A relatable tale about prank-calling, bad golfing, and 1980s teenage shenanigans (Part 1)
Enough time seems to have passed to safely tell maybe the funniest true first-hand story in my possession
My suspicion is that, although the readership of this blog has begun to skew a little younger (it almost had to eventually, considering the senescence of the initial wave of masochistic sign-ups), even people in their middle thirties are at least vaguely attuned to the technological norms under which we Gen Xers labored during our teenage years in the 1980s. For example, younger Millennials who read things are probably aware that Caller ID, which is now too commonplace to even have a name, didn’t become a feature in any American homes I willingly entered until at least the late 1980s, and even then it was an add-on that only the sort of people who drove a BMW 3 Series as a second car bothered with.
At the end of 1982, either for Christmas or my thirteenth birthday, my parents gave me a gift, one to this day I find it impossible to believe they did not anticipate me and my dipshit, pimple-popping pals using in exactly the manner we immediately did. It was a combination clock radio/telephone-speakerphone/cassette player, state of the art for its time, probably made by Radio Shack. This unit could broadcast (among other events) Red Sox and Celtics games, wake me up for (among other reasons) the ass-early bus to the junior high seven miles away, and play recorded songs by (among other musicians) Fleetwood Mac, Men at Work, and The Police.
But this beautiful kludge of a machine’s most salient feature, by far, was that it could cleanly record phone calls right off the line.
Think about this, especially if you’re fifty or older. What kind of parents, no longer credibly posing as Santa, offer a newly minted teenager a means of seamlessly harassing anyone in the phone book and recording these spirited episodes of fuckery for hysterical review? It’s helpful to know that in those days, if you merely prank-called someone and didn’t threaten them or the like, that person was unlikely to invoke the long arm of Ma Bell or whoever controlled the nearest available operator to intervene. Therefore, the only practical disincentive to prank-calling people was not experiencing urges to be an annoying little fucker in the first place.
It did say on the device box that it was illegal in most states, per FCC regs, to record a conversation without informing the other party you planned to do so. But I figured that as long as what was spoken or heard didn’t qualify as any sort of genuine exchange, I could record whatever braying, crooning, and farting noises I wanted over an open line, along with any exasperated response groans and grunts, without risking any G-men showing up at the door the next day.
My best friend at the time, John, was the son of an authentic Kentuckian redneck father, a no-nonsense closet softie with around thirteen siblings back in or near Louisville and an equal number of oft-polished long guns locked in an ornate cabinet right there in his and his son’s New Hampshire living room. Neither John nor I were genuine miscreants, at least not at 13; we were both high-honor-roll students whose worst eventual act of collective juvenile malfeasance would be assembling a pipe bomb using one of my grandfather’s wind-chime remnants. a hot-glue gun, and some of John’s dad’s massive black-powder stash—I won’t say what the wick was made of—in an attempt to see if we could blow up either a long-neglected, sagging shed or the abandoned doghouse nearby.1
At some point in seventh grade, the cool generic term of address in my circle of dude-friends became “Buck.” As in, “Hey, Buck! We’re sledding behind Mike’s at 2 tomorrow!” or merely “Hey, Buck!” in the hallway between classes. Just one of a near-infinite number of harmless shibboleths adolescent boys use to maintain a sense of connection to a few important people in an ever-roiling sea of hormone-contorted faces. Who knows where it came from? Buck Rogers, maybe? Who the fuck else was ever named Buck? Probably several of John’s faraway uncles, or aunts.
One winter day, not long after I had explored and perfected the more diabolical capabilities of my new device, either John or I decided after trading too many after-school “Hey, Bucks” that it would be a good idea to haul out a Concord phone book and offer a version of this greeting to someone who actually deserved it, if possible. Much to our mutual surprise and delight, there was actually someone surnamed Buck (there was no point, obviously, in hunting at random for that first name). We decided to add sparkle to this gentleman’s afternoon by serving up a uniquely enthusiastic and personalized surprise telephone salutation.
After solemnly finalizing our strategy, we dialed Mr. Buck’s number and made sure the RECORD and speakerphone functions were both operative. When we heard “Hello?” (this much we expected), we said, “Hey, Buck!” in preening, drawn-out unison.
“This is Mr. Buck,” a friendly voice advised back. John and I, having expected an instant hang-up and already with nothing left in our bag of stupid tricks, just kept interjecting “Hey, Buck!” every few seconds, expecting a “click,” only to hear a few polite “This is [first name} Buck—how can I help you?” replies right back. After realizing ten or so seconds deep, and for at least the eighth time in as many days, what idiots we truly were, we hung up on ourselves, ashamed, before starting to hunt in the phone book seconds later for a different funny name whose owner we could target for momentary abuse.
It is important to note here that, while The Simpsons was still six-plus years into the future, had 1983 pop culture contained a Ned Flanders-type figure, the voice of Mr. Buck, whatever he looked like, would have immediately summoned that Neddish figure to mind. You’ll see why this is important, vitally so in context, soon enough.
Anyway, John and I stopped doing that kind of thing erelong, and progressed in our junior-high and high-school lives without any serious incidents anyone knew about. At some point, we and other members of our frolicking band of Ray-Ban-sporting scrawnies decided we needed to take up golfing.
There was a municipal course within bike-riding distance of John’s and my end of Concord, with $5 greens fees for those under 18, and we would occasionally pedal sedately the three miles or so to Beaver Meadow, each trailing beater golf-bags on wheels holding patchwork collections of clubs we had amassed from God knows where. John played baseball and shot at deer, and by high school I was trying out running, so golf for us was just one more way to fritter away an afternoon or early evening. We sneaked on to the course almost as often as we paid the $5 junior fee, starting somewhere into the back nine, often in mid-fairway, even mid-stroke. We would intentionally head over on drizzly days just to have the place practically to ourselves. And so on.2
One pleasant weekend day in the fall of 1986—I think; it may have been the spring, but I believe it was during my junior cross-country season, when I was listening to a great deal of Dire Straits and Peter Gabriel—John and I, perhaps no longer besties but damned close, headed over to Beaver Meadow to find the place packed—with adults. This meant that we would be paired with a twosome of overage strangers, a scenario that, while not unprecedented in our excursions onto the links, was at the low end of the desirability spectrum. Being matched with even a couple of laid-back dudes in their twenties with no skill or regard for golf etiquette would have dampened, by fiat, our experience. It wasn’t so much that we needed or even planned to swear, dip Copenhagen, make fun of duffers on adjacent fairways, or swap aspirational sex stories; it’s that we strongly desired the option to do any or all of these things. You know how it was, I hope.
On this day, John and I were 16; though not really an ounce more “mature” then we’d been in our prank-calling days, that brand of disruption was by then relegated to seemingly distant memory. I had advanced to using my clock-radio-like, G. Gordon Liddy-certified instrument to record phone calls with girls of interest, which I would then play back for selected friends in order to determine exactly where the girl had gone off the rails in conversations that failed to end satisfactorily. At that stage of my life, I was focused on sports (mine and Boston’s), the opposite sex, getting good grades, and running exhaustive four-team simulated cross-country seasons on a PC Junior, like a typical kid. Like most people approaching their later teenage years, I saw no value in thinking too hard about the introductory ones, when most girls had seemed taller than a typical NBA center.
As we strode onto the first tee at the required time, both in jeans, T-shirts, and river-worn sneakers, the couple we’d been assigned to golf with, a man and a woman in their mid-forties, identified and approached us with cheerful, matching smiles. “Looks like we’re in a foursome today!” the man said (or something very close; few of these quotes are exact unless by accident). He was wearing the uniform of someone who was serious about the rules and tradition of golf while probably being a relatively inexperienced player: A light-colored sweater vest over a polo-style shirt, clean slacks, real golf spikes. All too clean. His apparent wife was wearing the female version of this outfit, complete with a blindingly white visor.
The man stuck out his hand—first to John, I remember this clearly, and then to me. As we shook mitts all around, the man said, in the clipped voice and brisk cadence of a Simpsons character that was still three years away, “I’m ___ Buck, and this is my wife ___. We’re sure pleased to meet ya!” (Again: Probably not exact, but very close.)
I will never know what my face looked like in the seconds afterward, but I suspect it resembled John’s. He was suddenly wearing the expression of a man who has unknowingly bitten into a piece of bitter baking chocolate and is desperately trying to pretend it is the most deliciously sweet and deluxe confection he has ever tasted. At the sound of the man’s name, he had involuntarily shot his suddenly very wide-eyed gaze sidelong in my direction, just as I had surely pierced the two feet of space between us with a similarly dumbfounded swivel-headed gawp. Luckily, either the Bucks weren’t looking at us closely, or we didn’t actually appear any more addled than we had in the moments before this reveal—or would in the two-plus bizarre hours afterward.
I can’t remember who teed off first that day, or what kind of decision-making process led to the choice of victims. Today, all I remember thinking as John and I stood on the tee in the wake of returning the Bucks’ introductions is I guess Concord really is kind of small. (The population of my hometown in those days was about 33,000.)
So far, this is not an especially funny story. It’s just an example of a mildly ironic coincidence, amusing only in its forcing a couple of miscreants to privately recall a shared burst of years-old innocuous stupidity. But the subsequent half-round of golf our foursome went on to perpetrate would have served as the foundation for an entertaining tale even without this context. I’ve had some practice telling the whole thing out loud, and I’ve been assured it’s worth putting out there. So if the next part falls flat, that’s my failing, not the story’s.
That plan was hatched well after seventh grade and, I should put forward now for the record, resulted in no negative consequences to anything living.
I shot under a 50 for nine holes, sans mulligans, but once in my younger life, usually getting to the greens in regulation and then spastically nudging the ball into the cup in an additional three or four jabs that became increasingly less stroke-like. I was usually unbothered by this glaring hole in my short game, although I remember launching a few drives off the fifth tee in precisely the wrong direction on purpose, high mean slices over the old folks’ homes on Second Street, after stretches of particularly trying play. We occasionally met classmates with flasks stowed in their golf bags and stumbling around half-drunk in sand traps, which would add levity, intrigue, and occasionally alcohol to the day and diminish the sting of a series of octuple-bogeys.