Poor Marty had to work on Sunday with Marge. He knew she couldn’t wait to interrogate him about his big date, so he avoided riding with her on the pretense he needed to buy some parts for his truck after work. All day at the pet store, she kept on prying to find out what happened. The most she could get out of her son was a shrug and, “Fine,” or some other uninformative monosyllable. Meanwhile, his mind’s wastebasket was filling up with one discarded plan after another, trying to come up with a way to erase the last 2 minutes and 45 seconds of his bungled courtship. He dwelt on his gaffe over and over, completely dismissing that she said “Let’s see how it goes,” and focusing only on his miserable failure.
He confided to Mike what he had said, and he visibly winced. “Man, that’s too quick. You gotta take it slow with a girl like that.” Marty thanked him sarcastically for the most obvious hindsight in the history of romantic advice, but he was just trying to be a good big brother. Marty knew that Mike felt deeply for him, but was unable to show much emotion, which made it difficult to communicate. He didn’t tell him about the one detail that mystified him: that her brother “wouldn’t let her have a boyfriend.” The more Marty thought about that, the more he felt it was a cry for help, like a message in a bottle. On a purely instinctive level, he believed his impression was true, and that Michelle was confiding a deeply personal secret. Therefore, he told nobody else about it, which meant he couldn’t gain the insight of another person’s point of view. It was like having a terminal diagnosis, and not wanting to burden others with the bad news.
On Monday in journalism class, Michelle greeted Marty pleasantly, telling him she couldn’t get Vincent out of her mind, and thanking him again for the wonderful evening. The words were flowery, but delivered in the cordial tones of a neighbor showing appreciation for watering their lawn. There was no revealing spark of connection, or acknowledgement of the heights of emotion to which they had nearly ascended together. Marty nodded in a courteous manner, noting her gratitude with guarded etiquette. He could only imagine what whirlwinds of thought had swept through her mind over the weekend, as he was quite worn out from his own mental typhoon. So it was back to business as usual. The next issue of the Jolly Roger was going to be about Marin County, and Marty had to plan several contributions, so he tried to act casual, kind, and busy. While he worked, he kept glancing to see what she was doing. Sometimes he’d catch her looking at him with an inscrutable expression, and then she’d look away. Or she’d suddenly glance up to see him watching her, as if sensing the mental caress of his ardent attention. Neither of them knew what to say, so they said nothing at all. The class ended, and the moment was gone. His next class was art, so he headed for the refuge of the creek, to listen to the calming sound of rippling water instead of the raging torrent in his brain.
Marty’s sad sneakers squeaked as he walked down the empty halls into the art room, where alert female faces tracked his every move. Word had gotten around about his hopeless infatuation with the prettiest girl in school, and their glittery eyes conveyed a mixture of respect, curiosity, and pity. He felt an intense loneliness building up inside of him, and surrounded by the pictures in Mr. B’s art room, he reflected on Vincent and the similarities in their thwarted passions. Marty painted a self-portrait in an exaggeration of his style, using a confusion of colors that whirled and writhed on his face in streaks of pain. The tears that would not come were transcribed on canvas, and each brushstroke was a vibrant lash of self-flagellation. Only the eyes were clear; cast to the side wistfully, and gazing into the future…
At that point, Marty didn’t know what more he could do to try and find a girlfriend. He had invested four years of intense longing, and come up empty-hearted. He finally decided to give Michelle some space, in the helpless way that astronauts must wait to see if a planet can support life. They’d had a magical night together, sharing the highest levels of human philosophy, and then he had to go and propose such a stupid question! He couldn’t take that one back, and now she knew unequivocally that he wanted to possess her. With male frustration, he wondered if he should have simply grabbed her lustfully like those guys on TV, and had his way with her to see if that was what she wanted. He just didn’t know what to do! It appeared as though the females of his species really went wild for that sort of thing, but that wasn’t his style. He didn’t want to kiss or make love with anyone who didn’t also love him. For Marty, sex was the consummation of a deep, spiritual connection with a person. The problem was, he didn’t know how to write the screenplay that would lead up to the preferred climax. The movies didn’t show that part! There was much harvesting of carnal fruit on TV and film, but very little planting and pruning. So he was left with the dilemma of just leaving it alone, or pushing to try and make it work out. He’d been on that precipice too many times in his life already, and was getting tired of it, so he resisted the urge to call her, and figuratively sat down on the ledge and waited… with the tension and anxiety of an investor waiting to see if the market would crash.
During classes, Michelle was friendly but guarded with Marty, the way a celebrity might react to meeting an ardent fan. He wondered, at least 20,000 times, if he should just call her and talk this thing out, but his memories of disappointing phone calls convinced him that it was best to make eye contact while saying the things he wanted to say. And so he waited for the right moment, but the moment never came.
To distract himself from unrequited passions, Marty joined the golf team after school; not only to rehab his leg, but also to take out some of his frustrations by marching around an expanse of green grass and whacking a little white ball as hard as he could with a club. As a young boy, he had learned how to play the game from Good Ol’ Dad, but that man took all the fun out of it. Marty hoped his father might show some support if he started to play golf competitively, but he never offered to play a round with him, teach him a few pointers at the Country Club, or – G.O.D. forbid – actually come to one of his matches. Marty knew that high school golf wasn’t a spectator sport, but he thought it might at least attract a cursory interest.
Actually, he would have rather been playing baseball, and he watched a couple of Varsity games from afar, wistfully observing that he could have been much better than their starting outfielders. He was an All-Star player in his mind, in which he could appreciate all the nuances of the game, anticipate the proper plays to be made, and guess what the pitcher was going to throw. Alas, his legs weren’t strong enough anymore for the rigors of a running sport, so the plodding pace of golf was where he had to focus his attention. Marty began to discover the great mental challenge of golf, and a lesson he hadn’t experienced before: the planning of an action and execution of an accomplishment for his own benefit. He was raised on team sports, where every act was intended for the advantage of the group, or to vanquish an opponent, but in golf you played against yourself, and bore your own success or failure. Once he stopped trying to smash the ball into smithereens, and began to forecast where he wanted it to wind up, he started striking it in the manner intended with the club head, and damned if the ball didn’t go where he wanted it to! That significant breakthrough made the game so much more interesting!
San Geronimo Country Club was Drake’s home course, which was perfect because it was literally on his way home; in the heart of the Valley. Actually, Sir Francis Drake Boulevard cut right through the middle of the golf course. Even still, the scenery was breathtakingly beautiful, with knobby, rolling hills, magnificent trees, and forested ridgelines. That time of year, the grass on the hillsides was greener than the fairways, which gave Marty the impression he was stalking a wee feathery with a niblick in the Old Country! As an added bonus, Archie – the coolest teacher in school and former Olympic gold medal athlete – was also the golf coach. He hung around the putting green and driving range when they practiced, alternating between cracking jokes and straightening their backs. Out on the course, he drove around in a golf court like some helpful genie who appeared and disappeared at a whim. Marty could never figure out Archie. He was so casual and permissive that he seemed not to care, and yet he exuded an aura of caring very deeply indeed. He believed his wise old teacher had been through so much in his life that he was simply confident in knowing what truly mattered.
Marty bonded with Wes, a stalwart junior, who was also the only other player on the team who lived in the Valley. He was a much better player at first, but Marty was catching up very quickly. His putting was improving tremendously, as each stroke became a miniature puzzle in physics that had to be planned and executed skillfully. Consequently, his scores were coming down the more he sank putts, and he learned how to approach the green and leave a good position from which to attack the hole, follow through on the ball, and push with tempo. Marty the humorist was fascinated by the wealth of sexual innuendo in golf – or was it actually intentional? The object of the game was simply to get your ball in the hole in the fewest strokes possible, by controlling the head of your club. It was no wonder that old dudes enjoyed hitting the links so much!
Marty imagined the drunken Scots hundreds of years ago, when they invented the crazy game as a distraction from the weather. (When golf is played, one realizes the old blokes had to be three sheets to the wind to even conceive of such an activity in the first place.) He could imagine them holed up in a damp, dark pub in the middle of winter, with the icy northern squalls blowing sideways across the moors, when MacTavish skewered MacKenzie with a bloodshot eye, and rolled his tongue in brogue, “Let’s ply aft t’ the fescue and smote a wee fooking ball with yon mashie so it flees into yon fooking hole!” That they actually went outside and pursued such folly was testament to how drunk they must have been. Even the name “golf” sounded like something for which one should excuse oneself in polite company.
Despite the enthusiasm of the players, Drake’s links campaign didn’t go so well – they haplessly lost twice as many matches as they won. Golf was much more difficult when you had to count every damned mistake! Regardless, it was a great excuse to get outside, even if nobody came to watch. The brave service of the lads to defend Sir Francis Drake’s honor on the courses of Marin went almost completely unnoticed. There was only one blurry team picture in the yearbook (which was taken before Marty joined), and his name wasn’t mentioned. It was such a forgettable campaign that even G.O.D. hardly took notice.
Naturally, Marty was left with many ideas for golf cartoons. He wanted to do a silly Country Club feature for the Jolly Roger because the next issue was all about the extravagant culture of Marin. Genevieve (one of the rotating editors) nipped the idea in the bud, flatly stating that nobody at school cared about golf, or even knew they had a team. She had curly blonde hair, freckles, and round glasses, and dressed very conservatively. Then she abruptly changed the subject, asking Marty if his dad lived in Greenbrae. “Yeah,” he responded curiously, “Why?”
“He’s about your height, with gray hair and blue eyes?” She queried, and he nodded, mystified at how she knew his father, and then she blushed unexpectedly. “I think he’s dating my mom.” She was really embarrassed, and Marty suddenly saw Genevieve as a person for the first time: a goofy, intellectual girl who covered up her problems by acting stern and officious. Every kid in school had problems, he realized with compassion, but some disguised them better than others.
Nonetheless, he was dumbfounded by her revelation. “Really?” he blurted reflexively, believing she was telling the truth, and wondering how Good Ol’ Dad had wound up meeting her mom. She shuffled papers nervously on her desk, and kept taking a pencil from behind her ear and putting it back again. Marty didn’t know what to say, so he ventured, “I mean, that’s probably a good thing, right?”
“I dunno,” she moaned, unconvinced. “It’s kind of weird, like you could be my stepbrother.” Ouch! Marty hadn’t thought of that, and sank deeper into astonishment. Their eyes linked with the frank and probing stare of strangers who share an extraordinary experience by sheer chance.
Marty shrugged with resignation, knowing he had no control over the situation, and Genevieve told him how her mom had met his dad from a personal ad in the newspaper. They wrote at first, then he called her, and they went on a date to the movies. Eeeww! They were both grossed out at the thought of their parents on a date where they might actually kiss each other… or something worse. Marty wondered, should he warn her about the capriciousness of G.O.D.? Or just let her find out for herself? He decided that discretion was the better part of candor, and thanked her for informing him. His teeth were wrestling with his tongue in an effort to prevent it from saying what his cartoon brain was projecting about a “double date.” That would be so weird! She looked at him curiously, as he gulped and gagged on his own sarcasm.
Genevieve mercifully reverted to editor mode and changed the subject. “Do you think we should do a story about Larry, or is that in bad taste?”
Everyone at school was talking about “Leaping Larry,” a senior who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge early in the spring. Lots of people did that to commit suicide, but he actually survived, and swam to safety under his own power! What Marty found most incredible about the whole incident was that a few days later he was back at school with his arm in a sling, and bragging about the experience. One would think the poor guy might need professional help after jumping off a 245-foot span like that! He boasted that he did it intentionally, and described how he hit the water with his heavy boots first and separated his shoulder, but side-stroked his way to shore. Marty suspected that he actually was trying to kill himself, but kept his cynicism to himself for a change, letting Larry have his moment of glory. Who knows, maybe attempted suicide gave him something for which to live.