For my family A hole-in-one is amazing when you think of the different universes this white mass of molecules has to pass through on its way to the hole. —MAC O’GRADY Miniature: diminutive, minuscule, small-scale, pony; bantam, baby, baby- sized; toy, compact, dwarf, dwarfish, pygmy, midget, nonoid, elfin, Lilliputian, Tom Thumb. —Roget’s International Thesaurus And in twenty years they all came back, In twenty years or more, And every one said, “How tall they’ve grown!” For they’ve been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone, And the hills of the Chankly Bore! —EDWARD LEAR CONTENTS / SCORECARD Title Page Copyright Notice Dedication Epigraph The Ticket Booth: Prologue Front Nine 1. The Rocket 2. The Castle 3. The One With The Hill In The Middle 4. The Colored Light Thing 5. The Horse 6. The Swinging Pole 7. The Water Hole 8. The Wishing Well 9. The Windmill Back Nine 10. The Outhouse 11. The Covered Bridge 12. The Barrels 13. The Airplane (formerly The Clown) 14. The Purple One 15. The Ferris Wheel 16. The Weird Blue Pipe Thing 17. The Paddle Wheel Boat 18. The Clown Face The Ticket Booth: Epilogue Acknowledgments About the Author Copyright Rules 1. Ball off carpet, place at point of exit, add one stroke. 2. Ball in water, place on green, add one stroke. 3. Maximum six strokes per hole. 4. Have fun. 5. Be kind to others. 6. Go ahead and pet the dog. He’s tame. 7. This is a memoir. Every event is true. Because I don’t remember exact words spoken twenty to thirty years ago, I based the early descriptions and dialogue on “most likely” scenarios, for example, what customers probably looked like and what they probably said given the circumstances. I had my family read these portions of the text to make sure they agreed on accuracy. However, and by the way, the dialogue and descriptions of customers from the later chapters are not from imagination but in fact completely accurate. These are taken from extensive notes and tape-recorded dialogue, because I’m the kind of person who would hide a tape recorder in the ticket booth just to hear what people sound like when they reminisce about a place like Tom Thumb. THE TICKET BOOTH: PROLOGUE The state of Wisconsin looks like a hand. Set the book down. Hold up your right palm. Stick out your thumb, and lo, you have Door County, a thumb- shaped peninsula of tourism lapping into Lake Michigan, where summertime visitors can drive on crowded roads and buy cherry pies, cherry liquors, cherry-painted shot glasses, and stay at overpriced cherry-themed motels. At the top of your hand, between your extended fingers, in the northernmost part of the state, sprawl lakes and rivers and other water-soaked lands generally too overrun with mosquitoes to be habitable except by extremists. I have heard that religious monks in Italy would slap leather whips across their backs until they bled, believing pure suffering could bring them closer to God. Or they could just spend some time in northern Wisconsin, say, five to seven minutes. The suffering is the same; the insects more deft at drawing your blood. Across the center of the state, and the palm of your hand, are the fertile plains: fields of corn, alfalfa, and glowing soybeans, and pastures of reddish brown slow-moving cows, separated into farms by dots of broken-down silos, collapsing barns, and graying farmhouses. The winter is long and the climate absurd. No paint sticks to the sides of these buildings. As you drive up Highway 22, you can play the game “Abandoned House/Not Abandoned House,” looking for signs of human life between the abundant fields of abundant grains. Also abundant fields of geometrically correct pine trees. When my ancestors and yours came to the United States, there were thousands of acres of trees in Wisconsin to be sawed down and milled into lumber, and so they did. Then all the trees were gone. In the 1930s the U.S. Department of Agriculture looked at the bare sandy ground and paid people to plant more trees. Pine trees, they decided. Perhaps feeling glee at its success in organizing a military for World War I, the government encouraged planting in tidy columns, lining up the trees as if for inspection. Red pine, red pine, red pine. A steady ten feet apart. Row after row after row. Ten, hut! The trees look bushy on the top, rough and scaly on the bark, and completely at attention at the base. The forests of Wisconsin are for people who like their wilderness organized, who admire the beauty of crossword puzzles. While driving down state highways you can stare at the space between the rows and recall early lessons in mathematics, how parallel lines never intercept but only appear to converge near infinity. Along the roadsides, like wildflowers, are strewn the carcasses of freshly killed deer. They bloom red and white and brown, all year long. I tell you these things so that you will stay away. Don’t go to Wisconsin. Don’t consider buying land in Wisconsin. Maybe I should have mentioned this earlier, say, ten, fifteen years ago. If I could have stopped people from clamoring for land, real estate prices would have stayed the same. Property values wouldn’t have risen. Taxes would not have gone through the roof. My schoolteacher-parents would have money left over at the end of the summer after paying their enormous property tax. Their income from their miniature golf course could be used for other things, like hiring local kids to mow the lawn, or paying a handyman to paint all the hazards, replace the carpets, or rake the leaves. My parents are sixty-seven and seventy-six years old; maybe once in a while they’d like a day off. Maybe they’d enjoy working less than twelve hour days, seven days a week, all summer long, just for the right to live in their house, which just happens to be on a lake, which means their taxes keep rising as people keep bidding up the value of the plots of land that surround them. Maybe—just imagine!—if their taxes were lower, my parents could even make a profit. Maybe they wouldn’t have had to sell Tom Thumb. So maybe it’s actually my fault for not speaking up earlier, telling everyone how terrible it is. Maybe I could have prevented the whole darn thing from crashing to an end. The problem with Wisconsin: the lakes. Don’t ask me about the lakes. Don’t ask me about swimming through the clear water. Don’t ask me about floating over the surface in a canoe. I’m not going to tell you how beautiful they are. I’m not going to use words like sparkling or blue, or you will be clamoring too. You see, yesterday I found out that the world is coming to an end. But if I told you that, you would probably think I was being overly dramatic. Of course I am. This is miniature golf. Everything I say about the topic is going to sound like an exaggeration. The news arrived in the form of a red blinking light, which meant I had missed a phone call. I was driving up Vine Street at the time, heading home from the YMCA where I swim. I had just crossed Hollywood Boulevard in my fifteen-year-old Honda. The sidewalks were crowded, as usual, with afternoon sightseers. It looks most days as if every tourist in town has dropped something on the pavement. They walk slowly in clusters, canting together towards the earth, searching for the stars of their favorite entertainers. But they won’t find them here. Those of us who live here know that new plaques are found at the other end of the boulevard. This is where the has-beens are found, in front of pawn shops and the store selling discount men’s suits. As usual, I resisted the temptation to yell out the window, in a somewhat helpful tone, that they might happier if they just gave it up. I flipped down the visor of my car and headed up the hill. There is never any shade from palm trees. At the corner of the pointy-speared Capital Records building I looked down at my phone. Red. Red. Alert. Alert. That’s it then, I thought. Don’t ask me how I knew before I had even heard the message. It’s my mother. It’s over. They’ve sold Tom Thumb. Life is like that. Absurd. There are days you can barely find your car in a parking lot, and other times you know exactly what’s happening seventeen hundred miles and one half of a lifetime away. It is July 26, 2003. On the hill above my apartment there is a sign that says HOLLYWOOD, and for the last thirteen years I have lived below it in my one-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment. I am forty years old. I eat a Fudgesicle almost every day. I won’t cut my hair. It is blonde and down to my waist. I used to be a comedian. I’ve done over two thousand performances. I celebrate most birthdays in the mountains at Sequoia National Park, where I go camping alone. For comfort I watch Jane Austen movies. I sip red wine that I buy for cheap. When I was a teenager, I discovered that I can write backwards as well as forwards, using either my left or my right hand.