My Caddyshack Summer

At the beginning of one particular Summer in the early 1990’s, I discovered that I had a serious problem.

I still had one year left at an expensive private University in the Northeast and as I looked at my bank account, a dwindling mix of low-interest loans and high-interest Reagan-era T-bills given to me by my Italian Grandmother, I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it.

I needed something that paid better than the standard fast food franchise summer gig, and I needed it fast.

That was when my best friend Ted (not his real name) called me with a solution. He thought he could get me hired on at the private Country Club where he’d been working since the Summer began, and for better wages than I was likely to find anywhere else.

Well, I had seen CADDYSHACK about a hundred times by then and I figured that spending the summer like Danny Noonan, walking behind old rich guys pretending not to notice when they kicked their ball to a better lie, was a pretty good way to make six bucks an hour. I even thought there was a small chance I’d meet a rich young heiress with a suggestive name and questionable morals who was fundamentally opposed to the concept of clothing.

I said “yes” with real enthusiasm.

I showed up on Monday morning at 4:00 AM and was assigned to the Greenskeeping Crew. As it turned out they were looking for Carl Spackler, not Danny Noonan.

When I started at Creekwood Golf and Country Club (also not a real name) in the Virginia horse country, I had always believed that CADDYSHACK was a movie about the “Haves” versus the “Have-Nots”, because that’s how they sold it… but after a Summer in the literal trenches of an actual Country Club golf course, I realized something. CADDYSHACK, like our own current National political divide, isn’t about income, religion, sex or even race…

It’s about class.

After all, Al Czervik (Rodney Dangerfield) is the richest, most successful character in the movie… and he’s certainly the most hard-working. But Judge Smails (Ted Knight) would sooner change the name of his sloop from “The Flying Wasp” to “The Haganah” than offer Al Czervik membership in Bushwood Country Club.

Al Czervik was the Donald Trump of his time… blue collar, vulgar, and absolutely hilarious. He wasn’t a member of Judge Smails’ ruling class Elites and never would be, no matter how rich he got or how much ass he kissed (and like Al Czervik, Trump kissed precisely zero asses). Donald Trump made it all the way to the White House and even that wasn’t enough to square him with the Elites… arguably, it made things worse.

It has always been that divide, between class memberships rather than bank accounts, that really put the sting in CADDYSHACK’s jokes.

And it turned out that all of the working-class characters from CADDYSHACK were well-represented on our Greenskeeping crew that Summer.

If there was a Danny Noonan at Creekwood, it was my boss, Greg (also not his real name, in case you hadn’t noticed the pattern yet). Greg was neither the best boss I’ve ever had, nor the worst. He yelled a lot and called us names as a substitute for motivational speeches, but he mostly treated us fairly and quickly moved us up the ladder to better jobs the minute we showed mastery of the terrible ones.

The worst job on the course, to which I was assigned on Day One, was “weed-eating the creek.” The Creek was a hundred yards of water that ran along a deep depression in the center of the course. On either side of the creek was six feet of swampy ground full of snakes, frogs and totemic piles of goose shit. Every few minutes my gas-powered weed eater would hit a frog which would explode with a meaty thwack, covering me in slime and gore. The shower of goose shit was almost a constant. And after a few hours weed eating the creek, I would return to the shop looking like The Swamp Thing after a particularly rough day. On “creek days”, I quickly learned not to wear any clothing I might ever want to wear again.

It was clear to me from the first day on the job that Greg imagined himself on the 18th Tee rather than ordering around the guys who mowed it. And honestly, who could blame him… we were a pain in the ass, we dressed like slobs and we had no idea what made a Martini “dirty.”

Unlike the shiftless Carl Spackler, Greg had an expensive degree just like the one I was pursuing, and he knew a lot more about keeping a golf course running than just Manganese and chinch bugs. The first time you met him, you knew that he had a six-month plan to move up in the class hierarchy at Creekwood, rather than something more like Carl’s ambiguous six-year plan to spend his days cannonballing box wine and smoking joints the size of walking canes.

The angriest Greg ever got with me was the day I dared to sit down for a minute after several hours of digging wet sand out of the sand traps in the wake of a big thunderstorm. I made the mistake of picking a resting spot right outside the big picture windows of the Country Club bar where all of the wealthy Blue Bloods could see what I was doing. He wasn’t wrong, but I suspect Greg would not have been as mad if I’d done it way out on the sixth green where there were fewer witnesses.

My real sin was that I’d embarrassed him in front of the members.

If Greg was our Danny Noonan, the guy desperate to climb out of the working classes and into the Elites, then his second-in-command, “Hank”, was our Lou. Hank had a degree too, but it was from an inexpensive State School, and it wasn’t clear to me that ladder climbing at Creekwood was his goal. He treated the job like a fun diversion and seemed happy with his place in the Creekwood hierarchy, much like Brian Doyle-Murray’s longtime Caddyshack manager from the movie.

Hank was a good-old-boy Southern shit-kicker who was more comfortable hanging out with us in the shop than in the clubhouse. And he had none of Greg’s upper middle-class white-collar pseudo-perfectionism. At one point during the summer, Greg asked Hank to put some chemicals into the pond to knock back the summer algae bloom, and Hank overdid it. A few hours later everything that had been living in the pond was floating dead on the surface, including a huge white goose. Ted and I were assigned to Goose disposal duty… we fished it out and threw it deep into the woods.

One Saturday a huge storm rolled through Virginia and a tornado touched down on the golf course, knocking down more than a hundred old-growth trees. We were all called in to work on a rare Sunday to try and get the course cleared again for play to resume on Monday. Hank hooked up a tractor to a terrifying diesel tree shredder that looked like something out of a Stephen King story. He turned it on, thick blue smoke coughed out of the exhaust pipe, and the steel drum blade began to spin ominously. Hank looked at me and winked… “If she gets ahold of ya, don’t fight it, better to just let ‘er pull ya in”, he said.

We had “Lifers” like Carl Spackler on our crew, too. “Wyatt” was one. He was probably in his late 30’s but looked 50. He was a hard-drinker and if you were unlucky enough to get stuck on some job or another with him, he’d spend the entire day telling you stories about blowing his paycheck in the local dive bars and going home to his trailer with the last desperate woman still in the bar at closing time. When I was back at school and feeling unmotivated, it was Wyatt’s relentlessly depressing stories that got me up and out the door.

I once came back into the shop after finishing up an assignment and saw a black Government Issue Sedan parked in the employee lot. A couple of squared-away guys with motivational haircuts who could only have been undercover cops were escorting Wyatt over to the car. They opened the door, helpfully pushed his head down into the vehicle, and climbed in after him.

Turns out there was a serial horse rapist operating in the area that summer and, according to Hank, someone had fingered Wyatt as a potential suspect. He was probably joking… probably. Later that afternoon, I saw Wyatt back on his mower as if nothing had happened. The Cops were gone.

Wyatt, it turned out, was not their man.

We had several immigrants on our crew as well. Marcos and Carlos were from Central America, though I was never sure exactly which county. They spoke almost no English and tried to avoid long draw-out conversations under the theory, probably correct, that such conversations would be awkward and unproductive. This was particularly easy to do given that most of the machinery we worked with was loud and made conversation impossible anyway.

Marcos once had a sand trap machine the size of a small tractor break down on him just as a PGA tour event was starting. The PGA officials ruled that the tractor had to sit in the sand trap for the entire round… in the interests of fairness, of course. Every time we heard a golf ball plonk off its metal housing, Greg cursed loudly and the rest of us giggled like idiots.

Marcos and Carlos were two of the hardest working guys I’ve ever met and it seemed like there was nothing that could dampen their ability to make the best of things. The day of the infamous Goose poisoning, Carlos tracked me down. “Where you put goose?” he asked me, in the longest string of English words I’d ever heard him speak. I walked him over to the scene of the crime. For the next week, we watched slackjawed, as Marcos and Carlos ate greasy fried goose sandwiches for lunch, and wondered if we might not be looking at the plaintiffs in the next great civil judgment against Monsanto.

Our head mechanic was an Indian immigrant who sang along with the country music he played at top volume all day long in his shop. His enthusiasm was infectious and the contrast between the accents of the Country Western singers and his own heavy Indian accent was endlessly amusing to a dumb teenager like me. He could also curse as loudly and creatively as any Marine I’ve ever met. He would drive the three-wheeled work vehicles we used across the golf course at speeds that seemed suicidal, weed eaters and shovels bouncing around in the back like dying fish landed on a dock. I figured he must know what he was doing… and if he didn’t, well, he was the mechanic.

At Creekwood, our crew looked and acted like America… the only country on Earth where you can be whatever you want to be and where class is only temporary, if you’re willing to work hard enough to change it.

Just like America, the Creekwood Greenskeeping crew were a mix of different races, different intellects, different motivations, different skill sets and different levels of ambition. You were either happy with your station in life like Carl Spackler and Lou, or you were looking to move up like Danny Noonan and Al Czervik. Barriers to upward mobility appeared in your way and you either turned back, or you pressed forward, looking for a way over, around or through.

If it seems strange in the era of the 1619 Project, #MeToo, Ibram X Kendi, Robin D’Angelo, Nikole Hannah Jones, Lia Thomas and Joy Ann Reid to argue that what divides modern America is not immutable human characteristics like race or sex, but class… it’s really not, and I’m hardly the first person to make the argument.

Love him or hate him, the election of Donald Trump (aka Al Czervik) was the frustrated cry of a forgotten Middle and Working Class angered into action by a Government concerned only with the needs of the corporate wealthy and the subsidized ultra-poor. In their fear of Trump, which presented as fury, the Credentialed Elite Class latched onto the idea that Trump must be a racist… or a Russian mole… or the product of Fake News or whatever it took to deny what was really happening, which was a great realignment of the Right, Left and Center into something new and scary. Something that was (and is) an existential threat to those who profit most from the Status Quo.

And it’s not just politics… all of our national crises are defined primarily by class. The COVID “Emergency” split America into a laptop overclass with boutique concerns like Climate Change, Transgenderism and the proper use of pronouns, who were not inconvenienced by Government’s lockdown over-reaction at all… and a vast underclass of “essential workers” with more practical concerns like how do I afford food, or gas for my car? and what do I do with my kids during the day if schools are closed? The lives of the people in this second group were turned completely upside down by the Government’s Pandemic response and, in many cases, utterly destroyed by it.

During a staff meeting on Zoom about six months into the pandemic, one of my colleagues bragged that she had not been outside her condo in four months. Another colleague asked “how are you getting food?” She puffed out her chest and replied proudly “I have everything delivered.” After the exchange I quietly texted a friend who was also on the Zoom and said “bragging that you pay poor people to bring you stuff so that you can stay “safe” is a really weird flex.” But now I wonder if I was right about that… maybe it was the perfect flex… after all, isn’t that the way the upper classes have always thought about the lower classes?

Similarly, the debate over whether or not American forces should engage with Russian forces in Ukraine breaks down along a bright line between upper class twits who are gung-ho and itching for a fight they would not have to prosecute personally, and the working class Joe’s who would be inside any boots we might put on the ground. Look at the polling data and notice how support for war with Russia rises right alongside household income… what you have there, are the building blocks of a long and bitter Class War.

As this war continues to quietly escalate, like that coal fire that has been stealthily raging beneath a Pennsylvania mining town for fifty years, American polticians will continue their attempts to obscure the true nature of our modern American divisions. They want you to believe that it’s about the Rich versus the Poor because that version is easy to understand, simple to market, it’s great for fundraising, and it allows them to pretend that they’re on your side. The minute the conflict becomes openly one of Class, is the moment where AOC, with her Capitol Hill condo, $80,000 Tesla, $200,000 annual salary and priviledges like free tickets to “exclusive” Anna Wintour events, joins the ranks of “the Enemy”… and no one in any position of power wants that.

Eventually my Caddyshack Summer ended and I traded those nintey-five degree days full of humidity, blisters and diesel smoke for classrooms with gorgeous Northeastern Co-Eds and perfectly moderated temeratures, for the last time. At some point in that final year of college, I did sit down and watch CADDYSHACK again… and again… and again. And while it’s still one of the funniest movies ever made, it has never seemed like quite the same movie to me as it was before that long hot summer at Creekwood… where I first began to realize that what the Elites fear more than losing their money, is losing their status.