LOB BUDDHA

The Bronx

1997

           Hoping a long walk on a bitterly cold afternoon would numb my migraine, I rummaged through my medicine cabinet, ran tap water in a glass silted with toothpaste residue, and gulped half a dozen aspirin. In my bedroom, I donned woolen socks and long underwear. Snaring a Mets stocking cap from a wooden peg in the hallway, I tugged it over my head and clomped downstairs in boots unworn for years.

            In the kitchen I scraped leftover meatloaf and mushrooms into a salad bowl and watched Spike inhale pasty gobs of it with quick jerks of his muscular neck. I attached a metal clip to his collar as he lapped his water dish dry. To clear his snout, he arched his back and did a full body shimmy, causing his leash to writhe on the floor like a dying snake. 

            After twice refusing a nappy woolen vest I urged on him, he minced down the icy front porch steps, lowered his head and all but towed me to the grounds crew gate of Van Skyler Golf Club. My hands were hot and damp in my gloves and my heart was banging in my ribs on arrival. Unable to remember if I'd taken my blood pressure medication that morning, I shrugged it off. It wasn’t long life I wanted at the moment – just less headache.

     I pulled an icy padlock from its hasp and Spike put his front paws on the grounds crew gate until it opened wide enough for him to squeeze through. Back again on what he considered his turf, the golf course, he bounded and spun,  marked a pair of oaks on the edges of the sixth fairway and cantered over the crest of a hill toward the sixth green.

    A brindled pit bull displaced by the arrest of a neighborhood drug dealer –or so, at least, I'd persuaded myself – Spike introduced himself to me one mild spring evening behind the golf course snack bar. He was bone-thin and mangy and seemed ashamed. I took to feeding him tuna melt scraps and withered hot dogs at course closing time and in a week or two, he sported a shiny coat, and even a bit of a strut.

   We were well-matched. I was indifferent to slather and he wasn’t the demonstrative type. He preferred almost any leftovers to high-end dog food. I appreciated his understated protectiveness on the dicey Bronx Streets. Attentive rather than aggressive, he tilted his head toward anyone suspected of harboring a predatory instinct and took a genial disinterest in everyone else. He didn’t bark at neighbors or cars and, evenings, unless the weather was fierce, lolled around on my covered front porch eyeing the birds in my front yard and gnawing my worn-out golf shoes and flip flops to shreds. On cold nights he snoozed by a big radiator in the front hall, barring the door with his snout lest I try to slip out without him.

 Our walk began in a frigid tranquility. The sky was clear and blue and the fairway grasses were icy and crisp underfoot. Sparrows shivered in the denuded bushes. Small ponds and drainage ditches – working class water hazards when the course is in play – were frozen solid. Bunkers were limned with gritty snow. Blackened shapes of ice scabbed the bottoms of sandtraps.

We'd been on the grounds for maybe ten minutes when Spike dashed back, scurrying low, ears pinned back on his heavy skull. I’m completely deaf and had no idea what had scared him until I got a whiff of the toxic smoke. Initially, I urged him toward the stink, angry and prepared to set him on whoever had torched yet one more stolen car on our golf course. Luckily, better sense returned about the same time he recovered his dignity and his nerve. He was leaning too hard and hurting my shoulder; as we approached the fire, I got down on one knee to make clear to him that we were no longer in the initial heedless attack mode.

Once I saw the sparks in the heavy smoke I tugged him into the rough, the tree line, toward a pair of hemlocks. About seventy yards out, I hoisted a heavy spruce limb and scuttled under its protective canopy, dragging Spike behind me. Through an opening in the branches I watched blue flames lick the surfaces of a dark-colored vehicle, a Jeep, I would learn. Behind the flames I made out three figures and looked at my watch. It was 3:45. 
    Whenever the wind shifted our direction I spread the fingers of one gloved hand across my nose and lips and shoved the other hand in a coat pocket. Pouting over my change of heart, Spike lowered his head on his paws and trembled with affronted compliance. 
    The car burned a persimmon red. And whenever the air went still, as it did occasionally, a swarm of glowing debris ascended into the cloudless sky. Twenty feet up, glittery sparks darkened to coal colored spume. Ankles stiffening up and toes tingling from squatting under the tree, I scanned a nearby gravel service road, waiting impatiently for the cops.

   Maybe I should have retraced my steps as far as Broadway. I might have scribbled on a napkin at Nick’s Original Pizza, and Nick, or anybody tending his oven, would have recited my scrawl to a 9-1-1 operator. I have since argued that I had good reasons for doing things my way. I didn’t want the arsonists to slip away and didn’t want to miss the excitement of their arrest. And, of course, I was afraid of being seen and shot. 

What longtime New Yorkers have been known to refer to the Seattleization of the city was years in the future and city streets still pulsed with rage and surprise. Cattywumpus police cruisers, their doors flung open, were a common sight. Curbside beatdowns were, in all boroughs, a source of entertainment, stimulation and intimidation.

The streetlamps were routinely shot out to deepen the shadows behind my neighborhood supermarket. On a clear evening from the sidewalks out front you could squint back toward a cinderblock building and make out assorted leather jackets draped over open car doors, then human shapes in football jerseys and do-rags, Snap-On tools belted at the waist of young boys and men. Word was that neighborhood kids tall enough to see over a dashboard and nimble enough to run like hell were recruited to steal high-end cars in Westchester. My barber claimed an experienced crew could reduce a new Mercedes to few lengths of steel and cartilage in an hour flat. Come daylight, he claimed, fenders and bumpers and bucket seats were loaded into graffiti spattered vans and trucks, then driven up or down the Major Deegan Expressway to squalid warehouses and fenced chop shops.

Squatting under the tree and watching that Jeep burn, I thought, steal it, warehouse it, ship it in crates to Africa for reassembly; strip it, ditch it for another. Why burn on a brutally cold afternoon, risk the cops – and on our best green at that? Having more time to mull and speculate than I wanted, I wondered if maybe somebody’s girlfriend had been refused a ride home, making the firing up of a blowtorch a matter of honor. It was also possible, of course, that the owner was just being punished for removing a sound system and carrying it in for the night. A property-based resentment is a force to be reckoned with, even in today's, tamer New York. You can bleed or die up here – especially if you’re young – for flaunting or protecting something – anything really – in the thick of so much want and desire.

Van Skyler Golf Club is the oldest public golf course in the country and from it's broken lockers and dusty closets I’ve squirreled away over three hundred photos of the good old days. More than a dozen scrapbooks now in my quietly determined custody establish that, among other things, Mayors Jimmy Walker and Fiorello La Guardia made golf shots here. I’ve got a decent likeness of Abe Rothstein, mugging it up for the boys in the newsroom, gnawing a cigar almost as big as a billyclub. There’s a hokey press agent photo of Harry Houdini, golf bag on one shoulder, dangling a pair of handcuffs from which he’d presumably escaped, grinning at a pair of overly abashed beat cops.

Cardinals, archbishops judges, rabbis, hotel brokers, aldermen, pipe fitters, doormen, building supers, numbers runners, precinct honchos, jockeys, detectives, bellboys, altar boys, busboys, flyboys, and short order cooks. Armies of goofballs, cads, cons and holy men have played here – or tried to. Paunchy men in wide neckties, hefty baldies arms draped over the pale shoulders of their arm candy bimbos. Babe Ruth whiffed and chunked here. I’ve got Tony Lazzeri next to a stolid Lou Gehrig. My personal favorite, I've got to say, is is an image of the young Mick, Mickey Mantle, big beery grin, cigarette pack like an epaulette under a plain white tee shirt. Scrawled on the photo's backing is the claim that, on the day it was taken, fueled by “an unknown number of beers,” Mantle drove our first green, then as now, three hundred sixty-five yards away—a feat that would have been accomplished with a wooden driver, probably persimmon. I did see Mick hit a couple of bombs. I do believe the claim.

         After World War II fringe neighborhoods were leveled and paved. Parkways were widened so that the hordes of forward-looking suburbanites could get in and out of the city faster. Van Skyler Golf Club was hacked up and reconfigured to accommodate commuters. You could, as the old guys once did, curse the legendary Robert Moses for bifurcating and compressing the old course, or do as recent generations have done, make the best of our stubbed layout,  imperfectly embedded in fifteen-hundred acre Van Skyler Park. Nothing about our enclosed course is intact, uniform or routine. Our fencing is makeshift, rusty and decrepit, ripped away in places and patched with rotting plywood, truck tire and rope.

The Bronx being the Bronx, and our fencing being what it is, the course is permeable. A round here might be –has been – disrupted by a low-budget wedding reception, a fishing party, the deflowering of neighborhood girl, a mugging, a holdup, a ten dollar blow job, an ad hoc trail bike rally, a memorial or a baptismal picnic. There’s a bird sanctuary athwart our back nine, and come golf season, afternoon smell of chicken or roasting plantains can be enjoyed on any fairway. 

Not all of us have current mailing addresses or know how to punch a low five iron through the trees. Our makeshift fencing gets stomped for firewood and burned up at ephemeral homeless camps that spring up near the rusting railroad tracks that once transported Bobby Jones here. When that happens, unwashed men and women with little or no knowledge of golf emerge from the reeds to traverse our fairways, sometimes trailing garbage bags swollen with found balls to sell back to our golfers. Some of these merchants are running from street gangs, others ducking outstanding warrants, still others escaping pasts they've forgotten and distorted. When times are hard and dumpsters empty, the ubiquitous and unwary Canadian Geese that waddle our fairways end up on makeshift spits. Chilly evenings, I’ve smelled the rich meat and counted as many as a dozen men and women gnawing and warming themselves by smoky fires. The train tracks are rusty and overgrown and from another era. They're overgrown and surrounded, at least in warm weather, by unkempt wildflower gardens and urban wilderness. There are blackberries and bitter raspberries growing back there, and bright birds to flutter and feast among them. I should add that these rusty tracks are not to be confused with subways. A Number One train down the spine of Manhattan is just a meandering walk through a dicey section of the park. Eight minutes from the clubhouse.

**

Back to the car fire. By four in that afternoon Spike was shivering from the cold, my knees were icy and stiff, and the cops still hadn’t showed. And I wondered if maybe the arsonists were cops or friends of cops. How else to explain the lack of any official response to the smoke, or why the firebugs hadn't high-tailed it? The sun dipped white and orange behind a copse of beeches. Two hundred feet aloft, a  steady wind urged the acrid fumes north toward Yonkers, ever higher and bluer. My headache was better, but my lungs were raw. 
Abruptly a fourth figure emerged from the a smoky curtain, bounding up the wall of a steep sand trap. He stuffed his hands in the pockets of a gigantic sweatshirt and swaggered unceremoniously away from the fire. Three other punks followed him. One I remember being short and wide. The smallest was thin with long arms. Warmed by their toxic blaze, they didn't rush but moseyed off like boy scouts on a nature hike. Periodically, one or two even meandered up into the trees found patches of snow and ice and chucked snowballs at the others.

         I watched them go, aware that having crossed the seventh fairway they’d have to either trust the ice on Goosescum Pond or walk a semicircle around it. They’d skirt the empty golf course parking lot and pass the locked and boarded up clubhouse, Scaling a low fence there they'd descend into a playground an find themselves inside the park. The pewter-colored slides and swings would be too cold to divert them. If they had money, they’d walk Broadway for a slice and a soda, or maybe a hot chocolate. Fed and warm again, they might head down to the Village looking for girls to trash talk or vulnerable people to mug or punch for money. And why pay a fare when, at the top of those cement steps ascending to the nearest elevated subway platform, were turnstiles that could be cranked backwards, across those lean thighs, trains to opportunity every twelve minutes, courtesy the Metropolitan Transit Authority?

        As the arsonists faded into gray of the evening I staggered from under the tree and struggled to straighten my legs. My tongue was swollen, my mouth tasted of paint, and my legs felt like they’d been nailed to my hips. But my headache was gone and, as I whacked recalcitrant joints with gloved hands to get blood moving, it occurred to me that as a younger or warmer man I'd have considered a shortcut to Broadway where chances were good I would intercept and get a lineup-worthy look at the fire bugs. But my fingertips burned from the cold and I found it hard to believe in the cops or a society that wanted to reduce crime. Spike sneezed and shivered and we trudged home.

On the way I imagined a frigid black night, a big tow truck with a rack of white halogen lights, the hoisting and transporting of the fire-blackened Jeep carcass to a police lot in Midtown, there to accumulate ice and grit until its owner phoned (probably repeatedly). Eventually, there’d be a photo session, multiple conversations with clerks and insurance agents. Cabs would be hailed and insurance rates would creep up again in all the boroughs of the city.

        About ten that night the snow started falling and accumulated for the better part of three days, burying the city under more than twenty inches. My burning lungs of the afternoon morphed into a nasty flu and I scarcely left the house for two weeks. I was still half sick when my wife and I flew off to Orlando so she could consult a pair of esteemed oncologists and the two of us could make good on a promise to treat our stepdaughter to a day at Disneyworld.

         As Dorte went weak and ancient, the car fire’s importance in the scheme of things faded away. That said, I do seem to remember a cluster of early dandelions around the edges of a sand trap adjacent to the green where the car was torched. Van Skyler head pro Ralph Lessard would have you believe that I've concocted a memory of these flowers as an embellishment—a little greeting card comfort against the disquiet we all felt, years later, when the grounds crew unearthed coffee-brown human bones no more than fifty feet from where the Jeep was torched. Nevermind Lessard. Every gravesite deserves some flowers, however imaginary. Those dandelions were a brilliant, lemony yellow.

         A few days after the two bodies were exhumed it dawned on me that there just might be a connection between the car fire and the gristly remains. I walked to the local precinct house and asked for paper and pen and scribbled a few notes about what I'd seen. Owing to the huge blizzard, the car fire could be dated. Somebody enterprising somewhere turned up a police report stating that a pair of shovelheads had been discovered in the charred remains of the burned Jeep. Not everybody was impressed by a possible link between shovels and dead bodies, though. That it’s all but impossible to dig even a shallow grave in frozen ground was pointed out early on.

I wasn't about to be placated. Was there any sort of a connection between the fire and the bodies? Because, if there was, I scribbled furiously, and if the Jeep was used to transport the corpses, then the so-called “person of interest” – then being held in court-ordered custody – Edward P. Rehnquist – couldn’t possibly be their murderer because he didn’t drive or have friends other than me and, arguably, Ralph Lessard. And no, I scrawled, my saying so wasn't occasioned by a desire to protect a pal. After all, I was a kind of cop myself.

   My assertion elicited sniggering and raised eyebrows, but I shrugged it off; I didn’t care about winning the respect of cops. Whoever they’d been, those poor souls, I scribbled, they’d been interred on my watch, in my back yard, so to say. I felt a responsibility for them that winks and smirks would not dissolve. My little tirade proved good for a cup of cool and very sour coffee.

    Once I promised them not to play private eye hero the cops turned back to how much it bothered them that I hadn’t reported the fire the day it happened. Neck and face no doubt red, I scrawled for them to explain to me why there’d been no police or fire response to all that flame and smoke on such a clear and frigid evening. They shrugged again, thanked me for my interest, said they'd be in touch, and offered me a ride home for dinner. Smoldering, I walked.

         To my considerable surprise, the next day the New York Post published an unflattering photo of me over a story about a crusty, deaf golf starter at Vanny –me – who’d all but accused New York’s Finest of laziness or corruption or both. Two days later, police sent car service to my front door and I attended a big powwow in a yellow-painted room smelling of disinfectant and roach spray. Constantly coming and going that morning were half a dozen women in drab suits, toting file folders in their pale hands. Post reporters, ostentatious and seedy, bristled with truculent eagerness to defend the interests of the common people. A pert redheaded woman with the department sat beside me and signed that in her view the hearing was entirely damage control. Her instructions were to keep me abreast of what was being said; and she predicted, correctly, that it wouldn't be all that much. Assorted speakers reminded everybody how cold it had been that Sunday afternoon and how stressed the department had been. There'd been a shot cop on the Lower East Side, a multiple stabbing in Harlem, a bodega holdup in Bushwick and a big warehouse fire with smoke-related injuries in Long Island City. A stomach flu epidemic had reduced the numbers of cops on the street.

         Next a couple of portly men in too-snug sports coats read from texts about budget constraints, communication protocols and sluggish response times. Better dressed and younger men and women took turns reminding everyone that new technologies had since been put in place. Look at the graph on page seven, one tall man droned, waving a report. Emergency response times were improving in all the boroughs—most dramatically in the Bronx – and for two years running. On and on they went in the overheated room until the impulse to assign blame gave way to weary postures of professionally expressed regret and dutifully acknowledged responsibility. My interpreter got up to visit the bathroom so I absently thumbed through some papers on the table beside me.

  I was mulling insurance claim copies and a police report; in a letter certainly never intended for me, I read that the Jeep owner’s losses included scientific books and a briefcase filled with papers. The owner was listed as an agricultural chemist from North Carolina. He'd driven to the city by himself, stayed two nights in an Upper West Side hotel, and only discovered that his car had been stolen on the morning that he was to have started his drive home. Before I could learn more an angry man in a tweed jacket tapped me on the shoulder and pointed at my reading material. Giving over the papers, I reached for a pen in my pocket and wrote the Jeep owner’s name on the back of a detective's business card. Just for a lark.

About then the bigwigs and the reporters left the room and a pair of detectives pressed me to remember what the thieves had been wearing. Did I recall anything that might prove useful? I'd been under the tree a long time, I wrote, and would never forget how none of the arsonists hurried or looked back or bore the slightest resemblance to Ed Elk, aka, Edward P. Rehnquist, aka, Lob Buddha, the homeless golfer then being detained and considered a person of interest. Ed should be turned loose, I volunteered. Cops and the DA should stop pumping him with truth serums and designer drugs and let him be. He was lost in his own world, maybe, but he was not a killer.

         In the hall outside, the tiresome founder of the Guardian Angels, Curtis Sliwa, clapped me on the back as if he, too, were deaf, and we were known to be the best of friends. On rain dampened steps outside, Al Sharpton mugged into a bouquet of microphones and scolded listeners for being inattentive to “multiple incidents of shoddy police work” in the South Bronx, particularly where people of color were the victims.

        Two days later I was brought up short by yet another Post article claiming that Edward P. Rehnquist, the "troubled homeless" man “detained as a person of interest" was said to have "a longstanding relationship with both deceased.” I urged Ralph Lessard, to phone the reporter and to learn whatever he could about those so-called relationships. Lessard claimed he left several messages and his calls were never returned. Another dead end. 

What was Ed capable of or what had he been capable of at moments in his life? For a time, I grappled with the always noxious rediscovery of how little we really know about the people we like to think we know quite well.

The next day police released the names of the deceased and, after an initial shock, I began to fret about becoming a person of interest myself.

**

I was born Joseph Terrence Shawky, in Firefly Hollow, West Virginia, the only son of the docile, big-boned Margaret O’Connell and Martin Timothy Shawky, a lugubrious heavy equipment mechanic who claimed kinship to the great Sam Snead.

         Pretty much all I ever knew about the dispute was that Sam denied daddy’s claim, while daddy and a couple relatives never got shut of it. Daddy was an inward man, prone to resentments and slights maybe, dreamy and troubled, no doubt, but not, I think, the liar Sam and others made him out to be. Mama stood by daddy, out of wifely loyalty, I now think. Once I saw her shake her head and characterize the controversy as “naught but a succotash of ol’ time sin, religion and hillbilly snobbery.” Later, when I pressed her to elaborate, she denied having said anything of the kind. Me, I never grasped daddy’s sense of having been deprived by Sam of some higher standing in the human community. I introduce the controversy here only because, if it hadn’t been for daddy’s obsession with Sam, I’d never have been introduced to golf at such an early age and never, for better and worse, become the man I am.

         I was five or six when daddy sawed down some old mismatched golf clubs, snagged a fistful of water-logged balls, and dug a trench under some thick bushes to provide me with access to a country club a ten minute walk from our cabin. He told me I should crawl through the opening and keep up in the trees whenever play got heavy. I was to run and hide as necessary but to watch other people through the trees and whack away at my stained golf balls and see if I couldn’t get better at making the ball go where it should than Sammy Snead. A tall order, mama chided daddy at the dinner table one night, for a little guy with a missing front tooth whose ears were hopelessly different sizes. Like any father-loving son, I suppose, I was happy to have a challenging mission and took hard to golf. For a couple of years some big men on the grounds crew caught and ran me off, but I liked to scurry and hide and was by nature more devious and smart-mouthed than timid. One morning a trio of sweaty men marched me into a dark shed where they laughed with bad teeth and drank from mysterious bottles. After reading me the riot act they inserted my arm through a golf bag strap, called me “caddy,” and escorted me to a dirt-floored shack where a group of older boys practiced their tormenting skills on me. Mama got half my earnings and made me bigger lunches. She also urged me to hide a coffee can of my own money where daddy wouldn't find it and I did. Suddenly, I was allowed to walk through the front gate and even play the course for free on Monday mornings. I was a good putter from the start and within a month I'd won my first dollar from an older kid. Knowing mama hated gambling, I got a second can and hid my sinful income under a tree stump.

   Mama always held that there was an unpublished eleventh commandment that read, “Thou shalt not commit self pity nor accept pity from others.” I’m not as sure as she was that there is a good Lord tallying sins against eleven commandments, but I emphatically support her view that it’s a kind of karmic disaster to seek out or enjoy any human pity – not to be confused with the comfort which we all crave and need at times. I bring this up here because when I was fourteen daddy took a new job and moved us to Anderson, Indiana where I almost immediately took sick with bacterial meningitis and went stone deaf in a deep and fevered sleep. Since then, there have been good things I never got to hear and bad and inane things I've been able to avoid. In life, the good and bad things, I think, tend to even out – or maybe – and I do hope – turn eventually to some unforeseeable good. Of course I could be wrong and believe what daddy would call a lot of malarkey. What I don't think I could be mistaken about, though, is that those who persuade themselves they’ve experienced more bad than good in life tend to quit on other folks and to drift into lives of bitter friendlessness. A friend of mine said that if there's any silver lining to the fact that we all have to die, it must be that in dying, we finally get to leave behind so many millions injuring themselves with self pity
   My sister Bea stops short of claiming my deafness was God’s will, but she will readily tell you that I never listened when I could hear. Bea and I aren’t what you would call close, though we’re close enough to suit our respective selves, I suppose. Mama was a meticulous keeper of records and awards and scrapbooks, while daddy was a bit of a braggart. I inherited from each. A steamer trunk in my attic contains, among other items, a couple dozen yellowing newspaper stories about a young man who found local fame as a “tragically handicapped” amateur golfer. The “tragically handicapped” vexed me like a chigger bite for a time, but I never let it erode the pleasure I took from golf.

         When the move to Indiana didn’t bring sustained improvements to the Shawky family fortune and daddy took to drinking too heavy, I was urged to apprentice to the printing trade. It was in the order of things in those days; blind people sold brooms door-to-door and deaf people worked in clamorous printing plants. I learned to melt scrap lead and to “pour pigs,” but I was unhappy and restless in a printing plant. One spring morning I left mama a few dollars and hitchhiked to Chicago, where I got work washing and repairing golf clubs at a famous country club, not to be named here. I sent a few bucks home when times were good, befriended waiters and attendants, and spent many hours grooving my putting stroke on a practice green fifty steps from the pro shop.

         Concerning my first marriage I'll only say that shortly before I turned thirty, my wife Maddy, a piano player and singer whose luscious lips I’d learned to read all too well, informed me that she couldn’t live with my clowning and my silences any longer and was leaving me for a man named Zeke, a dental supply salesman and part-time sheriff. It was my fault she’d been carrying on behind my back, she insisted. Not only could I never hear how beautifully she sang, but a double shot of whiskey with a coffee chaser was no substitute for a breakfast; most women, she went on, did want more of a marriage than low end contraceptive foam and a decent humping—and, what's more, they were entitled to more than an occasional box of cheap chocolates as a dividend for their favors. Right, I signed, furiously, knowing of Zeke’s background, like maybe he could deliver a discounted teeth cleaning and a fast ride in a rebuilt police cruiser. I wasn’t much fun to yell at, so Maddy sat out on the front porch swing to wait for the arrival of her rent-a-pistol Romeo. When they drove off, I tossed back another double and made my regular afternoon tee time.

         I was a callow young fool and I hope that Maddy's happier now. She was a sneak with a flinty little heart, so I don't wish her happiness all that hard or often. Fortunately, her departure emboldened me. She wasn’t gone a week when I drained a fifty-footer on the first hole and rolled in an even longer birdie putt on eighteen. Over mint juleps in the kitchen that week it occurred to me that, while my game wasn’t pinpoint accurate or long enough for the tour, I was the best putter I’d ever seen and I ought to get out there and rub some elbows and see if I could make money by putting.

       Life comes with an assignment to change or suffer fading away. You can get tense and claustrophobic trying to hang on to whatever it is you sense you’re losing – because you’re always losing something – or you can rouse your inner snake, wiggle a little harder and pull clear of what doesn’t fit you like it once did. A day or two after those mint juleps I crawled from the dead skin of my inbred caution and good sense and slithered raw for the promised land of Vegas in search of autonomy and easy money.

         My sister Bea holds I became the putter I did as a way of proving to daddy that not all the game was lost on me. I haven’t read as many self-help psychology books as Bea has, but I decidedly reject her analysis. The fact is, that like most golfers eventually do, at least before they can be called ardent, I developed an aversion to hard work and routine. I became the putter I did, partly by design and partly as a natural consequence of wondering just how far a man could escape the numbness of the so-called "workplace.”

         Don't forget back then television was black and white and gas was thirty-five cents a gallon. Golf tournaments were named for cities or courses. Galleries were much smaller and professional competitors ceaselessly conspired to wring a little more from the tight-fisted golf equipment companies who sponsored them. Prize money was paltry by today’s standards and many good players hoping to catch a better bounce or bite next week thought nothing of driving thirty hours straight and eatng meals at diners near cheap motels. Tour caddies drove battered station wagons from tournament to tournament.

         My putting showmanship schtick got its biggest boost when Mack Shubansky, a trick shot artist who went by Mack the Slice, arranged for me to sub for him at about a dozen clinics in Nevada and California. He was hoping to honor his contracts with promoters and preserve his modest place in the greater scheme of things while he underwent major surgery for the heart ailment that I'm sorry to say claimed him on the operating table.

         Overwhelmed to think I was obliged to entertain with little more than a putter and a pocket full of golf balls, I hired cheerleaders and prom queens to read the corny little scripts I wrote myself. Initially my act consisted of making a lot of putts, at times wearing a see-through blindfold. On long off season nights I messed around with hatchets, sharp knives and ball placements and taught myself to make a couple of deformed Wilson Staffs hop and wobble into the cup with a frequency that amazed even me. A Lithuanian magician in New Orleans tutored me in the art of misdirection until I could persuasively make balls vanish and from thin air snatch packets of wooden tees from knotted up golf gloves. With practice and balloon-sleeved cardigans I could transform tees into matches and use them to light and relight my ubiquitous stogies. By trial and error I learned when to grin and bow, when to puff, how to pace my act, and how to confront and intimidate hecklers into shutting up or putting me for money. A girlfriend wrote me press releases, describing me as “the Joe E. Brown” of golf. These I tweaked and regularly mailed to local weekly newspapers in need of columns of type to separate used car and grocery ads.

         My "winnings" spiked significantly only when caddies pressed the pros who employed them to seek me out for putting lessons. After some serious effort to improve putting strokes I urged my "students" to “pressure proof” their gains by betting on themselves, against me. Learning when to miss putts that I didn’t need to make while trying to get them close made me a better putter; that’s about as close to a trade secret as I have to share.

         Whenever a money putt dropped, I grinned, looked up to the heavens, and sympathized with my opponents. Soon wherever I went I was "Lucky Joey." Of course, like a handful of golfers, the more I practiced the luckier I became. When my back hurt or it got too dark or rainy for putting practice, I read about optics, soils and drainage patterns. I studied grasses, dimple patterns on balls, and methods of building, irrigating and mowing greens. Maybe the most important thing I taught myself – especially as the bets got bigger – was to give my opponents opportunities to imagine themselves back in a match they were losing. Eventually, once I had the better part of the money an opponent thought he could afford to lose, my stroke faltered and my opponent, so long as he’d been sporting enough, won back a little of his losses. That I’m still around at all, I attribute to inheriting my mother’s slow heart rate and her merciful and generous disposition. My urge to win I owe, no doubt, to daddy.

Daddy died before I won much money, having been predeceased by mama. Sister Bea and I buried daddy in Woodlawn Cemetery and later sold his house. She took her share of the inheritance to Glendale, north of Los Angeles, in order to be close to some Rosicrucians she admired. I invested in a new set of, yes, Hogan irons, a tooled leather golf bag and a diamond studded money clip. I paid cash for a Cadillac El Dorado convertible, the same color as my bag, then drove all night to a tournament in Sarasota. On a Saturday at the US Open later that year I won twelve hundred dollars and fifty-odd drink chits from the owner of a local strip club. On Sunday, I peeled away thirty five hundred more from his half brother, before distributing the drink chits to local caddies whose players hadn't made the cut.

         I remembered a grizzled old caddy named Vaughn in Terre Haute and on the Monday two weeks after daddy passed, I wired him enough money to have daddy’s grave heaped with twelve dozen red roses and a card stating that on that particular weekend his loving and ever-grateful Joey had earned more money with a golf ball than either Snead or Hogan. A photo of that flowery mound hangs near a window in my kitchen, here in the Bronx, faded, but tastefully framed.

The next summer on a windy course near Lake Michigan I won ten grand from a plumbing contractor friend of Mayor Daly’s. Over a big dinner I was quietly advised to leave town late on a Sunday night rather than stay over into Monday as I usually did. Things, alas, were already getting out of hand. Occasionally my opponents ran out of cash but refused to admit it until they lost money that they didn’t have. At the center of a crowd grown too large for my liking in Pacific Palisades, I won a three-room cabin outside Big Bear, in the mountains north of LA. Later that season I dropped a twenty-footer in Baltimore and became the owner of a two year-old race horse named Sugar E. Goo. That horse cost me close to fifteen grand in vet bills before dying of pneumonia. I cried the day he was put down and resolved from then on to stay away from race tracks.

         Next spring after the Masters I won seventy grand from a prominent Reagan backer with silver mining interests in the Sierras, and I lifted my ball from the cup absolutely convinced that, for that moment at least, I was the best putter alive. I grinned, gesturing for anyone in the gallery to walk out onto the putting surface and challenge me. Everybody laughed and took half a step back. My vanquished opponent bowed, stepped away, and offered a sort of genuflection. Though I didn’t know it as I strutted around that putting green, I look back and think the easiest and best, if not the most remunerative days of my career, were already behind me. My egoism had gone as far as it could go and my drug use was nipping at my ankles.

My decline was both embarrassing and tortuous. One morning I woke up and looked in the mirror. I'd been allowing defeated opponents to pimp and bring me new meat. Those greasy cons blabbed about my decline to anyone who would listen. They bet small amounts on their chumps, while anonymous partners placed larger bets on me.

Disappearing faster than paneled station wagons and engraved Zippos were the days when dark-skinned Charlie Sifford tossed his smoldering cigars in elite country club fairway grasses. He used to knock a sand wedge stiff, stoop down and bite that cigar again, muttering a curse for every vexed and offended gallery gawker. Televisions were going color and corporate sponsors went hard at purging the tour of undesirables. Bibles began to outnumber rulebooks and unsavory types like yours truly were maneuvered to the sidelines. People were paid to keep me and other undesirables out of bright lights and away from important social events.

          Hard-living tour players, not here to be named, responded to the Zeitgeist by morphing into repenting and awakening Christians. Serial adulterers, including some of the best then on tour, took pains to be photographed with cynical wives at unbearable dinners and family counseling sessions. On tour, staged fun supplanted impromptu parties and drinking fests. Snubbed or ignored by so many whose livelihoods I'd boosted, I sinned repeatedly against mama's eleventh commandment. I took to chasing morning coffee with over-the-counter antacids, snorted cocaine and drank. Oakland teamsters got sore at me for reasons nobody could make clear and one day I found an anonymous cryptic note from “the vigilantes” taped to my locker. Determined not to be driven from my hard won place in the world by thugs or grinning dweebs in leisure suits, I bought handguns and rented post office boxes in Tahoe and Tampa. Hotel clerks hand-delivered letters from sponsors, tour officials and attorneys. I wasn't going gentle into the good night that the powers that be had in mind for me, and there came a time when I retained lawyers of my own: fat, blustery men who relished shouting.

On a trial leave of absence from the tour I added a glassy addition to a house I owned outside Reno. There, I fell in with a handful of chain-smoking card players, sun-parched men with a penchant for aviator sunglasses, cowboy shirts, string ties, green tinted windows in tricked-out Lincolns, silver plated pistols and mother-of-pearl cigarette holders. For these guys, any health-related and doctor-ordered break from the casinos merely meant a walk down the hall to watch karate demonstrations or Elvis impersonators in another part of the building, then back to the games. Half a dozen of these guys eventually accepted the notion that natural light and fresh air were important to longevity and that longevity was important to winning the big one what would change everything. The fees for golf and putting lessons I gave them, and the pocket money I won from them on desert practice greens, they recouped at cards that night or the next. I was in semi-retirement, rehearsing the real deal.

         By the time I went back out again, word was that I was some kind of an aging, palsied Wild Bill Hickok, or maybe a samurai or knight with a secret wound. It was being bandied about that my skills had lapsed, that my nerves were failing. This was undoubtedly true. But it was not as true as was widely hoped, and the people who bet heavily against me took losses that surprised them, heavier in come cases than others. That booze and coke had stolen much of the pleasure I took from my putting skills was true, but my decline as a putter was overstated.

Even today there are photographic likenesses of me in locker rooms or on clubhouse walls. I’m not the front-and-center winner holding up the trophy or the check, nor am I the defeated player at his elbow, struggling to smile graciously for the camera. I'm at the edge of the frame, a row, maybe even two behind the corporate blowhards and the country club bigwigs. Generally, the person closest to me is a man who very recently lost a large sum of money to me. I routinely paid staff and freelance photographers to make excuses to include me whenever possible and to provide extra prints and in some cases even file the negatives away. At the height of my fame and paranoia I wanted visual records of me posing with defeated opponents who might find a reason to kill me. In the event I ever turned up dead, I wanted the cops to find and investigate every person in every known photograph of me. I deluded myself, of course, that the cops would ever be so interested.

Toward the end I got a good price for my renovated glass house and bought a sprawling ranch house with a big pool and met and goofed with screen legends and began to enjoy, not putting, but playing golf again. I clowned a little with Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, tried to help Bing Crosby with his putting, and (putting one-handed) won sums from Sammy Davis, Jr. I could show you a photo of me with Dean Martin, the flash-bulb catching him none too happily surrendering the keys to a baby blue Oldsmobile convertible. Three weeks later I'm chagrinned to admit that I gave that car (together with an irretrievable piece of my heart) to a niece of Peter Sellers who, I later learned, lied about being deaf and about being related to the great comic as well.

         Time has marched on and these days about the only time my past arises is when Vanny pro Ralph Lessard downs too many and insists to his hangers on that I’m still feared and ducked—and that if I wanted to I could name dates and show unredeemed IOUs from great golfers now on the so called Champion's Tour. More than once he’s put me on the spot and I’ve embarrassed him – or at least tried to.

When Lessard aced a par three on our back nine on his birthday not all that long back, he closed the snack bar and invited friends and regulars to a party. By dark when I belatedly showed up he was deep in the hard stuff, characterizing the late Dr. Chiruppa Pargaa (about whom you will read more) as the reincarnation of the Buddha and me as Pargaa’s mentor, disciple and sidekick. When Lessard saw me trying to slink off, he predicted that a new generation of putters was trying to track me down in order to try their luck against the legendary Lucky Shawky. Put on the spot and compelled by a roomful of drunks to respond in some way I scribbled that it was possible that I had been the world’s best putter once or twice or for a few days, but that we all knew that the world was a vast place and that peaks were brief and declines were long. My hands were now palsied and my eyesight failing. I didn’t mind the decay of my skills, I lied, because I’d grown too old to remember much about the old days, some of which were anything but good.

         Every so often someone shows up around here and it proves impossible to shake him. On a good day I might plead poverty and a bad back, putt a starry-eyed challenger briefly for up to ten dollars, coach him a little, and refund his losses. Obnoxious challengers walk away with up to forty dollars and an exaggerated idea of his real skills; experience shows that the best way to punish a fool is to dangerously inflate his notions of how good he is, pat him on the back, and send him out to the jungle of those who also contend.

          Ralph Lessard and I go back. These days he's my benefactor and boss, so I’m usually patient with him. What I do for my modest golf starter salary is a little of this and a little of that and a lot of sitting in my cart on the first tee in a haze of cigar smoke – beat cop, traffic coordinator, occasional arbiter, and everybody’s stone-deaf avuncular skeptic, quick with a dismissive chortle.

         Van Skyler is leased from the New York City Parks Department and is managed by Pan American Golf Properties, Inc. PAGPRO, as it’s known, manages more than 163 courses, 41 of which it owns outright. If Lessard’s got his facts straight, sometime during the impoverished John Lindsey administration, a handful of out of town execs, lawyers, and assorted bean counters sat down with Parks Department lifers and inked a deal city golfers have lived and suffered with ever since.

         I won’t pretend I understand corporations or finance, city politics. I haven't read a complete paragraph of my employee’s manual, but I do know how to needle a golfer and how to chip and putt. And by now I may know these troubled, acres of urban forest, grass and decaying detritus—Van Skyler Golf Course—better than anyone. Wait; let me qualify that.

I may know the daylight golf course better than anyone, but when the sun is gone and golfers can no longer see to putt, and when the last of our penny-pinching twilight playing diehards have given up and the last vehicle has pulled out of our parking lot, our fairways revert to tree-lined alleys and starlit meadows and Van Skyler becomes a dark enchanted or accursed forest of urban wilderness that may be best known to Edward P. Rehnquist, aka, Ed Elk, aka, Lob Buddha Six O.


                                 **

        One summer morning I arrived early and unlocked the clubhouse, deactivated the alarm, and powered up the air conditioning. After pouring water in the coffee maker so that the cook could gulp a cup before confronting the morning rush of breakfasting golfers, I went out to the cart shed. Gathering up the flags that had been removed from our greens the night before, I strapped them like a sheaf of spears to the back of my cart. Spike trotted over, hopped up beside me and we zipped off to insert each pin in its designated cup.

         On my morning route I scanned the fairways for a five iron reported lost the day before. To my surprise I discovered it in the hands of a formidable looking man with an unkempt beard. He was hitting some very good shots with it, "standing on it" in the parlance of the time. Fascinated by the swing and skills I grabbed Spike by the collar to prevent him from going into his run ‘em off mode and steered the cart into the shadow of a nearby white oak tree.

         Mud soiled the seat and knees of his ill-fitting trousers, but our interloper was hitting one very good shot after another to our eighth green. It takes a good golfer to fly a steep trap and then hold a sloped green from two hundred yards out, but he was doing it consistently with a club visibly too short for him. While I’d seen players with comparable swings and ball striking skills, I’d never observed such fluency at Van Skyler. All the same he reminded me of a character in a low- budget werewolf movie, familiar to me from the trashy late night television movies my late wife Dorte favored. Spike may have barked at one point because the homeless golfer dropped the club and ran for a metal fence about thirty yards away. He reached a clump of thick bushes and turned back to see if we planned to press our pursuit. By then Spike was more interested in a fidgety squirrel on the burl of a nearby tree. I zipped over to retrieve the abandoned club. With the dog trotting behind me I made a beeline for the first tee where more than a dozen golfers would be waiting and eager to begin their early morning rounds.

          Once I thought about it I realized it wasn't the first time I'd seen this odd character. It was just that his skills with that five iron imbued him with a real life, a heft, solidity, a back story. He was tall and broad-shouldered. His brown hair had been hacked off near his ears and an unkempt beard grew in reddish tufts along the sides of his neck and throat. The rough beard and the way he lumbered off rather than ran reminded me of a bull elk. I may have been the first to refer to him as "Elk Man," a Vanny sobriquet that he may never wholly shake.

          Before I'd seen him wield that middle iron there had been reports of a scary guy standing in the shadows, under some trees, watching our golfers without comment. His ruddy beard and blank faced vigilance worried our women players. Over time, he came to seem less menacing – so much so that our beery snackbar crowd began ascribing to him mystical powers. An Elk Man sighting was said to be a harbinger of a birdie, a double bogey, even a hole in one. The more unresponsive he was to what turned into occasional overtures from well meaning golfers, the more mascot-like he became. People left apples and sandwiches in places he was known to frequent, even cigars wrapped in five dollar bills. When summer gave way to cooler days and nights some players near his size left him sweaters and shoes. In the rain I saw him making his way through trees sporting expensive golf umbrellas.

         Once other golfers began to see him swing and practice, interest in and speculation about his history accelerated. That considerable, even formidable, golf skills are not acquired by the long-term deranged or the utterly impoverished, was not lost on many Vanny regulars. Where had the Elk Man come from? What misfortunes had brought him to Van Skyler? How did he avoid the neighborhood punks who ran in jackal packs and beat the lame and the hapless into stupors for a few bucks or simply out of boredom? Since we spotted him only in bearable weather, we wondered if he migrated south in winter, and if not, how he stayed dry and warm when winter came to the Northeast.

         Not long after I'd first watched him take those practice swings, but before Ed Elk sightings became all but ubiquitous, I pulled a worn but respectable-looking Wilson Staff seven iron from a barrel of unclaimed clubs and leaned it against a tree near where he'd made his escape. With the club I left a note that read, “a gift, yours to keep, from the man and the dog in the golf cart.” The next morning, when I made my rounds to replace the pins, the club was gone, as was my note. I felt oddly happy.

         Corky Douglas owns luxury cars, winters in Florida and Arizona, plays top of the line clubs, smokes good cigars, and is a Yankee season ticket holder. But he looks a long time for any stray golf ball and never buys a sleeve of new balls in the pro shop, preferring instead to play found balls, never mind how grayed or scuffed. One day I saw him stowing handfuls of new-looking balls in his bag. When, using my hands, I marveled that he’d splurged on new balls he laughed and shook his head, and pointed toward the Sawmill Parkway. Near the eighth tee, he said, exaggerating movements with his mouth, the goofy guy, the Elk Man, was selling quality balls through a hole in the fence.

       Watching me motor toward him in the cart, the Elk Man chucked all his wares in a stained shopping bag and disappeared into the scrub. Before I left for home that evening, I fetched one of my favorite putters from my locker and leaned it against the fence near the opening where he’d been selling the balls. This time, I left a more elaborate note.

“My name is Joe Shawky. I am the starter here. In case you've tried to call out to me you should know that I am deaf and don’t talk. I left you the seven iron from our lost and found. I hope you enjoy this putter. This section of torn fence will have to be repaired, but if you bring newish found balls to our pro shop in the morning I’ll urge my boss to give you a little pocket money for them. I am a hired employee obliged to protect the golf course’s interests. However, I learned to play on a course where I was a trespasser and have a soft heart for any outsider, especially one as skilled as you are. The clubhouse opens at 6:00 and the first tee time is 6:30. Provided you’re discreet, and respect our golfers –and in particular do your best to avoid scaring the women – my dog and I will leave you in peace and I'll do whatever I can behind the scenes to see that you’re not bothered. If you ever get in a tight spot and there's something I might do, leave a message for me at the golf shop. But please don't ogle the women.”

         The next morning, it being late in the golf season, the fairways glowed with silver dew. Approaching the seventh green, I saw a jumble of footprints amid little dark paths made by golf balls that, having been hit to the green, rolled and came to a stop. I noted that the ball marks had been carefully repaired and the balls fetched, but not putted. I thought of the putter I’d just given the Elk Man and wondered why he hadn’t put it to use.

         A few yards up the fairway I found the area from which he'd hit those seven irons. Divots had been fastidiously replaced. Nearby was the putter, broken in two pieces. I'd won thousands of dollars with that perfectly balanced instrument and in some fit of middle-aged emotionalism had bequeathed it to some goofball who's snapped it in two. Angry at him for breaking the putter and at myself for being a sentimental old fool, I picked up the pieces and headed back to the first tee to dispatch the day's first foursome.