You ask what we do here in the off-
season. Well, if somebody crosses us, it’s always a good time to get revenge.

“It was a cold winter’s day!” says Mark Hess, manager of the Edgartown Golf Club since 1989, laughing at the melodrama that he stuffed into his own opening line. “I went up to the shop – it was a holiday weekend, like Presidents’ Day, about six or seven years ago, and it had lightly snowed – and I saw tire tracks going up to the back of the clubhouse. I saw footprints going over to the trash bin, which was empty, because we don’t have trash service running in the wintertime. I walked over, lifted up the lid, and looked in, and there was a big garbage bag, obviously full of junk. And I said, ‘What the hell is this?’

“You can jazz the story up a little bit if you want, and say there was stuff splayed out all over the place, but it was tied up.

“So I took it in the back room and opened it up and decided to dump the thing out, because I didn’t have anything better to do. So I gave it the once-over. No sign of an address or an envelope or reference. And by the way, the trash was of a juvenile nature: Cap’n Crunch, Coke cans, beer cans, and Cheetos. It looked like a college trash can.

“But I found this pizza box that had, on the side, a bunch of boxes checked off – you know, where it says pepperoni, extra cheese, sausage, onion, anchovies. It was some weird combination like 
anchovies, sausage, and onion. It was from Edgartown Pizza Shoppe, up here at the Triangle.

“So I went up to see them.

“It was about noon, I think. I went in and told the guy what had happened. And he said, ‘Well, I don’t really remember anybody like that.’ Then his wife came in. He asked her, ‘Do you remember who ordered the pizza with the anchovy and sausage and onion?’ She said, ‘You know, there was a bunch of kids who came in here the other night who ordered it. We didn’t have much business over the weekend.’ I asked if she knew who they were, and she said, ‘No, but I do know that they did have a big, old, paneled station wagon.’

“And I said, ‘Isn’t that interesting.’

“I was about to go back into town and to work, but I said, ‘What the hell. I’ll go up to the boat.’ So I drove up to the Steamship Authority. And right away the car was sitting there. I got that feeling when you know something right away: ‘That’s the car. I know that’s the car.’ There was nobody in it. I looked in the back. There was, like, duffel bags and lacrosse sticks and all that college baggage. The first thing I thought was, ‘I wish I had brought the garbage with me.’ I would have just opened the bag and dumped it right in the window. But I didn’t have it with me.

“So I went where most people go when they’re not with their car at the Steamship Authority in the middle of winter. To the Black Dog. I walked in there and there were four or five college-age kids – a couple of girls and three guys – that looked like they could be the culprits. And I said to them, ‘Do you know who owns that old paneled station wagon in the waiting line over there?’ And one kid said, ‘Yeah, that’s my car.’ I said. ‘Oh. Would you have happened to have dumped garbage at the Edgartown Golf Club on your way out of town?’ ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.’

“Right away I knew he was the guy.

“I said, ‘It just so happens I run Edgartown Golf Club and I’ve got a feeling you dumped your garbage there on your way out of town.’ ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you what. There’s a policeman over there directing traffic from the boat. Why don’t I go get him and we’ll straighten this out right now?’ ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. I guess we did dump it there.’

“So I gave them a little hell, scolded them for doing it, telling them not to do it again. And I asked them if they would give me ten bucks for the dump fee, which they gladly did. Seemed reasonable at that time. And I said, ‘Thank you very much,’ and walked away. Wishing all the way back to Edgartown that I had that bag of garbage with me that I could have dumped right in their car.”