"Dark Side of the Moose, Pt. 2" and drinking golf
What an outrageously busy few days I ended up
having, there.
THURSDAY:
I
was back at Terry's. It only gets weirder. When I got there early in the
morning, everything was still damp and dewy. Terry gave me a rag to wipe
everything down with, and then told me what "everything" consisted of:
Everything I'd done the day before!
I
recalled hearing about a form of torture that the Chinese used to employ. (They
really do seem to have a corner on the torture market.) They would make their
prisoners count grains of sand. This tedious and repetitive task would make a
person insane very quickly at which point, they could be employed doing
similarly repetitive tasks like working a register at McDonald's or burning
coffee at Starbucks.
But as I looked out
at Terry's wet, western display that morning, it really started to feel to me
that I was more of a paid friend than anything. I mean, why on earth would the
guy pay me $10 an hour to paint the same things over and over? The whole
situation suddenly felt infinitely more creepy, and my mind started running away
with itself. Had there maybe been a spate of cowgirl murders I hadn't heard
about?... murders involving larger-breasted cowgirls? Maybe these DD cut-outs
were, in fact, burial markers. Maybe he would drag his victims back to his
acreage and then pay them $10 an hour to paint and repaint their own burial
marker thus making them insane as well as dead. Ah, well... he gave me a jar of
homemade pickles so he couldn't be all
bad.
That night, my team played pool and
won four out of five matches. I personally rocked--played another four and took
all three games straight. For those who know anything about the CPA (Canadian
Poolplayers Association) or the APA (American Poolplayers Association), the
games were two innings, one inning, and eight innings. I pretty well smoked
her. Strangely, after the game, a lot of people hung around and there was an
unusually festive mood in the pool hall. I had one of my lowest bar tabs ever
but still got kinda drunk because everyone kept buying me drinks and shots...
and drinks and shots for everyone in the place, too, and it was... well, weird!
I had planned on not drinking much at all but the celebratory mood was
infectious, I had played some of my best pool ever, and before I knew it, it was
one
o'clock.
FRIDAY:
I
still had things to finish at Terry's and found myself there at 9am, mildly hung
over. I was cursing myself because I knew that Friday was going to be one of my
longest days in quite awhile. After leaving Terry's, I had a few errands to
run--errands that ended up taking me about three hours. One of these errands
was to pick up my golf clubs from storage for the Sharks annual golf tournament.
(If I haven't mentioned it before, "Sharks" is the name of the pool hall I shoot
out of.) After that, Wendy and I headed out for dinner and then met up with her
friend, Kate, and Kate's boyfriend, Ryan, for drinks. (Oh, yeah... that's
exactly
what I was looking for. I had a beer and a half a glass of Greek wine they had
brought back from their recent trip to Santorini. Outstanding wine--pity I
wasn't in the mood.) All the while, I kept thinking about how early I had to
get up for the golf tournament; I'd found out the night before that I had to be
at Sharks by 8am to catch a
ride!
SATURDAY:
I
felt surprisingly good and awake considering how little I slept, and I felt even
better when Jake showed up and gave me some of his Baileys-spiked
coffee.
Part of the entry fee included
carts. I never realised just how peppy golf carts can be! I had more fun
driving the cart than playing golf, although the golf didn't go as badly as I'd
expected. I'll spare you any sort of painful, blow-by-blow account, mainly
because I can't remember many details. I had brought a flask of 12 year old
single malt whisky with me which I had pulled out by the second hole. Game on!
The beer started flowing, then more whisky, then more beer, then shots with
another team (the number one team in the pool hall, actually--our
arch-rivals--we're a fairly close second), and then more beer... and by noon, we
were all absolutely hammered. I was only reprimanded by the course marshal
twice--for reckless driving of all
things.
The whole day, I kept remembering
this fairly bad golf game I used to have for the Mac maybe 15 years ago. I, and
a few of my friends, turned it into a drinking game with quite a complicated set
of rules although the essence was simple: At the end of a hole, if you bogeyed,
you'd have to take a drink. If you birdied, you could give a drink away.
Double bogey: two drinks--double birdie: two drinks given away. Then there were
the addenda. If you hit the pin, it would make this metallic sound: everyone
drink. Sand trap: two drinks taken. Trees: one drink taken, two given away.
The rule book, by the end, read like some sort of municipal code with sections
and subsections--loads of fun. We called it "Drinking Golf", and I often used
to wonder just how bad it would be to go and do that for real--to actually play
golf and apply those rules. Well, I think I kinda answered that
one.
So I knew that this tournament was a
notorious drunkfest and had been speculating for the previous week about what
one might do with the rest of the day if one were tanked by noon. Simple
answer: continue drinking and go and play dreadful, drunk pool. Before I knew
it, it was one
o'clock.
SUNDAY:
Watched
TV, slept, and convalesced. I was not in particularly good shape. Tiger Woods
won the PGA Championship, Seattle beat Indianapolis in an exhibition game, and I
managed to stay on the sofa and control the TV for nearly the entire day. It
was a good day, although I kept thinking about the couple of hours of work I
still have over at Terry's. We're camping the following weekend and then I'm
off to L.A. almost immediately when we get back so hopefully, Jake will hire me
for a deck or something and I won't have to go back to Terry's "Double D Ranch"
for awhile.
Posted: Mon - August 21, 2006 at 03:25 AM