“I’ll never make it, Fred.”
“You’ll make it.”
“Shit. Haven’t you heard the rumors? Captain Larson is retiring in June. Beckworth is going to be the new top dog at Wilshire, and I’m going to Seventy-seventh Street–Niggerland, U.S.A. And you, Beckworth’s golf avatar and fair-haired boy, are going to Vice, a nice assignment for a cunt-hound. I have this on very good authority, Freddy.”
I couldn’t meet Wacky’s eyes. I had heard the rumors, and credited them. I started thinking of stratagems I could use to keep Beckworth from transferring Wacky, then suddenly realized I was supposed to meet Beckworth at seven o’clock that morning at Fox Hills for a lesson. I dropped my bag to the ground in disgust. “Wacky?” I said.
“Yes, Fred?”
“Sometimes you make me wish that _I_ were the drunk and the fuck-up in this partnership.”
“Will you elaborate on that?”
“No.”
* * *
The driving range was deserted. Wacky and I dug our stash of shag balls out of their hiding place in a hollowed-out tree trunk and settled in to practice. Wacky warmed up by chugalugging a half pint of bourbon, while I did deep knee bends and jumping jacks. I started out hitting 7 irons–one seventy with a slight fade. Not good. I shifted my stance, corrected the fade and gained an additional ten yards in the process. I was working toward my optimum when Wacky grabbed my elbow and hissed at me: “Freddy, psst, Freddy!”
I slammed the head of my club into the dirt at my feet and pulled loose from Wacky. “What the fuck is wrong now?”
Wacky pointed to a man and woman arguing nearby on the putting green. The man was tall and fat, with a stomach like an avocado. He had wild reddish-brown hair and a nose as long as my arm. There was an appealing ethnic roguishness to him, broad laughter lines around his mouth, his whole face spelling out fiftyfive years of good-natured conniving. The woman was about thirty, and obese–probably close to two-seventy-five. She bore the man’s long nose and reddish hair, then did him one better by sporting a distinct downy mustache. I groaned. Wacky was only nominally interested in women, and fat ones were the only kind that aroused him. He pulled a fresh half pint from his back pocket and took a long pull, then pointed to the couple and said, “Do you know who that _is_, Freddy?”
“Yeah. It’s a fat woman.”
“Not the tomato, Freddy. The old guy. It’s Big Sid Weinberg. He’s the guy who produced _Bride of the Sea Monster_, remember? We saw it at the Westlake. You went bananas for that blond with the big tits?”
“Yeah. And?”
“And I’m gonna get his autograph, then I’m gonna sell him ‘Constituency of the Dead’ for his next picture.”
I groaned again. Wacky was a horror-movie fanatic, and “Constituency of the Dead” was his attempt to capture Hollywood’s monster madness in prose. In his poem, there was a world of the dead, existing concurrent with the real world, but invisible to us. The inhabitants of this world were all wonder addicts, because they had all been murdered. I considered it one of his poorer efforts.
Wacky waggled his eyebrows at me. “One thing, partner,” he said, “one thing I promise.”
“What’s that?”
“When I’m a big-time Hollywood screenwriter I’ll never highhat you.”
I laughed: “Watch out, Wack. Hollywood producers are notorious slit-heels. Go for the daughter instead. Maybe you can marry into the family.” Wacky laughed, and trotted away, while I returned to the blessed solitude of golf.
I was at it for over an hour, savoring the mystical union that takes place when you know that you’re a gifted practitioner of something much greater than yourself. I was crunching threehundred-yard drives with fluid regularity when I gradually became aware of eyes boring into my back. I stopped in mid-swing and turned around to face my intruder. It was Big Sid Weinberg. He was lumbering toward me almost feverishly, right hand extended. Taken aback, I extended mine reflexively, and we exchanged names in a mutual bone-crusher. “Sid Weinberg,” he said.
“Fred Underhill,” I said.
Still grasping my hand, Weinberg eyed me up and down like a choice piece of meat. “You’re a six, but you can’t putt, right?”