This thread (yes, the wheels came off) coincides with my fourth reading of A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley. The book toggles between long visits to a psychiatric hospital and drunken adventures with a motley assortment of seemingly imagined sidekicks. It's one of the great memoirs and rises very far above the cliches associated with the drunken novelist while at times indulging in them.
Ludicrously attired in a straw boater, a red suede vest making his stomach look like a rubescent mosquito’s ripe for bursting, his faded and frayed Levi’s, and a pair of glossy paratrooper boots, on entering the place he would make a direct, nearly maniacal line for the biggest assemblage of talkers at the bar, an assemblage that on spotting him seemed to shrivel visibly, to grow troubled and wan, to exude an unmistakable aura of sniffling recoil . . . Bumpy approached them forthrightly. With a furious flick of his fingers, he undid their bow ties. He gave them unsignaled, “playful” punches on their arms. He cuffed them affectionately on the back of the head. To those sitting on barstools facing him, their legs propped up and slightly spread, he reached up near the groin and ferociously gave them “chummy” little pinches on the inner thigh that drained the blood from their faces. Ordering drinks from the bartender, Bumpy bellowed, “Give us a drink here, you big ape!” and thereupon disdainfully threw a fifty-dollar bill on the bar. Without the least heed to what their previous conversation might have been, Bumpy immediately began telling the dreadful jokes he had “stored up” for me during the week.
Is there a golf novel that captures the discourse, the drinking, the utter frustration, the insane characters both new and familiar, etc.?