I’m Here. I’m back.
I don’t know how to start this. This has been the problem in the past, not knowing what to write in this blog. I guess my life will have to do.
Buying the we address was easy. My email address guysemailaddress is one of the most clever internet developments in years. How do you compliment such a fine address with an equally fine homepage name? guyhasawebpage will have to do; actually, it’s quite stunning.
Enough about me. I am not going to lie to you, these first few posts are gonna be rough, dry, tough to cut through. After encouragement by friends and family I have decided to not let the world be without the stories that make up my life. Here is my first:
The Time I Caused Havoc on a Golf Course.
My family is dysfunctional. When I was younger I would go back and forth between my mother’s and father’s separate living places. While this post-divorce arrangement was meant to make things easier on everyone, it totally screwed up my head as a kid.
Thursday after school, Friday and half of Saturday were at dad’s, the rest of the week at mom’s. Thursday always felt different to me, it still does. I would take a different bus home to go see my THR-SAT friends. These were the days before a driver’s license so anyone you hung out with was required to be in a four block radius of your house.
The Green Tee friends, the friends near my father’s, were least desirable. All the family’s in our neighborhood, besides mine, belonged to the country club, Green Tee. The gulf course which our house looked upon was off limits to my brothers and me; therefore we did whatever we could to breach its peace.
The elements leading to our first attack happened by chance. My brother Randall and I were hanging by the lake, the water trap, near the 4th green. This was the hole that butted up against our house so the green was just a few steps from our back door. Out of nowhere -thunk- a golf ball came down near my brother, almost hit him. Without thinking he picked the ball up. We heard a yell from the other end of the fairway and realized immediately what had happened. The guy whose ball it was, who may have just completed the shot of this life, began to charge after us. His pace was slow, golf carts max at about twenty, so we had time to escape.
Then we saw it. To the right of our house was a drainage ditch. This ditch went into the ground at a slow angle. The mouth of the concrete pipe had a diameter big enough for us to craw into, and we did. Inside, the pipe increased in size for about six feet. I imagine this was to allow a fitting to attach, whatever. We could sit in this cozy area, a few feet in from the mouth of the pipe, and be totally hidden from view.
When the golfer came to retrieve his ball, to find us, we were gone. Over the next few months the numbers of confused golfers multiplied.
Some great shots landed on that green. We would run out of our pipe, swipe them and then place them in one of the many jars of golf balls we had in the ditch. People were pissed, we saw their expressions and heard their cursing from inside the pipe, and we laughed.
This all took place years ago, when I was roughly 12. Now, 17 years later, I understand how shitty it would be for my great shot to end up the object of the prank.
Gotta stop writing for a while.
