Joseph Wambaugh - The Secrets of Harry Bright

Fiona said, “I almost forgot, Otto. Behind you across the water is where Billie Dove lives.”

“Who’s Billie Dove?”

“Oh, Otto!” Fiona cried. “See, you are just a kid. She was a great actress of the silent screen. She starred with Douglas Fairbanks!”

“I’m old, Fiona!” he cried. “ Please don’t talk to me like I still gotta sweat out chicken pox!”

He sensed he was losing her. All week he’d felt like his arteries were about to atrophy and now all of a sudden he felt like a snot-nose kid! And thinking of anything but his golf shot, he took a half swing and belted it right on the screws, 230 yards on the fly with a slight draw that took it twenty yards farther.

“I told you you’re young, Otto,” Fiona said. “You think an old guy can hit a ball like that?”

“Aw shit!” Otto Stringer said, having smacked the greatest golf shot of his life. “Aw shit, Fiona!”

When they finally played number eighteen, with the sun well behind Mount San Jacinto and the fairway in shadows, they lost five balls between them before reaching the green. A record for a day in which they lost twenty-six balls.

Otto gazed with melancholy at the rows of lacy, cone-shaped trees. He’d even started to love the shingled date palms, and all the other ball-grabbing bastards he’d faced that day, now that he realized this might be it . He had minutes to turn a lifetime of shit into sunshine. The thought of years still to come on the streets of Hollywood made him want to weep.

He turned up the radio when at last he parked beside the green. Fiona lurched unsteadily toward her ninth shot, which was twenty yards left. Otto began to sing along with a George Gershwin classic coming from the radio. He composed his own lyrics as he went, looking wistfully at Fiona who whacked a chip shot over everything , saying, “Aw screw it!” as her ball hit the concrete and took off in the general direction of Malibu, causing her to say, “Good-bye and godspeed, you lil sumbitch.”

“The way you wear your haaaat!” Otto sang it from the heart, and Fiona adjusted her lid, which was now resting across her nose from the force of that monster swing.

Then he sang, “The way you wreck that teeeeeeee!” And that was true enough. The eighteenth tee, after Fiona was through with all her mulligans, looked like it was nuked.

“Oh, Otto!” Fiona cried. “I don’t think I ever enjoyed a round of golf more. You gonna putt Out?”

Otto stopped singing and said, “I can’t, Fiona. That out a bounds approach shot did it. I ain’t got no balls left.”

“I don’t know about that , Otto.” She winked and his heart leaped! He still had a chance!

“You little dickens!” he said. “Hey, let’s have a drink in the bar! You can’t go home yet.”

“Okay, one for the fairway,” she said. “I just live across the golf course.”

“I’d love to see your home!” Otto said. “I ain’t scared to deal with a wall full a worms. You need a man around the house, is what you need.”

It was nearly dark when they got back to the pro shop where Otto was handed the phone message from Sidney Blackpool. He decided that in the event he could keep this romance aflame it would probably be on a golf course. He had a vague plan of playing again tomorrow so he said to the pro, “Gimme another dozen balls, will ya? I don’t care what brand. Make them orange. Easier to spot in the water.”

He was the same pro who’d sold Otto a dozen before starting this round. The pro put the balls on the counter, saying, “Would you like these to go, or would you like to lose them here?”

On their way to the bar, Otto said, “I don’t think that guy was so funny, Fiona.”

“They just don’t understand how hurtful this game can be to people like us,” Fiona said soothingly. “Forget it, Otto.”

There was some barroom music coming from the oldies radio station. Carmen Miranda was singing, “Chica chica chic! Chica chica chic!” and Fiona Grout paused in the foyer and did as frisky a samba as could be expected from someone so fat, old, and drunk.

“You and me’re ages apart, Otto,” she said sadly.

“I know that singer!” Otto cried. “Lemme think. She’s the one with all the fruit salad! Apples and bananas and coconuts used to sprout outta her skull! I know all that old stuff, Fiona!”

They both ordered mai tais and were eyed by a dubious barman who would never have served this pair of de-tox candidates in a public bar outside the club.

Fiona was sucking noisily on her drink even before Otto got his. There were three men sitting farther down the bar telling jokes that were interfering with Otto’s game plan. He couldn’t understand why the three men sounded so irritating, but they did. In fact, they were making him so mad that he’d forgotten three brilliantly conceived double entendres that he was going to use on Fiona to get her hot.

All he could think of to say was, “Fiona, let’s have a date tonight, just you’n me.”

“A date? Otto, I can’t possibly!”

“Let’s play golf tomorrow then,” he said in desperation.

“Tomorrow?” She put her mai tai down on the bar, but forgot to take the straw out of her mouth as she said, “I’m playing with another couple tomorrow. And with my fiancé.”

“Your fiancé!” They couldn’t have heard him in Mineral Springs, but only because of a windstorm.

“Yes, Otto, I’m engaged. I’m getting married in December and we’re honeymooning in the Bahamas at his son’s home. I’ll meet his grandchildren for Christmas.”

“Fiona!” Otto couldn’t believe it.

“Otherwise I’d be glad to date you tonight, Otto. You’re lotsa fun! I’d like you to play golf with my fiancé and me. His name’s Wilbur. You’d like him.”

Otto Stringer could only stare at his mai tai while Fiona resumed her slurping, blissfully unaware that a ship passing in the night had just gotten torpedoed, leaving nothing but an oil slick.

The jokesters were still at it. One of them was Otto’s age and the other two were in their fifties. They’d just told a Jew joke about the difference between a Jewish princess and Jell-O is that Jell-O moves when you eat it. Then they told the one about crossing a Mexican and a Mormon and getting a garage full of stolen groceries, and were into the second spook joke about the black sky divers in Texas being called skeet.

And that reminded one of them that something funny had recently occurred.

“Wait’ll you hear this,” he said. “We had an African gentleman try to apply for membership in the club. Because he was quite well known he actually thought he could make it.”

“Who was it,” Otto said boozily. “Gary Player?”

“What?” the jokester said, looking toward Otto.

“They mean a colored applicant,” Fiona whispered to Otto.

“Oh, is that what they mean?” Otto said, looking about as surly as Beavertail Bigelow always looked.

“You mean somebody that uses a chicken bone for a teething ring? One a those , Fiona?”

“Sorry if we offended you,” the man said. “I thought we were among friends here.”

“Offend me?” Otto said belligerently. “I ain’t a kike or a beaner or a nigger. I sure ain’t a member .” Then he was feeling so unaccountably mad that he lied and said, “Tell you what I am though. I’m a Democrat . And I think Ronald Reagan’s so old he thought Alzheimer was a secretary of state. And during the Mondale debate he almost reminisced about old Jane Wyman movies. And he’ll balance the budget when Jesse Jackson goes squirrel shooting with the National Rifle Association and Jane Fonda joins the Daughters of the American Revolution.”