Missing links, p.12
Missing Links, page 12
“So why work here, then?”
“Well, I had so many hundreds of offers to consider after graduating with a master’s that I came here just to clear my head.”
My players were approaching now.
“What’s your master’s in?”
“Paleontology.”
“Oh, so this is field research, then,” I said, being witty.
She laughed. “You know,” she said, “it’s too bad employees are not allowed to date caddies.”
“Who’s a caddie?” I said. “I’m a member. I just prefer carrying my associates’ clubs as a social grace.”
“Don’t say that,” she said, driving off. “I’d have to hate your guts.”
THOUGH TWO DOWN had no access to the members as the caddie chef, he was allowed inside the clubhouse, somewhere I couldn’t go. He also had his job as a phone repairman, in which he rarely did any work, but nonetheless had a uniform. Unfortunately for Dannie and me, he put the two jobs together.
After work each afternoon, he would go into the rest room, change out of his chef’s outfit, slide on the taco-brown New England Bell outfit, sneak down the hallway and up the stairs. Up there, where they didn’t know him from Yitzhak Rabin, he was allowed to wander in and out of offices, always giving some lame excuse like “Checking on some bad fiber-optic lines here, ma’am.”
Mostly, he’d go to the office of the general manager’s secretary, hoping to rifle through papers and see what he could see. The secretary was a matronly woman of about sixty-five. He’d just fidget around until she left and then go to her desk, being sure to take apart the phone just in case she came back. He had no idea what he was looking for, anything that might be useful—a carte blanche guest card maybe, or a memo with blackmail possibilities, anything.
And then one day, he came upon the yearly membership book, a computerized listing of all the members along with their monthly charges and he hit himself a gusher.
Under the name of Colchester, Bingsley M. (member number C-39), there were no charges. No dues. No cart fees. No milk shakes. None at all. Just a small pencil notation at the bottom by the secretary: “Retain per GM.”
Odd. He hunted through a few cabinets until he found the membership ledger from the year before. He found Colchester, Bingsley M., again. “Retain per GM.” He looked up the year before that and the year before that and before long he had looked through the last seventeen years. Zilch. The last time there was any record of Colchester, Bingsley M., paying for anything at all at the Mayflower Club was in August 1977. This Bingsley character had signed for a cheeseburger and then pretty much disappeared off the face of the earth.
Two Down began to guess. This Colchester had apparently been a fairly frequent visitor that year, his first year, 1977, playing in a few member-guests, having dinner, giving to the employee fund, and such. His address then was in tony Louisburg Square. Since then, apparently, nobody had heard from this guy. He hadn’t paid a dime. Yet he was being kept on the books. Why? Why hadn’t the club just dismissed him?
That night, Two drove the telephone truck to a gorgeous brownstone with a gold-and-black wrought-iron fence running in front of it. A black maid came to the fifteen-foot brass-trimmed door.
“Yes, ma’am,” Two Down said. “We’re just checking an old line that belonged to a Bingsley Colchester.”
“Oh, well, this is the Smythe residence now,” said the maid.
“No Colchesters?”
“Not in the three years I been here.”
Two Down even went so far as to ask a friend of his at the Globe to check the clip files on this Colchester guy and the friend came back with almost nothing. He found only two clips. One from 1966, when Bingsley Colchester was mentioned as being part of the “mentionable attendees” at the annual Boston Yacht Club Cotillion. And another one from 1977 that read:
“It’s clear that something needs to be done for this part of Massachusetts Avenue,” said Bingsley Colchester of the Junior League. “I don’t believe poverty is the kind of image Boston wants to put out there.”
And that was it. No other records.
Two Down’s eyebrows were starting to do the Watusi, but he did one last thing. He posted a note on the bulletin board in the men’s locker room. On the outside, the note read: “URGENT message for Bingsley Colchester.” He had folded the note and inside he wrote: “Mr. Colchester. Please call L. Petrovitz, attorney-at-law, 555-1525, regarding a recently uncovered inheritance.”
When nobody called Two Down’s answering machine after five days, Two Down decided to do an incedible thing. He decided to become Colchester, Bingsley M., long-lost Mayflower member.
He had just passed the fastest, cheapest and easiest application process in club history.
He figured three things: (1) if Bingsley old boy was in Cotillion in 1966, that made him about eleven then, which made him about thirty-nine now, which Two Down thought he could fake, being a hard thirty; (2) the odds against any guy who is gone seventeen years suddenly coming back by October I had to be worse than Thud (the Almost Human) getting anorexia; and (3) there couldn’t be many people at the club who even knew the whereabouts of Bingsley M. Colchester if not one of them would take an URGENT message off a bulletin board.
He decided he would need a few things. One, a story. He would say he had been in Burma and the Far East the last seventeen years, working in the gem trade. These were paper-money people. Not many of them could know much about gems. Or Burma, for that matter. These were not the kinds of people who went to Burma. These were the kinds of people that, when they were tired of playing golf and tennis at the club and lying on the beach in Hyannisport, went to the Caribbean, where they played golf and tennis and lay around the beach in St. Kitts.
He also figured nobody spoke Burmese, so he could fake that, and since he dealt in gems, and quite possibly the smuggling of gems, he could be a little secretive, too. That would actually be fun, thought Two Down, putting a little James Bond in the act.
Diamond-dripping Mayflower ingenue: So, Mr. Colchester, what exactly do you look for in a sapphire?
Two Down: The exact color of your eyes, mon chérie.
But if you are a gem king just back from Hong Kong, you can’t readily drive up to the swankest club in Boston in a 1979 Pinto with a smashed rear window. Ivan knew that car too well. He’d rat. He needed a new ride and new clothes if he was going to pull this off without getting arrested.
And this is when Two Down came up with a second very good idea.
Every year, the Shriners of Boston put on a colossal golf tournament at the Charles River Golf Club. It is a monstrous event in which teams of four play a scramble and there are giveaways on every hole. And every year, on the par 3 16th hole—164 yards over a lake—they give away a car to anybody that makes a hole in one. This year, that car was a brand-new Lexus.
Now, giving away a car for a year for a hole in one is just a marketing idea to get foursomes to enter the tournament and cough up the $250 entry fee. The Shriners pay Lloyd’s of London about $800 for hole-in-one insurance and if somebody wins the car, Lloyd’s takes the bite. Plus, the tournament gets an advertising fee from the car dealer. Of course, most Shriners are serious chops and nobody had ever won even an ashtray with a hole in one on that hole in all the Shriner tournaments I’d ever heard about.
Until this particular year.
Two Down had a plan, but he needed four other Chops to help him. By offering to pay the entry fee, he enlisted Thud (the Almost Human), Cementhead, Hoover (who was now starting to enjoy the bet a little) and Meltdown. Meltdown was a part-time Chop, maybe nineteen, tops, with pierced eyebrows, nose and tongue and spiked green hair. He’d show up in grunge shirts, a leather jacket and green Converse and he’d still shoot 75. He’d learned the game before he went rebel and he still loved it, though he had to do it on the lam because if his friends saw him playing golf, they’d kick him out of the Mao Youth Club.
Crowbar came along, too, mostly because he did anything Two Down did, and besides, how many chances in his life did he have to ride along in a golf cart?
Two put everybody but Thud in his foursome and told the registration office that Thud would have to play in the group directly in front of him. “He’s a diabetic,” Two Down told the lady. “And I have to give him a shot every hour. It’s vital that he play in the group directly in front of us.” The lady nervously wrote down everything he said.
When they arrived at the Charles River Golf Club the next Monday morning, the batting order was just as Two Down hoped. He, Meltdown, Hoover and Cementhead were in the group behind Thud, who would play with three guys he’d never met in his life. It was a shotgun, and they were to begin on the 4th hole. Everybody had their instructions.
Two Down had played in enough charity scrambles to know how they work. There is an 8 A.M. shotgun and a 1 P.M. shotgun, with two foursomes planted on every hole, which means 144 players in the morning and another 144 in the afternoon. On the Lexus hole, there would be somebody’s wife, whose job it was to verify a hole in one on the million-to-one chance that it would happen.
It sounds fun at first, watching hacks try to make a hole in one, but it gets numbing very fast and so, after about two hours of this, Miss Verification is usually sitting back in her lawn chair, reading Danielle Steel and turning her tan every twenty minutes.
So by the time Thud’s group came to the 16th tee at about 4:30 in the afternoon, the woman was lying on her lawn chair off the right side of the green, wearing sunglasses and needlepointing. Thud’s group hit their shots, all of them oblivious to what was about to take place except for the bulbous Thud himself, who was as nervous as if he were among cannibals, sweating through his golf shirt on a 65 degree day. None of them came close to a hole in one—in fact only one of them even hit the green.
Since it was a scramble, all four players putted from where that one ball wound up, Thud making sure to putt last. After he putted out, a chubby sort of man in his group put the flag back in and the group began to walk off the green. Only that’s when Thud suddenly stopped and announced to the group, actually enunciating for once in his life: “I’m gonna try it again.” The other three stopped at the fringe to watch him. Nervously, he took his ball and plopped it down on the green and putted.
As the ball rolled, he secretly reached in his pocket and took out another ball—a different ball, a Titleist 1 that bore the imprint “Leonard Petrovitz.” He took this ball and hid it in his right hand, next to the putter grip. The putt stopped rolling two inches from the cup and Thud brushed it into the hole with his putter, his right hand still holding Two Down’s ball. Now Thud reached into the hole with his right hand and switched balls. He took out his ball and put in Two Down’s, all of this unseen by anybody because his hand was covered by the hole.
Thud walked off the green, muttering, “Tht fkng ptt,” or somesuch thing, in a shaky voice, enormously nervous and relieved. The verifier, who looked to be about twenty-five with curly brown hair and a pair of purple jogging shorts and matching T-shirt on, never even stopped stitching.
As Two Down’s group prepared to hit their shots, the woman looked up and watched, though it was not easy, as the sun was somewhat behind the players, off their right shoulders. Meltdown went first. His 7-iron came up short in the front bunker. Cementhead, to whom Two Down had entrusted absolutely no responsibilities, hit second and his 8-iron landed nicely about 20 feet left.
The needlepoint lady went back to her stitching.
Hoover went third. His 7-iron landed on the right fringe.
Now Two Down stepped up. He had two clubs in his hand, his driver and his 7-iron.
The needlepointer kept stitching.
Two Down gave the 7-iron to Meltdown, then teed the ball higher than he usually does, ready to hit his driver on a 164-yard par 3. He aimed for the woods far left of the green. Taking a deep breath, he coiled and swung. He smashed one deep into the woods, easily 75 yards over the green and far, far left of it. The woman never looked up.
Quickly, Meltdown took the driver from Two Down and gave him back his 7-iron. Then Two Down whispered, “1 … 2 … 3 …”
“YEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!” he and Meltdown screamed.
“IT’S IN THE HOLE!!!!!!!” Hoover shrieked at the same time.
“IT’S A HOLE IN ONE!!!!!!” Cementhead roared.
The woman made such a lurch out of her chair she nearly stabbed herself with her needles.
“What?!?” she shrieked. “Who?!?”
The group on the tee was leaping and hugging and dancing as though Paris had just been freed.
“AYYYYYYYYYYYEEEAH!!!!!” Two Down was screaming.
“UNBELIEVABLLLLLLLE!!” Crowbar roared.
“Did you see that hole in one?!?” Cementhead bellowed.
The woman was still flabbergasted. “Who golfed a hole in one?” she hollered.
“He did!” yelled Cementhead, pointing to Two Down, who had pretended to be so overwhelmed by the incident that he was now lying flat on the tee, wiggling and kicking his extremities like his brain stem had been hot-wired to a power line.
“He did?” stammered the woman excitedly, not sure what to do next. “Well, wow! Really? Dahn! I didn’t see it!”
“Check in the hole!” yelled Hoover.
As the woman made her way to the hole, the fivesome clambered into their carts, continuing to whoop and holler, overdoing it, and started for the green.
All eyes were on the woman as she walked to the hole and looked in.
“Here it is!!!” she screamed. “You made a hole in one! You just won a cahh!!!”
Two Down leaped out of the cart while it was still moving, ran to the woman and hugged and danced with her ravenously. Then he ran over to the car and got in it.
“I just won a new Lexus!” he hollered, and began honking the horn. “Can you believe this?”
“Worked just like you said it would!” bubbled Cementhead.
Hoover and Meltdown and Two suddenly stopped for a fraction of a second and looked at him. The woman looked at him, too.
“Of course it works, you idiot!” yelled Two Down. “It’s a Lexus!”
And with that, the woman laughed and everybody laughed, except, of course, Cementhead, who suddenly felt the very sharp pain in the butt that comes when somebody like Crowbar jabs you with a ball-mark repair tool.
“When I want your opinion I’ll beat it out of you,” whispered Crowbar.
“Terms of Endearment?” whispered Cementhead.
“The Shootist,” whispered Crowbar.
“Damn,” whispered Cementhead, rubbing his gluteus.
I didn’t know it, but I suppose I was losing The Bet very quickly. I also didn’t care.
This is mostly because Madeline and I managed to find time to sneak away from the Gestapo and speak more and more. Some people have a romantic Italian restaurant at which to meet. We had the 5th hole.
I learned a few things about her. She was twenty-eight, from Grove Hall, was divorced once, never drank, was far too cynical, was smarter than me, actually loved being outside every day but truly hated most of the members.
When you are falling in deep lust, there is this feeling you get in your heart, which beats too fast, and your ratchet, which is very close to learning to unzip your Levi’s from the inside. It was something I hadn’t felt in years. Something was lighting up inside me, like a match you strike twenty times and, just when you’re about to give up, ignites. You’re a real boy, Pinocchio.
I had forgotten Two Down’s lunches and spent most of my money buying $7 sandwiches and $3 Mountain Dews out of Madeline’s cart. We seemed to stand a little closer every time we were together, careful not to be seen but too far gone with our little unspoken game to really care.
Oh yes, the more we saw each other, the closer we stood, until one day she put my change in my front pocket and said, “Darlin’, what I couldn’t do to you.”
“Speak into the beer cooler,” I said.
She laughed, but if she’d done it again ten seconds later, there wouldn’t have been any room.
The next morning, God or Destiny or somebody brought in a thick Boston fog. It rolled in, blanketing the course. Fletcher told us play would be delayed at least an hour, maybe two. And right away me and the Coach thought of Madeline. I came outside the Caddie Room and wandered around the corner, unable to see ten feet in front of me. I walked up by the pro shop and down by the kitchen and never saw her.
Then, suddenly, coming out of the mist, like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, was Madeline, on her golden electric chariot with the mustard and mayonnaise packs up front, wearing a Mayflower cap with her hair pulled back to show off her perfect pink lips and those Walt Disney eyes. At first, she looked as stunned to see me as I was to see her. Then she looked intrigued. Then she looked like she wanted to commit a misdemeanor.
I didn’t say a word. We were in as public and dangerous a place as we could be—twenty feet from the main window of the formal dining room—and yet we were all alone.
She knew it and I knew it. She tilted her head up at me just a little with those pink lips thick as strawberry shakes and I held her face in my hands and kissed her like you read about.
Then she pulled away and took a deep breath. “I told you. We’re not allowed to date caddies,” she said.
She started to drive away. Then she stopped and turned back.
“But nobody says we can’t fuck ’em.”
The ride we took in that cart was maybe like the ride St. Peter gives you once you’re past the Pearly Gates.
Blanketed in thick, rich clouds, I had no idea where we were and no idea where we were going, but knowing that when we got there it was going to be wonderful. She knew every inch of that cart path and so, even though there seemed to be no path ahead of us, she always made the right turn.
And then, there we were. She picked the 5th green, not far from our first meeting, a lusciously thick green with big willows all around and a creek running in front of it. Nobody ever really gets laid on a golf course. Getting laid on a golf course is one of the great myths in America. It is in the empty Smithsonian display case along with “Penthouse Letters That Really Did Happen.” But, may I get the incurable yips if I lie here. Basically, we got all over each other like Right Guard.
