Spivey Stops Smoking

The young man at the patio bar had loosened his tie and was masticating a pellet of Nicorette with the dour, bitter determination of one who would prefer to be doing anything else. He had the hollow, haggard look of the recently deprived — the look of one who has given up something essential to his functioning and is discovering, hour by hour, that functioning without it is not so much difficult as impossible.

“Three weeks,” he said, thinking out loud. “Three weeks without a cigarette. My wife says I’m a different person. She’s right. I’m a far worse one.”

The Oldest Member, who had been observing this spectacle from his customary chair with the face of a theater critic who has seen this specific tragedy staged many times and knows how it ends, set down his gin and tonic.

“Quitting smoking,” he said, “is a noble endeavor. I commend you. But I must tell you that the path you tread has been covered before, and the most memorable of these journeys in my acquaintance was undertaken by a man named Lester Spivey, whose attempt to quit smoking was noble in intention and disastrous in every other respect.”

The man stopped chewing. There is something about the promise of another man’s downfall that is deeply restorative to a man in the grip of his own, and he leaned forward in his chair.

“Let me tell you about Lester, and Bernie Sasso,” said The Oldest Member, who was decidedly unhelpful to the endeavor.”

Every club (said The Oldest Member) makes the mistake of admitting the wrong person. The application is reviewed, the references are checked, the candidate is interviewed over lunch, and the membership committee, having performed its due diligence with the ponderous gravity of a papal conclave, votes to admit a man who turns out to be, upon closer and prolonged acquaintance, an absolute menace. La Cucaracha’s mistake was Lester Spivey.

Spivey was a cosmetic dentist who had built a thriving practice on the principle that every patient harbored an imperfection that only Spivey could see and only Spivey could fix. He could examine a perfectly adequate smile and discover an urgent need for veneers, tooth reshaping, and gum contouring that the patient had never contemplated until Spivey pointed them out, at which point the patient could think of nothing else.

Spivey had gotten into the club because his father had been a member, because nobody on the committee had known him personally, and because the sins of the son do not always manifest until the son has been admitted, at which point it becomes clear that the father had nothing to do with it and the sins are altogether the son’s own. By the time the committee understood what it had admitted, it was too late. Spivey was in, and getting him out would require a level of collective courage that the board of La Cucaracha had never, in its long and largely ceremonial history, demonstrated.

Where to begin with Spivey? He played Swedish technopop from his golf cart at a volume that made conversation impossible within fifty yards, that prompted his own playing partners to ride in a separate cart, and the group ahead to request a ruling from the head professional on whether noise pollution constituted a “dangerous animal condition” under Rule 16.2. He had once brought guests onto the course while the entire club was closed, tossing aside the traffic cones to park in the head professional’s reserved spot. During a tournament he had once parked his cart directly over an opponent’s ball to prevent the opponent from finding it, a maneuver so brazen that the tournament chairman, upon being informed, snapped a pencil in half without realizing he was holding one. The most charitable explanation for this behavior was the rumor that he had been dropped on his head as a child, but this was unsubstantiated.

This behavior had earned him periodic warnings from the board, but warnings had generated in him no discernible change of behavior, in the same way that asking a volcano to please stop erupting produces no discernible change in the volcano. The board discussed suspension and expulsion at regular intervals and never acted. Spivey remained.

Spivey also carried what is known in golf as a vanity handicap — that is, he posted scores lower than he actually achieved, so that his official handicap portrayed a golfer of far greater ability than the one who actually showed up. This meant that in any competition against men with honest or “sandbagger” handicaps, Spivey was hopelessly outmatched. He lost every bet. He lost every Nassau. He lost every press. And yet he persisted, because to post his real scores would be to admit that he was the golfer he was, and this was an admission that Spivey’s pride could not permit. He would rather lose the bet than lose the fiction.

He also let everyone know how much money he had. Not in specific terms — Spivey was not so crude as to name a figure — but in semi-specific terms that left no doubt. His watch was ‘the same one they gave the astronauts, except mine has diamonds.’ His wine collection included ‘bottles worth more than your car,’ a remark he had directed at Chip Wetherbee, who drove a Porsche. Wetherbee laughed quietly to himself and said nothing. His house had ‘doubled in value since I bought it,’ which was technically true and which Spivey delivered as if announcing a cure for cancer, though he neglected to mention that he had bought it twenty years ago and that every other house in the neighborhood had tripled. Hugh Cavanaugh, a real estate developer who was sitting two tables away, snorted into his drink.

Into this landscape of unrelenting obnoxiousness, we must now introduce Bernie Sasso.

Sasso was a television comedy writer — a man who had spent thirty years in writers’ rooms in Los Angeles, constructing jokes for other people to deliver, and who had landed with his timing impeccable, his connections far-reaching, and his ability to get a pilot produced with a single telephone call intact. He was a mediocre golfer — a seventeen handicap on his best days, which were not frequent — but he was not at La Cucaracha so much for the golf as for the material. Every member of the club was, to Bernie Sasso, a character in a show that had not yet been written, and he studied them with the attentive, slightly predatory eye of a writer who knows that the funniest things in life are the things people do when they think no one is constructing a bit around them.

Sasso’s great gift was the nickname. He had one for every member, and each was so precisely calibrated to its target that it stuck on contact and could never be removed. He had dubbed Preston Klemperer, who had invented the bar code scanner and was currently awaiting sentencing for insider trading, “the Klemptomaniac,” and The Admiral — a man of high dignity and self-regard — “the Corporal.” He delivered these gems with the easy, unmalicious timing of a stand-up comic who frankly cannot help himself, everyone had laughed, and The Admiral had not spoken to him for six days.

Everyone loved Bernie Sasso. This was the maddening thing. He was impossible to dislike, because the jokes were never cruel — they were accurate, and accuracy, delivered with good timing and no malice, is the one form of mockery that even the target inevitably forgives. Everyone forgave Sasso, even The Admiral. Everyone except Spivey, who had no sense of humor about himself and who regarded Sasso with the wary, smoldering hostility of a target who knows he is being watched and knows that whatever is done or said will be reported in the most damaging possible light.

They did not play together. Spivey would not have survived it. But they sat at the same patio bar every Saturday afternoon. Spivey occupied a table on the outer edge of the patio, in the section reserved for smokers, where he sat with his phone, his drink, his Marlboros, and the dark, foul energy of a man who is trying very hard not to engage with the commentary drifting over from the non-smoking section and losing that battle by the minute. It was a long-running production conducted across thirty feet of flagstone, and every member of the club knew it, and most of them arranged their Saturday afternoons so as not to miss it.

It was into this local drama that Spivey, on a Saturday in early March, arrived at the patio bar without a cigarette. Without a cigarette, there was no reason to sit in the smoking section, and so Spivey moved inside — barely, just past the threshold — which put him within closer earshot of Sasso, a development that benefited neither man but that Sasso, at least, found stimulating.

The first Saturday, Spivey chewed nicotine gum. He chewed it with the dull, bovine rhythm of a Holstein that has never once been accused of enjoying itself. He chewed through one piece, then two, then six. By the end of the afternoon he had consumed an entire 24-pack, and his jaw had the clenched, overdeveloped look of a gorilla that has been chewing gravel. Sasso, seated at his table with Chip Wetherbee and The Admiral, watched this for some twenty minutes and then remarked, to no one in particular, that Spivey resembled an aggrieved wildebeest working through its afternoon sawgrass. The Admiral, of all people, laughed. Spivey’s jaw clenched harder.

The second Saturday, Spivey appeared with toothpicks. He went through them at a rate of one every four minutes, snapping each in half when it had served its purpose and depositing the remains on the table in a small, growing pile that resembled the aftermath of a very tiny logging operation. Sasso watched this for a full twenty minutes and then remarked, again to no one in particular, that Spivey appeared to be eating a fence one board at a time. Wetherbee covered his mouth. Don Pengerson didn’t bother. Spivey’s neck reddened.

The third Saturday brought sunflower seeds. Spivey shelled them with the frantic, compulsive energy of a hamster that has been issued a wheel and takes the responsibility seriously. The debris field was widespread. Shells accumulated on the table, on his lap, on the flagstone beneath his chair, and, through some aerodynamic phenomenon that defied explanation, on the shoes of a member seated at the next table, who happened to be Pengerson. Pengerson examined his shoes, examined Spivey, and moved to the opposite side of the bar without a word. Sasso suggested, in the mild, conversational tone he reserved for remarks intended to travel, that Spivey had become a parrot without the gift of speech. A member at the adjacent table, who had been drinking a Red Bull Vodka at the moment of delivery, snorted it out his nose. Spivey glared at Sasso, swept the shells off the table with his forearm, and said nothing.

The fourth Saturday, Spivey arrived with a Tootsie Pop. Grape. A grown man with a Tootsie Pop at the patio bar of La Cucaracha Country Club. He sat with his drink in one hand and a Tootsie Pop in the other, alternating between them with the distracted indecision of a Labrador that cannot decide between two tennis balls. Sasso stared at him for a full minute without speaking. Then he turned to Wetherbee and said, almost quietly, “Kojak.” Spivey was, it should be noted, balding — a detail that elevated the nickname from merely apt to withering. The name traveled the length of the patio bar in under thirty seconds and was in general circulation by sundown. Spivey was Kojak for the rest of the month. He did not enjoy it.

The fifth Saturday introduced the unlit cigar. Spivey sat with a large, unlit cigar snapped between his teeth, which fooled nobody and satisfied nothing. He looked, in short, exactly like what he was: a cosmetic dentist with an unlit cigar. He should have known better. Sasso opined, with the mild, reflective affectation of an academic recalling something he had read, that Freud once said sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but that this was not one of those times. Tony Romanesco, who was sitting with Sasso that afternoon, laughed so hard that he knocked over his drink. Spivey removed the cigar from his mouth, having just been forced to agree with Freud, and put it in his pocket.

The sixth Saturday was the vape.

Spivey had acquired an electronic vaping device, which the membership might have tolerated under different circumstances. The vape required him to sit outside again, which he did, reclaiming his old table in the smoking section with the relief of a traveler coming home from a business trip. The flavor was mango coconut.

He raised the device to his lips and exhaled a cloud of vapor so vast and so dense that it drifted from the patio into the bar like a weather system making landfall, engulfing Sasso’s table, obscuring The Admiral, and attaching itself to the clothing of every member present. The bar smelled like a smoothie shop in a steam room.

Pengerson, who had drifted back within range after the sunflower seed incident, stood up immediately and went inside. The Admiral retreated to the men’s grill with the dignified haste of a bishop for whom running is not an option. Buster Cauldwell noted that the smell was comparable to Butch, just less earthy, which, coming from Buster, was not the compliment it might have appeared. Hugh Cavanaugh, the real estate developer, waved the cloud away from his face — he had rarely encountered a problem he couldn’t bulldoze and was not adjusting well to this one.

Sasso said nothing. He picked up his drink, moved to the opposite end of the patio bar, and sat down next to Spivey.

“Spivey,” he said, “if you gas us with that thing again, I’m going to write a pilot about you, and I’m going to sell it, and you’re going to be played by the guy who plays George on Seinfeld, and your mother is going to love it and recommend it to the Ladies Bridge Club and the entire foundation board.”

Spivey put the vape away. He did not use it at the patio bar again. But the damage had been done.

What Spivey had not yet discovered — and what everyone else at La Cucaracha knew with the merry, conspiratorial certainty of people who are enjoying themselves at someone else’s expense — was that a Calcutta had been organized, not as to whether Spivey would resume smoking, but when. Don Pengerson, who ran the Calcutta with the quiet assurance of a bookie who has been setting the odds successfully his entire life, had established the terms. The minimum bet for each day was the price of a new Scotty Cameron putter. The pot at the end of the auction had grown to a sum that Pengerson described as “substantial” and that Preston Klemperer described as “obscene.”

Hugh Cavanaugh had taken the contrarian position, buying a date eight weeks out, because Cavanaugh always took the contrarian view and had a grudging respect for Spivey’s capacity for stubbornness. Sasso bought a date five weeks out, because Sasso could already see where this was going and had every intention of helping it get there. McClag outbid everyone for a popular date three weeks out, because McClag, who had never in his life successfully resisted an impulse, assumed that Spivey couldn’t either. Romanesco paid a low price for a date six months in the future, explaining that he was playing for the unexpected, because the unexpected was where the money was. Wetherbee bid on and won the date proposed by his wife, because Wetherbee had learned, over the course of a happy marriage, that agreeing with his wife was not capitulation but strategy.

Meanwhile, on the golf course, Spivey’s behavior had deteriorated from its baseline of dreadful to something approaching abysmal. The nicotine withdrawal had stripped away whatever thin membrane of self-restraint had previously existed between Spivey’s impulses and his actions. The Seve Cough — Spivey’s habit of coughing at the top of an opponent’s backswing — had, ironically, become a problem. Sasso had pointed out, on the first Saturday of the experiment, that without a cigarette to blame, Spivey had lost his alibi — a remark that reached the rules committee before the day was out.

Spivey, deprived of his cover, was forced to rely on the pocket jangle — the shaking of coins, keys, and seemingly a collection of small hardware, a less surgical offense than the cough — not a sudden distraction but a constant one, the auditory equivalent of a dripping tap — which he deployed with increasing frequency and no pretense of subtlety. Sasso told Spivey that the noise sounded like Spivey had a pet weasel trapped in his trousers that was now trying to escape.

The pocket jangle, deployed once too often, finally gave the board the excuse it had been looking for. Spivey was suspended for one week. Spivey served the suspension with sullen indifference, as if viewing the suspension as a cost of doing business, like parking tickets or malpractice premiums. He returned on a Saturday, took his seat inside the bar — for he had grown accustomed to sitting inside during his weeks without cigarettes, and had not yet announced any change of plans — and ordered a Grey Goose and soda. He sat with his drink and his phone and the demeanor of a subject who now understands that the reason he keeps getting invited is that he is the entertainment.

Sasso watched him from across the patio. The bar was full. Pengerson was there. So were The Admiral, Wetherbee and his wife, Cavanaugh, McClag and Romanesco. Buster Cauldwell was there, fresh from the avocado ranch and still wearing his boots. Preston Klemperer was there, pre-sentencing. It was, in short, a full house, and the full house was watching Spivey with the quiet, expectant attention of an audience that suspects the third act is about to begin.

Spivey sat in silence for almost twelve minutes. Then he reached into his “Members Only” pocket and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. He tapped one out. He placed it between his lips. He then brought forth a lighter. And he lit it, right there, inside the bar, in violation of club rules, California state law, and the lungs of every man, woman, and bartender within thirty feet.

He inhaled. He held it. He exhaled, slowly, with the deep, shuddering gratitude of a survivor on a life raft who has finally sighted land. The bartender, who had been watching like a notary public who had already prepared the paperwork and was just waiting for the signature, directed him to the smoking section.

Nobody said a word.

Pengerson grinned and reached for his phone. He had a group text to send. The Admiral looked away — Spivey had confirmed his worst expectations. Romanesco smiled. Although he had lost his bet, he did not mind, because the show was worth the price of admission.

It was Sasso who broke the silence. He raised his glass from across the patio bar, and in a voice loud enough to be heard across the bar, and gentle enough that even Spivey could not take offense, he said:

“Welcome back, Spivey. You were worse without them.”

Spivey looked at him. For a moment — and I swear this is true, for I was sitting not eight feet away — the faintest ghost of a smile crossed Spivey’s face. It was gone in an instant, replaced by the scowl, but it had been there.

Pengerson won the Calcutta. His date had been off by only two days, and under the rules he had written — for Pengerson always wrote the rules — the closest date without going over was the winner. The pot, when distributed, was large enough that Pengerson later described it, with the false modesty of a card shark who has just cleaned out a poker table, as “a nice golf vacation.”

You might suppose that this was the end of the affair. It was not. It was three weeks later that the members of the pool received subpoenas from the office of the district attorney. Spivey, who had somehow discovered the existence of the pool and all its participants, had reported the illegal gambling operation to the authorities, and the authorities, who presumably had nothing better to do, had responded. Every participant was summoned for a deposition. Every single one. Pengerson received a subpoena. Sasso received one. Wetherbee received one. McClag received one. Cavanaugh received one. The Admiral received one, and his response — a letter to the district attorney’s office on personalized Crane stationery, written in a hand that indicated a man who had learned penmanship at Annapolis and had never seen a reason to abandon it — was described by those who read it as the most erudite display of contempt ever committed to paper.

It was Tony Romanesco who saved them. Romanesco was a litigation attorney who had the special gift of making inconvenient legal documents go away, and he enjoyed doing so. He gathered the subpoenaed members in the men’s grill on a Tuesday evening, told them not to worry, and made it all go away within a week. He did this for free, because Romanesco understood that some things were more important than billable hours, and the preservation of a good gambling pool was one of them. The district attorney’s office silently dropped the matter. Preston Klemperer framed his subpoena. It hangs in his office to this day, next to his scanner patent and insider trading indictment, because Preston Klemperer is the kind of man who finds the absurdity in things and keeps it where he can see it.

The board, mistaking Spivey’s suspension as sufficient precedent, moved to expel him. Spivey, through his attorney, informed the board that he was protected under California’s whistleblower statutes, having reported illegal gambling activity to law enforcement, and that any adverse action taken against him would result in litigation of a scope and expense that would make the district attorney’s investigation look like a noise complaint. The board retreated. Spivey remained. He sat at the patio bar. He smoked. Sasso sat at the other end and watched him, and occasionally, when the light was right and the beer was cold, you could see Sasso’s lips moving, very slightly, as if he were writing something in his head.

The Oldest Member paused and took a sip of his gin and tonic.

“So you see,” he said to the man with the nicotine gum, “quitting is not the hard part. The hard part is what you and your friends become while you’re trying.”

The man considered this. He removed the nicotine gum from his mouth, examined it briefly, and placed it in the ashtray.

“I think,” he said, “I’ll have a cigarette.”

“That,” said The Oldest Member, “is the most sensible thing you’ve said all afternoon.”