The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist: A Novel

Say hello to your light-running money-whipped steer-job three-jack give-up artist.

This is pretty good. Man talking to himself. But it's me, all right. Your no-heart Mother Goose who blowed about $80,000 in the last round of the Hawaiian Open today.

Lost my swing, lost my tempo. Tempo Retardo. Also, I played too fast. I mean shit, the way I raced around out there you'd have thought I was a pickup truck on the way to happy hour.

You don't have to stick a thermometer up my ass to find out I shot a fever-running 73. Just look at the scores in tomorrow's paper and you'll find a dunce named Bobby Joe Grooves tied for nineteenth over here at Waialae Country Club in Honolulu.

"Over here," by the way, don't get it done. Not when you're talking about Hawaii. The first time I came over here I didn't think much about it. I just hopped on a plane, flew to Honolulu, got off, inhaled a bottle of perfume, golfed my ball, hauled ass. Perfume is what the air in Hawaii smells like when it don't smell like suntan lotion.

Then one day I looked at Hawaii on a globe, and whoa--it ain't near nothing. There's about six thousand miles of lateral hazard on all sides of it. You're seriously off the fairway when you're over here, and I think that's one reason nobody in Hawaii knows anything about what's going on anywhere else in the world, especially in America.

Your basic Hawaiian wears shorts, sandals, and a shirt that looks like Granddad ate dinner in it six times. He'll light a torch, paddle a canoe, and grill a fish for you. And at the drop of a mai tai, he'll sing to you about a Waikiki moon, which, for my money, don't look much different than the one that comes up over Fort Worth, Texas. But he's nice and sweet-natured and wants to take you to see his fern grotto and his slippery slide and his Killykooky Canyon.