Golf Memoir No. 4. The food.
It's commonly known that some think of golf as an upper-crust sort of sport, a few stiff hours spent blabbing on the latest slabs of stock data or gurglings in the bowels of insurance floats. A fellow in between tee shots might try to unload a Rothko, or a horsey daughter who too closely resembles a best-forgotten patch in the lineage. In the coming months I'll champion the alternate angle — that golf is the great equalizer, the plane where the Boston Brahmins and the Venice beach bodybuilders, the dawdling decagenarian diners and the Dominican dishwashers, the Victorian constable-euthanists and the kittens who mewl as their burlap casket is beaten over and over with the side of a helmet — meet glove-to-glove and flip a tee for honors.
But not today. I came here to speak of the vagaries of golf course cuisine, and so it shall go. You will get your penny dreadfuls of 19th-century London flatfoots braining still-blind, squeaking litters of Siamese with their cast-iron "Bobby buckets" on some other day. Shame on you. It is gross what you want. It is sick what you feel is relevant.
Onwards, then! Golfers are largely pigs. They ready two fingers, index and middle, and poke two nostrils into their figurative Play-Doh snouts with every new round. They pucker their bushy, mustachioed pusses as the beverage-and-sandwich cart "girl" appears over the rise of a hillock five hundred yards off. They compare rock-hard fantasies in which the lass (a 58 year-old bar pixie named Meg—short for Margaret, not Megan), using a sharpened Coors Light, eviscerates their old, stone-ridden kidneys, and then produces fresh sets from the Igloo strapped to the rear of the light-service Daihatsu. They yell "high five!" to each other as they lay on their bellies near a yardage marker, two bloody incisions in their lower backs. As their skin grows tacky and their pupils less responsive in the white-hot afternoon rays, Meg pushes the new kidneys into place with the sharp end of a triangle-cut ham on white that's been plastic-wrapped so hard, it's water resistant to three hundred meters. "High...five...," the last to receive the transplant whispers into the fragrant, fresh-cut turf.
That is the long and short of golf course cuisine. You may ask after the fabled "private clubhouse's" filet mignon avec jabot du bacon, but this is largely a fiction created by retirement community literature. More likely than not you'll be choosing between a frankfurter that's been lolling around on metal rollers for the better part of Comet Halley's retreat from earth, and a hamburger patty that was tenderized on the narrow path between the 18th green and the cart shed.
I believe this actually serves to pre-affirm my future over-arching point that, when all the facts are in, golf is the great equalizer. I see, upon re-reading my introduction (this does happen), that I had planned on not making this point. This speaks to the strength of my message, I think. Though I had tried desperately not to make any point at all, it was inescapable, and now it is deposited lightly upon the surface of the busy sea of human discussion, soon to sink beneath a great wave of non-syllabic text messages weighing in on whether or not Britney Spears is fat.
