Country Clubbed

` Golf is the only thing, besides my Dad, I’ve ever loved. Loaded statement, not to everyone, but certainly to other golfers. Why? Every golfer will tell you the same thing: if you’re at the level where the sport becomes more than just an expensive hobby, you also love gambling. My old man would throw in women, say those three are hitched. A golfer and gambler himself, he burned through three wives before I left high school and two more in as many years until he died of a massive heart attack celebrating his fifth divorce. Dad loved me in his own messed-up way and also taught me that love and hate are too often two sides of the same coin.

Until my senior year at the South’s premier golf university, before I broke my foot balcony jumping at a kegger and ruined my future for a laugh, everyone was certain I’d go to the PGA tour. The house I grew up in stood nearest to the sixteenth hole at Foggy Downs, our community’s pristine golf course. At ten, my father gave me his lucky putter. I won the under eighteen title at Foggy Downs at sixteen, and shot one over the course record at seventeen, four years ago now. The title holder at Foggy Downs was a local real estate manager with a network of properties he rented all over town, named Brady Walker. The same age as Dad but six inches taller, Brady had a head like a front loader and a mouth presumed wrenched into his shit-eater’s smirk even when asleep. I’d hated him as long as I could remember, my feelings courtesy of my dear dad who lost more money to Brady Walker—betting hole to hole on the course and at the poker table in the club’s locker room—than if he’d mortgaged our house to invest every cent with Enron in November of 2001.

Every year since I was sixteen, we’d enter the club championship four-man scramble with two of dad’s pals. Brady and three of his pastel-polo-shirted cronies hoisted the trophy every year. The sneer from Brady, the cigar clamped in his mouth, the adoration from his flavor-of-the-week blonde—all stamped deeper into the blackening recess of my mind year after year. College semesters offered a break from seeing him every week at Foggy Downs, until Christmas or summer vacation, when I’d return to find Brady still holding the clubhouse hostage. His old money kept him from working. Brady haunted the club seven days a week, inhaling martinis, pawing every woman regardless of their marital status, and firing his despicable pickup lines at the female waitstaff. Which, to my horror, often worked. Once—and I know this ain’t just in my head—after he heard me ask out one of the servers, Julie Bounds, for a date the following Saturday, he spent the next week lavishing her with gifts and buttering her up with lies. Julie cancelled our date and went out with him twice before he got her fired from the club—not the official story, but I know the bastard did it—because he didn’t want to see her again. For weeks after, when I was in earshot at the club bar, he’d say all too loudly, “That pretty little slut Julie ain’t working here no more? She sure had a tight ass on her, didn’t she? Goddamn. Pretty young, but I say if there’s grass on the field, play ball!” The sycophants at the club just played along. 

Golf and women weren’t the only areas of our lives Brady bulldozed. Poker games four nights a week in the club’s card room saw thousands of dollars change hands. Again, initiating me into the requisite mores of upper-crust southern manhood, Dad acted as guide through this particular circle of the underworld. Poker went, naturally, Dad said, with golf. In college, I learned to prefer blackjack because of my gift with numbers and became so legendarily good that finally I had to leave my university’s town to get into a game. But I was a shark at the poker table, too, because of how good Dad was.

And yet I can’t tell you how many games I sat beside the table, watching dear ole dad win when Brady Walker wasn’t playing, and lose, lose, lose when he was. Brady’s poker face was legendary, it being the same smirk he always wore. Impassive and harder to decipher than Sanskrit. As I got older, I had no better luck against him than my father, losing the stacks of cash my dad would send me to club poker games with once he declared his luck had flown the coop for good. I’d come home hollow, and dad would take one look at me, kick back a dose of whiskey, and rocket the crystal glass against the nearest wall. Once we had to replace an entire eight-by-eight pane of glass in the back porch door, shattered courtesy of a hurled solid oak chair.

I realized too late that Dad was trying to get at Brady through me. Using me. In fact, nothing I could do would make Dad proud. A golf scholarship, playing at nationals, and an invitation to pro-ams before my injury—all meant nothing. He grew bitter, drank more, and never shot par again. Light bled slowly from his eyes. Eventually, he quit going to Foggy Downs, where folks would ask me about him in tones that suggested they’d all seen his decline, Dad simply becoming a specter before disappearing. Eventually, they started asking about my life, everybody except for Brady.

One evening, he cornered me, yelling from his great height so everyone in the club’s bar could hear. “Your daddy, whoowee! Got tired of losing, didn’t he? Losing at everything. Golf. Cards. Women too. Couldn’t get it up anymore, what I heard. Why the last one left the limp dick cocksucker. He’s on the goofy golf course now, ain’t he?” Brady’s breath was hot with vodka martinis and cinnamon gum, one playing off the other, until a smelly cloud like kerosene overtook everything around him. “Goofy golf. Reckon he belongs there, what with the clown’s mouth hole and everything. Yeah, he feels right at home, doesn’t he, with the clown? But who am I telling? You ain’t much for it these days either, are you, junior? Sorry about your foot. Probably good though. You wouldn’t have done no good on the tour anyway. Those old boys would whip you up and down the links like I used to do you and your old daddy.” Then he moved in close and whispered: “I hope he’s rotting, your old daddy. Rotting in that big house all alone. Y’all don’t belong. Just jumped up. Your old daddy’s been worthless since we were kids. Worthless. Same as his son.”

I walked out and grabbed my clubs, and stayed at the driving range through twilight. I couldn’t concentrate. My drives, usually beautiful fades, wouldn’t quit hooking. Brady’s words rolled around in my head like a stone in a tin can.

So my dad and Brady knew each other in a past life, when they were kids. Dad told me that night, slurring and red-faced and looking like he’d pop all the blood vessels in his head any second, that Brady grew up rich. His family had acreage in our neighborhood before its roads were paved, before the golf course was built. Dad and my biological mom didn’t move in until later, after they sold my dad’s medical supply company he’d worked up from nothing. Upstarts, in Brady’s eyes. We could only play at being bluebloods while Brady and the others at the club were the real deal.

We were phony. Brady’s truth cut like a rusty hacksaw.

I said earlier that Dad was celebrating his latest divorce when he suffered his heart attack. This is true, though celebrating might be a stretch, and divorce implies a timeliness to his revelry. He was merely trying to drink his cabinet dry. He’d not left the house for weeks. Ordering meals in.

This was Christmas break of my senior year. I hobbled inside the house, my foot encased in a giant boot from the break, to find him sloshed, splayed like a human puddle on the couch. All three levels of the house stank to high heaven. Puke dried to the main floor sink and unflushed shit in his upstairs bathroom coupled with the heat turned up to eighty-five resulted in a rancid frat house reek. I cleaned up a little and slept in my childhood bedroom.

In the morning, the bursting glass from the kitchen below woke me. Dad turned when I appeared downstairs, fixing me without recognition, like I was a phantom. I sort of like to think he was so far gone, so close to death, that he started seeing things from the next life. He stood, gibbering spittle, glass from the shattered liquor bottles glittering across the floor, windows all around spider-cracked from his missiles. I raised a hand and said his name. That’s when the old man howled.

He turned to sprint over the glass shards toward the back porch and busted straight through one of the splintered windows, like the oak chair all those years ago. The crash of glass was something awful, the crescendo of a thousand tiny bells, and each one ringing with a man’s hounded thoughts. I knelt beside him on the porch, his clothes putrid, blood trailing behind from his gashed feet and draining from his head like a weeping spring. I grabbed his hand. The old man made noises, but I swear the only words I could make out were “Brady” and “everything.”

Dad lived long enough for the ambulance to arrive, but he was dead when he came back out of it. In the end, he’d become consumed by so many hatreds, passed on to me finally, like the ridge of my nose or the hitch in my backswing.

Three days later, I discovered in my father’s files that he was flat broke. Dad borrowed against the house to cover his drinking and gambling and whoring. The bank stepped in. Reading the next file made the base of my skull burn hotter than napalm. The house didn’t make it to auction because a buyer stepped in promptly to scoop up the prime property on hole sixteen at Foggy Downs, so close you could chip onto the green from the backyard.

Guess who. Brady Walker. Adding our house to his real estate collection. I pictured him razing the place and building a new palace for himself on the site.

Dad did leave me something in death, though: one more week on our club membership.

I realized I’d soon have no home to come back to after school, no family to embrace me, no club to attend, no pristine course to play on in my hometown. Foggy Downs would be a memory.

Might as well tee things up and send them flying, I figured.

Days I brooded in the house. Evenings, I practiced the fluid arc of my stroke on the practice green with Dad’s lucky putter. I saw him, Brady, drinking and watching me from the club’s patio every night. His teeth shone in the moonlight, and the smoke curling off his cigar twisted green. I’d lock eyes with the man who killed Dad, and he’d just smirk. You’ll ask what I was waiting for. Well, the biggest poker game of the week was always on Sunday nights.

That night, after putting, I hobbled into the smoky clubhouse locker room. The four men left at the table hushed at the sight of me. Their mouths fell open, all except Brady’s, whose trademark smirk remained etched onto his face.

I said, “Can I buy in?”

The other three looked at Brady. He smoked, said, “Thought y’all were broke. What old lady did you beat up for the money, son?” He guffawed, and the others joined in, but Brady waved me over. “Long as the money’s green. Hell, I’ve been taking it from you and your daddy so long it ain’t no reason to stop the gravy train now.”

I sat and exchanged five hundred I found in the house’s safe for chips and began losing, hand after hand. I struck dumb luck and picked up a pot or two, but tried to make sure most of the hands went to Brady. He raised, I’d call. Back and forth. My losses mounted. When the clock struck midnight, I pushed all my chips in and promptly lost to him again.

Brady raked up the chips and said, “You want to bet your house next, stay in one more hand?”

He snapped. “Oh, wait. That’s my house now. My mistake.” He laughed again, and the others joined in, then said they were done and started counting their chips.

I said, “I do have one more thing to bet, Brady.”

“I don’t want your streaked underpants, boy.”

I pointed to a locker—mine until tomorrow—and my bag of clubs. Brand new, bought with the school's money before I broke my foot. “The whole set. Finest you can buy. Gently used, so let’s say five thousand. Just me and you, Brady.” And here’s where I knew I had him. “But we switch to blackjack.”

The smirk. Like he could see the future. He said, “I don’t usually like Blackjack, but what the hell. I figured you’d need to pawn those clubs for your old daddy’s coffin, but I’ll take them off you, and you can just find a hole to throw him in. But I’m tired of all this winning. I’ll play one hand for it all.”

I nodded. One of his cronies shuffled and dealt Brady the queen of diamonds face up and me the six of clubs. I peeked my down card and saw the ten of hearts, which made sixteen. The crony looked at me. I said, “Hit me.” He laid the four of hearts. Twenty. A flood of adrenaline tightened every tendon in my body, but I kept my face neutral and passed my hand over the table, indicating I’d like to stay. One hand, and I was sitting at twenty, about to be five thousand dollars richer, just like I drew it up.

Brady peered under his queen of diamonds, said, “Hit.” It felt like a million eyes were on our table. The crony dealt him a five, and for the first time ever, I saw Brady’s face twitch. The smirk dropped into a sneer of disgust for an instant.

He’d busted, went over twenty-one. I’d won. I could feel it.

Brady unlatched his cigar from his mouth and breathed long, making his eyes huge. He pushed back from the table and stood, shaking his head. The dealer said, “Flip.” I went first, revealing my twenty, letting myself smile finally. Brady whistled at my cards. “Well, boys,” he said. “Everyone’s luck has a limit.”

He leaned over and flipped his hand. The six of diamonds appeared.

Brady had twenty-one.

“That’s what they say, but I ain’t found mine yet!” He slapped the table and boomed a laugh. “Like father, like son, losers both.” Brady sauntered over to my locker and held my bag out like a trophy, smoking, ash falling from his cigar into the leather bag that had carried my whole identity and existence.

Brady and his boys backslapped and wobbled drunkenly out of the room and left me alone, penniless and now technically since it was after midnight, trespassing in the club. I sat in shock at the table, my guts liquified, my foot pounding, my throat constricting to the size of a sewing needle. Life as I knew it is now a memory, one I could never again make reality. No family, no house, no bankroll, no future on the tour. Really, I’d been alone and destitute before I sat down at the card table, but I still held the illusion of hope before that last hand.

He’d won. Again. Brady always won.

For a while, I couldn’t move, frozen by the swoop of reality..

Then I remembered I’d left my Dad’s lucky putter—the only thing I had left of my father—outside earlier after I’d practiced. I shot up and limped in my heavy boot outside to find the putter leaning against the clubhouse. It shook in my hands. This wouldn’t do. No, no, no. Brady had won fair and square, and I’d bet him all my clubs, including the putter.

I had to make everything right.

I saw three cars pulling out together, the cronies in coupes. Brady’s Range Rover sat by itself, the last car in the parking lot besides mine. Then I saw Brady open the back hatch to deposit his newly won bag of clubs.

“Brady,” I called. “Wait.”

He looked up, smoke swirling. “What now?”

I walked up. “The putter. It's yours. Fair is fair.”   

He looked at me crossways, shot up his eyebrows in disbelief. “By god, son. You’re hopeless. Just like your old man.”

“You don’t want it?”

“Course I do. You bet the whole set. Give it here.”

When Brady put out his hand, I gave it to him, club face first, hammering his forearm as hard as I could.

Brady yelped, bent over holding his broken arm, and I brought the club down on his spine once, twice, a third time. He slammed the pavement with a sound like wet meat hitting stone. His cigar rolled down the paved hill, trailing sparks. I reached over him to slip my driver out of the bag, the club I’d sent a thousand balls hundreds of yards towards pins all over the country.

I prodded his ribcage with the club’s head. He rolled over on his back.

I swing a driver at just over one hundred miles per hour. A golf ball is less than two inches wide. A man’s head is, on average, about seven. I reckoned that with the size difference, I could swing a little harder and still be accurate.

Like I said before, might as well tee things up and send them flying.