I am tired of walking the course even if it is the US Open and the scene is full of pageantry and excitement. My right knee is screaming, my forehead is badly sunburned and I have a terrible hangover from being on full throttle since arriving in town on Wednesday afternoon.
So I have planted myself in a seat by one of the TVs in the Hospitality Tent which today (Sunday) has been moved from the Lake Merced Country Club ballroom to the 18th green outside the ballroom. Because I have just finished heavily tipping all the service staff and the bartender for the fine attention to detail they have shown myself and my friends over the last five days – my drink is a triple and everyone is all smiles.
There are just a few of us here in the tent now, because it is Championship Sunday with the winner still in doubt – so most folks are on the course.
But I am tired.
In my golden years I have put on quite a bit of extra weight, wore out all the ligaments in my right knee and drink to excess at the drop of a dime. So being tired is a condition that seems to have become my default status in the afternoon.
It is what it is.
Summer 1976
Texas Prison Farm
As a newcomer you really stick out on the Hoe Squad with your gleaming white uniform and pale skin. The old hands have worn and red dirt stained uniforms that reflect the time and wear that mark their years in the field. Faces worn by the Texas sun and spirits broken by the relentless weight of “doing time”.
I am still a revolutionary in my spirit. Neither broken nor repentant, having fought the Law and lost, I resign myself to simply paying the price that the State says I owe. It is a foolish attitude that will not survive the cruelty of the coming years – but I do not know that yet.
It is water that occupies most of my thought process. In the morning we get a water break and after so long in the county jails my body is screaming for water. When the break finally comes, the old man who is too crippled to work in the fields anymore, goes to the wood wagon being pulled by the tractor and brings us the bucket. It is a single bucket with a dipper. The bucket is filled with ice cold water – the finest beverage your mind can imagine.
You drink by seniority – old hands down to the “new thangs” that have just been dropped into hell like aliens from another planet. It is an old metal dipper that stays cold itself even after your drink is finished; it tastes of decades of well water - the taste of the farm and of the closeness to the land that will soon mark your entire existence.
Create an about page James.