For a long time, whenever I remembered something embarrassing that I did as a child or teenager, I would make this weird noise with my mouth. I’ve tried to stop doing so, but I remember the moment I caught myself doing it, I realized there was way too many times that I was overcome with real, palpable embarrassment for something that I did a long time ago that I could in no way change. It seemed super unhealthy. Probably because of the amount of times it was actually happening. This is one of those memories.
I’m not sure what it is about the confines of a motor vehicle around us as humans, but it seems to give a lot of us the belief that we’re alone. Even though the top half of said vehicle is often covered with all-too-transparent glass or mesh (I’ll get to that last part in a bit).
I am a person that loves singing in the car. Mostly whenever I’m alone. I don’t have any illusions of me being any good at vocalizing musical lyrics, but I’m sure I was much worse before I had years of practicing in the car. The only time I ever got called out for this was during my times working the best middle school job a kid could ask for; working at a 27-hole golf course.
Pay was good, tips were great, got to drive a golf cart around all over the damn place, and there were often times where you could escape to the back 18 holes and just listen to your iPod when no one was around. Of course, this was prime time to practice my singing since I was in a moving vehicle and there was often no one around. After enough times, it just became second nature to sing along whenever the feeling was right.
The only problem was, Old Oakland was a members-only club. If you sensed my actual air quotations as you read that, you get the gist of my thoughts on the matter. Dress code enforced kind of place. Things were supposed to happen exactly how the old white men that loved their early (and late as fuck) tee times wanted it to. The afternoon that I was out picking spent golf balls off the driving range with the specially-designed golf cart was an afternoon where my singing ruined that status quo.
This memory shook loose the other day when I heard Queen’s Somebody to Love because holy hell what a jam that song is. Thanks to it being a wonderful gift from my parents, I had ripped Queen’s Greatest Hits onto my iPod and was learning about the historic vocals of Mr. Mercury. At that time, I think I had been recently dumped by my girlfriend and was feeling a bit down, Somebody to Love really hit home, so I was in prime mood to join Freddie in his pleading.
Picking a driving range free of golf balls is a monotonous task. The specialized golf cart looks like it’s a heavily armored Popemobile with baskets that line the front of a little rolling contraption. Heavily armored because of course if you’re hitting balls off the driving range, why not play a fun little carnival game of “hit the moving green dot?” Doesn’t matter that THERE’S A HUMAN BEING INSIDE OF THAT CART. It would sound like a bomb going off every time one of those drives hit that plexiglass. But, you couldn’t be quick either, because driving too fast would spin the collector rapidly and the balls would fly straight up instead of into the buckets. We were forced to make ourselves an easy target for these vicious old men.
So on this particular day, Mr. Mercury and I were signing about the lack of humans to love in this world and the picking was going well. Thinking back, I’m still not sure how I heard the radio on my belt over my singing, the racket of the golf cart, and my headphones jammed into my ears, but I did. It was my boss in the Pro Shop calling for me. I eventually answered and probably stopped picking, I can’t remember, but he wanted to inform me that I need to sing be a little quieter because some of the members had complained about my volume of wailing. I wanted to melt right into that white vinyl seat underneath me. Since I’ve already mentioned my tendency to get embarrassed about shit like this 10 years later, you can imagine how I felt in that moment. I’m pretty sure I just turned off my iPod at that moment and hoped that I wasn’t going to get fired. It was the worst.
But, like most problems that we encounter in middle school, it was not the end of the world. I don’t think anyone mentioned it ever again after that, and my brain did a pretty good job of hiding that memory deep, but silly brain didn’t estimate the power of Freddie Mercury. Sure it was embarrassing, but I ended up laughing about it instead of whatever weird response I had been conditioning myself with until that point.
The moral of this story is: don’t aim for the golf cart on the driving range. It’s a dick move.
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