Barbarian Days Read online

  I won the rematch, I think. Then Tino kicked my ass, no questions asked.

  There were more fights, including a multiday brawl with a Chinese kid in my agriculture class who refused to give up even when I had his face shoved deep in the red mud of the lettuce patch. This bitter tussle went on for a week. It resumed each afternoon, and never produced a winner. The other boys in the class, enjoying the show, made sure that the teacher, if he ever came round, didn’t catch us at it.

  I don’t know what my parents thought. Cuts and bruises, even black eyes, could be explained. Football, surfing, something. My hunch, which seems right in retrospect, was that they couldn’t help, so I told them nothing.

  A racist gang came to my rescue. They called themselves the In Crowd. They were haoles and, their laughable gang name notwithstanding, they were impressively bad. Their leader was a jolly, dissolute, hoarse-voiced, broken-toothed kid named Mike. He was not physically imposing, but he shambled around school with a rowdy fearlessness that seemed to give everyone but the largest Samoans pause. Mike’s true home, one came to understand, was a juvenile detention center somewhere—this schoolgoing was just a furlough, which he intended to make the most of. He had a younger sister, Edie, who was blond and skinny and wild, and their house in Kaimuki was the In Crowd’s clubhouse. At school they gathered under a tall monkeypod tree on a red-dirt hill behind the unpainted bungalow where I took typing. My induction was informal. Mike and his buddies simply let me know I was welcome to join them under the monkeypod. And it was from the In Crowd kids, who actually seemed to include more girls than boys, that I began to learn, first, the broad outlines, and then the minutiae, of the local racial setup. Our main enemies, I came to know, were the “mokes”—which seemed to mean anyone dark and tough.

  “You been beefin’ with mokes already,” Mike told me.

  That was true, I realized.

  But my fighting career soon tailed off. People seemed to know I was now part of the haole gang, and elected to pick on other kids. Even Freitas in wood shop started easing up on me. But had he really put away his two-by-four? It was hard to imagine he would be worried by the In Crowd.

  • • •

  DISCREETLY, I STUDIED the surfing of some of the regulars at Cliffs—the ones who seemed to read the wave best, who found the speed pockets and wheeled their boards so neatly through their turns. My first impression was confirmed: I had never seen such smoothness. Hand movements were strikingly in synch with feet. Knees were more deeply bent than in the surfing I was used to, hips looser. There wasn’t much nose-riding, which was the subspecialty rage at the time on the mainland and required scurrying, when the opportunity arose, to the front of one’s board—hanging five, hanging ten, defying the obvious physics of flotation and glide. I didn’t know it then, but what I was looking at was classic Island style. I just took my mental notes from the channel, and began, without thinking about it, to walk the nose less.

  There were a few young guys, including one wiry, straight-backed kid who looked to be about my age. He stayed away from the main peak, riding peripheral waves. But I craned to see what he did. Even on the funky little waves he chose, I could see that he was shockingly quick and poised. He was the best surfer my age I had ever seen. He rode an unusually short, light, sharp-nosed board—a bone-white clear-finish Wardy. He caught me watching him, and he seemed as embarrassed as I was. He paddled furiously past me, looking affronted. I tried to stay out of his way after that. But the next day he cocked his chin in greeting. I hoped my happiness didn’t show. Then, a few days later, he spoke.

  “Mo’ bettah that side,” he said, throwing his eyes to the west as we pushed through a small set. It was an invitation to join him at one of his obscure, uncrowded peaks. I didn’t need to be asked twice.

  His name was Roddy Kaulukukui. He was thirteen, same as me. “He’s so tan he looks Negro,” I wrote to my friend. Roddy and I traded waves warily, and then less warily. I could catch waves as well as he could, which was important, and I was learning the spot, which became something of a shared enterprise. As the two youngest guys at Cliffs, we were both, at least half-consciously, in the market for an age-mate. But Roddy didn’t come out there alone. He had two brothers and a sort of honorary third brother—a Japanese guy named Ford Takara. Roddy’s older brother, Glenn, was a lineup mainstay. Glenn and Ford were out every day. They were only a year older than us, but both of them could compete with anybody in the main peak. Glenn in particular was a superb surfer, with a style that was already flowing and beautiful. Their father, Glenn Sr., also surfed, as did their little brother, John, though he was too young for Cliffs.

  Roddy began to fill me in on who some of the other guys were. The fat guy who appeared on bigger days, taking off far outside and ripping so hard that the rest of us stopped surfing to watch, was Ben Aipa, he said. (Years later, Aipa photos and stories began to fill the mags.) The Chinese guy who showed up on the biggest day I had seen yet at Cliffs—a solid, out-of-season south swell on a windless, overcast afternoon—was Leslie Wong. He had a silky style, and he only deigned to surf Cliffs when it was exceptionally good. Leslie Wong caught and pulled into the wave of the day, his back slightly arched, his arms relaxed, making the extremely difficult—no, come on, the ecstatic—look easy. When I grew up, I wanted to be Leslie Wong. Among the Cliffs regulars, I slowly got to know who was likely to waste a wave—fail to catch it, or fall off—and then how to quietly snag the wave myself without showing disrespect. Even in a mild-mannered crowd, it was important not to show up anyone.

  Day in, day out, Glenn Kaulukukui was my favorite surfer. From the moment he caught a wave, gliding catlike to his feet, I couldn’t take my eyes off the lines he drew, the speed he somehow found, the improvisations he came up with. He had a huge head, which seemed always to be slightly thrown back, and long hair, sun-bleached red, also thrown lushly back. He had thick lips, African-looking, black shoulders, and he moved with unusual elegance. But there was something else—call it wit, or irony—that accompanied his physical confidence and beauty, something bittersweet that allowed him, in all but the most demanding situations, to seem like he was both performing intently and, at the same time, laughing quietly at himself.

  He also laughed at me, though not unkindly. When I overpowered a kickout, trying to put a flourish on the end of a ride, slicing awkwardly over the shoulder and into parallel with his board in the channel, Glenn said, “Geev ’um, Bill. Geev ’um da lights.” Even I knew that this was a pidgin cliché—an overused exhortation. It was also a dense little piece of satire. He was mocking me and encouraging me, both. We paddled out together. When we were nearly outside, we watched Ford catch a set wave from a deep position and pick a clever line to thread through a pair of difficult sections. “Yeah, Fawd,” Glenn murmured appreciatively. “Spock dat.” Then he began to outsprint me toward the lineup.

  One afternoon Roddy asked where I lived. I pointed east, toward the shady cove inside Black Point. He told Glenn and Ford, then came back, looking abashed, with a request. Could they leave their boards at my house? I was happy for the company on the long paddle home. Our cottage had a tiny yard, with a stand of bamboo, thick and tall, hiding it from the street. We stashed our boards in the bamboo and washed off in the dark with a garden hose. Then the three of them left, wearing nothing but trunks, dripping wet, clearly stoked to be unburdened by boards, for distant Kaimuki.

  • • •

  THE IN CROWD’S RACISM was situationist, not doctrinaire. It seemed to have no historical pretensions—unlike, say, the skinheads who came along later claiming descent from Nazism and the Klan. Hawaii had seen plenty of white supremacism, particularly among its elites, but the In Crowd knew nothing of elites. Most of the kids were hardscrabble, living in straitened circumstances, though some had been kicked out of private schools and were simply in disgrace. Among Kaimuki Intermediate’s smattering of haole students, most were actually shunned by the In Crowd
as insufficiently cool. These unaffiliated haoles seemed to be mainly military kids. They all looked disoriented, scared. The two guys who had watched me fight the Freitases without offering help were among them. And so was a tremendously tall, silent, friendless boy whom people called Lurch.

  There were other haoles, I later realized, who were too smart to get involved in gang nonsense. These kids, most of them surfers from the Waikiki side of Diamond Head, knew how to keep low profiles when in the minority. They also knew losers when they saw them. And they had, in a pinch, their own mutual-assistance structures to draw on. But I was too clueless those first months to register their existence.

  Adolescent cool was, as ever, mostly a mystery, but physical strength (read: early puberty), self-confidence (special bonus points for defying adults), and taste in music and clothes all counted. I couldn’t see how I qualified in any category. I wasn’t big—indeed, puberty seemed, to my shame, to be eluding me. I wasn’t hip to fashion or music. I certainly wasn’t bad—I had never even been to jail. But I admired the spunk of the In Crowd kids, and I wasn’t inclined to question anybody who had my back.

  I thought the In Crowd’s main activity would be gang fighting, and there was certainly continual talk of impending warfare with various rival “moke” groups. But then Mike always seemed to be leading a peace delegation to some last-minute powwow, and bloodshed would be avoided through painstaking, face-saving diplomacy. Truces would be formalized by solemn underage drinking. Most of the group’s energy actually went into gossip, parties, petty theft and vandalism, and being obnoxious on the city bus after school. There were a number of pretty girls in the In Crowd, and I was serially smitten with each of them. Nobody in the gang surfed.

  • • •

  RODDY AND GLENN KAULUKUKUI and Ford Takara all went to Kaimuki Intermediate, it turned out. But I didn’t hang with them there. That was a feat, since the four of us spent nearly every afternoon and weekend together in the water, and Roddy was soon established as my new best friend. The Kaulukukuis lived at Fort Ruger, on the north slope of Diamond Head crater, near the cemetery that abutted our school. Glenn Sr. was in the Army, and their apartment was in an old military barracks tucked in a little kiawe grove below Diamond Head Road. Roddy and Glenn had lived on the island of Hawaii, which everybody called the Big Island. They had family there. Now they had a stepmother, and she and Roddy didn’t get along. She was Korean. Did I know what Koreans were like? Roddy was ready to fill me in.

  Confined to quarters after a fight with his stepmother, he poured out his misery in bitter whispers in the stifling room he shared with Glenn and John.

  I thought I knew something about misery: I was missing waves that afternoon in a show of solidarity. There wasn’t even a surf mag to leaf through while grimacing sympathetically. “Why he have to marry her?” Roddy keened.

  Glenn Sr. occasionally came surfing with us. He was a formidable character, heavily muscled, severe. He ordered his sons around, not bothering with niceties. He seemed to loosen up in the water, though. Sometimes he even laughed. He rode a huge board in a simple, old-fashioned style, drawing long lines, perfectly balanced, across the long walls at Cliffs. In his day, his sons told me proudly, he had surfed Waimea Bay.

  Waimea was on the North Shore. It was considered the heaviest big-wave spot in the world. I knew it only as a mythical place—a stage set, really, for the heroics of a few surf celebrities, hyped endlessly in the mags. Roddy and Glenn didn’t talk much about it, but to them Waimea was obviously a real place, and exceedingly serious business. You surfed it when you were ready. Most surfers, of course, would never be ready. But for Hawaiian kids like them, Waimea, and the other great North Shore breaks as well, lay ahead, each a question, a type of final exam.

  I had always assumed that only famous surfers rode Waimea. But now I saw that local fathers rode it too, and in time, perhaps, their sons would as well. These people never appeared in mainland magazines. And there were many families like the Kaulukukuis in Hawaii—multigenerational surfing families, ohanas rich in talent and tradition, known only to one another.

  Glenn Sr. reminded me, from the first time I saw him, of Liloa, the old monarch in a book I loved, Umi: The Hawaiian Boy Who Became a King. It was a children’s book, first given to my father, according to a faded flyleaf inscription, by two aunts who had bought it in Honolulu in 1939. The author, Robert Lee Eskridge, had also done the illustrations, which I thought magnificent. They were simple but fierce, like lushly colored woodcuts. They showed Umi and his younger brothers and their adventures in old Hawaii: sailing down mountainsides on morning-glory vines (“From vine to vine the boys slid with lightning speed”), diving into pools formed by lava tubes, crossing the sea in war canoes (“Slaves shall accompany Umi to his father’s palace in Waipio”). Some of the illustrations showed grown men, guards and warriors and courtiers, whose faces scared me—their stylized cruelty, in a pitiless world of all-powerful chiefs and quaking commoners. At least the features of Liloa, the king and Umi’s secret father, were softened at times by wisdom and paternal pride.

  Roddy believed in Pele. She was the Hawaiian goddess of fire. She lived, people said, on the Big Island, where she caused the volcanoes to erupt when she was displeased. She was famously jealous and violent, and Hawaiians tried to propitiate her with offerings of pork, fish, liquor. She was so famous that even tourists knew about her, but Roddy made it clear, when he professed his belief to me, that he wasn’t talking about the kitsch character. He meant a whole religious world, something from before the haoles came—a Hawaiian world with elaborate rules and taboos and secret, hard-won understandings about the land, the ocean, birds, fish, animals, and the gods. I took him seriously. I already knew, in rough outline, what had happened to the Hawaiians—how American missionaries and other haoles had subjugated them, stolen their lands, killed them en masse with diseases, and converted the survivors to Christianity. I felt no responsibility for this cruel dispossession, no liberal guilt, but I knew enough to keep my junior atheist’s mouth shut.

  We started surfing new spots together. Roddy wasn’t afraid of coral the way I was, and he showed me spots that broke among the reefs between my house and Cliffs. Most were only ridable at high tide, but some were little keyholes, slots between dry reef—sweet waves hiding in plain sight, essentially windproof. These breaks, Roddy said, were customarily named after the families who lived, or had once lived, in front of them—Patterson’s, Mahoney’s. There was also a big-wave spot, known as the Bomb, that broke outside Patterson’s. Glenn and Ford had ridden it once or twice. Roddy had not. I had seen waves feathering (their crests throwing spray as the swells steepened) out there on big days at low tide, but had never seen it big enough to break. Roddy talked about the Bomb in a hushed, strained voice. He was obviously working up to it.

  “This summer,” he said. “First big day.”

  In the meantime, we had Kaikoos. It was a deepwater break off Black Point, visible from the bottom of our lane. It was hard to line up, and always bigger than it looked, and I found it scary. Roddy led me out there the first time, paddling through a deep, cross-chopped channel that had been cut originally, he told me, by Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress, to serve a private yacht harbor that was still tucked into the cliff under her mansion. He pointed toward the shore, but I was too worried about the waves ahead to check out Doris Duke’s place.

  Thick, dark blue peaks seemed to jump up out of deep ocean, some of them frighteningly big. The lefts were short and easy, really just big drops, but Roddy said the rights were better, and he paddled farther east, deeper into the break. His temerity seemed to me insane. The rights looked closed out (unmakable), and terribly powerful, and even if you made one the ride would carry you straight into the big, hungry-looking rocks of outer Black Point. If you lost your board in there, you would never see it again. And where could you even swim in? I darted around, dodging peaks, way outside, half-hysterical, trying t
o keep an eye on Roddy. He seemed to be catching waves, though it was hard to tell. Finally, he paddled back to me, looking exhilarated, smirking at my agitation. He took pity on me, though, and said nothing.

  I later learned to like—not love—the rights at Kaikoos. The spot was often empty, but there were a few guys who knew how to ride it, and, watching them on good days from the Black Point rocks, I began to see the shape of the reef and how to avoid, with a little luck, catastrophe. Still, it was a gnarly spot by my standards, and when I bragged in letters to my friend in Los Angeles about riding this scary, deepwater peak, I was not above spinning tall tales about being carried, with Roddy, by huge currents halfway to Koko Head, which was miles away to the east. My detailed description of scooting through a big tube—the cavern formed by a hard-breaking wave—on a Kaikoos right contained, on the other hand, a whiff of authenticity. I still half remember that wave.

  • • •