Welcome to the Real World (A Story From the Dark Side)

by Lawrence Block

  His routine worked, and he saw no reason to depart from it. Maybe he wasn’t playing “real” golf, maybe he was missing something by not getting out on an actual golf course, but he got more than enough pleasure out of the game the way he played it. There were no water hazards, there were no balls lost in deep rough, and there was no score to keep. He got the exercise—he took more swings at the driving range than anyone would take in eighteen holes on a golf course—and he got the occasional satisfaction of a perfect shot, without the crushing dismay that could attend a horrible shot.

  Maybe Bellerman would realize that the last thing he wanted to do was waste a morning playing with Kramer.

  And yet, when he was back at the range that Friday, he felt vaguely sorry (if more than slightly relieved) that he hadn’t heard from the man. He knew how much he’d improved in recent months, hitting every club reasonably well (including, this particular day, the notorious 1-iron) and of course it would be different on a golf course, but how different could it be? You had the same clubs to swing, and you tried to make the ball go where you wanted it.

  And just suppose he turned out to be good at it. Suppose he was good enough to give Bellerman a game. Suppose, by God, he could beat the man?

  Sort of a shame he wasn’t going to get the chance...

  “Good shot,” said a familiar voice. “Hit a few like that tomorrow and you’ll do just fine. Don’t forget, I’m coming for you at six. So remember to take your clubs home when you’re done here today. And make sure you’ve got enough golf balls. Kramer? I’ll bet you don’t have any golf balls, do you? Ha! Well, buy a dozen. They’re accommodating at my club, but they won’t hand you a bucketful.”

  On the way there, Bellerman told him he’d read about Japanese golfers who spent all their time on driving ranges and putting greens. “Practicing for a day that never comes,” he said. “It’s the cost of land there. It’s scarce, so there aren’t many golf courses, and club dues and greens fees are prohibitive unless you’re in top management. Actually, the driving-range golfers do get to play when they’re on vacation. They’ll go to an all-inclusive resort in Hawaii or the Caribbean and manage to squeeze in thirty-six holes a day for a solid week, then go home and spend the rest of the year in a cage, hitting balls off a tee. Well, today’s your vacation, Kramer, and you don’t have to cross an ocean. All you have to do is tee up and hit the ball.”

  It was a nightmare.

  And it began on the very first tee. Bellerman teed off first, hitting a shot that wouldn’t get him in trouble, maybe a hundred fifty yards down the fairway with a little fade at the end that took some of the distance off it.

  Then it was Kramer’s turn, and he placed a brand-new Titlist on a brand-new yellow tee and drew his Big Bertha from his bag. He settled himself, rocking to get his cleated feet properly planted, and addressed the ball, telling himself not to kill it, just to meet it solidly. But he must have been too eager to see where the ball went, because he looked up prematurely, topping the ball. That happened occasionally at Chelsea Piers, and the result was generally a grounder. This time, however, he really topped the thing, and it caromed up into the air like a Baltimore chop in baseball, coming to earth perhaps a hundred feet away, right where a shortstop would have had an effortless time gathering it in.

  Bellerman didn’t laugh. And that was worse, somehow, than if he had.

  By the third hole, he was just waiting for it to be over. He’d taken an eight on the first hole and a nine on the second, and at this rate he seemed likely to wind up with a score somewhere north of 150 for the eighteen holes Bellerman intended for them to play. That meant, he calculated, around 130 strokes to go, 130 more swings of one club or another. He could just go through it, a stroke at a time, and then it would be over, and he would never have to go through anything like this again.

  “Good shot!” Bellerman said, when Kramer’s fourth shot on Three, with his trusty niblick, actually hit the green and stayed there. “That’s the thing about this game, Kramer. I can four-putt a green, then shank my drive and put my second shot in a bunker, but one good shot and everything feels right. Isn’t it a good feeling?”

  It was, sort of, but he knew it wouldn’t last, and it had begun to fade by the time he reached the green, putter in hand. He was some thirty feet from the cup, and his first putt died halfway there, and he overcompensated with his second, and, well, never mind. He took a ten on the hole.

  “Still,” Bellerman said, as they approached the next tee, “that was a hell of an approach shot. That was a nine iron, right?”

  “An eight.”

  “Oh? I’d probably have used a nine. Still, it worked out for you, didn’t it?”

  By the end of the seventh hole, he’d lost four of his new golf balls. Two were in the water hazard on Six, out of anybody’s reach, and one was in the woods on Five, where it would take sharper eyes than his or Bellerman’s to spot it. And another was somewhere in the rough on Seven; he saw it drop, saw it land, walked right to the goddam thing, and couldn’t find it. It was as if the earth had swallowed it, and he only wished it would do the same for him.

  On the eighth hole, the head of his Big Bertha driver dug a trench in the earth behind the teed-up golf ball, and the ball itself tumbled off the tee and managed to roll three feet before coming to rest. “I don’t think we’ll count that one,” Bellerman was saying, but he stopped when Kramer lost it and, enraged, swung the club at a convenient tree. That was the end of the club, if not quite the end of the tree, and Kramer stood there looking at the ruined driver, embarrassed not only by what he’d done but by the unseemly feeling of satisfaction that stirred him.

  “Probably not a bad idea to use the 2-wood off the tee,” Bellerman said gently. “You gain in accuracy what you sacrifice in distance. Hey, you’re not doing so bad, Kramer. This is real-world golf. Nobody said it was going to be easy.”

  Nor did it get easier. The good shots, fewer and further between as the day wore on, were no longer even momentarily satisfying; he was all too aware that they were just a brief interruption to the parade of bad shots. He used his brassie off the tee, and every time he drew it from the bag it was a silent rebuke for what he’d done to his driver. At least he didn’t get mad at his brassie. He hit the ball—never terribly well—and returned it to his bag, and went off to look for the ball, and, if he found it, hit it again with something else.

  On the sixteenth hole, a 140-yard par-three on which he’d miraculously hit the well-protected green with his tee shot, his putter betrayed him. He’d brought both putters, of course, had in fact brought every club he owned, and he was using the antique wooden-shafted club, the one that might have been used at St. Andrew’s.

  He stood over the ball. The cup was eight feet away, and if he could sink this putt he’d have a birdie. A birdie! He’d been writing down sevens and eights and nines, he’d carded a hideous 14 on one endless hole, but if he could actually sink this putt—

  It took him six putts to get the ball in the hole.

  He couldn’t believe what was happening. In his hands, the trusty putter turned into a length of rope, a strand of limp spaghetti, a snake. He poked the ball past the cup, wide of the cup, short of the cup, every damn where but into the cup. Bellerman tried to concede the fifth putt—“Close enough, man. Pick it up.”—but Kramer stubbornly putted again, and missed again, and something snapped.

  And not just within him. The graceful wooden shaft of the old putter snapped when he broke it over his knee.

  The last two holes were relatively uneventful. None of his shorts were good, but neither were they disastrous. He drove with his brassie, and each time kept the ball on the fairway. He took four putts on 17 and three on 18, using the putter that matched his other irons. He didn’t utter a word during the last two holes, just playing doggedly, and Bellerman didn’t say anything, either.

  They didn’t talk much on the way back to the city, either. Bellerman tried a couple of times, but gave it up when Kramer failed
to respond. Kramer closed his eyes, replaying a hole in his mind, and the next thing he knew they had reached his house.

  “I know it was a rough day for you,” Bellerman said. “What can I say? Welcome to the real world, Kramer. You can get that putter repaired, you know.”

  Kramer didn’t say anything.

  “There are craftsmen who fit old clubs with new wooden shafts. It’s not cheap, but it’s worth it. Look, you played real golf today. This was the genuine article. Next time it’ll come a lot easier.”

  Next time?

  “And before you know it you’ll be hooked. You’ll see.” A hand on Kramer’s shoulder. “I’ll let you be, buddy. Lemme pop the trunk and you can get your clubs. Grab a shower, get yourself some rest. We’ll do this again.”

  That was Saturday.

  Sunday he stayed in and watched sports on TV. There was golf on one channel, tennis on another. Ordinarily he much preferred watching golf, but this day, understandably enough, it got on his nerves. He kept switching back and forth between the two channels, and was grateful when they were both done and he could watch Sixty Minutes instead.

  Monday he went to the gym, warmed up on the elliptical trainer, then put in his time on the treadmill. There were runners, some of them men as old as he, some of them older, who entered the New York Road Runners races in Central Park, trying to beat others in their age group, trying to improve their times from one race to the next, trying to up their mileage and complete a marathon. That was fine for them, and he could applaud their efforts, but no one would fault a man who ran just for exercise, no one would argue that he wasn’t doing it right if he never took it outside of the gym.

  Tuesday he went to the batting cage and took his cuts. He hit some balls well and missed some of them entirely, but he wasn’t so invested in results as to lose his temper with himself or his equipment. He never had the impulse to slam his bat against an unyielding metal post, or smash it over his knee. And he never for a moment saw his activity as a second-rate and laughable substitute for joining a team and playing baseball in the park.

  Wednesday he went to the gun club, Thursday to the gym again, this time to lift weights. And Friday found him at the driving range at Chelsea Piers.

  He hadn’t yet replaced his Big Bertha. It would be easy enough to do, one Big Bertha was essentially indistinguishable from the next, but he hadn’t yet had the heart for it. He hit his drives with his 2-wood, as he’d done on the course, hit a dozen balls with it, then continued to work his way through his bag of clubs and through two buckets of balls.

  It wasn’t the same.

  Memories of the previous Saturday kept getting in the way. “The wonderful thing about golf,” Bellerman had assured him, “is the way memory improves it. You remember the good shots and forget the bad. I suppose that’s one of the things that keeps us coming back.”

  Wrong, dead wrong. He’d already forgotten the handful of good shots he’d managed to achieve, while the awful ones crowded his memory and got in the way of his practice today. He couldn’t take a club from his bag without recalling just how horribly he’d topped or sliced or shanked a shot with it. His mashie, which he’d hit solidly on Twelve, only to send the ball thirty yards past the damned green. His 3-iron, which he’d used from the rough, visualizing a perfect shot to the green between a pair of towering trees. And of course the ball had struck one tree dead center, rebounding so that it left him further from the hole than he’d started, but with the same shot through the trees. Second time around, he’d hit the other tree...

  “Want to go out tomorrow?”

  Bellerman, damn him. He drew a breath, forced himself to be civil. “No,” he said. “Thanks, but I can’t make it tomorrow.”

  “You should, you know. Kid gets thrown from a horse, best thing he can do is get right back on him.”

  And get thrown again?

  “You obviously love the game, Kramer. Otherwise you wouldn’t be over here after a day like the one you had Saturday. But don’t try to make this take the place of the real thing. You’ve had a taste of golf and you want to keep at it, you know? Say, did you find somebody to put a new shaft on that putter?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, you will. Are you sure you can’t make it tomorrow? Well then, maybe next week.”

  The weekend passed. Monday he ran on the treadmill, and afterward he went online and ordered a new Big Bertha driver. Tuesday he had a good session at the batting cage, and that afternoon he took his putter to an elderly German gentleman somewhere on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, who repaired old golf clubs and fishing rods in his basement workshop. The price was high, more than he’d originally paid for the club, but it was worth it and more if it could erase the evidence of his bad temper.

  Wednesday he went to the gun club. He fired the deer rifle and the .22 at his usual targets, then took a break and sipped a cup of coffee. The weight machines tomorrow, he thought, and then the driving range on Friday, and Bellerman would show up, dammit, and what was he going to do about that, anyway?

  The real world. There were, he supposed, fellow members of the gun club who hunted. Had country places in Jersey or Pennsylvania, say, and tried to get a buck in deer season, or a brace of pheasant at the appropriate time. But the majority of members, he was sure, just came to practice marksmanship. They didn’t think of their activity as a pale substitute for the real thing, and neither did anybody else.

  He went back to practice with the magnum, selected his usual paper target. Then something made him switch to a target he’d seen used by other members—law enforcement personnel, for the most part. The target was a male silhouette, gun in hand.

  It was strange at first. He’d always aimed at a bull’s-eye target, and now he was aiming at a human outline. It too had a series of concentric circles, centered upon the figure’s heart, so you could see just how close you came. And it wasn’t a person at all, it was just a piece of paper, but it still took a little getting used to.

  And an odd thing happened. Welcome to the real world, said a voice in his head, and it was recognizable, that voice. It was Bellerman’s voice, and he steadied the big handgun and squeezed off a shot, and the gun bucked satisfyingly in his hand, and the bullet found its mark in the silhouette.

  He kept hearing Bellerman’s voice in his head, and the two-dimensional generic silhouette began assuming three-dimensional form in his mind, and the face began wearing Bellerman’s features.

  He spent a longer time than usual at the range, and his hand and forearm ached by the time he was done. The real world, he thought. The real world indeed.

  He returned the rifle and the target pistol to his locker. No one noticed that he walked out with the magnum tucked into the waistband of his trousers, and the remainder of a box of shells in his pocket.

  Would Bellerman show up again at the driving range Friday?

  Perhaps not. Perhaps the man would have gotten the message by then and would leave him alone, having done what he could to ruin Kramer’s life.

  But somehow Kramer doubted it. Bellerman was no quitter. He’d be there again, with the same abrasive drawl, the same smile that was never far from a sneer. The same invitation to a round of Saturday golf, which this time Kramer would accept.

  Only this time there’d be something new in his bag. And, on one of the more remote holes at Bellerman’s club, Kramer would bring out not his brassie or his mashie or his niblick, not his sand wedge, not his (and God’s) 1-iron, but a .357 magnum revolver, cleaned and loaded and ready.

  Welcome to the real world, Bellerman!

  I hope you enjoyed

  ● Welcome To The Real World ●

  A Story From The Dark Side, by Lawrence Block

  Lawrence Block is a Grandmaster of the Mystery Writers of America, and winner of multiple awards, including the Edgar and the Shamus awards for his novels.

  I hope you enjoyed this story. If so, I’d love to hear from you.

  Email: lawbloc@gmail.com


  Twitter: @LawrenceBlock

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  If you did in fact like this story, you might enjoy more of my short fiction. Three collections of my short fiction are available as ebooks:

  Enough Rope

  One Night Stands & Lost Weekends

  Ehrengraf for the Defense

  Also available as special edition ebooks are Single Short Stories, Novellas, and a play. Subscribe to LB’s blog and sign up for the newsletter to get the latest updates on sales, new releases and special offers.

  Stories From the Dark Side

  “Catch & Release” (a fisherman)

  “A Chance to Get Even” (a poker game)

  “Dolly’s Trash & Treasures” (a hoarder)

  “Headaches and Bad Dreams” (a psychic)

  “In For a Penny” (New York noir)

  “Like a Bone in the Throat” (revenge)

  “Scenarios” (a man with imagination)

  “Sweet Little Hands” (a cheating wife)

  “Three In The Side Pocket” (a failed scam)

  “Welcome to the Real World” (a golfer)

  “Who Knows Where It Goes” (a job hunter)

  “You Don’t Even Feel It” (a boxer’s wife)

  Bernie Rhodenbarr

  “The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke”

  “Like a Thief in the Night”

  Chip Harrison

  “As Dark As Christmas Gets”

  Ehrengraf For The Defense

  “The Ehrengraf Defense”

  “The Ehrengraf Presumption”

  “The Ehrengraf Experience”