Par for the Killing

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So there’s this thing that happens when you live in the Philippines long enough—you develop this weird calibration for tragedy. Like, your baseline for “Jesus Christ, what the fuck” has to recalibrate every few years or you’d just be screaming constantly.¹

Anyway.

Let me tell you about the man who played golf.

Not a man. The man. Because in this story he’s less a person and more a symbol, you know? A placeholder for a certain kind of life, a certain kind of privilege, a certain kind of not-knowing-what-the-fuck-you’re-actually-participating-in until it’s too late.

Here’s what you need to understand about golf in the Philippines: it’s not a sport. It’s a production. You don’t just show up with clubs and a dream—you show up with an entourage. A caddy, obviously. But also: an umbrella girl.²

The umbrella girl in this story, let’s call her what she was: a person trying to survive in an economy that treats people like accessories.

The man showered her with gifts. Money. An allowance, they said.

And here’s where it gets… look, I don’t even know what word to use here. Baroque? Grotesque? Capitalism meets telenovela meets something Dostoyevsky would write if he was Filipino and extremely tired?

The umbrella girl had a boyfriend.

The boyfriend was the man’s caddy.

The boyfriend—and this is where my brain does that thing where it tries to leave my skull—allegedly encouraged his girlfriend to have the affair. Because money. Because gifts. Because what the fuck else do you do when you’re holding golf clubs for someone who makes more in a day than you’ll see in months, and your girlfriend is holding an umbrella, and you’re both just… there. Witness to wealth you’ll never touch except through this weird proximity, this performance of service.

So she had the affair.

And then one night—we don’t know why, and that’s the thing that keeps me up, the we don’t know why—the man turned up dead. Stabbed. In his car.

They say the umbrella girl and the caddy did it.

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I keep thinking about that golf course.³

I keep thinking about the umbrella girl standing there, arm getting tired, watching this man line up his shot, watching him play. What did she think about? Did she compartmentalize? Did she disassociate? Did she calculate? Did she hate him? Did she not think about him at all, just about the money, about survival, about getting through the day?

And the caddy—what was it like, handing clubs to the man fucking your girlfriend? Except you told her to fuck him? Except maybe you didn’t really mean it but capitalism doesn’t care what you meant, only what you do to stay alive?

I’m not saying murder is okay. Let’s be fucking clear about that.

I’m saying: what a horrifying stage we’ve built. What a grotesque theater of inequality, where people become props in each other’s lives, where intimacy and transaction get so tangled up you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.

The universe watched this happen and probably poured itself a drink.⁴

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Golf is a deadly game in my country.

Not because of the sport itself—though I’m sure the sun and the exertion and the rage at a small ball not going where you want could kill you eventually. But because of everything around it. The systems. The hierarchies. The way we’ve normalized having an entire human being whose job is to hold an umbrella.⁵

I wonder if the man ever really saw them. The umbrella girl. The caddy. Or if they were just… furniture. Background. Part of the landscape, like the grass and the sand traps and the oppressive heat.

I wonder if he knew he was going to die that night.

I wonder if they planned it or if something just… snapped. If there’s a breaking point where being a prop in someone else’s story becomes unbearable, where the script flips, where the people holding the umbrella and the clubs decide they’re holding something else now.

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There’s no moral here.

No tidy lesson about class consciousness or violence or the commodification of human bodies.⁶

Just a story about a man who played golf.

And the people who were there.

Until they weren’t just there anymore.

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P.S. I don’t know if I should publish this. Keep this here. It feels too close. Too specific. But also too vague? Like, I’m not naming names—I don’t even know the names—but it happened. It’s real. Someone’s dead. Two people are probably in prison. And golf courses in gated communities are still operating like nothing happened, because of course they are.

P.P.S. Every time I hear someone talk about “job creation” I think about umbrella girls and I want to scream.

P.P.P.S. I’m literally talking about a murder and somehow it still feels like I’m gossiping. Which… is that disrespectful? Or is that just how we process horror—by turning it into narrative, by trying to make sense of senselessness, by talking about it at 2 AM to whoever will listen?

P.P.P.P.S. The universe is still drinking.