Imagine my confusion when the four golfers showed up to the first tee. First and foremost, they were old, sixties, maybe into their seventies, which for me at thirteen meant they were old codgers, fossils. Nothing over the first few holes led me to believe that I hadn't been duped in some way, by Chris and fate. The guys were hacks, maybe a par or two between all four of them in the first four holes. Naturally, at the time, I believed the only criterion for a good loop was if the golfer was a good golfer. The guy I caddied for certainly wasn't. He was short with white hair and chain-smoked un-filtered Pall Malls, tossing them on the wet grass when it was his turn to take a shot, then picking up the wet rag to inhale some more; this action, which frankly kind of disgusted me, took place often, as the guy needed several shots each hole just to reach the green.
I didn't want to say anything to Chris, because he was thoroughly enjoying the round, and besides, he was Chris, he knew things. So I just doggedly followed my golfer, not a mean guy by any definition, but not a real talkative, personable guy like a lot of the other, much younger, golfers I had caddied for. I raked traps, pulled pins, and found lost balls, waiting kind of anxiously for it all to click--why I should be so happy and enlightened caddying for these old coots. Picking up on any kind of subtlety, definitely without the aid of older brothers, is kind of out of the ken of a thirteen-year-old.
By the fourteenth hole I had pretty much given up on discovering the reason why this should be the loop of my life up to that point, and was only trying not to let the image of my golfer's too-low-crouch and mad lurch swing at the ball imprint itself too deeply into my mind, thus ruining any chances I would ever have to develop a smooth golf swing. But then, there on the fourteenth tee, tucked into an obscure corner of the golf course, something monumental happened, the reverberations of which still shudder through me, something which, when I think about it and tell it--as I used to tell it to my classes--is as distinct a marker for me as any other that separates innocence from experience, childhood from maturity, being clueless to beginning to get it--a rite of passage indeed.
As my golfer teed up his ball, crouched way low and began his wild, herky-jerky backswing, the guy Chris was caddying for farted kind of monstrously. I believe my golfer whiffed his shot entirely as his laughing fit commenced. The two old guys in the cart rocked the frail machine with their laughter, and probably added a fart or two themselves. Chris's golfer, the farter, laughed so hard at the result of his gaseous prank, he turned heart attack red, gagged for air, and fell down on all fours laughing or dying, for a while I couldn't tell which. One well-timed fart and at least five minutes of uncontrolled laughter from these legal and business paragons. Chris and I, at that curious age when our senses of humor were just beginning to see behind the horizon of fart humor, were kind of mystified; we looked at each other and smiled, but also looked confused: what the hell are these old guys doing laughing so hard about a fart that admittedly would have sent us howling a year ago, but now, isn't it all kind of juvenile (at least that's what I read in Chris's look and tried to match in the look I was giving him). Eventually the old guys controlled themselves, we finished eighteen holes, they paid us--not bad, but not great--and that was that. What the hell was that all about, I probably wondered myself to sleep for a good week afterwards.
Well, over the next few summers I caddied for those guys and their cronies many many times, in all sorts of combinations. They weren't as exciting to caddie for as the young hotshots, they didn't pay as well as some high-roller with guests to impress, and between the cigarette and fart fumes, being around them could be kind of noxious, but they were all great guys, a lot of fun, and as unpretentious as could be. Whenever I would be assigned their bags, I would kind of re-enact Chris's gleeful chanting. And of course, they started dying off. The farter died quickly one summer of cancer, and his ashes were famously scattered in the pond in front of the third green. My golfer, the fartee, I guess, died more slowly of throat cancer. He was scarce one summer, as the news of his sickness got around. But toward the end of the summer, as I attained the pinnacle of caddying in the club championship match (for a young hotshot who paid very well but was basically a jerk), I saw him again. Crowds would turn out to watch the championship finals match, and as we walked down the ninth hole, I looked over and saw the guy. He looked exactly like a guy who would be dead in six weeks from cancer. By then he had lost the ability to speak. After my hotshot golfer had hit his approach shot to the ninth hole, and as I loitered behind, retrieving and replacing his divot, suddenly I looked up and the old dying man, not laughing hysterically like someone had just farted in his backswing, but looking serious, but somehow happy to see me, was standing right by my bag, sticking out his hands to give me one of those two-handed handshakes. The old skinny guy gripped my hands firmly and shook them, giving me a watery look from his eyes that said something ineffable but clear, something which nearly thirty years later is just as untranslatable but just as clear and meaningful to me as it was back then.
That fart has come to symbolize for me the fact that life makes you older but you don't necessarily have to be older. Adulthood isn't completely serious. Old codgers can have as much fun if not more than thirteen-year-olds. Aging isn't all bad. Golf isn't really about the score. A well-timed fart is priceless, at any age.
For a bevy of reasons I've been thinking about this story all day, not the least of which is that today I attended the funeral of one of my best friends from when I was thirteen. I probably hadn't seen Mike since college, and as I sat there listening to the priest's homily, I thought of how Mike and I used to sit together at mass in high school and whisper irreverent jokes. I thought of how much he, as I, must have grown and changed in the twenty-five years since I knew him. I thought, too, of how little he might have changed, and laughed to myself at what funny things he might have whispered to me in church today, listening to his own eulogy.
T. Rex-Life's A Gas
