January 27, 2020

Waiting For Zakarian

Lewberg and I were in a dark place. For Lewberg, it was his natural habitat. As for me, well, I had a timeshare there and paid it the occasional visit.

Lewberg and I hated playing in the morning. All the old-timers played in the morning and the pace would be brutal. But Goldfarb, our regular afternoon partner, had prophesized late day thunder showers and, rather than missing a day of golf, cajoled us into playing while the storm clouds were still at bay.

Lewberg was drinking double vodkas with a splash of cranberry juice. Less of a splash as the day wore on. He liked Ketel One and kept a stash of mini bottles, like from the airlines, in his golf bag.

“Lewberg, it is 9 in the morning,” I said.

“Yeah,” he replied, “I should have some breakfast.” And with that he ripped open a bag of salt and vinegar chips.

There was no point lecturing him, and either way, Lewberg was not going to be shamed, so we headed to number one in three separate carts.

I was in a dark place.

Mine was mostly golf-induced. I couldn't hit the ball straight. Had no idea where it was going. Golf is a game of confidence and mine had packed its bags and headed down to Key West for some rum-laden scuba diving.

We got to the first hole and, as I suspected, there was a minyan of golfers milling about. I shot Goldfarb a dirty look. He glibly pointed to the early morning sun.

“Let’s go off the back,” I said. We would start on number ten and have the whole course to ourselves. So we doubled back and I waved at Billy, the morning starter, and said “Ok if we go off the back?” Now I phrased it as a question but I didn’t slow down my cart. I wasn’t really asking.

Billy shouted out “Whoa whoa, the back is closed.” Then a golf cart shot by me and Billy yelled out again “Whoa whoa Mr. Zakarian, the back is closed.”

I reversed my cart and it made that siren like warning sound.

“Why is the back closed?”

“Maintenance,” replied Billy. “It will be open when you make the turn.”

So we went back to the first hole and waited our turn.

I was in a dark place.

On the first hole my tee shot went right. It didn’t slice right. It didn’t veer right. It didn't fade right. It went sideways.

Lewberg, who had hit 220 yards to the middle of the fairway with a line drive that didn’t get up over the height of my head, looked up from his drink and gave me a quizzical look. Goldfarb also looked at me askew. Askance?

Am not sure.

There are a lot of bad shots in golf. The duck hook, the slice, the chunk, the topper, and the blade. Those are all bad shots. But the shot that goes virtually 90 degrees to the right after the club hits the ball is not a bad shot. It is an affliction.

It happens when you hit the ball with the hosel of the club instead of the blade. The hosel is where the blade meets the shaft.

When the hosel, instead of the blade, strikes the ball, it makes a very distinctive sound. The golf equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard. Like a dog whistle is to dogs, golfers on other holes in the golf course know what has happened.

Once a year, a professional on the PGA tour hits that shot and ten million amateurs smile to themselves.

Class action schadenfreude.

It isn't a bad shot. It is a virus. It is a bug. It is an affliction. There is no cure. There are no antibiotics.

You would rather swing, completely miss the ball, and land on your ass than hit that shot.

I pulled a second ball out of my pocket, took a practice swing, and tried again. And once again, the ball went right. It hit a house. When the people first bought that house they would have asked the real estate agent if any golf balls ever landed in the yard and the real estate agent would have said “Nah, you’re safe. No way anyone hits your house from there.”

If it were four in the afternoon, when I usually play, I might have hit another ball because there is nothing worse for the confidence then starting this badly. But there was another foursome waiting so I said “I’ll hit from Lewberg’s ball.” And then I jumped into the cart and dropped a ball, my third of the morning, next to Lewberg’s. Then I quickly took a swing and managed to hit a ground ball to the edge of the green. It was ugly. But it was straight. I now just had a short chip to get on.

Lewberg and Goldfarb were already on the green and they stood aside as I hit my chip.

They needn’t have moved.

The chip went dead right.

Perpendicular.

Sideways.

Lewberg and Goldfarb looked down at their feet.

You know when you are beginning to get a cold. Just a little tickle in your throat and maybe one or two sneezes more than normal. You tell yourself that it is allergies. It’s nothing. Just a tickle.

But you know.

I was hoping this was just allergies. Just a tropical storm. But I knew a hurricane was brewing just around the corner.

On the par 5 two, I Tin-cupped three shots in a row from the tee box using three different clubs and then just got into my cart and wordlessly drove down the fairway. Lewberg and Goldfarb had stopped acknowledging my presence. I was an outcast. A leper.

I was patient zero.

I stood on the fairway in a daze. I should have gone home but I was too shell-shocked to make a decision.

Overcompensating as much as I could, I hit my second shot right off the toe and managed to advance it down the fairway. The ball took a flight which defied both modern and ancient physics but ended up in a perfect spot. If you had turned your head for a second, you would have thought I had hit a beauty. Lewberg gave me a thumbs-up but his face made it clear he thought I was still contagious. Both Lewberg and Goldfarb had hit their second in the same vicinity and was where we were standing, when we saw Zakarian again.

He sped by on his cart just as I was in the middle of my backswing for my third shot. He raced by on my left with barely a wave. Actually, no wave. No acknowledgement. We were a threesome and he, as always, was playing alone. The foursome behind must have let him play through. He didn’t like playing with others and, truthfully, nobody wanted to play with him either. We would have let him play through on number three but he didn’t have the patience to wait and maybe thought that Lewberg, who he had had run-ins with in the club golf committee would be a dick and not let him play through. But Lewberg wasn’t a dick and anyways, nobody wanted to play with Zakarian up their ass, so there was no question we would have let him play through, but he never bothered to ask.

I managed to check up my swing and muttered, “Fucking Zakarian,” under my breath and then out loud once he was out of earshot. Lewberg, who was standing next to me, smiled and also said, “Fucking Zakarian.” Goldfarb liked fishing balls out of the pond. Which, to be fair, would have irritated even the most patient golfer. And Zakarian was hardly patient.

The Zakarian interruption darkened a mood I thought could get no darker so I just picked up my ball and watched Goldfarb and Lewberg make pars on the green and then we got into our carts and crossed the short bridge over the mangroves to the signature par 3.

When we got to the tee box, we saw that Zakarian’s cart was still on the edge of the green. He drove with a white handicap flag which allowed him to drive virtually anywhere on the course except the actual greens, and he took full advantage of it. Nobody was quite sure what his handicap was—other than being a bit of an asshole. He had driven his cart to the very edge of the green just beyond the pond which was between the tee box and the green box. The golf gods needed to be respected and I had made my fair share of golf ball sacrifices into that pond.

Lewberg said, “Fucking Zakarian,” again and then repeated some variation of “what the fuck.”

Zakarian, it appeared, was sitting in his cart, and we stood there, hands on our hips, calling out his name.

I asked Lewberg if he knew his first name and he thought for a second, furrowing his Eugene-Levy-like brows, and said, “I think it is Arman.”

“We should just fucking hit into him,” I said with false bravado, making a big show of teeing up my ball.

“Jesus fuck, he is so fucking oblivious,” I said. “Is he on the phone?”

Finally, Lewberg and I decided to drive up to see what the hell the holdup was. We called out his name as we drove up the cart path and then gingerly walked to where he had parked his cart there on the edge of the green.

Zakarian didn’t once turn around as we shouted his name, and we could see he was a little slumped down on the bench of his cart. He had ‘Zakarian’ stenciled on one side of the cart and a Miami Dolphin sticker on the side where his wife’s name would have been if he had a wife—none of us knew if he had ever been married.

Lewberg leaned his head into the cart, gave Zakarian’s shoulder a gentle shake, and then turned to me and said, “Zakarian is dead. Zakarian is fucking dead,” he said. It was true. Zakarian was dead.

I called the clubhouse and then called 911.

We stood there without saying anything and Lewberg, who had not moved from the side of the cart, said “He gave himself a par on number two.”

“What?” I was trying to deal with the fact that Zakarian was dead.

Lewberg pointed to the scorecard which was clipped on the steering wheel of the golf cart.

“Five. Five. Bogey on one. Par on two.”

I couldn’t understand what Lewberg was trying to say. He explained without prompting.

“He gave himself a par on number two even though he didn’t play it. I’m just saying.”

“Zakarian was a pretty decent golfer,” I said, already referring to him in the past tense. “A par is not unreasonable. You just made a par.”

“Supposed to take the average you have made in all played holes and then apply it to the unplayed holes.” Lewberg wasn’t being a dick. This was just his way of dealing with Zakarian being dead in his golf cart on hole number three.

“What did he make on this hole?” I asked.

“No score recorded for number three,” said Lewberg.

“You think he died before he was able to mark down his score or did he not finish playing the hole?” I also was not being a dick. It was just my way of dealing with the fact that Zakarian was dead.

“I think he hit his shot. Drove to the edge of the green. Then died before he could finish the hole,” Lewberg stated with such assurance that I believed it had to be so.

“So then where is his ball?”

The three of us looked up at the green at virtually the same time. There was no ball on the green. Lewberg walked over to the bunkers on the right and declared there was no ball in the bunkers. Goldfarb scoured the rocks next to the bunkers where the iguanas sunned themselves. He retrieved a dirty white Titleist from the rocks but it couldn’t have been Zakarian’s. Everyone knew that Zakarian played with yellow balls.

“Maybe he was in the water?” I said.

“No,” said Lewberg without hesitation. “He would have gone to the drop zone. He wouldn’t have driven to the edge of the green.” He then walked from the bunkers to the grassy slope to the left of the green. We called it the Valley of Death. A lot of balls landed in the Valley of Death. Especially if you were trying to avoid the bunkers, rocks and iguanas on the right. But there was no ball in the Valley of Death. Lewberg then took a 7-iron out of my bag—why couldn’t he use his own 7-iron—and used it to poke into the shrubs that lined the back of the green. Long would have been a bad miss. But he came back empty-handed.

Then I said, mostly in jest, “Check the hole.” Lewberg walked, 7-iron still in his hand, to the pin on the third hole. The greenskeeper had placed it right in the middle of the green that day. 155 yards from the white tees. Lewberg bent over, briefly looked up to me where I was standing next to the cart with a dead Zakarian, and pulled out a yellow Callaway from the hole.

Lewberg took a long time walking back to the cart from the green. You know how you can tell when someone is deep in thought? Well Lewberg was deep in thought. None of us had ever made a hole in one. Two years ago, Zakarian claimed he had aced number fifteen but he had, as always, been playing alone and knew better than to take credit for an unverified ace.

“Maybe he...” I started, but Lewberg cut me off.

“It was a hole in one,” he said very softly. Lewberg looked like he was about to cry. “155 yards. Probably his six hybrid.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That sounds about right.”

Then Lewberg showed me the yellow Callaway he had pulled out of the hole. It had a letter Z marked right below the Callaway logo. That’s how Zakarian marked all of his balls.

“Yup,” I said. I could hear the sound of the ambulance driving up the Turnpike.

“He must have hit it pure,” said Lewberg. “Saw it sail right towards the hole and then disappear. Drove to the edge of the green hoping against hope that he would not see a ball on the green. Meaning that it could only be in the hole.”

“Heart attack?”

“Not from the excitement,” said Goldfarb “but from the realization that he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone. That’s what killed him.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That makes sense.”

“Hole-in-one,” said Goldfarb “Nobody will know.”

Lewberg stood there inspecting the ball. The sounds of the sirens were getting louder. They were getting closer.

“Fucking Zakarian,” he said.

Then he walked back to the green, gently deposited the ball back in the hole, and jogged back to the cart. He looked at me but didn’t say anything. I grabbed the pencil and slowly and deliberately wrote in the number one in the spot next to the box for hole number three. I blew on the card and inspected my handiwork.

“Nice,” said Lewberg, but it was barely a whisper.

He looked at me and said, “He must have hit it pure.”

I said, “Yeah.”

“And you thought you were having a bad day,” Goldfarb said without smiling.

We could see carts coming up the path. There were four of them.

“Fucking Zakarian,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Fucking Zakarian.”

The end.