by Otto Penzler
I knew that was no big deal to those guys. But five thousand dollars on one hole?
I figured there was a big tip riding on this one.
Mr. Vaccaro and Skeeter were walking ahead of us up the path to the eighteenth green. Mr. Mazza was mumbling something about respect.
“Sir,” I said to him, “why don’t I wash your ball for you?”
“Sure, kid,” he said, and he tossed me his ball.
When I went to put it in the ball washer, I saw that it was a Titleist 2, not the Titleist 3 he’d been hitting. I almost laughed out loud. It was the trick that James Bond had played on Goldfinger—swap balls on your opponent. By the strict rules of golf, if you hit the wrong ball, you lose the hole.
Skeeter had tried to win the seventeenth by pocketing Mr. Mazza’s ball. Lost ball, lost hole, end of match. But I’d seen him do it and dropped another one.
Then when Mr. Vaccaro picked up Mr. Mazza’s ball to concede the hole, he substituted a different one that looked the same if you didn’t look too closely. If Mr. Mazza hit that Titleist 2, he’d lose the hole and the match and five bucks. It would look like he’d hit the wrong ball from the short rough on the seventeenth, and there was no way I could tell them that I knew he’d hit a Titleist 3 back there, because then I’d have to tell them that I’d dropped it.
On the other hand, Skeeter couldn’t very well say he knew I’d dropped a ball, because then he’d have to admit he’d picked up the original one.
I took another Titleist 3 from my pocket, gave it to Mr. Mazza, and tossed that 2 into the bushes.
Mr. Mazza had the honor on the eighteenth. “Whaddya think here?” he said to me.
“Four-iron, sir. Keep it in the fairway.”
He cocked his head at me and grinned. “Yeah. Good idea.”
He took his 4-iron and hit it right down the middle.
Mr. Vaccaro sliced his drive into the rough.
Mr. Mazza hit to the fringe, while Mr. Vaccaro had to punch out of the rough. But then he hit a nice iron to the middle of the green, and when Mr. Mazza chipped about six feet past the hole, they were both lying three.
Mr. Vaccaro was away. His putt stopped about a foot from the hole. He looked up at Mr. Mazza, who waved his hand. “That’s good,” he said.
Mr. Vaccaro picked up his ball. “Big putt, Paulie,” he said. “Make this one, you win. Looks like you got a little break to the left. Hit it firm. You been leaving ’em short all day.”
I was squinting along the line of Mr. Mazza’s putt. It looked straight-in to me, and if he hit past the hole, he’d catch the downslope and who knows where his ball would end up.
Mr. Mazza came around to where I was standing. “Looks straight-in to me,” he whispered.
“Me, too,” I said. “Just don’t hit it too hard. You come up short, worst thing happens, you tap in and halve the hole. Too long, it’ll roll forever, leave you a tough one coming back.”
Mr. Mazza patted my cheek. “You’re a smart kid.”
Then he went back, stood up to his putt, and dropped it in the middle of the hole.
“Congratulations,” said Mr. Vaccaro. “Pressure putt. Looks like you win.” He reached into the hole and took out Mr. Mazza’s ball. He tossed it up and down in his hand a couple times, then held it up, pretending to notice something. I saw his mouth open and close.
It wasn’t the Titleist 2 he expected to see.
Slowly he turned his head and looked right at me, and his eyes drilled into me from behind those sunglasses for what seemed like about ten minutes. Then he sort of shrugged and tossed the ball to Mr. Mazza. “Let’s go have a beer, Paulie,” he said. “Winner buys, huh?”
On the way back to the clubhouse, Mr. Mazza slipped me a hundred-dollar bill. “Good work today, kid,” he said.
You don’t know half of it, I thought.
“Same time tomorrow, huh?” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
After I got his clubs cleaned and stowed in his locker, I took the back stairs up to the members’ bar and got Judy, one of the waitresses, to change my hundred-dollar bill into tens and twenties so I could take care of my old man.
Mr. Mazza and Mr. Vaccaro were sitting at a table by the window that looked out at the tennis courts. Neither of them were watching the girls in their little white skirts, though. Mr. Vaccaro was leaning on his forearms with his face pushed forward, talking in a low snarly voice, and Mr. Mazza was kind of slouched back with his arms folded, looking down into his lap, nodding and shaking his head and shrugging, not saying anything.
“What’s with them?” I whispered to Judy.
“Those two, I don’t want to know,” she said. “Something about trucks.”
When I got home, my old man was waiting at the kitchen table with his hand out, as usual. I gave him a twenty and a ten.
“Hey,” he said. “Good day, huh?”
“Mr. Mazza won a big match, tipped me extra.”
The old man gave the ten back to me. “Here, son. Guess you earned a little something for yourself.”
“Thanks, Pop.”
“So tell me about this big match.”
“We were playing a guy named Vaccaro, and—”
“Vaccaro?” said my old man. “Fat, bald guy, wears sunglasses alla time?”
I nodded. “So it came down to the eighteenth hole, and—”
“Wait a fuckin’ minute,” he said. “You talkin’ about Anthony Vaccaro? T-Bone Vaccaro?”
I shrugged. “I guess so.”
“You know who T-Bone Vaccaro is?”
“He’s got a slice but keeps the ball in play. Cheats about as bad as Mr. Mazza.”
“T-Bone Vaccaro’s the man,” said my old man. “The boss. You follow me?”
“No.”
“Your Paulie Mazza, he works for Vaccaro. Vaccaro tells Mazza to go fuck himself, Mazza says, ‘Yes, sir. Where, sir?’ T-Bone Vaccaro owns half the cops and politicians in the state. I hope the hell you didn’t cross him, son. You were polite to him, right?”
“Sure, Pop. I was polite.”
But I cheated him, I thought. And he knew it.
The next day I was waiting at the practice tee with Mr. Mazza’s clubs and a bag of range balls. He didn’t show up at 12:30, like he always did, and he still wasn’t there at one o’clock, his regular tee time.
Finally around 1:30, Mac, the caddie master, came out. “Bring them clubs back,” he said. “Mr. Mazza ain’t playing today.”
“No? How come?”
Mac shrugged. “Sick or something, I guess.”
“Mr. Mazza called in sick?”
“Nah. Mr. Vaccaro told me. Said Mr. Mazza wasn’t feeling good. He wants to talk to you.”
“Who?”
“You. Mr. Vaccaro’s waitin’ on the patio. You better put them clubs away and hustle your ass out there.”
“What’s he want with me?”
“I don’t know,” said Mac. “He don’t look too happy, I can tell you that.”
I lugged Mr. Mazza’s clubs back to the clubhouse, taking my time, trying to think, trying not to panic, and by the time I got to the patio, I’d pretty much decided that the best thing was just to admit what I’d done and make sure Mr. Vaccaro knew that Mr. Mazza had put me up to it.
Mr. Vaccaro was sitting alone at the table with a glass of beer. He was wearing a straw hat and sunglasses, and he was puffing on a cigar and watching a foursome of women tee off on the tenth hole.
I stood there for a minute waiting for him to notice me.
Finally I said, “You wanted to see me, sir?”
He swiveled his head around slowly. “Sit down.”
I took the chair across from him.
“You want something to drink?”
“No, thank you.”
He looked back at the ladies, and without turning his head, he said, “I’m thinking I’m gonna start playing more golf. Three, four times a week, maybe. That match yesterday, I had a good time, you know?”
�
�Yes, sir.”
He turned and looked at me. “That kid Skeeter, he’s a pretty good caddie, huh?”
I nodded.
“Not as good as you, though.”
I didn’t say anything to that.
“Paulie Mazza,” said Mr. Vaccaro, “he don’t beat me yesterday if Skeeter’s caddying for him.” He took off his sunglasses. His eyes reminded me of a lizard’s, dark and hooded and without expression. “I had my eye on you, kid. It was you beat me, not Paulie.”
“I was only—”
Mr. Vaccaro held up his hand. “I want you, my personal caddie.”
“Well, yeah, but Mr. Mazza—”
“Mazza gave up golf,” said Mr. Vaccaro. “He ain’t coming back. Forget about Paulie Mazza, understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re a good caddie, kid, but you don’t wanna carry golf bags, give alla your money to your old man, for the rest of your life, you know.”
I nodded.
“So,” he said, “let’s talk about the rest of your life.”
THE SECRET
John Westermann
Things slow down here fast after Labor Day and die off completely by the end of September, which is tomorrow, Sunday, getaway day at Le Club Fantastique. The weatherman on the pro shop stereo has been calling for heavy rain starting tonight and continuing through the weekend. Municipal courses on Long Island will be jammed, anyway, with poor bastards dragging themselves through sodden, seven-hour loops. Here at East Hampton’s fabulously private Le Club Fantastique, three hundred acres of grass and dunes between Montauk Highway and the Atlantic Ocean, it will be just me, folding pink sweaters and stacking Ping golf bags, closing things down from dawn until dark.
For the record, my name is Jay Swann, assistant pro at this Siberian outpost, as I was last season. The head pro and director of golf, positions no self-respecting tour caddie would accept, is my half brother Levon Greenbriar. Of course, Levon left town two weeks ago for South Florida, allegedly to find us an apartment and winter jobs. More likely he is sunning himself with a topless waitress by a motel pool. Like most employees of Le Club, there are reasons we work here and few of them are good. Twice I have scanned the PGA Web site for West Coast job openings, looking to go it alone. Twice I have changed my mind, admitting, accepting, that Levon is the rainmaker.
Hence my position bogged down in these northern latitudes. When members drop in to play on this penultimate day of the season, it will be me who hauls their clubs out of storage and sets up the carts, who trades golf tips for stock tips, who does not cringe at their guests. Me, Jay Swann, of average looks and questionable parentage, already thirty and still working for twelve dollars an hour, plus half of my lesson fees. Levon gets the other half. And Levon isn’t even all that handsome or witty, but Levon has blond hair working and that year-round tan, and he can listen to hours of drivel to get where he’s going.
For me, it’s all about the game.
Before heading South, Levon informed me that our continued employment here, or anywhere else in golf, depended on Le Club’s notoriously difficult membership accepting my final draft of Levon’s annual report: my, his, explanation of the occurrences leading up to the crime that spooked the Hamptons this summer.
“Keep it short and uninformative,” he said, leaning on the roof of his overloaded Subaru Outback. Levon had dressed in denim and black cowboy boots for the road, any sign he was a sissy golf pro hidden, any good-byes already said. “File that sucker as you turn out the lights. Finish upbeat, you know, like a lesson. Make me proud.” He flipped down his metallic-blue sunglasses and vanished.
Today was the last good day to write the report, as tomorrow I was also on that southbound highway. I had only one foursome out on the course at the moment, Mr. Jason Kravitz and his three doofus guests. The surplus clothing stock was mothballed, the new clubs reboxed and stacked, the billing records up-to-date. I fixed a cup of instant coffee and sat in my comfortable office off the shop, fired up the desktop computer. Dear Sirs, I began, not to be sexist, but because the husbands are the members here, not the wives, even if the women are sufficiently offensive to qualify on their own. And then I froze, remembering that the members are not individually—nor as a group—easily pleased, which is how they got to be members here in the first place. They are very rich, and they have been blackballed everywhere else. You know who I mean. The people of whom it is often said, “Not for all the tea in China.”
How rich? The initiation at Le Club Fantastique is $200,000, and you have to buy a bond. The annual dues and fees are another twenty-five grand. How gauche? If I were to get up from my desk and walk you into the floral-scented locker room to greet the tuxedoed staff, you’d see names on the lockers you’d know, but not from the world of golf. We’ve got three dot-com billionaires—Jason Kravitz is one of them—and a Pakistani newsstand operator who won Powerball. Most have closed up their summer homes and returned to their kiosks and their baseball teams, their paving companies and dental practices.
The staff and I have Le Club pretty much to ourselves these days, and a magnificent place it is. They spared no expense when they built this place three years ago. The clubhouse atop the preeminent hill is a copy of the White House, right down to the security measures. A uniformed stylist remains on duty in both locker rooms. The men have a Grill Room. The women have a Necessary Room. The house staff is obedient and docile, usually imported from Ireland.
I know because I dated two of them this summer.
The handsome young caddies in their fresh white overalls winter at Wesleyan, Columbia, Georgetown, and Brown. They will never be members here. Here is for losers.
The golf course is short, the fairways wide, and the greens slow. The signature features are all but unhittable by the members; only a good player making a bad swing or a moron with a wild driver can find any serious trouble. Thus we’ve got 7s strutting tall here who couldn’t break 90 at Shinnecock or Garden City, not that they’d ever get invited to such illustrious venues. And why should their golf lives be any less phony than their public lives? Most members never take a lesson. Why learn a skill when you can buy a self-correcting, titanium-shafted 9-wood, or cheat? Like lousy parents, they apply but a millisecond of ill-considered influence, and then yell, “Be good, baby. Be as good as you look. Ah, hell. I’ll take a mulligan.”
I’m a purist, and I purely hate the members, though I hide it well, or I have up till now. And nobody liked the victim, anyway, which is definitely par for this course.
Ah, yes, the victim, the sticky part of the report. Everything else would be smooth sailing, lies I’ve told before. What a grand season of golf and good fellowship we enjoyed, how much everyone improved, hosannas to the club champions and their beautiful new diamond rings, the planned course improvements, stay fit, see you in May, a tap-in for a schmoozer like me. It was only the disappearance of our member—and last year’s D-Flight champion—Slingblade Beinstock that needed to be handled with care. (For a skinny little guy, Slingblade could hurl his Odyssey prodigious distances when the wind was with him.)
“Jay? Are you on the counter, perchance?”
I spun around in my studded-leather chair to see Mr. Jason Kravitz leaning into my office, the dot-com geek in the midst of a spectacularly bad hair day. “Yes, sir. How was your round? Little windy?”
Mr. Kravitz gave me the deep frown of a man who thinks I really care how he played. “Only fair, Jay. Only fair. In fact, for a moment, dreadfully embarrassing.”
“You didn’t whiff one again, did you?”
“I wish I had, Jay, God help me. No, what happened is, one of my guests, big Wall Street guy, mergers and acquisitions, found some beer cans in a sand trap on the twelfth. Four, I think. Cans. Budweiser.”
“Damn kids,” I said. “Once the season ends they sneak in through that hole in the hedge, mostly at night. It’s an unfortunate local tradition.”
“That’s no excuse, Jay. This land is for our exclusive enjoymen
t, whether we’re actually here or not. And I don’t enjoy the image of children drinking in our bunkers. I swear, winter can’t come soon enough.”
I had not the heart to tell him the man-sized break in the privet hedge was used by the locals to reach these snow-covered hills with their sleds. Somewhere, sometime, this guy Kravitz had taken a sales course that preached the cheerful repetition of the sucker’s name. “I’ll tell Emmett Bessler down in the security booth. Maybe they can double up the night watch.”
“Good. Plus the greens were a little slow.”
“What’d you shoot, sir?”
“Eighty, but it woulda been better if somebody’d thought to mow the damn grass.”
“Yes, sir. Well, last day and all that. Breaking down and greasing the mowers. Now, do you want your golf clubs cleaned and packed to travel or will we be storing them here for the winter?”
Jason Kravitz shrugged his narrow shoulders as he turned for the locker room, showing me a bald spot I’d never seen before. “I don’t know yet. Keep ’em out for now. I’ll come back after my rubdown.”
“Very good, sir.”
And people wonder how a member here might have been the victim of a crime. Did the notion of a year-end tip never once cross his mind?
Anyway, it all started during the heat wave back in July, at the annual Sadie Hawkins Matches, where the ladies invite men other than their husbands to team up and scramble, the purpose being to stimulate sociability among the normally deplored. The rather austere Sarah Beinstock invited probationary member Jersey Joe Krumholt to join her team, and the new club hottie, Karen Krumholt, invited Sarah’s husband, Slingblade, to join her. (In the interest of full disclosure, I freely admit I give Jersey Joe lessons now and then, but he’s hopeless, both at golf and at club life, always showing up dusty, dressed in one of those faux athletic suits. My lessons have not helped him, but he says he enjoys our time together. I’m glad, because he carries a revolver on his ankle.) They set off in their golf carts from the first tee that Saturday morning with good spirits and high hopes, and large bottles of Absolut vodka. Somewhere on the back nine lightning struck; for they returned from 18 slobbering all over each other, laughing and grabbing ass. Their scorecard was illegible. They didn’t care. They didn’t even stay for the dinner-dance, just kept the team thing going into separate BMW station wagons, and then whizzed off from the gate of Le Club Fantastique in opposite directions.