by Dan Jenkins
36
AS SHIPS GO, THE QE2 CAN LEAD my armada anytime.
I boarded that dude in New York on July 7, a week after Memphis and ten days before the start of the British Open. I confess I spent the first two days counting all the bars and restaurants on board—the thing is bigger than most Texas towns that have high school football teams. After that, I spent the rest of the “crossing,” as we call it, wishing Cheryl had come with me.
It’s a romantic deal, being on a luxury liner, especially if you have a suite like I did. Big bed, big bathroom, TV, phone, and glass doors instead of portholes.
Doors that opened onto my private outdoor veranda. I devoted some time to standing on my outdoor veranda, cocktail in hand, wondering how debonair I looked—and thinking about a line from a movie that seemed to fit: “What is it about being on a boat that makes everyone behave like a film star?” Amazingly, I couldn’t remember what movie it came from, or who said it, for two days. Finally I remembered it didn’t come from a movie at all, it came from a TV series, Brideshead Revisited. Which most of my friends would have bet the Under on me watching back when it ran, but I recall liking it. The parts I understood.
There were things to do on the ship other than look debonair during the six nights and five days it took to get from New York to Southampton. There’s twenty-four-hour room service, a casino, shopping mall, bookstore, library, theater, concerts, lectures, dancing lessons, swimming pool, jogging path, and a driving net on an outside deck where I hit balls for a while every day, keeping loose. But mostly you dine and drink.
I do heartily recommend that everybody take a voyage someday, but only in the summer, when it’s smooth. If you go any other time, according to my waitress at my regular table in the Britannia Restaurant on Upper Deck, you might find yourself trying to grab your salad plate as it goes floating through the air.
From my very own suite I could pick up the phone and call Cheryl—for only fifteen dollars a minute. I called her every day. But the first time, Jolene Frederick answered at Donald Hooper Realty.
“Hi, Bobby Joe,” Jolene said. “Last night we were trying to think of all the names for the grail. Help me out here.”
“The what?”
“The Holy Grail,” she said. “You know. The juicy.”
“Is Cheryl there?”
“Yeah, but help me out. We thought of beaver . . . wool . . . gash . . . donut . . . taco . . . c-word, of course . . . snatch . . . boat . . . box . . . clump . . . slice.”
“Slice?”
“You don’t listen to rap much, do you?”
“I assassinate rap. Put Cheryl on, please, this is costing fifteen bucks a minute.”
“In a second. What do they say on the Tour?”
“I don’t know, Jolene. I’ve heard caddies call it fringe . . . face . . . froghair . . . first cut.”
She squealed, “Face! I love it! ‘Gimme some face, baby.’ Hold on. Here’s Cheryl.”
I asked Cheryl if Jolene ever sold any property. Lowering her voice, she said yes, occasionally, but not if it interfered with a chance for her to break up a home. Cheryl asked how was it out there in the Atlantic. I said she should be here—she’d enjoy sitting in a deck chair, watching fat Greek guys and long-tall Brits splash around in the pool in their little briefs.
Closest thing to royalty on board, I said, were the assorted pairs of snooty mothers and bored-looking daughters. Made only in America. Cheryl said if I tossed a move on any of the daughters I could stay in Scotland. I said the mothers were the threat. They’d had work done. But they weren’t likely to be attracted to me—I didn’t bring a tux and didn’t know how to hold a brandy glass.
None of the other phone calls to Cheryl were that interesting, although some cost more than $200.
Three other so-called “celebrities” on board paid their freight by giving a talk and answering questions in this huge lounge. The most popular was the English lady mystery writer I’d never heard of. She filled the room and, unless I misunderstood, basically said that no other mystery writer, man or woman, knew shit.
I didn’t bother to hear the former butler at Buckingham Palace, who I heard made a big hit by talking about how much the Queen liked her gin. I also took a pass on the German soccer star.
I drew the smallest crowd, maybe three dozen people. They found nothing to laugh at, and I cut it short after reading the disappointment on all their faces. Their looks said, How come I wasn’t Arnold Palmer?
The penetrating questions they asked me were:
Do I know Tiger Woods?
What is Tiger Woods like?
How tall is Tiger Woods?
Part of the deal called for me to hit balls into the driving net outside after my talk. I was also expected to give some swing tips if the crowd asked for any. The crowd consisted of seven geezers in plaid wool caps with bills. James Cagney caps.
I went through the bag, hitting two or three balls with each club. The geezers didn’t say anything, except one of them asked when it would be his turn. Each one hit some balls. I didn’t cure any of their tops or shanks.
Smokey Barwood earned his agent’s keep—or I should say avoided the loss of a limb—with the arrangements he’d made for me when I arrived in Southampton on July 12. We docked soon after breakfast.
I was met by a pleasant and helpful East Indian fellow with a limo who drove me the two and a half hours to London Gatwick airport and saw to it that I boarded the right shuttle, the one to Edinburgh. And an hour and a half later I was in the Edinburgh terminal, where I was met by a pleasant and helpful Scottish fellow with a limo who drove me the two hours it took to reach the Old Course Hotel in St. Andrews.
As I told Smokey later, by way of thanking him, if I’d had to work all that out on my own, I’d probably still be in Budapest.
37
THE OLD COURSE HOTEL IN ST. Andrews looks completely out of place. It’s a big modern structure that stands a little apart from the ancient gray city, a city with spires sticking up and every building looking like a church or a ruin. But the hotel is convenient because it sits right by the seventeenth fairway—the Road Hole—and from all I’ve heard in discussions on the subject, it has the only up-to-date bathrooms in town.
It’s primarily reserved for contestants and officials when the British Open comes along every five years. There are other okay places to stay, like Rusack’s and Scores, a couple of relic-type hotels
right there in town that are even closer to the R&A clubhouse, but if Americans want to feel like they’ve never left home, the Old Course Hotel is their joint.
Which, from my personal point of view, was what was wrong with it during my wonderful stay.
A full complement of American fans had managed to have enough stroke to reserve rooms there, too, and just after I passed muster with the registration people I saw one American of particular interest across the lobby—Nonnie Harrison.
And she saw me, and started toward me, looking pleased, borderline excited as I interpreted the look. I don’t mind admitting I was stricken with terror.
“Oh, shit, oh, dear” is close to what I said to myself.
I had a few seconds to recover from the kind of shiver I hadn’t known since I was a kid in a movie and saw Dracula for the first time, although it behooves me to admit that she looked pretty damn good for a lady who plays out of the Rich-Wife-Good-Little-Shopper Division.
As she was coming toward me I was standing there reading the note Mitch had left for me at the front desk saying he’d arrived, had a room in a B&B in town, and would meet me in the morning around nine—he’d arranged a practice round tee time for 11:30.
If I’d been quick, I would have said to the Scottish guy with my clubs and luggage on the roll cart, “Of all the eight-centuries-old linkslands in all the cities in all the world, she has to walk into mine.”
But I was travel-weary. So all I could think of to say to Mrs. J. Rodney Harrison was “Hi, Nonnie. What in the world are you doing here?”
She insisted on giving me a hug and kissing me on the mouth, after which, with her tongue back in her own mouth, she said, “Rodney wanted to see a British Open, and I wanted to shop in London for a few days on the way, so here we are.”
I slipped the guy with my stuff ten pounds, close to twenty dollars, to wheel the things up to my room as I chatted with Nonnie. He didn’t act like I’d overtipped him at all, which gave the place something else in common with America.
I asked if Neenie, her sister, was with them. Making small talk.
Nonnie said, “No, Neenie’s working in a boutique in Highlands this summer. She’s staying in our cottage. Neenie’s not looking for Mr. Right. She gets bored to intense sleep with any relationship that lasts more than a month. Her latest, she tells me, is a man named Casey something from Jacksonville, Florida. He’s renting a cabin for two weeks in Cashiers. This is Neenie’s summer to screw tourists.”
I asked if Rodney was off playing golf someplace today, knowing that’s what most Americans do when they come to British Opens—play more rounds of golf at various courses than the contestants do in the British Open. There’s a golf course of some kind about every two miles in Scotland in one direction or another.
Yep, she reported. Rodney had gone off with three assholes from Atlanta to play North Berwick, wherever that was.
“Ah, my favorite course in Scotland,” I said. “But it’s two hours from here. You have to go around Edinburgh.”
“They have a chopper.”
I said, “It’s probably my favorite area in Scotland. I mean, you play North Berwick West, North Berwick East . . . Dunbar, which Old Tom Morris designed . . . Gullane, which Willie Park designed . . . Gullane has three courses, actually, but Gullane No. 3 is the best. How do you like St. Andrews, Nonnie? Great atmosphere, huh? This is the birthplace of golf, in case nobody’s told you.”
“It looks like the birthplace of death to me,” she said. “You’d think it might have occurred to them to plant a tree somewhere.”
Chuckling, I said, “I know what you mean. The first time Sam Snead came to St. Andrews, he said, ‘It looks like there used to be a golf course here at one time.’ You have to play it to appreciate the subtleties.”
She said, “Can we lose the golf encyclopedia? I want to see you this week. I’ll work something out.”
“I’m, uh . . . not sure that’ll be possible, Nonnie.”
“I haven’t forgotten Pebble Beach,” she said, “and I don’t think you have . . . even though you didn’t return any of my calls. By the way! Who was that dirt-bike bitch in Fort Worth who told me to get lost on the phone?”
I informed her that the “dirt-bike bitch” had a name. It was Cheryl Haney. And she was a whole lot of babe, and the woman I was in love with.
“Oh, please,” Nonnie said.
“I’m not kidding,” I said.
“She’s in Texas, isn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“And we’re here, right?”
“Yes.”
“So?”
I tried to look ill. “Nonnie, seriously . . .”
“You can at least have dinner with us,” she said. “Rodney will make reservations upstairs. Maybe I’ll work something out for us, maybe I won’t. We won’t sweat it. You look tired, Bobby Joe Grooves. Go cuddle up with your fucking morality and get some rest. I’m off to buy cashmere.”
She gave me a subtle feel-up as she pecked me on the cheek and was gone. I watched her leave, wishing like hell I’d skipped the British Open.
IT KEPT me up half the night, tired as I was, thinking about how I’d give Nonnie the slip all week. I could throw off, tank the deal, miss the cut, and be off the reservation by Friday night. But I’d still have four days to worry about. Okay, I could claim an injury and WD right away. Concoct a death in the family? Choke on a toenail I’d find in a pork pie or a sausage roll? Fake mad cow disease?
I shared such thoughts with Mitch the next day on the course while I was reacquainting myself with all of the historic hazards at St. Andrews—the Swilcan Burn, Hell Bunker, the Principal’s Nose, the Beardies, the Elysian Fields, Miss Grainger’s Bosoms, the Valley of Sin.
Going way back, a handful of architects had tinkered with St. Andrews. The likes of Allan Robertson, Old Tom Morris, James Braid, Alister Mackenzie. But the Old Course—squeezed on one side by the town and lashed on the other by the winds from the sea, with its yawning double greens and hidden moguls and massive patches of purple flowers, your basic heather—was still the gem that Nature had designed.
Mitch was naturally concerned that with Nonnie on my mind I wouldn’t play well in the world’s oldest major. It dates back to 1860 and the Brits still call it “the Open Championship,” like nobody else has one.
“Kind of funny, though, when you think about it,” Mitch said. “Man tryin’ to run away from a lunch wagon.”
Lunch wagon. I’d file that away for Jolene.
“Nonnie Harrison is big trouble,” I said. “The serious kind. Trouble in Downtown Cheryl Haney City.”
“Hate them kind,” he said. “Can’t just trick fuck and let it go. Must be a white thing.”
I said I hadn’t thought of it that way.
“We have to de-flect, is what we have to do,” he said.
“Deflect?” I said.
Mitch said, “Yeah, we spin her off . . . keep you out of the purple flowers this week.”
“Spin her off on what?”
“You not usin’ your head.”
“It’s not the first time.”
“Think Knut,” he said.
“Knut?”
Mitch said, “Spin her off on Knut. He a lunch wagon man. Hell, he been to lunch wagon graduate school. You can bust me if Nonnie don’t go for a big old handsome white bread like Knut.”
“I drop Knut on her and I skate?”
“Now you quick.”
“Could work,” I said, giving Mitch a low five. “I’ll do this thing.”
I DODGED Nonnie for two days by being on the golf course or in areas where she couldn’t gain admittance. Like in the R&A clubhouse or out on the practice range. But I didn’t escape her messages. One message said J. Rodney would be playing golf at Gleneagles all day Tuesday, and what were my plans? Another message said J. Rodney would be playing golf at Elie all day Wednesday and what were my plans? And another said dinner was on for Wednesday night in the hotel’s upstairs dining room, no excuses.
I responded to the dinner message, telling her to count me in and have Rod make it a table for four—I was bringing a “mystery guest.”
By then I’d recruited Knut for dinner. I’d finally caught up with him that Wednesday morning and he favored me with a chat on the putting green behind the big grandstand to the right of the No. 1 tee.
I was covered up in friendship and innocence—I needed his ass.
“The she-bitch!” he said. “Do you know what this woman has done, Bobby Joe? It is to be unbelievable! Cynthia, the she-bitch, is asking for a divorce. From me! The Nukester! This is a crazy woman, I tell you not.”
“Gee,” I said, “I had no idea Cynthia was unhappy.”
“She is not unhappy,” Knut said. “How could she be unhappy? She is married to me. I have given her everything—houses, cars, swimming pools, my name. Without me she would still be flying for Delta Airlines and stealing cups and saucers!”
“You’ve been a generous guy,” I said. “Not every American wife drives a Mercedes and a Lexus SUV. That alone . . .”
“What it is, she is crazy,” Knut continued. “Things have been put in her head by other she-bitches. This is what I believe to be true. Now she is wanting much of my money. I am told this is the way of she-bitches.”
Knut said Cynthia was asking for $30 million for herself and a $20 million fund set aside for the two boys, Sven and Matti, a fund they couldn’t touch until they were out of college.
He said, “Cynthia thinks she is hitting me where I hurt, and I am acting
so as to be injured and complaining bitterly, but the joke is to be on the she-bitch. I will give her this amount and be done with her because what she does not know is, I am worth four times that much! Har-har.”
Unable to avoid humor, but keenly aware that most humor takes a detour around Knut, I said, “By God, that’ll show her. Strap a little thirty million on her, see how she likes it.”
I could only imagine how much Buddy Stark would like it.
The remark missed the Nukester like an air ball. Seconds later he was telling me about this great school his sons were going to enter. The she-bitch had found the school in Virginia, but he’d approved of the idea. With his busy schedule he couldn’t very well take care of the boys himself, and Renata didn’t want the full-time responsibility. The private school was a good solution, even if it was the she-bitch who thought of it. Sven and Matti were going to be getting the best education possible and receive some much-needed discipline at the Jeb Stuart Institute.
“For Young Men,” I said.
“For who?”
“It’s the Jeb Stuart Institute for Young Men.”
“You have heard of this place?”
“Yes, I have,” I said. “It’s highly respected. You’re a lucky father to have your sons enrolled at Jeb Stuart. They will learn many things and may become future generals in the army—maybe even for the United States.”
Another air ball.
I carefully studied the crowd around the putting green and was happy not to observe any bimbette who might be traveling with Knut. With “Captain Wood.” Another nickname Jerry Grimes had recently given him. If Knut had a honey with him, she’d be faithfully in the gallery at all times. He liked having them there. He’d once had two in Palm Springs—cut-slack Stacy walking on the left side of the fairway and no-slack Lori walking on the other. Dueling dirty legs.
“I take it you’re alone this week,” I said.
“Yes, this is unfortunately true,” he said. “I have been looking, but I must tell you, Bobby Joe. I have never pulled a lot of pussy out of Scotland.”