Les Temps Perdu: In which I gain my first employment

I had other jobs in addition to my short career sweeping up the music school. After all, I started working when I was 13. You rack up a few miles when you get a head start.

My first job was caddying, which was also my first encounter with the game of golf. 13 was the considered age for starting one's bag-toting career, and there was a public course at which people my age had a perfectly good chance to get out, as we used to call it. Of course, you would get out after everyone else, but if you didn’t mind waiting around for most of the morning playing cards, it would happen. This was before the dawn of golf carts, which means that everybody walked, and it was the rare golfer who wanted to carry his (or occasionally her) own bag. These things could weigh in at serious tonnage, and if you didn’t have to carry it yourself, what did you care if you threw in a few extra clubs, a couple of dozen balls, a change of clothes including shoes and your pet brick collection? Young ‘uns like myself would carry one bag, a single; older kids and adults usually carried two, a double, and get paid twice as much for it. If you were hungry enough, and stalwart enough, you could get out twice a day with two doubles. You could also saw off your right foot with an emery board, if you enjoyed slow torture. One bag once a day was rough enough, especially if your golfer wasn’t any good. In addition to the five or so miles of traversing the course, bad golfers would send you into the woods as often as not, adding a couple of miles more over hazardous terrain. And woe be to the caddy who didn’t find a ball! That was your job. You watched it fly off, and then you marked it, connecting to some geographic landmark to which you would head and then, voila, there it was. Or not.

The golf courses I would caddy at were not near my house. Sometimes a parent would drop me off, but as often as not I would hitchhike. At the age of 13. The idea of hitchhiking at any age in the year 2012 (unless you’re John Waters) is tantamount to wishing yourself a sexually abused and slow tortured demise, but back then, it was just somebody picking you up and giving you a ride. I hitchhiked up through my college years, hardly alone in the act, and only encountered a couple of dicey situations (if you don’t count Texans telling you about their guns and how they’re ready to use them so even though they’re good guys for picking you up don’t try any sudden moves). It was just how you got around, almost always effectively. There was one course I could walk to, though, where I discovered that, if I got there early enough, I could get right out. The Westchester Country Club was about a half hour away. I would arrive there at about five in the morning and help put up the flag, and then there would be a handful of solo golfers who were going to work or put in their family time later and wanted to get in a round right after sunrise before they had to punch in or before the duffers showed up. These guys tended to be seriously good and seriously fast, and I would make my money and be back home by nine o’clock, ready to head to the beach for the rest of the day. Of course, a place like the Westchester had professional caddies, so if you didn’t catch one of these early birds, you’d soon be sidelined by the serious workers. There were two courses at the club, a really tough one and a normal one. (I don’t think there’s such a thing as an easy golf course anywhere on the planet. Normal is the best you can hope for.) All the he-men played the tough one; the men who were honest with themselves, and the women, played the other one, the South course. In the private club world of the 60s, women were literally not allowed on the other course. Imagine that. Imagine also that they were paying through the nose not to be admitted to all the privileges their husbands enjoyed. On top of that, when they did play, on the wrong side of the tracks, they would get caddies like…me. Those poor women. Then again, poor me. I’ve played golf with plenty of women, including plenty of women who are a damned lot better at the game than I am, but at that course back then, it was women who were waiting for their husbands to finish their games over at the real course or whatever, and as a rule, they were dreadful. Slower than molasses, for one thing, and not capable of moving the ball very far. A round on the South course could easily last an hour longer than a round on the real course. At least the women were nice to the caddies, though. They didn’t pay much attention to us, for the most part, but the one thing they didn’t do was blame us for their shortcomings. At the public course I usually worked—I wasn’t getting up at 4:00 a.m. every day because I may have wanted to make some money but I wasn’t insane about it—I still remember one golfer in particular who was, to this day, the worst golfer I have ever seen*. Worse, the cause of his crappy play was, in a word, me. He blamed me for everything, every time. I recommended the wrong clubs, I was standing in the way, I lost his balls, whatever. (Imagine me at 13 years old. If you were a golfer, would you listen to my recommendations of what clubs to use?) That guy was, for all practical purposes, the first lousy boss I ever had. And as I say, I still remember him, even though I only caddied for him once. I even remember what he looked like. That’s amazing.

I caddied for three years, until I was 16 and old enough to get working papers and a regular job. Which I did, almost immediately. Which is a story I guess we'll get to soon enough.


* Bonus John Updike golf joke: A golfer goes to Ireland and hires a caddy and the golfer hits the ball everywhere but straight, losing balls, whiffing, generally demonstrating terrifically bad golf for the entire round, scoring off the map, while all the while blaming his caddy for everything that goes wrong. At the end of the round the golfer says to the caddy: "You are the worst caddy in the world," to which the caddy replies, "I don't think so, sir. That would be too much of a coincidence."