John Hanson was fired from the Deer Lake Golf and Country Club on Friday morning after his night escapades of playing “flame golf” were discovered. Flame golf was a game John had invented. It involved breaking into a golf course (usually, the Deer Lake Golf and Country Club) at night and driving flaming golf balls that had been soaked in lighter fluid at the main lodge with a two iron. John knew it was for the best, because he would now have more time to dedicate to his new novel, Golfing With Apollo. Golfing With Apollo was the story about a man very much like John Hanson who meets Apollo, the god of the sun, one night while playing flame golf at the Deer Lake Golf and Country Club. Apollo looks just like a wealthy middle-aged Englishman with bad teeth, and delights in obscene jokes and cryptic aphorisms about the death of the Olympian virtues. It recounted the quasi-homoerotic relationship between the two men, their adventures playing flame golf and exploding gas stations in Springfield, Missouri. John returned to his apartment at noon on Friday, and began to rework his manuscript. Three pages into his edit, John decided it would be a lot easier to write after watching The Matrix trilogy and drinking a few glasses of Jack Daniels and organic pink lemonade. By 6pm the bottle was almost empty, and John was reading Hamlet’s monologues aloud in front of the mirror. John called his friend Karl, a criminal lawyer, and the two of them went to the driving range. They brought along a twelve of beer and John ranted about his book, his driving getting worse and worse. The next morning, John woke at 11am, sobered up as best as he could, and decided that Golfing With Apollo should be a graphic novel. He began calling his old classmates at Middlebury to find out whether they knew of anyone in the graphic novel business or anyone who could draw. At 4pm, he found a bottle of Jagermeister that Luna must have left after moving all her stuff out three months earlier. He started up a Tumblr web page called “Hail Apollo” and began making friends. He fell in love with a woman named “catekill” and offered her half his savings if she would come to Springfield and be his wife. He sent her a photograph of himself in a black smoking jacket holding a plastic skull and then wrote her a long erotic poem. At 7pm, Karl came over and the two of them went to see a zombie film with a quarter of Jim Bean and then tried to pick up two Goth chicks at the cinema. Karl got lucky but John’s target decided to take a cab home. At 10pm, John took a cab to the casino alone and told a prostitute that he would put her into his novel and that he’d really like a blowjob. She asked for two hundred dollars and took him to the handicapped bathroom at 11:15pm. John couldn’t come, and then he lost another hundred dollars trying to understand the rules of baccarat. He called Luna in tears at just after midnight telling her what had happened to him and she told him to fuck off and never call her again. John woke up at 3pm on Sunday, sobered up as best he could, and picked up the manuscript for Golfing With Apollo for the third time. He stared at the cover page, and imagined his brains leaking out of his mouth and eyes like liquid Jell-o. The problem is, John thought, is that I am not John Hanson. I am Apollo. I am the god of the sun. The revelation seemed like a joke at first, but when he repeated the words again, “I am Apollo, I am the god of the sun,” shivers went through him, and his life took on a profound significance. If he really wanted to write Golfing With Apollo, he would have to live and die for it; he would have to take every aspect of his life seriously, beginning with flame golf.
Jonathan Ullyot has been published in many small journals and wrote the feature film Crime Fiction. He is finishing a dissertation at the University of Chicago on failure.