Caught in a jam

In previous UOPTA posts, I've documented in great detail some of the menial jobs I've had in the past. One in particular was actually quite fun, despite being almost the definition of menial.

For two summers, I worked at a country club. One of my jobs there was to drive a golf cart continuously around the parking lot to see if anyone wanted a ride to the clubhouse. For four to six hours at a time, I basically drove in circles. When I'd find someone and ask if s/he wanted a ride, the usual response was a puzzled look accompanied by the line, "But it's right there!" True, it wasn't much of a walk, but it couldn't hurt to ask.

Why did I enjoy that job? Mainly, it was beautiful everywhere I went at the club. I find golf courses to be gorgeous, and one overlooking the Valley with majestic mountain views is my ideal scenery. I often tell people that playing golf can certainly be frustrating, but man, it's a beautiful place to be frustrated. Likewise, there's hardly a better place to be bored out of one's mind.

One morning, I was helping set up for a tournament by putting people's names on the line of golf carts out in the main area. I took one piece of paper over to a cart and saw that the gentleman's bag had a tag on it from another event with the number 941 hand-written on it. Immediately, I heard Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder's voice in my head singing, "Nine four one, yeah!" It was an instantaneous reaction, but then I couldn't think of what song it was or what the real words were that I was replacing with those numbers.

Fortunately, I had some time on my hands. While driving the cart around the parking lot for the next four hours, I also was driving myself crazy. I tried incredibly hard to figure out my musical mystery. I started by singing every single song from Pearl Jam's three albums (at the time) aloud to myself, listening for the 941 part. I was a big fan, so I knew every word to every song in order, and I was calling upon that skill to finally be useful. Nothing sounded like it. I then realized that it could've been Stone Temple Pilots, whose lead singer sometimes sounded quite a bit like Eddie Vedder. I sang every song on their two albums aloud while looking for people who didn't want a ride. Nothing doing there either.

I asked my friend Greg a couple of days later when I still didn't have any success, since he was an even bigger fan of the band than I. I sang him the "9-4-1," and he started thinking about it too. He had some b-sides that I hadn't gone through in my circles through the lots, so we listened to those while carefully trying to locate that particular part of whatever song we were seeking. Nothing.

Months (literally) went by, and we joked pretty frequently about the 941 song. It even got to the point that we talked about writing a song with that as a chorus just so the song would exist. It was a catchy tune, after all, and maybe Pearl Jam would sue us for stealing their song. At least we'd find out what song we had stolen, right?

And then one night, Greg came back to our place after working late with an excited look on his face. "I found it," he said. "What?" "941." "No fucking way!" He then told me the story, and I sat there with the same eager look that kids get when they're opening a present and already know what it is. (I made that face when opening Megatron for Hanukkah, I'm sure of it.) Someone at Greg's work put on some music while they were cleaning up the gym after some intramural basketball. He was going about his business when he noticed the song that came on was a rare live version of a rare Pearl Jam song called "Wash." In the chorus, Eddie sings, "Wash my love" a few times. Near the end of this particular version though, Eddie more emphatically started shouting something different than "Wash my love." Instead, it was something like, "Life on the run" in a tune very similar to my 941 tune. Greg excitedly looked around for anyone he could say, "This is the 941 song!" to without getting a blank stare in return, but no one fit that description. He hurried home to tell me, ecstatic to have an answer to a question that had plagued us for the better part of a year.

There was one problem with this answer though: I didn't know that live version of that song. I had heard the studio version of the song a few times, but didn't remember ever hearing that live one before in my life. We came up with a hypothetical situation that is probably how it really happened: My friend Maya's brother had a bunch or rare, live Pearl Jam cds that would sometimes be on in the background of us all hanging out. That song must have been on one of his cds, and I registered it somewhere in the recesses of my brain. Why did it come out so quickly upon seeing 941? We didn't have the slightest clue, nor did we care much. We'd found our answer at last.

About 4 or 5 years later, a group of us all managed to fit a Vegas trip into our busy schedules. We stopped by the sports book en route to the tables to see if anything caught our eye. Greg had been working in the horseracing field for a while and said that we should pick some ponies. It's not my thing at all, but I like looking at the names. "I want to find a race to pick the numbers 9, 4, and 1 horse in a trifecta," Greg said. That's when you pick which horses will finish exactly in that order in the top three, and the odds are obviously stacked heavily against that. "Sure," I said, "let me know when you find a good one." He spent a while looking, and we were all getting restless. After a few more minutes, everyone but Greg and his brother Bryan headed out. "Ok, we'll meet you at the tables," Greg said.

Sure enough, he did meet us at the tables. "Never doubt the power of 941," he said, smiling and holding a wad of money. "Are you serious?" I asked. He nodded victoriously. He and Bryan had each put down $1. Those $2 (see, I do math occasionally) yielded a payout of $460. Un-frickin-believable. If I hadn't been in such a hurry to lose money more quickly at the tables, I would've been wearing that same smile all night long. We were happy for them, and even happier for ourselves that we might have a horse-picking savant in our close group of friends.

To recap, I got paid a little to drive around a beautiful country club with good music in my head that ultimately led to my friends winning hundreds of dollars. There are far, far worse ways to be bored, gentle readers.

Got anything you want to share with me? You know where to go: ptklein@gmail.com.