The roughest of rough draft to date. Bloated? Yep. A touch “all over the place”? To a noticeable degree. Put it up anyway. By the time I get back to this for some tuning up, I’ll have a cleaner and clearer “vision” of what I’m trying convey at this point in this story.
Will spent his days well-scrubbed, well fed, well entertained. His golf clubs stayed in the room that first week, but April was fading. He didn’t let that dissuade him from going outdoors. He took advantage of the conditioning that was the result of three weeks of using a large hammer. He started running again. It had been a habit that had carried him through middle school, allowing him an excuse to stay away from home for a couple extra hours a day. That was the purpose it had served up to the day his mother died. From that day after, it was a tool to deaden his mind and exhaust his body enough to keep him out of trouble until he graduated from high school. That he started every morning, charging into the sunrise from a place that’s primary intent was to keep people indoors, was motivation enough. After a few days he’d become familiar to the staff. A man staying in the swankiest room of a casino who began every day running around the edges of the parking lot had to be some kind of freak. That more than a few of them made no effort to hide that they considered him an oddball provided even more incentive. It was a role he’d been cast in all his life.
When the weather evened out and the daily high temperatures were consistently above fifty degrees, Will finally took to the golf course. It had been open since he’d been there, but Will had long refused to unbag a club if the temperature called for a stocking cap or pulling on mittens between shots. Crappy weather fostered bad habits. He adjusted his schedule accordingly, cutting his running schedule to every other day. On the days he ran, he played a round in the afternoon. On the days he didn’t, it was eighteen holes in the morning, nine right after lunch, and another eighteen in the afternoon, daylight permitting. Will had also managed to establish himself as a borderline whack-job with the folks at the clubhouse. His action in promoting that perception was his adamant refusal to take a cart, even though it was included in his ridiculous room package. The clubhouse manager had gone to great lengths in pointing that out.
The first day he’d decided the weather was to his satisfaction, he’d just showed up at the clubhouse. He didn’t call from his room for a tee time, as was recommended in his check-in brochure. Calling in meant they’d send somebody to the main entrance to pick him up in a golf cart—his golf cart. Will was having none of that. As he was setting up his tee time, he informed the starter he was a guest. This seemed to irritate the man.
“Why didn’t you call in?” He was checking the computer, confirming Will’s declared status as a registered patron of the Casino, Spa, Resort and Entertainment Experience.
“Room Eight-Thirty-Two,” Will said as the man checked his driver’s license against the information on his computer. “Top, floor,” Will added as the man actually picked up his license from the counter and held it next to the screen, “from where I enjoy the spectacular vistas of the Minnesota River Valley and the west parking lot.”
“Hmph…” The man looked at him and returned the driver’s license. “If you call ahead, and we encourage calling the night before, we’d have everything all set for you. You don’t even have to walk through the door.”
Will tucked his license away and shrugged. “I’m a spontaneous kind of guy,” he told him.
Spontaneity was never a welcome thing on a golf course. The man’s expression said as much. “How many in your group?”
“Just me,” Will answered. Will knew that was also not a welcome thing on a golf course, especially in the mid-afternoon. However, it was the third week of April, and they weren’t exactly jammed up.
Even less pleased than he was a minute before, the starter offered a mild scowl. “I suppose we can squeeze you in—” he hit another button on his keyboard, “—in twenty minutes. Be on the first tee at two-twenty-five. I’ll have them pull your cart around.”
“No need,” Will told him.
“Pardon?”
“Don’t want a cart. I prefer to walk.”
The starter now mixed puzzlement with his annoyance. “It’s free,” he told Will, “it’s part of your Welcome Packet.”
Will gave another shrug. “I don’t want it. I never use a cart.”
“There’s no cost…”
“Don’t want it.”
“We really encourage the use of a cart.”
“I don’t recall any mention in my Welcome Packet that this was a ‘cart-only’ course,” Will said.
“Well, it isn’t,” the starter said, “but we encourage the use of a cart.” He tried to add more weight to this encouragement with, “In fact, we strongly recommend it.”
“I appreciate the recommendation. I choose to decline. Strongly.”
The starter wouldn’t let it go. “We strongly recommend the cart as a way to discourage slow play.”
Will couldn’t let that go. “Carts don’t mean squat when it comes to slow play. Slow golfers make for slow play, riding or walking.”
“My experience says otherwise.” The man tried to say something else, but Will cut him off, tapping his watch.
“I’m up in fifteen minutes. Want to stretch out a bit before I make that first drive.” He thanked the man for his time and the offer of the cart. At the door, he called back, “I’m not slow.”
From that day on, Will called ahead with religious adherence, even though it meant accepting the ride to the clubhouse. That amenity of the Welcome Package was apparently non-negotiable. Each time, he had to resist all arm twisting and cajoling that ensued in the process of declining a cart for the rest of his round. Once, he’d been asked to fill out a foursome. He did with cheerful consent, though he suspected the situation had been contrived just to get him into a cart. While his newfound mates rode and parked, rode and parked, Will walked the eighteen holes. Over dozens of rounds, hundreds of holes, he’d never once been called for slow play. Wheels and motors have no place in the game of golf. It was one of his few core beliefs. He wouldn’t even use a pull cart for his bag.
Running and golf were not the extent of his athletic endeavors. One of the swimming pools at the Casino, Spa, Resort and Entertainment Experience was half Olympic size. It inspired his first and only stop at the gift shop, looking for a pair of swimming trunks. Will couldn’t imagine any occasion that would bring him back for a repeat stay, so he was hoping to find a Speedo. Not to be. The only thing that would fit him was a baggy, knee length suit printed with day-glo palm trees on an orange background. Should he drown, or suffer a fatal medical event, there’d be no trouble spotting him at the bottom of the pool. Sundays became “swim days”, fifty lengths before breakfast, with a single round of eighteen holes after lunch.
No matter how much time he spent running on asphalt, walking on grass or churning through water with his ass swathed in a distress signal, his days as a resident of the Casino, Spa, Resort and Entertainment Experience became interminable. The hours consumed by his exertions, excessive as they were even to him, still didn’t take up the hours that would be spent by full time employment. There was a lot of time left over in the day; time for rumination, perseveration and anything else capable of gnawing the insides of his skull.
Will thought his choice of accommodations was a stroke of ironic brilliance. The quintessential inside joke. That he’d come up with it on impulse could only mean it was perfect. If he were to succumb to the life of pampered indolence he could now afford, he could not imagine a better locale to give it a test run. It was this type of pedestrian hedonism that would validate his father’s view of him as an irresponsible, self-pitying, self-absorbed brat.
When Will was “shown to his suite” by the bellboy, he was immediately reminded of how well previous impulse decisions had served him. Standing in the elevator with his escort and the luggage trolley, loaded with his golf bag and the tote, the smell emanating from the plastic box didn’t support any assumption the facility may have had that he was a high-roller. Once inside the room—rooms—he stopped the young man from taking his package of fetid laundry from the cart.
“There’s a laundry service here, right?” Will couldn’t help but notice the young man looked happy for at least a momentary reprieve from handling the tote again.
Standing erect, he answered, “We do, sir.”
Will gestured to the luggage cart. “Would you mind . . .”
“Not a problem, sir. I’m happy to do it. Whatever you need.”
Will could well imagine he was happy to do anything if it meant not having to put his hands on that reeking box. “Offer my apologies when you get it to them,” Will said. “Let them know there’s no roadkill in there and, if they’ve no choice but to burn it, I’ll understand. No hard feelings.”
Will sent the young man on his way with his rancid cargo and a twenty-dollar bill. When the door closed he took a heavy seat on the leather couch in the “living area.” After a brief study of his accommodations, he decided they did a pretty good job of making a deep pocketed guest forget he was staying in a gambling joint surrounded by miles of cornfields and pastureland. He was expecting—hoping for—“smarmy.”
Just this quickly, he was back on the roller coaster, a ride he’d been able to get off of by destroying walls for three weeks, and one he’d not taken for years until his father died. Too much change in too little time, too many nasty surprises and too much confusion. He’d barely learned his father was sick before he died, and he didn’t even hear it from him. It was that fucking lawyer, calling him to inform him of “terminal illness and imminent demise.” That’s how the paterfamilias’s mouthpiece put it.
“He couldn’t tell me that himself?” Will snapped back over the phone.
“I’m acting on my client’s instructions, Mister Holliday. I apologize—”
“On his behalf?” Will interrupted.
The pause was brief but, there was a pause. “For having this kind of news delivered to you over the telephone, and by a stranger.”
“Sure,” Will said. He could have added that the attorney had nothing to apologize for, that he couldn’t be expected to understand the full scope of their relationship. He could have added that, instructed to do so or not, this was a difficult call to make to a third party, as he’d been in that position many times in his life. He could have shown some empathy. Instead, he ended the call with, “I hope, for your sake anyway, this is a service that falls under ‘billable hours.’”
That poor lawyer. The next time Will talked to him was in the man’s office, going over the estate. I hope like hell you were getting paid top dollar for the shit you had to take. It was that same shit Will thought he’d buried years before it was his father’s turn for the same treatment. Arguments, accusations and abandonments, Will thought. Plenty of that on both sides of our story, right Dad?
“I’m willing to talk to you about anything,” he’d told his father, and more than once. “I want to talk about this, and that, and how, why and what. Everything and anything, Dad, except money.”
Will drummed his fingers on the arm of the couch. He liked the sound. He’d always wanted a leather couch. A silly indulgence, and not worth the money, at least not the money he had at the time he wanted such a couch. Now, he could furnish that house with nothing but leather couches. That house which he’d also wanted once as a silly fantasy. That desire had also been buried. To discover it hadn’t died like everything and everyone else, it came back more as a haunting than a celebrated resurrection.
Stop this. . .
Will pushed off the couch and surveilled the rest of the suite. Kitchenette, balcony, and in the other room, a king-sized bed and a TV screen the size of a refrigerator door. There was a hot tub. He’d always wondered how great it would be to have one of those, too.
+ + +
Yeah, this bit needs a shave, a haircut and could stand to lose a few pounds. It’ll get done, but it’s going to have to wait.