Джеймс Эллрой - Brown's Requiem

The L.A. south course was flatter than Bel-Air, and more urbanbound. The lights of the Century City business monoliths about a half mile away cast an eerie glow on the trees and hills. Stan was directing me to the spot where he thought Fat Dog was most likely to be: the eleventh tee. Our flashlights played over the terrain, picking out scurrying rodents. In the distance I could hear the hiss of a sprinkler.

Fat Dog was not residing on the eleventh tee. Somehow I didn’t care. I was astounded that I had lived in Los Angeles for over thirty years, had prided myself on my knowledge of my city, and had missed out on all this. This was more than the play domain of the very rich, it was quite simply another world, and such diverse types as caddies, wetbacks, and burned-out ex-cops had access to it, on whatever level of reality they chose to seek. Golf courses: a whole solar system of alternate realities in the middle of a smogbound city.

I decided to explore all the city’s courses, with my cassette recorder, on future sleepless nights. After Fat Dog Baker was safely locked up in the pen or the loony bin, of course.

I trained my light on a pair of wooden benches next to the tee. “Let’s sit down,” I said. I opened the thermos of coffee and poured Stan a cup, drinking mine directly from the container.

“You like it here, don’t you?” Stan asked.

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m surprised it took me this long to discover it.”

We sipped coffee and stared into the darkness. We were facing north. Wilshire was a narrow strip of light in the distance. Cars glided silently along it.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” I said. “I’m not a cop. I’m a private investigator. I shanghaied you out here illegally. You can take off, or I’ll drive you wherever you want to go.”

I could feel Stan The Man staring at me in the dark. After a few moments, he laughed. “I knew there was something funny about you, I knew it, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it. How come you’re looking for Fat Dog?”

“I’m working for him. He hired me to do a little work for him.”

“What kind of work?”

“It’s confidential. Do you want to split? I’ll drive you home.”

“Naw, I like it here too. What kind of cases do you handle?”

“Mostly I repossess cars.”

Stan laughed, wildly. “Now that’s really funny,” he said. “I used to steal cars and you repo them. That’s a fucking scream!”

“Tell me about looping,” I said.

“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. The ugliest guy I ever seen. Got this lantern jaw that sticks out about two feet. Used to hit all the invitationals. No caddy master would let him loop regular. He couldn’t even work Wilshire, and that’s the bottom of the line. So he’d loop invitationals to supplement his welfare check. He had a regular routine: at the end of the day, when all the loopers were hanging around the caddy shack, he’d chug-a-lug a half pint of bourbon, get up on a card table and suck his own dick. We used to throw quarters at him while he did it. He was one of the most famous caddies on the West Coast. Then he made his big mistake. He started doing it in public. The public didn’t understand. Only caddies and perverts could dig his act. Old Dave’s in Camarillo now.

“It’s the loneliness, that’s what gets me about looping. All these sad motherfuckers with no families, no responsibility, don’t pay no income tax, nothing to look forward to but the World Series pool at the Tap and Cap, the Christmas party in the caddy shack, the next drunk, or the big horse that never hits. We got this college kid, a real smart kid, who loops weekends, and he says that caddies is ‘the last vestige of the Colonial South. Golf course cotton pickers lapping at the fringes of a strained noblesse oblige.’ He said that we were a holdover from another era, that we were a status symbol, and it was worth it for clubs to keep us around, to uphold their image.