CHAPTER 10

In the Pit of Despair, we played a macabre game. Whenever we read or heard about somebody killing himself, Two Down would always ask the standard: “Whaddya think? Jump, hose, or rope?”

And we’d all coldly and cruelly debate the merits of each.

“Me, I think I’m a hose guy,” Two would say. “Not as messy. No pain. Hook that hose up to the exhaust and drift right off to the big dirt nap. Very seamless.”

“Nah, you’re too ADD to do hose,” I’d say. “You couldn’t sit still in a car that long. You’d keep hopping up and going back into the house to call us, tell us shit to say about you at the funeral.”

“Hey, speaking of that, don’t forget, I want a cell phone in the casket with me, just in case. You heard about that Thai guy, right? Woke up three days after they buried him? Had a chicken bone in his throat and it cut off all his vital signs for a while? Make sure I can reach out and touch you guys.”

“What? And waste my minutes?”

But now, on this particular bus stop in our lives, it looked very much like all three of us could be the actual subject of “jump, hose, or rope,” maybe all at once.

I mean, consider the wash of blues that was cascading over the three of us, all at once.

First, there was Dom.

You can’t imagine how obsessed he became with Kelly van Edible. You’ve got to understand, Dom never got rejected. Not once. Ever. He was so handsome he’d make a Chippendale dancer go into the insurance business. Even my wife salivated over him. “That boy is just finer ’n a Safeway chicken,” she’d say dreamily. Her sister met him once and said he “could make a girl plow clean through a fence.”

And yet he could not, for all of his efforts, get the time of day from Kelly. Forget that, he couldn’t get the current month. He moped around Ponky like a sick yak, playing holes but forgetting what he made, staring off into the window of the pro shop, not even going out and getting laid but, like, every third day.

We knew Dom was MIA when Cementhead came up to him with the obit page, looking for a good bet in the cemetery game, and said, “Check this out! I’ll bet this has never happened before: Everybody died yesterday in perfect alphabetical order!”

And Dom just stared off into the distance and muttered, “Weird.”

He was one sagging stud. And then the Human Stain came up to him and said something so shitty that for weeks afterward, Chops stirred his vodka tonics with their schlongs whenever he went to the john.

“What troubles thee, Romeo?” the Stain said, eating his third plateful of Blu Chao’s Velveeta wontons. “Juliet won’t come out from yonder windowpane?”

“Get bent, Stain,” said Dom.

“What’s amusing,” continued Stain, “is that the young damsel Kelly seems to be free to date anybody in our fair burg save thee.”

Dom turned to face him. “What do you mean? Like who?”

“Whom.”

Dom grabbed Stain hard by the collar.

“Listen, you oompa-loompa, you bettah dish whatevah news you got on Kelly or I’ll pop yah eyes out and eat ’em like olives.”

“All right, all right, calm thyself! It’s just that I overheard her on the phone. Seems she’s got a blind date tonight. Some gentleman friend of her hairstylist. Apparently the girls call him Gary the God. More than that, sounds like Kelly has been hoping to get this date for a while. They’re eating at the Blarney Stone. Eightish.”

Dom let go of the Stain and a pall fell over his face. “Goddamn! Everybody gets to shaht-ahm her except me?”

Upon much brooding, he set out on a plan only a desperate man could conceive, a plan that would surely be of absolutely no help to him and only damage the chances of others. In other words, he set out on Operation Cockblock.

         

The Blarney Stone sits in the middle of Belleville Street, only two blocks from the Lawn and Bottle Club, as we like to call the ever-present collection of bums, winos, and scholarly types who hang there.

Seated at the front window was Kelly van Edible, in her new Betsey Johnson dress, and a guy who seemed to be America’s largest purchaser of hair product, Gary the God. He seemed to have been bought at the Kevin Costner knockoff store, only taller, younger, and more cut. He was a blond Dom, and he made Dom see green.

It was sometime after the soup when the first bum, reeking of Ripple and Eau de Funk, came storming up to their table and grabbed Gary the God hard by the shoulders.

“C’mon, man!” pleaded the bum. “Please! I need more time to pay! Just a little more time! I’m begging you, man! It’s just—ain’t nobody else ever charged me a hundred percent interest before!”

Gary the God pushed the vagrant off him. “Get away from me! I don’t even know you!”

The bum came in harder. “C’mon, dude! Call your boys off me! I got a mama who loves me! I’ll pay! I’ll pay! Just another twenty-four hours!”

Kelly, flabbergasted, shrank back in her chair. Gary the God looked at her, panicked.

“I don’t even know who this guy is!”

He wailed for help from a nearby waiter. “Get this bum outta here! We don’t even know him!”

As two waiters dragged the bum off, he hollered, “Why you gotta play me this way, man? You know I got kids!”

Gary the God tried to straighten his shirt and hair, nervously laughing like a guy who’s just been caught with a troop of Cub Scouts in the basement. “Wow. Kelly, honestly, that guy, I mean, he so obviously mistook me for somebody else! I mean, you could see what kind of shape he was in! What a freak! I mean, why would I associate with someone of that kind?”

Kelly said she understood and believed him and not to worry about it and wasn’t that weird and let’s get some more pinot.

But into the meat of their shepherd’s pie came a downtrodden woman, eyebrows furrowed, dusty cleavage swaying this way and that out of her nineteen-dollar peekaboo dress. She stomped straight up to Gary the God, threw her hands on her hips, and said, “Penicillin didn’t help either, you bastard!” She threw a ring at him and stomped out.

The entire restaurant turned and froze. Mystery Date was speechless, shoulders up, palms up, eyebrows up, trying to laugh but getting nothing to come up.

“I mean, what’s going on here?” he said, finding the ring in his lap. “I mean, look at this! This is a two-dollar ring! I, I, I’ve never seen that woman in my life! This is crazy!”

Kelly had her lips pursed and was looking down so as not to have to see the fifty or so other faces staring at her for her reaction. “Yeeeah,” she said through a hard white line that used to be her mouth. “Let’s just finish our dinner and go. Before Britney Spears comes in with your baby.”

“Kelly, look, I swear! I don’t—this is all so—she was just lying! I wouldn’t touch a person who—I mean did you see her? As if I would even look at somebody—”

“Forget it,” Kelly said, wishing she could fall through the floorboards. “Eat.”

“Kelly—”

“Just shut up and eat! Okay?”

So they buried their heads in their meals and flinched each time a waiter came up. They looked up with alarm at every customer passing them on the way to the restrooms. They finished, paid, and were climbing into his Maserati convertible when the third shoe dropped in the form of a pastel note left under the passenger-side wiper. Naturally, it was Kelly who snatched it up and read it.

Gary. It will never be over for me. Forever, Lance.

“That’s it!” Kelly hollered. “Goodnight, everybody! Drive carefully! I ammmm outie!”

She crumpled up the note, flipped it over her shoulder, and started walking with her thumb stuck out.

“No! Kelly! Somebody is trying to screw me over here! This is somebody’s idea of a sick joke! I’m not gay! Okay? I’m not! And that other woman! What a liar! And that first guy! I mean, come on! Who’s doing this to me?”

Kelly’s head just dropped as she walked away.

The first car that came along, a red Porsche, screeched its brakes, backed up, and Kelly ran to it. When she saw the driver was Dom, she crinkled her forehead.

“Kelly?” Dom said. “Are you all right? You look freaked out. You need a ride or something?”

And it all added up in her head.

She slammed the door, flipped him off, and started walking the other way, just in time to get passed by Gary the God in his Maserati, cell pressed to his ear. And as she tried to wave at him, she could hear him say, “Lance? You can’t mean that!”

         

Second, there was Two Down, who had never before slowed down in his life long enough to be morose. For Leonard Petrovitz, life was an all-you-can-eat buffet, timed. This is a man who, when attempting a long putt, would send it on its way and then chase after it, hollering “Eleven o’clock news!” just before it dropped in. He was Walter Mitty in golf spikes. His self-image was along the lines of Ernie Els. He’d go to Richmond’s Big and Tall Shop, pick something out, and go, “This is perfect. Just take about eight inches off the sleeves and I’ll pick it up Thursday.”

Two believed life was his oyster and he swallowed it meat, pearl, and tablecloth. He liked to come barreling into the clubhouse after winning piles of stackable jing and holler, “Stop yer cryin’, Two Down’s buyin’!” And after a monstrously big win, he’d yelp, “Stop yer bitchin’! Two Down’s openin’ the kitchen!”

His mind was unlike anything God ever strapped to the top of a spinal column. One time he hosted a very large dice game. The pot was just over a thousand when the cops came busting through the door. That’s when Two Down quickly slapped the dice off the table, stood up, and announced, “Well, that’s very generous of you gentlemen. The Boys and Girls Club will be so pleased!” and scooped up all the cash with both arms, stuffed it in his coat pockets, and left, hollering, “You’ll all be invited to the Easter egg hunt!”—leaving the cops and rollers wondering what in the world they could do to stop him.

This was a man who used to go out and get stinking drunk with us, then call a flatbed truck to come get him and his car. Who needs taxis? I can still see him, sitting behind the wheel as the flatbed hauled him away, honking at people he knew, flashing the lights, air-toasting them with his fresh-squeezed Bud.

But the man sitting in the puke orange La-Z-Boy, looking like somebody on his way to anesthetic-free dentistry, seemed to bear no resemblance to the real Two.

Luckily, the Human Stain was around to make things worse.

“I have an idea that I think could get you out of this predicament,” Stain announced. “May I proffer it?”

“No,” Two said, staring blankly. “You may fold it sideways and stick it.”

“Fine. Here’s what you do. You engage the services of a very good plastic surgeon and get your face completely redone. I mean everything. Change your eyes, your nose, your ears. Get fuller lips, have your eyebrows narrowed, your nostrils widened, your eyelids lifted, your cheeks dropped, the works. Then you change your hair color and your hairstyle. You completely change your look, all different clothes. You move to the other side of town. You change your name, your job, and your friends. You get all new habits, a new car, a new religion. Now you tell me: How are they ever going to find you then?”

Two Down just sat in the chair clutching his haircut, trying not to listen.

“True, but then he’d look like some kind of fag!” Hoover offered.

“Yeah,” contributed Cement, “but he got all that surgery for free!”

“True,” Hoover said, “but now he’s gotta get all new friends because his old friends won’t recognize him!”

“True,” said Stain, “but they can’t collect any money you owe them. And besides, now you can have better-looking friends!”

“Okay, let’s just assume,” Hoover said, rising and crossing the room like Clarence Darrow, “that Two Down is willing to give up all his friends, stop doing the things he likes, go through all the pain and risk of all that surgery. Let’s say he’s willing to do this and completely change who he is. That kind of surgery would cost $100,000. He doesn’t have $100,000. He doesn’t have a dollar. That’s why he’s in the mess he’s in. He needs to get $36,000, not spend $100,000, you halfwit.”

Stain sniffed. “How simple my brother-in-law is. Don’t you see? How can the plastic surgeon get the money from him if he can’t recognize him!”

And now Hoover was holding his haircut.

Two Down nearly sank beneath the La-Z-Boy. This problem with Big Al seemed to be beyond Two Down. He wanted Big Al and his colleagues to understand that he was making every effort to pay him. That’s why he asked them to meet at Ponky to hear his plan. When they showed up—all three of them in the Lincoln—they walked up to the clubhouse like Jesse James and his gang.

Two treated them to a cardboard box of Blu Chao’s Vietnamese calzones and ice-cold Gennys.

“So, my American friend, what iz it that you are dezired to inform us with?” Big Al said, pushing away the food.

Two Down ran his fingers through his hair and took a deep breath.

“Okay, I know I owe you guys $36,000, and I just want you to know I have some pretty creative ideas for paying you back.”

“Such az?” Big Al said, arms folded over his chest.

“Such as, I’ve decided to let you fellas in on my business plan. Ground floor. I’ll cut you in as full partners—until the $36,000 is paid off, of course.”

“Not interezted,” said Big Al.

“No, but listen!” Two Down said, practically spraining his eyebrows trying to sell it. “This is good. I’ve come up with the perfect idea: the remote-control bumblebee. Can you imagine? You’re betting somebody huge, some guy who needs to make a putt for $50,000. What he doesn’t know is that you’ve got the remote-control bumblebee in your pocket. You discreetly flip it out on the ground, hit the remote, and just as the guy is about to putt, zzzzzzip—the bee goes right by his nose. He yanks the putt a foot off line and the bee has paid for itself five hundred times over!”

“Nyet.”

“And it wouldn’t just be great on the golf course! You could mess with your ex-wife! Kids could screw with teachers! Can you imagine how much you could win in Vegas? The Oklahoma kicker is about to make a field goal that’s going to beat you out of twenty-five large, you send the bee after him, it goes up his helmet, Texas wins!”

“No more talk of bumblebee or I break arm.”

“Right, right, there would be some development costs with that one. But what about this one? Look out the window. Right there. What do you see?”

“A graveyard?” said Dewey.

“Exactly! All that gorgeous grass, those fantastic trees, the little meandering stream, all going to waste, right? Cities and counties all over America trying to find land to build golf courses on, and the answer is right in front of them—the cemetery!”

“You wanna build a golf course in a cemetery?” Dewey asked.

“Exactly!” Two Down actually leaped in the air at this. “Our company would specialize in the building—in the respectful building—of golf courses on cemeteries. 1) They’re the perfect size. 2) The land is woefully underused, and 3) No dead person is disturbed! And think of all the advantages! Yardage markers on the gravestones, for instance. You know, ‘Here lies Sam Dilbert, 183 yards.’ ”

“Nyet.”

“Although I’m sure we’ll all kick ourselves when this idea starts sweeping America,” Dewey said.

Two Down’s shoulders slumped. He looked like a man watching his new boat sink.

“We require our moniez,” said Big Al. “Now.”

“Okay, let me work on a few more ideas.”

“No more ideaz. We have already given for you the three dayz extra. Pleaz to give us the moniez.”

“But, see, I don’t have any, you know, liquid funds, available, uh, currently.”

“What about the Bentley?” asked Dewey.

“Bentley?” said Two Down, a drop of sweat meandering lazily down his temple.

“The one out in the parking lot.”

“Yeah, well, see, that’s not mine. That’s a friend’s.”

“Thiz will be fine,” said Big Al. “Pleaze to tell him thank you from uz.”

“Well, actually, you see, it’s a she. Mrs. Wilcox. Mrs. Gertrude Wilcox. And she—”

“Fine,” Big Al said, getting up. “Bring uz the—what iz English?—the title and the keyz. Tomorrow night. Zix o’clock. We shall at that point be even.”

“What? No! I can’t! It’s not mine!”

“The Bentley or the moniez,” Big Al said, pushing his big shoulders through the Ponky door. “Zix. Or elze.”

As they swaggered out to the parking lot, the Voice announced: “Attention Ponky visitors! Take advantage of our July Fourth special! Whack one Chop, get the second one free!”

Big Al turned again to look for the source of it.

“Iz funny man, actually,” he said. “Should write humor column in Pravda.”

         

Third, jammed in the center seat, between Abject Loneliness and Simmering Red Ass, was me.

I met someone.

You’d be amazed how many times you can repeat a single phrase over and over in your mind during one six-hour coach-class flight, each time attaching some new meaning to it.

Could she really have met someone met someone? Could she just be trying to make me jealous? Damn right she could be! Could it be just a bluff! Could be—but what if it’s not? What if she’s trying to tell me that her feelings for this guy are serious and I need to solve our problems or it could be all over? And if that’s true, why the hell was I on a plane going four thousand miles away from her? On the other hand, wasn’t this showing her that I was serious? That I did too have ambition, despite what every friend, boss, and family member had always told her? Not to get all Tibetan monk on you, but what the hell was “ambition” anyway except a fucked-up capitalistic push for you not to be happy with what you had? A way to constantly want the Saab 9000S when you already had the Saab 9000? A way not to be but to want? A way to work your ass off all your life so you can retire at fifty-five and play golf and cards with your buddies and drink beer? I had all that now!

Why was she so concerned about me fulfilling my potential when I wasn’t? Wasn’t it my potential to fuck up as I wanted? Everybody was so concerned about me being great at golf, forcing it on me, wanting it for themselves through me, that I walked away from it. I resented it. I purposely didn’t try, just to say, “You won’t control me. I’m not here to live for you.”

But then I remembered Dannie saying something once: “That’s all bullshit, Babe. What you fear is finding out you aren’t great. ’Cause it’s a helluva lot safer havin’ that pretty unopened present sitting under the tree all the time, Ray. Helluva lot safer than opening it and finding out it’s just an old lump a coal. Right, Ray?”

“Ray!”

It was Bob, pulling on my shoulder. “Man, can’t you hear anymore? I said your name four times! Damn.”

“Sorry.”

“Okay. Now, read these faxes Hoover gave me. Tells us where we’re going and when you play and all that.”

I read Hoover’s printout.

British Open Local Qualifying

The Gog Magog

Cambridge, England

July 4

One 18-Hole Round

Top Nine (Plus Ties) Move On to Final Qualifying

Medal Play

And then in italics:

Hart, Raymond—USA

Tee time: 2:53 P.M.

“You realize that means we have to get our butt up there as soon as we land, find this place, hit balls and play, all today, without any sleep, right?”

“True,” I said. “But what’s at stake, really?”

“Nothing, really,” he said. “Except Ponky and Leonard’s kneecaps and possibly your marriage.”

“Exactly,” I said.

We rented a crappy little right-hand-drive Fiat on the concept that rental car companies cannot know that you are fifteen hundred in debt on your credit card already. But by the time we pulled into Cambridge, I felt like a hansom cab had run over me forward and back. The left side of the Fiat was scraped from me panicking and pulling so far to the left that I was scratching hedges, fences, and walls to avoid the traffic that was suddenly coming at me down the wrong side of the road. Bob poured two espressos down me, fed me a pork pie—awful little sausage pies that were so bad I was surprised Blu Chao didn’t serve them—signed me up, and got me on the range to hit exactly fourteen balls and three putts.

Who needs better prep than that?

The Gog Magog looked a little like Ponky but slightly more manicured. Then again, the city dump is more manicured than Ponky. It was definitely linksy, no trees. It looked like it was mowed once a month by six sore-gummed sheep. There was a sign that read NO ROUND SHALL TAKE MORE THAN 3 1/2 HOURS, which made Blind Bob and me hoot. “We barely make the turn in that,” he said.

Lord, it was flat. I could just hear my wife if she were there. “Damn,” she’d have said, “this course is so flat you could watch your dog run away for three days.”

Sigh.

Made me think of a good greeting card. It would be a woman on the front and she’d be saying:

I’ve really missed you. I mean I’ve REALLY missed you. In fact, I’m going to meet you at your airport gate lying on a mattress.

And inside . . .

You better be the first guy off that plane.

And so it was I made my way to the 1st tee, having declined Bob’s generous offer to caddy. “I need no help sucking,” I said. He said he’d stay on the porch and listen to girls walk by, imagining them all as Elizabeth Hurley. How he knew what Elizabeth Hurley looked like was anybody’s guess.

So this was it. The best nine scores (plus ties) out of 141 players were going to make it to final qualifying. Some guys came with professional caddies, some hauling their own bags on pull carts, some with their fathers or brothers or mothers on the bag, some French, some Swedish, some with perfect Ben Hogan swings and some with Hulk Hogan swings. The par was only 70, and there was already a 63 on the board from the morning round, so there went one of the spots. The best after that was one 64, three 65s, and a pile of 67s and 68s. So there was room in there to qualify at 65 or 66 for one very desperate, unlaid, greeting card writer from Dorchester, Massachusetts, if he could somehow play his best round of the year on no sleep, one pork pie, and two No-Doz.

It was threesomes. I was with a thirtyish-looking guy featuring triangle sideburns and spiked blond hair, a cool bowling shirt, and patterned pants. He introduced himself as Desmond. He looked like the sax player in a jazz quartet who gets the good ecstasy. “Pleasure,” he said. He had a professional caddy. Guy named Provisional. Dez told me Provisional got his name for always having a backup plan, no matter the situation. Like, if he was out at lunch, he’d say, “I’ll ’ave the ’amburger, love, but only with the Muenster cheese. If they don’t have Muenster, then I’ll ’ave the chicken sandwich, if you please.”

The other player was a kid, couldn’t have been nineteen, real slick, with the Titleist hat perfectly bent, the wraparound sunglasses stuck on his hat backward, the buttoned-up golf shirt with the sleeves that went past his elbow, the five-hundred-dollar golf pants that broke fashionably twice at his leather FootJoys. His caddy was a man about forty-five-ish, also spiffy, with nicer shoes than I’d worn to my wedding, gorgeous khakis, an alligator belt, and a golf shirt with a Sunningdale logo on it. Perhaps the only Savile Row caddy in history.

“My name’s Ray,” I said to the kid, offering my hand.

“If you insist,” he said in a stuffy British accent, sticking his tee in the ground.

Okay, so that’s how it was going to be.

Punk Boy took a rip at his drive and flushed it three hundred yards, at least, down the center cut.

“Good shot,” I said, teeing my ball up.

“Get used to it,” he said.

Cheeky. I hit a kind of high draw out there thirty yards behind him, and as it landed the kid says, just loud enough for me to hear, “Get in a divot.”

Nice manners.

Desmond put a pretty swing on his and blew it by both of us, but the end had a tail on it and he wound up in the right rough. I couldn’t help notice the punk didn’t say a word to him.

As we walked, the kid’s caddy said to me, “Where do you join us from, Ray?”

“Boston,” I said.

“What propels an American to come over here with the outlandish idea he can qualify for our Open?”

I get it. Our Open.

“United Airlines,” I said, thinking myself funny.

“I see you have the sparkling American wit so treasured among game show hosts,” he said archly. “So you failed in your attempts to qualify for the American Open and are now gracing us with your presence?”

“Nope. Didn’t even try to qualify for the U.S. Open. I just came over ’cause I like pork pies.”

“Charming,” he said, walking away.

From the looks of him and the way he talked to the Punk, the guy had to be his father. It was a two-man show. Like father, like jerkwipe.

I didn’t care. I’ve taken more shit than a fat stripper. Thanks to the Chops, you could run the Macy’s parade behind my backswing and it wouldn’t get to me.

But Lord knows these two assholes tried.

On 5, to my tee shot, the kid said: “Get out of bounds!”

On 7, just before my birdie putt, the father said: “Knock it close, Ray.”

On 8, the kid screamed “Fore!” on both my drive and Dez’s when they were headed for nothing but the light rough.

On 9 green, the kid kept backing off his putt. An old codger was watching us play while absentmindedly jingling the change in his pocket. This unnerved the Punk to no end. Finally he walked over to the old guy.

“Sir, have you any change?”

And the old guy, surprised to be talking to one of the participants, stammered out, “Well, yes, yes. I believe I do. How much do you require?”

“All of it,” the punk said. “Whatever you have, if you please.”

So the guy had like 4 pounds and 73 shillings in his pocket and the punk kid gave him a five-pound note for them. Then the kid took the change and heaved it as hard as he could right over the old codger’s head. Then he stared daggers at the old guy and went back to his putt. Very classy kid.

I made the turn in two-under 33, then birdied 10 and 11, very crisply, I thought. All I knew was I was one shot up on the brat and two on Desmond. I don’t know how. I was beat like a Persian rug. I was on autopilot, really. Every shot I hit came out of memory, not will or effort. I kept setting up to shots and thinking I was back with my favorite teacher, my Uncle Joe, while he sat behind me in a lawn chair under the old willow at the range at his course. He’d sit and I’d hit for hours, him giving me tips between laughs. I loved golf with my uncle. All he cared about was the purity of the shot, not where it was going to lead me in life. Maybe that’s the way I should play every round—so tired that I go there. I was swinging great. If I parred in from there, I’d shoot four-under 66, and I guessed if I could do that or better, I’d make the top nine.

But then came the 13th—a 208-yard par-3. The kid went first and knocked it onto the green, but his ball disappeared over a little ridge and down. I thought maybe he was off the green, but my yardage book said there was a lower level to the green. I hit my 8-iron on the same line and it disappeared over the same little ridge.

As I got to the green, I saw the two balls were about eight feet apart, one of them deeper than the other. The kid and his dad were already at the near one, reading their line. I went to the deep one, marked it, cleaned it, and lined it up again. I hit my putt about four feet past. But I couldn’t help noticing that they were both standing and looking at me.

Finally, the father cleared his throat and said, “I’m not sure how they do things in the colonies, but in England, we’re not in the habit of hitting our opponent’s ball. In truth, it’s a two-shot penalty.”

It took a second to sink into my jet-lagged cerebellum. Hit our opponent’s ball? What the hell was he talking about? I looked at the ball and saw, to my horror, that it was a Precept 00 instead of my own Titleist 3. And then it hit me: I’d been suckered.

The two of them were looking away to keep from laughing outright. They’d tricked me. They’d walked to the wrong ball and pretended it was theirs. But they’d been careful not to touch it. They just stood over it and lined it up like it was theirs. They’d moosed me into assuming the shorter ball was mine and in my walking coma, I never even checked it. Who goes to the wrong ball?

“You assholes,” I said, my mind frying. “You did that on purpose.”

Desmond walked over. “What happened?” he said.

“These two bastards, the guv’ner and the prince,” I said. “They walked to my ball and started lining it up, so I’d think this other one was mine. I hit the wrong ball.”

“Oh, you paranoid Americans,” tsk-tsked the father. “Always sure everybody’s out to get you.”

“Well, what were you doing standing by his ball?” Desmond asked.

“Simply seeing what type of putt our opponent had,” he said. “Quite within the rules.”

“Bollocks!” said Desmond, glaring at him. I had no idea what “bollocks” meant, but from the look he gave him, I’m guessing in Ponkese it meant, “You’re so fucking crooked you have to screw on your hat.”

I took a step toward the Family Fuck. Don’t know what I was going to do, but it would probably involve burying my putter into one of their orifices at least up to the leather. Desmond got in the way.

“You limey shits,” I said as Dez held me back.

“I’d love to, old man,” said the kid, trying to get me to brawl.

I had to walk off the side of the green and take ten deep breaths to calm myself down. I’m sure I’ve been more pissed, but I can’t remember when.

I was just so torqued off I missed my four-foot comebacker, my first bogey of the day. Well, actually, with the two-shot penalty, my first triple bogey. The kid two-putted and picked up three greasy shots on me, just like that, and led me by two. Not only that, but now I was only one-under for the day instead of four, back in with the huddled masses, and I knew I had to somehow get to four-under to have a prayer. I was madder than Billy Graham in a gay bar.

I walked up to the dad and said, “I will get even, hairball. If I have to move next door to you, I will get even.”

“I see we’ve gotten under your skin,” he said. “You Americans are so predictable.”

I vowed then and there—I was not sending those two a Christmas card.