For summer tourists the beach is a delightful escape to the sun and sea…a place to let the waves wash away troubles while your toes sink in the sand. In the past, I had only known the good things about the beach but there is a darker side. Beach towns are also where lost souls wash up on the shore like broken shells.
Zoom in from the shrimp boats past the swimmers and sunbathers, beyond the high-rise hotels and past even the breakfast dives and seafood restaurants and you will find these refugees from life living their mortal purgatory in shabby apartments. Not quite homeless but at home nowhere. I once sat in the dreary apartment of a Green Beret, a veteran of Viet Nam, who had come home to find all his belongings burning in the front yard. Whether he deserved it or not, he was broken and doing his best to look like a person was still alive inside his body.
I joined them for six months.
Walking out of a courtroom holding separation papers I could not even bring myself to read, I was bruised and baffled. I had friends and family and they offered shoulders to cry on and patience to listen but sometimes it is good to heal alone. It was terrifying but I knew it was the time to let go and dive deep into my own abyss. North Myrtle Beach was my place to fall. Leaving home was scary and being so far from my children was painful but intuitively I knew what I had to do.
Thanks to my good friend Eddie Weldon, I found work at Gator Hole, a now defunct nine hole golf course in North Myrtle Beach. I rented a single room in an apartment with refrigerator privileges. That was fine… having lost thirty pounds. I didn’t take up much space and introvert that I am, I kept to my room most of the time banging away on an electric typewriter with a notion of living a solitary life as a suffering writer. My clothes, and a ragged old set of golf clubs completed my possessions.
I was hired to manage the Driving Range. My responsibility was to set up baskets of balls and rent them out to customers. Toward the end of the day, I would drive the neat little tractor with the attachment designed to pick up golf balls. Once I had picked up the golf balls, I would dump them into a big tub of almost pure bleach. After the first time raking the golf balls around to clean them, I had to buy a new pair of jeans as the bleach had begun to eat holes in the ones I had on. Some life lessons cost $39.95 at Belks.
It was great sport for my new acquaintances, while I was in the steel cage of the tractor, to hit golf balls at me. As they got to know me, they brought their friends along to help. People who work around a golf course develop an uncanny accuracy. No matter how safe the cage is supposed to be, the sound of a golf ball hitting it is enough to make a person jumpy. In all fairness, I was already jumpy and truth be told, I would have done the same to them.
I was easily bored with sitting waiting for customers and after some talk with the management, was able to take a demotion to course maintenance. It was hot hard work in the August sun. We ran weed eaters and trimmed shrubs and repaired fairways and greens. We raked traps with a tractor and finished them by hand. I liked this job a lot better.
In the mornings I would ride a cart from green to green to set the pin placements for the day. The sun would still be low when I began at 6:00 am and I often had the course to myself, along with an occasional eagle, and the omnious snout of the eponymous eight-foot gator as he eyed me like a morning biscuit. Sound effects were provided by the hammering of pilated woodpeckers and the occasional bullfrog still belching out a mating invitation. Hold the irony please.
To set the pins, I had to get up at 5:00 am to be at the course by 6:00. After a month in someone else’s house, I found a two room apartment near Eagle’s Nest golf course just below the North Carolina state line and had to drive fifteen minutes to the south to reach Gator Hole.
In the mornings the sun would rise just as I crossed the Inland Waterway. The effect was dazzling. The sun lit up the waterway in reds, oranges and yellows. Every morning the world was painted in a new palette and I was struck with the epiphany that my poor woes did not dull the beauty of creation. From the first time I saw the scene, I knew that life like the waterway, would get brighter.
I spent my days working at the course and my nights in my solitary room pounding away on the typewriter. I wrote a novel about a little guy who is thrown into circumstances which take him away from the home and people he knew and loved. The theme is common in literature and life. Also, like my life, I am constantly revising it in an attempt to get it just right
While working at Gator Hole, I was doing my best to have a good time but I was failing miserably. For a time I haunted all the popular night clubs hanging around on the fringes too afraid to make contact and miserably alone in the crowd. I had read somebody’s self-help article which advised, “Do the things you loved during good times even if you have to force yourself to do them.” I tried out for a play, Doctor! Doctor! produced by the North Myrtle Beach Pla
yers. I was cast in the title role, a Groucho Marx sort of doctor complete with mustache. It was a farce and seemed to be a hit with the audience and the distraction did help. Billy Davis, my lifelong friend, came down to see the play. “When you walk on a stage,” he said, “all the attention goes to you.” I count it nicest complement I ever received as an “actor”.
Because I was diligent, trustworthy, and older than anyone else, I was promoted to temporary cart guy. My favorite day as the cart guy came near the end of my stay at the beach. I was loading carts for some of the winter golfers, most of whom were very nice people. Occasionally, in golf as in life, we run into jerks. I was thirty-six years old and, I admit, elderly to be the cart guy. One smart mouthed golfer, after I loaded the cart, turned to me, and loud enough to make sure his friends heard, said, “What are the qualifications for being a cart boy at your age?”
I was in no mood to be toyed with and so my answer was, “Well, I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology and a Masters in English, but I don’t think they care what field your masters is in. Can I get you an application?”
He huffed and drove off. I didn’t expect a tip and I didn’t get one.
My exile meant seeing my children, Kate and Case much less that I wanted to but When I could get could get a weekend off, I would meet their mother in Darlington and have a couple of days with them. My sister Connie and her husband Steve were my greatest advocates during the time. They took Kate and Case and their son Robbs on several adventures. I will always be grateful for the weekend that Steve packed up Kate (5) Robbs (3) and Case (2) and drove the 4 hours so they could visit me. Brave man was Steve to try and placate those three during the drive. He and Connie are serious when it comes to family.
Eventually, my exile to the coast was over. I knew it as suddenly as if I had been struck by lightning. I talked to my counselor and told him he had to work really fast because I was leaving within two weeks. He said his work was finished and to go home. Too much time had been spent away from Kate and Case and my hometown. I packed up and moved back to Fort Mill, not to take up my old life but to begin a second one.
“There once was a man named Michael Finnegan
He grew fat and then grew thin again
Then he died and had to begin again.
Poor old Michael Finnegan
Begin Again”*
*Irish children’s song
The Hackney Scout Song Book
Stacey & Son Ltd. 1921
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