by Craig Carton
We did have three girls coming over, though, so we tried to prep ourselves by jumping in the pool and making sure we didn’t smell like puke. John parked his car two blocks away, just in case the girls decided to check it out. We brought a radio outside so we could listen to the rest of the game while we drank and waited for the girls.
The Mets went back in front in the bottom of the eighth when Ray Knight doubled in two runs. Ojeda got the leadoff man in the ninth, but then gave up three straight singles. Roger McDowell came in and blew the save by giving up a hit to Andre Dawson. Ray Knight came through again, singling in the winning run with two outs in the tenth off Tim Burke. As the Mets players mobbed each other, the three of us cheered with shots of Jack in Steven’s hot tub with the three counselors, who more than made up for our misadventure in the city just a few hours earlier.
Jack Nicklaus set me up with my second encounter with a hooker.
I know. You’re thinking: there’s no way the golf legend set me up with a prostitute. But in a weird way, he did.
For three straight summers, starting after senior year in high school, I had a job with a valet parking company. It was run by a small, nebbishy Jewish kid who was the son of a wealthy parking garage magnate. Its main account was the booshie Westchester Country Club, as blue-blood a facility as there is in the world; all old money, and an average membership age of well over fifty.
Some of my buddies and I got wind that kids our age were making a shitload of money working there. We applied and were hired. Most days, our routine was routine: people pulled in for dinner, we parked their cars and waited for the wealthy elderly people to finish eating, and then we retrieved their vehicles. For most of these people, the car of choice was an old Caddy the size of a small pontoon, or the classic Mercedes. In either case, the cars smelled like old people and old cigars, or a combination of both. There were many times I would take a deep breath just before entering the car and try to hold it until I was out. We would run about a half mile to the lot where we’d parked their cars and drive them back to the entrance, collect a modest tip, and do it all over again. This shift usually lasted from 5 p.m. until 2 a.m., but the real work was from 6 to 8 p.m. and then again from 10 p.m. to midnight, when the diners arrived and departed, respectively. In between, we got high, played cards, threw a ball around, and tried to pass the time without getting too bored.
Wednesday nights were bonus nights for us, as it was Lobster Night. We’d roll out of there with a minimum of $150 a man, which was what we made on weekends. But the event we all waited for was the annual PGA tour event the Buick Classic. Not only did we get to meet the golf pros, but we made at least $500 a day, and the tourney was four days long. All cash, of course, and you earned every penny because you ran nonstop all day.
Buick, the title sponsor of the event, provided the courtesy cars for all the golfers and major sponsors. During the tournament, we had to get to the course by 6 a.m. and stay till nearly midnight. It involved constant running and parking and driving cars, but again, it was well worth it. It was a coveted gig to be able to greet the drivers and then bring the cars down to the club, because there were some kids who spent all day in the open lot doing the actual arranging and parking. Those guys got a set rate for the day, but those of us who were lucky enough to meet the cars when they arrived could make big bucks.
I often look back on that week of my life, and that $2,000. When I got my first job in Buffalo, New York, at WGR Radio, I made $12,000 for the year, and that was before taxes. That’s a grand a month. Two months’ work on the radio paid the same amount that I made in cash in four days of parking cars. The first day of the tournament, I arrived at the club by 6 a.m. The day was going great, steady running and driving. Days like that go fast, as opposed to nights waiting for the three remaining octogenarians to finish gumming their lobster tails and come out to get their cars. By 4 p.m., my pockets bulged with cash. Then a young, Waspy-looking guy wearing a Buick-logoed golf shirt and khakis came out, cut the line, and handed me a parking ticket. “This is Mr. Nicklaus’s car; get it fast. He doesn’t like to wait,” he said.
I was off. I was fetching the car of the Golden Bear, the greatest golfer to ever live (before Tiger, of course, and with all due respect to Arnold Palmer, who many people feel was better than both of them). I wondered if I was going to meet him, or just give the keys to one of his lackeys, like the guy who gave me the ticket.
I had met two other notable athletes in my time at Westchester Country Club prior to this moment. I was never a star-fucker, never a big autograph guy, but even for me, meeting Ralph Branca and Bobby Thomson a few months earlier on Lobster Night was cool. They were participants in one of the most famous home runs ever hit in New York, let alone baseball history. I was in awe that they were close friends, and that the event that catapulted their lives in two different directions could bring them close so many years later.
Just as a reminder, the “Shot Heard ’Round the World” is the term given to the game-winning home run hit in 1951 by New York Giants outfielder Bobby Thomson off Brooklyn Dodgers ace Ralph Branca at the Polo Grounds to win the National League pennant. As a result of the “shot,” the Giants won the game 5–4, defeating the Dodgers in their best-of-three pennant playoff series, 2 games to 1. Thomson’s home run erased the last of what had been a 131/2-game deficit in the standings to their crosstown rivals in the final weeks of the season. The Giants wound up losing to the Yankees, but nobody remembers anything other than Thomson’s home run.
Forty years later, these two amazing sports figures were about to gorge themselves on lobster. I noticed that the handsome Bobby Thomson had aged gracefully and looked like a winner, from his dress to the way he carried himself. Ralph Branca exuded the exact opposite.
Now I was driving a Buick for all of about two thousand yards to another iconic sports figure, Jack Nicklaus. As I pulled into the club driveway and began to turn into the clubhouse, I saw Nicklaus waiting with his golf bags.
I slowly pulled the car in front of him. I put it in park, and he walked around the front to get in. He wanted to get out of there without too many people seeing him. When I went to open the door for him, it fell off the car and onto the ground—right at the feet of Jack fucking Nicklaus.
The door wasn’t hanging on. It wasn’t even close to being on. It wasn’t attached to the car by any stretch of the imagination. It came right off in my hands and lay on the ground between me and Jack. I started to laugh nervously. Here was the greatest golfer in the world standing a foot away from me, and the door to his car had just fallen off. Nobody knew what to do.
I apologized and then made a joke about it. I asked him if he wanted me to take the other door off, so both sides would match. Jack didn’t laugh. “What I want is a fucking car to drive to the hotel in, and preferably one with doors. And I’d like it now.”
The scenario was funny to me, but Jack didn’t see the humor in it at first. I mean, of all the Buicks—and there were hundreds of them—the only one that lost its door was the one I drove to get Nicklaus in. I made another sarcastic remark about it, and then he cracked and became a human. As tourney execs went bonkers on their walkie-talkies to get Mr. Nicklaus a new car, stat, Jack leaned into me, pressed a folded twenty into my hand, winked, and said, “That’s why I drive a Cadillac, kid.”
Twenty bucks and a wink from the Golden Bear—not bad!
By that time, my boss had arrived at the scene to make sure one of his employees didn’t fuck up, and also to make sure everything was still kosher. Both he and Jack talked to a club executive, and then Nicklaus drove off. I was about to run and get another car when my boss called me over to him.
He asked me what happened, and I told him the story. He gave me a big hug and said that Nicklaus had raved about how I handled it. He wanted to reward me. I figured there was a big cash payment coming my way, but no. Because of how I handled the situation, he wanted me to join a veritable Navy SEAL–type team of valet parkers for a special pri
vate house party in the Hamptons next weekend, with a major reward after working the event.
That Saturday, I met five other guys, all high school seniors, at the mall parking lot where we would get into one of the kids’ conversion vans. Phillip was the driver, the boss sat shotgun, and then the rest of us hung in the back. We drove out to Southampton, and valet-parked a crazy wealthy house party until midnight. We each got four hundred dollars for the night, but the boss promised us an even bigger bonus. The best way to reward us, he figured, was to get all of us blowjobs from a New York City hooker. Oy vey, here we go again. I had been in this exact position the summer before with Steven and Mike. I was in a bad spot again. But I was stuck in the van and had no way of getting out of it.
We cruised Midtown for a hooker and again found one near an empty lot. Our boss negotiated with her for about ten minutes. When he was done, he ordered everybody out of the van and told us we would go one at a time. It was his treat. Seven guys and one woman with superhuman lips and jaw strength, I figured. My only goal was to try to delay as long as possible having to get in the van with her. The hooker he had picked could have been my last hooker’s grandmother. She was a walking tragedy.
The group of us hung out behind the van in the corner of the parking lot, talking shit about what we were going to do when it was our turn, and joking about how badly the guy inside the van must be performing. One after the next, each one of these guys entered the van, and within ten minutes they exited with smiles wide as the moon. Some pathetic streetwalker had just blown them with a condom on.
I imagine these guys didn’t get laid much, but back then neither did I. I just wasn’t willing to be the eighth guy blown by a nasty hooker. I didn’t want to be the first, either. The whole thing was disgusting to me, but for a teenage boy, if everybody else is doing it, you are in a weird spot if you say that you aren’t. My mother used to ask whether I’d jump off a bridge if my friends did, and I’d tell her that I would go last and then just not do it.
This strategy worked well for me later in life. Two years ago, my wife and I were in South Florida for the Super Bowl with some friends. After a good, solid day of drinking, we all decided, “Let’s get some tattoos.” I’d often thought about getting one, but I’d always had a problem with what to get and where on my body to get it, not to mention its permanence. We walked into a random tattoo parlor and there were three people inside the store. One guy had bolts in his forehead—real bolts had been surgically embedded in his forehead. They stuck out like horns. The second guy had African hoops in his earlobes that extended past his chin. Two freaks. The third guy, the tattoo artist himself, greeted us chomping on takeout Chinese food. “What kind of fucking tattoo do you guys want?” he asked.
Okay, peace out. We walked out of the store, and luckily for us, there was another tattoo parlor a few doors down. There were no customers at all inside, which I suppose wasn’t a good sign, but it was clean. Everyone decided this place was the best. My wife went first. She got the names of our kids written in script in between her toes. I noticed that the tattoo artist was shaking a lot throughout the procedure like he had Parkinson’s. Maybe he was just nervous. When she showed me the finished product, the ink had bled so badly it looked like he threw on some green paint and she was rocking a nonsensical Philadelphia Eagles coloring on her toes.
My buddy’s wife went next. She got a small heart tattoo with her kids’ and husband’s initials on her left butt cheek. I thought it came out well.
During the girls’ tattoos, I wandered into a bar next door. For the first time in my life, I was thrilled to hear someone inside the bar yell, “Carton, what’s up!” Now, you have to remember, it was midafternoon and a solid 80 degrees out, and I was inside a random bar in Fort Lauderdale. Turns out the only people in the bar are from New York, and they listen to my show on the radio.
“Let’s do a shot!” they bellowed, and I was happy to oblige—so happy I bought four rounds of shots and five dozen wings, and spent more than an hour with the group.
By the time my buddy was up for his tattoo and I was supposed to be picking out mine, I was drunk. He asked me to help him pick out what to get and decided it was going on his ankle. He wavered back and forth from Chinese symbols to astrological signs to random drawings. He decided on Chinese or astrological. He asked me what I thought. I said, “How do you know what the Chinese symbol really is? For all you know, it means ‘pussy’ or ‘fuck me’ or ‘kick the idiot.’ Wouldn’t that suck if that’s the tattoo you wound up with?”
He decided on his astrological sign and showed it to the shaky-handed tattoo artist. As he did, the shaking got worse. I decided that was my out. Who could argue it? My wife had green shit on her toes, and my buddy’s ankle was getting mauled by the needle. He wound up with what looks like a headless snake with his kids’ and wife’s initials on either side of it.
I chose to go last, and as a result I have no tattoo, which is a relief, considering what theirs look like.
Moments away from my turn with the hooker, I was hoping that the idea of going last would work out. There were two guys left before me. The boss was starting to get itchy. Not itchy because he got blown by a nasty hooker, but itchy because we had been in the lot a long time and he was pissed that he had paid her as much as he did.
He huddled us together and said, “Listen, when the last guy goes, I want all of you to get in the van right away.” He was so agitated that he had lost track of who did and didn’t go, and no one else seemed to care, either, once they had shot their loads. The guy before me got out of the van, and our boss looked around and said “Everybody go?” We all yelled, “Yup!” I was free and clear, but what happened next was one of the most ridiculous things I have ever seen. We all got in the van as instructed, and Phillip started the car. There were now eight guys in the back of a van with one hooker, and she knew something was fucked-up.
Looking nervous, she started to get dressed. As she stood up to get out, she was facing inside the van, holding her purse in one hand and the door handle in the other for balance as she tried to put on her high heel. Just then the boss grabbed one of those handlebars, drew his left foot backward, and with all his might kicked the hooker as hard as he could in the chest. He grabbed her pocketbook as she fell backward out of the van. He yelled for Phillip to hit the gas, and we pulled away.
It all happened in slow motion, and I can still see the woman flying out of the van. Before the door swung shut, she yelled, “Stop, you motherfuckers, you stole my makeup!” That seemed strange to me. She had to have gotten a few hundred dollars for blowing eight guys, and she was worried about her makeup?
My boss instructed Phillip to run every red light and get far away from the area. Nothing but dumb luck saved us from being shot at by a pimp, arrested by police, or something in between. When we got several blocks away, my boss opened her purse to retrieve his money, but the only things he found inside were lipstick and a roll of nickels that one of the guys gave her as a tip. (“Who carries rolls of nickels around?” is a good question. Another is, “Who tips hookers with it?”) There was no money to be found.
This hooker was smarter than he thought. She rolled the money up and hid it on her body, just in case some douchebag decided to get his money back by karate-kicking her out of a van at one in the morning.
The whole way home, I kept thinking, fuck Jack Nicklaus. If he hadn’t said anything to my boss, I would not have been an eyewitness to the drop-kicking of a hooker.
To this day, every time I see the Golden Bear, it makes me remember how he indirectly got me in front of a hooker.
Years later, when I was hosting a sports talk show in Cleveland, Ohio, a local golf club asked me to come out and see the progress of the new course they were building, which Jack Nicklaus was designing. They had the idea for me to sit in a golf cart next to Jack as he drove from hole to hole and pointed out what needed to be done, and how it would ultimately play. The course was still just razed land and dirt, and
I announced to the half-dozen other folks that were going to join us on the drive that Jack and I were old friends. This was going to be a great reunion. The general manager of the club of course asked how we knew each other, and while Jack kind of grimaced like he had no idea, I reminded him of the car door falling off.
It would have been great if Jack did remember, but this was seven years later. It would have been even greater if Jack had played along by throwing out a simple “Oh yeah, that was you? Wow, great to see you again, boy! You’ve come a long way from parking cars.” But all I got from Jack in front of the group was “Can we start the tour?”
I sat in the cart next to him, perturbed that he didn’t remember. Why didn’t he do the right thing, just guy to guy? But after a while I forgot about it, thrilled to witness Jack Nicklaus take us through each hole. On one hole there was a big weeping willow that they had not cut down, on Jack’s orders. We stood on a hill of dirt and Jack said, “On this hole, you will use a five-iron off the tee.” One of the club executives asked, “Why not a driver?” Jack said matter-of-factly, “Because if you use a driver, the tree will come into play—not now, but ten years from now when the course is more mature.” Fucking awesome! He had contemplated club selection for a shot he couldn’t even hit for ten years.
I had witnessed greatness. But he didn’t remember the door incident, so I decided to get him back when we stopped for drinks about halfway through the tour. I said, “Come on, Jack, it’s okay to tell the guys you remember. I mean, I remember the tip you gave me, five bucks. I was disappointed.” Jack shot right back and said, “I gave you a twenty, and I heard your boss was giving you an even bigger bonus than that. Now is everybody ready to see the back nine?”
Long live the Golden Bear.
It’s funny, but when I was nineteen, I hated my WFAN internship. I did it in the summer of 1988, as the station celebrated its first anniversary. Back then, there was no guarantee that the station would make it, or be the success that it eventually was. It was doing terribly in the ratings and was on the verge of financial collapse.