Slim and None

by Dan Jenkins

  “You and I have been together—what?—three months? I’ve been practically the same thing as in love with you for three whole months . . . and it’s been great. It’s something I never thought would happen to me . . . not after I married three women who hated golf—until we were divorced. But I get lucky. One day I meet you and we connect, and it turns out you not only love golf, you care about me, even though I’m zero-for-heart-stopper. I mean, I don’t edge out too many guys in the romance department. And you’re so gorgeous, I feel like I may go blind every time you walk out of the room. But while I’m wallowing around in this love, something else happens. I lose two majors. Two I deserve to win. I’m out here almost twenty years and I finally get two real shots at a major—hell, I’ll settle for one—but I get screwed out of the Masters when I’m playing really good, and then I come here and I get screwed out of the Open when I’m playing really good. So guess what, babe? You may be the all-time dynamite lady, but I have to tell you. Since I’m a golfer, I’m about to believe you’re a fucking voodoo curse.”

  She may have set a new PGA Tour speed record for a lady slamming a napkin down and leaving a dinner table.

  PART THREE

  SHOOT THE HAGGIS

  36

  The main thing I had to do in the two weeks between the U.S. Open and the British Open was fetch my love life out of the sewer.

  As any sober person might have guessed, Gwen bolted out of Pinehurst early the next morning, hot as a pot of collards that my martinis had accused her of bringing me bad luck in the majors. I didn’t realize I’d made her that angry until I discovered she hadn’t even left a note.

  I took a flight home later that Monday, cured my hangover, and started trying to find Gwen a day later. There weren’t many places where she could be. At her home in La Costa was one place. At her shop in Del Mar was another. On the outside, I figured, she might have gone to meet her ex-husband, Rick the Agent, in Beverly Hills or New York City, to accept his offer of a highly lucrative position with International Sports Talent, although I didn’t think my martinis had been the decider on that all-important question.

  Interestingly enough, when I called both IST offices in Beverly Hills and Manhattan, the secretaries I spoke with had never seen or heard of anyone named Gwendolyn Pritchard. In fact, they were surprised to learn that Rick had ever been married.

  Sandy Knox, Gwen’s partner in the Die Shopping boutique, came clean in the second phone conversation with me. Yes, Gwen was home but no, she wasn’t talking to anyone. She was “disappointed . . . hurt . . . bruised . . . depressed.”

  “Infuriated?” I said. “Would that be part of it?”

  “It’s in there,” Sandy said.

  “I gather she’s leaning hard on the asshole word when my name comes up, would that be fair to say?”

  “You have assumed correctly. This isn’t something you can fix with a phone call, Bobby Joe.”

  “Please tell her I need to speak to her.”

  “It won’t do any good. She’s too upset.”

  “OK, try telling her to stop acting like I broke a date for the dance.”

  “You should come out here if you really care about her.”

  “She Knows damn well I care.”

  “A woman can’t hear it too often.”

  “Boy, I Knew I shouldn’t have canceled my subscription to Cosmopolitan. I’d have Known that.”

  “Sarcasm. That’ll fix it.”

  “Maybe I can shout how much I care for her. Hold the phone up so she can hear me.”

  “She’s not as amused by the situation as you seem to be.”

  “I’m not amused either, Sandy, but it’s frustrating to try to fix something with somebody when the somebody won’t even talk to you.”

  “Do the romantic bit, Bobby Joe. Come out here, take an ocean-view suite at the La Valencia, lay in champagne and flowers, invite her over for a visit, see if one thing leads to another.”

  “That’s a very romantic suggestion, Sandy, but considering the mood she’s in, it could be a big waste of time and money.”

  “No it won’t. If Gwen doesn’t show up, I will.”

  I laughed at her joke—if that’s what it was.

  While I was home I dropped by the office of Alleene’s Delights to check out my mail and see if my bills were being paid on time, or if my part-time secretary’s social life was Keeping her too busy to worry about it.

  Ever since I’d been on the Tour, traveling thirty-five weeks or more a year, I’d hired someone to do secretarial work for me. The big stuff like investments and taxes and retirement funds, that was handled by Smokey Barwood’s money managers and accountants in New York.

  Smokey’s people had done well by me. I’d been with the agency fifteen years and nobody had run off to Buenos Aires with my money yet.

  The same wasn’t true on the local scene. Over the years I’d been through a half-dozen bookkeepers who thought my money was their money, and by the time I discovered it and fired them, they were driving away in new Celicas and Corollas.

  My latest had been working out OK for the past two years. She was one of the Gwyneth Paltrows who worked for Alleene. She managed the catering office. She’d agreed to take on my chores in her spare time and I paid her well for doing it. Her name was Tina or Frieda, I could never remember, always being on the road. Maybe if she had a bigger rack ...

  There was a signature stamp for the fan mail she answered in my behalf. Not that I received much. Four or five desperate requests a month to cure somebody’s slice. Four or five letters a month from people wanting to Know if I could help them get on Augusta National, Cypress Point, or Pine Valley to play eighteen holes.

  “Get born rich and start your life over,” is what I would advise them, but I left it to Tina or Frieda to say it more delicately in letter form.

  My sec didn’t open letters that were personal from names she recognized, and while I was there she called my attention to one. It was from Terri Adams, my second ex-wife, the one who enjoyed helping Red Taggert Keep criminals loose on society.

  Terri had a talent for conning me out of money. If it wasn’t a problem with her car or a Kitchen appliance, it was a medical emergency regarding herself or a close relative. Sometimes this was true. But most of the time, I Knew she wanted cash to lavish on herself at Neiman’s or give to her latest live-in, some out-of-work slug with a talent for rolling joints—a guy she would have become infatuated with because he reminded her of some handsome dimwit in a TV series.

  I frowned as I read the letter from Terri—she wanted to “borrow” $30,000. “Alleene has to see this,” I said.

  “She’s in the Kitchen,” Tina or Frieda said. “We’re catering a gala tonight at the Fort Worth Zoo for the deep-pockets. She’s probably in there reminding the staff not to beurre-blanc the poached salmon until they serve it.”

  “Jesus, that would haunt me forever,” I said.

  I summoned Alleene out of the Kitchen. She was wearing a white food-stained chef’s coat and a pair of old jeans and her hair was pulled back in a bun, but she still looked terrific. She poured us a mug of coffee from the fresh pot she Kept ready in her office at all times.

  She sat back in her leather desk chair and started reading the letter from Terri out loud.

  “Dear Bobby Joe: I Know I am always asking you for something, but this time it is urgent. I have nowhere else to turn because, as you Know, my whole family is dead from various sick causes.

  “Now I have received another severe blow. I find I cannot get health insurance because of a pre-existing condition—I have fibroids in my uterus.”

  Alleene laughed. I was shocked by her reaction.

  “She has fibroids in her uterus?” Alleene said, a smile lingering. “Everybody has fibroids in their uterus.”

  “They do?”

  What did I Know about fibroids?

  Alleene said, “Well, not everybody. I don’t have them. But it’s a common thing. Almost every woman I Know either
has them and her doctor watches them, or she goes ahead and has the hysterectomy.”

  “Terri’s had a hysterectomy,” I said.

  “She has?”

  “I gave her money three years ago for a hysterectomy.”

  Alleene laughed again. “B.J., if Terri’s had a hysterectomy, she doesn’t have fibroids in her uterus because she no longer has a uterus. She really does take you for a sap, you Know that?”

  I shrugged. “It’s easier to give her the money.”

  “You don’t have to listen to the yelling, right?”

  “That’s it. I want to talk about something else, babe. I have a bigger problem than Terri Adams.”

  Alleene Knew I’d been taken with someone named Gwendolyn Pritchard. I’d told Alleene about Gwen a month earlier when I was in town and we were having one of our business lunches. Now she listened while I told her I’d decided that Gwen was the greatest lady I’d Known since Alleene herself, and how I was certain I’d fallen into serious love with her, but how I’d messed up in Pinehurst and had run her off with a hurtful remark I didn’t mean, and what would she suggest I do to go about repairing the damage?

  Alleene and I had gotten married twenty-one years ago because we liked screwing each other. Then we got divorced a year later because we didn’t have any money. We were living in a tiny garage apartment where the couch made into the bed and the Kitchen was a hot plate.

  I was still trying to become a pro and didn’t Know much about anything other than golf, gambling, movies, hanging out, and sitting around. She’d suggested we split and I agreed it was for the best. I assumed we’d still screw now and then, and we had, for old times’ sake—until I started marrying other people.

  We’d remained close friends through the years. She’d found excuses for my marriages to Terri Adams and Cheryl Haney, and she hadn’t heaped too much ridicule on the swell dancers and fun ladies I dated in between.

  Alleene was still a great-looking woman and it baffled me that she’d never married again, that a smart guy hadn’t scooped her up. She went out with guys, and she’d enjoyed one or two meaningful relationships in the past, whatever a meaningful relationship is. But lately she wasn’t involved with anyone. Which was fine with her, she insisted. She’d reached the point in her life where nothing was more important to her than her successful business, her golf game, and her two dogs—Victor, the Maltese, and Ilsa, the poodle. Alleene was a good golfer, ladies’ division, despite the fact that she hadn’t taken up the game till her thirties. She was still winning country-club trophies around town.

  When I was finished describing my Gwen problem, Alleene couldn’t deny herself the fun of saying, “If you were a star in the NBA, you could buy her a four-million-dollar ring. That tends to square things.”

  “Very helpful,” I said.

  “I have another piece of advice.”

  “Strap it on me.”

  “Have you thought of going out with ugly women for a change?”

  “That wouldn’t work. They’d take it out on me because they’re ugly.”

  “A cripple, maybe?”

  “Would you go out with a cripple?”

  “It would depend on what’s crippled.”

  “His dick, let’s say.”

  She giggled, stood up. “I have to go back to work, B.J. Go to your shapely adorable in California. It’s obvious the lady’s in love with you or she wouldn’t have been hurt so badly. Throw yourself on the mercy of the court. Begging helps. It’ll work out.”

  We parted with our usual wet Kiss and feel-up—for old times’ sake.

  37

  he best place to sit in the Whaling Bar & Grill at the La Valencia Hotel, in my judgment, was a table by a window where you could gaze out at the blue Pacific and still see Gwen Pritchard if she entered the room in a slinky white dress.

  That’s where I was when Gwen came in and moved across the room toward me. The joint was crowded at cocktail hour and she couldn’t have turned more sun-tanned faces if she’d been Rita Hayworth at the top of her game. Which would have been the year she made Gilda.

  As I pulled out a chair for her, she said, “I’m only here because Sandy Knox would have come if I hadn’t.”

  “Sandy wouldn’t really have come here, would she?”

  “Like a shot out of a cannon. You’re single, aren’t you?”

  Gwen ordered a potato vodka on the rocks from the waiter who pounced on us. I motioned for another tall scotch and water.

  “No martini?” she said cunningly.

  “Martini is a speed horse. Junior lets me go a distance.”

  “Junior?”

  “J and B. His close friends call him Junior.”

  “So here I am. Start talking your way out of it.”

  I opened up with the confession that I was in deep-type love with her, back-seat high school love, the Kind I’d never been in before despite my unfortunate marital history, and I wanted us to get married and live happily ever after in whatever place she preferred, as long as it wasn’t San Francisco—at this stage of my development I couldn’t live around that many Commie dupes.

  “You have to drop in a joke, don’t you?” she said.

  “It wasn’t a joke.”

  She battled a smile.

  I said, “Gwen, I’m sorry about the other night. I should have caught you when you ran out of the restaurant and apologized right then. Instead I went and sat with the Brits and Kept drinking. I was bitter about the tournament. I let it get the best of me. You haven’t brought me bad luck. That’s the best I’ve played in the Masters and the Open. You must Know I think you’re the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I hope you’re somewhere close to thinking you might want to forgive me.”

  “Do you really have a suite here?”

  “I do.”

  “Let’s check it out.”

  I was hoping Gwen wanted to check out my suite so she could slip out of her duds and plunder my body, but the main reason was because she wanted to smoke.

  Smoking had turned into a sneak deal in California. Thanks to the powerful lobby of busybodies and carrot cakes, it was now against the law to smoke a cigarette anywhere in the state, even in the middle of your own forest fire burning out of control on your own hillside. As Grady Don had commented on the situation so eloquently, “It’s OK for fags to go down on strange dicks in San Francisco, but you can’t light a cigarette.”

  Gwen was aware that she could smoke in my hotel suite. Or she could until one of the illegal immigrants on the housekeeping staff reported it to the management.

  While I made us a fresh drink at the well-stocked living-room bar, she recruited a decorative plate for an ashtray, put it down on a table, sat in a chair at the table, crossed her legs, and lit up her Merit Ultra Light.

  “You only came up here to smoke,” I said observantly.

  “That’s part of it.”

  “I thought you might be going to lose the dress.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “I’m a silly old romantic. I came all this way—”

  “We have things to discuss.”

  “Yeah, we do. I want you to go to Carnoustie with me.”

  She looked stunned. “We haven’t even made up! You’re asking me to go to Scotland?”

  “We’re making up.”

  “We are?”

  “I told you how I feel.”

  “You make one speech and that’s it?”

  “Like my dad says, life’s too short to put sugar in cornbread.”

  “We have things that need to be settled, Bobby Joe.”

  “The big thing’s already settled. I love you. You love me. The only thing left is my town or yours?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Why not?”

  “It just isn’t.”

  “Why do you want to complicate it?”

  “We have differences to work out.”

  “What differences?”

  “Politics, for one.”<
br />
  “Politics?” I almost yelled it. “What did I ever say to make you think I give a shit about politics? Have you ever heard me say politics is more important than golf . . . football . . . barbecue?”

  Slight grin. Recovery.

  I went on. “You say you care about human rights, and if that makes you a liberal, you don’t apologize for it. Fine with me. Hell, Gwen, if liberal means open-minded, I’m a semi-liberal and everybody I Know is . . . well, everybody but my dad.”

  Another grin. Another recovery.

  I said, “But that doesn’t mean I have to vote for Fidel Castro’s cousin. You talk about human rights. Hey, I’m all for it—if the sumbitch’ll step out of the unemployment line long enough to mow my lawn. Abortion? It’s OK if my own daughter needs one, not for anybody else . . . Same-sex marriage? Here’s my deal on that: if I’m a chick and Sharon Stone wants to tie the Knot, count me in. What else?”

  “That about covers it.”

  “You want to Know who most of your quivering liberals are?”

  “I have a feeling I’m going to hear it.”

  “In high school they always had to sit in the middle.”

  “Middle of what?”

  “When they rode in the back of somebody’s car.”

  “I’m so glad you shared that with me.”

  While she sat and smoked, I paced, stood around, leaned against walls, paced again. Frustration deal.

  I said, “Look, we have the rest of our lives to cancel out each other’s vote. I’m going to Carnoustie early to practice, but you don’t have to come till the tournament starts if you don’t want to.”

  “Where am I?” Gwen said, throwing up her hands. “What am I doing? Have we just walked out of a movie holding hands and we’re on our way to the ice cream parlor?”

  Now I grinned.

  She said, “There’s a whole future out there, Bobby Joe. I want to Know if we’re going to fit in it. You and me . . . us . . . together. What do you plan to do when you grow up? What do you want to do?”

  “What do you mean? With my basic life?”

  “Yes. When you’re no longer competitive on the golf course. Do you have a long-range goal? Do you want to design courses . . . take a club job . . . run a golf school . . . Has TV made any overtures? What?”