Chapter 9: Day 2: 1:45
The native Hawaiians did not have a god of golf.
They had far more appropriate sports considering the environment. Surfing, swimming, canoe racing, wrestling, and javelin throwing. ‘Ulu Maika, where players rolled a disc-shaped stone called a maika as close as possible to a target, was the most akin to golf. But even so none of them had a divine patron. Except the Makahiki Games, an annual event which was a combination of many of these sports whose patron was Lono. Perhaps he would have adopted golf as his own. He was associated with a sense of abundance, contentment, and harmony. He carried a wooden staff and often dressed outrageously.
Come to think of it, Lono would have felt quite at home on the golf course or a country club.
I am amusing myself with these random thoughts at the Ritz Carlton’s driving range. It is the most gorgeous setting I have ever seen to try and hit a little round ball with a crooked stick. Lush emerald, green fairway dropping into French blue Pacific with Molokai in the distance all under a sapphire sky. Were I a golfer, I would be in heaven. But I am not. I have tried to like it many times over the years, but it has never taken. My rationalization is that I cannot justify the amount of time and money that it takes to learn a sport that even if you are an exceptional player will frustrate you and ruin your back, shoulders, and neck. The truth is my father ruined golf for me. Near our home is one of the most prestigious golf courses in the world, home to multiple US Opens, which until they were embarrassed into it, did not accept Jews, people of color and other ethnicities. Dad despised the place and the people who belonged to the club and when we drove along the course, he would wait for someone to be in the middle of their swing and honk the car’s horn.
It is far easier to blame the old man than it is to just accept the fact I have zero aptitude for the sport.
I am here because Liam has asked me to hit a couple of buckets of balls with him. He does not share my dispassion for the game. He grew up on the golf course. After my walk, I would have gladly stayed in my room, enjoying the air conditioning, and depleting the mini bar. But after blowing him off last night I wanted to spend time with him. One of the reasons I have come to Hawaii is for him. The last eighteen months have been rotten for him. He has endured far more than I ever did at his age. I have done my best to be there for him when he needed me. He has helped me maintain my sanity as well. This part of the journey should not be an exception. We will need each other to accomplish what we came here to do with a minimum of drama and hopefully find a modicum of closure.
The way I envisioned this outing was he and I would stand in adjacent t-boxes chatting and joking between swatting at the ball. Fortunately for my ego that did not happen. The range had a que when we arrived, and we were placed in stalls at opposite ends of the range. There is no doubt in my mind the display I have been putting on with my feeble attempts to hit a golf would have caused a flurry of jokes and or well-intentioned insults from him and diminished his view of his Uncle. . I try to remember all the lessons I have taken over time. Feet shoulder length apart, head down, square my shoulders and take a mighty swing. The ball rolls twenty feet before coming to a rest. My next swing is marginally better. It is a “worm burner” that skims grass tops and eventually comes to rest thirty yards away. What a stupid sport. I rush my next swing and miss the ball entirely and stumble forward awkwardly. I close my eyes and curse the Scottish man who thought this would be a fun game to teach the world.
“You know Ukrainian weightlifters have no business playing golf.”
I look up. Standing in front of me is a very tall man, maybe 6’4” with thick black hair, dense expressive eyebrows that are almost prehensile and a broad welcoming smile that makes it easy to grin right back at him. I know this man. He is Desmond Francis O’Reilly. Des to his friends and Saint Des of the Berkshires to those who loved him. He is a friend and a person to whom I owe a debt that I can never repay. Over the past few months he and I have been spent a lot of time together. In many ways, you can say he has been my spirit guide.
I respond “Are you really going to greet me with that old saw? Can’t you come up with something a little bit more original? For crying out loud we are in Hawaii.” Des’s response is a toothy grin. The joke is on me.
Saint Des has been my friend for over twenty years. I met him at a time when feeling worthless felt like a step up and hope seemed like an abstract idea you read about in books. I had been living with, and in love with a woman who checked all of my boxes: She was smart, beautiful, an accomplished travel journalist with a passion for living Our life together had been filled with adventure and fun. We skied in Whistler, ate pastries at Demel’s in Vienna, made love on beaches across the Caribbean, and we could talk about anything from geopolitics to why Pringles were not really potato chips. Our biggest challenge was we both traveled a great deal for our jobs. But we had tried to turn that into an advantage by meeting each other when we could at one of our destinations.
All was good, until it wasn’t.
I had been in Israel visiting the home office of a company I worked for. She had been in London doing a story on the city’s historic grand hotels spending a couple nights each at the Ritz, Grosvenor House, Dorchester, Claridge’s, and The Savoy. Our plan was on my way home to New York to meet up in London for the weekend, a city I knew well and loved. My work in Israel would end on Thursday (the end of the Israeli work week) and I would fly to London on Friday morning. As luck or perhaps fate would have it, my Thursday meetings were cancelled. Given the extra time I made the snap decision to fly to Heathrow and meet her a day early. It would be great. A whole extra day together in a one of the worlds’ great cities. I imagined her surprise when I came knocking on her door at the Connaught, wouldn’t she be delighted. Which is why I decided not to call, text, or email her about my early arrival.
She was surprised. Just not the way in which I had hoped. When I knocked on the door to her room, she answered it wearing a translucent black Teddy and a matching gossamer thin silk robe. I didn’t recognize either piece of lingerie. Nor did I recognize the man who was lying on the bed wearing a towel. Stunned, embarrassed and humiliated, I was speechless. Reflexively, I did an about face and stumbled my way to the elevator and stood there jabbing at the button. It took an impossibly long time to arrive. I kept expecting her to call my name. Yell out an explanation. Tell me not to go. That I had misinterpreted the situation. She did none of those things. The elevator came. I lept on and held the close button until the doors finally shut. I found a London black cab in the taxi que in front of the hotel and paid a fortune to have it take me to Heathrow. I wrangled a business class seat on the last flight to JFK and on the flight west I lined up little bottles of Jack Daniels lined up like soldiers on parade. I was aiming for a regiment, but I only managed a squad. From time-to-time tears would roll down my face or I would pound my leg as if it needed to be punished. What had I done wrong? What hadn’t I seen? How could I be such a chump?
When I landed, I expected a voice mail, an email, or a text explaining what it was that I saw or even begging for forgiveness. The latter hope being ginned up by my friend Jack. But there was nothing. No message whatsoever. Not even a smoke signal. When I did not hear from her the next day, anger replaced grief. Fuck her and the horse she rode in on. I called a real estate agent and spent the morning looking at six apartments that were in my price range and available immediately. I picked the least offensive, a studio in mid-town with a balcony view of the Hudson. That afternoon I arranged for movers to come the next day, pack up my things and transport them to my new apartment. Moving so quickly nearly melted my credit cards but spending another moment in the apartment I shared with someone who had betrayed me so badly was not an option. I could not bear the thought of the confrontation that would take place when she finally came home, especially considering her silence. I hurt enough. A fight would only deepen my misery.
“Hello. “I said in best neutral tone.
“You moved out.”
“I did.”
“Don’t you think we should have talked before you left.”
I wanted to scream. I needed to call her? Shouldn’t she have called or texted me. Something. Not gaslighting five days after the fact. With undisguised hostility I replied “I felt that was on you. Not me. You didn’t call. I left.”
There was a pause. “You took some of my things.”
“I did not. I only took the things that I bought or brought with me. Anything questionable, like the couch we bought together, I left behind.”
“What about the Agam print.”
“I bought that.”
“But I was with you when you bought it. I thought it was a present.”
I was seething inside. I just caught her fucking another guy and she was not apologizing. She provided no explanation. Instead, she wanted to talk about how I took some of her stuff?? All the emotions I had stifled for the past week started to bubble up and it was all I could do to maintain myself. I said coldly “It was not a gift. And you know that. But let’s not go there. I have no desire to talk with you about this or anything else without an explanation of what happened. If you don’t want to talk about that. Conversation over. Just send me a list of things you think I took of yours. I will send you a response. Are we done?”
I guess I was hoping my anger would prompt her to talk about what I had seen at the Connaught. I wanted to yell and scream and tell her how betrayed I felt and rid myself of all the bitterness, questioning and self-doubt I had been feeling since the door had opened to her hotel room. But instead of offering up an explanation she said, “You owe me rent.”
“Why the fuck do you think that I owe you a dime of rent?”
“Because you promised you would pay half and the lease is not up for another year.”
I wanted to shout “And, part of the deal was you not fucking other men, bitch.” No doubt that would have made me feel better at that moment, but I felt then, as I still do, that letting my full anger out would give her too much power. She would be able to use it as a justification for what she had done, and I wanted none of that. The best way to make her feel as empty and broken inside as I felt at that moment was to say nothing at all. So, I hung up.
Mind you, I did not think any of the above consciously. I am not that self-aware. It was instinct, followed by years of therapy, before I understood what I had done and why. She and I never spoke again and from then on, my mother only referred to her as “the bitch.” Actually, she used another word, but that is not the image I want to paint of my Ferragamo wearing, impeccably dressed, never leaving the house without lipstick, mother.
God, humorist that he is, was not finished playing with me quite yet. Two weeks after I moved into my new apartment, the company I had been working for went tits up. It was a hedge fund backed, tech start up and while we had been hitting our marks the hedge fund had not been. They ran out of money and one cheery Tuesday afternoon the CEO of the fund walked into our offices, called us all into a conference room and told us we were done. Final checks would be sent to us. Pack up your personal belongings and leave.
I would love to say that I rose above this adversity and took the opportunity to reevaluate my life and find a new course that would take me to the promised land of inner peace and harmony. I cannot. It broke me. Not to the point of not bathing and living in an apartment littered with empty pizza boxes and half-filled containers of Chinese. But to the point where I no longer believed in myself. I had, at least in my own mind, made terrible choices. The woman who I was convinced loved me, and whom I had loved unconditionally, had cheated on me, and offered no apologies. The company I had poured my heart and soul into, that I felt was to get its legs and soar and make me rich, had failed and I had not seen it coming.
It is difficult to find a new job when you have no faith in yourself. Your lack of self-confidence is like a pheromone. Interviewers can smell your self-doubt. I struggled for months. I went to countless interviews. All to no avail. What little faith I had in myself eroded even further. Savings dwindled. My 401k was raided. I was on the edge of complete failure when a friend from college, Bob Schwartz, introduced me to one of his colleagues, Desmond Francis O’Reilly. It was supposed to be a networking meeting. Bob knew that I was looking for my next gig and he thought Des might be able to help me. I was not enthusiastic about the meeting. I thought of it as a mercy interview. Just another step down another road that did not go very far. I had no idea it would change my life in the way that it did.
Before Des had become a publisher at one of the leading publishers of magazines in the country he had sold advertising. He had been incredibly successful at it due in no small part to his ability to instantly engage with the people who sat across the desk from him. He was tall, handsome, with a ready smile and a quick wit. In that way he reminded me of Conor, but unlike him, Des’s first instinct was to do the right thing.
I sensed all of the above the minute I stepped into his office. I felt I was in a safe place. So much so when he asked the question “What brings you here? I did not give him the carefully scripted answer I normally give in interviews. The one that began “I am looking for the next great opportunity where I can grow as a businessperson and an individual.” Instead, I started with the complete unvarnished truth. I told him that within a matter of weeks my life had imploded. I had been betrayed by the woman I thought I had loved. Cut loose from a company I had hoped to build, I was currently rudderless and looking for a job where I felt safe and appreciated. The most important thing for me was to work with people I trusted and liked.
It was far too much to share with someone I had just met. If I had heard what came out of my mouth that day during the interview, I would have figured out a way to cut the meeting short. Des did not do that. Instead, we talked for hours. Everything from our shared love of the Red Sox to why I thought the internet would be the dominant media force in the years to come. We talked about dogs. I told him about my German Shepherd Suki who had died a few years back and that once my life stabilized a bit, I would like to adopt a new one. Did he have a dog? He said, with a glint of mischief in his eye, he did, a Pyrenees Retriever. When I told him that I had never heard of that breed before he laughed, said they were quite rare and described them as being black medium sized dogs with hair like the Karakul hats Afghan leaders often wore. I laughed and said, “So you have a poodle.” He let loose a booming chuckle and asked “How did you figure that out? I have been using that dodge for years and no one has ever guessed that I have a poodle.” I just grinned, inordinately proud of my detective work.
Des hired me. And for the next ten years we worked together trying to take the venerable old publication we worked for into the twenty-first century. He was my biggest fan and as the internet grew in importance in publishing, he pushed my career along by promoting me not only in rank within the organization but privately in conversations with other people within our company. I reciprocated the best I could. I wanted to help pay my debt to Des by showing the world how brilliant he had been at hiring me. It meant getting to work before anyone else and staying until the cleaners came in after hours. I overcame cynicism about the role of the internet in the company and spent every week on an airplane trying to convince marketers and advertisers that our digital brands were worth associating themselves with. It became therapy. Des’s support, and the growth of the company rekindled my belief in me.
About five years after I started working with Des, I was in Boston on the day they run the Boston Marathon. It inspired me despite the fact I am not a natural runner. I am 5’9” with broad shoulders, short legs and a gait that is at best ponderous. I thought that running a marathon would be a coming out party for my renewed self-confidence. A person who can run a marathon can do anything, right? Des thought the idea of me running a marathon hilarious. He would say to me on an almost daily basis “Why are you running a marathon? You are not a runner. You are a Ukrainian weightlifter.” I knew he was teasing. I knew he was trying to get my goat. It was his way to challenge me. I probably should have left it alone. But it annoyed me, so I did something stupid. I challenged Des to a 5-mile race while we were on a business trip to Florida. I knew I could beat him because I had been training for six months running upwards of thirty miles a week, Des bragged often that he never worked out. He thought life was a workout. `He snuck cigarettes when he was out for cocktails. Surely, I would be able to beat him. Nope. He crushed me. I didn’t see him from the second minute of the race until I saw him at the finish line where he was waiting for me smoking a cigarette. He said, “Weightlifter I should probably should have mentioned I ran division 1 Cross Country while in college.”
The 2000 New York City Marathon was held on November 5, 2000. I had hardly slept that night. Every doubt I had about running a marathon was on a continuous loop in my consciousness. Were all the hours I spent running enough? How humiliating would be if I did not finish? How could I ever set foot in the office if I didn’t finish? Des, I knew would be nice about it but after all the smack we exchanged I would be humiliated. I am sure it was my self-doubts that made me commit a costly error at the beginning of the race. When the gun went off for my group I tried to keep up with the pack. This was a bad idea for two reasons. The first is the NYC Marathon starts on the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge, which is among the largest suspension bridges in the world.and the first mile or so is all up hill. Combined with that I was running an unmaintainable a pace and I was completely gassed by the time we left the bridge and headed into Brooklyn. It made every remaining step in the race a mental and physical challenge. The only thing that got me through the next twenty-three miles and was reliving Des’s taunting and knowing how nice it would be to tell him that his favorite weightlifter had finished the race.
I crossed the finish line of the 2000 New York Marathon in 4:57:32. Much to my surprise, standing next at the finish line, was Des wearing a T-shirt that read “Ukrainian Weightlifter’s Marathon Team.” That was Des. He never lets you take yourself too seriously. But he believed in his friends, and he showed up to support them in every way he could.
Our offices were located on the 23rd floor of 475 Park Avenue South. It is the last skyscraper on Park Avenue before the city gets “low.” Our southern windows offered a wonderful view of lower Manhattan with the crown jewel being the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Des’s office was in the Southeast Corner of the building. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Des and I were there when the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Initially, we thought the roar we heard was just errant air traffic but then someone ran through our offices telling us that the World Trade Center was on fire. Everyone in the office ran to our southern windows to see. We were standing there seventeen minutes later, when we saw a fire ball erupt from the South Tower. We thought it was an explosion. We could not see that it was another airplane blasting its way through the South tower.
It is hard to describe the chaotic moments that followed if you were not there. The internet was down. The news stations were speculating, not reporting. But one thing was clear. An unspeakable act of terror had occurred, and we did not know what was going to happen next. Most of just gazed at the two towers now engulfed in smoke and speculated at what was going on inside, wondering how many people worked in the building and how you evacuated buildings that tall. Des was not among us. He had returned to his office. He had friends who worked in the World Trade Center. He needed to make sure they were all right. When I had not seen him in a while I went looking for him. He was in his office, standing, speaking on his phone, with the smoking towers at his back. As I stood in his doorway, waiting to speak with him, the unimaginable happened. The South Tower collapsed leaving only a ghost of smoke. I did not say anything. I just pointed. Des turned around and gently laid the phone back in its cradle.
By the time the North Tower fell thirty minutes later we had heard about the attacks on the Pentagon and of a missing plane somewhere over Pennsylvania. In readiness for additional attack the city had shut down all mass transportation. We could see fighter planes circling our city and officials were telling us to try to make it home and if they could not shelter in place. Most of us in the office were running around like chickens with our heads cut off. Des organized us. He asked those of us who lived in the city to share our addresses with those who commuted in so if they got stuck leaving the city, they would have a place to wait until things normalized. Then he arranged people in groups by commuting destinations so everyone had a “buddy.”. No one would be alone. He told us all to leave but stay connected with their managers so we could make sure everyone made it home safe.
Everyone headed home. All accept, Des. Like most of us that day, he assumed there would be survivors at ground zero. Instead of going home, and hugging his family close, he went to “the pile” to dig. His friends were somewhere in the debris and if they needed his help, he would be there for them. Des never spoke of this. That was not his style. He did not think that running toward danger when someone needed his help was a big deal. When we did find out, months later, he developed a new nickname around the office. One we never dared say to his face but when uttered was done in admiration and affection. He became St. Des.
After a decade of working together Des left the company for greener pastures. I left soon thereafter. It was not the same without him. Unlike so many business friendships that drift apart after their work together comes to an end, our friendship continued. We exchanged barbed emails that made fun of each other, bad jokes and updates each other on our lives on a frequent basis. We would have lunch, dinner, or drinks four or five times a year. On one such occasion, about a decade after we had worked together, we met for lunch in a favorite Irish Pub near his home in Westchester County called “Farrells. We met there because Des’s new publishing company was located in Florida, and he spent Tuesday-Thursday working there and Monday and Friday’s working remotely from home in Westchester. It was a typical meal for us full of bonhomie and well-intended kidding.. He gave me a tough time putting on some weight. I teased him about the grey hair in his eyebrows and how much time he was spending on the golf course. I told him about my love life, such as it wasn’t, and he got me up to speed on the stars in his galaxy, his five children. As usual we fought over the check and then decided to split it. It was normal. Just like dozens of meals we have had.
That is, until it wasn’t.
Blame it on Rio 