Marshmallow World
For BL, my BB
Inching along in traffic before taking my most anticipated left turn of the year, the fading three-quarter moon in the sky looked like two bites had been taken out of its right side to reiterate how my mission needed to begin. In the week leading to this moment I sent numerous friends a meme I’d created using Dan Hurley, the UConn men’s basketball coach, his forehead frozen in time as he rubbed it against an unsuspecting referee’s forehead, Hurley’s improvised exhilaration following an improbable game-winning shot both cathartic and hilarious each of the hundred-plus times I watched the clip that spawned the instantly unforgettable image. On Hurley’s bald noggin I’d typed “AHF” and captioned the referee’s gray hair with “Peach ice cream sandwich at 9 a.m. on Monday.” The resemblance of the aide-memoire in the sky to the decadent orb about to be consumed thankfully generated no inexplicable temptation to gnaw a chunk of the rental car steering wheel in overzealous preparation, a potential presumption about your fanatical scribe worth clarifying.
Taking literal note of where I parked, I exited the car and joined the nearby giddy throng, the majority wearing something suitably green, as officials instructed us when we could take more steps forward toward our destination: the Augusta National Golf Club. Many people in line had another coveted item in mind as the idealistic speculated about their odds of obtaining a collectible gnome, one Brian, the man responsible for my yearly trek to the promised land, had insisted I grab for “us,” meaning him, the odds of ensnaring one theoretically increased since I’d gotten in line when the gates opened until during the wait the earliest patrons in line walked quietly back to their cars with gnomes in hand, a plastic handle on the box’s top to aid carrying it like an extinguished lantern. “I’m gonna call you from the course,” I’d told Brian, his comeback being to only dial his number if the gnome was packaged in a FedEx box ready to be shipped to his Miami Beach mansion. The gift shop would be temporarily closed (with an interminable two-hour wait) upon my entry to the course, disappointment I’d secretly craved as my primary goal was to buy food at the concessions stand beside the second hole fairway.
When I sent the Dan Hurley meme to a co-worker, he couldn’t comprehend why I’d want to eat ice cream for breakfast as I outlined my girlfriend Sue’s longstanding belief in the concept of “dessert first,” a ritual she inaugurated a decade prior by ordering two scoops of mint chocolate chip at a beloved New York City vegan eatery, one I now mirrored at Augusta National. In the afternoon, I entered through the central opening at the rear of the fourteenth hole grandstands, sitting in the left side front row with a group of five people four rows behind me. “You been following anyone?” one of the men behind me inquired, a question I failed to infer was sent my way. “Guess he dudn’t wanna talk,” I heard him mutter to his friends, prompting me to half-turn my head and say, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize you were talking to me. But I have no clue who’s about to play through.” Several minutes later, one of the ladies in the group, tired of staring at the hole’s slanted, tilt-a-whirl fulcrum sans golfers, perked up.
“I thank I see one,” she said about the right side of the fairway, technically on our left. “Yup, someone knocked a marshmallow over there.”
“There it is,” the man who assumed I was impertinent said. “‘Bout time. ‘Member when you dropped a whole bag of ‘em on that spot back home?”
“Shore do,” she said. “That groundskeeper wudn’t too happy, but it was his loss, y’all. Coulda juss eaten ‘em up.”
“Ooh, there’s another next tuh it now! That’s a dandy.”
“D’joo juss say, ‘That’s a dandy?’”
“I deeid.”
“Yer sum’thin’ today, you know that?”
“You started it, hun. Hey, look! More marshmallows’re droppin’.”
A theme of sweetness would pervade the Monday practice round I attended, my thirteenth trip reaffirming that no matter how invidious the world’s external conditions might be, patronizing my favorite place on the happiest day of the year would forever remain life as sugarcoated splendor, the golf course’s immeasurable sumptuousness supplying its concomitant pleasures that amalgamate into the annual intensest rendezvous with its miraculous influence. Hell, when making my way toward the barcode scanner to be granted entry, one security guard with a drug-sniffing German shepherd kept snaking through the crowd on “paw patrol,” the respectable canine not making a peep, wisely ceding the day’s vocal duties to the melodious avian choir rehearsing diligently and distinctly from the plethora of pines enshrouding us.
I entered the grounds with two edits to my standard uniform. The trademark blue Masters hat with white trim, navy blue Masters polo shirt with azure-accented horizontal white stripes, and navy blue walking sneakers with peach-colored laces were in tow, but I’d worn a long sleeve navy blue 2015 Masters tee shirt to cover the eleven bracelets I keep permanently on each wrist—the significance a nod to the day Sue died and our joint addiction to numerology—not caring if anyone saw them, more disinterested in drawing attention to myself on the high holy day, a black “Who The Fuck Is Mick Jagger?” tee shirt on underneath the long sleeve shirt my way of humorously (and meekly) sticking it to the powers that be. Additionally, I elected not to don cargo shorts, purchasing a pair of gray golf shorts with almost invisible stippled white dots at Kohl’s days in advance of my flight, the cashier circling a link at the bottom of my receipt and coaxing me to complete the online survey, earning my deadpan rejoinder: “Nothing I like more after shopping than filling out a survey. First thing I’ll do in the car. Won’t go home until it’s done, either. Only reason I bought these shorts, to be honest.”
Walking past the main scoreboard up the first hole fairway, long sleeves were the correct choice: the temperature wouldn’t surpass sixty-six degrees, a pleasant number in comparison to what I left behind in New England, intermittent cloud cover and five to ten mile-per-hour winds a reminder that early spring in the south isn’t archetypal every day, not that I had any complaints. I studied the tee shot at the second hole, the concealed descending slope teasing newcomers about a vista where the course fully blooms, the second green, third tee, bunker-abutted seventh green, and unending eighth fairway converging beside one another like four stamens on the golf world’s richest flower. The second hole concessions stand is my go-to spot, a place routinely with little to no lines, and where a black girl named Donyelle greeting visitors at the back entrance smiled so brightly that I couldn’t resist flashing all my teeth in kind, pointing at the raised bed of marigolds beside her and saying how happy I was to see their golden eminence.
“I’ve never had one of these,” the cashier said while inputting my peach ice cream sandwich on her register’s touch screen.
“Are you fuh—, uh, serious?” I said while censoring myself from cussing.
“Guess I should try one this week, huh?” she said through a smirk.
“Try one each day, you mean?” I corrected her with a wink.
Once I devoured both a breakfast sandwich (fluffy yet firm scrambled eggs layered with American cheese, a sausage patty, and Canadian bacon) and a chicken biscuit with a cup of perfect temperature black coffee, I kept the ice cream sandwich in its wrapper, any seasoned Masters eater letting it thaw for a bit to scale the top of the world. My search for the day’s prettiest dress commenced as I walked the third hole, the finest garment of the week a mint green and mother-of-pearl knee-length checkerboard-patterned aesthetic tour de force with frilly, diaphanous shoulder straps in harmony with the matching bows in the irresistible blonde woman’s impeccably straight and vibrant hair, a follicle funicular cascading down her back glimpsed as she passed by me in a crosswalk while I idled in traffic doing a quadruple take—doubling double my pleasure—her shiny silver Adidas sneakers featuring unblemished white laces through white eyelets further enhancing her graceful gait, the city’s water tower across the street rising over her in the background like the prodigious and indispensable trophy she deserved. Approaching the fourth green, a Securitas guard sat in a chair to the right side, nobody around as I asked if I could touch the course’s lone palmetto tree beside us, the man happy to oblige my dendrological desire as I also wanted to know what team he expected would win the national championship game that night: “Gonna be tough to beat Michigan, but you can’t rule out UConn.”
With a vacancy at the courtesy phone detected, I dialed my buddy O’Connor, a guy I’ve known for twenty-six years, having attended a jazz concert with him and his two teenage sons a week before my trip south. Sensing its feasibility due to that night’s dynamic, I’d finally embarrassed him in mixed company as his older son, Andrew, confessed how he accidentally discovered his college roommate’s Fleshlight intermingling with bags of chips and cookies while raiding the corpulent kid’s dorm room snack drawer, my opportunity to disclose how I’d bought one for “research purposes,” ultimately achieving the clarity that enlisting the same hand that had always functioned well on its own to substitute as a passive-aggressive guide for an unnecessary if intriguingly lifelike device wasn’t worth the trouble nor the imperative cleanup. “OKAY, ADAM!” O’Connor said with cherry red cheeks, keenly aware of my track record and undoubtedly fearful I’d provide more odious, nightmarish particulars while we ate our meals at a Japanese restaurant much more charming than I can sometimes be.
“Hello! Can you hear me?” O’Connor said, his first salutation inaudible. “I answered your call in the shower.”
“Hello!” I said. “For real? You’re in the shower?”
“Yes, Adam. I’m holding the phone away from the water, of course. Also, my balls are currently stuck to my thigh.”
“I’m honored,” I said while laughing loudly.
“So am I. My phone said the call was from Augusta National Golf Club. I had to pick up. So…you’re there,” he said as it hit him. “You are a lucky bastard.”
“I know, man. I never take this for granted. What do you want? I’ve gotta get you something.”
“I dunno. Let me think about it. I’ll text you later.”
“You can’t. I don’t have my phone in here. That’s why we’re talking like this.”
“Oh, right. Dude, I don’t need anything,” my ego-less friend said.
“I don’t care. I’m gonna get you ball markers to remember this call.”
★ ★ ★ ★
I took the usual life-affirming walk around the course as I overheard one man tell his friend that there “[weren’t] too many ethnics” among us, many visitors unable to mute a gift of gab comparable to the oddly impulsive statements melded into anxious airport asides, the erasure of creature comforts and suggestion to be mindful in a pleasure palace-slash-time machine ceding to periodic claptrap my clandestine notepad absorbs with glee. Due to the arid winter triggering a premature spring, more sneezes erupted on each hole than any year in memory, raising the prospect that the concessions may sell Zyrtec beside the Aleve packets during future tournaments. Select holes lacked their native blossoms—virtually no pink or white dogwood on the respective second or eleventh hole, no yellow jasmine to the left of the eighth fairway, and many brittle, browning magnolia leaves canopying the pine straw beneath dehydrated tree trunks—ample color still evident throughout the grounds, though, the minor inconsistencies ones a seasoned vet might judge mildly dismaying whereas anyone with even the palest green thumb could jubilantly behold the bazillion azaleas accruing fulsome approvals. The highlight was walking behind an elderly couple on the right side of the tenth hole, the woman’s airy brown hair, nose, and cute chin in profile identical to Sue’s mom, Marge, the bespectacled, white-haired, slightly hunched man dotingly tracing her steps akin to her dad, Mario, a lachrymose sign from Sue once again surfacing on what I believe is not merely the world’s greatest golf hole, but also some kind of supernatural wellspring for her undissipated afterlife Augusta energy.
Signs from Sue in Georgia arrived as soon as I did. I turned on the week’s brand-new—well, eight hundred miles logged—Jeep Grand Cherokee as a Rick Springfield song played, the man one of her all-timers, listening to him amiably deejay a two-hour set of ‘80s tunes while I drove east, the pines on each side of the interstate reminiscent of the ones Sue and I praised on trips through Maine, the two heavily forested states conveniently sharing a signature city of the same name. Poised to check into my hotel on Easter afternoon, the manager on duty, Tiara, exhibited a rabbit-eared headband and color-coded wardrobe and jewelry ensemble that Sue would’ve fangirled out on in her uncontrollable fashionista form with an “Ohmygodiloveverythingaboutyou!" blurted while on the verge of hyperventilating, eyes and hands darting around like a goldfish in a new bowl. When Tiara told me my room wasn’t yet ready, I got a cup of coffee and sat in the lobby for a few minutes until she said, “You know what, Mister Adam? We just got done cleaning one room. Since you’re here first, it’s allll yours.” She handed me the keycard as I saw the number jotted diagonally on its holder and said, “You’re giving me room 316 on Easter? That must mean something, huh?” “It sure do,” she replied with a big smile, the top of a cross around her neck visible above her curved sweater seam. My friend Rick acknowledged this serendipitous run by texting me back a remarkable compliment: “This is the real tradition unlike any other. You during Masters week. Just always delivers.”
What else is there do after one walk around the course than begin a second one? Opting to laze at the fifth green grandstands, I sat beside one of the hole’s Securitas guards, a man named Gary Wood whom I’d seen there but not spoken to during the previous two years. In between his saying “Welcome to The Masters” to each new person who joined us along with “Have fun” and the like to everyone with refueled legs, he explained how Securitas staff are compensated for their work and must be at the course by five each morning in contrast to the yellow-capped gallery guards, men who pay their own way as volunteers and are perpetually late or leave a smidge early to beat traffic, remarks not said with a hint of bitchiness, more an observation of the parameters when a paycheck’s at stake, the gallery guards, unlike the Securitas crew, rewarded for their loyalty when accorded the right to play the course in May before it shuts down until October. Gary slid off his pilled gray ear warmers as the sun blazed on us, deriding himself for how much of a wimp he is when it’s cold, the black jacket, black slacks, and black sneakers adorning him not heat-absorbent enough protection for the stubbly, silver-haired Georgian. We discussed our mutual love of the challenging hole, historically one of the course’s most difficult, as he described his most eventful time in the grandstands, an anecdote about turns-sideways-and-vanishes-thin Will Zalatoris’s ball hitting a patron in the head during a blustery round, the poor victim bleeding and needing emergency medical attention. Zalatoris, to his credit, wrote his cell phone number for the man and said he would ship him gear as a contrite memento of the scar, a yarn the dimple-domed attendee must love retelling. Gary left for a mandatory bathroom break as another guard took his place, the third guard perched on the opposite end, clearly the elder statesman of the three, strolling by to tell the second man to take lunch when Gary reemerged, brusquely declaring that Gary tended to take long breaks, the respite surely prolonged by his engaging demeanor and skillful storytelling when among fresh faces outside his gelid greenside constraints.
At the sixth hole, the downhill par-three where golfers tee off over patrons, I was captivated by a beautiful blue-eyed woman’s exemplary tan, briefly radiating in her glowing skin as if it were able to beseech the sun to stick around longer, my reverence for Sue’s tan furnishing an idea: to dial her old cell phone number. I ran through the things I’d say to keep the new user on the line should he or she answer, walking across the path in the seventh hole’s fairway to grab an egg salad sandwich then call her. Unfortunately, an automated recording said that the number was not in service, information I easily found a way to be happy about, “riding the positive pony” as Brian once said, Sue managing to cling to her old number twenty-nine months after she shuffled off. I tried it a second time to be certain, yielding the same result. When I told my best bud, Moore, he hypothesized about if I’d tried a third time: “Sue answers, you somehow travel back in time to your first Masters visit.” I’ll await your inevitable afflatus in response next year, Augusta National.
Now that she was at the forefront of my mind, I walked to the ninth hole, initially confused by my inability to find a way to walk the right side, the view from the pines to the tiered green a restorative approach shot I feel duty-bound to revere at length each year. The logistics figured out, I leaned against a tree in my established post as the gallery guard sitting a hundred feet away looked elsewhere. I extracted a sandwich bag from my pocket and dumped a third of the contents onto the pine straw at the conifer’s base, Sue’s ashes now at rest in the most verdure location I could conceivably place them, a baby bird peeking at me in between pecks at the adjoining fairway as some bone chips clung to my sneaker tips, the little lady undeterred in trying to initiate a new way to play footsie. Immediately afterward, I walked to the tenth hole and emptied another third on the right side of the fairway, the same area where I’d seen her doppelganger parents. Toward the end of the day, I poured the remaining third on the opposite side of the tenth hole, plucking two unopened camellia buds from the ground with specks of her ashes on them, a floral appendage to the pinecone and magnolia leaf on my Masters shrine at home.
Sue’sday, or Sue’s fifty-sixth birthday, would occur two days after my day at Augusta National, a day on which I honored her by watching a SpongeBobSquarePants episode, visited two Goodwill stores (a shelf at one with a signed hardcover Masters children’s book I didn’t know existed), and went for a constitutional through the local shopping mall, purchasing three cookies in the food court: a chocolate chip with pink frosting resembling an adorable monster’s face, a pecan raisin (puh-con, not pea-can, a phonetic battle Sue and I waged for sixteen years; “Howzit goin’ trying to convince them they’re not called Pea-can Sandies, Blebbz?” I can hear her saying while holding in a devious laugh), and a sugar cookie with alternating yellow and orange Peanuts-themed frosting spirals, a plastic ring stuck in its center stickered with Charlie Brown’s head, the character’s humility an integral trait harnessed during Sue’s tenure as The Ambassador of Happiness. While eating the latter cookie, a gorgeous crimson-locked girl in wire-framed glasses with freckled cheeks and a forgot the rest spellbinding torso vacuum-sealed in a skintight red crop top walked by holding a Barnes & Noble bag, an alluring nerd only Augusta could endow me with to enhance the saccharine moment, the day’s biggest bell-ringer materializing when I chose to eat lunch at a new African restaurant on the main drag a couple miles from the golf course.
I placed my order then sat by a window in the deserted space, a bald man a decade older than me and his eighty-one-year-old father entering not much later, the son, James, saying hello, inviting me to eat with them, then introducing Ron. In between his pair of business calls, I learned that James had hosted an Australian version of SportsCenter filmed at ESPN’s home studios in Bristol, Connecticut, a role he worked for two years, the man living in Manhattan because he found my stomping grounds too dull during his leisure hours. (“What do you do for fun there?” he asked me in jest. “Eat pizza?”) He now hosted seminars to help adults quit drinking alcohol and maintain the discipline mandated to stay sober, another synchronistic Sue sign I could not ignore. Fearing our food might be as elusive as a gift shop gnome, James excused himself, so I talked to Ron, a Brisbane resident who three days prior to his flight in 2022 contracted Covid and had to postpone his Masters trip, the two men now attending the upcoming Friday round together. Eager for tips, I provided them in excess by reading aloud a paragraph from a bygone “Masterspiece” I’d written and gave the man my business card, Ron inherently curious since James put in time as a wordsmith, too, penning a trio of books. Ron dished about his love of cricket (a game he exceled at in his youth), how he’d been a member of a jazz club in the 1950s (he didn’t play an instrument but loved bebop, a genre he no longer listened to), and told me that his other two sons lived in Leeds and Copenhagen, the Danish city where he’d had his phone stolen on his most recent trip impelling him to attach a rippled hose-like cable from his belt loop to his new phone to dissuade any pocket pickers in the Peach State. Perhaps due to the sweetness in the thiakry I ate—couscous in creamy yogurt flavored with vanilla extract—conversing with one’s elders, another Sue pastime, produced wonderful chatter until bittersweetness encroached when Ron said that he had a wife once, now uninterested in love, inquiring if I had a wife of my own.
“I don’t want to make this meal mournful, but she died over two years ago,” I told him. “However, today is actually her birthday!”
“I’m sorry,” Ron said. “What happened?”
“Throat cancer. Here she is,” I said while pulling up a kaleidoscopic image from my camera roll. “That’s Sue,” I said, handing him my phone.
“Oh,” he said, pausing to process her pizzazz. “She’s lovely, mate. And wild.”
When James’s call ended, their food hit the table soon thereafter, my cue to finish my main course of yassa, chicken legs in lemony onion sauce, and let them enjoy their spread together (and not risk hearing either man chew with his mouth open, an altogether different yet essential tribute to Sue’s misophonia). Our server’s smile brought to mind the one woman on the course whom I’d practically befriended during Monday’s round, flashing to when I revisited the second hole concessions for a chicken salad sandwich and fruit cup, the sole non-sandwich to grace my lips during the day. There by the entrance stood Donyelle, her sparkling teeth glimmering at me as she announced, “You again?! Welcome back!” How apropos that one of the aides Sue employed to help her father during his Alzheimer’s marathon was named Donyelle, another incomparable Augusta National party favor.
★ ★ ★ ★
Ready to fulfill the second walk around all eighteen, I noticed a young girl in a pink and green dress pushing a stick circuitously to tunnel a hole in the pine straw beneath a tree by the irrepressible twelfth hole, her dedication forging an impromptu ground-level bird’s nest while her parents absentmindedly chewed the fat over her. Little moments abounded, the lifeblood of a practice round: two black women with intricately braided hair palming one another’s shoulders to preserve the integrity of their ornate and pulsating fingernails, borderline talons, while cheesing for photos with the thirteenth green green-screening them along with an exhausted Asian girl taking comically slow, open-mouthed steps, panting as her mother turned and fortified her with, “I’ve got chocolate almonds in my bag. They’ll give you some energy!” The boisterous bands of bros also lingered, grown men who began swilling cups of beer earlier than I opened the ice cream sandwich wrapper, causing me to ponder about my suspicion that Augusta National serves lower alcohol by volume beer like the kind sold in Utah to keep inebriation at bay for as long as possible during the round, the stacks of clear beer cups in many men’s free hands a higher tally than should be attainable on the property so early in the afternoon.
The fourteenth hole is a study in patient contemplation, an agronomical stratagem that induced my oath to not underestimate anything at Augusta National again, the hole one I once believed was the layout’s weakest now among my treasured walks and places to sit, its lack of a bunker or any water further enhancing its nuanced idiosyncrasies. I examined an uninhabited spiderweb on the railing, damn near snagging an indolent fly from my knee to leave as a treat while eavesdropping on the Marshmallow Lady and her friends for my time in the grandstands, their throwaway quips distracting me from the two socks shielding each of my throbbing feet, one sporting a gumball-sized blister I nursed with vitamin E lotion at night. Daydreaming about the idea of scaling the ladder to sit in the media tower by the green, an action that’d guarantee me landing intel about how the Securitas squad interrogated Augusta National’s inmates, I made an ironic note to self to dial Moore again after a late morning missed call.
On my walk to the phones I saw a middle-aged lady in a powder blue blouse and matching shorts wearing a white visor remove a pack of Marlboro Lights from her pocket, the urge to ask if I could pay her cash for a loosie and a light churning inside me, the twisted logic encouraging me that smoking at Augusta National didn’t count, woolgathering I flicked away when diverting my eyes to two turtles side by side at the fifteenth green’s pond then to flocks of blackbirds twisting through the air in the same repetitious V-shaped pattern, ecstatic to witness nonhuman life bestowing order within the vital boundary’s glints of sporadic cerulean sky. The eighteenth hole’s left side was not walkable, a rope blocking off the area typically open to patrons, so I touched a holly tree on the dextral half, the cynosure’s unintentional hommage to Christmas conjuring up the Masters gnome ornament that hangs on Sue’s fake tree in the corner of my living room year-round. Reaching the culminating green is a triumph on each walk, the tee shot carved into my brain from childhood years fascinated by the tournament, weekends spent watching the concluding two rounds on CBS enraptured by Jim Nantz’s unironic, mellifluous tone, his former step-nephew a man I picked up at the airport days later when the guy imparted the least surprising synopsis of the commentator: Nantz was an amazing human being off camera, too, whereas Nantz’s ex-wife, on the contrary, was not.
Sharing Masters week with Moore had become our custom via Securus, the prison email application we used for his tenure on the inside, plus I’d tell him times to call me once or twice during the week, a week he deemed a genuinely hopeful inspiration for himself while doing his time. Now able to reach him directly, I broke our seven-year streak of him calling me, dispensing the day’s noteworthy tidbits before we discussed our mutual high school friend Josh, the day also his forty-third birthday, the happy one I wished him via text responded to with him wondering if I’d been back to Berckmans Place this year, telling him it was my serene assumption that it was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, the day arguably the pinnacle twenty-four hour stretch of my life, no sequel required. Moore had become pen pals with Josh’s eldest daughter during his incarceration, a correspondence closely monitored by Josh and his wife, but one that Moore’s probation officer had taken umbrage with by denouncing the mutually beneficial back-and-forth as an indefensible form of “grooming.” It long being a dicey situation for all the glaring reasons, Moore subsequently put the dialogue on hiatus, a sage move despite him doing nothing wrong. During those seven years of separation, I apprised Moore whenever an idea he considered implementing appeared detrimental to his amelioration, none of my feedback too harsh or nasty, assessments enacted strictly to safeguard him (and selfishly, me) so nothing would impinge on our reunion in the real world. I knew his heart was in the right place, an over-sharer whose hot and cold runs with impulse control necessitated some delicate supervision, me taking on a big brotherly role to ensure my figurative kin got to do things as utterly simple yet monumentally meaningful as answer a call on a Monday afternoon to bandy about some mirthful turns of phrase, invoke some absurd and inappropriate humor, and end the exchange with a “Love you, bud” that wasn’t recorded by the penal system but instead by Augusta National’s brass. To regard our call, an encapsulation of what we ground away at rebuilding together on the phone for hundreds of hours, as anything less than a love supremely humane would be cheap, John Coltrane stans be damned.
Now with a pimento cheese sandwich in hand, I ate it en route to the main gift shop, the placard by the entryway indicating the wait was ninety minutes. I’d never seen gift shop lines remain so long at this juncture in the day, a spark to try the secondary gift shop in the vicinity of the Berckmans Place hospitality locale, the palatial retreat the genesis for Brian and I dubbing one another BB, an acronym for Berckmans Bro, the two of us visiting the prestigious locale days apart in 2024, a BB thoughtfully enclosed in parentheses beside my name on the post-tournament envelope in my mailbox containing a Masters badge he shipped me for my shrine. The secondary gift shop’s wait showed as fifty minutes, a delay I convinced myself would be brisker, that fact unfurling in an alternate fashion.
A seventy-three-year-old man got in line behind me, the guy having exited the line and his wife’s company to use the bathroom, unable to re-enter where she now stood. My friend Brock is fond of telling me that one day he’ll catch me engaged in an animated conversation with a wall, a facetious dig on my gregarious nature and belief that people one-on-one are a true pleasure in life, and so I put his theory to the test once more by chatting with the stranger during our wait. Paul, a Chicago resident and White Sox fan, mentioned how he was hoping to secure tickets to see the Savannah Bananas, a Harlem Globetrotters-esque popular exhibition baseball team scheduled for a series at Wrigley Park, as we traded tales from what ballparks we’d been to, segued to the NCAA Final Four (the man’s University of Illinois team had lost to my Huskies two nights earlier, him blaming the Illini’s cold three-point shooting and commending UConn’s excellent defense, restating the palmetto tree-adjacent security guy’s point to not discount a team coached by Peach Ice Cream Sandwich Head Dan Hurley), and I heard how he attended on Monday last year, the round truncated by a downpour at noon, Augusta National refunding ticket lottery winners and offering them first right of refusal if they wanted to try attending again in 2026, an invitation Paul and his wife, both retired, couldn’t find any reason not to accept. I also briefed him about my Masters book collection, the man wishing me luck as we furcated from one another at the entrance to disabuse our wallets into believing the tchotchkes about to enliven our evergreen mesh shopping bags were crucial keepsakes.
Truth be told, as the years go by it’s easier to talk myself out of buying items, especially hats and shirts, apparel my closets showcase in gluttonous abundance. It’s stuff like porcelain serving trays I won’t use that I can’t abstain from nowadays, and stuffed animals to plop atop the shrine, and the commemorative pin, my bathrobe brandishing so many on its left lapel that I had to retire them recently. I carted a jigsaw puzzle displaying the fifteenth and sixteenth greens, his favorites, for Brock, and a long sleeve tee shirt for Rick, the two friends from my first two Masters trips who I buy for on each stop. And I added a belt to my tally, Moore lifting his sweatshirt to show me his when visiting my house for linguine puttanesca in tandem with a screening of Goodfellas in March, the modest man declining a souvenir this year.
“Oh, my God!” I said to a man behind the counter. “Is that a new book?!”
“Yes, sir,” he said. “Exciting stuff, huh?”
“Holy fuck! You haven’t had a new book in here since 2014. I can’t believe this!”
“I’m happy for you! So, should I go get you one?” he asked rhetorically and swiveled through an open door behind him.
I told an employee on the other end of the counter how euphoric I was about the book, the new man echoing his co-worker in a robotic manner by saying he was happy for me in the same way Moore’s probation officer would say he was happy if Moore was attending a collegiate women’s gymnastics meet, laughing about the man’s enervated intonation as I walked away. In line to cash out, I tossed a ball marker for O’Connor in my bag, the red-faced man behind me abruptly hiccupping into my skull and apologizing, admitting he’d downed one or two too many as his buddy gave me the I-swear-I’ve-got-him-under-control tight-cheeked gaze any sober companion must feign on a blowhard’s behalf. One black teenaged girl bagging items was another model for the type of woman Sue and I loved lauding in public, her hair’s edges immaculately and ornately decorating her forehead, a bevy of sparkly Aries-appropriate diamond stones anchored in silver in her hair, ears, around her neck, and on her wrists and the knuckles and bases of her fingers, a brooch to boot, none of it ostentatious, too expertly arranged just so on her person that anyone with an affinity for details could delight in the coruscating cornucopia, my comment to her—“I love your whole look! You look great!”—a signal to the white teenaged cashier beside her to stare at me with a shit-eating grin like a proud older sister as if to silently thank me for being the first patron kind enough to state the obvious out loud. My items would be scanned and bagged by a different duo, a retired, short-haired black lady and afro-topped black teenaged girl, as I asked my tried and true question—“How tired are you?”—the younger girl ready to pass out but her effervescent co-worker adrenalized and thrilled to be at The Masters, the lady and I going smile for smile in a Who Can Make The Other Happiest contest. We both won.
★ ★ ★ ★
Nervous that they may be sold out, I started walk number three homing in on the second hole concessions, my pal Donyelle’s lassitude now pronounced, her meek wave and half-smile evidence of the toll a day standing in place spreading cheer takes on the psyche. A congenial, middle-aged woman toweling the drink counter dry was overjoyed by my desperate plea to seize a second ice cream sandwich, several dozen assembled in one of the two coolers, the valedictory treat one I would gorge myself on after a ham and cheese with mustard on caraway rye bread, my sandwich tally tying my previous record of eight, half of another, turkey and cucumber slices with tzatziki, eaten at halftime of the evening’s basketball game, UConn losing by six points, a defeat that in no way put a damper on the day. As for the round’s drinks: two cups of coffee, two Diet Cokes and one unsweetened iced tea (all three with exquisitely undersized lemon wedges), and too many water bottle refills to count. Taking a shortcut from the second hole, I decided to eat in the eighth hole grandstands, the greenside mounds not unlike pies warming on a grandmother’s windowsill. The time at eight, where I bantered with two endearing sexagenarian women from Alabama hankering to snap photos of Rory McIlroy, the man who would repeat as champion, renewed my dialectical conviction that the hole, my favorite par-five on the course, lavishes what is assuredly the most relaxing patron seating area, the access to the first and third greens, second, fourth, and ninth tees, and the concessions, restrooms, and courtesy phones getting swiftly referenced when Brian summoned me to offer tips to his friends and family members attending the Saturday round, a court-holding spotlight he generously shines on me year after year by saying a Reddit moderator’s variation of, “Adam knows more about The Masters than anybody. Ask him anything.”
On Friday afternoon, Brian and I shopped for organic items at his preferred grocery store then drove a mile to a house he rented, zigzagging cautiously around teens navigating fatigued patrons in golf carts down a hill back to their own rented homes. Two affable older women, Brian’s aunts, Woody and Debbie, were sitting on couches watching the second round awaiting us. Debbie informed me how she’d been to The Masters with her father in the ‘70s, back when far fewer patrons got inside, my awestruck reaction instantaneous: “Was it as beautiful back then?” It was. Duh. Aware the Saturday round would be conducted with temperatures in the mid-eighties, Debbie quoted her father’s trite if now anachronistic advice to “never give up your fan,” seemingly ascetic words betraying what life was like growing up in Georgia prior to the ubiquity of air conditioning. Woody and I were swapping sarcastic commentary about the onscreen coverage—Brian later telling me that he dug our rapport—when a married couple, Brenda and Marit, the latter a proud Norwegian who said her country cares about two things (“Sports and also sports”), joined us, Marit cheering on countryman Kristoffer Reitan’s stellar play until I mentioned Augusta National’s original chairman, Clifford Roberts, a benevolent dictator whom I love beyond reproach, Debbie claiming she and Woody had brought his name up beforehand.
“Do you know that that man left his entire fortune to Planned Parenthood?” I said.
“Really?” two of the ladies replied in unison.
“He believed overpopulation would be the death of us all. Seems like he might’ve been onto something.”
“Ooh, I like him now,” Marit said.
“That’s the same man who enforced an all-black caddie rule until…,” Debbie trailed off.
“Nineteen eighty-three,” I said.
“How progressive of him,” Marit added. “Now I like him even more.”
“Not how you think,” Debbie said. “They weren’t allowed to play the course or be members. Thing is, they knew it better than the players’ regular caddies.”
“Knew it better than anyone,” I said. “And had crazy names like Cemetery and Stovepipe and Pappy.”
Consistently capable of bewildering me, Brenda asked Brian if he’d added to his Masters hat closet yet, some personal history I was stunned he’d forgotten to tell me, habitual BB1 behavior, Brian broadcasting that he now owned two or more hundred and had no plans to stop pollinating, a revelation I knew firsthand when shipping him sixteen I gathered from Tony, his Australian client, the man calling me family and imploring me to sit with his friends and son at the dining room table, the group’s tribal teeth bared when I alluded to my lunch with James and Ron, the jolly man across from me drinking cabernet blithely saying, “They’re from Brisbane? Bloody awful there, mate.” The most startling outcome was my newfound tolerance of Australian enunciation, recklessness I’d mocked for years by quoting John Oliver’s interpretation of how Marshall Mathers’s name is pronounced Down Undah: “Eeemineem.” As I left the house on Sunday night, I relayed to Tony how Brian had asked me to hug him on his behalf, the man halfway across the opposite room promising to greet me with one next year instead and saying, “Adam? I’m always happy to see ya, mate. You’re a beauty!”
Camellia, the name of the tenth hole, home to rococo flowers Debbie told me were currently in bloom like regalia in her yard, had a farewell gift as I spotted a patron’s lost ticket on the fairway’s sinistral side, tucking it face out behind my own ticket in the lanyard holder dangling from my neck, it not lost on me that if I unearthed some marshmallows and a handful of that Asian lady’s chocolate stash I could craft a makeshift cardboard s’more. I’d joked to a co-worker each day in the weeks preceding the trip that I was one day closer to my demise, preposterously bragging that I bought some dark web cyanide capsules to ingest beside the hole’s greenside bunker, my wish to die at the hole real, my actual preference that it ensue no sooner than my forty-fourth round. “Is he not gonna mention how that was Sue’s ticket on the ground?” some readers may now be whispering to themselves, the syllogistic analysis already done on my behalf. Thank you, friends.
Two weeks prior to Moore’s release in January, I rewatched one of the most sublime masterpieces there is, the Danish film Gertrud, an untraditional melodrama and piece of pure cinema centered on the titular protagonist, a fervid woman who refuses to compromise her belief that “love is all,” the driving force of life, the reason why. It was the unifying work of art that swirled in my mind’s periphery at Augusta National, my love of the golf course, of Sue, of my Briumvirate (Moore, O’Connor, and BB sharing the same first name, Moore’s sandwiched with a quizzical Y), of all the people who matter to me, of food and drink, of walking, of flowers, of animals, of birdsong, of pretty hair and pretty dresses, of meeting new friends, of conversation, of books, of writing notes on paper, and of continuously creating memories that collectively imbue me with a love so deep and true that as corny as it may read, I feel like coining the happiest day of the year my “Gertrud Day,” a term that nobody would be inclined to understand, the kind of uncompromising love befitting Nina Pens Rode’s ineffable portrayal. If you don’t have such a day, please go invent one.
The day’s natural terminus was the eighteenth green, my palms creased by the weighty gift shop bag handles as I stared mindlessly at the antediluvian world I wanted to live in most, a former nursery I’d equate with gelatinous confections until next April when a new motif manifested itself out of the obscurity of an order. With the security rope caressing the underside of my stomach, I peered into the clubhouse’s translucent windows from afar infused with the optimism that I’d spy on the green-jacketed ventriloquists who make it happen doing something profound, my endless squinting leading to an unplanned note for my pad: “eye exam/new glasses?” I also scrutinized the angle of the clubhouse from the building next door, the caddie facility, the same angle Moore’s grandfather had selected when painting the clubhouse in the ‘90s, the jaw-dropper hanging in his parents’ foyer one we will admire together soon enough. At the exit, a Securitas guard cheered on patrons dumping leftover liquids on the pavement and grass to use the sewer grate at his feet, a shameful congregational failure that led to my shrug and his beleaguered yet nonetheless perky, “Ain’t goin’ so well. Ain’t nobody listenin’ ‘cept you.”
I called Brian seconds after turning on the Jeep, the man unsurprised that gnomes were sold out. Upon my arrival on Saturday morning to bring the four ladies along with him and one of his friends to a drop-off lot, he bellowed, “Adam! I got you a present! Open it!” He held out a sorta weighty green box at me, my instinct to read the label causing him to say, “DON’T LOOK! JUST OPEN IT!” Afraid that my reaction would be inadequate, I said that I disliked opening things in front of people, a white lie that was really Sue’s excuse, shifting around the corner to the kitchen countertop where I saw a green-bezeled watch with a white wristband, a gnome in a caddie suit’s two hands telling the time. Having not worn a watch since my teens, I put it on, flashing it to the room and saying how at 9:15 he’d been directing traffic, Brian demanding to know if I liked it. No mendacity this time: I loved it, the man’s newest annual gift more memorable in the wake of my asking for the time at a few intervals on Monday. I also tried to get a picture with his evasive mug for the however many’th time, Brian saying we’d take one soon, his own lie inciting Woody to retort, “You sound like a guy I knew who was in the Witness Protection Program. He owned a restaurant, and if someone pulled out a camera, that man disappeared faster’n you ever seen!” At least a new nickname was birthed: WITSEC Brian.
Brian left a peanut butter chocolate bar for me in the car on Saturday morning as he departed to go set up shop near his prized post, the sixth hole. Sadly, I recalled the candy bar when it was too late, pinching the semi-hollow wrapper’s corrugated top, the bottom full of melted pudding like it was a used snack drawer condom in the cupholder. An hour before Sunday’s round began on CBS, I knew what had to be done: I patrolled eBay for last year’s gnome, the peach ice cream sandwich in his left hand missing a couple bites a la Monday’s moon, contentedly overpaying to add it to my shrine. He may not believe me, but I got the gnome for “us,” the day Brian’s forty-fourth birthday, also Sue’s favorite number supersized, two effortless reasons utilized when persuading myself to procure it for a shrine that would not exist without Brian’s magnanimity. Then I took a walk around the apartment complex on the other side of the industrial park home to my hotel, cheekily texting friends that I needed to do a final safety inspection, no lifeguard on duty at the pool where I’d seen a comely, chestnut-haired woman in a G-string bikini by herself pacing laps barefoot around the limpid water while on a phone call, Brian upset that I didn’t go talk to her. Funny how he thought my heart would have survived when I asked her name and she extended a delicate hand to predictably reply, “My name’s Gertrud, but you can call me Sweetie.”