by James Ellroy
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s still around. He liked me. I was patient with him. He used to come by my office and talk about his obsession and what he wanted to do with his life. He hated Cathcart and used to say he was going to join the L.A.P.D. so he could run all the assholes like Cathcart out. He sends me a card every Christmas. He’s had the same job, off and on, for years. Mechanic at a gas station in Hollywood. He’s also some kind of counselor at a drug recovery program in the Barrio. A great kid. Lotta heart.”
“Where’s the gas station where Omar works?” I asked.
“It’s a Texaco on Franklin and Argyle. If you talk to him, give him my best. Wish him good luck from me.”
I said I would and grabbed the check. I thanked McNamara and left him to his memories. I was glad to be sober.
Leaving the restaurant, I felt a strange surge of affection for Fat Dog Baker. He was growing in my eyes, from misanthropic buffoon to brilliant and daring killer. Stranger still, I felt that he had some secret knowledge that was important to me, some new epigram on urban wonder. I had beat up on a killer, and now it was time to make amends and win back his confidence before lowering the boom.
I checked my watch. Nine-thirty. Fat Dog should be asleep on the grounds at Bel-Air Country Club by now. But a golf course is a big place, and I might stumble around half the night looking for him, and scare him off in the process. It wouldn’t do to upset my gravy train, so I drove to the Tap & Cap to look for an escort.
The escort I had in mind was Augie Dougall, but he wasn’t there. The noise in the bar was deafening, country and western mawkishness coupled with loud voices. The Tap & Cap was bustling tonight, and the golf attire and sunburned faces told me it was packed with caddies. The same bartender I had talked to the previous night was on duty, so I went to him for a referral. He told me that every looper in the joint knew Fat Dog, and that no one could stand him. When I asked him who disliked him the least and might be willing to help me locate him, he pointed out a blond guy in his early forties named Stan The Man.
Stan The Man was the perpetrator of the country-western ear-splitting, standing by the jukebox, feeding it coins. Of all the caddies in the place, he looked like the only one capable of giving me a hard time. He had the wary eyes and angry mien of someone who had done time, so I decided on the phony badge ploy.
After ten minutes of cowboy laments, I got my chance. Stan The Man moved from his perch at the jukebox and walked back to the can. I waited a minute, then followed him. He was walking away from the urinal, zipping his fly, when I braced him. I whipped out my badge. “Police officer,” I said. “I’d like to talk to you.”
Stan The Man flinched, then said, “Okay.”
“We’ll go outside,” I said, “the bar’s too noisy.”
He muttered “Okay” again. I started to feel sorry for him. He obviously had a long history of being hassled by the fuzz in odd places.
I tried to quash his fears. “You’re in no trouble. I just want to talk to you about a caddy you know.” Stan The Man just nodded. We moved out onto the street. The night air was welcome after the smoky din of the bar. “Let’s take a walk,” I said, “my car’s just up the street.”
As we walked I learned that Stan The Man was one Stanley Gaither, late of Brentwood Country Club, Los Angeles Country Club, Bel-Air Country Club, and the L.A. County Jail system. His thing was auto theft. He said it was compulsive, that he was on probation, hoeing the straight and narrow and seeing a psychiatrist. This came out in a torrent of words, unsolicited. He was lonely and I started to like him. I introduced myself as Sergeant Brown. Once we were in the car, I said, “It’s like this, Stan. I’m interested in Fat Dog Baker, and I heard you got along with him as well as anyone. Is that true?”
“Kind of. We’ve known each other for years. Looped a lot of the same clubs. I don’t hate him like a lot of guys do. Is he in big trouble?”
“No, I just want to talk to him. Tonight.”
“Are you with vice?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. A crazy fucker like Fat Dog sleeps outside, never changes his clothes. I’ve always had this feeling Fat Dog was some kind of pervert. I mean, shit, he used to be the golf-ball king of L.A. He had three hotel rooms filled with nothing but golf balls, fifty thousand of ’em. He was keeping every driving range in the city supplied and keeping a fifty thousand ball reserve. Fifty thousand golf balls at ten cents a ball is five grand! Fat Dog paid rent on three hotel rooms to keep ’em safe, while he slept on the fifth tee at Wilshire. A guy who’d do something like that has got to be a pervert. Don’t you think so?”
“Maybe. What does Fat Dog do with his money? I heard he still carries a heavy roll.”
Stan considered this. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think he just likes to look at it. That, and go to Tijuana. He loves T.J. He goes down there all the time. He’s crazy about the dog races. He loves that scumbag town. The mule act, the Chicago Club, the whole scene. He’s always saying he’s gonna retire down there and race dogs. He hates Jews and niggers, but he loves Mexicans. He’s got to be a pervert.”
Stan The Man looked at me expectantly, hoping his information would be enough and that he could go. It wasn’t, and tonight I needed a tour guide. “You’ve caddied at most of the clubs in L.A., haven’t you, Stan?”
“All of ’em. I’m a loopin’ motherfucker.”
“Good. I need you to take me around tonight. I want to talk to Fat Dog. We’ll start with Bel-Air. Okay?”
Stan The Man’s “okay” was resigned and sorrowful, the lament of a man used to carrying freight and complying with orders. I started the car and we took off.
The Bel-Air course yielded nothing, but it was beautiful. Armed with flashlights, the reluctant Stan The Man and I searched for an hour and a half. We hopped the fence by the statue of Jesus and made our way north. Stan claimed that he knew all of Fat Dog’s campsites and that it wouldn’t be necessary to check out the whole golf course. He explained to me that Bel-Air was a tight urban course built in and around little canyons. That was why the big houses that loomed off to our right looked so close: they were close.
We walked up a steep hill that led to the first tee. It was pitch black, and the grass smelled wonderful. The view when we reached the top was so beautiful that for a minute I completely forgot the purpose of my mission. The golf course spread out before me, deep black hills that seemed to promise peace and friendship. It was very still and chilly—a good ten degrees cooler than the city proper—and clear, the lights of Los Angeles etched sharply in pastel shades. I was here to talk to a murderer, a psychotic whose lifestyle was incomprehensible to me, and yet for a split second I envied him the solitude of his urban hideaway. If he lived here he had superb taste and the very best of two worlds; nestled in the arms of a great city, yet free, during the night hours, from all her strife.
We crossed the “Swinging Bridge,” a suspension bridge over a deep canyon that carried golfers from the tenth tee to the tenth green. It was aptly named, for a night breeze and the weight of two men sent it swaying gently. Stan broke the silence and told me that on a clear day you could see all the way to downtown L.A. and the San Bernardino Mountains.
Shining our flashlights into sand traps, we walked up from the green into a tunnel. Stan said that this was the end of the line, that no way would Fat Dog camp out on the back nine. He hated it too much, calling it the toughest nine holes he had ever packed. I believed Stan. The still night beauty of this place seemed to have informed us with a wordless rapport. We made our way back the way we had come.
Once back in the car, Stan The Man sighed. “Well,” he said, “we got a choice to make. There’s four more country clubs on the West Side: Riviera, Brentwood, Hillcrest, and L.A. You can forget Riviera. They don’t have caddies, and Fat Dog sleeps out only on courses where he knows the caddy master. Brentwood and Hillcrest are Jewish clubs, and Fat Dog ain’t camped out on them courses in
years. That leaves L.A. and it’s huge. Two courses, thirty-six holes. If Fat Dog’s in town, that’s probably where he’s at.”
“Let’s hit it, then,” I said. We drove south, along the periphery of the U.C.L.A. campus, to Wilshire, then east. It was shortly past midnight, and I was getting tired.
“Your best bet is the south course,” Stan was saying. “There’s a gate on Wilshire that’s open twenty-four hours. There’s a bunch of wetback maintenance guys who live there. They got their own barracks. We can park in their lot. There’s the gate coming up. Slow down.” I did. The gate led down to a woodsy nothingness. I could hardly see. Stan was giving explicit directions. “Real slow now, hang a right now and stop.”
I stopped and Mexican music hit me. Then I heard laughter. As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I could see a large, one-story bunkhouse off to my left. There were men sitting on the doorway steps drinking beer. They stopped talking as they heard us approach. I grabbed my flashlight and thermos of coffee and beckoned to Stan The Man to follow me. We walked up to the beer drinkers. “Hola,” I said, “we’re looking for El Perro, Perro grande y blanco?”
It broke the ice. The five or six voices that answered my query were friendly. As best I could understand them, they all said the same thing: they hadn’t seen any big, white dog. I should have told them I was looking for a fat dog, but I didn’t know the Spanish word for fat. “Gracias, amigos,” I said.
“De nada,” they returned. As Stan and I moved into the darkness, they turned their mariachi music back on. Silently I wished them a good life in America.
The L.A. south course was flatter than Bel-Air, and more ur-banbound. The lights of the Century City business monoliths about a half mile away cast an eerie glow on the trees and hills. Stan was directing me to the spot where he thought Fat Dog was most likely to be: the eleventh tee. Our flashlights played over the terrain, picking out scurrying rodents. In the distance I could hear the hiss of a sprinkler.
Fat Dog was not residing on the eleventh tee. Somehow I didn’t care. I was astounded that I had lived in Los Angeles for over thirty years, had prided myself on my knowledge of my city, and had missed out on all this. This was more than the play domain of the very rich, it was quite simply another world, and such diverse types as caddies, wetbacks, and burned-out ex-cops had access to it, on whatever level of reality they chose to seek. Golf courses: a whole solar system of alternate realities in the middle of a smogbound city.
I decided to explore all the city’s courses, with my cassette recorder, on future sleepless nights. After Fat Dog Baker was safely locked up in the pen or the loony bin, of course.
I trained my light on a pair of wooden benches next to the tee. “Let’s sit down,” I said. I opened the thermos of coffee and poured Stan a cup, drinking mine directly from the container.
“You like it here, don’t you?” Stan asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m surprised it took me this long to discover it.”
We sipped coffee and stared into the darkness. We were facing north. Wilshire was a narrow strip of light in the distance. Cars glided silently along it.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” I said. “I’m not a cop. I’m a private investigator. I shanghaied you out here illegally. You can take off, or I’ll drive you wherever you want to go.”
I could feel Stan The Man staring at me in the dark. After a few moments, he laughed. “I knew there was something funny about you, I knew it, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it. How come you’re looking for Fat Dog?”
“I’m working for him. He hired me to do a little work for him.”
“What kind of work?”
“It’s confidential. Do you want to split? I’ll drive you home.”
“Naw, I like it here too. What kind of cases do you handle?”
“Mostly I repossess cars.”
Stan laughed, wildly. “Now that’s really funny,” he said. “I used to steal cars and you repo them. That’s a fucking scream!”
“Tell me about looping,” I said.
“What about it?”
“Everything.”
Stan The Man thought for a minute. What he had to say surprised me: “It’s kind of sad. You show up and sign the list in the morning. If there’s play, you work. Basically you carry two bags, one on each shoulder. You usually get twenty bucks for eighteen holes. The ladies stiff you about half the time. Some of the men do, too. Some members pay real good, but the caddy master’s buddies get those loops. The way you make money in the looping racket is by getting regulars who take good care of you, and by pressing thirty-six holes, which is a lot of fucking work. Or you get foursomes, two on your back and two on a cart, and you make up to forty scoots. Or you get high-class putter jobs with gamblers and high rollers who know how to pay. But it’s the guys who suck ass with the caddy master who get that action. Me, I just push thirty-six four days a week and spend the rest of my time fucking off. That’s the great thing about looping. You can take off all the time you want, as long as you show up on weekends and for tournaments. It’s also why you get so many bums as caddies, there’s always cash on hand for booze or dope or the horses.
“We get some young college kids out at Bel-Air now. They got that young golfer image. The members eat it up and whip out heavy for those snotnose cocksuckers. None of ’em know shit about golf, they just know how to hand out a good snow job. They snort cocaine and blow weed out on the course. There’s also the horseplayer clique. The caddy master is a bookie, and the guys who bet with him get primo loops. But caddies never save their dough. They either blow it on booze or pussy or gambling or dope. They’re always broke. Always coming out to the club to make a measly twenty bucks to get drunk on. Loopers is always hobnobbing with big money, and they never have jack-shit themselves.
For instance, there’s this Brentwood goat named Whitey Haines. He’s an epileptic and a big boozehound. He used to loop Bel-Air, but he got fired ’cause he kept having seizures out on the course. It shook up the members. Anyway, the Bel-Air pro, he felt real guilty about eighty-sixing Whitey. Whitey ain’t doing too good over at Brentwood; them Hebes like their goats healthy.
“You see, Whitey is always going on two-week drunks. Them seizures scare the shit out of him, and the booze fixes him up, temporarily. Right before he goes on a drunk, he comes back to Bel-Air and cries the blues to the pro. Tells him he’s got to see his dying aunt, or go to the hospital for some tests, or have hemorrhoid surgery, some line of horseshit like that. He puts the bite on the pro for two and a half C’s and then splits. After he gets back from his drunk, he starts paying him back: ten here, fifteen there, twenty there. As soon as he gets his debt all paid off, Whitey comes back and pulls the same routine all over again: ‘I got cancer of the armpits, pro, lend me two-fifty so I can get it cured.’ The pro whips it out on him, and they’re off and running again.
“Now the pro knows that Whitey is lying, and Whitey knows that he knows, but they play that charade over and over, ’cause the pro is a caddy who made good, who was good at playing golf and sucking up to money, and guys like Whitey Haines eat him up. He thinks, ‘Jesus, if I didn’t have such a sweet smile and a sweet swing, I might have ended up like this asshole, packing duck loops and on the dole.’ So what’s two hundred and fifty scoots on permanent vacation from your pocket if it makes you feel like a humanitarian?
“Looping continues to fucking amaze me. If you think Whitey Haines is a sad case, you ain’t heard nothing yet. Take Bicycle Pete. He’s dead now. He got fired from Wilshire for never taking a bath. He stunk like a skunk. Rode a girl’s bicycle all over town and wore a Dodger cap with a propeller on top. Lived on Skid Row. Everybody thought he was retarded. He kicked off of a heart attack in his room. When the ambulance guys came to take his stiff away, they found over two hundred grand in diamonds in his closet.
“Then there’s Dirt Road Dave. The ugliest guy I ever seen. Got this lantern jaw that sticks out about two feet. Used to hit al
l the invitationals. No caddy master would let him loop regular. He couldn’t even work Wilshire, and that’s the bottom of the line. So he’d loop invitationals to supplement his welfare check. He had a regular routine: at the end of the day, when all the loopers were hanging around the caddy shack, he’d chug-a-lug a half pint of bourbon, get up on a card table and suck his own dick. We used to throw quarters at him while he did it. He was one of the most famous caddies on the West Coast. Then he made his big mistake. He started doing it in public. The public didn’t understand. Only caddies and perverts could dig his act. Old Dave’s in Camarillo now.
“It’s the loneliness, that’s what gets me about looping. All these sad motherfuckers with no families, no responsibility, don’t pay no income tax, nothing to look forward to but the World Series pool at the Tap and Cap, the Christmas party in the caddy shack, the next drunk, or the big horse that never hits. We got this college kid, a real smart kid, who loops weekends, and he says that caddies is ‘the last vestige of the Colonial South. Golf course cotton pickers lapping at the fringes of a strained noblesse oblige.’ He said that we were a holdover from another era, that we were a status symbol, and it was worth it for clubs to keep us around, to uphold their image.