Month: June 2023

The Country Club Chronicles Part 5 – Chocolate and Beer

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When I asked to work in the pro shop during the off-season, The Weasel was more than happy to oblige. Initially, I think he was trying to do me a solid and also probably wanted some company. Eventually, he would realize that having me there to do the work meant that he could skate off whenever he liked to do whatever he wanted. Which he did nearly every day. He was incredibly easy to work with for that reason. As long as I showed up on time, clocked in and wasn’t hungover enough from the night before to at least sound somewhat clear when I answered the phone, I was golden. We began that off-season with the yearly goodbyes to the bag-staff, starter, assistants and interns. Normally, the head pro would run the shop in the off season until the club would take its month off in January. However, considering our Bird had flown the coop in absolute disgrace, The Weasel was left to pick up the slack. Most pro’s, especially in the northeast, head down south or out west to work at other clubs where the golf is year-round when the season ends. I should clarify, most competent pros head off to warmer climates. So, the fact that The Weasel didn’t should have been a red flag to me. But a job is a job.

Right off the bat I saw how easy this gig was to be. I came in a little before nine and stood around watching TV with The Weasel until we closed up and left which was usually around four. We would have a small number of members come up to purchase Christmas presents and other little items here and there but for the most part it was just the two of us. That allowed us to get more comfortable with each other. We never reached friendship level, but he realized he could count on me and trust me, and I realized that as long as I had a pulse and matching shoes, I’d remain employed. The shop was relatively small, but considering our clientele, it was stocked with pricy items. Clubs, golf bags, balls, golf shoes, golf clothes, club apparel, sunglasses, range finders etc. etc. The members who came up to buy items never used cash. They almost always put their purchases on their club accounts to be billed later. The register was hardly ever opened, and the phone barely ever rang. When it did, it was usually The Weasel’s wife. I was put in charge of answering the phone and it only dawned on me later that this was an attempt by The Weasel to avoid any and all communication with her. Whenever she called, I was told to let her know that he was either on the course doing something or out running an errand for the club and that I would relay that she had called. After a while, her calls were more and more pathetic. She knew damn well he wouldn’t be returning her calls and that came across in her voice. At the tender age of 21, I had become an interference runner for a local bookie dubbed The Weasel. That was his nickname. I am not making it up for the story. That is literally what people called him. I suspect that had she known that before they got hitched, she might have gone over her options a few more times before saying yes.

After a couple weeks of the same thing in day in and day out, The Weasel started to leave me alone in the shop during the day. It started with him telling me that he would be back soon. Then, it became him telling me that he wasn’t sure he would be back at all. Finally, it ended up with him telling me to lock up whenever I wanted and that he’d see me the next day. The Weasel’s wife and I had that in common I suppose. In the beginning, when he’d leave, he’d call in regularly to check in on how things were going. Eventually he would call maybe only once a day and then by the end of my tenure not at all. Again, The Weasel’s wife and I had a lot in common when it came to our relationships with this guy. When he would leave, he would normally head off to a sports bar in town to open up his book and take bets for whatever sporting events were taking place that day. What kind of a bar are we talking about here? The kind that opens at ten a.m. on a Tuesday. I’ve been there a couple of times and it is every bit as depressing as I am attempting to make it out to be. It is, or at least was, a place where degenerates go to watch their hard-earned shekels fly out of their accounts and into the wallets of dudes like The Weasel. Being left alone in the club, I was naturally incredibly bored. During the off-season, the kitchen and dining room are still open but everything else is a veritable ghost town. There was a door that led from the pro shop into the men’s locker room. From the locker room, you could gain access to the lounge which was closed from the outside. The lounge was where golfers would grab a drink or something to eat when they made the turn from the ninth green to the tenth tee. There were heavy, mahogany tables and chairs set up and televisions where during the season golf was on perpetually. In the back of the lounge there was a cigarette machine and in the front was a small snack window which could be accessed by a door that was unfortunately locked. In that area, a guy I will just refer to as Goofball would dole out beer, sandwiches, hot dogs, soda and Arnold Palmers. Goofball was just that, a total goofball. He was the biggest suck up I had ever met and even in a club where the membership was used to having their heineys kissed , they’d roll their eyes at his over-the-top butt smoochery. The thing about him, is that I can’t even say that he was a good guy. Normally, I liked to try to look at everyone’s situation and then assess their character from there, but this guy treated everyone who worked at the club like shit. He was oddly friendly to some of the employees but really looked down on us bag staff guys and would make it a point to be unpleasant towards us.

One Saturday before Christmas, The Weasel defeatedly announced that since the off-season was coming to a close and Christmas was withing walking distance, we needed to do inventory. That is when he dropped the info that would turn Christmas into a gala event in the homes of myself and my friends. I was writing down the numbers of sweaters we had on a rack, and I remarked on how insane I thought it was that anyone would buy a $600 dollar sweater, cashmere or not. The Weasel then explained to me, that since The Bird had been such a naughty boy, the board basically let him quote his buyout price for the merchandise he had a piece on in the shop and then simply paid it out. They wanted him gone and they wanted him gone fast. For that reason, it would be literally impossible for the club to make any profit on anything sold in the shop and that they had resigned themselves to not even break even. Most of the stuff would be heavily discounted the coming year and what didn’t sell would be pitched out. Basically, whoever our new Bird was to be would most definitely want his own stuff in the shop to sell and wouldn’t want stuff he nor the club would be making a dime on taking up valuable rack space. So, I somewhat flippantly asked if I could have one of the sweaters. I was met with the response; “dude take it all, I don’t give a shit.” I was shocked for a minute until he reiterated that I could literally take anything I wanted aside from clubs and golf bags. Well, say no more, boss! I gave my uncle a $500 dollar cashmere sweater for Christmas that year as the $600 dollar ones were all too big. I gave my father Ray Bans. My mom got silk scarves and incredibly soft leather gloves. I got myself some swag as well. All of this thievery mind you was sanctioned by the guy signing my paychecks. The following day, The Weasel pulled his usual, “I’m going out to get a pack of smokes” routine and high-tailed it to the den of the miserable he called his second office. I immediately called my friends. They came, we locked the doors. They ransacked the place. Every one of those guys gave their families gifts that year that must have left their relatives wondering what kind of drugs they were selling in order to afford this sort of stuff. This was also sanctioned by The Weasel when I had mentioned that day that I might have a friend or two come by to grab some of the crap that we knew wouldn’t sell. He chuckled and replied, “take it all. It’s less shit I have to deal with later on.” So that is exactly what we did. I took the opportunity to show them around the club and eventually we ended up in the lounge. Once I explained that the booze and goodies were behind a locked door, they naturally asked me if I had looked for the key. I hadn’t because I wasn’t interested in drinking bottles of warm gin by myself. I acquiesced to their insistence that I look for the key and reached for a cabinet that was right next to the door that led into the snacks and drinks area. No one could be incompetent enough to leave the key this close to the locked door, thought I. Well, I learned a lesson that day. Never underestimate stupidity. Goofball, in his lack of a single functioning synapse, had hidden the keys in the cabinet by the ingenious method of hanging them up with a tag that said, “SNACK SHOP DOOR” on them. We entered into the forbidden city with glee. There in front of us was what we had been pining for. Boxes of Snickers bars, Mounds bars and a fridge full of icy cold Becks.

For the rest of the Winter, I stayed quite fed and happy with that find. I also made a couple bucks sitting around on my can doing next to nothing. There is something magical and incredibly lonely about a golf course in the Winter. What had just months before been a bustling, high-traffic area had become a Winter wasteland. The grass, which at a well-taken care of club, is usually a vibrant green had turned into a strange shade of greenish gray. The trees were bare, and the wind caused their branches to sound like baskets of baseball bats being tossed around in the air. It’s cold and bleak. But it offered me some time to think in peace and quiet. When I wasn’t “shopping” or eating candy and drinking beer, I was taking breaks to go outside to look up at the first tee box. The planters which were filled with beautiful flowers during the season became ashtrays. The bulletin boards which had fliers on them and notifications of hole-in-ones and great shots by individual members and their guests were all down. Even the big water and ice machine that stood by the outter door to the men’s locker room was disconnected. Awnings were down. Aside from the Winter wind and the sound of the leaves rolling by it was silent. I mention this because it was at this time that I started to use those moments of silence and start to evaluate not only my life but where I saw it going in the next few years. I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t impressed with the trajectory. Those moments would play a large role in where my life is today only a couple of seasons later. I will cover that eventually. Trust me, it’s pretty good.

The first week of January saw The Weasel and I working only a few more days as we had a blizzard roll through which summarily put an end to our time in the shop. We shook hands, thanked each other and bid each other good luck until we would meet again in March. This time though, when I came back, considering the interference I had run for him and the blind eye I had turned to his piss-poor work ethic, he vouched for me to become the afternoon starter. I had moved up in rank. It was, to this day, one of the most fortunate things that has ever happened to me. Again, I will explain later. The Weasel will pop up again in these chronicles but for now, let’s let sleeping rodents lie. Tune in for the next installment; random incidents of burglary!

P.S. I remember that one day when I had a friend visit me at the club, he introduced me to urbandictionary. So, we put up an absolutely horrific post eluding to one of our friends at the time. I just looked it up and it’s still there. That means nothing for this post other than I have an accurate timestamp now for when all this went down. December 21st 2003.

The Country Club Chronicles Part 5 – Chocolate and Beer

The Country Club Chronicles pt. 4 – Enter The Weasel

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What can you say about a guy whose nickname pretty much says it all? I had known The Weasel for two years by the time I started to work directly for him in the pro shop after the close of the golf season. He was a decent enough player and people seemed to get along with him well. The bag staff had more interaction with him than with the other pro’s as he was designated to be our direct boss. For that reason, we all had a pretty good idea of who he was. A typical assistant pro. Pray tell, J.M., what is a “typical assistant pro”? You had to ask, didn’t you? I will break them down for you.

1. The Intern – Interns are college students that are majoring in golf sciences. I have no idea if “golf science” is a thing but it sounds cool, and I just made it up so let’s run with it. These guys are either unpaid or get a little stipend so that they can buy soap, toothpaste and club apparel from the pro shop. Normally they are housed at the club and fed by the club. These kids would come to us wide-eyed and full of excitement and by the end of the Summer they’d leave desperate to get back to school. I can understand. College-aged young men (I am sure there are female interns as well, but we only ever had guys) are not hard-wired to kiss as much ass as is required to hold a position of rank at one of these places. They have long days for little to no pay, and at the end of their hitch have only experience as the one by-product of their virtual indentured servitude as a reason for having endured it in the first place. Most of these guys were great and Hayseed was one of them. He would eventually return to the club after his year as an intern as the second assistant pro. A southerner, good golfer, incredible boozer and all-around good guy, he was universally liked at the club by members and staff alike. We had some others as well who were good eggs. We also had some born-again Christian kids who came to us. They were fine but a little tough to read. Once, Hayseed and a couple other guys and myself took two of our holy rollers to a bar. After about a half hour of solid drinking, I noticed that one of them had disappeared. The other, sat at the bar and drank diet coke. He looked like he was carrying three pounds of heroin taped to his leg and had been stopped at the border by Interpol. Nervous doesn’t begin to describe this poor kid as he sat there sweating into his diet coke while the rest of us pounded down Jameson and draught Budweiser. I went looking for our lost little duckling only to find him in the nearly empty restaurant portion of the place on his phone with his mom. I think he was talking to her about temptation. I instantly felt nothing but revulsion towards this little toad. Now, twenty years since, I admire him. Nevertheless, not a great way to get in good with a bunch of guys who call a dude named The Weasel their boss, but we gave him his space and then proceeded to avoid him for the rest of the season. Interns are OK in my book.

2. The Assistant – These guys are good golfers, there is no doubt about it. There is a ranking system in a club or municipal course of assistants. 1st, 2nd and then the others along with the interns. The head pro sits at the top. The first assistant takes care of the pro-shop, scheduling, the other assistants and sometimes the bag staff. They are the head pro’s second in command. The second assistant is the sergeant of the operation and delegates jobs to the bag staff, other assistants and is usually in charge of the interns. All of them teach golf lessons to the membership. Like in every industry, some of them are good people. Spicoli was a good guy. He was honestly one of the best bosses I have ever had. A couple others were nice guys as well. Irish was a good guy. Red was a good guy. The Rook was a sad sack. A lot of random names from my ever-fading memory. A lot of them, however, weren’t exactly winning any humanitarian awards. A friend of mine from college who ended up working at the club for a season or two told me a story about an assistant who worked at a club that he had worked at in high school. The assistant gave my buddy advice on life in the most assistant pro way possible. He took him aside and said, “kid, you only need the 3B’s in life to be happy. Booze, broads and barbiturates.” He might be right but I sure as hell don’t want to find out. I am married, I like beer, but I haven’t slid into the hole of downer addiction luckily. You have to feel for assistants. It is a transient life. As an assistant who works in the northeast, you will be moving at least once a year. When the weather gets too cold, you will be heading out west or down south. For this reason, a family, solid roots and all of that jazz can be exceedingly difficult for these guys to establish. I noticed a lot of them are gamblers as well. Perhaps the nature of the business lends itself to sports betting as there is always a group on the course at any given time thinking of ways to make each shot, each hole and the entire round “more interesting.” I don’t know. I just know a lot of these guys are heavy betters. Assistants are the backbone of a country club, and they know it. They tend to throw their weight around here and there but that is to be expected. Since they were generally close to us in age, we all got along relatively well.

For the most part, assistants are alright. We usually got lucky with some decent ones, and I was friends with a couple. It’s like anything else; you’ll get some good guys and some bad guys. I am trying to rack my brain to remember if we ever had a female assistant. I swear we did, and I think I sort of remember her. If we did, she was short lived. The golf world is very much a male dominated slice of the cosmos. For that reason, most of our pros and most of the members who came up to play regularly were men.

The Weasel fell into category that was truly unique. He was a decent enough golfer, who treated the staff really well. But he was also a degenerate gambler and a functional alcoholic. So, when he and Hayseed got an apartment together, it was like adding chocolate syrup to milk. Or in this case, grain alcohol to rubbing alcohol. Perfection! Hayseed once drank over 20 beers in a three hour stretch just to win a bet for the rest of a Subway sandwich from his roommate, the assistant superintendent whom I called Hacksaw. I was there. It wasn’t pleasant. By the end of the night when we went to head home, he was unable to speak and just put his hand up to let us know that he had registered that we said we were going to leave. Hayseed drank so much on a nightly basis, that once while we were hanging out at his house, we spotted a gentleman of the street walking by collecting bottles and cans. We asked him if he wanted some extras, and he was more than happy to take them. When Hayseed opened the front door, the stairway that led to the second floor where his apartment was, was quite literally piled with garbage bags full of cans almost all the way up the stairs. The collector’s eyes nearly exploded out of his head. This was the motherlode. It would take him three trips on his Huffy back and forth from Hayseed’s place to wherever he lived in order to collect all the bags. Hayseed is a great guy, and I haven’t spoken to him in a while, but I hope he is well. I also hope he is also on vitamin supplements for liver health. The Weasel and Hayseed lived together for a full season I believe. This was because The Weasel was going through a divorce. I can’t blame his wife. Whenever she would call looking for him, I was instructed to tell her that he was “running errands on the course.” In actuality, he was in a sport’s bar on the other side of town opening up his book and watching multiple televisions to keep an eye on his business. We’ll revisit that again down the line.

While trying to figure out how to cover the Winter where I worked in the pro-shop and the experience of working for The Weasel, I decided that it would probably be a good idea to break this post up into two parts. The first, an intro to the assistants and a little background on The Weasel. The second post will get into the weeds with what went on that off-season. So, I apologize if this post wasn’t as juicy as you thought it would be. It gets better moving forward. No one wants to open a post that takes an eternity to read and for that reason, you are just going to have to wait for the next installment. The Weasel … Part Deux!

The Country Club Chronicles pt. 4 – Enter The Weasel

The Country Club Chronicles pt. 3 – The Scandal

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This installment deals with some pretty sensitive stuff and frankly the story needs to be told for any of the rest of these chronicles to make sense. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write about it but a lot of what happened during the rest of my time at the club is because of the scandal that took place and the subsequent regime change afterwards. Let me start by saying that the only people who actually know for a fact what happened are the people directly involved. Namely, The Bird and the young lady who worked in the pro shop. When I say young, I mean young. I believe she was 16 at the time. When the whole thing broke, there were plenty of theories as to what actually happened between the two. I have heard them all. That being said, I have no idea which is true. I have my suspicions, but that is all they are. I will relate the story and leave out the particulars as again, the particulars are based on a lot of rumor mill accusations and theories. All I know for absolute fact, is that all of a sudden one day, the club would be thrown into turmoil because of a man who decided to ruin his professional life over an underage girl.

The second season at the club was very much like my first. A lot of tedious labor, a lot of schmoozing for tips and a lot of nefarious activities including controlled substances and assorted miscreants. I had fully gotten into the groove by that point. I knew the job, I knew how to get it done quickly, and I knew who to steer clear of. One of the things that we all knew, was that The Bird had an obvious crush on the young lady who worked in the shop. We all did. From what I recall, she was a very pretty girl. I didn’t have much interaction with her as we hardly ever went into the pro shop, but I do remember her being a very nice kid. I also remember her being very sweet and friendly to everyone as it was part of her job. To reiterate, the bag staff had very little to do with the pro shop which is where The Bird’s office was. Even though he and his underlings were our bosses, there was no reason to go into the pro shop other than to ask a question, grab a few minutes of air conditioning or to catch a glimpse of the pretty girl that worked the register. It could have been a separate world for all we knew. Walking into the shop might as well have been like walking into a wormhole and ending up on a planet a trillion light years away nine trillion years in the future. For that reason, we had no idea about how awkward it was in there for all when The Bird would make his interest in the girl known which apparently was quite often. Again, it was obvious enough that we all sort of had an idea that he had the hots for her, but we had no idea to what extent.

On a non-descript Saturday afternoon after clocking in for my afternoon shift, I headed up to the bag room and got ready for another day of attacking dirty golf clubs. The Cardinal was on shift with me that day along with Skinny and a couple other guys. After a few minutes of small talk and club scrubbing, the door from the bag room into the shop opened and out came the shop girl moving at a noticeably rapid clip. She looked upset as she scooted past us and down the hill towards the staff parking lot. I tried to get a reading on the situation by making one of my legendarily ill-timed and painfully unfunny remarks. “Whaddyou make your own hours now?” The Cardinal gave me a curtesy chuckle. That’s about all I got. We had no idea why she stormed off and in true guy fashion, no one did any checking to figure out what was going on. We simply went about our day. What was happening in that pro shop though, was pretty big stuff. Apparently, the shop girl’s parents had gotten wind of the situation. The story I heard, and again this is strictly conjecture and I am not claiming that this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, was that The Bird had purchased some skimpy lingerie for the girl and her parents had found it. Now, whether or not that is the truth, it honestly doesn’t matter. Did the two ever do anything other than flirt? Did she even flirt back? Was it all one-way traffic from The Bird? Did someone drop the dime on the bird to the parents? Did they actually have a physical relationship? I truly don’t know and to reiterate, it doesn’t matter. Because whatever went down was bad enough that not only did the girl quit on the spot, but the board met almost immediately and promptly and rightly shit canned The Bird. Within a season, his entire staff would be out aside from one man called The Weasel.

For weeks afterwards, no one at the club would talk about what happened. Except for us! We talked about it non-stop. Theories flew all over the place. Now we knew for sure why they spent so much time on the teaching tee and in the teaching shed together! It never dawned on us that maybe the girl legitimately wanted to learn how to play golf. Maybe The Bird was pressuring her, and she was too shy to say no and went to the range for lessons. Maybe she hated the job and pretending to care about this sport got her out of the pro shop for a little while. Any of those theories are just as plausible and far more likely than they were heading to the range in front of the entirety of the club to have illegal encounters in the teaching shed. But as young guys, clearly the most salacious rumor has got to be the closest to the truth.

If you read the intro to this series of posts, I mentioned how the membership of these places join for two reasons. The first, is to have a decent place to play golf or tennis for business purposes and the second is for status and keep up with your equally wealthy neighbors and friends. Becoming a member of a country club is to voluntarily head back to high school. A place where perception and social status reign supreme. Each club’s membership will brag about its facilities, grounds, food and staff. There is a hierarchy at these places. At the top of the food chain is golf followed by tennis, then dining and lastly the pool. Each one of these areas is run and staffed by its own crew so while working at a country club you may have a hundred or so fellow employees, you will probably only know an eighth of their names. There is also a bit of a rivalry between each group with each believing that their sector is the most important to the club. Again, golf is at the top. The course, its upkeep and the head pro are all things to be lauded by the membership. You hire the best superintendent, you hire the best head pro, you hire the best assistant pros and then you proceed to go out and consistently shoot 100 on every round. How you play doesn’t matter. It’s where you play and who is giving you lessons that matters in the country club world. So, when our club went from a point of pride to our membership to a punchline, it became a major problem. I keep going back to the analogy of high school as it is really perfect for this. Remember back in school when someone you knew well said something or did something that was considered either taboo or downright shameful? Do you remember the fallout from it? From what I recall, in these situations not only would the culprit be ostracized but so would anyone close to them. So, what did you do? You distanced yourself from them as well. After a while, when things would cool down, the social landscape would be different. People had moved into different cliques, formed new ones or stayed on the outside. That is precisely what happened at the club. We were definitely on the outside of the swell-set for a good long while. As I said earlier, The Bird was fired and never heard from again. I have no idea what became of him. I did hear that his wife stayed with him as they had young children but his time in the golf world was most assuredly finito. The shop girl went on her way as well. I don’t think I ever saw her again at the club or anywhere else. You have to feel for the kid. She was young and in a really awful situation. I hope she landed on her feet.

With The Bird having flown the coop, it was left to one of his assistants to pick up the pieces and try to salvage what was left of the season. That fell to our most competent assistant pro and arguably the best actual golfer on staff. As the season drew to a close, I decided to ask the second in command to the new Bird, who was set to fly the coop to warmer climes at the end of November, if he needed any help in the pro shop in the off season. I got the job and was told that we would only be working from December through the first week of January. It wasn’t much of a Winter job, but I took it anyway. That is where these chronicles really get rolling. It wasn’t until that Winter that I really started to see how grimy a lot of the stuff that went on at the club was. It was mostly all centered around a few people but regardless, there was enough bad energy at that place to power the lights in hell for a good month. That off-season would also prove quite advantageous for me as the man I worked for was one of the greasiest trolls to ever put on a polo shirt and a pair of chinos. He was a gas and we got along well. But a decent, upright citizen he was certainly not. That leads into the fourth installment of these chronicles which I will be publishing next week. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to The Weasel.

The Country Club Chronicles pt. 3 – The Scandal

The Country Club Chronicles pt. 2 – One Hell of a First Week

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As with any new job, you walk into it a little nervous, a little excited and also a little bummed out that you needed the job in the first place. The best way to get the lay of the land is to get into the weeds with your co-workers. Normally this takes some time. It might even take months. Once they are comfortable enough with you, they’ll let you in on the nitty gritty of the job and the people around you. Not with the pirate crew that I was thrown into, however. It took about three days. The first day I had to learn the ropes of maintaining the bag room, the carts / cart barn and the driving range. Brainless, tedious manual labor. It was easy to pick up because when it comes to brainless, I reign supreme.

I met The Cardinal and C $ the first day of work. The Cardinal took me out to the range to teach me how to use the range picker, which is the steel-caged golf cart that rakes up all the range balls, and to show me what our responsibilities were out there. We became friends pretty quickly as we were both into cars, girls and booze. Typical late teen stuff. C $ and The Cardinal were seniors in high school, and I was about to enter my first sophomore year of college. They were friends already, so I had to show my chops in order to get into good graces of the crew. Frankly, looking back on it, in order to get in good with the guys you just had to be a mensch. If you weren’t into any of the craziness that was going on around you, that was fine as long as you didn’t rat out any of the guys who were. It was an easy-going group of dudes. Work was pretty straight forward that first week. Clock in, do your job, go home. However, what we did that Sunday night would set the tone for my entire time at the club.

Tournaments are a constant nuisance at all golf courses. They take up a lot of time in setting up and even more time in cleaning up. Shotguns were the worst. For those of you who don’t golf, let me explain what I mean. Our main job as the bag staff was to clean crap off of golf clubs and put them away. So, on a normally busy Summer afternoon, anywhere from two to four carts would come in at a time at an interval of about five to ten minutes throughout the day. This meant that from time to time, the bags would pile up. We would always get to them although admittedly we would do a half-assed job a lot of the time. The carts had to be taken down to the barn, cleaned out, hosed down, restocked and brought back up dry in order to be used again. During a shotgun tournament, the entire fleet of carts would be out. Anywhere from 35-50, all with two golf bags on the back. Every group heads to a different hole and starts at exactly the same time. This means that at the end of the tournament you will not get the constant trickle of carts coming in that we were accustomed to. You will get all 35-50 showing back up at once. It was chaos. Each bag had to be cleaned and if guests were a part of the tournament, their bags had to be cleaned first and brought down to the parking lot so that all they had to do was pull up to the bag rack and grab their stuff. Bags would be stacked to the rafters after a while. Before we could leave for the day, each cart had to be cleaned out, hosed down, restocked and put back in the barn to be plugged in to charge. Pull carts had to be brought down to the barn to be put away. All member clubs had to be cleaned and put into their rack slot in the bag room. The range had to be picked and the ridiculously heavy Rubbermaid garbage cans full of yellow range balls had to be put through the washer and made ready for the following day. The range had to be cleaned which meant taking down the folding tables, tablecloths, and all of the little baskets of range balls. All of the towels that we put in each cart had to be washed, dried and if time allowed, folded. Scorecards and pencils needed to be replaced. After all of this, we would split up tips and finally be allowed to leave. All of this took place while one of the assistant pros impatiently waited for us to finish. One of them had to stay until we were done. The tips for these tournaments made them worth it. Each guy would normally walk out with between $50-75 and sometimes $100 in cash and this was split with the morning crew as there were two shifts a day. My first tournament was my third day of work. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon, and I had no idea the shitshow that awaited me when all of the golfers came in.

After a while, the crew got pretty damn good at taking apart these tourneys and getting out of work at a decent hour. It required everyone to fire on all cylinders and move quickly. Easier said than done when working with teenagers. You’d have thought the junkies on the crew would slow us down as they were always rocking dilated pupils. You’d be wrong. They were so eager to grab their cash and head out to score that most of the time Skinny and The Quiet Man were the fastest guys on the shift. For whatever reason, this particular tournament took forever to take apart and clean up. The assistant pro asked us if we were “good to close up on your own”. I don’t know, maybe he had a date that night. However, if my memory of him is correct I am not sure whoever his date was would have been all that upset if he had shown up late or at all for that matter. Boy, did he make a big mistake by leaving us. We of course said yes to him and were left alone to our own devices. It was getting dusky, and it was just The Cardinal, C $ and myself. As I had mentioned earlier, these two were already friends from school. They had also been working there for a few months longer than I had. The Cardinal took a look at the mountain of work we still had to do, threw his scrub brush into the bucket of murky water he had been using to clean clubs and turned to C $. “Cart wars?” was asked by the Cardinal which was met by an overly enthusiastic “yeahhhhh dude!” from C $. I had no idea what cart wars were. I knew they must involve carts and some sort of war but I had no idea just how accurate that guess was. Before I knew it, I was sitting shotgun in one of our shiny electric golfcarts bombing down a fairway heading to the driving range with C $ in his own cart in hot pursuit. Once we got to the range, all hell broke loose. It was basically high-speed bumper carts on grass that had become slick with evening dew. We locked up the brakes and did donuts down the side of the hill. We smashed into each other head-on and broadside. We raced and only stopped when we slammed into the fence that ran along the back of the range. We threw neon yellow range balls at each other at high speed. We jousted. All the while, laughing so hard that our stomachs ended up hurting. It got to the point where it was almost too dark to see so we decided to head back in. The carts were surprisingly not damaged. They may have had a few scratches and a couple small cracks but nothing too bad. We finished our work and headed home.

Most country clubs are closed on Mondays. This gives the grounds crews enough time to do a thorough once-over of the course with their equipment. Staff is allowed to come up to play golf as well. The driving range was closed. Aside from the grounds crews and some assorted staffies coming up to play, the place was deserted. Which meant it was strange when I received a call from the head pro at around 12 pm that day.

The Bird: “Hey, you uhhhh, you closed last night with _____ and _____, right? “
Me: “Yes. Yes, I did.”
The Bird: “K….. well, uhhh did you guys notice anyone coming in off the course that might have been drunk or looked like they were uhhh…. kinda…. well…. a little loopy or a little off?”
Me: “Nope. Everyone came in basically at the same time and I didn’t notice anything.”
The Bird: “Did anyone take a cart to go out after? Anyone say they wanted to use the range?”
Me: “…. hmm… ya know, not that I can remember.”

It was at that moment that my brain and central nervous system began to prepare for Defcon 4. My brain had noticed that the heart had started pumping harder than normal and it was getting reports from its intel department that the skin began to leak more perspiration than usual. It went into survival mode and frantically began to search for exactly what to say considering that no one could be so stupid as to not already know who the culprits of the apparent destruction of the driving range were. Excuses, explanations and escape protocols were instantly created, and the info was sent to the mouth, tongue and vocal cord department nearly instantaneously. Luckily for me, none were needed as my assumption about the intellectual capacity of my new boss was completely shattered when he said, “well, ok then. See you tomorrow” and hung up. I was floored. At 19 you are still very much a kid. You believe, wrongly, that most adults and especially adults in positions of authority have something going for them mentally. So, when I realized that I was working for the most unbelievably gullible man to ever exist, I had a hard time processing it.

The Cardinal was the first to call me and express how stupid The Bird was for believing that he, C $ and I had nothing to do with whatever had happened on the range. Which, by the way, we still didn’t know. We figured there may have been some plastic pieces from the carts we didn’t see the night before on the ground. We had no idea what we had done. The following day, we got to work and were asked to go see The Bird himself. Again, the same questions were asked and again the same answers were given. Because everyone was making such a big deal over what had happened at the range over the weekend, it was natural to want to go see. So, the three of us got into carts and headed off to look. There, right in front of us, was the by-product of our handy work. One entire side of the driving range looked like it had been a staging ground for a tank regiment. Think no-man’s land in Flanders circa 1917. “Hooo-leeeee shit” was all that The Cardinal could muster. C $ just laughed nervously and I stared wide eyed in disbelief to the amount of damage we had done to that ground. “Yo, we can never tell anyone this was us… this is like straight up vandalism and destruction of property shit.” C $ was right. This was straight up vandalism and destruction of property and if we had been found out, we would have been in a world of shit. We got closer to really get a good look at what we had done. We surveyed the ground like a bunch of skunks looking for ant hills. At the far end of the veritable wasteland of torn up grass, I saw what looked like a white piece of paper. Because in fact, it was a white piece of paper. I carefully made my way over to it and picked it up to take a look. My jaw dropped and all I could do was laugh. Apparently, in all the of the jostling that had taken place during the epic battle that was cart wars, a bank deposit slip, with my name clearly displayed right on the front, must have flown out of my pocket and landed on the ground. What a lucky break, right? Perhaps. I think it is more a testament to the absolute incompetence and nearly Forrest Gump-like intellects of the higher ups at that club. To not even do a close inspection of the area in question is ineptitude on a level that would make Basil Fawlty blush. Thank goodness I worked for clownbirds. I pocketed the slip after showing it to my two new co-workers and now accomplices and we headed back to work our shift. Nothing of the incident was ever mentioned again by any of the managers at the club and we were not questioned further. The assistant who had left us alone lied and said that he had stayed with us to close. We decided to go along with his story. He basically knew it was us who had destroyed a quarter of the driving range, but we had him dead to rights for leaving before he was supposed to. An uneasy peace existed between him and us for the rest of the season. Luckily, he was an intern and at the close of the year headed back to whatever school had sent him to us. For all intents and purposes, the matter was closed.

In the end, the course had to buy a few thousand dollars’ worth of sod, dig up the area that had been destroyed, flatten it out, lay the sod and then hook up sprinklers to keep the area from drying out. Members and their guests were still allowed to use the range but were told to try to shoot away from the area that had been eviscerated by our marauding carts. This was a pretty big deal, but it would pale in comparison to what was coming the following year. The season rolled along and eventually came to a close. Nothing else of note really went down that Summer or Fall. We all went our separate ways and said goodbye until the Spring. I had started working there mid-season so I only really had a good three months before the weather got cold enough that members stopped coming up to play. The following season rolled in, and we all got the call to return to duty in March. That season would be the one that brought about a scandal big enough that other country clubs made us the butt of their jokes for years to come. That particular scandal would also offer me the opportunity to rise in the ranks and get a deeper insight into the club, its membership, my fellow employees and the unbelievable amount of absolutely abhorrent shit that went down there on a nearly daily basis.

I wanted to start this series of chronicles off with an example of the kind of kids we were and the kind of dunces we worked for, and I think I have done a decent job. Next up, the scandal heard ’round Fairfield County, and its fallout. Stay tuned.

The Country Club Chronicles pt. 2 – One Hell of a First Week

The Country Club Chronicles – Intro

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When I was a young man, I worked at a country club. I was a “bag boy”. Which meant that my co-workers and I were in charge of the bag room. We would pull golf bags and stage them on golf carts for members when they came up to play. We would also clean their clubs upon completion of their rounds and put them back into the bag room. It was a tipping job, so the Summers were hot, long, labor-intensive but very lucrative. Eventually, I would rise to the illustrious rank of “afternoon starter.” Basically, the person who tells you when to tee off. This was not because of my bag room prowess, but because I was a totally besotted lout with the entirety of my twenties ahead of me to figure things out. That meant, that the heights that I aspired to were what would normally be reserved for bored retirees. Boy, did I waste a lot of time. Anyway, I will not name the club nor any of its members or staff in this or any future installment of my story. Not because I care about the club or want to protect the membership, but because a lot of the members are lawyers and if Better Call Saul has taught me anything; it’s that they’re an ornery bunch. I plan on explaining what the country club life was like for a lowly peon such as myself over the next few posts. We were privy to all sorts of juicy gossip, criminal incidents, scandals etc. In short, it was a wild place to work.

Again, I will not name the club as it still exists. However, it is in Fairfield County CT. Fairfield County is one of the wealthiest places in the country so good luck trying to figure out which club. There are a bunch. You can then imagine the membership was a veritable “who’s who” of local richies. Which is fine. Everyone is entitled to some fun regardless of their bank account. I am not going to dive too deeply into the politics of these places as that is not the purpose of these stories. Honestly, I was just thinking about some of the lunacy I witnessed at my time there and figured it’d be fun to write about. In the interest of full disclosure, I worked there nearly 20 years ago. So, some of the details are getting foggier with the passage of time and ever-increasing number of whiskey and sodas.

In thinking about how to start this series of posts, I had a difficult time figuring out in which order I should present the material. As a teacher, it is natural to me to want to set some background information before I get into the proverbial meat and potatoes of the subject. So that is what I will do. Let’s meet the cast of characters.

  1. Me. I come first because it’s my blog. Bag boy
  2. The Cardinal. One of my best friends to this day. Bag boy
  3. Mincent J. Narco. Friend. Bag boy.
  4. C $. Friend. Bag boy.
  5. Skinny. Friend, drug addict, brilliant. Bag boy.
  6. The Quiet Man. Friend, drug addict. Bag boy.
  7. The Bird. The head pro.
  8. The Second Bird. The guy who replaced the first bird.
  9. The Weasel. Assistant pro, bookie. His nickname at the time was literally “the weasel.”
  10. Spicoli. Assistant pro, California guy, one of the best bosses I’ve ever had. Universally loved.
  11. Hayseed. Assistant pro, southerner, good friend. I have never seen anyone drink as much as this guy and not need to go to the hospital.

First off you have to know a few things right off the bat. Any job that is a tipping gig is going to attract some absolute degenerates. Our men’s locker room attendant, most of the cooks in the kitchen, some of the servers and a couple of the bag room guys were all completely whacked out on Oxy. Once the tips dried up it became heroin. There was a guy who’d come to the club, park in the employee lot and sell Oxy and H out of his car to the assorted cadre of junkies. There would be a steady stream of kitchen guys and other employees that would head down to the lot and sit in his car for five or ten minutes and then hop out in much better moods than when they had hopped in. Nice, huh? We ourselves were not angels. We used to have a game where we would take a staff baseball cap, and everyone would write the name of whatever drug or booze they had on themselves or in their cars from the night before on a piece of scrap paper. We would then reach our hands in and whatever you pulled out was what you had to do. I think there was a “?” slip that meant you had to do a little of everything but thank God no one pulled it. The Quiet Man used to smoke crack in the staff bathroom in our cart barn (place where the golf carts are kept.) I remember watching Skinny nod off in the range-picking cart after snorting a little wax baggy of heroin. A lot of other substances and their abuses took place on that property day in and day out. Some by the members. I’ll get to that later.

If you have never been a member of a country club or even been to a country club as a guest, let me say that Caddy Shack isn’t too far off. Everyone that works at these places is a kiss-ass. They have to be. Were there members that we legitimately liked? Of course. Generally, that wasn’t the prevailing feeling. So, some of the times we were pleasant because we genuinely wanted to be. Most of the time we were just going through the motions of being a droog at a place that we legally wouldn’t have been allowed to be at without our uniform shirts and employee numbers.

The Members
Membership at these places all have one thing in common. Money. You have to be wealthy to afford the initiation fee and the mandatory fees each year which include dining and using the club’s facilities a certain number of times. I’ll never forget when I became the starter and had to log in rounds for the day. I was in charge of billing and a round of 18 with two carts for a member and three guests ran about $350. I was floored. These people were already spending bookoo bucks on just being members in the first place. It was at that moment that I realized how low on the socio-economic food chain I actually was. I sort of started hating these folks at that point. Pure jealousy. Along with a boatload of cash, you also need one of two things:


1. The necessity for a nice course / tennis facility. This is usually always for business purposes. It makes sense.
2. A complete lack of a personality. The members who were actually personable and funny were few and far between. Most of them were basically buying friends and a place to hang because left to their own devices, they probably wouldn’t make it work elsewhere. Also, there were a good number of folks who were members because their friends were. Let’s face it, joining a country club is like voluntarily heading back to high school. Not because you will learn anything or build a potential for a better future for yourself, but because you like the idea of an insular little hole that you can crawl into and be surrounded by moles of the same tax bracket.

As always, there are exceptions to every rule. Some of the members were genuinely fun, interesting and warm-hearted people. So, let’s catalog these folks now.

1. The Hedge Fund Guy – Usually young, either ex-frat guy OR science fair type with a young wife and either a baby on the way or a couple already crawling around. These guys usually can’t play golf or tennis all that well, but they really don’t have to. These are the guys who go out of their way to let the bag staff and basically anyone else under 40 that will listen know how “fucked up” they got last night. I never understood this. We were in our late teen’s early twenties and half of the staff had started their days or finished their nights doing Schedule 1 narcotics before these guys had even had their coffee. However, we had to pretend that they were totally badass because ya know, tips. I remember running into one of these guys at a bar once and we had a drink together. He then asked if I wanted to smoke weed. At the time, I didn’t smoke since I never really liked it. That being said, I thought it would be a cool story, so I said sure. We went to his Lexus, and he clumsily rolled a joint and we proceeded to smoke it. At that point, he went on to tell me that he was worth 7 million dollars. Good for you? I got out of there tout suite and headed back to my friends who proceeded to ask which one of us had been giving or receiving the oral sex. I guess they picked up that he was coming on to me. I certainly didn’t. I do recall him staying away from the club for a little while after that and going out of his way not to make eye contact with me when he returned. Maybe he did want some hanky panky but unfortunately for him I wasn’t giving off any “have at it, big fella” vibes to him that night. Anyway, these hedgies are wealthy, young and some of them are perpetually high or drunk. Kind of dangerous in a nerdy way. Would they tip? Yes. Sometimes big.

2. The Middle-Aged Family (with teenage kids) – One would have to assume that this was the natural progression from hedge fund youngin’ to middle aged golf enthusiast. However, I noticed that most of these folks were lawyers, doctors, business owners and CEO’s. These people were probably the most innocuous of the bunch and I understand why now. As a middle-aged man with a family myself, I simply don’t have the energy to be a jerk anymore. They would come up, play, be relatively pleasant to us and then head back to their enormous McMansions and drink bottles of wine that you can only get at auction. The issue with these folks was their kids. Some of the staff knew and went to school / hung out with their kids. This actually ended up working to my advantage. If I found out through the grapevine that their kids were nightmares, I would be the clean-cut, All-American boy scout they had always wanted. If their kids were little rockstars, then there wasn’t much I could do aside from simply existing. I, at 19, was a great contrast for them. So, when little Madison or Colton had fucked up royally at school or at home, they could look at them and then look at me and say, “well, Colton may have sodomized that muskrat to death after eating mushrooms he found on the bus, but at least he’s not this loser.” I learned how to be whatever the customer, in this case the membership, wanted at any given moment. I learned to how to work people. It was an invaluable education. Did they tip? Yes. Normally $2-5.

3. The Old Guard – Antique gentlemen and their antique wives with their antique ideas about how to treat the help. We were very much, “the help” to them. These folks had been members since the Star Spangle Banner was written and they made sure to let all of us know that. These members ranged from incredibly kind, to absolute dipshits from the farthest reaches of the dipshit jungle. I got along with these folks just fine. Again, they helped teach me how to work people. I was the grandson that didn’t call as much as they wanted. I was the guy who reminded them of themselves back when they were my age. I was also the guy who went out of his way to call every woman over 75 “Miss” on purpose. I was the darling of the geriatric set. However, I did see them treat a lot of staff members atrociously. So, I knew that I was essentially swimming with sharks every time I waded in the AARP waters. In the end, I never got bit. One old gentleman used go out of his way slip me a few hand-rolled cigars he’d buy on Arthur Ave. in the Bronx once a week. Here’s the thing; I didn’t smoke cigars. Again, I was whatever the member in front of me wanted. Did they tip? Rarely. Cigars and life-advice that was obsolete years before any of us we were born.

I could go on and on about the membership and their sub-groups. I could give a description of the facilities and grounds. I could tell you what the food was like. None of that would enhance the reading of these posts though. Maybe one day if I write a book about this time in my life, I will do a better job with the color commentary. Now, who’s ready for a series of tales of ruined lives, larceny, vandalism / destruction of property and other hilarities?! Next installment: Criminality. So, settle down, relax, get comfy and let’s cut deep into country club life. Also, if you are a member of a country club in Fairfield County CT, see if any of this rings a bell and if it does, maybe, just maybe I am talking about your club or dare I even say, you. Stay tuned.

The Country Club Chronicles – Intro

A Short One About the Heat

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Being a teacher in the late Spring means that you will have to deal with days where you and your students lose your body weight in sweat three time before lunch. Today, is one of those days. I really feel for my students today. They look like they showered, didn’t dry off, put their clothes on and came directly to school. I am allowing them to take it easy today. I am giving them as many water breaks as they need. I am allowing them to stand directly in front of the two fans I have in the room. Which is a gamble as some of them are stinky. I wouldn’t know but by the reactions of the students sitting downwind from them, some of them ought to invest in some deodorant.

These sorts of days make me nostalgic for my youth. In particular the 2nd grade. Ah, what lovely days those were! Days like today, in the upper 80’s with humidity as thick as a latte made with rubber cement. Days when we would go out for recess and come back in beat red, dripping with sweat and begging for water. Desperate for a drink in our second-floor classroom which had two operational windows. A classroom lorded over by a teacher who seemingly hated children. She tied one of my classmates to a chair with a jump rope once. Not as a joke, just because she was tired of his acting up. Yeah, real pyscho shit. On days like today, she would (again, not as a joke) deny us our pleas for water, smile at us from behind greasy glasses and then pour herself an iced tea the size of Andre the Giant’s leg. Filled with ice. Looked good. She would then explain that since we had done (insert innocuous second grade behavior) that we were not going to get water that day. It got to the point where we would save some of our juice boxes and hide them in our lunch in order to have a quick swig if we were to be denied water which was basically every time. I remember once, some of us laughed during prayer (it was an Episcopalian school) right before lunch when she was leading. She literally told us that she hoped we “choked on lunch” and stormed out of the room. Nice lady.

I have heard that she passed away a few years back. Which, I suppose is sad. She was an obviously messed-up person. I don’t know why she was as bitter and mean as she was and frankly, I hope she has found some rest. That being said, she was a total bitch. She scared the ever-living shit out of all of her students and made our lives a living hell. My Grandfather once put her in her place with a perfectly timed sarcastic chuckle. He was in very bad shape with cancer at the time and basically didn’t have the time to put up with anyone’s BS. His little chuckle and the look of, “are you serious, lady?” on his face shut her down immediately. After that, she didn’t bother me too much. She still went after our class but as for going after me individually, there was a definite cessation in hostilities. And I realize now that it was because she was a bully. When bullies are finally stood up to, especially publicly, they tend to wilt. Which is wonderful to watch. Taking anger out on anyone is a bad look. Taking it out on kids is downright sinister.

So, to my fellow teachers out there, let the kids get some damn water. So what if they actually just want to get out of class for a moment? Maybe you’re boring. Or maybe they want to talk to their friends. Or maybe they’re actually just friggin’ hot and need a drink. Or maybe you are like my second-grade teacher. If that’s the case; maybe think about a job where you don’t have to interact with kids / adults / any living thing. Maybe a nightwatchman at an abandoned steel mill. Just an idea.

A Short One About the Heat