“Just a car door.”
Paul wiped his forehead. “I’m not gonna make it.”
“Courage is the ability to suspend the imagination.”
“What?”
“We need to keep our minds occupied. Hand me the travel guide.”
Johnny Vegas was a golf pro.
As of Thursday.
Vegas’s tanned, six-foot frame rippled in all the right places beneath a tight mercerized-cotton shirt, stretched over broad, firm shoulders and tapered to a trim waist under an alligator belt. He had that squinty Latin thing going that drove women wild. His black hair was longish and currently organized for the Antonio Banderas effect.
Johnny had decided to begin teaching golf when he met his first pupil. Her name was Bianca, a tall Mediterranean model in town shooting a swimsuit photo spread for truck tires. Bianca broke golf etiquette by wearing a bikini to her first lesson. That made them even. Johnny didn’t play golf.
Johnny had met Bianca an hour earlier on the beach behind the Orbit Motel. He was standing near the shore wearing two-hundred-dollar sunglasses, holding a surfboard. Johnny was standing on the beach with the surfboard because he didn’t know how to surf. Bianca walked up.
“You surf?” she asked coyly, cocking her hip.
“Of course not,” Johnny said with playful sarcasm. “I just stand here with this board.”
Johnny didn’t have a job. Didn’t have to. The scion of an insurance mogul, Johnny had a bulging trust fund and the kind of lifestyle not seen since Joe Namath wore mink on Broadway. He also had a secret. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but Johnny had never gone all the way. Oh, he wanted to. So did the women. It had just never worked out. It was always something, some kind of bizarre interruption. Johnny had learned the hard way that if getting a woman in the mood was an art, then keeping her there was a fucking science — the whole fleeting phenomenon more rare, delicate and unstable than suspending a weapons-grade uranium isotope at the implosion point. The least little vibration and everything tumbles. Or detonates.
That was Johnny’s love life. Hotel fire, civil unrest, military jet crash, ammonia cloud evacuation, George Clooney sighting. In addition to being a trust-fund playboy, he was Johnny Vegas, the Accidental Virgin.
A few months earlier in Miami, Johnny had picked up a Cuban dreamboat with a perfectly positioned beauty mark that made him swallow his own tongue. They had met at a trendy salsa club in Little Havana and were back at her place within the hour. She grinned naughtily as she gave Johnny a private dance, peeling off her clothes piece by piece, tossing them aside with aplomb. Johnny sat at the foot of the bed, ripping open his trousers like a stubborn bag of potato chips.
She finally flung her panties over her shoulder and sauntered toward Johnny. “You’ve been a bad boy.”
That’s when they heard the sirens. Flashing blue and red lights filled the bedroom. The woman ran to the window.
“What is it?” asked Johnny.
“I can’t believe it!” she yelled. “It’s the feds! They’re taking Elián!”
“Who’s Elián?”
“This is so unfair!” she sobbed. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go. I need to be alone tonight.”
Seven months later, Johnny was back at the plate. He had landed a drop-dead attorney in a serious pantsuit and glasses, her brunette hair in a no-nonsense bun. She strolled up to him at a political cocktail party, slipped off her glasses and shook down her hair. “What do you say we blow this Popsicle stand?”
A half hour later, Johnny was lying in bed on his back, the woman climbing aboard.
The TV was on. Tom Brokaw. The woman heard something and looked over.
“What?” she yelled. “They’re taking Florida away from Gore? They can’t do that!”
She jumped out of bed and turned up the volume with the remote.
“What is it?” asked Johnny.
“Shhhhh!”
So when Johnny met Bianca on the beach behind the Orbit Motel, he had just one question.
“Do you read newspapers?”
“Read what?”
They headed for the golf course across A1A from the motel, where Johnny said he was the club pro. That impressed her; she said she had always wanted to learn golf.
On the third hole, the ball was three feet from the cup. Johnny interlaced his fingers on the putter’s leather grip. Then he handed her the club. “Now you try.”
She pretended to be all thumbs. “I just can’t do it. Could you show me again?”
Johnny stepped up from behind and wrapped his taut arms around her, repositioning Bianca’s hands on the shaft. She turned toward his biceps. “Wow, you’re pretty strong. I’ll bet you have lots of girlfriends.”
“Just stroke through the ball,” said Johnny. “One fluid motion.”
Bianca tapped the ball with the putter.
“Darn! It hit the windmill again. I just can’t play this game.”
“Let’s try the dinosaur hole,” said Johnny. “That’s an easy one.”
“It’s not golf,” said Bianca, pooching out her bottom lip, then staring off.
“What is it?”
“I have this problem…. It’s medical.”
Just my luck, thought Johnny. Probably a week to live. On the other hand, a week’s a week.
“What kind of problem?”
“It’s embarrassing. My boyfriend dumped me because of it…. Autagonistophilia.”
“Is that like a bunion?”
“It means I can only become sexually aroused if I’m doing it in a public place near people.”
“You do it in public?”
“Not actually in public, but where I can see lots of people close by, and there’s a high risk of being discovered, possibly arrested…. You okay? You look pale.”
Johnny braced himself on the side of the windmill.
“Wait, there’s more,” she said. “I’ve also got chrematistophilia — that’s getting excited if you’re blackmailed into sex. And hybristophilia, sex with convicted criminals, and symphorphilia, sex during natural disasters, and formicophilia, wanting to have sex on cheap countertops.” She held out her left arm. “See? I have a medical alert bracelet.”
Two men walked by them on the cart path, sipping coconuts and reading their Cocoa Beach travel guide. They strolled past the waterfall, the pink elephant and the airplane crashed into the side of a plastic mountain on the thirteenth hole. They crossed the Japanese footbridge over the lagoon that separated “Goony Golf” from the driving range. The lagoon was actually a retention pond, and the pair looked over the bridge’s railing at the bubbles in the water and the submerged scuba diver with a sack of golf balls.
Sleigh bells jingled as Paul and Jethro opened the door to the driving range office. The man behind the counter scooped balls into wire baskets and plopped them on the counter.
Paul pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket.
“We don’t take hundreds.”
“I’m sorry,” said Paul. “What if I let you keep the change?”
“Then we have a new policy.” The man plucked the bill from Paul’s hand, stuck it in his back pocket and pushed two baskets of balls across the counter. Paul and Jethro went to select clubs from a large oak barrel of bent irons and woods.
“We close in a half hour,” said the man. “You can still play, but you’ll be in the dark.”
“Ah, such is the challenge of life itself,” said Jethro.
“No problem,” added Paul. “Anything you say.”
“And replace your divots,” said the man. “This ain’t a sod farm.”
Actually, it was a sod farm, at least on documents at the zoning office. The state was under drought restrictions, which meant only sod farms could water, and the driving range wanted to keep its sprinklers going.
“Right. Replace divots,” said Paul. “Sure thing.”
“I remember it well,” said Jethro. “Grand traditions of Scotland, the noble but curious land of plaid…”
“And stop talking like that. Both of you. It’s getting on my nerves.”