Honma Golf.

Thirty-six thousand dollars. A new BMW. A year of tuition at Northwestern (You’re on your own for room and board, kids). Just about double the cost of joining a country club.

Or, enough cash to get you a set of Honma Golf clubs. The set of clubs was recently only available in Japan, where wealthy Japanese businessmen watched their gold-plated heads glimmer in the sun as they shot a round of golf. But I’ve never been there–I snapped this cell phone picture in Inwood, New York, when a member had asked me to clean them for him. It takes a particular kind of greedy New Yorker to invest in this kind of gear.

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My first recollection of him was the time when he stumbled in, plastic bag in hand, on the mulched pathway to the country club’s bag room. I had just gotten back late from caddying for another member, and had propped myself up on a fence so I could enjoy the balmy breeze and clean the clubs I’d been paid to carry. As Goldmember (as he will now be called, because of the obvious cringe-worthy pun and the need for some personification) made his way towards the Jamaican bag room attendants, he began unwrapping the bag from whatever was inside it. It was late, and the majority of the golfers had already played their day’s allowance of golf, and so Goldmember had no qualms about handing the two sixers of Red Stripe he had recently unsheathed to my co-workers.

After they stowed the beer, they fetched his bag and one of the men began lugging it to the driving range. Honma’s flamboyant-looking golf bag turned the bag room attendant into a kind of lopsided packmule; it was deliberately designed to be unfriendly to caddies, and weighed more than double what an average bag weighs. He spoke to the other bag room attendant, Ivanhoe, as he looked towards his bag, catching the sunlight as it teetered its way toward the driving range.

He talked about a rough week at the office, and spliced hollow laughter with wandering speech before he decided to go whack a few. As I sat next to Ivanhoe and watched the balls sail out towards Jamaica bay and the airport beyond it, he explained that Goldmember always wandered in drunk during the week; he was a young wall-street banker who was overworked (and in retrospect, perhaps overpaid), or so he said, and wanted to chip and putt and drive the stresses of the day into the dry grass of the driving range. Like I’d heard so many members say as they played their own golf games, he desperately wanted to escape his nagging wife and annoying kids too. The more time he spent with his Honmas the less they entered his mind. He had the life that many chase after, and a family to share it with. But here he was, swinging away and sweating out his beer, likely brown-bagged from a Penn Station newsstand on the commuter train home. Swinging for the fences, and coming up short.

Ivanhoe chugged several of the Red Stripes as he explained Goldmember to me. I’m not sure exactly why I took the picture; maybe it was the improbability that I’d ever see clubs that expensive again (or convince anyone they actually existed). Maybe it was because of the irony I found in them; the fact that a bag-room employee could easily collapse under the weight of golf clubs worth thousands more than his yearly salary. Maybe it was me searching for something upon which to fixate my mind, trying to forget missing the life I left in Chicago that freed me from the suburb I hated. Or maybe because it was because of Goldmember and the booze he brought; whether it was a Wall Street banker or a bag room employee making minimum wage, both experienced the same dreariness and monotony of the daily grind. Both enjoyed knocking back a few drinks in rapid succession before they sat back and let their cares melt away, whether in the form of driving a small, dimpled sphere hundreds of yards, or watching an unhappy man search for his own peace.