Knuckleheads

by Jeff Kass

  Lisa and Natalie, though both nearly a decade younger, are junior associates like I am, but moving swiftly toward dropping the junior from their titles. I am moving swiftly toward being dropped from the firm. When we triumph in the tournament today, we will be showered with gift certificates to local eateries and bottles of aged scotch and at least my name will be associated with winners. That should buy me another six months of employment. It’s not that I’m bad at what I do. My clients, generally, are happy with my services. My problem is I’m horrendous at small talk. I just don’t log enough billable hours because meetings with me, phone conversations with me, are quick and to the point.

  I try to be socially adept. I try to spend time during each interaction being “the grease that keeps the ball-bearings bouncing” as my supervisor advises me to be, though I’m not even sure what ball-bearings are, let alone whether they bounce.

  My standard interaction with a client starts with my offering some engaging witticism such as, “Hey, how’s it going?” and then I’m pretty much tapped out. Because I specialize in divorces, I can’t move on to “How’re the wife and kids?” so what typically follows is a fetid, polluted-swamp silence that makes me doubt I actually began my morning by coating my tongue with several mint-flavored cleansing products designed to inoculate against bacteria. I’ve yet to master the kind of warm laughter that can fill up that silence, that can paint the room with cheery bonhomie and add an extra fifteen minutes of bullshit to the meeting. I don’t know how to do joviality. Instead, for thirty seconds I fidget and make pathetic and futile faces begging the client to assume responsibility for greasing the ball-bearings. Inevitably, as the silence grows and threatens to suffocate the conference room, the building, the city, I panic. Too soon, I lick the insides of my teeth, and say, “Let’s get down to business, shall we?”

  My supervisor says I’m costing the firm a hundred grand a year. Minimum.

  Women like Lisa and Natalie don’t talk to me either, or they might initially out of politeness, but when the swamp silence hits, they pivot like ballerinas and make excuses about text messages, and Gordon knows all these shortcomings about me. He knows I often spend five out of seven nights a week wondering if I should shoot myself. That’s why I’d like to brain him with a golf club right now, angle an eight-iron like a cleaver through his pea-sized skull, then leave him bleeding in the fairway.

  I’m not surprised, after I demonstrate my proficiency to swing as hard as I can and nub golfballs roughly the length of my living room, that Lisa and Natalie have no use for me. They tolerate my slightly sweaty presence on the tee box, the uncomfortable mix of my perfumey cologne and over-medicated mouth, and my two-hundred dollar ill-fitting golf shirt and professionally pressed slacks while I address the ball, and they blandly expect horrible, uninspiring contact when I swing. After I fail to disappoint that expectation, they stoically move on. It makes sense for them to gallop like gazelles with those long tasty legs far ahead of me in the fairway while I hunt around in the high grass for my pathetic shots. But Gordon, he’s supposed to be my friend. He’s not supposed to be loping along with them, sandwiched between them as they laugh and joke as to whether the team should play Natalie’s perfect shot, or Lisa’s perfect shot, or Gordon’s perfect shot. Maybe that’s not even what they’re talking about. Maybe the shot-choice is obvious and knowable to anyone not stuck excavating gnarly clumps of rough in hopes of not losing yet another six-dollar personally monogrammed golf ball. Maybe they’re joking about something entirely different, something airy and hip and totally unrelated to the present moment. Either way, I have no access to their fun.

  Gordon’s supposed to stick with me in the muck and encourage me because it’s still possible that at some crucial point in the round my skills will be vital to our team’s success. He’s supposed to buoy me with inanities like, “You just missed that one, buddy, but you’ll come around, you always do,” and he should be helping me find my ball. He’s not supposed to be up ahead flirting, bopping along, admiring the curve of a laughing breast or the swish of a loping hip. That’s not why I called him to play with us. I called Gordon instead of, say, Lennie, because Gordon’s never betrayed me before. He’s patient with me. He possesses reservoirs of patience. This is the same man who loved calling me retard, but who nonetheless never turned me down as his spades partner, never refused to play with me even though my breath reeked, even though I bet four books when I should have claimed the donger.

  The caddy shack at Flintmoor was a tent. Inside it were benches and folding chairs but no tables, and never enough places for everybody to sit. If you didn’t get there early enough, you had to stand. Sometimes for hours. The caddy master, an obese man named Stan with a clean-shaven face who wore collared shirts and mud-hued slacks, sat nearby on a barstool in a small wooden booth like a toll collector. There he answered phones and charted tee-times and sold us Devil Dogs and Fanta Orange Sodas. When a coterie of members was ready to head to the tee, he’d squeeze out from his booth with a ballpoint pen behind his ear and a clipboard in his left hand. “Johnny Jones,” he might say, pointing to one of the veterans who caddied as a career, moving south in the winter to work the clubs in Florida, “you got Stein and Bloom. Beal and Beal too. Two carts.”

  Johnny was Stan’s favorite caddy, his drinking buddy who accompanied him to the chariot-racing track each night, and he always got the premium loops. Four bags on two carts was the best anyone could hope for—you just had to carry a quartet of putters and you made sixty bucks plus tips. Kids like me and Lennie never got loops like that, but we didn’t begrudge the grizzled black men like Johnny and Sparks and Lester who did, with their broken knees and hand-me-down golf shoes. Johnny, who did way better than Stan at the track, had a car, an old Ford he kept polished and purring. The rest of the career guys bused it to the club, limping into the caddy tent with racing forms curled beneath one arm, clutching paper bags housing fried-egg-and-butter sandwiches on hard rolls. They talked to us about women, about the track, about how good they were as golfers in their own right. If you got paired up with any of them, they took care of you, telling you where to stand and what to look for on the course. Because they knew I was hapless, they’d even follow the ball into the woods if the person I was caddying for hit one there. They were being helpful and kind, sure, but they also knew if they covered for my fuck-ups, the round would go smoother, everyone would be happier, and they’d make more in tips.

  I could have learned a lot from them if I’d been paying attention. I was the worst caddy in the tent. Poor Stan would look in my direction only when everyone else was already on the course. There’d be a reluctant hope in his eyes then, a kind of pleading that either I’d somehow do a better job, or I’d get so discouraged by my own incompetence that I’d stop showing up for work.

  Gordon, on the other hand, was terrific. He was as good as the career caddies, better in some ways. He didn’t know every nook of the course like they did, but he was a Jew and they weren’t, so he knew the culture of the members more intimately. He knew how to make them comfortable with off-color jokes and he could talk politics with them. In his own way he was the Flamingo Kid, charming older men and women, making them want to adopt him as a son. They loved him because he personified no societal guilt. He was a bright young herald of the elders’ own tribe and they could share wisdom in order to aid him along his journey—a marked contrast to the beaten-down, sometimes-smelling-like-liquor servants from another social class who wore golf shoes they’d discarded five years ago and literally bore the weight of their leisure on their backs.

  Gordon was a fresh breath, standing unbuckled and handsome in the mist and dew of the fairways, and he could caddy for anybody, even Newfeld and Bloch.

  We always knew when it was about to happen. Instead of squeezing from his booth and strutting to the front of the tent, belly puffed with his big boss status and the security of knowing he would never have to carry another bag except his own, Stan would shuffle out shamefa
cedly. He wouldn’t gaze over the congregation searching out which of us to favor with the upcoming loop like a faith-healer choosing whom to grace with a miracle. Rather, he’d stretch his palms upward and say, “Okay who wants ’em? Newfeld and Bloch going out in fifteen minutes. Anybody?”

  The older caddies would get real busy with their racing forms, or stare at the ground, or start rubbing their tired backs. Newfeld and Bloch were sons-of-bitches, the worst loop at the club. Legend had it they’d once caused Largeman George—a stellar caddy who’d reportedly carried for Tom Wieskopf at the U.S. Open—to lose his job when, overflowing with anger at the way they were treating him, he’d shrugged their bags off his shoulders in the middle of the eighteenth fairway, and then one at a time, hurled each magnificent over-stuffed trunk into the middle of the pond fronting the green. Then, without looking back, he’d walked off the course directly to the bus-stop.

  The story is legendary because the launching of a member’s bag into a pond constitutes a colossal and gorgeous gesture of defiance. It takes a powerful man to hurl a bag of clubs. There’s the grip and heft, the momentum that must be generated to sail something that bulky through the air. The tricky timing of the toss. It’s a feat worthy for competition in a World’s Strongest Man contest, a feat that speaks of a surrounding clamor, a noisy chaos of country and culture that cannot be walled away by high fences and membership fees. Like sleeping with the prettiest girl in the senior class behind her boyfriend’s back and giving her the best orgasm she’s ever had, it’s also the kind of triumph I will never accomplish in this lifetime. While I was getting yelled at during a loop, I liked to imagine what Largeman’s launch might have looked like, the heavy bags soaring upward, individual clubs and balls tumbling into the water before the finality of the great massive splash.

  Jonathan Newfeld and Ira Bloch both had high squeaky voices and had been either widowed or divorced. Regardless of the circumstances that ended their marriages, they seemed as socially inept as I was, except older and more venomous. They’d blame their caddies for every lousy shot they hit, which was every shot they hit. Heading out with them meant five hours of searching for balls in the woods and digging into clumps of poison ivy because the bitter bastards refused to ever give up on a ball. You’d troop back in after the loop with your feet blistered from your wet socks, and your legs and pants soaked because they’d made you wade into water hazards to retrieve the balls they’d dunked there, and you spent so much of the round raking sand traps that you felt like a landscaper. They’d yell at you constantly, screech that you were stupid and worthless if somehow your shadow had the temerity to intercept one of their shadows and then one of them shanked a ball into the trees. They were the undisputed kings of the miserable loop, walking cat-claws who never tipped a dime.

  In fact, because they didn’t want to feel guilty about never tipping, they successfully lobbied the club to adopt a no-tipping policy so no one else would tip either. Fortunately for us, the adoption of the policy actually increased how much money we made. First, to compensate for the absent tips, the club raised the rates from sixteen dollars a bag to eighteen, and second—except for when a caddy like me was the bungling boob holding the clubs—most of the members, who were generally douchebags of the paternalistic variety, kept tipping anyway. It seemed like they maybe even tipped more because the policy change made it a little illegal, a little naughty for them to dig into their pockets and fish out a billfold, to whisper, Hey, Caddy, here’s for your troubles, and slide us a few bucks as if they were getting away with something.

  This surreptitious tipping only further embittered Newfeld and Bloch and hardened their determination to be nasty and demeaning to whomever carried their bags. None of the veterans would do it. Gordon, who could wring a hefty tip out of anyone else, invariably stepped up. “I’ll take ’em,” he’d say, and the weathered veterans would shake their heads as if he were the stupidest moron on the planet.

  But Gordon was playing a different angle. “If I take these clowns,” he told me, “Stan will feel like he owes me. Watch what happens the rest of the week. I’ll get out early and often. Two loops a day, sometimes three. I’ll be getting loops with carts. Johnny Jones will always be number one, but check out who’s gonna be number two. Just watch.”

  I did, and he was right. Gordon got loops before guys who’d been lugging bags for thirty years. Gordon got the big tipping couples like the Ginginfelds and the Sterns, who bought their caddies fat condiment-sloshed cheeseburgers at the snack-bar. Gordon got it all and his bank account doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled, all in one summer. He caddied for the biggest assholes at the club once a week, sucked up the miserable five hours without a tip, and the rest of the time he was golden. Stan loved him and the other caddies did too. He took the bullet for all of us.

  It happens on the seventh hole. It’s a par five and with Gordon’s monster drive and Natalie’s laser-stroked five-wood, we’re on the fringe in two. Fifty feet from the cup. A birdie feels inevitable. I chip first so I can get my hack out of the way and let the others show off how close they can nestle the ball to the hole. That’s my attitude when I line the shot up: just don’t waste time, scurry through the motions and let one of your so-called teammates get the job done. Still, somewhere deep in my ribs—like old Stan hoping I can miraculously transform into a more heroic version of myself—I believe.

  My short game’s as lousy as any other part of my game, but occasionally I get lucky. I visualize a high floating lob that will land four feet from the hole, bounce minimally and roll within six inches. The shot I hit looks nothing like that. My backswing is balky and I jab at the ball and blade a one-hop line-drive that speeds toward the flag. If it misses hitting the pin it will skitter over the green and into the surrounding sand, but it doesn’t miss the pin. Smacks it with a resounding clack and drops straight into the cup. The eagle has landed and we are eight under par after seven holes. At this rate, we will break the all-time tournament record. Gordon offers a hardy high-five but I suspect he’s irritated. Lisa whistles and Natalie squeezes my shoulder and says, “Good aim, young man, superior aim.” We skip lightly, all four of us laughing, to the next tee.

  In the Flintmoor caddy tent, cheating was a much-discussed topic. Johnny Jones and other career guys advocated in favor of it. Johnny would say, “You gotta be sneaky. You want the members to play well. Lower scores mean higher tips and if they have a good round, they’ll request you the next time. You can’t let them know you’re cheating for them though. It’s only when they can’t see you. It’s only just if the ball’s in the woods and stuck behind a tree in an unplayable lie, you just kick it a few feet so it’s sitting in an open clearing with a shot at getting back to the fairway. Same thing in the high rough. If the lie’s bad, nudge it a few inches so the shot’s playable. The key is you don’t just do it for the guys you’re carrying for. You gotta do it for all the players in the foursome. That way everyone’s happy. That way nobody complains about the supernatural luck everyone else seems to be having.”

  Gordon disagreed, though he never said so in the tent. He’d explain his theory to Lennie and me over spades games. “Look,” he’d say. “These are guys who were living here, in America, during the Holocaust. They already feel like they cheated fate, like their whole life has been based on supernatural luck. What they want now is struggle. They want challenges to overcome, even bullshit ones like a golf ball behind a tree, because they survived Hitler without having to overcome anything. They’ve got relatives who were killed while they were over here eating pot roast with their mothers. Eating noodle pudding. The best thing you can do, when they’re behind a tree, is to encourage them to take some crazy shot. Go for it, you gotta say, what’ve you got to lose? Listen, they’ll probably miss the shot and then you can give that shrug that says, oh well, the whole world hates Jews anyway, and then you drop and take a stroke penalty and move on. But what if they hit the shot? What if they make that one miracle swing that makes them feel li
ke Arnold Palmer? That’s joy for them. In the middle of all this guilt they already live with, that’s one hundred percent pure joy. It’s the thing they search for when they come out here. They’ll talk about that shot for the rest of their lives. Trust me, if they hit a shot like that, they’ll tip you for days, maybe set you up with their nieces. Maybe sign over the papers to their Cadillac.”

  We’re ten under par after nine holes. I haven’t hit another good shot, not even close, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t need to. I have achieved my magical moment. We stop at the turn for a beer. Heineken. Lisa and Natalie quaff theirs in about twelve seconds and order another. “I think I’m in,” Gordon says to me, nodding toward Lisa.

  “She’s dating another attorney,” I say. “Good guy. Environmental law. Keeps our drinking water pure.”

  “He’s not about to keep her pure, trust me.”

  When we finish the round, the four of us will sit in the clubhouse banquet room and be awarded a large trophy. We will also be awarded a case of aged scotch and various and sundry gift certificates. We will break open one of the bottles of scotch and relive the glories of our record-breaking day, especially my miracle chip shot on the seventh. Our in-firm band, The Sharks, comprised of oh-so-clever tort specialists who strum guitars and sing lyrics with smug puns about how smart we are and how stupid our clients, judges and jurors are, will play a twenty-five minute set and we will grow drunker and drunker and at some point I will realize it’s just me and Natalie at the table, that Gordon and Lisa have slipped away to her BMW in the parking lot where he surely has two hands under her skirt. Natalie will look at me with slurred eyes and rivulets of scotch drool on her chin and say, “Hey, partner, care to demonstrate any more of your superior aim,” and the sticky issue here, the high tangled rough, is that I’m already engaged.