Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [37]
“Dear Girls,” Sonny wrote to his daughters Carla and Christie, ages eight and ten. “Your Dad is still a golf bum”—this was their private, semifacetious running joke, his feeble way of defusing his ex-wife’s more vicious criticisms—“but he is now making more money than President Bush. I am going to be sending most of it to your mother, so please tell her to stop scaring you about the homeless shelter.”
His first day on the job he teed it up with the generals and a delegation of Japanese steel tycoons. Happy face, he told himself, smile, smile, so what if it’s golf hell? He jumpstarted the good karma by thinking about his girls, and nuked a drive on Number One of such rare and aching profundity that everyone present—generals, tycoons, bodyguards, toothless caddies—emitted an awed, transcendent “ahhh” like the dying chords of the world’s largest gong. So he was delivering—before they got to discussions about labor capacity and penetrative pricing, the big guys had to bond, and Sonny saw that as his job, supplying the positive vibes. The next day he walked into the pro shop and found a beautiful Oriental vase waiting for him.
“It’s for you,” said Tommy Ng, the pro-shop pro. He was a slight, melancholy man in his late twenties who’d started life as a Vietnamese boat person and learned his golf caddying at Singapore’s Keppel Club. His English was so rushed and idiomatic that it sounded like change rattling out of a tube.
“Get outta here. For me?” Sonny was afraid to touch it.
“Those guys you played with yesterday, the Japanese. They sent it over.”
“Why would they do that?”
Tommy hesitated. “They want to be your friend. They want you to like them.”
“Oh. Oh.” It wasn’t so much a bribe as a, ah, gesture, a little goodwill grease for the wheels. It wasn’t long before Sonny realized that a giant corporate ratfuck was happening out on the course. If you wanted to do business in Burma you had to cozy up to the generals, and the best place for that was the National’s elegant links. Which put Sonny in a classic trickle-down position: over the next few days he received a case of Bordeaux from Singaporean financiers, a carved elephant from Thai teakwood barons, a kangaroo-skin golf bag from Malaysian gem traders.
“So popular,” said Tommy Ng in a voice like dry ice. “Two weeks in Myanmar and look at all the wonderful friends you have.”
But Sonny was troubled—these people thought he could pimp for them? He was just the pro, a performing human whose job was to stun them with his mighty swing and tell colorful stories on the verandah after the round. They were all, generals included, relentless jock sniffers, eager for inside information about their favorite pros. Did you ever play with Palmer? they’d ask him over drinks. Was Nicklaus really the best? Tell us about Tiger, is he as good as they say? If Sonny didn’t have an actual personal anecdote he’d make one up, something dramatic or funny to make everybody feel good.
“Don’t you find it strange,” said a voice behind his back one afternoon, “that a guy from Texas is Myanmar’s national champion?”
Sonny was stroking ten-footers on the practice green. He turned to find a tall Caucasian watching him, a slender, well-constructed man with impressive teeth and a helmet of glistening, slicked-back hair. With his chiseled, Waspy features and minimal body fat, he might have just stepped out of a Polo ad.
“I guess,” Sonny said, more or less playing along; he didn’t much care for people sneaking up on him. “But I’d give it all for a couple of decent cheeseburgers.”
The man laughed and introduced himself as Merrill Hayden. He added that they’d be playing together today.
“I saw you at the Masters in ’87,” said Hayden. His voice had an airy William Buckley trill, the adenoid lilt of gentlemen sailors and champagne