The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist: A Novel Read online

  The Hope is the only desert golf I play. I duck Phoenix and Tucson and don’t even do outings that would be lucrative in the Scottsdale area. Not in years. Not since I read this story in an in-flight magazine. It pointed out that there are seventeen different kinds of esses—your rattle esses—in North America and sixteen of the sumbitches live in Arizona.

  That info must be a great sales tool for real estate agents. In my wildest dreams I can’t imagine a sane man naming a major league team the Diamondbacks, although I guess it speeds up baseball.

  I played good that week. Swooped $108,000 for sixth place. I shot 67, 70, 65, 67, 70 for a total of 339. That didn’t exactly threaten Cheetah Farmer’s winning 332, but I liked the way I hit the ball, tee to green, plus I drove it off the planet.

  I realized on the practice range why I’d been losing distance lately. I was taking the club away too fast, straining. That’s a natural mistake you can slip into. First thing I did was tee it up higher so it would stay in the air longer. Next thing I did was widen my stance so my heels were about even with my shoulders. Better for balance. The last thing I did was the hardest part, and one of the hardest things to do in golf. Make yourself swing slow. You might as well try to teach a dog to stop barking. So every time I got over the ball on the tee I made myself think s-l-o-w, very s-l-o-w. Sometimes I even whispered it out loud to myself. Got some looks.

  It all worked, but you could still call it a minor miracle that I played as well as I did considering the amateur slugs I was paired with.

  The first day at Bermuda Dunes I drew geezer, codger, and gramp.

  The second day at Indian Wells I got Ed, Fred, and Dead.

  The third day at Tamarisk I had dot.com, dot.dumb, and dot.dick.

  The fourth day at PGA West I was even luckier. I found myself with the Chance brothers—Slim, Slight, and No.

  It made me think how just one time I’d like to draw me a six-handicapper who can play to a six, or a ten who can play to a ten. But what I always catch are guys who have the clothes, the big bag, and the newest mallets, but they couldn’t hit water if they fell out of a boat.

  It was No Chance who kept apologizing to me Saturday. One thing I pressed into my memory book was him saying, “I can play a lot better than this . . . but I never do.”

  THE PERMANENT residents of Palm Springs are every bit as scenic as the petrified forest.

  Most are skinny as one-irons and have better tans than beef jerky. They don’t walk, they shuffle. Which is why the place suffers its share of ridicule. It’s called the Official California Wax Museum, Heaven’s Parking Lot, God’s Waiting Room, and other endearing things. I figure somebody’s bound to come up with a drive-through funeral parlor there someday.

  But it wasn’t all golf in Palm Springs. If you know where to look, there are these fun-loving ladies out there. I’m talking about your rebuilt, over-forty, glitzed-up dolls. Your ladies who usually have a rich husband that’s crawled off and died, or he’s stone drunk at home, or he’s gone somewhere to seek relief from a light hook. I’m talking about your gold-plated sparklers in skimpy outfits who consider the evenings to be their playtime.

  They can be found in the hot-ticket hotel bars around the desert, but closer to old original Palm Springs than Indio. The best joints are White Cargo, Gilda’s, Hit or Mrs., and The Pre-Nup Lounge.

  I should caution that you need to steer-job your way clear of a joint called Fresh Horses. The name alone ought to be a tip-off, but it didn’t stop Jerry Grimes one night last year.

  Jerry said he’d never seen so many beautiful women under one roof in his whole life. The only trouble was, if you delved deeper into the subject, you found out they all had a dick and balls. Still, he confessed, there was this one blonde so gorgeous he almost went for it anyhow.

  On Wednesday night after the first round of the Hope, Buddy Stark and I investigated White Cargo.

  I wanted to find out if the name had anything to do with the old flick, see if it looked like a rubber plantation in the jungle with Hedy Lamarr hanging around.

  It didn’t look like that at all—the name must have meant something else. It was up to the brim with sequins and low-cut implants and bronze guys in pink blazers. Grown-ups. Two or three couples were dancing to music from the piano bar. People were jabbering around tables. The long stand-up bar was crowded. We nudged our way into the bar and ordered drinks while the jovial fat lady at the piano sang about how she guessed she’d travel on to Avalon, and then how you were nobody till somebody loved you, and then she launched into “I don’t know why I love you like I do . . . I don’t know why, I just do.”

  Next thing we knew we were being brushed up against by these two sequined stoves with store-bought racks, eye jobs, cocktail glasses in their hands, and hair that was still trying to be blonde in places.

  The one pressed against me said, “Me Tondelayo. Want to fuck?”

  She let out a big whiskey laugh.

  I looked at Buddy. He looked at me. We weren’t really in there hoping to get fixed up, we just wanted some laughs.

  I said to the doll, “You may have said that to the only person in here who knows who Tondelayo was. It was Hedy Lamarr’s name in the movie.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I love that name. The owner of this dive has no idea there was ever a movie called White Cargo. The asshole thinks he made it up . . . Tondelayo wants vodka.”

  I waved to the bartender, who came across like a shot with a vodka-rocks—the national drink of your stoves.

  With a nod my way, Buddy said, “Me Clarence, him Larry. We’re meeting Jeffrey and Dexter here.”

  “You’re full of shit,” mine said, turning to her running mate. “He’s full of shit. They’re pro golfers. This is Billy Bob Grooves.”

  “Bobby Joe,” I corrected her with a smile.

  “Whatever,” she said. “And you’re Buddy Stark.”

  “I try to be,” Buddy said.

  She said, “I’m Camilla . . . this is Gretchen.”

  Camilla handed me a huge emerald ring to shake.

  “You ladies follow golf?” I said.

  “Golf is my life,” Camilla said, and roared laughing again. “Actually, golf is my husband’s life. Jim would kill to be here with you two right now, the suck-up asshole. He has a business dinner tonight—ho, ho, ho. I do play some, and I usually go to the tournament. We’re members at Eldorado and Indian Wells. Oh . . . and Tamarisk. Jim plays with Jews there. We’re only here four months in the winter—never in the summer, thank God! We live in Saddle River, New Jersey. We’re members at Ridgewood.”

  “Nice course,” I said. “Tillinghast.”

  “Who has?”

  “The golf architect,” I said. “A. W. Tillinghast.”

  “Never met him.”

  “That’s probably because he died in 1942,” I said.

  “Terrific,” Camilla said, looking around the room.

  “He was one of the greats,” I said. “He did Winged Foot, where the Open is this year. Quaker Ridge, Somerset Hills . . . Brook Hollow.”

  She said, “Christ. Ask a question . . .”

  Buddy said, “What about you, Gretchen?”

  Gretchen said, “What about me what?”

  “Is golf your life?”

  “Yeah, right,” she said. Buddy might as well have asked her if she liked poor people.

  “Gretchen shops,” Camilla explained.

  Buddy said, “Well, it’s been a little bit of heaven, but me and Billy Bob were just leaving.”

  “Early tee time,” I said.

  Camilla said, “You can’t leave till you dance with me.”

  “Camilla!”

  That came from Gretchen, with a look that said they could do better than us in a homeless shelter.

  But Camilla tugged me onto the dance floor, where I was reminded that you never make contact with a glitzed-up doll in Palm Springs without first doing the feel-around test.

  I didn’t dance as much as I ju
st stood there with my arm around her back, listening to “When You’re Smiling,” while Camilla humped my leg and pretended to moan.

  That’s when I was presented with the opportunity to feel the ironworks inside her dress. Some kind of heavy, skintight elastic deal that held everything in—her waist, hips, butt. It was obvious that if you were crazy enough to unhinge that elastic thing, there’d be this great whooshing sound and suddenly you’d have an inflated raft on your hands.

  Call it a tourist tip.

  I led Camilla back to her vodka-rocks at the bar, gave Buddy a head signal, and we ran for our lives.

  5

  FLYING OVER ARIZONA AS HIGH up as the airline could take me—and being thankful the Skipper didn’t put wings on esses—I went home to enjoy a week off. Except I didn’t get to enjoy a week off because I wound up in a jackpot with women.

  The first thing that happened, Cheryl Haney, my current honey and possibly my next ex-wife-to-be, picked me up at DFW in a gold four-door Lexus I’d never seen before.

  Cheryl was a top real estate agent at Donald Hooper Realty, and she allowed that it had become too embarrassing to drive her clients around town to look

  at houses in her old ’84 Mercury. The Mercury had developed a recent tendency not to heat or cool very well, and it was starting to go clickity-clickity on occasion, not a good sign at all.

  So she’d put $500 and the Mercury down on the Lexus. Got a good deal on it, she said. The balance was only $52,000 and the dealer was carrying the note. The car was fully loaded—a sunroof and CD player were essential for her clients, people looking for houses to buy. It would be best if the balance on the Lexus was paid off as soon as possible, she informed me, because if she kept paying it off by the month it would cost $450,000 before she was done. That was based on the contract she’d signed with the dealer.

  I said $450,000 was an exaggeration, surely.

  It was, she said, but not by much.

  I said, “I wish your car dealer was my agent.”

  She said she’d looked several places for a practically new car and this was the best deal she’d found.

  “It’ll be a happy day for me,” she said, “when every car dealer is in Huntsville.”

  “On death row.”

  “No, I don’t want them to die. That lets them off too easy. I want them to live indoors for forty-five years with Big Leroy for a housewife.”

  I said, “What’s in it for me if I pay this thing off for you?”

  “What you been gettin’, baby,” she said with a little smile and a pat on my thigh.

  Cheryl is a smokin’ babe. She’s a spunky, blue-eyed divorcée in her middle thirties with a major championship body that’s all hers. She has long, dark blonde hair that she can wear different ways—piled up, swept back, ponytailed, Farrah Fawcetted.

  We’d been together two years, ever since I scooped her up during the Colonial because of what she was wearing, which was close to nothing, on a hot, sultry day—it was humid as everybody’s armpits.

  I liked the round button pinned next to her tournament badge on her flimsy top. It read MAKE AMERICA SAFE FOR ADULTERY. I liked her sophisticated manner of speaking at a table in the clubhouse with a group of people having cocktails. She managed to turn everything anybody said into a reference to fucking and sucking.

  She scored big with me with her aw-hell, go-anywhere, do-anything attitude, and the fact that she came with no kids, which is a huge plus today where your divorcees are concerned.

  We weren’t living together. Well, we did some when I was in town or when she made a rare appearance on the road with me, but we kept separate places in Fort Worth for various reasons of convenience.

  Her white stucco garden home was out in Ridglea on the West Side, the one she was awarded in her divorce from the stockbroker, “Talk Big Burt”—her name for him. Her place was in a cluster of other garden homes with shade trees and crawling vines and little ponds all around, but it was sort of dark and I felt like I was down in a hole when I was there. And besides that I’m a South Side person, born and raised, as I’ve mentioned.

  I’ve always had friends from every side of town, but it was an established social rule in Fort Worth that if you didn’t come from the West Side or South Side, or didn’t live on the West Side or South Side or Southwest Side of town, you’d probably be better off if you just went ahead and killed yourself.

  My speckled brick townhouse—two stories, two bedrooms, two and a half baths, fireplace—was on Bellaire Drive South. It’s well located if you want to play golf at Mira Vista or Colonial, or drive around the TCU campus to look at shapely adorables out walking or jogging, or go buy a stack of Swanson’s frozen chicken pot pies at Tom Thumb, a combination food emporium and soccer moms jamboree. The Tom Thumb is on Hulen, a drag strip that used to be a city street.

  Cheryl’s favorite thing about my place was cable TV in every room, including the master bath. When I was home I didn’t want to miss any old movies, and Cheryl never met a talk show she didn’t like. She very much liked the talk shows where the guests were fat and loud white trash—they made her proud to be a Republican.

  MY TOWNHOUSE was the one I’d wound up with eight years ago in my divorce from Terri Adams, my second ex-wife. Terri was a receptionist in a bank when we met. She was sitting at her desk in the lobby with nothing to do but wait for some guy to ask her out to lunch. I was the guy.

  The lunch lasted so long we both got drunk and she got fired. I was also drunk enough to decide that she looked like Meg Ryan’s long-lost twin sister. I suspect that even in Terri’s drunken state she thought I looked like Son of Meal Ticket.

  We were married about a year and Terri even took up golf herself out at Mira Vista, but one day she decided to start looking around bars and clubs for someone who didn’t travel as much as I did and somebody who might even look more like the Marlboro Man’s younger brother. That’s when she met Cowboy Leon. She was so taken with him, she believed him when he boasted that he was a wealthy rancher out around Weatherford.

  But after a year Terri was greatly saddened to find out that Cowboy Leon wasn’t the wealthy rancher himself—he was the wealthy rancher’s ranchhouse sitter and caretaker. Terri found this out one day when the real rancher showed up and sold the ranch out from under them and they were forced to move out.

  They tried to stay on with the new owner but the new owner said he didn’t need Cowboy Leon and Terri to ride herd on the condominiums he planned to build on the property as far as the eye could see. Cowboy Leon couldn’t find anything better to do than start selling used cars, and Terri said, “I didn’t sign up for this shit.” She divorced him and moved back to Fort Worth and went to work for Red Taggert, the jake-leg criminal lawyer downtown who likes to keep killers and armed robbers out of jail. That’s where she still is.

  It’s been my good fortune that Terri not only kept the Mira Vista club membership with me paying the monthly bills, but occasionally she needs a loan because Cliff Doggett, the muscled-up slug who now lives with her in the apartment she rents on Sunset Terrace, doesn’t do much but drink beer at Hooters. I was only home long enough to buy the Lexus for Cheryl and throw away a load of junk mail and catalogs when I heard from Terri.

  “I figured I’d catch you at home this week,” she said on the phone, “knowing how you feel about the esses in Arizona.”

  “How are you, Terri? How many murderers did Red put back on the street this week?”

  “That’s not fair. Red Taggert believes every person has a right to the best legal defense available. I really hate to ask you for this, you’ve always been so generous . . .”

  “How much this time, Terri—and what for?” I said.

  “I really feel bad about having to ask you for money, Bobby Joe.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do too. I wish I had somebody else to turn to, but Cliff keeps having the darndest luck with jobs . . .”

  “He sure seems to,” I said.

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p; “He’s up for a job right now with the fire department.”

  “Good,” I said. “He’ll be real valuable to the fire department if a blaze ever breaks out at Hooters.”

  “That’s not nice, Bobby Joe. Cliff’s a good person. He’s just looking for his proper niche in life—and you ought to be glad he’s a gentle soul who don’t beat me up or anything.”

  I said, “I am glad he doesn’t beat you up, Terri, because if he did, I’d have to bury a five-iron in his forehead—and trust Red Taggert to get me off. How much this time?”

  “They say it’ll cost $4,000.”

  “What will?”

  “The surgery.”

  “What surgery?”

  “My mother has to have to her appendix out.”

  When I stopped snickering, I said, “Terri, you need to be more creative. I paid for your mother’s appendix operation four years ago.”

  “It’s come back.”

  “It’s what?” I snickered again.

  “This is not funny,” she said. “Either it’s come back or they took out the wrong thing the first time, I don’t know. All I know is, she has a problem with her insurance, and she has these x-rays that show she still has her appendix, and her doctor says it has to come out before it grows a head and four legs.”

  “You’re making this up, Terri. Tell the truth.”

  “Bobby Joe, if I wanted to con you out of money, don’t you think I could come up with something better than my mother needs to have her goddamn appendix out twice? Jesus!”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “This is awful good.”

  She said, “I’ll be happy to show you the x-rays!”

  I told her not to bother, the check was in the mail.

  A DAY later I received an urgent phone call from Alleene Simmons, my first ex-wife. Cheryl answered the phone that time and said she’d clean forgotten it must be Ex-Wives Week in Fort Worth—we ought to be flying a flag or some fucking thing.