The Caddy Yard

The Shorehaven Golf and Country Club overlooked Long Island Sound and its tidal marshes. It was an exclusive protectorate for the privileged and their children, mostly people who had clambered up enough rungs on the economic ladder to become members. The club was just a few miles away from the housing project where I grew up in small, crowded rooms together with my seven brothers and sisters, but could have been in another world. I made a daily trip between the two extremes, and in many ways the golf course with its well-manicured, open spaces and glistening vistas of the Sound, became a refuge not only for the wealthy but also for me.

I look at an imaginary snapshot of myself as a kid, moving between those two worlds. Was that me, crew cut and wearing a faded t-shirt and worn Ked high tops? The boy I saw in the photo stared back like he doesn’t recognize me, trying to figure out who I am, as though he never saw me before. 

I carved my initials into the weathered clapboard of the caddy house in nineteen-fifty-eight, alongside those of my brothers Joe, Dickie and John. I was ten going on eleven.  There was never any question as to whether or not I would join them in the caddy yard when I was old enough, and as soon as the spring sun dried out the golf course, a part of my childhood ended. I had seen a brochure for a camp on Candlewood Lake and harbored dreams of spending my summers there as a Boy Scout.  I imagined myself dressed in a well pressed uniform, with a blue cap and a colored scarf, learning how to paddle a canoe and sitting around a campfire listening to stories and roasting hotdogs. In reality, I knew that carrying golf bags was to be my job for the rest of my school years and that I was expected out of economic necessity to be on the course at every opportunity and contribute to my family's support.

I wasn’t nervous or apprehensive on my first day in the caddy yard because I knew that my brothers were there to watch my back.  I was the youngest among all those kids and the dozen or so otherwise unemployed men who drank at night and scraped together a few dollars on the course in the daytime.  If you saw the caddy yard as an outsider, it might have seemed like a hangout for delinquents, or a remote island like in the Lord of the Flies, with its own initiation rites, hierarchy and rules.  It was there that I received an early and dubious education in sex, gambling and cursing, my understanding and lifelong love for the game of golf, and some hard-won insights into the self-effacement expected of service personnel.

The other caddies were kids like me from the streets of the poorer sections of town, mostly first or second generation Italian immigrants, scrappy and spirited like ponies at pasture, still unaware that life was there waiting to tame them.  Sometimes the kids that spoke Italian amused themselves with a finger game they called “morra” a form of “odds and evens” with numbers up to ten. They shouted words that I didn’t understand but wished that I did. When I asked them to translate the curses that were interjected between the numbers and hand gestures, they answered in the same way that my father did when I asked him to translate the oaths he murmured, and evaded answering by saying, "they don't sound so good in English". 

There was always time to kill when it was slow and you were waiting for a bag, or if it was raining. Some of us played roof-tennis, a form of handball, on the overhang of the caddy shack or chipped and putted on the stamped dirt course that we had made, always betting dimes or quarters that we might or might not have. As often as not, there was a poker game, or a little seven come eleven on the porch of the caddy shack, “rollin the bones” they called it. The crap shooters set up wooden soda crates to form stops for the dice and there was always someone keeping look-out in case the pro or caddy master showed up to break up the game. 

You could see someone making the sign of the cross, blowing on the dice, reciting a litany of phrases and expressions then shaking them and throwing them with glazed eyes, fists full of dollars, and a hopeful entreaty.  “Come on "darlins,” three and a pimple, little Joe from Kokomo, baby needs a new pair of shoes, four the hard way, eighter from Decatur, “Shit!” boxcars, snake eyes, six and a pimple, a voice in that group saying fade me, another answering “you're covered.” As a kid I couldn’t shoot craps like a backroom hustler but I talked the jive and could sound like one. I knew the jargon and learned the game and understood the elation of making a point, the adrenaline high of being on a roll.

But I was too young to play, so instead, I sat under the century old elm that gave us shade and shelter from the rain, straddled the wooden plank bench that was polished smooth over the years by generations of sweaty backsides, and played Black Jack, because it was easier, and wasn’t primarily dependent on luck or guessing the odds. 

Intuition told me that if you paid attention and remembered which cards were already out of the deck you had a better chance of knowing when to take a hit or stay. It was easy for me to make an extra dollar on top of my caddy money by playing for nickels and dimes with my less observant friends. I knew better than the other kids that seventeen was a bad number to take a hit on, especially if a lot of low cards were out. 

 Blackjack was a game of logic and observation and not of daring.  Craps was a game of chance and poker was too slow and serious, and besides I was brought up in a Catholic home and I didn’t know how to bluff, which both our priest and my mother would have said was just a euphemism for lying.

The yard was full of characters, definitely not role models for a young boy or people that I would have liked my kids to meet, but colorful personalities that made up the mosaic of my life. Gobbo, a dark, unpredictable Sicilian who was chronically broke, and when he wasn’t in jail or the insane asylum at Newtown, hung around on the outside chance that he´d get to carry a couple of bags and make ten bucks. His bloodshot, blank, eyes gave him the appearance of a psychopath and when he talked there was a bubbly stream of spit that ran down his chin as though his glands produced saliva faster than he could swallow it.

I suspected that he was the one that stole my lunches from the rack on the caddy shack porch, mostly baloney sandwiches, or tuna fish on Fridays, that my mother wrapped in waxed paper and put in a brown bag with my name neatly printed on it in pencil. Everybody gave him a wide berth. Fearing for what his damaged brain was capable of, I never made the mistake of provoking him by mentioning my missing lunches, I just started hiding them. 

His cousin Tony said that Gobbo had taught himself to read when he was four, something that his parents couldn’t have helped him with because they could barely read themselves. He was always the brightest pupil in his class, skipped grades and might have had a chance to a brilliant future if he hadn’t caught a piece of shrapnel in the forehead in nineteen fifty-two, a north Korean lobotomy, done without finesse. He came home from the Korean War minus thirty or forty IQ points and with a steel plate in his head. He made gas money by bending over and letting the guys in the yard throw golf balls at the crown of his scarred and balding skull. “Okay, three throws for a quarter assholes,” and everybody reached into their pockets except Bobby La Meza, a lanky south-paw, who was a state all-star pitching ace, with a lightning fastball and a college baseball scholarship; Gobbo still had enough sense left and wouldn't let him throw. When Gobbo didn’t show up in the yard one summer, Tony told me that he was killed when he wrapped his Chevy around a bridge abutment on I 95.

There were a few “tough guys” who wore duck-tail haircuts and had their Lucky Strikes rolled up into the arms of their t-shirts with one tucked behind an ear, and always seemed to be talking about chicks and getting laid, or maybe they were just fantasizing about it. I was too young to know the difference, but pussy, and more pussy was all they seemed to have on their minds.  I remember somebody talking about going “around the world " and never I could make the connection as to how that could have anything to do with sex. 

A couple of the older men, not exactly bums as itinerants were called then, and definitely not people that I might invite home to dinner now, had crude tattoos, probably made with the head of a safety pin and a fountain pen. Back then, a tattoo was a marker reserved for sailors and bikers, unlike today, where they have entered into the cultural mainstream. I remember one with a dagger adorned with coiled serpents and another with a skull and crossbones etched into his forearm. I unconsciously compared them to the majesty of the clipper ship that my grandfather had tattooed across his breast, and even back then thought that they looked tacky and amateurish. 

Chaz, one of the older men that came now and then, always unshaven and with a wheeze of a laugh, slicked back hair, and an incisor and several front teeth missing, clearly an alcoholic as I look back now, claimed that he had the word “HONEY” tattooed on the head of his penis.

As I got older, I was unconsciously learning that it was expected of the poor and uneducated to be subservient and invisible, understand the hierarchy where they were on the bottom, keep their mouths shut and show gratitude for the scraps that were thrown to them. Eventually my unwillingness to be servile, it was in reality an inability, was sometimes interpreted as arrogance, but I was just mirroring the nonchalance of some of the people whose golf bags I carried since I was eleven years old, who never bothered to learn my name and just called me kid or caddy.  

One day, a club member whose bag I was carrying said, “that I should learn my place,” as if my reacting to his calling me "stupid" because I couldn’t find a ball that had strayed into the wiry marsh grass, was somehow disturbing the order of things. It seemed as though what irked him was that his class had failed to inculcate in me and my "ilk," as he called people like me, the necessary feelings of subordination and obedience. When he paid me, withholding a tip cost him a Spalding Dot, taken from the ball pocket of his heavy, leather bag. 

It was a way we caddies had of quietly getting even, like a mistreated servant spitting in the master's soup. We called our thefts "hitting the canvas rough," referring to a time when golf bags were made from thick canvass, and any ball you found in the rough that was abandoned by a player was yours to keep.  But still, those people were the exception, and I often think back on other, magical days, when the sky and the Sound had the same summery blue color and the smell of salt water and newly mowed grass was as intoxicating as the sweetest perfume. 

On those days I would have caddied for free just to be out with the club's best players, helping them choose clubs, reading the breaks in the greens and gauging the wind. I watched those golfers hit their well-aimed shots and then when I played, I imitated their gracious swings. 

Epilogue

It was the 1960’s, and the times really were "A Changing." Bob Dylan was writing the musical score that inspired me and a lot of my generation. The country had wandered into the Vietnam era and gotten lost there. Flower power was born and hippies were tuning in, turning on and dropping out, while student leaders spoke rhetorically of a "peoples revolution,” a revolt by the people who do the work against the people who pay to have it done. Civil disobedience and civil rights were on the agenda. The inner cities were burning. Black Panthers had rejected the thought of non-violent protest and were challenging the authority of the police. 

Kids that I grew up with in the caddy yard were traveling halfway across the world to fight a war against fishermen and farmers for reasons they didn't understand, in a place they never heard of, and there were demonstrations all over the country against it. Black kids that I knew since kindergarten started calling me "Whitey" and regarded me as their enemy. There seemed to be turbulence, polarization and unrest everywhere coupled to a growing social awareness.

My politics were shaped in my neighborhood. I saw clearly the differences of how people were treated and the limited opportunities that poor people had. I saw how hard my parents struggled for so little, and even if I didn’t have the vocabulary to express it, I knew where my heart was. It never occurred to me to aspire to the comfortable life that the golf club members lived with luxury cars, cocktails and a thin veneer of manners, 

I was growing up, groping for political awareness. I had a naive longing for a better world, a world where people were judged by their character and not their income.  There was a long time when I never let on to my radical friends that I loved and was proficient at something as bourgeois as the game of golf, but golf was like a lot of other things, something that I learned in the caddy yard.