capitalism explained

I’ve pissed away roughly one-thirtieth of my life on a paint-chipped bench, waiting. That’s a lot of time! I’m exaggerating that 1/30th statistic, of course, but not as greatly as one might suppose. From the ages of 13-15 (my early caddie years at LaGrange Country Club), sitting was the name of the game. I got very good at sitting. Very good, I say, because while sitting I learned and mastered many indispensable card games/life skills, including but not limited to:

hearts
spades
poker
how to curse

Loopers (slang for caddies) sleep less than your average truck driver. I'd rise terrifically early, rub the night from my eyes, pedal my bicycle in hellcat fashion past the manicured lawns of my Burtonian suburbia, chain ‘er up in the rear parking lot and jog through that Midwest dew over to the cold, unforgiving wood of the caddie picnic tables. After scouting a proper squat for my khakied bum, I'd cheek it on a gym towel—my makeshift cushion—with chin in palm, as if posing for a Rockwell or something. That’s just the way it was, day after week after sepia year. Very Sisyphean.

We sat for varied amounts of time, our waiting period mostly determined by caddie rank. The little craps—that was me, if we’re still groovin’ in ‘97—claimed “B” caddie status, meaning that we were the lowliest turds in the sewer. “B” caddie status carried with it lots of non-responsibility. Synonyms for “B” caddie: seat-filler, virgin, guinea pig, ashtray, (sacrificial) lamb, chum (not chum the buddy, chum the bloody shark bait). There were like a million of us, meaning that our chances of getting out on the golf course—or “on a bag,” in caddiespeak—at any given moment were 1/1,000,000. We sat there politely and longed for pubic hair, careful not to make any sudden movements that might agitate the sharp-tongued piranha (caddies with pubic hair).

Let’s ascend a rung. Assuming you’d done alright as a “B” and didn’t fuck anything up, you might attain a swell promotion of sorts (see: slap on back and firm, bone-crushing handshake) after ‘bout two years and become an "A!" An “A” caddie assumed a role not unlike that of an office manager. You now hovered somewhere in purgatory—certainly not a monarch but not really a boot-licking minion, either—cuz now there’s someone beneath you to humiliate. “A” caddies instructed the “B” caddies when and where to piss and what (the aforementioned urine, sometimes) to eat/lick off the pavement. Ever play Asshole, that one drinking game where you try to get rid of all your cards quickly as you can? “B” caddies=Assholes, “A” caddies=vice-Assholes. Perfect analogy. There were far less than a million “A” caddies, meaning that your odds of securing work on any given day catapulted from 1/1,000,000 to about 1/10, just like that! A swell promotion.

Then, should you crawl thru five hundred yards (and four years) of shit-smelling foulness I still can’t even imagine—that’s the length of five football fields!—you emerge, half-naked, gasping and free, an “Honor” caddie at long last!

Ah, the “Honor” caddies (13-yr-old me bows reverentially). These guys were gods, immortals! They rocked fully-realized facial stubble, drank heroically, chawed on chaw, spoke of women’s bodies as conquistadors speak of golds and spices and measured in at 5’8", 5’10"—Herculean, impossible heights! You’d be a damn fool to speak in their presence. They slapped us around, caned our behinds, ridiculed us until we ran home crying for our mothers. They were bad. They were fierce. There were only about a dozen of them. They carried two bags, one per shoulder, and we carried none at all.

A typical day at LaGrange Country Club:

So now it’s 5:50, sun's still cowering away somewhere, everybody’s cold as shit (our breath is the frost) and the caddie count is as follows: “B”: 1,000,000, “A”: 18, “Honor”: 12. Our caddiemaster (funny term, to be sure, if you haven’t heard it before), a gruff ex-jock named Brian (Coach “K”) Kopecky, barrels into the shack, gruffing under his breath. He’s dragging behind him an industrial-sized garbage bin swelling with a million multi-colored golf tees, each tee sporting a different Sharpied number across the top of it, right across the fat part of the peg where you place the ball. The “B” caddies scamper over like the idiots they (I) are (were—er, are) and select from the pail, drawing one tee apiece. This is the Lottery Of Lotteries, but the Shirley Jackson kind, not the hopeful, optimistic kind. You select a tee with 31, 509, or, God help you, 112,242, forget it—you’re not getting work today. Go home! Cut your losses, pick your nose. That precious Sharpied number becomes your identification number for the next eight-odd hours, a prison badge of sorts. On any given day, 15 or 20 “B” caddies might secure a bag, meaning the other 999,985 unripened tweens pedaled their asses over there for nothing.

BUT we (I) were young and awfully stupid, cuz we’d inevitably snatch up a 41 or 284, or, Christ, a 612,349 and stick around anyway, ignoring logic, precedence, everything. We’d gamble money we didn’t have on card games we didn’t know how to play. We’d listen to tall tales of booze, coke, pregnation and incarceration, mouths agape. The “B” jocks aged ten years in a matter of weeks.

Bukowski once said something to the effect that anything you ever wanted to learn at University could be learned in one day at the horse races. I don’t have the quote in front of me, but you get the gist.

To further that sentiment, I’ll maintain with a straight face that anything you ever wanted to know about capitalism can be learned in four hours at a caddie yard. Those 12 “Honor” caddies controlled 90% of the wealth. They wooed LaGrange CC’s high-end clientele, lived lives of privilege and extravagance, slept with scores of women (or claimed to, anyway) and worked far less hours than their counterparts. No one attempted to unseat them, for fear of “dumpstering,” a very real phenomenon in the shack. Dumpstering is when you take a kid and throw him in a dumpster. The “A” caddies earned modest amounts of cash, which they folded neatly into their billfolds and later deposited into savings accounts at the local bank. “B” caddies scraped and conned and hoarded and deceived, attempting to eke out a proper living.

That’s capitalism, baby.
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