When You Are Hot

By Craig Van Dyck

Major Paul was variously believed to be in his 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s. When he referred to “fighting with the Sikhs against the Boers in the ‘90s”, it wasn’t clear if he meant the 1890s or the 1990s, or if this had taken place in India or South Africa. An imposing bear of a man – if a bit stooped, and if his hands seemed rather palsied, and if his deeply tanned leathery skin was riven with cracked rivulets, and if his left eye either worked or didn’t (or sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t), and if his limp came and went with the rain – Major Paul was known as Major Paul B., but no one knew what the B stood for, nor whether it was his middle or last initial, nor whether his last name might be “Bee”, nor indeed whether Paul was his first name or last.

Only the clubhouse attendant Smokey pre-dated Major Paul’s membership in Austin Golf Club. But Smokey was impossible to interpret on the subject of Major Paul’s personal details. Smokey was not known as a reliable purveyor of factual information in the best of circumstances, and querying him, say, on Major Paul’s marital status, or nationality, only elicited replies along the lines of, “Yep, he were in the mil’terry. Nope, he got no wife, but he’s got plenty of ‘em. Yep, he be Murrcan, from Casablanca. Nope, I mean Georgia, y’know, the Crocuses.”

Major Paul had the habit to disappear for a week or two at a time, only to re-appear to resume his exact same habits, and volunteering nothing about where he’d been or what he’d done. If asked, the answers tended to focus on special golf lessons in unlikely locales such as Myanmar, where he’d say he’d learned new insights into the art of extracting information from a golfball, or mystical perceptions about attacking an elevated green. The mystery of the Major’s background and doings was made that much more impenetrable by the shocking ignorance of the club’s membership on most subjects but especially including geography, history, politics, economics, agriculture, linguistics, ergonomics, architecture, and the law.

Jimmy Bingey-Purge plopped himself down next to the Major, who sat placidly in his customary deckchair on the rickety verandah overlooking the implausibly green 18th fairway. Jimmy needed someone to share his problem with, and since the love of his life Nathalia Genvethique was at that moment otherwise engaged in a game of online Go with a 12-year-old in North Korea, the Major was a handy and famously reliable resource.

“Drat, I just can’t enjoy the vistas while I’m playing,” muttered Jimmy.

“This implies that you consistently enjoy the vistas while you are not playing,” spake the Major. “Be thankful for what you’ve got, young man.”

“But my pleasure is diminished!” protested Jimmy, who had a reputation for being particularly protective of his pleasure.

“The game itself is not pleasure enough?”

“Come, Major, surely you agree that admiring the expanses, the sky, the sun, is a seminal part of the game itself. The sun! Ah, the sun! Is there anything more warming, anything more life-giving, anything more quintessentially GOLF than the sun?” Jimmy had half-risen from his deckchair, and was gesturing to the wide open spaces before them.

“Indeed I do agree that admiring the expanses is seminal, and no there is nothing more golf-ish, more life-giving, nor more whatever the first thing you said was. But tell me, why, then, can you not enjoy these estimable qualities of the game that God invented and then wasted upon the Scots?”

“Sir, it’s my damn hat. The bill covers too much of my visual angles.”

“Doff said hat, then, my boy.”

“No can do. Doctor’s orders.”

“You let a quack get between you and your enjoyment of golf, sport?”

“It’s a skin cancer thing. You may have noticed that I am bald as a sandtrap up top. The doc says if he burns off one more lesion, he’ll have to cover my pate in a permanent gauze.”

“That does sound inconvenient. I recall a serious bout of skin cancer in the Nairobi, and it took my aide-de-camp sucking the poison out of my elbow before I could be back on the first tee.”

“I’ve tried hats with smaller bills. I even wore a beanie once, but I’m afraid it made me a laughingstock. And when I turned my hat around and wore it backwards, I was informed that I’d violated an age-old club rule against hip-hop. Nothing works!”

The Major leaned back in his chair and took out a pipe, tamped some tobacco into it and lit it. Waving the match dead, he stroked his flowing white moustaches thoughtfully, and murmured with a faraway look in his eye, “Back in the ‘90s, on the Transvaal, I met a colonel with much the same complaint. As I recall, he came up with an ingenious solution, which I think just might work for you, old boy.”

“What! What?”

“He wore a golf toupee.”

Jimmy faltered, trying to get his mind around this strange concept. “You mean…?”

“That’s right. I seem to remember that he favored plaid. Though on certain days he might wear sky blue to match his socks.”

“But Major, please, I am NOT a toupee-wearing man!”

“But I notice that you wear glasses to improve your ability to navigate this world of ours. And clothes to cover the rest of your skin. And fillings in your teeth to save them from rotting. I see no difference in this case,” pronounced Major B.

Jimmy was flummoxed. He had long sworn that you’d never find a rug atop his dome. He made a sport of catching out those sad fellows who donned the carpet, and pointed them out to his friends with a smirk. How could he join their number?

“Furthermore,” continued the Major, “you need not wear it except on the course. Your fellow members will soon come to understand its purpose, and any mocking that you may initially be subjected to will surely give way to acceptance if not respect, or certainly at least they will make fun of you only behind your back, and I am sure you are plenty man enough not to care what others may think anyway. Indeed, in the case of my friend the Colonel, he started something of a fad, and even parlayed his accoutrement into a rather profitable side-business, employing guest workers from Ceylon to mass-produce the haberdashery for sale throughout the Golden Hexagon region.”

“Well, I don’t know…” stammered Jimmy thoughtfully.

“I tell you what, my friend, let us, you and I, play a round together at dusk, when the shadows are long and the venerable Grande Dame is gentle and near deserted. You try the golf toupee once and see how the vistas look to you then. What say you, my good sir James?”
It began to dawn on Jimmy that this could be possible. The thought even occurred that this was an opportunity to do that which he’d secretly longed to do but could never allow himself – to have hair. But what would Nathalia think?

Meanwhile in the clubhouse, Nathalia Geventhique was powering down her laptop, smug with the gratification of having defeated another stranger. She sometimes wondered how many of her opponents were really anything at all like the profiles that they had entered into the site. This last one claimed to be an anime character named FRBR. She herself was remarkably similar to her Go-playing alter ego, Amazonia von Roxy, and she even looked a lot like the picture she had posted from the cover of the album “Country Life”, though normally she did wear a top, particularly when being photographed with another woman, which unaccountably seemed to happen often.

Nats was a well-travelled, spirited youngster who had never felt love. Admittedly, there was something about this Jimmy Bingey-Purge that caused her to permit his repeated advances, though she could not for the life of her understand what. Maybe the dearth of alternative competitors? For the Austin Golf Club was not famous for the coolness, wealth, talent, or conversational abilities of its male members. In a strange way, that’s exactly why she liked it, and her girlfriends at the club had the same attitude. Nats could not remember the last time she’d seen a fellow at the club who seemed to think he was any better than the lowliest frog in the water hazards, in contrast to other golf courses and clubs she’d occasionally visited as a guest of one of her less-inspired partners, where the mid-round joshing and 19th-hole wit seemed on par with that of the male baboon who kills females’ infants in order to hurry them back to impregnability, the better to increase his own chances of spreading his spawn.

Whenever Jimmy saw her, Nats could see the light go on in his eyes. The bad news was, otherwise there was no discernible light, and when it did come on, it was pretty dim. But to his credit, he cared only for two things: golf, and Nathalia, and it didn’t much matter in which order.

The next day, Jimmy and the Major met on the first tee at 4 p.m. Jimmy wore the piece that he’d furtively acquired earlier that day on a visit to an out-of-town salon. It was a bright orange specimen, perfect for “not getting shot in the woods” as the salesman had said. Given the amount of time that Jimmy spent in the woods, he thought it advisable to acquire the orange, along with a yellow that blinked on and off, for those times when his ball found its way into construction sites.

With their bags laying side by side in the grass next to the tee-box (the Club allowed no electric carts), the Major explained the rules for the round’s bets. There were sandies and greenies, pushes and pulls, nassaus and kingstons, closest-to-the-pins and furthest-from-the-fairways. Jimmy couldn’t follow it, but he knew it would all be forgotten anyway because the Major viewed betting as a bastardization of the game, and had only enumerated all these rules to test whether Jimmy would accept them, which he declined to do, to the Major’s satisfaction.

Jimmy drew a deep breath, as that magic moment approached when the day’s first shot would be struck. He paused to look around and admire the vista of grass, trees, sun, sky, and to listen for a moment to birdsong. Then he gathered himself, chanting his mantra to himself, “Head down.” Four hours was a serious commitment. The only other thing that Jimmy ever did that took four hours was a half-day’s volunteer work at the reference desk of the public library. Both activities required the utmost concentration. Finally the Major stepped up to the tee.

Major Paul B’s golf swing was a rococo amalgam of tips, hints, insights, and minor adjustments that had been collected over five continents and untold decades. Every piece of helpful advice ever committed to video or magazine page informed his takeaway, downswing, and follow-through. Not that he watched videos or read magazines; he never did. But those pearls of wisdom had all been sussed out by the Major on his own during the tens of thousands of rounds that he had played. In one swing, his stance would take dozens of approaches to the target, his hands scores of positions, his left elbow hundreds of angles, his knees thousands of degrees of flex, his weight all possible shades of shift from left foot to right, his head every version of stillness, his touch millions of gradations of feeling, and his mind infinite forms of emptiness, all in a split second, for he was a very quick player, indeed his etiquette was faultless.

His swing was an encyclopedia of tactics. If you saw him, at first you would immediately and involuntarily think, Ouch, what a terrible swing, no way he can the hit the ball that way. But as his swing progressed, your perception would evolve into an appreciation of the remarkable equanimity that the swing somehow possessed, despite its many quirks. Like Gaudi’s Sagra Familia, each well-intentioned but misguided nuance somehow added up to a thing of beauty. Swing after swing, round after round, all of these contortions would perfectly cancel each other out, and the clubface would always hit the ball square. There was no adjustment that the Major could make that did not already have its antidote in situ in the bloodstream of his swing.

It was this consistency that made the Major the most empathic of playing partners. Other players were looked upon by him as children to be supported and encouraged as they tripped, fell, bled, healed, and tripped again. He knew, from his own long and bitter experience, that each just needed to get back up, learn, adjust, and keep learning and adjusting until their swing, like his, contained the entire universe of possibility, eventually graduating to godhead of golfswing.

It was on the long 6th, dogleg left, while hunting for his ball after failing to carry the dog, that Jimmy spied, two fairways over, Nathalia herself, coming down the homestretch of her round with her customary playing partner Elspeth d’Avignon, who played rollerblade professionally for the Austin Slashergrrls. Jimmy straightened up and waved to Nathalia. She did not wave back. But she stopped and stared straight and steadily at him. Jimmy shrugged and resumed looking for his ball.

Nathalia, for her part, did not recognize Jimmy, but she was very favorably impressed – even intrigued -- by the figure that the stranger cut and particularly the flaming crop protruding from his scalp. There is something about a full head of hair that says “Youth, health, confidence, virility, power, danger, excitement, lack of skin cancer” to a woman.

A couple of hours later, coming off of the 18th green after shooting his customary 99, Jimmy shook hands with the Major (whose score was unknowable but seemed to come in somewhere between 87 and 92) and waved again to Nathalia, who stood on the rickety verandah overlooking the implausibly green 18th fairway, staring hard at him. Next to her stood Jimmy’s rival, Barney Funkey-Phyffe, who always managed to annoy Jimmy with his yapping around at Nat’s heels.

…”The sun! I love the sun! And, oh yes, I love Nathalia!” evoked Jimmy, the sweat pouring down into his eyes. “But this damn toupee is too damn hot! Major, how did the Colonel keep himself cool back there on the Transvaal?”

“—Jimmy? Is that Jimmy?” Nathalia called down. The name caught in her throat, as she realized that indeed this was Jimmy, but a new Jimmy, a more vital Jimmy, a Jimmy with purpose, a Jimmy with authority, a Jimmy with hair! Suddenly she knew that this was her man, this was her love, this Jimmy, hair or no hair, now that she’d had this glimpse of this setaceous side of him, she knew she was his, and he hers. He would marry her, she would marry him, he would enjoy his vistas, she would enjoy his ever-changing golfhair, and they would be living happily ever after.

“In fact, my boy,” the Major continued, “the Colonel always claimed that the hotter he felt, the hotter he played.”

“You mean – “

“Yes -- ”

“When you are hot…”

“You are hot!”