Prayer

PRAYER

By Christopher G. Bremicker

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2017 by Christopher G. Bremicker

Cover Image by: Miss Mae

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

CLUBS

I knew the best of life and the worst of it.

THE CHURCH OF WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW

I was tired of getting better and longed for an adventurous life.

SAILBOATS

I sailed as a young man, which got me in trouble but gave me skills that helped later in life.

ICARUS

I was a success early in life and God got pissed off.

MEDALS

The father of a woman I met at work won a bronze star for valor.

GOD

I pondered my spirituality.

RETIREMENT II

I talked to a lot of people about my decision to retire or not.

HANDBALL V

I practiced in newly renovated courts.

COFFEE KLATCH III

The hi-rise, where I lived, threw a coffee klatch every Saturday morning.

PLAY REVIEW: ROMEO AND JULIET

I reviewed the time-honored play showing at the Guthrie Theater.

AIRPLANES

Our family had a history of aviation.

THE PLATE II

Mistakenly, I thought I got my mojo back.

DEPRESSION II

I was diagnosed with depression and resisted the use of medication.

COOKS

The people who prepared our meals were a cut above humanity.

BOOKS

I remembered passages from classical literature.

TUNING MY SKIS

I bought a new pair of skis and learned how to tune them.

REDEMPTION

My eighth-grade class threw a party for classmates who turned seventy years old.

BOOKS AND TEA

A coffee shop went bust.

STARBUCKS

I went to a coffee shop every day before I went to work.

GROWING OLDER

I turned seventy and felt the effects of age.

CABLE

I visited my hometown.

HAMLET

Review: A local theater company produced the most famous play in history.

MY GRANDPARENTS

I came from good peasant stock.

THE SPECIAL FORCES MEDIC

I was a Green Beret medic from 1968 to 1970, stationed at Ft. Bragg, NC.

ALTA

I skied one of the best ski resorts in the world, known for its powder snow.

THE HUNT II

My brother and I hunted Pelican Lake late in October.

THE TREADMILL

I walked on one to stay healthy.

RULES

A.A. had rules regarding the opposite sex.

THE TRIP II

A wonderful day ended on a sour note.

SCARS

My father and I had scars on our bodies from an active lifestyle.

REVIEW: OF MICE AND MEN

This play was about loneliness, the American dream, and Fate.

THANKSGIVING II

A small church catered our hi-rise and I had a second dinner at the home of my sister-in-law’s cousin.

AFTER CHURCH

I reveled in the sociability of after church lunches.

WHY I STAYED SOBER

My Higher Power of the outdoors kept me sober.

THE BOOK READING

I got published and had a book reading.

AN INCIDENT

A black man had a heart attack, I called 911, and left him.

MY OLD MAN III

He stole money to keep up a front, save my mother from poverty, and keep our family together.

A SITUATION

A woman is terrified of riding the bus and freezes to death because she refuses help.

THE NEWSPAPER BUSINESS

I became a newspaperman at a small-town weekly.

THE GUITAR

I played a guitar when I was a boy.

THE FUNDRAISER

A close friend and I attended an A.A. fundraiser and I won a flat screen TV.

THE STORIES:

CLUBS

I

My family belonged to country clubs, where I was raised, athletic clubs I liked, and private clubs that prohibited minorities. They were ostensibly for golf, fitness, or socializing. In fact, they were the bastions of people terrified of humanity.

The Town and Country Club, in St. Paul, had a difficult golf course, a practice range I lived on, and a halfway shack where we drank something called a Conroy, made of Seven Up, orange juice, and vodka. It went right to my head and I had only one per golf round.

A friend and I played a lot of golf after college and the club created the junior membership for us that gave golf privileges for fifty dollars a month. My friend and I played together rather than with the members, which the club wanted us to do when they created the junior membership. Normally, memberships cost thousands of dollars.

It was an Irish Catholic club and our family was Presbyterian. This made the club cliquey. My parents threw a party for its members.

My father wore a yellow golf shirt and plaid shorts. My mother wore a visor with a ponytail. The cleats on their golf shoes clicked when they walked across the parking lot.

The party was good for business. My father was a bank president. The bank paid for his membership and the Cadillac he drove to the club and parked by the driving range. The boys at the pro shop and the caddies kissed my parents’ asses. They kissed everybody’s asses.

So, did the golf pro, Ray Valentine. I took a golf lesson from Ray and he taught me what I called the country club swing, with a low backswing and high finish, with my belt buckle pointed at the target. I spent hours on the practice range until my hands bled, even when I wore a glove.

I tried inside out swings to make the ball hook. I tried outside in swings to make the ball slice. I tried different clubs and club speeds to learn distance.

Members watched me practice from the men’s lounge, that overlooked the front yard, with flowers on its walkway. The driving range was across the street. A lot of members bet money on me in a tournament in which they thought I would play well. I played poorly in the tournament and they lost money on me. This, despite my practice.

One afternoon, a man stood at the window of the men’s lounge and said something about them and us. He meant poor people, minorities, and anyone not rich enough to be a member. He meant the unwashed masses, in other words.

This statement affected me and was the source of what my mother called a too heavy reliance in my life on the importance of country clubs. When a girlfriend overdosed on pills, I talked maniacally to a friend at a coffee shop about her. In my mind, I was back at the country club, where its conversations were the highest form of human discourse possible, I thought. They were higher than those of international diplomacy, I believed. I was insanely worried about my girlfriend.

The man’s statement in the men’s lounge reminded me of the narrator’s statement in the novel, Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad. He was one of us, the narrator repeated often during his nightlong story about a British officer who jumped ship during a fire onboard a boat carrying immigrants. Jim spent the rest of his life running from his reputation. In the end, he married a native woman and died on an island, defending a group of natives from British invaders.

The club had a swimming pool with a lifeguard who was another girlfriend of mine. It had four tennis courts where I invited a girl to play before I left for Portland, Oregon, collapsed in the insurance business, and belonged to country clubs no more. I was ahead of myself.

We ate in the dining room. Men came up to my father to pay their respects. He was successful and mentored young businessmen. One man, referring to the company I kept, called us puss chasers.

I played golf with Vick Rein, my father’s vice president, and Joe Kart, a U.S. congressman. Vick told me to swing slowly through the ball and Joe counseled, No one’s got all the brains. I took both pieces of advice to heart.

My parents’ membership at Town and Country Club was not snobbery. They both loved golf, my father’s bank depended on it, and they were social. Unconscionably, I lived at home, after a hitch in the Army, and was in school, while my parents played once or twice a week. They dragged me along.

My family considered golf my training in life. I met prominent men in town, played a game we enjoyed, and learned how to present myself to businessmen. It was a prep school for adulthood.

II

The bank paid for two other country clubs. Hillcrest was a Jewish country club and my father was the first Gentile admitted. The course was nondescript and flat. We ate in the dining room and a few people came up to my father to speak to him. Otherwise, we ate quietly.

North Oaks Country Club was expensive, in a pricey suburb, and was where I hit a golf ball for the first time. My grandparents lived on the sixth fairway and, after dinner, I took an old, wooden five-iron out of their garage and hit a golf ball toward the green that lay over a hill, surrounded by woods. It was dusk, the grass was lush, and I developed my love of golf course architecture.

Golf courses were like parks. I was an outdoorsman and we played golf outdoors. In the morning, the sun rose and the dew on the grass dampened our golf shoes. Freshly mowed grass stuck to our cleats.

III

The University Club, on a curve of Summit Avenue, a street of mansions once dilapidated but now rebuilt, overlooked the city of St. Paul, like a captain’s house on a cruise ship. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived there when its rooms housed young, single men on the way up. His sitting chair was in the bar, until our family bought it, reupholstered it, and put it in their living room, when the club was redone.

The U Club had an excellent bar and the bartender wore a tie, vest, shook martinis the old-fashioned way, and poured them cold from their metal containers. I belonged to a Toastmasters club that met downstairs and I talked members into joining me in the bar after the meeting. We got stewed to the gills.

There was a ballroom, where I attended parties, such as my aunt’s ninetieth birthday and a summer party for a library where I worked. I picked up a librarian’s aide and fucked her for the first of eight times at a party in this room. There was a patio below the lobby that overlooked the pool and tennis court, where I bought her a drink. A dining room was next to the bar.

Our family belonged to the University Club when we were children. We rode our bikes to the club, five miles away, with our towels and swimsuits on the handle bars, swam in the pool, and ordered hamburgers and Cokes we charged to our father. A young man, in a cabana, cooked hamburgers. We played squash in the courts by the locker room.

A childhood friend, who became a rich real estate developer, bought the club, when it fell into decline, and rebuilt it into a first class gathering place for young, well-to-do families. He got his start renovating a nunnery on Summit Avenue and asked me to help him. I declined, knowing his reputation as being difficult to work with.

IV

He bought the St. Paul Athletic Club too, to save it from oblivion. One of my best friends and I played sports at the club when we were boys. We swam in the pool, played basketball in the gym, handball in its courts, squash because he could beat me, and chess, at which we were equal. We ate egg salad sandwiches and chocolate malts for lunch.

We shot pool. A little black man brought us Cokes on a tray, we signed our fathers’ names to the tabs, and Harry Chilin, a pool shark famous at a national level, supervised the pool parlor. The parlor had snooker and billiard tables too, in addition to eight ball tables. My grandfather played snooker with his cronies after work.

There was a shoeshine stand on the first floor and a barber shop. The black lady at the magazine stand greeted us. The lobby displayed high-backed sitting chairs where men smoked cigars and read the newspaper. There was a coat check room too.

The men’s lounge prohibited women, until Joan Grow, a state representative, integrated it. It was the Seventies and feminism was rife. The men in the club thought she was a pain in the ass but went along with it.

A ballroom with a molded, metal ceiling was for weddings and other large occasions. I attended the wedding of a daughter of a friend of the family. The marriage did not last.

A restaurant on the top floor was secluded and overlooked the city at night. It was a great place to take a date, especially an impressionable one. A Jewish girlfriend of my brother stepped over to our table, as our family ate dinner. She said belonging to the Athletic Club was a big deal to her.

When I had a job as a governor’s aide, I played handball with a friend from the office. We soaked our hands in hot water in the sink to harden them and drank Black Russians at the bar after the game. We loved to play handball but neither of us was good. I’m going to be tough today, he said to me, whenever we played. He never was.

A friend from high school was assistant athletic director at the club. He and I were uncomfortable when I signed my father’s name to the tab for a court and a towel. He worked at the front desk. He was national singles champion in handball in the Seventies and came from humble origins.

The athletic club was closed for years then came under the ownership of a fitness company. The real estate developer bought it and brought it back to its former glory. His reputation as a hardnosed businessman followed him but his success was unquestionable.

V

The Minnesota Club, downtown, was for business. The president of the University of Minnesota, a little man with a shock of white hair, got drunk at the bar. The protests and sit-ins were occurring at the university and he was overwhelmed with responsibility. The university named buildings in his honor.

I met my father in the dining room to get a ten-dollar bill from him for a date. He introduced me to Bill Nordstrom, president of Northwest Airlines, who sat at the table across from him. He was trying to get Nordstrom to do business with his bank. This meant savings and checking accounts from the airline’s employees, I thought.

The Minnesota Club was remodeled too and my parents obtained a rug from its dining room. They laid it on the floor of the living room of our cabin up north. It was made in a mill in North Carolina, green, with red trim, and a thick nap.

The club attracted men like barflies and one friend was fired from his marketing job at the newspaper because he was there too much. My brother’s wedding party toasted him and his bride at dinner at the club. I never went into the Minnesota Club, without my father’s permission.

VI

My father belonged to the Lake Traverse Hunt Club on the Red River. We slept in the bunkroom, ate steaks cooked by the chef of the Criterion, who stayed there all duck hunting season, and shot ducks as they flew in herds downriver. We played Liars Poker before dinner and I became adept at betting men their shirts I was not what I said I was.

VII

I belonged to other clubs. I joined the Portland Athletic Club in Oregon and played handball in a tournament. I was a C class player but they matched me with a B player and I performed respectably. I got beat by ten points but my opponent said I had talent.

An insurance agent took me to the Multnomah Athletic Club that dwarfed the St. Paul Athletic Club. It teemed with businessmen in suits, having lunch, or playing handball. I remembered it as a golden dome, like the pleasure palace of Kublai Khan.

I came home from Portland, after incurring a nervous breakdown, and country clubs were far from my family’s mind. I was sick and we switched gears to survival mode. My family surrounded me.

VIII

Two months later, we relocated to Cable, Wisconsin, a town of three hundred jack pine savages who thought country clubs were phony. There were golf courses in the area but they were for everyone. Cable was an egalitarian town. I took a lesson at the Hayward Golf Club, where I corrected my country club swing to one with a more horizontal swing.

Telemark Golf Course was an untamed monster that wound through the woods, in long, dogleg fairways, with obstacles like boulders, creeks, impenetrable rough, and intimidating sand traps. It was so formidable it was the only golf course I ever played I did not consider beautiful. Our American Legion league played it every Thursday. None of us shot well. Constantly, we searched for balls in the deep woods.

IX

To get well, I got a job involving manual labor on the grounds crew of Mendakota Country Club in St. Paul. It was a poor man’s country club, with a pitch-and-putt course, a clubhouse since rebuilt, and members who were gruff, instead of refined. We phoned the clubhouse from the grounds shack, ordered hamburgers from the grill, and drove in a golf cart to pick them up. I never went to the clubhouse otherwise and disliked playing the course.

My boss on the grounds crew, a Jewish man who sold eggs, until corporations drove him out of business, could do anything, and was one of the finest men I ever met. He was kind, laughed at our foibles, and had contempt for Jews who supported Israel. He organized us into a team that rebuilt a golf green, complete with irrigation system, a huge tee, as well as performed routine maintenance.

I ran a rotary mower under the trees, a rough mower with three rotors, and a Weed Eater that trimmed around the bushes. I ran the greens mower too. As the sun rose, I mowed the wet greens in straight lines across then diagonally. I kicked the rotors in and out of gear and turned the mower on a dime.

X

My parents bought a small rowhouse in Fountain Hills, Arizona, and fixed it up with gravel in the back yard and new furniture. The ceiling was low but the ambience was nice. With a second bedroom, it was big enough for my parents and a guest. I attended a party at the rowhouse with St. Paulites, people from Cable, and other snowbirds.

They played golf at the Fountain Hills Country Club. Fountain Hills was a meandering, flat course lined with cactuses. It had large sand traps, scrub brush, and parched fairways. My father took me to lunch at the club and we were the only ones in the bar.

We played golf with a neighbor from Cable on the little-played course. He cared more about golf than he did about friendship. When my mother developed Alzheimer’s, he was nowhere around. He ran to his tee time in Cable, when she stopped by to say hello.

XI

The Delta Airlines Crown Room served free booze. My father read the Wall Street Journal, while I had a drink. A man next to us, in an easy chair, smoked a cigar. He and my father talked business. It’s a part of life, my father counseled me, as we walked out the door. By this, he meant, don’t take the Crown Room too seriously.

XII

I had it good, had it bad, and knew the difference. I told people this but they never believed me. They looked at my ravaged face and never believed the heights I knew.

I played Liars Poker with them and fleeced them every time we played. They were rubes. I was a proponent of Murphy’s Law. It was immoral to allow a sucker to keep his money.

THE CHURCH OF WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW

I was tired of fighting, tired of the recovery way of life. I did not mean recovery from alcoholism. I meant recovery from schizophrenia.

My mind was as good as it was going to get. I looked at my old emails and they seemed nuts. I wondered how people ever tolerated me.

Muhamad Ali threw punches as a joke in his old age. He threw punches all his life. So, he threw punches when he talked to people after his retirement.

Ed Bradley, the journalist, interviewed him and Ali threw punches at Bradley, which confused him. Did he do this all the time? Bradley asked Ali’s wife. She and Ali began to laugh. It was a joke they played on people. As Ernest Hemingway said, What else is a fighting cock supposed to do?

Franz Klammer, the Olympic downhill skier who won the gold medal for Austria in a suicidal run by a hundredth of a second, was retired. The Austrians called him the Kaiser. He got haircuts and his countrymen kissed his ass.

In St. Paul, retired men drove Lincoln Town Cars and got haircuts. They read the newspaper, as the barber cut their hair and kowtowed to them. Then they drove home and took a nap.

David Letterman interviewed Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. They got interviewed in retirement. That’s all they did. The laconic life of a retired sports hero did not appeal to me. What did a retired basketball star do? Watch the game and eat potato chips?

My brother admitted to sleepless nights because of his retirement. He skied, hunted, and fished because he had nothing else to do. Hobbies, once passions, were now acts of desperation.

I worked at Walgreen’s because it cured me. In effect, I was in work therapy. They paid me so little it was like a sheltered workshop. I sweated blood for a pittance. If the illness was over, I’d quit the job. Right?

The battle went on for forty years. It was a habit, a way of life, like that of a gladiator. Fighting was part of my genes as much as the genes that caused my breakdown.

Despite my fatal flaw, I was