%#*K+#!! is the most obscure and inscrutable of my golf companions. He never speaks, and I’m not even sure where he lives in my body, although I suspect it’s somewhere in the lung-and-throat area. All I know is he’s a dependable guy. Whenever I miss a short putt, whenever my opponent holes a long one, and most of all, whenever I’m held up by the damnable slowpokes in front of me, %#*K+#!! is always there. All I have to do is scream out his name and I instantly feel better.

Marty is balding, 40-ish and given to loud sportcoats and garlic breath. We don’t talk much about his background, but the rumor being spread by Stanley is that Marty hails from the heart of a used-car salesman. That doesn’t surprise me a bit, given his behavior on the golf course. Typically, when my opponent strokes a putt within gimme range, Marty wraps his arms around my windpipe so that I can’t say, “That’s good, pick it up.” When my opponent flubs a shot, Marty tickles my ribs so that I burst out in laughter. And one sad day last week, on the 18th hole just as my opponent took the putter back for a six-footer to tie our match, Marty leapt into my cough-control center and set off a hacking fit that secured me victory. Although there’s undeniably something engaging about Marty, he’s still a hard guy to stomach. Happily, he doesn’t hang out anywhere near there. He lives in my left armpit, and that’s exactly what he deserves.

Cosmo owns a modest houseboat that cruises the synapses of my central nervous system. The smartest, most worldly guy I know—inside or outside my body—he consistently captivates me with perorations on everything from fractal geometry to Italian cuisine to the film career of Pamela Anderson. Cosmo’s only problem is that he doesn’t know when to shut up. At least three or four times a round, just as I’m setting up to a shot, he takes me on a mental excursion from which there is no return. Jack or Tiger would have sunk Cosmo’s boat years ago, but I can’t seem to shake him.

Lily, my final friend, is a sweet but timid young thing, a refugee from the liver of an indicted member of the Boston archdiocese. She cowers deep in the gelatinous flesh of my right buttock, and I must say, she is a pain in the ass. It is her trembling voice that I hear when I face a tee shot through a claustrophobia-inducing tunnel of trees or a pitch over a bunker to a tight pin or a short putt on 18 to break 80—a voice of fear, foreboding and doubt—and she always uses the same seven words: “I don’t think you can do this.”

Hey, as a modern man, I realize it’s important for me to be in touch with my feminine side, but why couldn’t I get a dame with some guts—someone like Annika Sorenstam … or even Martha Burk!