Missing links, p.1
Missing Links, page 1
A hardcover edition of this book was originally published in 1996 by Doubleday. It is here reprinted by arrangement with Doubleday.
Missing Links. Copyright © 1996 by Rick Reilly. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address: Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.
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Visit our website at www.broadwaybooks.com
First Broadway Books trade paperback edition published 2000.
All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Map by Jackie Aher
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as:
Reilly, Rick
Missing links / Rick Reilly. —1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Golf—Batting—Fiction. 2. Golfers—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3568.E4847M57 1996
813’. 54—dc20 96-10265
eISBN: 978-0-307-79389-8
v3.1
To Ziggy, Socks, Bluto
and the rest of the addicts
at Ponkapogue Golf Club,
Canton, Mass.,
where golf is way too much fun.
Much thanks and a free complimentary press to Leonard (Two Down) O’Connor, who actually exists against all odds and reason; Kevin Cartin, the best writer nobody ever heard of; Richard Brenne, who baby-sat; David Gernert; Amy Williams (my “buddy”); Bill Thomas in relief; Jacqueline LaPierre; Linda, Kel, Jake and Rae; Dorcester Doris Masten; Ken and Lisa Tyler; Art, Janet and even that temp receptionist; my brother and “The Goons,” who are possibly even more ill than the Chops; Mark Mulvoy; Jaime Diaz; and everybody at Zaidy’s, whose fried egg sandwiches and coffee kept the beast alive.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
The Rollicking Sequel to Missing Links
OTHER THAN WRECKING my best friendships, ruining the happiest time of my life and causing two perfectly good women to give me a free drop (no closer to the hole), The Bet was just one helluva good idea.
Looking back on it, that’s the thing that torqued me off the most. The fact that a bet did us all in. I mean, other than sucking down fresh-squeezed Genesees and trying to teach Blu Chao to say, “Fuck them in the neck,” betting was all we did at Ponky.
Maybe I should mention that Ponky is better known as Ponkaquogue Municipal Golf Links and Deli, named by Golf Illustrated as “possibly the worst golf course in America.” Ponky is to great golf courses what Spam is to the great chefs of Europe, but it had 18 holes most days, which was all we needed to contest our friendly golfing wagers.
Even when we got bored betting on Ponky the usual way, we started dreaming up ways to bet on Ponky in unusual ways. For instance, we’d hot-wire Froghair’s Ford Fairline when he was napping, park it on the side of the clubhouse, open the right passenger window and bet on who could fly an L-wedge in there from 25 yards. Or we’d open the sliding-glass doors of the lunchroom two feet and try to see who could hit 4-irons through the opening out onto the driving range.
When we got incredibly C-SPAN-2 bored, we played Reversals, in which your worthy opponent could tee up your ball, turn around on the tee and hit it as far in the opposite direction as he could, as long as the ball was inbounds. You have not lived until you’ve played a 674-yard par 4 from the edge of some lake, lying two.
We played Murphys, which allowed, once per 9, your worthy opponent to pick up your ball and hand-place it anywhere he pleased, within two club lengths of its original position. Thud (the Almost Human) liked to stick it directly behind a tree, preferably on a root. Two Down used to enjoy dropping your ball in the water, though this led to the Two Down Corollary, which stated that you had to actually be able to see the ball when it was done rolling. Unless the pond was clear—and Ponky ponds were never clear, featuring as they did trash flotillas of half-eaten sturgeons, a Safeway cart, biodegradable Pampers and maybe a murder victim or two—we argued that the ball might have gone outside the two-club limit.
When nothing else would do, I liked to find the ugliest, deepest divot and stick my opponent’s ball in the very epicenter of it, which is why I very much liked to play in the group behind Thud, for he and his 394 pounds left divots which would make a back-hoe jealous. It is very discouraging, indeed, to be just about to hit the bejesus out of your drive and then have somebody holler “Murphy!” and walk over and deposit your ball in a ball washer.
When we got tired of playing Ponky mostly inbounds, we played it mostly out-of-bounds. We’d play it from the far end of the mats-only driving range, over the net, out to 13, down the T tracks, down 18, through the drive-thru of Manelli’s dry cleaners and into the back of the hearse Thud (the Almost Human) drove working for the Peaceful Rest mortuary.
It was one of the great mysteries of life why grown men would actually arrive at 4 A.M. to put their little golf balls in a rusty old pipe outside the pro shop at Ponky and then go back and sleep in their cars, just to play a golf course at eight that would have a hard time making Best of Chernobyl. Actually, we had stuff even Chernobyl never thought of. For a time, the front 9 at Ponky was the Dorchester city dump. Eventually, those 9 holes were built back over the landfill, but we’d still get reminders that Ponky is, literally, a dump. Like you’d find an old shopping cart sticking up out of the ground or your ball would disappear in the fissures that open up in the fairways (a free drop if you could prove it) or you’d get a good whiff of the methane gas that’s caused by decomposing trash. Yeah, we did that, too. Somebody would track down a good strong leak of methane and we’d take a Bic lighter and light it and have our little mini eternal flame. Very emotional.
Guys kept coming to Ponky maybe because Ponky was its own world, the kind of place that had its own language. It was never a “cup,” it was a “jar,” and “jar” was mostly used as a verb, like “I have every notion to jar this on your ass.”
Golf clubs were “hickories” or “bats,” as in the sentence “Hoover just made a 13. I don’t think he’s gettin’ along with his new bats.” Beers were, among other things, “Claudette Coldbeers.” Money was “zops” or “jing,” as in the sentence Two Down often employed when he won big, which was “Boys, if jing wasn’t made to be stacked up, how come it’s flat?”
You “chased some balata” more than you “played golf.” And you did not shoot a “bad round” at Ponky, you put up a “radio station,” as in the phrase “Damn, I’m on my way to a serious radio station today.”
“Magic 103?”
“Worse. Zoo 105.”
It always pissed us off, that “possibly the worst golf course in America.” Goddamn media. To us, Ponky was unquestionably the worst golf course in America, and if you didn’t believe it, you should’ve come and tried to break 90 on our Astroturf tees and tractor-pull fairways and greens about as soft and puttable as Boylston Street. This is the kind of place Ponky was: We had 150-yard markers that weren’t 150 yards from anything in particular.
And why a guy who got into Harvard (but never went) and doesn’t have a troop of Cub Scouts in the basement and doesn’t quite look like Kevin Costner but isn’t bad in a Wayne Gretzky kind of way would hang around a dump like Ponky is a story in itself.
My real name is Raymond Lee Hart and I guess I had no excuse. It’s just that Ponky was the only place I had any real friends and golf was the only thing I really did, I suppose. Well, except for my lame job, which was writing lame glowing reviews of lame books for a lame outfit called Publisher’s Reviews. Other than Ponky, I was about as alone as one sock.
My mother got lucky and out of Boston—which is the same thing, I suppose—and lives in San Diego now. My father, the very respected CEO and part-time kid-murderer of the First Boston Bank, hadn’t spoken to me in six years, which was convenient, because I hadn’t listened in ten. How the word “trust” got into his title is a backstabber, ain’t it? And my only brother, Travis, had been dead, what, six years? Six years. Some coincidence there, huh?
Of course, a Chop was not a hard thing to be. All you had to do was buy us a round once in a while and take on a small golfing wager without being bothered by harmless little gestures like Velcro ripping on your backswing or guys suddenly getting whooping cough as you stood over a four-footer or somebody swinging the flagstick on the backswing of your putt so that the cloth whip sounded like a helicopter.
Not that Ponky itself didn’t give you enough distractions. Right in front of No. 8 there was a rusted-out,
We also boasted a very, very bad deli featuring a very, very bad cook—Blu Chao, a Cambodian refugee. Blu Chao’s finest culinary delight was her bacon sandwich surprise—Bac-Os, mayonnaise and parsley. Although some would not give you three of those for just one of her eighty-nine-cent fried egg and Spam sandwiches.
The nice thing about Blu Chao is that she went nicely with the interior of Ponky, which looked like it was put together from remnants from a Holiday Inn fire. Most of the red flowered whorehouse-velvet wallpaper was still on the walls but only thanks to yards and yards of blue duct tape that ran all along the ceilings and the seams. Years of grime blocked the view of the course, which we were all thankful for. The tables were from a school rummage sale and thus read “Most Precious Blood” in Magic Marker along the side. The fixtures were done in Early Wal-Mart.
Our showers featured the kind of fungus that fungus wipe off their feet. Plus, we had the single cheapest course manager in the world, Froghair, so named not just for his Wally Cleaver haircut but because in his whole entire life he had never reached one of Ponky’s holes in regulation.
It was hell, but it was home. We drank at Ponky, ate at Ponky, argued at Ponky, napped at Ponky, lied about sex at Ponky, rolled Serious Dice at Ponky, schemed at Ponky, got depressed at Ponky, and played golf at Ponky, but usually only 36 a day, unless an emergency 9 was voted upon by at least half the participating Chops.
A “Chop” is Ponky for “hack” or “hacker,” which is a bad golfer, which is what many Chops were, but not all. Two Down, Chunkin’ Charlie and Cementhead were your basic average golfers—12s, 15s, 17s—though Two Down was patently unbeatable. We called him Two Down because he always said, “Boys, the bets don’t start until I’m two down,” and sure enough, he’d play like a diseased yak on the first four holes and be down to you on the presses something like three, two and one and then come barreling back, making pars from behind Dumpsters and bottoms of lakes and end up in the Pit of Despair with a pile of jing in front of him.
Thud (the Almost Human) and Hoover were truly horrible Chops, but had redeeming characteristics. Thud could steal you anything you needed stolen if you could find which Wendy’s he was currently at and Hoover paid out like an ATM machine in spikes and therefore was liked by one and all.
Crowbar, oddly, didn’t play golf at all. He only rode around with us in his cart. Crowbar was this very fat black guy, maybe thirty-five years old, with glasses held together on each side with adhesive tape and patches of white skin all over his face and arms, and a head that just sort of emerged from shoulders. He was the kind of guy you’d like to go up to and say, “Let me know when they find your neck.”
We called him Crowbar because he was constantly prying himself into situations, conversations, dinners, parties and other people’s lives. He had no redeeming characteristics other than he’d seen every movie ever made and knew almost every line ever said. He had a habit of barging into the conversation with stuff that you did not want to talk about, never even considered talking about, at absolutely the worst possible moment.
Like, you’d be about to try a four-footer that decided whether you ate at Black Angus that night or the science fiction movie in your fridge when he’d out with something like …
“All-time worst ice-cream flavors.”
And you would have to step away from the ball, unable to block out of your brain whatever the fuck it was Crowbar was talking about.
“What the fuck are you talking about, Crowbar?” you’d ask.
“What would be on the list of all-time worst ice-cream flavors,” he said defensively. “That’s all I’m sayin’.”
“Banana chicken,” Two Down would offer.
“Steak tartare,” Chunkin’ Charlie might add.
Pause.
“Lox,” you would say.
“Squirrel,” Dannie would offer. “With gravy sprinkles.”
We all managed to have no jobs or bad enough jobs that allowed us to waste much of our prime earning years at Ponky. Two Down was a telephone repairman. Cementhead was a plumber who had somehow sniffed too much pipe epoxy over his young years. Every now and then you had to rescue him from a one-hour rake job, in which Cementhead could not seem to understand that the footprints that seemed to be all over the stupid bunker were being made by his own size 13s.
Thud—as his weight kept redoubling, his name devolved, from Thaddeus to Thad to his current handle—worked, like I say, at the mortuary, doing most of the cremating, and having no trouble whatsoever eating a turkey leg while doing it.
Thud lived for food. That’s why we always liked to ask Thud for directions.
“Say, Thud, you don’t know how to get to the DMV, do you?” Two Down might ask knowingly.
“Sure,” he’d say. “Uh, you go down until you see the Häagen-Dazs, go past that to the McDonald’s, then go left. Follow that past two Winchell’s and then go right at the Arby’s. It’s about two blocks past Fudge City.”
Chunkin’ Charlie, of course, was dying of cancer. Any day he could get up and around, he came to Ponky, I suppose because laughs were even cheaper than the fried egg sandwiches and nobody treated him any different than anybody else, which is to say, we gave him as much shit as anybody else. “Hey, Charlie,” Two Down might say. “Next time you go in for some chemo, see if they can give you a chili-dip vaccine while they’re at it.” Chunk was a helluva good man. He was like a father to me. No, wait. That’s not true. Chunk actually liked me.
Almost none of us had wives or lives or anywhere to go or anything to do except hang around Ponky. We’d stay at Ponky until Froghair kicked us out at eleven, then return with one of Thud’s complete set of stolen Ponky keys, hauling a pound of bologna and some Cheetos and a case of fresh-squeezed Budweisers and play Buck and Schtuke and Spit in the Ocean until two.
We were all good people, raised right by our mothers, it’s just that over the years I guess we’d all become a little out of round and probably should have been taken out of general play. We were a box of X-outs nobody wanted on the half-price table.
We were not moving up any career ladders, had no socially redeeming values and weren’t improving our circle of friends any. But we were kind of a family—probably the most dysfunctional family in modern American life—but family just the same, and if there was one thing I just couldn’t give up on completely, it was family. Even if my father had.
Besides, I always had Dannie—the sneaky-pretty pro shop assistant with, as she liked to say herself, “the best real tits in Boston”—but only from the lips down.
Dannie Higgins was a flaming redhead luscious, about twenty-seven, with a cotton-eyed Arkansas accent, a freckled face right out of a Scottish riding stable, this twelve-car-pileup body and a little nose that could’ve hardly made a dent in a cream pie. Mostly, though, she had these eyes. There have been few sets of eyes in luscious history that made you take a full step back, but these were two of them—a kind of sea green you only see in those postcard pictures of the water off an old boat drifting lazily in the Caribbean somewhere. You could easily dive into these eyes and leave no forwarding address.
Of course, almost nobody knew all that because she wore her hair back in a ponytail all the time and then covered that up with a Titleist hat and Oakleys. She wore almost no makeup and hid those two wonderful girls of hers under the baggiest sweaters in the shop.
We were regular wrestling partners, every Friday, midnight. We’d alternate. One week, we’d go to her apartment and I got to be Heidi and she had to be the senator. The next week she’d come to my apartment and she got to be Heidi and I had to be the senator. No switching up. If it was my apartment, then the rules had to be the same. I would find my instructions under the mat and had to follow them explicitly. On her weeks, she would find the instructions in her milk box.
Get completely naked except for your baseball hat, a pair of white socks and your black pumps. Face the bedroom mirror. Have the catcher’s mitt ready.
All that got started one night after we’d played 36 holes, and I won one up after a great match. Then we played gin until midnight and I won by one Hollywood. Then we had one of our Diehard putting matches on the putting green with everybody’s car pulled up around it and the headlights on and I took her for $20 with a 40-foot camel ride on the last hole. It was a rare day. I had beat her at everything. And we were sitting there just the two of us at the corner table, loaded up on fresh-squeezed Gennys, and me beaming and her pissed off and she just looked me right in the eye and said, “Yeah, but I bet I fuck better than you.”
