REEF'S RUMINATIONS: #2 - HEIMSCH

Unlike my research on Gordon, tracing and verifying the golf lore of the other competitors is a much simpler matter—in that we were all born in the twentieth century. And of all the combatants, it is most certainly Rich with whom I have played the most golf—in total, almost as exciting as when we used to exchange girlfriends [editor’s note: ‘do tell…’]. Over these many years we have played courses good, bad, and really, really bad on two continents. Occasionally, in our mutual and youthful primes, we actually met on the fairways, or what then and there passed for fairways. Mostly, as kids, at our home course, un-fabled Florham Park Country Club, we spent time in ivy-skeeter-and-pricker-filled woods or knee deep in fetid brown-green swamp ooze that never came out of any fabric it touched. The mansion that sat on the high ground just east of Ridgedale Avenue was the place where, in a former-future lifetime, Heimsch had-would celebrate{d} his first wedding, saddled, as with an addled partner on a bad four-ball [sic] team, with me as “Best Man.”

Truth be known, F.P.C.C. was then, in the early sixties, a mediocre public course, but had, as an additional draw, a nine-hole Par 3 course; a course blindingly lit at night from April to November. It cost a buck to play 9. Heimsch and I, along with both our fathers on many memorable occasions, were regulars at this Par 3. Nothing fancy, holes between 75 and 140 yards in length, a few changes of elevation and, for damn certain, devilishly elevated greens which were a trademark (read: an ESSENTIAL, due to the constant flooding visited upon the low-lying track in perpetuity). The pro shop would loan local miscreants both clubs and bug-spray for free. But we brought our own clubs—a five, seven, nine and putter. Believe me, the bug spray was useless

We didn’t need tees, other than to fix, at times, deeply if not damply cavernous ball-marks, left when a high shot landed with a characteristic “Tha-WOP”. Heimsch’s brother once lofted a gorgeous nine-iron skyward on #2, and though we all knew it was going to be very close and we all saw and heard the ball come to Earth, we never found it. The second green had eaten Gary’s Maxfli; he was monumentally ‘not amused’—earth the consistency of firm pudding had opened and closed, telling neither him nor anyone else a single secret. On each hole, we teed off while simultaneously trying to stabilize the woven rubber mat beneath us by spreading our feet as wide as they would go so that it wouldn’t snap our johnson off and roll us up like a brittle old map.
We didn’t really need to bring more than one ball as there were hundreds of them in the woods. We played that course endlessly, every day in summer if we had the scratch, over and over again, the same little nine holes; well…day and night.
And it was at night when the true character of the course emerged. Everything changed. Everything looked different, smelled different, felt different, was different.

So one night we stroll into the Pro Shop to see our “good buddy” Snapper, the officious but brain-dead nighttime proprietor of the golf shop, an angry, diNobile cigar-chomping, moronic fifty-something who had caught us at least two thousand times sneaking on to the course and fuckin’ hated us. We each drop a buck on the counter, grab and fold a scorecard without looking, and as I turn and head for the door, I hear Heimsch behind me beginning touchy negotiations with Snapper …

“I’d like to borrow two 3 irons”, Heimsch said to him.
“What for?” snapped Snapper, ever the suspicious one, drooling diNobile juice down his chin.
Coolly and calmly, Heimsch said, dead-panning over at me “To play golf, of course”.
“Get outta here, you clowns don’t need no 3 irons on dat course.” He had a maniacal grin, a grin that said ‘I gotcha!’ “Look, we’re working on a new shot, and we need two 3 irons, OK?” Heimsch had beaten him again, and we were off. I never bothered to ask him why he thought we needed 3 irons.While none of the holes were particularly scenic at any time of day, there was one, the eighth, that always took on an eerie presence, and especially so at night. In order to make a golf hole at #8, a fifty-yard by three-yard earthworks and stone jetty had been constructed, down which one advanced twice: once, at night at least, going back to the brilliantly illuminated tee, and again in the other direction after you had offered your Spaulding Pacesetter to the Moth Gods by night and the Mosquito Gods by day (and night). On that tee—whenever one was there-- you were surrounded by what are now referred to politely as watersheds or wetlands; but these were, and still are today, Springsteen’s swamps of Jersey. Organic and vast, and in August at 9:00pm, you’re there on #8 tee, and it brings out the primal in you. Or at least it brought out the primal in Heimsch and eventually this reporter on one night many moons ago.
You see the entire jetty at number eight was always crawling with frogs. And at night in the summer, the spotlight at the end of the jetty drew a variety of flying creatures to their eventual demise, to be snared away and devoured by any one of the lightning quick tongues of upwards of three million frogs. Not that we were sorry to see billions of mosquitoes—Jersey’s State Bird—disappear every second. I mean we’re talking mosquitoes with big-ass talons and license plates…and moths? Moths the size of Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis.
Well, during the day, the bugs are fewer and the frogs—huge frogs, I mean frogs bigger’an snapping turtles--were mercifully asleep on the slimy rocks below. But the collective roar those frogs gave off at night, during their full-feed phase, was out of the Old Testament, other-worldly. And, as it happened one night, when the contest between Heimsch and this writer was tied, and the tension on the eighth tee heavy as my sodden Keds, a frog made a fateful leap out of the then shimmering purple ooze and on to the tee just as Heimsch was about to offer a 7-iron shot up to Mothra.
He got so pissed, he dropped the club mid-downswing, bent over, picked up one of Snapper’s 3-irons and brained the bloated amphibian, sending a good bit of its hind end to the left, toward Florham Park and most of what remained of his top half to the right, toward East Hanover. Next thing I know, fire in his eyes, Heimsch is scaling his way down into the murky darkness, clubbing frogs indiscriminately. Seconds later I too was in the croaking fray. Suddenly I realized why Rich brought the 3 irons along. We had often kidded about clobbering a few of the frogs, and now we were at it, but not with our clubs, rather with Snapper’s.

After rinsing off the evidence in the still “stream” behind #9 Rich took the clubs back in to Mr. Charm Himself, who quipped, “So smart-ass, how’d yer new shot work out?”
“Hit ‘em all square, Snapper…see you tomorrow”