golf ball creek

chapter 4

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Mr. Goodspeed was the source of Tommy’s inner forward drive, his constant plowing toward a raison d'être. But while Tommy often misplaced or misdirected his focus, Mr. Goodspeed had long solidified his aim in life: work and the acquisition of money.

This isn’t rare. I’d say it’s the default mindset for many people, particularly men like Mr. Goodspeed, for whom the pursuit of money didn’t exactly feel like a rigged game. They had no reason to turn elsewhere.

People like Mr. Goodspeed pursue money because, when spiritually ill-informed or malnourished, in the absence of answers, it’s easiest to gravitate toward a quantifiable representation of what life is all about, even if they wouldn’t admit it. They’d rather frame it as “providing for one’s family” or something equally virtuous, but everyone knows what they mean. It’s a mindset that leads mostly to unhappiness and a hardening of the heart, something countless stories have warned of since money was invented.

Tommy, however, escaped this mindset. He found a spiritual education in the books we read, particularly in poetry, which disavowed such a primitive paradigm. I suspect this side of him came from a latent creative streak in his mother, one that had been squashed early in her life and made her more amenable to marrying a man like Tommy’s father. His father’s neglect in the pursuit of work and money, and the resentment it bred, likely turned Tommy off from the idea of living for money even further.

Tommy always grimaced when his father said entrepreneur, like it was a dirty word, an embarrassing word, as if it were a slur for the spiritually bankrupt. It was always a prelude to some scheme or idea he had for us, even as middle-schoolers, to make money.

“I have a proposition perfect for a couple of young entrepreneurs like yourselves,” he said to us one day, the summer after sixth grade, standing on the edge of the small in-ground pool the Goodspeeds had—because, of course, they had a pool.
Tommy ignored him, too busy smacking me with a pool noodle in the friendly and slightly phallic way boys do.

“What is it, Mr. Goodspeed?” I asked. Since Mr. Goodspeed wasn’t my father, I had more patience for him than Tommy. Plus, I was always short on cash, convinced my parents hadn’t adjusted my allowance for inflation.

“Okay, I was out golfing the other day with Mr. Lightfoote and some of the guys from the chamber. And Jerry, well, he totally shanked one out and over the green on the par-three on nine,” he said. “And then Mr. Gatchel did too, and it reminded me of the time I did a few weeks ago. It’s easy to do, and you lose your ball. So I thought—me and Mr. Lightfoote play that hole all the time, and if we manage to hit it over there, imagine all the terrible golfers who’ve never played it before! On a windy day, you could easily get three or four guys hitting their ball way past the green.”

“Yeah, so?” Tommy said, impatient. He blew water out of his pool noodle.

“So, you know where those balls go? They roll down the ravine to the creek. Into the woods. I bet it’s full of ‘em. And did you know—you can sell golf balls to the club? You can get up to a dollar a ball if they’re good quality, maybe fifty cents for some of ‘em. So I was thinking you kids should get in there and start looking!”

Tommy perked up. It sounded like an adventure to him, yet another thing to pour himself into.

“You really think there’s enough balls back there to be worth it?” he asked, already climbing out of the pool.

“Only one way to find out,” Mr. Goodspeed said.

To his credit, the idea was selfless. He wasn’t looking to profit—he genuinely thought that finding ways for his eleven-year-old son and his friend to make their own money was as important as spending quality time or imparting a life lesson.
We changed into dry clothes and went into the woods behind Tommy’s house to begin our quest.

There was a little gate from the Goodspeed backyard that led to a rough trail in the woods, which in turn led to a more maintained trail that was part of the Whispering Pines Park, a wooded area of a couple square miles cut into the heart of Veddersburgh. It bordered the neighborhood on one side and the expanse of the golf course on the other. A creek stormed through it, leaving a couple of small, beautiful waterfalls in its wake as it made its way to the Mohawk River. During Veddersburgh’s heyday in the 1920s, it was called an ‘ornithological park’—a fancy way to say, “a place to watch birds.” There were even the remnants of a brick birdwatching house, roofless and dilapidated, with its windows boarded up. In those days, the creek used to run different colors depending on what rugs or shirts they were dyeing in the mills.

In our time, Whispering Pines was more a place for teenagers to get high, have sex, play paintball, junkies to shoot up, and homeless people to make camp. Sometimes I wonder why Tommy’s parents let us play there unsupervised, considering the number of needles we found and the tents we came across that may or may not have been occupied by horny teenagers or the unhoused. But nothing bad ever happened to us. The place felt too familiar to be dangerous—how could something accessible via your backyard lend itself to evil?

Whispering Pines was a magical place for us, a place for pretending. Middle school is usually when playing pretend gives way to reality, but for us, the forest kept that magic alive.

Tommy and I pretended in a way that was more conversational, more akin to role-playing or improv than childish games. Whispering Pines could be the Ardennes—we were taking cover from the German barrage, trading stories of the girls we left back home. It could be the Canadian wilderness—our plane had crashed, and we needed to build a shelter before the blizzard arrived. It could be itself, but three hundred years ago, and we were Mohawk warriors, discussing the encroachment of the strange white men.

That day, though, there was no need to pretend. We had a task. The hunt for lost golf balls held more allure as an adventure than as a way to make money.

We followed the trail along the creek, down to the bottom of the ravine, out of sight below the 9th hole. The biggest waterfall of the creek was there, giving way to a round pool before the water narrowed and became less intense. Waldo, Tommy’s dog, splashed through the creek behind us, just as enthusiastic about the adventure as we were.

“Where do you think? Right about here?” Tommy said, standing with his hands on his hips on a big rock above the waterfall.

I looked up at the top of the ravine. “I think so,” I said. “I bet a lot of them bounce and roll down to the creek.”

“Let’s make it a game,” Tommy said, grinning. This was his thing—everything was a game, and he always won. “Whoever finds the most by sundown?”

“Sundown?!” I checked my Velcro digital watch. It was my job to temper him.

“That’s hours from now. And if we find a lot, we won’t have time to take them to the country club and turn them in.”

“Fine,” he said. “Until four?”

“Sure. Here’s one!” I yelled, dipping my hand into the cool, clear water of the creek where a white Titleist was lodged between two mossy rocks. Tommy narrowed his eyes, already bounding around the bottom of the ravine in search of more.

By four o’clock, we had gathered 28 balls—enough to fill the plastic bucket we’d brought along. Tommy found 15, and I found 13. He manifested the last two through sheer will, as if the balls were finding him instead of the other way around.

We carried our bucket to the edge of the ridge. We must have been a sight to the golfers on the green—two dirty, sweaty boys with a bucket of golf balls, Waldo by our side.

I didn’t know the way to the clubhouse—golf courses were anathema to my dad—but Tommy’s dad took him there all the time. As it turned out, Mr. Goodspeed’s estimate of payment per ball was rather generous. They paid us a grand total of $6.37 for the afternoon’s work.

This seemed like a very bad deal to me. We had probably found every ball that had been hit into the ravine over the past few months.

Tommy split the money with me despite finding more—he insisted, despite my protests, so he took the extra penny in the end—and we walked back through the woods to the neighborhood, then out onto the sidewalk to go to Andersen’s.

Andersen’s was a local convenience store, always the closest place for anything an 11-year-old could want. What to buy with my newfound riches? I got a pack of gum, a Snickers bar, and a bag of Cheez-Its. Tommy got a Hershey bar, a bag of Sour Patch Kids, and an Andersen’s-brand iced tea, the only drink cheap enough to afford.

“Darn. I wish I thought to get a drink,” I said as we were about to pay. I didn’t have enough money left.

“Hang on, I want a different flavor,” Tommy said to the cashier, putting the rest of his snacks on the counter. He went to the cooler and returned having exchanged his purple-colored iced tea for something blue. We paid and stepped back out into the hot summer sun.

From his cargo shorts pocket, Tommy withdrew the original iced tea flavor he’d claimed to have put back and handed it to me.

“Here ya go, Jude-dude,” he said, like his pocket were the cooler shelf.

“Did you—what? Wait, did you steal this?” I asked. I’d never stolen anything in my life.

“I think stealing would mean I did some evil,” he said, as though he’d practiced this speech to himself in the mirror. “But I didn’t take anything that belongs to someone else. It’s just a store. The iced tea already belongs to me; the Andersen’s store is just unfairly withholding it. I can choose to pay them for it, sure, but there’s no victim in the crime. The victim would be a company that makes millions anyway. The guy at the register still gets paid, so I wouldn’t say it’s stealing. I just took it without paying.”

I was both amazed and afraid of Tommy in that moment, but also humbled and grateful he’d do such a thing for me, even if I couldn’t quite follow his logic.

“You weren’t afraid of getting caught?”

“Nah, Jude-dude. If you do anything without being nervous, no one ever notices. No one ever suspects you of anything,” he explained. “You act like there’s nothing wrong, and there isn’t.”

“Don’t you feel bad, though? Not for stealing, but for taking without paying when other people do, ya know, pay?”

Tommy looked away, with his trademark smirk that would become infamous through the story of our lives. “I don’t feel bad about choosing to do it. I feel bad about getting away with it,” he said, unwrapping his candy bar.

I studied his blue eyes, the blonde hair still well-conditioned even after scraping through the woods, his Lacoste t-shirt, cargo shorts. Even after all we’d been through that day, Tommy Goodspeed still managed to look composed and put together.

Then I realized why no one would ever think Tommy Goodspeed would steal anything.

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previous (the age of thumb sucking)