1964 - SUMMER
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Someone told me it was good.
Someone is always telling you something.
I had not seen a swell coming our way and I had been scanning the signs, checking the lows and highs and looking for the beginnings of tropical storms and long range swells coming from the South Pacific. None of the atmospheric readings told me there were waves, but I rushed to the beach.
My definition of good and my informers were not the same. Waves were breaking somewhere on the planet but it wasn't at this beach. Waves don't have to be big to be fun but they have to have some zip to them, some power behind them. I looked out on a typical summer day, small slow mush piled with people pretending they were photo shots for surfing magazines.
I had psyched myself up to go surfing so surfing I was a- going. I saw Rallio's car which indicated he and probably Da man were somewhere around. I stood on the bluff and looked for them. Too far from the lineup to make out a face, I knew I could recognize both by the way they surfed. And not only those two. I spotted people I didn't personally know but had seen in action enough times to discern their identity from their surfing. Most people walk or run or move in a distinct manner. You can't always define it or describe it or even imitate it, but you can identify it when it's going down the street. Surfing style is like that also. Recognizing a couple of guys out in the water also made me want to go in, I didn't want to miss anything. Besides, I told myself, you never can tell.
It's true. You can go out on a nothing day and you take a bump that doesn't look any better than anything else rolling through and something happens. It catches the outward surge or strikes the sand just at the right moment in the tidal movement and the small two-foot breaker rises up another two feet and allows you to sneak inside the curl and you've got a gift ride that makes the price of admission worthwhile. All I could see in my mind's whirlpool was that freak wave and it was calling my name.
Since it was small surf and I'd been in much larger and more powerful waves I felt in control. I exuded control. I could turn these waves into vehicles of free expression. So with full confidence and on top of my game I turned and made my move. I paddled swiftly and hard to catch the small bump, I gathered my feet below me, rose and jerked my board towards the shoulder of the wave. A wave harnessed by man's technology could light cities. But do we have the ability to light cities with breaking surf? -- no. A most telling observation if I had cared to notice it. All it took was the introduction of a collateral factor to show me how little in control I was. I looked up and saw another rider plowing towards me. Faced with an obstacle in my path I could have opted to swing the board back in the opposite direction or bring the turn all the way around and over the wave. My thoughts ran like test patterns on the tube, snowy and without form. My brain locked my feet to the deck and I fell backward. Falling backward has the effect of launching your board forward, forward into the other surfer.
A surfing wave breaking on a beach break usually peaks in one place along the face and then breaks from that center outward. From the beach this is easily perceived but from the top of the wave on a day when the peak is shifting it is not always obvious how off-center a take-off is. I don't really know if I had gone right on a left breaking wave or the other guy had gone left on a right breaking wave. I'm not sure it mattered since I had compounded the mistake. As soon as the water drained out of my ears, I realized the other guy was ordering me off the beach. My board had made a beeline for shallow water and was spinning on a rock after running aground. I wasn't going anywhere and I told him so. The guy moved closer to me. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Damon coming in on his stomach.
It was good to have friends around, especially Da man. When I was younger I'd gotten in the way of an older guy and the big moron grabbed me by the neck and dunked me. If Damon had been there, he'd have jumped on that guy's back no matter how big he was and dug in and held on till the guy either killed him or gave up. Rallio was another matter altogether. I could never be sure he'd intervene in any kind of dispute. Intervention in anything but a great set was somehow beneath him. Mind you, I couldn't be sure he wouldn't, I just couldn't be sure he would. Damon slipped off his board.
Before Damon had time to raise his voice, Rallio appeared. He had managed to slide his board along a fair-shaped little wave, then he let the whitewater deposit him next to us. He looked good even in the soup. "You two are fighting over this slop? You both can't be that hard up, can you?"
The guy whined on about me going the wrong way on the wave but he had been defused. We were all looking out at the giant flat spot called the Pacific. It was not a day to fight over waves.
Rallio went to look for another wave while Damon followed me to shore where we found Snake sitting on his towel. "Live by the goofy-foot, die by the goofy-foot."
Snake was referring to the way I stood on a board. Most guys stand with their right leg on the tail so they faced a wave breaking to the right. (Right and left are determined by facing the beach.) I ride backside, facing a left, opposite of the majority. Since we all like to get a good look at the wave by facing it, occasionally, we pull into each other's path.
I stacked my board on top of Snake's knowing that the wax on his board was getting good and gritty with sand and not feeling too bad about that outcome. What to do with your board on the beach is always a tricky proposition. If you leave it deck up, the wax melts and runs off the board and if you turn it deck down, the next time out you rub your gut or knees sore on the deck where the softened wax has absorbed the sand grains.
"It sucks, been this way all day. You should have stayed out."
"I had to make sure the water was still wet."
Damon opened up a baggie and pinched a piece of grass onto some rolling papers, he rolled and sealed the joint with a lick of his tongue, lit it, held in a couple of lungfulls, and passed it on.
I was never a good smoker. I seldom could make it through a toke without coughing. And if I was stoned, I was unable to function. I wouldn't even consider going in the water with a brainful of THC. But I liked the social interaction of smoking, everyone focused on the same activity with a spirit of sharing the experience.
We watched Rallio nurse a wave into three feet of water and then make a pose like a one-legged flamingo before he fell off like he was a geek or something. "Nice kickout." Damon passed the smoke to him.
Rallio took it in his wet hand and carefully managed to quench it. "Goddamn it, you ruined it. Why the hell did you do that?" Damon dueled eyes with his brother.
Rallio thought Damon smoked too much and he wasn't shy about telling him even if Damon didn't hesitate to note the hypocrisy in Rallio's position usually by pointing to the beer can in his hand.
"No heroin addict ever started with heroin. They work their way up, starting with weed."
The dope had mellowed Snake and while it often turned the communication process to static in greater minds, in Snake it seemed to fine tune articulation, "Relax, plenty of heroin addicts started on mother's milk, you gonna ban breasts?"
Damon went for cruelty, "You're the one with the goddamn habit. How long do you think you could last away from the ocean? It's the only thing you know."
"You start out as a surfer," I was using my best apocalyptic voice, "soon you're mainlining seaweed, snorting sand. Then you hit bottom, Rallio. You're wearing black socks and shorts, spending your time combing the beach for change with a metal detector. Ugly, very ugly."
Even Rallio was laughing at himself, "Aw, screw you guys. Anyway, surfing's not a habit, it's a disease."
"From which there is no known cure."
"Surfing is the cure."
We agreed.
It was an argument all of us had heard from our parents, teachers and everyone else bound by age to tell us how the world functions. One thing always led to the inevitable other. It was cosmic certainty. And with that in mind you had to draw your line early. Let nothing cross because any weakness would lead to the impending exploitation.
The double whammy of economic catastrophe and social upheaval stalked the older generation's lives and it colored their conversations at us. It should be no surprise that all they wanted was stability, peace, contentment. But twenty years after World War II the desire for tranquillity had turned into a stifling sameness. It was evident in our suburban neighborhoods. The uniformity of our homes, schools, and our wants as sold to us by TV consumerism. Even the way they looked: the gray suits or blue collars, the en masse change in women's styles that only indicated the lack of individual style. Their heads were above the waterline but they feared the ripple that might shove water into their faces. And yet at the same time, as they ran to their supermarkets, bought the latest lawn care product or shine for their car, they believed that ten thousand years of civilization had pointed in their direction. Pointed personally at each and every one of them. Their crewcuts and high heels were at the end of the evolutionary chain.
Not that it wasn't something to behold when things were cranking along. The country was like the cars it produced. Big and steel-framed, not easily dented. Why you could jump on the hood of your family's wagon and it not even leave a mark, drive a baseball into its front window and it bounce right off. It had power to spare. You could hear it and feel it in the rumble of the engine. Sure you only went 65 or 60 with the kids in the car but you knew that the capability was there. The big V-8 exploded onto the highway and it was all you could do to rein it in. When you rode along you felt invincible, that no power on earth could sway you from your destiny. Every once in a while some guy on the block would buy a diminutive foreign car. So just to show him what he was missing you loosened the muffler and let them see the ignition fire strike from the tailpipe and then only half-jokingly threatened to race for pinks. Heaven help the guy if he tried to suggest that there were any benefits to him driving a small lightweight foreign deathtrap. To you and everyone else there was no alternative, there was no other way of living.
Surfers were throwbacks just by our presence. We were beach bums who had crossed the line, breached the barrier, knocked the first domino over, thrown the stone into the calm water. Perhaps if we didn't know our parents, we could have swallowed some of their grave pronouncements. It wasn't that it was bad, it was just irrelevant. We didn't want what they wanted and we'd had what they had to offer. We wanted more and not more of the same but more of the different.
When they told us about their hard work that produced "all of this" we didn't get it. It wasn't that it was unappealing, it just seemed to lead to getting more of "all of this". They were like misers so afraid their fortunes were going to disappear that they grimly continued to acquire more. Weekends were dedicated to the maintenance of the castle. Curses to the child who wanted to do something not designed to acquire or maintain, something like surfing.
My dad's idea of a family outing is a trip to the couch to watch TV together. He in his chair, she in her chair. The truth is, my parents are boring, as are everyone else's. But that's the idea. Go along, get along, stay along.
It was discovered you could measure happiness and you measured it by the things you accumulated. Our house was full of fixtures. Lamps and furniture all properly placed and attended. If it frayed, it was gone. I was like one of those fixtures, something to be polished and placed in its appropriate space in the house. Once in its place, it wasn't suppose to move.
That's why getting out of the house posed a particular challenge. "I'm going to the beach with Damon."
"Again. Can't you find anything more constructive to do?"
I felt no need to answer her rhetorical questions.
"You're not always going to surf. Why don't you take up a hobby that will serve you later in life? It's important to consider the future. Can't you ask that kid down the street to go with you?"
That was the real point. She didn't like Damon. He couldn't do anything socially for me. I was suppose to try and meet the right people.
But if I thought Damon and Rallio had it any better, I was sadly mistaken. There was a time when Damon and I were in his garage unsuccessfully trying to fix up a lawnmower engine. We had visions of putting it on some sort of frame and having ourselves a motorized vehicle.
Rallio came out the door with anger pushing at his back.
"When you get to be king of the castle you can make the laws, until then, you live by the king's rules," his father bellowed after him.
The door slammed shut and Rallio muttered as he blasted by us. "OK, King Shit, I'll remember that."
Damon didn't even look up, "Pass me the wrench." Perhaps Damon was embarrassed by Rallio, perhaps he was embarrassed by his father. Perhaps he was just accustomed to their battle.
I passed the wrench to Damon but didn't accompany it with any words.
Damon's old man scared me. There was a constant anger that seemed to simmer in him and I didn't like being around when it was boiling over. If Damon's father was frightening, Snake's old man was enough to make me pee in my pants, in part, because of Snake's description of him as a brutalizer and in part, because of the respect he garnered from us for having survived some Pacific Island hellhole during World War II. I only saw him twice, both times clad in an old fashioned armless undershirt slumped in front of the tube with a beer in his hand. According to Snake he was prone to rages. Something would set him off and he wouldn't come back till he had rumbled the walls and spewed an acrid tirade of hostility at everyone and everything before him. We had no real knowledge of internal struggles, of personalities dissolved in traumas, we only knew what we saw on TV.
Television is one dimensional. It is most suited to broadcasting sports and cartoons. The closer it stays to those formats the more universally appealing it is. Movies can be slightly more refined but they have to put forth a tremendous effort to make the leap and we weren't going to be in the audience if they were working that hard. We watched war movies. We knew Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima and Wake and Bataan. And our tour guide through that world was John Wayne. Perhaps the axiom does not hold true for females, but for a man, although he has but one mother, he has many fathers. John Wayne was father to us all. By the breadth of that popularity he took on a prominence beyond his scripted parts. He informed us as to how an American man walks and talks and commits himself to action. And how he sees the world, "there's them that's for us and there's them that's agin' us". We would have followed John Wayne anywhere.
Indeed, some blamed John Wayne for the path they took. But who did their father's, father's, father accuse for their jaunty departure into the Civil War or World War I? War was their noble cause. Their fears trite and silly, that their great adventure would end before they had their chance, that they wouldn't see action before the war concluded.
Snakes' father made him turn the set off every time a war flick screened. He told him "It ain't like that", told him nothing more, just that it "ain't like that." He had plenty of opportunity to yell at Snake because those movies were scheduled regularly. Network TV was still dazed from the realization that they could crank out inane comedy series and people would watch. Local TV followed behind the networks. The locals hadn't yet realized that the same people that first watched the inane comedy on the network channel would watch that same inane comedy several years later on local TV. That revelation must have made more than one network exec believe he pissed gold. But at that time, before widespread syndication, local TV had to come up with their own format and the old movie format was one of the cheapest. They called it the "Million Dollar Movie" or later, after inflation had set in, the same movies were featured on the "Ten Million Dollar Movie".
Snake's father's pronouncement that the movies weren't real bounced off us like shells off one of the extras. Since 5th grade we had been drawing battle scenes of carriers and destroyers on fire and planes being blown out of the sky. How could he tell us John Wayne wasn't real? John Wayne was more real than he.
I stayed late at the beach after most everyone had gone and caught the evening glass-off, the time just before dusk when the wind dies and the water becomes smooth again.
It was supper time for most people and for most fish. People and fish are alike in this regard, they can eat anytime but they particularly enjoy a meal just as the sun is setting.
Someone yelled, "Shark!"
Small, three-foot-long little guys we call sand sharks twist through waist deep water and are sometimes to be found dead on the beach. Everyone knows blues and grays lazily patrol right off the shelf but they don't mess with people. Giant squids are out there swimming with Moby Dick but we don't ever expect to see them coming on shore with a bib around their neck and carrying a knife and fork looking to dine out. Great whites are a different matter. When someone yells "shark" we see blood in the water and the remnants of limbs protruding from teeth. Surfers are on their menu. Don't bother telling us that attacks are cases of mistaken identity. I don't see any great drive to fit sharks with glasses. And by the time they've spit you out, you may be missing appendages that you've grown fond of.
The reality is that shark attacks in Southern California are non-existent. I've never seen one. No one I know has ever seen one. No one I know has ever heard of anyone who has seen one. Still, when everyone started paddling towards shore, I followed. I wasn't going to be the only buffet selection left in the water. I even thought I saw a dark shadow flit under me.