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.