The Last Sunset at Beechtree

So Cybergolf ran “The Last Sunset at Beechtree” today.  In the meantime, I wrote a coda to the piece about my trip, so here it is.  Click over to see Jeff Shelley work his magic in getting things up in a heartbeat.

THE THINGS WE DO FOR GOLF

My road to Beechtree was hectic and hair-raising. I spent the night before the round at the townhouse of my on again-off again-on again-off again-on again-off again paramour, Britt, who insisted on Ethiopian food for dinner.

I took two bites of a dish made with something called “Magma-Hot Tektonic Sauce,” and set my whole body on fire. Good thing my legs still worked so I could run out the door screaming to submerge my head in the nearest fountain. So that’s what they do in countries with no food. Two bites of that and you won’t eat for three days.

Then, after returning to her place and falling asleep, we were violently rousted out of bed by Britt’s roommate, who came home from bar crawling at 2:36 a.m. with Foghorn Leghorn, Daffy Duck, and Petunia Pig for drinking buddies. These four loudmouth, lunkhead Looney Tunes proceeded to keep us awake until 5:00 a.m. playing “Guitar Hero” at a volume that could’ve passed for a devastating thunderstorm. One of them, an aging hippie who gestured wildly with a cigarette in his hands as he said, “Hey man it’s all good,” nearly set the apartment on fire when he knocked over a pot of oil they were boiling to cook french fries. Finally, after plinking and plunking their drunken way through Kwame West’s hit “Thug Thizzle,” they passed out in a pile on the couch. Had I been fifteen years younger, I would’ve taken a Sharpie and drawn all over their faces as they slept. That’s idiot’s justice.

Hey! Jay’s got an early morning tee time tomorrow! Let’s go rage at his place!

Then things got worse. As they say in the infomercials, “But wait, there’s more!” The next morning, a tractor-trailer with hazardous material jack-knifed across I-95, shutting down traffic both ways on the most important north-south arterial on the eastern seaboard. I called the course and they gave me alternate directions, simply saying “get off at route 40 and take that to Old Philadelphia Road/Rt 7.”

There’s just one problem: there are two such exits – one right after you get on 40 and one ten miles down. They didn’t tell me take the second not the first, and I made that mistake. “What’s the problem?” you ask? Well there’s no re-entry back to the highway once you get off. So I had half an hour following a rolling chicken coop, half an hour behind a tractor, and half an hour not moving at all on the two lane road. So there I was, stuck in a stinking bano crossroads called Abingdon going nowhere. See the city, see the zoo, traffic light won’t let me through. (Where have I heard that before?)

As a result, I made my tee time by six minutes, whereas if my plans hadn’t gone haywire, I would have made it by ninety minutes. Hit the range? Properly introduce myself? Get a leisurely breakfast? Ha! I didn’t even get a chance to spread the butter on my morning toast, I just wrapped the triangle of bread around the thick pat, shoved it in my mouth like Quentin Tarantino eating that whole donut in one bite, (that’s from Four Rooms), and dashed off spitting crumbs as I ran to the first tee.

The girl steals the covers after burning my innards, the roommate’s boy-toy of the week bellows like a wounded rhinoceros all night, and a manure spreader crashes across I-95. Next time, I’m sleeping in the car.