She secured her summer job at the local five-star golf resort during a period of wreckless personal abandon. The things she would only say yes to included shots of Wild Turkey, narcotics, one-night stands, pornography, drunk driving, self-pity, cigarettes, and parties hosted by Eastern European amusement park employees. She only applied for the job because the golf resort was owned by the Anheuser-Busch company and she’d heard that once a month every resort employee received a free case of Bud or Bud Light.
She was hired to drive the perimeter of the 18-hole golf course from 8am until sundown in a tricked-out golf cart with coolers on the side that she’d fill every morning with snacks and cold beer. It was a dream job. Most of her time was spent parked at the top of manicured green hills, waiting for businesspeople to tee off. The rest of her time was spent circling the course at high speeds, hoping that she wouldn’t get hit by an errant ball. If a businessperson felt desirous of her refreshments, he would flag her down, and she would pull up alongside whatever corporate retreat collective he belonged to and sell him Buds and turkey sandwiches wrapped in plastic.
Though overnight guests tended to have charge accounts with the resort, it was mostly a cash business. She quickly realized that Misters Anheuser and Busch weren’t trying to profit from her golf cart—they merely wanted to provide their clientele with a convenient service—so she provided the convenient service and then skimmed off the top accordingly. She would have gotten rich that summer had it not been for the Wild Turkey and narcotics.
But this lucrative era of driving a golf cart around a landscape radiant with sunlight and Round-Up had its dark and weedy side as well. She soon discovered that the high-calorie snack food she was charged with transporting in her felonious gyre was actually quite tasty. And not only was it tasty, but for minutes at a time it could quell her raging hangovers and self-hatred. And the food was right there, within arm’s reach, in her mobile 7-11, at all hours during her shift. And if the food ran out, she could just drive back to the kitchen for more, because no one was overseeing her inventory.
Foods she could only say yes to: hotdogs, ham and cheese sandwiches, oversized chocolate chip cookies, relish packets, 3 Musketeers Bars, Snickers Bars, fruit snacks, granola bars, Cheetos. The binging would start at 8 in the morning and not end until she plugged in her cart. It was a nightmare. She just could not keep her hands off the hotdogs. If she had been leading a wagon train on the Oregon Trail, she wouldn’t have made it five miles without devouring all the supplies. Her whole family would have starved to death or eaten her younger siblings. She felt miserably ashamed of herself, but the only thing that made her feel better was a pork product washed down with Gatorade and Skittles. Sometimes she pulled off into the woods just so she could smoke, cry, and eat potato chips at the same time.
She soon outgrew her work uniform. Not only was she sweating through her Cintas-issued khaki mom shorts every afternoon thanks to a malodorous physical cocktail of alcohol withdrawal, social anxiety, and her immune system’s infuriated response to all the nitrites, but her gut had burst open her zipper as well. The old white men on the course stopped flirting with her. The cute boys in the kitchen no longer hustled to replenish her sandwiches. She found out that the resort’s other two beer wenches—both slim and pretty blondes with the ability to say no to things—had been wing-womaning each other at the bars after work without extending her an invitation. Her tongue and the corners of her mouth were stained orange with processed cheese. In the cart she felt like one of those morbidly obese people who had to get around on motorized scooters. It was only a matter of time before she got fired.
But against all odds she did not get fired. She just stopped showing up for work long enough that some distant supervisor decided that she’d quit. She didn’t even collect her final case of free beer because she was so mortified that she’d finally been broken, not by hard drugs or two-day blackouts, but by mundane American gluttony. She could no longer pretend that her depression was continental and poetic when it involved six tons of Doritos. She was just a fat girl on a golf course—less like a tormented Woolf or Plath and more like a pouty Trump. She didn’t get out of bed for several weeks. When she finally did, it was to say no to something: the suicide spiral, which in her mind looked a lot like those circuits around the green.
*This has been a paid advertisement for Anheuser-Busch.