Knuckleheads Read online

  For a moment she rolls the revolting Cypress bottle in her hands as if she’s considering something novel that just occurred to her, then she dumps it into her cart and finishes sifting through the rest of the bin. Before she shuffles on, she leaves her plunder-bus at the curb and creeps across the front lawn toward the porch of the house she studied moments earlier.

  Daniel grabs your sleeve. “Dude,” he whispers, “we gotta stop her. She’s trespassing.”

  “So?’

  “She’s crossed the threshold from curb to yard. Anything can happen now. What if she breaks into the house and stabs someone?”

  You consider this, but don’t move. The woman steps quietly onto the porch.

  “Stop her,” Daniel hisses, but he doesn’t yell, and neither do you. She appears to move a few things around the porch, then grabs the handle of a jogging stroller, wheels it around, and pushes it down the stairs.

  “Yo, she’s stealing that,” Daniel says.

  “You don’t know that,” you say.

  “She just crept up to that porch and snatched it. Are you blind? That’s her, right there, pushing it down the walkway.”

  “Maybe she has a kid at home and she’s thinking of buying a new stroller, did you ever think of that? Maybe she just wants to test this one on the street, see if she likes the feel of it. A woman like her who pushes stuff around all the time, she’s probably a discerning consumer.”

  “A discerning consumer? Are you fucking kidding me? She stole your Pop Tarts. Now she’s stealing the stroller. She’s a thief.”

  Daniel’s right. There’s no third way here. The woman’s affixing the stroller to the front cart, weaving the yellow twine around the handle to secure it. It’s an expensive model, a status-stroller, sleek and triangular with a lightweight aluminum frame that’s collapsible for easy stowage when traveling. No way you could have afforded it when your kids were of stroller age. The family with the front porch will wake tomorrow and want to take their kid to the park, probably a wailing infant who needs to get outside, needs some time away from the house, and from Mommy who’s been nursing him for seven hours straight, and Daddy will volunteer for the job in order to keep his marriage afloat and he’ll pack the diaper bag, fill the sippy cup, get ready to earn some serious sensitive-male points with his wife and when he goes to garner the vanished stroller—whoops, oh boy—the recriminations will be loud and enduring because Mommy has told Daddy repeatedly not to leave the stroller on the porch, to store it in the garage because hasn’t he noticed stuff disappearing from their yard every once in a while? Little stuff like the snow shovel that one time in the winter, and whatever happened to the Frisbee?

  Yeah, he’ll say, but who’s cruel enough to steal a stroller? And who’s bold enough to venture all the way onto their porch?

  Once again, you minimized my concerns, she’ll say, you never take me seriously, and he’ll shout, Don’t make this a bigger deal than it is, you always blow everything out of proportion, and the baby will be wailing and the whole weekend will be ruined, and maybe their marriage too.

  “Do something,” Daniel says, because even though he’s the genius, you’re the muscle. That’s what makes your team work. He does his let-me-appeal-to-your-inner-weasel thing, and then you step forward with the papers, holding them with your meat-hook hand, your lead-pipe arm and GQ smile, and the subtle undertone of we just spent our whole afternoon talking to you and if you end up wasting our time maybe you shouldn’t be too confident about your legs or your jawbone or your windshield, and the deal closes and it’s time to start making reservations for the cruise.

  Daniel’s right. You should stop her because even though you don’t give a shit about that couple’s marriage—they’ll be fine with their too big house with the fake Victorian eaves and the satellite dish, and they’ll have a new stroller, a more chic model with an even lighter alloy by this afternoon—still, there’s the broken window theory to consider. If you don’t stop the woman from jacking the stroller, what will she steal next? Maybe, you’ll wake one morning and there will be empty space on the street where your car slept happily the night before.

  “Do something,” Daniel says again, almost whimpering now. At heart Daniel’s a wuss and if you don’t do something, there’s no way he will, but you don’t do anything, because the woman’s moving again with her rhythmic right-left shuffle push and the night is warm and calm, and the stroller affixed to the front cart looks like the sharp prow of a ship, and you’re thinking of the boat you’ll be on in two weeks, of the beer, of so much beer, and of the ocean unfolding, and there she goes, there she goes, cutting her way through the dark.

  SCRAMBLE

  THE SUMMER GORDON AND LENNIE CHRISTENED ME EUGENE was the summer Gordon was beautiful. His muscles were fresh and newly defined, miracles in the way muscles can only be the first time, when they surprise.

  He was slim and strong, his hair thick and dark. He carried thirty-pound golf bags casually, a bit disdainfully, as if they were schoolbooks. The skin on his face, and from his elbows through his hands, was the brown of wet beach-sand. Girls from our class pedaled their bicycles to his front porch in the early evenings and told him how many stuffed animals they still slept with, and how they liked to be held when they kissed.

  On a Monday night in August, he showed me an unrolled condom on the bookshelf in his bedroom. Used, he said.

  I wouldn’t see another used condom for seven years.

  That summer, I was as ugly as a fourteen-year-old can be, a sickening combination of short and pudgy, with limbs that were long and gangly. I looked like a potato an angry infant had jabbed toothpicks into for arms and legs. My head was oblong, my hair angled wrong and brittle, still cut by the half-drunk barber who’d once dated my mother. My teeth stuck out like thumbs, held in check by painful railroad tracks that cut my gums and glommed onto food-crumbs as if they had tentacles, infusing my breath with the stench of rotting vegetables. Horrible qualities for anybody, but excruciating for a kid so consistently horny, he walked around with a boner three or four times each hour.

  I had nowhere to put that boner, no idea at all what to do with it, and its nagging presence distracted and embarrassed me. I tried to hide it with long t-shirts or by offering three-quarters of my back during conversations. People thought I was rude, but I was just trying to be considerate, attempting to shield friends and strangers both from my rancid breath and the inappropriate bump in my boxers.

  Gordon and Lennie and I, and another dude named Horace, played a lot of cards that summer. Horace wasn’t Jewish and didn’t caddy because he had a job washing dishes in a deli that made dry-tasting sandwiches with too much meat. We gathered on the screened-in back-porch at Lennie’s house and his mother fed us Hostess cupcakes and off-brand potato chips and pitchers of fruit punch mixed from foil packets. She’d say, “How about some brownies? Or should I cook that homemade pizza you like, Len?” and he’d shout at her, “We’re good, Ma, for real. Just leave us alone.”

  We laughed at Lennie and told his mom to keep the food coming, which she did, so we ate a lot, if not well, and we grew even though we were burning roughly four million calories a day carrying golf bags. Because we worked at a country club with a lot of douchebag members—including Lennie’s parents who were members but not douchebags—we were obsessed with Matt Dillon’s cabana-boy role in The Flamingo Kid. We wanted to be self-assured and knowing like he was so girls and older married women would want to do us, even if Gordon was the only one who knew what doing anyone meant. Like Dillon, we wanted to be familiar with the slick universe of playing cards, wanted to be able to recognize when people who tried to scam us were cheating or bluffing, wanted to be able to shuffle decks with quick and practiced confidence. We played poker sometimes, but the money we made caddying felt too precious to risk losing—especially to each other—so mostly our game was spades. Gordon, the best player, was handicapped with me because I was the worst, and that made it fair against Lennie and Horace.


  If you could only bet one book, you had to proclaim you were betting the donger. It was silly and demeaning, but even though we didn’t actually wager money, or maybe because of that, the biggest sin anyone could make was to under-bet. That wasn’t playing by the rules of the cool, confident personas we were crafting for ourselves—being feckless and conservative was for the half-dead geezer-schmucks whose bags we carried—so if you absolutely had to bet only one book, you had to claim the donger, and then you had to unzip your pants and play the whole hand with your package hanging out beneath the table. This prospect caused obvious problems for me because every time Mrs. Ross asked if we wanted more food, which was every fifteen minutes, the sound of her voice caused me to pop a rod.

  I spent a lot of time in that house with my back turned to Lennie’s mother, who wore tight capris and bright flowered blouses over her water-balloon breasts and, fortunately, never seemed to notice my rudeness because she was enthralled by Gordon and the ripples in his shoulders. Still, because my strategy was to avoid at all costs the potential problems that could ensue from betting the donger, I never under-bet, I over-bet. I’d have a hand with worse than nothing and I’d wager three books and we’d get crushed and Gordon would glare at me and mutter, “Jesus, Eugene, what are you, retarded?”

  Now, two decades later, Gordon’s face is repulsive. He addresses the ball on the first tee and grimaces, looking pissed and vicious during his takeaway as he twists the over-engorged muscles in his back. I don’t understand how he retains any flexibility at all with his massive weightlifter’s build. He looks like a cartoon bad guy. His jaw’s still square, but his neck and shoulders are so thick his head is tiny in comparison, like a grapefruit on a gorilla. A hairless gorilla. With his bald dome and small, angry eyes, he could be a Neo-Nazi setting out with a lead-pipe to stalk the streets, but he’s only trying to hit a golf ball. He crushes it two-hundred-and-eighty yards down the middle of the fairway, which is roughly sixty yards farther than I’ve ever hit anything in my life. Lisa and Natalie, the two attractive women on the tee with us, applaud and nod as if they understand something significant, and Gordon claps me on the shoulder and says, “All right, partner, I played it safe. Go ahead and rip it.”

  Gordon’s clap on the shoulder is, in fact, a slap in the face. He knows I’ve never ripped anything. The asshole’s messing with me before I even start my round. He’s well aware that playing it safe is as much a part of my daily survival strategy as the trio of breath mints I still pop every half-hour, that the only bravado I’ve ever displayed was when we played spades and even that was counterfeit, the desperate pose of a faux maverick attempting to avoid an erection-related catastrophe. Yet here he is, taunting me when the two most beautiful women who’ve ever paid attention to me in the bleak history of me are actually watching me, focusing on me, actually caring about what my physical body is capable of doing.

  I muster the dignity necessary to attempt only a single practice swing, flex my back muscles as if I have some, and then drub the ball forty feet, a weak grounder to the right side, barely nudging past the ladies’ tee. Technically, it doesn’t matter how lousy my shot is because it’s a scramble tournament and we’ll only play the best of our four drives—I’ll just have to pick mine up—but I’m terrified Gordon will make a comment about how I just missed having to play a “dick-out” hole. A dick-out hole is an adult variant of our teenage card games. If you fail to get your drive past the ladies’ tee, you have to unzip and play the rest of the hole with your package jauntily swinging, but Gordon doesn’t say anything about that, just looks back with his shrunken monkey head and winks, and though I know his silence has less do with his growing up than with his not wanting to appear a total juvenile in front of two intelligent blond women in tight skirts with legs like race-horses, I think maybe I made the right decision in recruiting him for our team. This is the annual charity golf outing at my highly successful and hugely corporate law firm, and no squad I’ve ever previously been on has ever won so much as a raffle. Instead, my name has been associated with a slew of last-place finishes and once, a second-to-last, which actually felt worse because of how people congratulated me for it.

  Mostly my teams have sucked because I suck. I’m heavier than dead weight, a fossilized rock that drags anyone I play with deep into a pit of soul-sucking tar. Worse, with the random way the firm hooks up the foursomes, I’ve actually never been lucky enough to be slotted with anybody good. Except this year, I have no idea why, but somehow I got thrown in with Lisa, who played varsity at Northwestern, and Natalie whose father is a scratch handicap and senior partner and who wanted his daughter to be the next Nancy Lopez. That didn’t work out, but trust me, she still drums the Jesus out of the ball. Better luck, the other nebbish we were supposed to play with, Bob Horowitz—who’s only a slightly worse golfer than I am—apparently experienced an intimate moment with a deer tick on Martha’s Vineyard a couple weekends ago. We just found out yesterday he’s feverish and debilitated with early symptoms of Lyme’s Disease, so I called up Gordon who said he was busy, had “a lot of important shit to do, you know, but all right, Eugene, what the hell, I guess I owe you.”

  That long ago summer when my teeth were encased in metal, we were a year removed from our parents allowing our Bar Mitzvah money to kick-start personal savings accounts, ostensibly to teach us the value of money. We already valued money, however—we’d been born valuing it—and though we had no real place to spend what we had, we carried golf bags to augment our accounts. With the exception of Gordon, we had no girlfriends, and he never seemed to take his anywhere, just received them at his house like mail. Despite our Flamingo Kid aspirations, we had no need to buy anything, and no vision of wanting to purchase cars, college, or any other part of growing old we cared nothing about. Still, we loved the thrill of weekly sojourns to the bank to deposit our earnings and to watch our balances expand like a fat uncle’s waistline. We could earn eighteen dollars a bag, per loop, cash. If we carried two bags and pulled two loops, we could walk home with seventy-two dollars a day, plus tips if we were any good. A caddy like Gordon could bank five hundred bucks a week.

  I, on the other hand, was awful. I never got tips. Didn’t deserve them. I gave members the wrong clubs—a nine-iron when they asked for a six, and vice-versa. I had no clue about any distance from anything to anywhere and when it came to reading the undulations of greens, I was functionally illiterate. I forgot to pull pins and rake traps, made footprints in golfers’ putting lines and stood, twitchy and fidgeting, too uncomfortably close to them in the fairway when they were preparing their shots. I couldn’t have located a missing ball in the woods or high grass even if losing my virginity would have depended on it, but if there was a female golfer anywhere on the course—anywhere in the state, really—I could smell her.

  It didn’t matter if she were matronly, menopausal, grossly obese, or a fully robed Mennonite, my genitalia would respond in predictable fashion and, instead of looking for a ball in the woods or searching for the right place to stand, I would be looking for a tree to hide behind, or a way to shift the clubs from around my back to cover my arousal.

  It was this lack of focus that earned me my nickname. Because members didn’t know my name was Bruce, they’d try to garner my attention by calling me, at first politely, “Caddy, excuse me, Caddy,” then after two or three failed attempts to lure me from formulating a response to my burgeoning groin-crisis, they’d grow more strident. “Hey, you!” they’d yell. “What the hell are you doing?”

  After one round where the three of us—Gordon, who carried two bags, and Lennie and I who each hauled one—covered a foursome, and I got yelled at half-a-dozen times, Gordon, while counting his unheard-of fifteen-dollar tip, beckoned me, tipless, over. “I didn’t know you changed your name,” he said.

  “Me either,” I said, slightly to the side of him so he wouldn’t have to smell my breath.

  “With Goldbaum yelling, Hey, you! all day, he must think your nam
e’s Eugene. Get it? That you, short for Eugene?”

  “I get that you’re a bastard.”

  “Hey, Eugene,” Lennie called, showing me a half-folded Lincoln. “Check it out. Five-dollar tip.”

  “Fuck off,” I said.

  “You wish, Eugene,” Gordon said. “You wish, Eugene the Retard.”

  The charity the firm chose to receive the proceeds from the tournament this year provides catch-release nets to Latin-American fisherman so giant sea turtles who accidentally get trapped can theoretically crawl their way out. That kind of technology is what I need to get through the remainder of the round. We’re on the fifth hole and we’re already four under par and we’re going to win the tournament, but if I could find a way to crawl out, I would. I haven’t hit a single good shot. It’s been one embarrassing dub after another, huge splotchy divots and pinball ricochets off trees. Multiple splashes into ponds and creeks. My team has birdied every hole so far, yet, other than having recruited Gordon, I’m completely useless. Worse, to the two luscious women who no longer even bother to pay attention to me when I’m lining up my shots, it’s obvious I’m useless.