All together they blurted, “Pleeease!”
“Well . . . okay.”
I waited for Cack to come circling by again.
He repeated his insult. I obeyed my own instruction and hit the balls quickly. Like white tracer bullets they flew into the night.
Thwack . . . wide left.
Thwack . . . wide right.
Thwack . . . too high.
Thwack . . . Clang. Got him in the front bumper.
Cheers, backslaps, and high fives from teenage girls.
I am young again. I am popular. I am Superman.
Lesson over, I gave the girls their club back and bowed deeply. The blond set seven balls on the mat and whiffed the first three. Cack shouted that she couldn’t hit dust bunnies with a broom.
I turned from the chaos to check on my pro shop. Underneath the awning stood a woman more my age. I had wondered why Molly had not arrived with the campaign, though I supposed with her being an analyst and not a local, she wasn’t going to show any bias. Still, she alone was the reason for my very crowded and boisterous golf range.
“Is that your girlfriend?” asked one of the teenagers as I departed.
“Just work on your golf swing, miss,” I said over my shoulder. They giggled as I hurried back toward my shop.
In jeans and a bright blue Pro-Dem T-shirt, Molly looked glad to see me. But after my initial “hello there,” she only said, “Great to see you, Chris. But right now I gotta go take my turn in the cart. Cack said it was okay. Wanna grab a pizza later?”
I blurted, “You bet,” as she went running down the hill toward the maintenance shed.
Cack met her there, handed off the bullhorn, and secured her inside the cart. He gave her a push start, then paused on the grass and wiped the sweat from his forehead. The night had turned humid, and the right-wingers were yelling for more.
Molly came tearing out from the right side of the range, weaving back and forth to draw attention to herself. In a kind of rolling ad lib she chastened the customers and wasted no time in making the insults personal. She turned the cart around the 100-yard marker and came speeding past the three candidates, all of them male and taking aim.
Then she raised the bullhorn and said, “The libs have prettier wives, and they got them without the benefit of unfair tax cuts for the wealthy!”
The guy running for State House swung so hard he fell down on the mat.
The ball sliced horribly off line, and Molly never missed a beat. She stopped in the middle of the range and shouted, “Slipped on your fat wallet, eh? That happens a lot to you capitalist extremists.”
Aides sprinted to my pro shop to buy more buckets of balls.
I sold them plenty, then returned to the window to watch the fireworks. And into the middle of it all, in patriotic red, white, and blue, strode Mrs. Dupree, trolling the range with her one-brick dog and handing out invitations to a party. Hack’s had become a nuthouse.
Just when I thought the revelry had peaked, my office phone began ringing. And ringing. One guy who had seen the news bit called in from out of town, wanting me to open “Hack’s of Myrtle Beach.” Another guy from Los Angeles who was vacationing on Kiawah Island and owned a public course and golf range in LA, requested an instruction manual on how to build a caged cart in the shape of a top hat. Then he asked for a list of Cack’s best political one-liners.
I felt the need to protect my eccentric friend, so I told a little Caucasian lie. “Um, sir, Cack is working the range at the moment, infuriating conservatives.”
“What about the instruction manual to build the cart cage that looks like a top hat?”
“I don’t think there is a manual, sir. Cack freewheeled it. Just him and his welding tool.”
The guy paused a moment. “Think he’d build one for me? I’d pay good money.”
“I’ll ask him when he gets through infuriating the conservatives.”
Cack was not overly thrilled by all this attention. Thirty minutes later, while Molly took her second turn at golfer harassment, he burst into the pro shop and told me this stuff could get out of hand, that our once fun-natured little business might become too much of a conduit for competing agendas.
“People are gonna take this too seriously, Chris,” he said while staring at the growing pile of cash in our register. “Someone could get hurt.”
No one got hurt. And no one budged Cack from his independent ideology. Even better, by the time the customers had left and the lights were turned out on the range, we’d sold fourteen hundred dollars worth of golf balls.
Molly remained in the pro shop with us while I bagged the money and Cack filled out a deposit slip. She gulped from a water bottle before leaning over the counter to watch our progress. With a kind of flirty curiosity she said, “Looks like a good night.”
I took a couple of twenties and stuffed them into my shirt pocket. “Pizza money,” I said.
I locked up the shop and followed the two of them into the parking lot. There I handed Cack three hundred bucks in cash and told him it was his bonus for “political insults above and beyond the call of duty.”
Cack stared at the wad of bills in his hands for a long moment. Then he stuffed the cash into his pocket and said he had no more reservations about the direction of the business.
He and Molly exchanged “nice to meet ya’s,” and he left whistling. At the door of his pickup he muttered something about the great one-liners he’d dreamed up for Saturday night, when the Democrats would invade us and have their turn on the mats.
At a table for two inside a pizza joint called Andolini’s, Molly lowered her menu and said, “You’re quite generous with your employees.”
I nodded with all the humility I could muster. “Cack is more like a partner than an employee. Besides, the whole insult-the-customers thing was his idea.”
Her face went blank. “You mean you didn’t think of it yourself?”
“Nope. My insult skills are quite pitiful.”
She hid again behind her menu. “Gosh, then I have no reason to be on a dinner date with you.”
Before I knew how to respond, she lowered the menu a second time and said, “Just kidding.”
“Somehow I expect a lot of that.”
After a minute of silence, Molly peered again over her menu. “Chris, do you like banana peppers on your pizza?”
“Yes,” I said, studying the list of ingredients, “but only if the peppers invite their cousins, the pepperonis.”
She rolled her eyes as if that was the corniest line she’d ever heard. But then Molly smiled and said, “Maybe the pepperonis should invite the black olives.”
“And the black olives should insist that the—”
A waitress came by and interrupted our silly first-date banter. But then we began again, and the waitress stood frowning as we debated our way to a seven-topping pizza. The only ingredient blackballed were the anchovies.
By the time only three slices remained on the platter, we had shared the shallower side of first-date basics: her family in New York and Virginia; mine in Georgia and Alabama. She had an older sister; I had an older brother. She liked dalmatians and Siamese cats; I liked labs and absentee cats. She’d seen Irish countrysides and wanted to visit Mexico. I’d seen Mexico and wanted to golf the Irish countryside.
During a lull in the mutual sharing, she picked at the crust of a pizza slice and said, “Chris, there’s another reason why I wanted to have a chat tonight.”
For a moment she just let the comment hover over the table.
All I could think was, Here it comes, her next great idea for expanding the customer base at Hack’s.
And for once in my life, I correctly predicted the actions of a female. After she’d eaten the crust—she seemed to like the plain outer crust even more than the ingredients—she dabbed at her mouth with a napkin and set the napkin in her lap. “I need to explain something.”
I sought refuge in a long slurp of sweet tea. “You’re gonna tell me that the
feminists really did invent the Super Blaster?”
Molly plucked a lone banana pepper from her plate but stopped short of biting into it. “What are you talking about?”
My pizza slice needed more Parmesan, and I was happy to oblige it. “Never mind. Go ahead and explain what you were going to explain.”
She tucked her napkin back into her lap. “You have a good thing going at your golf range, but tonight was just a general bashing of a political ideology. What if you promoted a night where actual opponents—say a local Dem State House candidate against a local Republican State House candidate—both showed up with their fan bases? Then do the same with the mayoral candidates and so forth?”
“I’ll give that some thought.” A longer gulp of sweet tea helped me process the fact that I needed to shift control of this chat. Moreover, just when I thought we might talk about more personal goals—like what we’re looking for in a spouse, if each wanted kids—she remained planted on her favorite subject. Perhaps she was just a bit nervous, this being a first date. Our talk, however, had shifted firmly from pepperoni to politics, a detour that created the conversational lull from which we needed recovery.
I simply blurted it out. “So, do you want kids, Molly?”
Slight hesitation. “With you, or in general?”
“The second one.”
She looked confused. “The second kid?”
“No, I meant do you want kids in general? I realize that we don’t know each other all that well yet, but right now I’m sorta picturing you as the career type who, at age thirty, thinks of parenthood in vague terms of someday, a woman who is great at her job but one who just might wake up at age thirty-eight wondering if it is too late for kids. So if this is how you’re viewing life, I need to know because someday I’m picturing a crib or two behind the desk of my golf shop and little plastic golf clubs in a rainbow of colors.” I paused for a quick breath. “Do you ever think those kind of thoughts? . . . I mean in general, not necessarily with me, or with plastic clubs.”
Perhaps this detour was a bit too swift, an unexpected squeal of the relational front tires. But it did serve to stun Molly out of political mode and force on her a kind of wide-eyed, open-mouthed wonder, as if she had never been asked such questions with such boldness—especially on a first date.
“Wow, Chris. You don’t waste any time, do you?”
I leaned forward in the booth, eyed her over the napkin holder. “So . . . do you ever think those kinds of thoughts?”
After several anxious glances around the restaurant, she managed a subdued, “Perhaps. But would you mind if we waited a few more dates before discussing these things in depth?”
This seemed reasonable enough. “Sure,” I said and reached for the dinner check.
Our date began its conclusion when Molly explained that she had to be up early for another TV spot, and it ended fully with a gentle handshake at the door of her rental car. I liked her a lot, though I wondered if I’d been too blunt.
“It was nice to chat with you, Chris,” she said and let go of my hand. “Although somehow the word ‘chat’ doesn’t feel substantial enough. Let me think on your questions some more . . . and, um, remember what I suggested about your business.”
“Sure. I’ll call you in two days.”
After I’d closed her door and she’d driven away, I stood there in the empty street for a moment and reconsidered my rather intrusive get-to-know-ya technique. I figured not only did I need to soften my method, but also I should somehow label it, in case I ever needed to share it with a fellow single.
I labeled it THUMPE—The Hackett Unbridled Method of Prospect Evaluation.
Part one was simple: If you don’t want kids, I probably don’t want to date you.
Perhaps Molly had her own methodology, though I wouldn’t hazard a guess. A college buddy had told me once that the evaluation systems of women were as varied as the universe of golf swings—and that any man who tried to predict a woman’s system was headed for yet another relational double bogey.
7
LESSON FOR TODAY
To grow as a golfer (or as a person), it helps if one submits oneself to regular accountability.
Saturday night something odd struck me as I watched members of the left gather on my driving range. Amongst the sixty registered Democrats spread out across the hitting mats, it was the candidates themselves who looked hesitant and confused. From my perch at the window of the pro shop, I watched them and tried to decipher what they were thinking.
I’m antiwar and yet I hold in my hands what is essentially a war club, used to fire these white, nonbiodegradable bullets at a fellow human.
I’m a big believer in protecting the environment, and yet here I am brandishing this 7-iron, taking big divots out of the precious earth, while all around me are gathered people who drive gas-guzzling SUVs, contributing to the global warming that makes all my shots slice to the right. I wonder if I can get away with blaming my slice on global warming?
I continued to observe them and wondered about the purpose of it all, this hiring out of my range for faux political vindication. The only thing I could understand on this night was that my business boomed because the people were given an outlet for election-year stress.
Cack provoked them with the same ease and lack of grace with which he provoked the conservatives. He even drove his cart in reverse. Bullhorn raised, he shouted, “If any of you Dem’s actually win, your policies will set America back forty years. So in your honor I’ll drive my cart in like manner.”
Thwack. Duff. Whiff. Duff, duff, duff. Thud. Whiff. Thwack . . . Clang.
“Oh for cryin’ out loud,” Cack hollered. “Who got lucky?”
From the fifth mat, the Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor raised his hand and grinned.
Still in reverse, Cack backed in a circle and said, “Give that man a free bucket of balls, Chris. And a free drink too! He loves entitlements so much that we should let him taste one for himself. And while we’re at it, let’s give free golf balls to all his tree-huggin’ friends, plus all the people he bribed on the way to his candidacy.”
A frenzy of hurried swings gave me pause to compare the relative abilities of the two camps. The results proved ironic: Republicans tended to swing with more self-righteousness and hit the ball left, while the Democrats swung with privileged annoyance and sliced the ball right.
This irony seemed lost on everyone but Cack, who did not delay in ramming home the point to the throng of GOP bashers. “Aim right! Aim right! If ya wanna whack a conservative, you gotta aim right!”
Range balls flew in many directions, and once again, aides and volunteers hustled into the pro shop to buy more balls.
My register rang until it hummed. While making change I glanced through the window to watch my groundskeeper going it alone—Molly had left a phone message that she had “other plans.” But this was a profitable autumn night, one that would act as ballast for the lean days of winter, and in the fury of fast revenue there was little time to think of romance.
On the TV mounted behind me the debate raged on, the campaigns in full attack mode. From what I’d gathered on the nightly news shows, our nation’s highest form of dialogue was no dialogue at all—just one witty sound bite versus another witty sound bite, blurted and repeated and crammed down each other’s throats, all for the purpose of acquiring power.
But if America was so polarized that no one ever gave an inch and acted as if destroying your opponent was the only goal worth pursuing, then perhaps Cack had found some middle ground. Perhaps his Taunt-mobile, together with my thirty-six hitting mats and manicured Bermuda, was the stage on which Charlestonians could vent their frustrations in physical form—without actually harming anyone. And perhaps after this reciprocal event, when both sides had swung themselves into exhaustion and were complaining of sore backs, an authentic dialogue would break through the stalemate and allow humans to act, well, human.
Then again, perhaps not.
Near closing time Cack performed what would become his signature move. He stopped in the middle of the range, climbed atop the metal cage, and put his Uncle Sam hat on his head. He faced the left-leaning hackers and raised the bullhorn to his mouth. With his left hand he waved his red, white, and blue hat at the crowd. “Howdy, y’all! I’m a big-spending Republican about to approve funding for oil exploration in the habitat of the spotted owl.”
Gasps, tumult, uproar. Violent swings. Cack ducking back into his cart. Buckets upon buckets of golf balls bought with cash, credit card, and righteous indignation.
Once again, Miss Molly’s idea had fostered a great night. I figured I owed her a nice dinner, especially since she’d endured my THUMPE test.
Since mid-April I’d been meeting twice per month with two other men to discuss various issues of manhood. We called ourselves Golfers of the Roundtable—our threesome had met each other during a rainout at a local course, and a camaraderie formed as we sat at a round table in the snack bar and shared our backgrounds.
Tonight we met in the downstairs den at the suburban home of Paul Mills, otherwise known as Pauly Three Seeds. His nickname was neither Native American nor Mafia connected. Every bit as Caucasian as myself, Paul was a mild-mannered accountant, complete with white button-down and the occasional pair of navy suspenders. He even drove a minivan. Paul had boasted at our May meeting that he’d had a “male operation,” this after fathering three children within the first four years of his marriage. Thus he was dubbed Pauly Three Seeds by the third member of our group, a 280-pound half-Samoan named Benny Tuimatofa.
Benny insisted that nicknames were only appropriate if we each had one, and so he became, at least to himself, Heavy T. They called me Hack, no great surprise there.
“Hack,” Benny said as he twisted the cap from a Diet Coke, “today I figured up if people use my nickname ten times per day instead of my full name, over the course of a lifetime I’ll save humanity nearly a million syllables.”
Benny was big into conservation, except when it came to food.
Par for the Course Page 7
