Dan R——(no last name, please, though it’s thirty-nine years later) showed one immodesty. He had a charming, actorish way of planting knuckled fists onto his hips. He had this lovely way of letting his well-made head fall back as he laughed. He laughed often and—if the things he said were the things that, at church, on fairways, they all said then—Dan said them in so ripened a baritone, and with such banal complete conviction, it made him seem even more a man.

Originality has never been required for admission to a country club. Originality would soon lose this guy his membership.

My dad was himself a chopper and clown on the links. His own ambitions for his game made him far less good at it. Dan R——played golf to relax. Golf worked my father’s every nerve. “That darn Dan,” Pop shook his head. “Guy consistently shoots in the low seventies.” My father watched the younger man’s natural swing; Dad’s groans sounded close to lust, not the simpler vice of envy.

“I swear, Dan. I keep telling the pro—person can’t learn it. Guy either gots it or he don’t, and—Dan?—you’re loaded with factory options, damnit. Maybe bottle it? For us mortals, pal? Sell me a six-pack at cost, what say?”

“Well, thanks, Richard. I do really usually try hard, I do. And sometimes, I admit, I’ll get m’balls to set down at least near where I wanted ’em.”

Be careful what you wish for, Dan R——.

If this were fiction and not the blunt, hyperpictorial, and unlikely truth, I would assign “the Dan character” some personal peculiarities. These would separate him from his leggy, same-ish junior partners’ crowd. Maybe I’d make him a bit accident-prone? or give him some slight endearing limp, a major stammer. Fact is, he was too able-bodied.

He was plain and good, and as visible everywhere as Wonder Bread was then. “Builds Young Bodies Twelve Ways.” (I felt built by every vitamin Dan’s company and little gifts provided me.)

From my tree house, through fieldglasses, I stared down on a Dan foreshortened. His beer-loving pals had already begun the tragic waist-high unraveling that gets most guys. From my perch, they looked like stacks of pebbles, largest on the bottom and the smallest, pinkest, right on top. Dan’s build still reversed this.

From overhead, his brown locks and foursquare shoulders eclipsed narrow hips. Just shoe tips showed. I’d memorized the hair cocooning his ridged forearms. Back when I put my fishhook in poor Dan, I touched arm fuzz growing haywire, all directions. Hair sprouted every color, blond, brunette, and Lucy-red—mixed, like the pelt of our brindled boxer dog.

I’d never seen Dan shower at the club; I didn’t dare, but liked knowing I could’ve. I feared he would be burred across with many-colored patches. The taut chest and high butt—speckled, furred thanks to helpless handicapping manliness. Strange, that his perfection almost made you pity him.