THE RAGTOP CLUB

It all started with what my wife calls “a delicious coincidence.” Why she calls it that is completely beyond me. The fact that Bryan and I bought new cars a week apart from each other is hardly coincidental. I had needed a new car since before I got out of college twelve years ago, due to the fact that there’s only so much mileage you can get out of an aging VW Karmann Ghia. Bryan was buying a new car every other month at that point. The last one had been a stately Land Rover, so it only made sense—and let’s remember that I’m speaking of Bryan here—to buy a brand new BMW Roadster. For myself, after driving a Karmann Ghia for the entirety of my adult life, I had only two qualifications for a new car: a) it had to run, and b) it had to be a convertible.

So when Bryan and I met that fateful Thursday morning for breakfast, we admired each other’s acquisition politely, myself responding to Bryan’s proclamation that it was about time I got something that didn’t leave bits of itself along the road with the pronouncement that the last thing this county needed was a middle aged whacko haring around in a British Racing Green Beemer.

Of course, it doesn’t take long to admire a Geo Metro. There were certain things I personally liked about it: it was a ’95, the last year Geo produced a convertible. It was bright yellow, which my wife quite liked. And it was exactly enough car for my ten minute drive to work each morning, no more, no less.

On top of all that, it was cheap. Cheap to buy, cheap to work on, cheap to buy tires for. Good gas mileage. As a one car owner, I will heartily admit, cheap makes good anesthetic when entering the uncharted waters of car buying.

When Alan bought his Chrysler Sebring, well, that was even less coincidental. He saw me pulling up in the parking lot in front of our building, fumed all day long, went home that evening, had a terrific fight with his wife, and that weekend went to the dealership and plunked down a downpayment of $899.99 with an interest rate of 12.9% for 36 months with a 36,000 mile warranty. Monday he showed up for work 20 minutes late, hoping that he’d get some notice from the windows. Unluckily, for the first time in the history of the firm, the morning meeting had started on time, so the majority of us were already cloistered in the conference room, and the only one who might have seen Alan’s new toy—sorry, that’s what Alan called it—was Jenny the receptionist, and she was too busy taking calls to notice. Fortunately, the proclamation that he’d bought a brand new convertible smoothed over his lateness to the meeting, and he had a fairly good gaggle of people go out to the parking lot at lunch time to goggle at it.

Myself among them. Let’s face it: a Sebring is an impressive chunk of car.

The next weekend Alan dropped by the house to say hello, and insisted on taking me and my wife for a ride in his new chariot. I made the mistake of not saying no when my wife suggested a drive out to Bryan’s house—his ex-wife had finally relented, apparently coming to the conclusion that keeping the house and leaving the state were not mutually supportive decisions. I could actually see Alan’s heart sink when we pulled up to the end of Bryan’s long road to find Bryan lovingly rubbing down his Beemer with a genuine kidskin chamois.

Monday Alan was late for work because he had taken his car to the dealership to have it “detailed.”

When Alan started showing up on Thursday mornings to have breakfast with me and Bryan, I was surprised. Weeks later, when Jim started showing up, suddenly everything made sense.

Alan had started a club. And we were in it.

When Alan showed up the first couple of times, Bryan was pissed. I don’t know if Alan really got that or not; he treated Bryan’s abuse as something akin to locker-room banter. After Jim started showing up, suddenly everything was fine. Bryan had never met Jim up to that point, and viewed him, in Bryan’s words, as “an old fart from the old school.” With Bryan, it seems, that designation brought its own cache.

And, to tell the truth, things went extremely well for the first six weeks or so. Jim always had something to talk about, something in the news or someone in the firm, great golfing stories, and tragic tales of his daughter’s immersion in college life up in Chapel Hill. Most gratifying, he deferred to either me or Alan on how to deal with each episode and what advice to give his daughter. He seemed to assume that, being closer to the date of our own graduation that he was to his, we would know what the real deal was. Bryan continued to abuse Alan, and Alan continued to reply in good humor with what were, for Alan, barbs of impressive wit, and I, of course, was my usual charming self, burying my nose in the newspaper until called upon for comment and drinking far more coffee than is actually helpful.

And then Alan started making rules.

It actually seemed completely innocent at first. One morning, during a lull in Bryan’s abuse and Jim’s daughter, Alan, gazing casually out the window at our four cars, all parked one beside another in the parking lot, said “Have you noticed how many convertibles there are in this town?”

I looked up from George Will’s neo-conservative blather. Yes, I thought to myself: since buying the Metro, I had noticed a lot of convertibles. And all of them newer and nicer than mine. Which is largely why I had noticed.

Jim said, after a thoughtful pause, “Yeah, I guess there are a lot of convertibles on the road these days.”

Bryan said “Probably because they just started making them again in the last, what eight years?”

Alan continued, like a stand up-comedian setting up his audience, “have you noticed how many of them have their tops up? What kind of a schlub buys a convertible and doesn’t take the top down?”

“Schlub” is a word that Alan picked up watching television. This fact Bryan readily enunciated, to Jim’s delight.

“No, really,” Alan continued, “On the way over this morning, I must have seen a dozen other convertibles, and not a single one with the top down. Except mine! I’m the only car on the road with it’s top down, all the way from Matthews!”

“People don’t want their hair mussed,” I offered.

“Traffic noise,” Bryan opined.

“Smog,” I continued.

“If it’s good weather,” Jim stated, “I don’t have much of a choice. It’s either pull down the top or suffocate.” Jim gave us his party laugh, deep and slightly self-deprecating. We all joined in, for no other reason than that it’s good to share a laugh.

Alan shook his head. “It’s because they buy a car without thinking about what they want. They think they want a convertible, but what they really want is the impression of a convertible. They buy a sporty, free-wheeling car, and then they ride around with the top buttoned up and the air conditioning cranked up full blast and the radio on to the morning zoo crew. If you’re going to buy a convertible, if the weather is good, I think you really should drive with the top down.”

“Whether you like it or not,” Bryan added sarcastically.

We all laughed again. Breakfast went on. No one thought anything of it. But deep down, something in me quivered, uncomfortable with the inkling of more rules to come.

The next thing was Alan’s discovery of his CD player. Whether he knew the car had one when he bought it, I know not. But one morning he wheeled into the restaurant parking lot blaring Miles Davis from the cockpit of his Sebring.

At first it didn’t seem to be a problem. I have been a Jazz fan since my college years, Jim was a bit of a Jazz fan, mainly because most of the smart people in his generation were expected to be. Bryan was a Jazz fan when he was around me. But there was something that made the three of us vaguely uncomfortable. Alan had made another rule: Ragtop Men are Jazz Fans. No one spoke of it, but the look of horror on Jim’s face when Alan would come into the parking lot with Be-Bop flowing from his car at immense decibel levels and Bryan’s obvious if non-vocal annoyance at Alan’s detailed descriptions of his growing CD collection assured me that my mis-givings were not due to my admittedly over-active imagination.

What, I wondered, would the next rule be? Were we all to take up cigar smoking? Road racing? Playing chicken out on Highway 29? Would we be required to flash our pink slips at each other as a sign that we were ready to race for the titles to our cars at a moment’s notice? My wife told me to stop worrying about it and go to sleep.

Luckily, the next rule was to be an easy one: Ragtop Men Play Golf. Which was easy, because it was something that we all did, with the exception of Bryan, who said he always meant to try the game but had never gotten around to it.

SO, after three weeks of balancing schedule conflicts, Alan signed us up for a tee-time at a golf course not far from his house, where, he said, the fees were reasonable and there wasn’t likely to be a crowd.

Bryan picked me up at 6 AM. We decided to take his Beemer because, as he put it, the Metro wouldn't make it out to the end of the county without a day’s rest halfway there. I agreed that his car would have a better shot at getting us there, although we’d have to fill the gas tank twice along the way.

It wasn’t until we got to the course that I began to have my doubts. I hadn’t recognized the name of the course when Alan had mentioned it the previous Thursday. That was because they had changed the name of the course. As Bryan pulled onto the old, crumbling blacktop that led to the clubhouse, I muttered, in a tone that came out ominous due to the severe nature of the sudden revelation, “This is Purgatory Hills.”

Bryan looked at me in horror. He had heard many things about Purgatory Hills, whose proper name had been Paradise Valley, from me over the years we had known each other. Purgatory Hills had been the hard-scrabble, red-neck golf course I played during my college days, for the sole reason that I could play on weekdays before five for $3.50 a round.

And when I say that was the only reason, I mean it in earnest. Purgatory Hills was the hottest place I’d ever known. It was hotter than a car dealership’s parking lot. The bugs came in thick, dark clouds, and they came hungry. The groundskeepers were surly, and blessedly few and far between. The tee boxes were hard as asphalt, the fairways rough and sparsely grassed, and the greens were like concrete.

We pulled up to the clubhouse in time to see Frank and Alan pulling their bags out of their cars. I tried to take the glare of familiar contempt off my face before they could see it. Bryan didn’t. He just kept on glaring in disbelief at the sign on the clubhouse, muttering “It says Green Valley Country Club. . .”

After collecting our money for greens' fees, Alan ran into the clubhouse while the rest of us collected on the first tee, checking our ball supplies, making sure we had tees and markers. I surveyed the landscape with a critical eye. They’d given it a face lift, and the grass had been more thoroughly watered than I was used to, but there was no escaping the simple fact of the matter: it was still Purgatory Hills. By this time it was closing on a quarter of seven. I checked the wind: still fairly cool, but you could feel the heat rising. By the time we got to the back nine, we’d feel like we were in a blast furnace. A big, sunny, windy blast furnace full of bugs, chasing little white balls around with funny crooked sticks.

Before anyone could say anything, I piped out "Okay, I’ll get a key from the clubhouse.” I gave Bryan my Better Than Not look, which increased his growing discomfort. As I loped towards the clubhouse, I noticed that Jim looked like he was trying to do math in his head, figuring just how much cheaper the greens fees were than he was used to.

For an amateur using borrowed clubs on his first time out, Bryan played a really rotten game. On the first tee he hit the ground six inches behind the ball and nearly bent his driver. Every shot after that, he came up off the club at the last minute, with the result that he smacked the ball on it’s head like a nun would an errant student. I didn’t catch it until about halfway through the round, but Bryan had quickly devised a strategy to help him overcome this failing: Get the ball into the rough in as few strokes possible, then whack it over towards the green with a wedge. Bryan could, in fact, play his wedge.

Jim didn’t fare much better. He broke a tee trying to force it into the rock hard ground on the first tee, and from there on out, no matter how beautifully he played, he did not enjoy the game.

Alan played the way you might expect a man who owns a low-end set of Pings to play: extremely well, but angry at every shot. He could land the ball three inches from the pin and bitch about it.

I played my usual scintillating game, muffing my tee shots and then hacking down the fairways by five iron and intuition. I still got a better score than Bryan, at least.

By the ninth hole, I was ready for a beer, Bryan was ready for serious therapy, and Jim was ready for a jury of his peers to hear why, precisely, he had killed Alan with his three iron. Alan, in his surly and overly audible way, was ready to go to the tenth hole, so, midway into my lope to the clubhouse, Bryan called me back. Reluctantly, I trotted back to the cart and we proceeded to the tenth hole.

I hadn’t told anybody yet, but this was the hole that tried men’s souls. If you’ve had a good cold beer or two, a nice rest in the air-conditioned clubhouse, perhaps some light intellectual conversation, the tenth hole was survivable. Coming at it as we were, overheated, getting tuckered out, and, in the case of Alan and Jim, decreasingly tolerant of each other, there was surely no hope for us.

The bugs had been bad, but when we got to the tee box it was like standing in a field of apiaries. The mosquitoes and gnats were joined by an example of every species of insect known to man. The heat that had before been shoved around by the wind now was thrust into our faces with sheer malevolence, with the added benefit of now being completely saturated with water vapor.

Then they saw The Hazard.

The water hazard on the tenth hole is not, confessedly, any worse than most any other water hazard in the world. It’s not so large that a reasonably good golfer can’t get across it. The far side is below the tee in elevation, which always improves your chances and your outlook. The fairway on the other side is flat from the bank to the green, so the chances of your ball rolling back into the water are remote.

The problem with the tenth hole was that decades upon decades of runoff from the surrounding farmland had invested the pond with a rich, fertile, deep green abundance of algea, collecting as scum around the edges of the pond, visible through the surface up to ten feet out from the edge, and pocketing up in various places where methane gas had collected.

The problem with the tenth hole is that even if your ball is visible to the naked eye, reachable without a tool of any kind, and barely even damp, you still have plenty of other balls in your bag.

Bryan plunked one into the water against the best counsel of all assembled. Alan pinged one to the green and cursed at it for not going in. Jim, disabled as he was by the powerful stench of the water, gamely landed a solid shot a good ten feet past the water. I used my worthless 2-iron to smack a ball against the bank, where, happily, it bounced to a rest a good four feet past the water’s edge. Once on the other side, Jim discovered his ball had landed in a bare patch, and rather than risk banging his club against the sun-hardened red clay, used his Winter rules privlege and nudged the ball into a slightly nicer part of the fairway.

And that’s when the trouble started.

I don’t know if Alan thought Jim was trying to cheat, or if maybe he was just hot and tired, but he took exception to Jim moving his ball to the side. “I thought you were supposed to move it back, according to Winter rules.”

“Back, side, anything that gets you out of the mud,” Jim replied, as cheerfully as a 54 year old man being corrected by a 35 year old whipper-snapper while suffering heat stroke can.

From there on out, Alan was suspicious of everything Jim did, questioning at least one rule every single hole. By the time we got to 14, a long up-hill drive that can only be accomplished by multiple strokes with a 9-iron, we had all had enough of Alan. On 15, Bryan had had enough of Jim. Jim had stopped taking the criticism with good spirit, and had taken to lecturing Alan on the rules of the game every time he questioned a move. On 16, a long par 4, Bryan teed up his ball, took about half of a backswing, and whalloped the thing to within about eight feet of the green. I looked at him questioningly. Bryan muttered, calmly sotto voce, "I just want to go home.”

By the time we finished putting out at 18, Jim and Alan were no longer speaking to each other. I returned the cart to the clubhouse, and Bryan humped our bags back over to his car. As I rejoined him, he and Jim were chatting, suprisingly amiably, about how badly Bryan had played. After a while, I cut in to thank Jim and Alan for a nice game, and, actually managed to do it with a straight face. Jim said “We’ll have to do it again some time,” but his eye twitched halfway through.

Bryan looked at me with a grin and said “I’ll even give you a ride home! That’s the kind of a friend I am!”

I repeated an old line from our college days, a propos of nothing: “Friends help you move; REAL friends help you move bodies.”

Walking towards his car, his face turned away from us, Alan said “I thought it was ‘real friends help you move golf balls.’”

Jim flushed. He was very clearly as pissed as he ever gets. He strained his face into a smile and said “See you Monday.” He climbed into his MG, flipped the roof clamps loose from the windshield, and began the complicated process of folding the top back, reaching over here and there to pop a snap or loosen a zipper. Alan got into his own car, flipped loose some latches and pressed a switch, and sat there as the top smoothly whirred back into its compartment. Jim paused in the midst of his operations to glare at Alan, as if to accuse him of taking the easy way out. Alan smirked back, silently accusing Jim of being a sap for making things harder than they had to be. They both gunned their engines harder than they had to getting out of the parking lot, spitting gravel indiscriminately until they each realized, independently, that they were driving like jerks.

On the way back to the city we didn’t say much of anything. Bryan pulled up in front of my house, killed the engine, and just sat there for a moment. I asked “Want a beer?

“No. Thanks” He rubbed his eyes, as if he hadn't slept in days. "Never ask me to play golf with Alan again."

“Okay. I guess I’ll see you next week sometime. Give me a ring.”

“Yup. I’ll do it.”

I got out of the car and walked to the house. I hollared to see if my wife was there, which she wasn’t, went to the kitchen, opened the fridge and got the beer I had been wanting since before the tenth hole. Out of curiosity, I went to look out the front window. I got there just in time to watch Bryan put the top of his car back up, crank up the air conditioning full blast, and sit there, soaking in the cold air, before backing out of my driveway and heading home