“Chewy Chewy"
A sticky situation from Self Evident: We Hold These Tooths
“Chewy Chewy”
The song of that title, by a “band”1 called The Ohio Express®, was about the worst of the bubblegum era, IMHO. There, I got that off my chest. [But what did I really expect from the misguided and too-slick crowd that cranked out “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy?”2 I don’t care if they were both million-sellers.]
[Right is right and wrong is wrong.]
That said, the title of this little gem is fully apropos, given that we are about to get into bubblegum in the worst possible way.
Feet first. Or foot first, at any rate.
Ted was minding his own business, as upright citizens like your author and your dear mindful self are inclined to do. He was in a bit of a hurry, having an appointment across town with his accountant, and running a little late, as even the best of us (you and I for example) sometimes manage. Even the near perfect do stumble from time to time. Oh, they stumble!
The reason for the CPA visit was, as is so often the case, an unsympathetic letter from the IRS. There was a suggestion—well, actually, more like an instruction—to write them a check for some thousands of dollars purportedly due in April of 2019, plus interest. This was not a welcome missive.
A bite in the backside if there ever was one. The interest due is the real killer, and one necessarily suspects that the IRS is slow to notify in order to run up the bill. [Though, yes, we all know they are understaffed and overworked and are doing the very best they can under the circumstances. If you think it’s not easy being green, just imagine how difficult life would be if your neighbors thought you were an IRS agent. I can hear the air hissing out of your slashed tires even as we speak.]
Unfortunately, Ted’s accountant doesn’t seem to be as creative as, say, The Donald’s®. Just yesterday we learned That this Man of the People paid no taxes for something like ten of the last 15 years, and the taxes he did pay during the several years that he wasn’t losing money hand over fist [The Apprentice® Years] were kindly returned to him by the good folks at the Treasury.
$72.9 million.
Nice refund if you can get it!
Ted’s a successful small business owner, and he actually does make a profit each year—a fairly astonishing thing, really. Did you know there exists a substantial demand for ball-washers? Neither did I. Yet Ted’s three employees are kept busy pretty much year-round installing and repairing the things.
Golf ball washers! [Golf ball washers?]
The idea that there’s money to be made on anything even marginally related to golf is one of those sad facts that trouble all of us in the sleepless wee hours. Well, clubs are in a different category—the ones swung,3 not the ones joined: Trump®, for example, has never made a profit on any of his eleven courses.4
But, credit where due, Ted found a niche.
The idea came to him when he was still in his teens, caddying on weekends and after school. He noticed that the ball washers were often ineffective, inoperable or knocked over by carts driven by intoxicated duffers. He’d asked management and had been told, “There’s nobody knows how to fix them.” So he took one home, took it apart, figured out how the crank and the brushes worked, and was quickly in business for himself.
He mailed business cards to all of the courses within a hundred miles or so and was soon awash in work. He became a ball-washer dealer and started accepting trade-ins, which he refurbed during the slower winter months. He was, pardon the expression, “cleaning up!”
Partway through his third season he made his first hire. Lester is good with his hands according to Ashley but we won’t go there. He picked up on the mechanics of ball-washers quickly and does most of the repair work now. Back when he started, the things were cranked, but these days they use spiral plungers, and Les got a handle on the new ones lickety split.
Ashley was the next employee, an obvious choice since #1, she lives with Les and was already somewhat familiar with the business. And #2, because she has a winning smile and dimples and subsequently is a terrific salesperson. She doesn’t need to talk a leg off a horse or a table; she just smiles and all resistance is futile. Few club managers can say “no” to her dimpled grin.
But neither of them is as, gosh, downright interesting as Cornelia, who does most of the installations now.
Most commercial-grade ball-washers mount on 2-3/8” metal or Fiberglas® posts set in concrete. So Corrie’s5 work, on new installations, involves a bit of digging, some mixing of Quikcrete®, insertion of a post and bracing to keep it vertical while the cement cures.
New installs are, pretty obviously, on new courses or, in some cases, decrepit courses that are being upfitted6, and as you’ve already guessed, in places where some idiot7 drove over the old one.
The driven-over can occasionally be restored to service, at least the ones on steel posts. The Fiberglas® posts tend to snap before pulling the concrete ballast out of the ground. [At least, we ought to note here, they don’t rust. Something to keep in mind when you’re considering building a new course.]
Because of the uniformity of design, swapping out a defective unit is pretty simple. Just a couple of bolts and bingo, good as new! That’s probably the most satisfying part of the work. It surely would be for me.
But, naturally enough, that’s not what we’re here to talk about, and truly, truly, the less said about golf the better. It will only encourage those people.
Corrie is married to Dennis, and both of them just luh-uhve to travel. So on each yearly vacay they go someplace really interesting and often catch really interesting diseases or deal with deadly threats along the way. That definitely infuses life with a sense of derring-do!
Pretty much anyone can snorkel in Hawaii and see a sand shark and get a little spooked, or climb a hill in Alaska and see a grizzly 400 yards away, or eat something a little off from a street stall in Mexico (with all that follows and flows therefrom8)—but Corrie and Denny9 don’t dabble in the easy stuff. Try a night hike.
In Hong Kong.
Sounds like what? A walk in the park?
I can hear what you’re thinking: “Hong Kong is a densely populated island outfit about the size of Los Angeles—but considerably more crowded. (Seven point five million to LA’s four.) And, more to the point, with one of the lowest murder rates on the planet: 0.4 per hundred thousand people as versus 7.0 in The Entertainment Capital of the World. So a night hike in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China® has got to be safer than the same adventure in Tinseltown®.”
You skeptic, you.
It is exactly like a walk in the park. Forty percent of Hong Kong is parkland, protected from development—green and growing and wild. And the parks are home to the fourth-most-toxic land snake in the world. A flavor of cobra, from whose bite one is highly unlikely to recover the use of one’s body.
Their night hikes on their last vacay were not tiptoes through tulips by any stretch of the imagination.
What they seem to enjoy is the adrenaline rush of confronting serious danger. They night-hiked in the deep darkness and only used their cellphone flashlights when they heard a slither, a slink or a slide. They came home with videos of about two dozen snakes, three of which were reared with spread hoods—a long stretch from your grandfather’s snapshots taken on his European tour. “This is the sidewalk in front of the Louvre.”
Plus the wild boars. Yes. Sometimes on the city streets! Tusky-suckers they are! On city streets!
So you see?
But, to regroup, before my train of thought derailed I was going to tell you about Ted’s big adventure.
He’d found a parking space only a block from the bookkeeper’s office. [Score!] He’d put some quarters in the meter, which already had 20 minutes left over from the prior patron. [Score!] Grabbed the paperwork, locked the car and dashed.
Almost there!
That’s when his foot landed on the big pink glob and he stepped right out of the glued shoe, tripping and taking a dive.
If he hadn’t hit his head on the fireplug when he fell, the coroner says he would certainly have survived the tumble.
There are cobras and then there are metaphorical asps that slither their way into even the happiest of lives. Or stories. In the present case, was the snake that bit him the hydrant, the bubblegum, or the thoughtless person who spat the Double Bubble®10 on the pavement? Or, to take a broader view, the IRS? Absent the revenuers Ted would have been minding the store.
Becca, Ted’s widow, was relieved, though of course she would never admit it. Her affair with the golf pro11 at the local course was getting harder and harder to cover up. Ted was bound to find out rather sooner than later, and infidelity, she was pretty certain, would have led to splitsville. Not a pretty thought.
And the ball biz rolls on.
*******
Note per footnotes: Substack renumbers when I post, but footnotes sometimes refer to previous super important stuff in the print version, so originals are in [#].
1 [151] It wasn’t actually a “band,” rather a mot [French, non?] for whatever group of musicians the record label pulled together to make an album. Sort of like the Monkees®, but the Monkees® surprised everyone and turned out to be actual artists. No tellin’.
2 [152] “Yummy” made it to #1 on the Canadian charts and #4 in the U.S., which says something. Something rather unsettling. Those fans may very well have voted in 2016. Think about that.
3 [153] $450 for a driver? Really? Are you kidding me?
4 [154] Or he so-claims. On his tax returns. But then, if you are writing off business expenses to the tune of $70K for hair styling, loss is easy.
5 [155] I haven’t reminded you of the term “hypocoristic” for a while. This is one, as I’m hoping you recall. “Is our children learning?” (Per GWB.)
6 [156] Eight hours’ work when she’s covering 18 holes. Then an overnight in a motel if she’s more than a couple hours’ drive away, with washer installs the next day.
7 [157] Of whom there are many on a golf course. There are few exceptions to “prove” this rule.
8 [158] Your humble author has been there, done that. Don’t ask.
9 [159] And “Denny” is a … come on now.
10 [160] A double Double Bubble®, by the way. Two pink squares masticated into a single mass. The perp ought to be in manacles.
11 [161] One of those bad eggs. Well, no, two: Becca and Bob. Frankly, they deserve each other.
Copyright© 2020, Cecil Bothwell, All rights reserved.
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