“Total crap.”
“Louder.”
“Total crap.”
Stereophonic sound now.
“Good.”
Rocket tugs my collar toward the wall for a better hear, and I tumble into Pauley, who teeters on the edge of the washing machine before crashing to the ground on a heap of dirty clothes along with a loud “Hey!” He scrambles back on top of the Maytag. Rocket triples over with hyena sounds, and I mouth the words “Shut up!”
“Did you hear something?” the patient says.
Kittens croon beyond the curtain wall.
“Please continue.” Pauley nods in recognition. “Mom’s tryin’ her Confrontational Therapy Method,” Pauley whispers, “bringing out the repressed feelings of the patient. We’ll know if it works if she cracks … I’ve heard her do it a million times … and got a crap load of tapes upstairs.”
“You record this stuff?” I ask. Pauley just smiles and turns his ear toward the ceiling.
“Now, he sheltered your true feelings?”
“Yes.”
“And he buried your child spirit, right?”
“Yes.”
“And if he were here right now, what would you say to him?”
“You bastard.”
“Now, what would you really say to him? C’mon, you can do this, you’ve come this far.”
A garbled sound rattles down the aluminum vent.
“What? I can barely hear you.”
“You bastard.”
“Louder.”
“You damn bastard.”
DOLBY Stereo.
“Louder, Martha, louder.”
“You goddamn bastard.”
“LOUDER.”
“YOU GODDAMN BASTARD.”
“Okay, okay. Excellent.”
The house shakes with those words. Rocket’s no longer grinning. Asteroids are bursting through his retinas. I shoot him a knowing look because I’ve heard that loud voice yell “ROCKET!” a thousand times before.
Rocket’s mom’s having a session with Dr. Clark. Rocket flies up the stairs, shrieking like a boiled raccoon. The front door opens and slams shut.
Kate comes over with her black kitten, stroking its head as it sleeps in the palm of her hand. “What’s up with Rocket?”
The shouting upstairs turns to whispery nothings. Footprints stomp above my head.
“Pauley?”
Dr. Clark’s coming!
Footsteps patter down the stairs, and my head puppet twirls to find somewhere to hide while sweating puddles form at my feet on the concrete floor. Pauley leaps down from the washer, runs to the furnace, and grabs a kitten. I follow his lead, get tangled in the curtain, free myself, and pick up a white kitten, clutching its itty-bitty skeleton fur against my chest.
Dr. Clark descends the stairs, her long gray hair flowing behind her. “Pauley, I didn’t know we had visitors. You should have told me.”
“They’re here for the kittens.”
She scans my guilty face. “I know that, Pauley. I heard someone slam the door. Who else was here?”
“Rock—” Kate starts to say.
“Terry came by,” Pauley interrupts her. “He’s thinking of getting a cat.”
She frowns, skeptical. “I thought he hates cats?”
Kate, oblivious to the wiretap operation, rubs her chin against her kitten’s tiny head. She has no clue why Pauley’s covering for Rocket, but she knows my friend and probably figures he’s done something totally stupid and Pauley’s in on it.
“It’s for his girlfriend,” Pauley lies, brushing his rumpled hair out of his face and dropping the kitten back next to her mother.
“Well, it looks like you’ve found a kitten,” Dr. Clark says, shifting her attention to Kate.
“Isn’t she adorable?” Kate strokes her cat’s thimble-sized head with her thumb.
“Is that the one you want, or has your brother found one, too?”
“No, we’ll take this one,” Kate says. I put the kitten down, and she limps over to her sleep-deprived, nursing mother.
“She’s the tiniest one, Kate,” Dr. Clark says. “Are you sure you want that one? She may not survive.”
Kate swallows her kitten in her arms. “Oh, I’m sure. I’ll never let her go.”
“What name will you call her?”
“Fluffy.”
“You have to keep Fluffy away from Sheeba from now on,” Pauley says, nodding toward Fluffy’s mom. Kate gives Pauley a distrustful leer and smothers her Fluffy, who’s buried beneath her arms. “Once a kitten is touched by human hands”—Pauley opens his mouth wide and brings his crooked teeth together—“the mother cat will bite the kitten in the neck until it’s dead.”
“Oh, Pauleeey.” Dr. Clark flicks her hand at her son likes she’s batting away a fly. “Don’t listen to him, Kate.”
Once at home, Mrs. Olivehammer’s therapy session has left me in a state of electric shock. I wonder if Virginia ever ventures next door, and if she does, how much Pauley knows about my parents’ life that I don’t. Then I remember she has her Mensa-Netics philosophy to lean on. I sit frozen, petting Chimney’s velvety coat on the living room shag. The doorbell rings, and panic seizes my lungs. No one is home except me. I open the living room curtain a fraction, peek outside, and see Dr. Clark at our door.
We’re in a heap of trouble now. I close the curtain, hoping she didn’t see me, and a minute later trim it back again. She’s left. I release a gallon of oxygen. Why’d she leave so quickly? A half hour later, I trip over Rocket’s unicycle on the doorstep on my way to his house to cheer him up. Phew! She was just returning it. Probably figured it was mine since she hadn’t cornered Rocket in her basement.
As I skip from sidewalk crack to sidewalk crack, I worry about Rocket’s parents and hope for his sake they aren’t headed to Splitsville City. He’s never told me a thing, and I’ve never heard them fight like my parents do, but maybe that’s better for parents than having nothing left to say to each other. Fights can be good because they get things out into the open rather than simmering and festering inside until things erupt like Mount St. Helens did last May. If that’s true, Mom and Pop will never get divorced.
And maybe that’s how Dr. Clark’s confrontational therapy is supposed to help Mrs. Olivehammer.
The Clark house no longer has the same mysterious Halloween feel to it, and the next day I return without any fear, bringing Chimney with me. Dr. Clark and her welcoming smile answer the door. We stand under the chandelier in the foyer while I explain to her Chimney is a cancer-sniffing dog, how she sticks to Cleo like glue, and Cleo might be dying. She asks for the skinny on the dog cancer training center, and I tell her all about Mr. Levi-Vest Man. Dr. Clark kneels down, closes her eyes, placing both of her hands on Chimney’s floppy ears like she has X-ray vision. An eternity passes.
“Good girl, Chimney, good girl.” Chimney yawns and slobbers gobs of spittle on her hand.
Somehow Dr. Clark knows by touching Chimney that I’m not fibbing. She agrees to “investigate the situation” with her medical contacts and to speak with Cleo’s mother.
“I’ve met that lady,” she says in a harsh tone but doesn’t disclose how.
And something about the tone of her voice gets me to thinking Cleo’s mom might also be getting therapy once a week from Dr. Clark. A gnarly notion sprouts in the pit of my stomach. If I somehow found out good old Pauley records Cleo’s therapy sessions, I’ll drop him from a scrapped Apollo command module for a nuclear splashdown on the shore of Three-Mile Island. He’ll be space-wrecked forever.
n a steamy Wednesday afternoon in July when the blades of grass are fainting from thirst, I finish up a loop with Owen Rooney, the Brit I’d befriended my second day on the job. I can carry two rounds now without passing out. Bobby Walton stuck me with Mr. Toadrey, the worst tipper
in the club, who smells like a foul mixture of Musk English Leather and Noxzema.
Mr. Toadrey’s playing partner is a Detroit Zoo zoologist, Glenn Lerch, nicknamed Lurch because he’s ten feet tall and rarely speaks unless it’s about his stupid pet iguana named Dragon. Dragon normally sits contentedly in the large front pocket with his little green head poking out as long as you drop Razzles on his red lizard tongue every other hole. But you have to keep an eye on him because Lurch allows him to roam free in the sand traps, and before you know it you’ll be chasing his spiked spine down a cart path or up a tree. Bobby had given Lurch’s bag to Owen, which was okay with him because he has a soft spot for reptiles.
After our loop, Owen and I escape onto Kensington Road through a hole in the fence on Number 9 on the north side of the club. You have to wait until there’s a gap in the foursomes between the eighth and ninth hole before you make a run for it. A large volcano of a trap at the 150-yard marker on the ninth hole provides cover if you spot a golfer. If King or Gandy catch you, it’ll be shithouse detail for three weeks and shouldering for hackers with bags as big as Volvos.
Once outside the fence, Owen asks, “You wanna come stay over at my place tonight? We’ll get in an early loop.”
Heck yeah.
Owen gives me a grand tour of the Palms Motel: an indoor pool, a video arcade, a ceiling-high fake palm tree in the lobby.
Man, I can get used to swimming and playing video games all day long. We have the total run of the motel the whole afternoon: swimming in the palm-tree-shaped pool, playing Nerf basketball in vacant Room 4, swimming again, and stuffing our mouths with Orville Redenbacher popcorn in the arcade. The motel owners are smart enough to have both Space Invaders and Asteroids in the arcade, and naturally Owen gets free tokens, so he can play until his fingers fall off.
In Room 9, Owen has hung a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the knob, and band posters serve as wallpaper: Quadrophenia (of course), The Ramones, Sex Pistols, and The Jam. A nice Fender bass leans against the wall in the corner, and Owen picks it up, switches on the amplifier, and does a mod bass line that sounds like a wounded elephant. “I’m taking bass lessons down at Strings ’N Things.” Maybe he can start a punk band with Rocket.
At dinner, Owen’s older brother, Jake, announces the Kensington Hills Country Club will be hosting the 1980 PGA Championship this summer. I don’t think much of it; there’s no way I’ll ever caddy for a professional golfer in a major tournament and one of the biggest prizes in the world of professional golf.
“Don’t worry, boss,” Jake says to me. “There are other jobs you can do. Hold a group’s scoreboard or rake sand traps … either way you’ll be ’tween the ropes.” After playing a bit of golf myself lately and caddying for a load of hackers, I’d shine golf shoes to get near a real tour pro.
We wake the next morning at 4:30 and rumble down the quiet streets of Kensington Hills in Jake’s battered orange wood-paneled Ford station wagon. In the darkness, the clubhouse sits lonely as a pyramid in the desert; a single car hums in the lot with its yellow parking lights on.
“Who’s that?” I ask.
Owen eyes the make of the car. “Chip.”
“Jackson Pollock!” Jake slaps the steering wheel, and black-and-white fuzzy dice waffle from the rearview mirror. “Chip beat us here again. He’s got no life.”
The caddy shack won’t be open for a couple of hours, but first come, first served rules at the club. Chip gets first pick of the player he wants to caddy for this morning.
“Where’s Rat?” Owen asks, picking his head up from reading song lyrics of the album jacket from Secret Affair’s Glory Boys with a magic penlight.
“He’s been at the club so long he doesn’t have to sign in at the shack … might as well be doing life behind bars.” Jake turns off the overhead light in the station wagon and reclines the seat. “For Rat, this is his life.”
We’ll get a little shut-eye till the sun rises. With our heads resting on our balled-up towels in the back seat, we listen to Larry King on the radio interviewing Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton, and afterwards the man who invented the Slinky.
“Good night, John-Boy.” I fall asleep to the sound of Larry’s throaty voice and Jake’s wild snoring.
Two restless dreams later, Jake slaps us awake with his towel. “Rise ’n’ shine, Teddy Boys.”
“Bloody hell, Jake.” Owen throws a Bazooka Joe gum pack at his brother’s head.
Because we’re on top of the loop list, we don’t have to spend two minutes at the caddy shack, and we’re on the first tee before dawn breaks above the majestic oaks. I’m handed a bag with a King Tut wash towel, but the significance of the ancient boy ruler doesn’t register a thing in my sleep-deprived brain.
Jake reads the nametag on my player’s bag: Valentine. “Wot a lucky bloke … he’s a real corker.”
A second later, a golfer approaches me dressed in plaid yellow-and-orange golf pants and eyes my green badge. “I’ve heard you caddied, but I haven’t seen you out here before.”
Rust crumbles out of from sleepy eyes; I’m barely human at this hour of the morning. “I don’t normally get here this early.”
“Then you’re missing the finest part of the day.” He gives me a wink and a mile-wide smile. I hate when anyone smiles at me before noon unless it’s a girl, but he seems nice as all get-out. Although still a green plebe, I’m not exactly a rookie, having notched almost twenty loops on my caddy belt. Once you reach forty, you’re automatically promoted to the rank of captain with a blue badge, no questions asked, plus $2 more a round. If I carry two rounds a day, I’ll be Captain Quinn in no time.
Jake warns me “morning golfers” take their golf as serious as tour pros. I want to show this Mr. Valentine I’m not some caddy hack and “know me onions” as Owen’s fond of saying. By now, I’ve memorized the distances from various spots on the course stone-cold. For example, the creek that runs through the fairway on Number 5 is ninety-eight yards from the green. A terrific tee shot will end up in the creek, so you better alert your player to the hazard if the member doesn’t remind them. A driver on Number 15 will end up in a monster trap or the woods behind it. A 3-wood is a better play.
A few feet from me, Mr. Valentine takes short, smooth practice swings with his driver. Fresh grass clippings kick up and float down around his white-tipped golf shoes. He loads the tee and knocks the ball out of sight on a string down the middle of the fairway, leaving behind shoeprints in the dewy turf.
Mr. Valentine shoves his club into the bag while another player tees off. I slip a purple velvet cover over the driver so the irons won’t scratch the blonde wood’s precious surface.
“I toted bags once, too,” he tells me while putting his tee behind his ear. “Good way to pick up poor swing habits. Do you play the links?”
“Links” is Scottish for golf course but technically means the rough grassy terrain between the sea and the land. Mom thinks I should study French in high school because it’s the rage in the Hills, but I’m learning a language all on my own this summer.
“Yes, sir. I’ve been playing quite a bit this summer.” Golf’s as addictive as nicotine or alcohol. One great shot brings you back to the course for more.
The course is just waking up as we make our way down the fairway. Dew has swamped the grass. All four tee sheets have found the short grass and have made wet comet trails ending at the balls. Glimmering yellow morning light floods a warm coat on our chilly start to the day. The group goes at a breakneck speed like one big oiled machine churning down the fairway without the usual chitchat you endure from the afternoon beer league. Just solid whacks on the ball with the occasional “well done” or “you smoked that drive” and on to the next hole.
Until that round, I had not seen a golfer hammer the ball straighter or farther than Mr. Valentine. He swung the club with a smooth arc, as if the club weighed no more than a dove
. On my round, he cards a 71. All pars and a birdie on Number 17—only pros shoot a round of par or better at Kensington Hills. Turns out he’s a “scratch” golfer, which translates to professional grade. Now I understand why Chip arrives before sunrise every day. To be in this foursome. The name on the bag tag means more than just avoiding a dreary wait in the shack. A normal round with four slackers and hackers will take five hours. Mr. Valentine’s group finished in just over two, rarely venturing into the rough, never stopping for anything except to watch the flight of the shots soaring toward the flag like eagles diving for a fish strike.
After our round, the three other players pay Mr. Valentine a wad of money because he won all three bets in their gambling game called “Nassau.” He hands me a hefty $20 tip for barely doing anything at all but walk in a straight line, except helping him read a putt on 17 after one of the other players pressed him (basically a double-or-nothing dare).
“Let me see your hands,” he says before I leave. I hold out my hands, wondering if he thought I stole something out of his bag. A caddy named Brad Elston got canned for pilfering a pack of Camels and a Jacques Restaurant matchbook from a member’s bag.
“No, your palms.” I turn them over and assume he’ll tell me my fate like some fortune teller. “Do you have tendency to slice the ball?”
Maybe he is a fortune teller. “How’d ya guess?”
“I didn’t guess. I’m looking at your calluses.” He retrieves a 5-iron from his bag. “Here, grip this club.” I weld my hands together on the shaft. “Your grip’s a bit off.” He shifts my left hand a tad clockwise, adjusting the shaft just below the middle set of my finger creases. “The V of your right hand should point to your chin.”
It’s nice he’s taking an interest in me; most members don’t know you exist unless you give them the wrong distance to the hole, and then they want to take your head off.
“Keep your elbows together.”
I fold in my elbows and take a short practice swing. He drops a tee at my feet and nods. A free and easy swing sends the tee flying across Yellow Brick Road. “Nice. This grip will give you a nice draw on the ball.”
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