Hot Lunch

“You must be hungry,” said the Old Man one miserably humid day at the Country Club golf course.

“Yeah, I sure am,” I replied.

“How about a hot dog?”

“That would be great, Dad!”

He could have offered me dog excrement on a saltine cracker and I would have probably eaten it. I was so freakin’ hungry.

After watching my Old Man hit a golf ball with his cronies for an agonizing eternity on the golfing greens I was hot, tired, and utterly famished.

“Cmon Charlie,  let’s get you a dog over at the Snack Bar,” he said.

Ah, but little did I know how much it would cost me. And if I had known I would have passed on the Old Man’s offer. Gladly resorting to chewing on putting green grass and drinking some water out of one of the decorative ponds to assuage my hunger pains.

Standing in my garage years later the painful memory came flooding back while helping my wife clean out some of the junk abandoned in there.

The morning was uncomfortably hot and I had been busy moving some broken hardware and old bags of clothing to be recycled when I espied in the corner of the garage by the shovels and gardening hoes a desiccated golfing bag covered in dust.

“Sweetheart, who’s bag of clubs is that?”

“Mine. I used to play with a friend of mine back in the day,” said my wife.

Plucking out a club out of the dusty bag I gripped the iron in my two hands. Looking it over, I had to resist the temptation of snapping it over my knee and tossing it out in the street. 

“Can we throw this bag of clubs into the trash?”

“No! I want to keep them. Put the bag back, please… where you found it.”

“Are you sure? You ain’t using them and we agreed to get rid of all the unused stuff to make some room out here.”

“I want to keep them for sentimental reasons. Just put them aside for now. What’s the matter? You look red as a beet and seemed pissed,” said my wife.

“I’m fine,” I lied. “Let’s go through some of this other crap and see if we can make more room,” I said roughly tossing the “sentimental” golf clubs back in the corner and resuming my honey-do task.

Of course, I wasn’t fine. No, the sight of those miserable golf clubs was enough of a reminder of that fateful day I agreed to caddy for my Old Man at his Country Club.

It was his idea that we should spend some quality time together doing what he loved doing best which was golf. I was not consulted, of course, as he assumed I would want to do what he wanted.

To be honest, at seventeen years of age, I had no interest in the game. Watching a bunch of old farts knock a tiny white ball around endless manicured lawns seemed pointless and stupid. And quite frankly b-o-r-i-n-g. 

But, since my parent’s divorce, it was one of few chances of doing something with my Father. I missed him and I figured if schlepping a bag of clubs around all day would make him happy, well I guess I could placate the old geezer. Little did I know how much hard work caddying would turn out to be.

The day started kinda fun. It was a beautiful sunny California morning and the smell of freshly cut grass on the golf course was intoxicating. The Old Man was in good spirits and he seemed enthused seeing me after eighteen months of us being incommunicado.

We had a cup of coffee at the Clubhouse before he teed off and soon I was dutifully trudging after my Dad and two of his golfing buddies carrying a very heavy golf bag filled with woods and irons. The clubs had brightly colored fuzzy socks with tassels that looked ridiculous.

At first, carrying the bag was manageable,  but as the day wore on I began to wonder just what was in the thing to make it so damn heavy. Soon rivulets of sweat coursed down my body as I struggled to keep up with the happy threesome. I felt like Clint Eastwood in the movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as the Man with No Name staggering across a searing landscape while the sadistic Tuco prodded him onward.

The Old Man was a serious golfer who talked very little while he played. Since I knew very little about the game it was hard for me to judge how he was doing. My only clue was by how fast or slow he smoked his pipe while walking. When he did well he would puff leisurely on his old briar.  If things were going badly his pipe would puff away like the little engine that could and soon I would lose sight of him of a cloud of Amphora pipe tobacco smoke. 

“Charlie, did you see where my ball went?” he cried.

“I can’t even see you, Old Man,” I muttered as I rested the bag at my feet using my hand waving away a cloud of impenetrable pipe smoke from my face.

“No, Dad!” 

“Ha! Ha! Did you lose track of your ball again, Buck?” teased one of his friends.

“Ahh, for cryin’ out loud…I must have chipped it over into the trees by the sand trap,” he said. “You fellas go on ahead and I’ll catch up.”

The Old Man disappeared into a small wooded area and his friends went on to the next hole. After a few moments of silence, I heard what sounded like the cutting of timber. Abruptly several small pine trees crashed to the ground and out onto the green rolled a small golf ball a few inches shy from the ninth hole.

My Dad emerged from the treeline looking quite pleased with himself, swinging his club jauntily back and forth while puffing on his pipe.

After he made an easy putt I continued following the Old Man as we trudged across the never-ending greens under a blazing sun.

I gazed wistfully at other golfers and their caddies as they sped by us in electric golf carts. Some of the golfers in carts would merrily wave at my Dad and yell greetings to him. One joker asked him how he got such good looking son to which the Old Man wittily replied “Good seed!” My Dad’s quip was a joke, but it was completely lost on my young mind until years later – when I got it. Good seed?! Oh, brother.

As heat exhaustion set in, the remainder of the day passed in a hallucinogenic blur.  A phantasmic haze of sickly colors filled with images of me stumbling, struggling, and mutely handing the Old Man his requested club for his next swing or putt.

By the time the game was over, and he and his friends had shaken hands by the eighteenth hole, the Old Man noticed I had passed out face down in the shade of a small tree.

He shook me awake and promptly took me over to the Club Snack Bar and magnanimously ordered me a hot dog and coke which I proceeded to wolf and guzzle down in nanoseconds.

“Son, you did great. I could use a good caddy…so, let’s do this again soon,” he said, pulling out his wallet.

I held out my pale and trembling hand expecting to be paid the agreed-upon five dollars for caddying.

Much to my dismay, the Old Man carefully counted out three dollars and fifty-nine cents into my palm. That was my day’s wages minus the cost of the hot dog and coke.

And people wonder why I hate the game of golf so much.