we trade. We barter. Simple and clean. It’s the very best and purest way to do business.”
“What’s a widget?” Pooder asked when I was complaining again about how my dad spent energy and not money. “Sounds like a smelly nocturnal animal.”
“A small mechanical device of no known origin,” I said. “I looked it up on the internet and that’s the informal definition. It’s also a part of interfacing computers, but no one seems to be able to clearly explain how it fits in there, so I went with the informal usage. The word is sometimes misused when gadget would be more appropriate, as in—”
“Thank you.” Pooder, who has made tangents an art form, cut me off. “So your dad likes to barter.”
“I think it’s his breath of life. He loves the very idea of it.”
“But,” Pooder said. Full sentence.
“Exactly. Most people don’t want to barter for things that are new and, well, the practice isn’t exactly universally accepted. Plus, he’s gotten involved with some strange trades because he wasn’t careful and got caught up in the spirit of the thing rather than keeping his eye on endgame. I mean, not all the barters were failures or mistakes. He found a good rear-tine Troy-Bilt garden tiller that only needed some work on the motor and it makes gardening a snap. Way better than a hoe or pick and shovel, and he got it for a clothes dryer he had reconditioned with a new belt system.”
“So when it works,” Pooder said, “it works. Bartering, I mean. But when it goes wrong, it can be a calamity.”
Like the Harley-Davidson.
I’m speaking, of course, of the Softtail Harley that Dad received in exchange for building a small stock barn for goats and chickens from an ex-biker named CB.
I had asked my dad what the initials stood for, and he said it was short for his nickname, which was Coffinbreath. While it was true CB’s breath didn’t smell like a blast of mint, it wasn’t that bad (not like, say, standing downwind of Oscar or sleeping
with Carol in the summer after she’d killed a skunk), and even though it didn’t feel wise to ask CB how he got the nickname, I was still curious.
When I mentioned the mystery to Pooder, he said I was smart to let it go. “It’s never wrong to act with restraint of pen and tongue. Especially when it’s an ex-biker whose nickname is Coffinbreath. You might wind up as a hood ornament.”
But CB was nice enough and said they needed the building because he and “his woman” were going to be farmers. CB’s woman had a name, Priddy, but you wouldn’t know listening to him talk about her because I mainly heard him call her “my woman.” As in, “My woman needs a place for her animals now that we’re going to raise our own livestock and live green and all that crap.” Or, “My woman wants me to milk goats so I’ll need a stand for them because my back and knees and all that crap are shot from all the years on the bike.” And, “My woman says I can learn to milk goats and all that crap even though I keep telling her I’m better with engines than teats.”
CB may have talked like a sexist pig but it was clear he did pretty much anything “his woman” asked.
My dad was happy with the proposed exchange. “Getting a Harley is perfect for future bartering. Everybody wants a Harley,” he said, as we watched CB roll the bike (what CB called “a hog” and what Priddy called “the loud, two-wheeled, like, death machine that I’ve, you know, had enough of already, damn”) out of their garage to show us what a great deal my dad was making. (“They’re always in, like, great demand,” Priddy added. Maybe she was worried my dad was thinking of backing out, which he wasn’t.)
When I told Pooder about the Harley, he nearly drooled. “Chicks dig Harleys,” he said. “We can ride around and they’ll flock to us.”
I thought that sort of language didn’t sound right coming from a budding economist, and so I looked at him and said, “Chicks?” in the same tone as I would say “Homework over summer vacation?”
He rolled his eyes and said, “Get a grip, man, we’re of an age to think that way.”
There are times when you correct your friend for being an archaic sexist pig like CB and then there are times when you sit back and wait for karma to drop-kick his disrespectful butt into gentlemanly manners. I chose the latter because who am I to deprive some budding feminist of the chance to put Pooder in his place? Sometimes you learn more from painful example than helpful warning. And I already had my hands full trying to train my dad.
So my father built a small shed and a goat barn for Priddy and CB and naturally I helped, and for a time there, life wasn’t bad. The work kept us from going to garage sales or used-clothing stores, and for a couple of weeks, I didn’t even have to worry about positive or negative reinforcement techniques.
Carol came with us to CB and Priddy’s place, of course, and quickly developed a bond with CB—they seemed to speak the same language, which was essentially a series of grumbles and grunts—and it kept her from staring into my right eye.
Plus, I made a new friend. One afternoon when we were working on the roof and I was running back and forth handing shingles up to Dad (I should mention that I was wearing a set of the pale-pink bibs with the faded word JUICY written across the butt), Priddy came up to me.
“Love your bibs,” she said. “I have, like, the exact same pair. You can come over after we, like, get a goat, anytime you want and have fresh goat milk. Like, on the house. After, you know, CB learns to, like, milk a goat.”
I nodded and smiled and thanked her even though I was fairly certain I wouldn’t think much of the taste of goat milk, much less go out of my way to get a free cup. I didn’t think CB was, like, you know, going to start milking goats soon. (Turns out I was wrong on both counts: CB did learn to milk a goat, which he named Betty, and I wound up, like, enjoying fresh goat milk.)
So there finally came a morning when CB rode up our dirt driveway on the motorcycle with mufflers that sounded like machine guns, and parked it in front of our trailer; then Priddy drove him home in her Prius. I thought I saw a tear in CB’s eyes when he walked away from the bike, but it could have been my imagination. I don’t think he cried often.
And suddenly we had a Harley-Davidson motor- cycle.
There it sat, about four feet from our mailbox at the side of the path leading up to the porch. I hadn’t thought much about it until there it was, in our yard, shining in the sun, visible from every window on one side of the trailer.
A Harley-Davidson motorcycle, for those of you who don’t know, is nothing short of magic.
Dazzling. Mesmerizing. Captivating.
The closer you get and the longer you’re near one, the stronger its hold on you.
All right, I know not everybody gets all side-wiggled at the sight of a motorcycle. But put yourself in my shoes and think, having never ridden anything without pedals, having never gone anywhere except in a beat-up old Chevy pickup that made enough rattling sounds to make you think earplugs were as essential to travel as seat belts, think what the motorcycle meant to me.
There is, simply, nothing on earth cooler than a Harley-Davidson. And, if you own one, which we miraculously did, you simply called it a “Harley.”
It was like America—all the best parts of a wonderful, pure, American Dream America—had suddenly moved into our yard, covered in chrome and shining bright silver in the sun. Everything in me, every cell, wanted me to go out and get on that Harley—the Harley—and fire it up and thunder down the road into the rest of my life forever and ever, amen.
After I stopped and asked Peggy if she wanted to go for a ride on something majestic and manly and then the wind would blow her hair around and her eyes would laugh and she’d sit in back of me and hold on tight around my waist …
Pooder says I’m getting off topic again, but he understands the intoxicating effect of the bike and thinks you will, too, so we’re leaving it in.
Although I couldn’t drive yet, I did go out and sit on the Harley and balanced it enough to knock up the kickstand and sort of semi-pretend I was riding it, cranking the handgrip throttle and making motor sounds in my mind. But Harleys are very heavy and I started to lean and then lean more and suddenly I was about to lose control and I was covered in sweat and my arms and legs were shaking as I tried to right the bike before it tipped over on me. I barely got it balanced and back upright again so I could put the kickstand down, which was nothing short of a full and complete miracle because Harley-Davidsons weigh between five hundred and forty and nine hundred and five pounds, and I only weighed about a buck five, and being smushed by a Harley in your own front yard is the second worst way to be taken out by one after losing control on the freeway and sliding under a semi and …
Carol stood by and watched the whole thing and was, I think, concerned that, first, I had somehow stolen the bike from her new best friend, CB, and second, I had gone completely insane. But she was a lot less displeased than when I’d tried to distract her and SP from garage sales so she didn’t show me her teeth or stare at my right eye.
My father had propped up the Harley and wandered off to do other things in his shed. I thought he’d forgotten about it, and to be frank, I’d been so caught up in dreams of the Harley that he could have disappeared altogether for all I’d noticed. Harleys have a blinding effect.
I mean, he had been there all along, of course, and once I noticed him again, I could tell he was getting ready to return to his normal way of living, and by that I mean hitting garage sales, and I was on the edge of firing up the reinforcement program again. But I didn’t have to, because the Harley saved me.
Well, at least at first.
Because there came a morning when he was sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee, looking out the window while I had some oatmeal, and staring at the Harley, and his eyes looked a little different. Had a warm shine in them, a glint, and he said softly, “CB said there were some problems with the fuel system. Maybe I should check it out.”
And I thought, oh no. Not the fuel system.
He had some mystical knowledge about fuel systems in engines. He knew things—Dark, Secret Basement Things—about fuel systems and their potential. He would take the most ordinary tools such as a wrench and a screwdriver and a magnifying glass and set in to tinkering, and the engine would become altered. That’s the way to put it, too—altered—he would take it to an altered state, no longer a normal, sensible, peace-loving engine, but a fuel-devouring, insanely powerful, roaring monster.
My dad’s particular talent vis-à-vis fuel systems had led to such disasters as the famous Wood Chipper Horror, where he bartered his labor working on an engine-driven wood chipper for a stack of roof shingles. My dad “tuned” the fuel system on the motor, and according to the new owner when he fired it up, the chipper went berserk and reversed course, spewing instead of chipping, and driving the three-foot two-by-four completely through the front and back of his new car, smashing the front windshield and rear window to smithereens, and he swore, “taking Binky right out” when he hit the stop button and the chipper seemed to take a deep breath, then inhale everything. Simply everything not nailed down.
Binky was the pet cat of the guy’s wife, who claimed Binky got tangled in the seething vortex of swirling debris in the chipper’s swath of destruction and was eaten whole and obliterated.
That’s how she put it in a complaint letter from the lawyer: “The chipper ate my whole cat.”
Which, if you think about it, is better than if the chipper had only partially eaten her cat and all you had is, well, leftover cat. Personally, I think Binky just ran off as soon as the chipper fired up, heading for sanctuary where there was no Frankenstein wood chipper, because cats are smart and fast.
In any case, Binky was permanently missing, so we got the lady a new kitten from Oscar’s yard and her husband promised her that he would never run the wood chipper if the new whole cat was outside. My dad and I helped him drag the chipper to an open field behind his house where it couldn’t suck up debris and produce another hurricane-force blast. The lawyer who sent the letter saying he looked forward to taking Dad to court and winning “substantial damages for emotional suffering and property damage” took one look at our 1951 half-ton dented Chevy pickup and me in my pink bibs, threw up his hands, muttering something about lost causes, and then kicked us out of his office. Dad smiled and told me that mitigation is far superior to litigation in terms of legal problem solving.
