He spent the break in Toledo with Jenna. I returned to Maine, where I felt like an astronaut who had returned from Mars. Houston is a strange place, but we’re both settling in again in Gunpoint, which isn’t as bad as the name implies, though a couple of nights before we left for break, we woke up to the sound of glass breaking. Out our window looking over the parking lot, we watched two guys with baseball bats breaking the windows in every parked car, working their way methodically down the row while alarms went off. We keep Jack’s truck in the front lot, right beside the entrance to the place, and so far we haven’t had any problems.
We were talking about this as we played our way through a practice round today, talking about America, starting with the African American families in our hotel who are refugees from Hurricane Katrina. We’ve seen them walking the hallways with plates of fried chicken and sauce pans of gravy. The young mothers have their children polished and shined for school at six in the morning, when they walk them to the city bus. You can tell they are trying hard to build some kind of life here without a house to live in or a car to drive. “Not unlike your great-grandmother when she came to America from Ireland,” I said at one point. “We’ve got a new wave of refugees here.”
“Americans as refugees in their own country,” Jack said just before he nailed a four-iron through the wind and watched it land softly on the green about 235 yards away. “That’s a new concept, I guess.”
I asked him if he remembered the time we were watching the news on TV and there was a story about immigrants coming to America. “I think you were twelve years old. Some politician was arguing that the new immigrants from Somalia should be sent home, and you said, ‘Who are we to tell anyone they can’t live here, Daddy? We stole all the land from the Indians.’ Do you remember that?”
He did.
“You were quite a little philosopher,” I said.
I’ve been careful not to bore him with stories from my seasons caddying in Scotland and to remember Colleen’s admonition not to speak negatively about America, but while we played this afternoon, I told him about the round I caddied for two brothers who were grandsons of one of the wealthiest families in America. We were the last people out on the course as darkness fell, and I used the lit screen of one of their iPhones to line up the putts on the 18th green. When we were finished, they took me to a local pub for a late supper and a few pints. I walked almost two thousand miles as a caddie in St. Andrews, and I never accepted an invitation from a golfer except this one time because they were such great guys and I was hungry and it was late. We talked about America, the nation in ruins, that I had left behind. “Here is essentially what they said to me, a kid who grew up stupid and poor in a depressing city in Maine,” I told Jack. “They said they were pretty sure that I had believed all my life that America is a meritocracy where if you work your ass off, you might get somewhere. ‘Your father and grandfathers probably taught you that,’ they said. ‘Nothing is further from the truth, though we are thrilled to have you believe that shit. Get this, and tell all your friends about it: Rich people in America today are no longer content to have just their own wealth—much of which they simply inherited, like the two of us, and never earned themselves. We know that there is a worldwide economic apocalypse coming, and so now we want all the money. We want the welfare mother’s fifty bucks a week. We want the retired teacher’s $400-a-week pension. Give us more tax breaks and we won’t create new jobs. We’ll keep putting the money into our pockets. Trust me. And we don’t even believe that guys like you are entitled to any dignity. You can starve to death for all we care.’ ”
Jack asked me if I believed that.
“No,” I told him. “I still believe it’s a meritocracy. Maybe I’m just a dummy from Maine, but I believe hard work can get you anywhere you want to go in America. But I do think we’re headed for a civil war in this country. A class war between the people who belong to private golf clubs and the guys with dirt on their faces who carry their bags.”
“The rich and the poor,” he said.
“Yeah, it’s coming. Once the average workingman looks in the mirror shaving in the morning and realizes that he no longer has a fighting chance, there will be a real war. Take a look at your great-grandfathers. They both worked forty hours a week at hard labor for the minimum wage, and they were able to own houses, their wives didn’t have to go out and work, they had a new Ford in the driveway every three years. Today they would be beggars in America. So, yeah, there’s a war coming. I probably won’t live to see it, but you will. And you’ll have to decide which side you’re on. For now, though, look at us, chasing a dream. This is a country where you can still chase a dream, Jack.”
“I guess so,” he said.
We played a few more holes in relative silence before he said, “At least golf is a meritocracy. You work hard, you play well, you don’t cheat, and you win.”
“Perfect,” I told him.
“Did you notice that all my irons were flying ten or fifteen yards farther in the clear air today?” Jack said. “All my distances were off.”
“I know,” I said. “Usually the air is thick and dead here. We’ll have to take that into account.”
“Maybe you should write it in your notebook.”
I assured him that I would do that.
Outside our door one of the Katrina mothers was crying. I had heard someone crying the night before as well.
“Can you imagine trying to raise a family in this place?” Jack said.
I told him that I believed it was going to be these people, the people at the bottom, who would one day return America to its greatness. “I mean the people who are not spoiled. The people who don’t have too much. The teachers in the ghettos, and nurses’ aides who take care of the elderly.” I told Jack that the driver of my shuttle the other night was one of them. He was working the graveyard shift, and he had his two little boys with him, a four-year-old and a five-year-old sleeping on the floor of the van because his wife worked at night cleaning offices, and together they didn’t earn enough money to pay for a babysitter. Their beautiful little sons were spending the night sleeping on the floor of the van beneath their blankets. I almost stepped on one of them when I climbed into the middle seat. It was one in the morning, and America was sailing past me—the Bible seminaries and the “XTC” sex parlors, and gun shops and shopping malls—and every so often the highway lights would illuminate the boys’ faces. I wanted to take them home with me. No, I wanted to persuade the father that he could leave this place and go to Scotland with his wife and their boys, and he could work as a caddie there, walking lovely ground every day, and they could live with a little dignity. “I didn’t say anything,” I told Jack. “But, you know, this man was filled with hope and enthusiasm. He talked on and on with me about the new planet that astronomers just discovered that resembles Earth. He was filled with wonder. I wish you could have met him.”
Jack turned out the light and swung the TV in the direction of his bed so he could watch some college hoops while I fell asleep.
I closed my eyes and was soon sailing back across the years again, to the days when he was little and we would camp out in the family room watching sports for hours and hours, just the two of us lying on the couch together with Teddy sprawled across us, napping, and the girls wandering through from time to time with their dolls or hula hoops. I didn’t know then that there would ever be things I would keep from my son. Fears, I mean. Fathers hide their fears from their sons. When you are a sixty-year-old caddie in St. Andrews, management keeps an eye on you to make sure you are not slowing things down, and I went to work there every day with the fear that I might be let go—“sent down the road,” as they say when referring to a caddie who has been released. My first season after the recession hit us, when suddenly there wasn’t enough work to go around and it became every man for himself, I was afraid each day that I might not be able to make my pay to send home. I never told Jack about those fears, or the new fear of mine back at
home during the Thanksgiving break—the grinding motor of the heating-oil truck as it passed through our neighborhood. If it stopped at our house now, it was a mortgage payment to fill the tank. Enough to make me shudder.
My second morning home I shot a big fat Canadian goose that would serve as our Thanksgiving dinner. I’d never shot anything before. It was a single goose, flying alone, maybe seventy feet above my head, and it fell out of the sky and into the cove with a lovely little pirouette like a ballerina falling off her stage. Unfortunately, as soon as the gun went off, Teddy hightailed it straight home, scared to death. And with the tide exceptionally high, the bird was at least a football field from me across the open water. I decided to walk home and return after the tide had receded. Two hours later when I rounded the corner of the marsh and stepped out of the tree line, I saw a flock of crows tearing my Christmas goose apart. I lost that battle, but the next morning I rowed a dinghy out in the high tide and dragged it across the marsh to the shore, where I tied it to a tree so I would never again be caught without a way to retrieve a bird. Dragging the dinghy was difficult. Shocked at the strength I have lost since I turned sixty, I could make it only in ten-yard stretches before my legs burned and buckled and I had to rest. My heart felt as if it were scraping against my rib cage. I pretended each ten yards was another first down as I worked my way through the thick marsh grass, and the whole time I was seventeen years old again playing football for the chance to go to college instead of Vietnam. I had loved everything about football. I loved the sweat from the hard work. I loved getting knocked down and getting up again. I loved the way all the noise in the world fell off to a marvelous ground of silence so I could actually hear the ball spinning in its spiral the moment I took it out of the sky into my hands. And even though it had become a game of millionaires since then, played across a disillusioned and broken nation, it was still a meritocracy and I was grateful that my son loved the game.
I closed my eyes and waited for sleep to come. Outside the door to our room the Katrina mothers were rounding up their children to put them to bed. I thought about the missing fathers, and I wanted to believe that they were back in New Orleans busy rebuilding a life and they would summon their families someday. But maybe they had been defeated by the flood and by their fears, and they would spend the rest of their lives wondering what had become of the little children who had smiled at them, and the women they had taken into their arms with a certain measure of hope for what their future held. Hope that somehow gave way to fear. And what about the rest of us? The vast army of fathers out there with our new fears of the next oil delivery, or the pink slip, or the hike in insurance premiums, or the doctor’s bill, or the bottom falling out of the stock market, or tuition bills we might not be able to pay. I suppose we are afraid of disappointing the people who depend on us, or being cut loose from what protected us for so long and ending up as haunted, weary travelers on a night journey, bound for where we might never be certain again.
I was looking forward to morning, when all these thoughts would fade away and it would just be Jack and me and the eighteen holes in front of us. I pictured the first dogleg at Cypresswood. On Thursday, in round one, maybe I will ask Jack to just hammer his drive straight up the middle and forget about trying to shave the corner. Make a few early pars, and then take our chances.
I e-mailed old Glen that I was frozen the whole way around today, as cold as I’d ever been caddying with him in Scotland. He replied with one line: “A caddie goes nowhere without his long johns.”
DECEMBER 8, 2011
At five this morning it was clear and cold as I took my walk around the hotel and went over the course in my head. I know we have decent birdie chances on the 1st and 2nd holes, but after that, if the wind is up again today, we’ll be fighting to get on the greens in regulation. And I hope the battle doesn’t come down to number 17, the 328-yard, drivable par-4, with ponds on the right, left, and behind the green and a creek running in front. The hole reminds me of number 12 on the Old Course. A 316-yard par-4 with a stroke index of 3, marking it as one of the toughest holes on the course because of all the hidden bunkers. But if you hit an eight-iron off the tee, and another eight-iron into the center of the green, you could take all the trouble out of play and be putting for a birdie. Yesterday when I asked Jack, “So, how do you play this hole if you have to make a par?” he didn’t budge from his earlier position. “You take driver, and you drive the fucking green,” he replied.
Not exactly music to a caddie’s ears.
I had a terrible golf dream in the night. I had become one of those overbearing fathers; I guess they call them helicopter parents because they’re constantly hovering over their kids’ lives. Anyway, I was caddying for Jack, and we were within shouting distance of making it onto the big tour, and I began cheating secretly. Suddenly these two officials from the Royal and Ancient Golf Club showed up at our hotel room, formidable fellows in double-breasted blue blazers with brass buttons. They wanted to inspect my wardrobe. “Actually, we’re only interested in seeing your trousers,” one of the gentlemen said. I had seven pairs of pants hanging on the rack, and they discovered that I’d cut a hole in the right pocket of each pair so that I could drop new balls into play without being detected. Jack stood there mortified while they read me my rights and summoned the gendarmes. “What were you thinking?” he kept yelling at me. “Golf is a fucking meritocracy, man. We already agreed on that!”
We left the hotel at 9:15 for our 10:40 tee time. In the four hours since I’d been outside, the sky had cleared to a beautiful pale blue, and the wind had risen. On the radio in the truck there was news about a mother somewhere in Texas who, having been denied food stamps, shot both her children and then herself. “Jesus,” Jack said.
It was as good a time as any, I thought, for me to follow the advice of a man I respected in Maine who had recently counseled me that if I was going to talk with my son about the civil war between the rich and the poor in America, I should be sure to present both sides equally. I began by telling Jack that plenty of the wealthy guys I’d caddied for in Scotland had done a lot to try to help the poor, just like this man in Maine who had worked his way from nothing to the top of his profession and had given millions of dollars to underprivileged kids and worthy college students along the way.
“The same with the people at Inverness,” Jack said.
“So, what’s the answer then?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, how come every great civilization since the beginning of time fell apart for the same reason—when the divide between the poor and the privileged grew too wide?”
He thought about this while he tuned the radio to ESPN. Then he said, “It’s like anything else, man. People blame each other for the problems instead of working together to solve them. You take the biggest problems in America right now, and if you could get a hundred smart poor people and a hundred smart wealthy people in the same room to talk to each other instead of blaming each other, you’d solve them. Maybe in a couple of hours.”
From the mouths of babes, I thought.
I was still smiling about this when we made our way to the range, and I was thinking to myself, He’s a good boy. No, he’s a good man.
He struck the ball beautifully on the range and stepped onto the 1st tee and drove it 322 yards right up the left side. “We’re in the mayor’s office,” I said.
So there we are, a simple soft eight-iron to the flag. He takes his smooth practice swing, steps up to the ball, takes the same smooth swing, and—what! The ball squirts right and barely flies 60 yards. He looks at me. “What was that?” he asks. I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. I’ve grown so used to seeing all his iron shots fly straight to the pins. “I shanked that ball off the toe of the club,” he says with a disgusted little laugh. “I can see shanking it off the hozzle, but off the toe? I almost missed the ball completely.”
“Maybe you didn’t settle into your swing” is all I
can say.
From there we nearly saved par but took a bogey.
Up to the next tee and another bomb right up the middle, 80 yards past our playing partners. Now we’re 90 yards from the hole, a simple wedge.
And bang, he pulls it into the bunker left. Trying to adjust from that last iron, I am thinking. The sand is as wet as concrete, and he leaves the first shot in the bunker. It’s a double bogey. We’re three over after two holes, another miserable start after two perfect drives. “I guess I just don’t ever want to make it an easy start,” he says to me with a shrug. He’s not upset. I’m not worried.
But I should have been. The rest of the round is the same thing. One perfect drive after another, and every iron shot flies 40 or 50 yards off line. On the par-4 number 4, we’ve got 117 yards left to the hole after a monster drive. I hand him his wedge, and I’m already taking the putter out when—what! He shanks it straight into the woods. We take a triple bogey.
And we never figured it out the rest of the round. One terrible iron shot after another. I’m talking wedges, short irons, long irons. All just awful. We hit two greens in regulation, and by the 12th hole we both knew that without four birdies coming in, we weren’t going to make the damned cut.
Walking with Jack Page 23
