Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [26]
“What about it?”
“Everything.”
Stan The Man thought for a minute. What he had to say surprised me: “It’s kind of sad. You show up and sign the list in the morning. If there’s play, you work. Basically you carry two bags, one on each shoulder. You usually get twenty bucks for eighteen holes. The ladies stiff you about half the time. Some of the men do, too. Some members pay real good, but the caddy master’s buddies get those loops. The way you make money in the looping racket is by getting regulars who take good care of you, and by pressing thirty-six holes, which is a lot of fucking work. Or you get foursomes, two on your back and two on a cart, and you make up to forty scoots. Or you get high-class putter jobs with gamblers and high rollers who know how to pay. But it’s the guys who suck ass with the caddy master who get that action. Me, I just push thirty-six four days a week and spend the rest of my time fucking off. That’s the great thing about looping. You can take off all the time you want, as long as you show up on weekends and for tournaments. It’s also why you get so many bums as caddies, there’s always cash on hand for booze or dope or the horses.
“We get some young college kids out at Bel-Air now. They got that young golfer image. The members eat it up and whip out heavy for those snotnose cocksuckers. None of ’em know shit about golf, they just know how to hand out a good snow job. They snort cocaine and blow weed out on the course. There’s also the horseplayer clique. The caddy master is a bookie, and the guys who bet with him get primo loops. But caddies never save their dough. They either blow it on booze or pussy or gambling or dope. They’re always broke. Always coming out to the club to make a measly twenty bucks to get drunk on. Loopers is always hobnobbing with big money, and they never have jack-shit themselves.
For instance, there’s this Brentwood goat named Whitey Haines. He’s an epileptic and a big boozehound. He used to loop Bel-Air, but he got fired ’cause he kept having seizures out on the course. It shook up the members. Anyway, the Bel-Air pro, he felt real guilty about eighty-sixing Whitey. Whitey ain’t doing too good over at Brentwood; them Hebes like their goats healthy.
“You see, Whitey is always going on two-week drunks. Them seizures scare the shit out of him, and the booze fixes him up, temporarily. Right before he goes on a drunk, he comes back to Bel-Air and cries the blues to the pro. Tells him he’s got to see his dying aunt, or go to the hospital for some tests, or have hemorrhoid surgery, some line of horseshit like that. He puts the bite on the pro for two and a half C’s and then splits. After he gets back from his drunk, he starts paying him back: ten here, fifteen there, twenty there. As soon as he gets his debt all paid off, Whitey comes back and pulls the same routine all over again: ‘I got cancer of the armpits, pro, lend me two-fifty so I can get it cured.’ The pro whips it out on him, and they’re off and running again.
“Now the pro knows that Whitey is lying, and Whitey knows that he knows, but they play that charade over and over, ’cause the pro is a caddy who made good, who was good at playing golf and sucking up to money, and guys like Whitey Haines eat him up. He thinks, ‘Jesus, if I didn’t have such a sweet smile and a sweet swing, I might have ended up like this asshole, packing duck loops and on the dole.’ So what’s two hundred and fifty scoots on permanent vacation from your pocket if it makes you feel like a humanitarian?
“Looping continues to fucking amaze me. If you think Whitey Haines is a sad case, you ain’t heard nothing yet. Take Bicycle Pete. He’s dead now. He got fired from Wilshire for never taking a bath. He stunk like a skunk. Rode a girl’s bicycle all over town and wore a Dodger cap with a propeller on top. Lived on Skid Row. Everybody thought he was retarded. He kicked off of a heart attack in his room. When the ambulance guys came to take his stiff away, they found over two hundred grand in diamonds in his closet.
“Then there’s Dirt Road Dave.