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.