Torque

As in:

The original intent of Frank (call me “Buzzy”) Dumarche’s weekly golf outings with the guys was just to blow off a little steam; have a little fun. It was not necessarily to reaffirm that the cart path to perdition was paved with good intentions. Yet, after three years, this was the effect. They’d been banned, outright, from Ballard Island Public Links and Kings Point. Ballard Island on account of profanely hitting into the trailing foursome of the Senior Men’s Nine Holers (twice), and at Kings Point because of the overt sexual advances toward refreshment cart maidens, primarily instigated by Kevin (“K-man”) Noches who was both Buzzy’s sidekick and alter ego.

The more you probed into these instances the more tawdry the details became. The police reports they generated were part of the accumulating evidence that what was once mostly about the golf, had now become mostly about the farce. The first foursome had expanded to a sixsome and then an eightsome moving about in four golf carts. It was by now a critical mass for constant trouble, to the point that three of the courses they played regularly required them to post a damage deposit with their tee times.

“Lord of the Flies with Golf Clubs,” is how Buzzy’s ex-wife Wanda described it based, primarily, on word of mouth. But this was a disservice, really, to William Golding’s book which was only imaginable as fiction, whereas Buzzy’s golfing caravan was too bizarre to pass as fiction. It was real-life docudrama trouble, a potent, aging mixture of brewery executives and boat builders who were at the cutting edge of open air intoxication and degeneracy.

Because so much money was involved (it was not uncommon for thousands of dollars to change hands each week) there would be comical arguments over technique and equipment, spin ratios and ball compressions and launch angles. In this group, whose trash talk was so steeped in sexual and anatomical improbabilities, the worst mistake you could make was to fish a less than $3 surlyn-covered ball from your bag, or hit it with a knock-off driver from K-Mart. That would get you no respect, at all.

For Frankie, who usually played in Buzzy and K-man’s group, the highlight of the season was when Buzzy (who was 6’4″ and 280) hit a very loose tee shot on #13 at Parkstone Ridges. There was enough of a gap in the safety netting beyond the rough that his duck-hooked ball snarled through it and smacked into the windshield of a passing lawn service truck. The smash to the windshield caused the driver to veer into the other lane and collide with the side of an even larger truck hauling Honey Buckets in the opposite direction. The portapotties tumbled off and right into the path of a six pack of garishly coloured, spandex-wearing bike riders who, in turn, tumbled in all directions to avoid hitting the vehicles and the portable comfort stations. Total chaos.

You can’t make this stuff up, Frankie thought as he watched with curiously detached satisfaction. The casualties would be unfortunate. But the group’s reputation for creative mayhem was secured for another year. And that counted for something. In a world that was beginning to doubt American supremacy and exceptionalism, this was clearly not the sort of recreational trouble that the Chinese or Indians could hope to pull off.

“Jesus Christ!” K-man shouted at Buzzy, laughing at the sight of the bicyclists scattering like so many paint balls. “How many times I gotta tell you to switch to a low torque shaft in that thing?!”