Doug had never been angry enough for his father Fred, an authoritarian who Carver was frankly relieved to not actually be related to. One of his favorite memories of Doug was a time when they were all out in Ohio for a family visit, and he had calmly interrupted a backyard tussle between Chip and Carver. Fred, who was American through and through but possessed a terribly stern German face and manner, said to his son, “When are you going to start hitting those boys?” and Doug snapped, “I’m not.” And he never did.
Carver was sorry to not be related to his grandmother Gladys, who was herself quiet and stern but secretly kind and a talented artist. She was a woodworker who made small pieces of furniture and dollhouse miniatures, and she knew how to blow glass into beautiful Christmas ornaments. Chip was never very interested in any of this, so before the artistically inclined Conway came along, Carver (who loved fine things from an early age) was happy to be the one who sat next to her in the garageand watched her work. Doug tried to imitate Fred’s manner at times, but he could never pull it off, thank God, because — like Carver — he was too much like his mother.
“I’m not, um, planning to become anyone you don’t recognize,” Carver said to his father, with the hesitancy of someone walking near a cliff’s edge. “I don’t know that I can convince you of the correctness of anything I’m doing, so I don’t want to waste our time arguing, but I hope you know that, at least.”
“Right,” Doug said in a gruff voice, and cleared his throat. “Ultimately, I guess, we don’t have any choice but to trust you.”
“Yeah,” Carver said with relief.
“I understand. I’m trying to understand.”
“I’ll see you back here at eleven,” Carver said with a nod. Doug returned the nod, and he went on his way.
Scott ended up being very glad to have Carver with him at the club. Not only was he happy to assist with the manual labor, he was also the very wealthy son of two club members, and his presence made the BCC staff more friendly and pliable. When Scott walked in the front door, a young woman in a green polo stopped him in the lavish entryway and snapped at him to wait where he was while she got her manager, an officious middle-aged man in a green polo. He was giving Scott an admittedly deserved tongue-lashing for leaving his shit there for them to deal with, instead of taking care of it last night during the wedding’s breakdown and clean-up hour, when Carver walked up and his energy switched. Suddenly the man was understanding and sympathetic while still being quite adamant that Scott get all his bullshit the fuck out of here right now.
“I’m here to do that,” Scott said, hands raised in surrender. “I — seriously, my bad, I get it, we’re gonna get all of it loaded upand out of your hair in ten minutes or less.”
“Perfect,” said the man, with a too-bright smile. “Wonderful. Mr. Novack, how are you today?”
Carver perched his sunglasses atop his head. “Excruciatingly hungover, feel like I got hit by a car.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, can we get you anything?”
“Any chance there’s a Red Bull lying around somewhere?”
“I’ll go have a look,” the man said. “You two can head back to the reception hall, everything’s there for you to load up, and we left you one of our dollies.”
“Great, thanks,” Scott said, immediately striding in that direction. Carver hurried after him. Once they were out of earshot, he said in an undertone, “Shall I cup the balls, Mr. Novack?”
Carver laughed. “They want me to join, that’s what it is.”
“Why would you join when your parents can get you in any time?”
“Well, they have to be with me, and if I want to use the golf course or the tennis courts or the sauna, it’s like twenty bucks for a day pass.”
“How much is this place a year?”
“Fifteen grand, but it’s like eighty just to get in. Maybe more now, that’s what it was when my parents joined. I mean, just the annual fee alone, that works out to…” Carver took a second to think about it, his eyes traveling upward. “About forty dollars a day? And they charge members for a guest pass ontopof that. It’s a really impressive racket.”
Scott shook his head. “The mind boggles.”
“And the thing is, it’s literally not worth it,” Carver whispered. “Or maybe it is to my dad, I don’t know, since he plays golf like fifty times a week. I hate golf, I’m too impatient. The idea of a sport where you hit the ball and then have to driveover to see what happened to it — it’s like satire. At least tennis is fun.”
“It’s bad for the environment, too,” Scott said, pulling open the door to the reception hall and holding it for Carver. Through the windows, they could see club members sunbathing by the pool and traipsing across the golf course.
“Wait,” Carver said, laughing as they made their way to where his remaining equipment was shoved into a corner, his cables piled up haphazardly by someone who had no idea how to wrap a cord. “I just remembered your thing about Caddyshack, your concerns about the abused gopher.”
“It’s a stupid movie,” Scott muttered, starting to quickly wrap and bundle the cables. He could feel a song idea starting to unfurl in his head, and unconsciously began to tap his foot to a beat to help himself figure it out.
“You know the gopher lives, right? That’s the joke.”
“Okay, I wasn’t actually upset about the gopher. It’s just an asinine movie. Every Chevy Chase movie is like nails on a chalkboard to me, I can’t stand that guy. That smirk he always has.”
“But Caddyshack is about class struggle,” Carver said with a grin, clearly fucking with him.
“No, it’s about how everyone involved in the movie was on coke,” Scott said, laughing. “Same with all the National Lampoon movies. Animal House. It’s this sinister, cynical cokehead energy, man. I just don’t like the view of the world they present.”
“You sound like David Foster Wallace,” Carver said. “I’m predisposed to like Animal House ‘cause it was inspired by ADPhi.” His eyes narrowed as he surveyed the scene, hands on his hips. “Did you really need two amps?”
