Barbarian Days Read online

  • • •

  I SAY THAT MY DAD was not yet forty. The ages of adults are absurd, of course, to kids, the numbers too large, mostly meaningless. But my dad’s age was weirdly constant, in a way that even I knew was odd. You could see it in the family photo album. One moment he was a dark-haired, watchful boy, skating and sledding, playing trumpet in a dance band. Then, at twenty, discharged from the Navy, he was suddenly middle-aged. He smoked a pipe, wore a fedora, looked intent at a typewriter, contented at a chessboard. He married at twenty-three, became a father at twenty-four. That in itself wasn’t strange in my parents’ world, but my dad seemed to take on adulthood with unusual relish. He wanted to be forty. It wasn’t that he was a cautious, measured person; if anything, he was moody and rash. He just seemed to want to put youth behind him.

  I knew he had hated the Navy, the claustrophobia of shipboard life (the war was over—he had just missed it—but he was in the Pacific on an aircraft carrier). He hated, especially, the helplessness of the ordinary seaman. “They don’t call them petty officers for nothing,” he said. What I didn’t know then was that his early childhood had been a horrorshow. His birth parents were itinerant drunks. Their two sons ended up in the care of elderly aunts. My dad was lucky, landing in small-town Michigan with Martha Finnegan, a sweet-tempered schoolteacher, and her husband, a railroad engineer known as Will. But my father was haunted his entire life by the turmoil and terrors he suffered before his first set of parents gave him up.

  My parents were both, not surprisingly, abstemious drinkers. Even in the heyday of the martini, I never saw either one of them tipsy. One of their abiding fears was that their kids would be alcoholics.

  They wanted a big family, and they got off to a quick start with me. We lived in a fourth-floor walk-up on Second Avenue in Manhattan. They paid a dollar a month to park my baby carriage in the barbershop downstairs. They hoped to move to Levittown, the prototypical suburb, then brand-new, on Long Island—a tragic idea, in retrospect. Luckily, they moved to Los Angeles instead. My mother then had three consecutive miscarriages. One may have been a stillbirth. Single pregnant Catholic girls, dispatched by some wing of the church, looked after me. When my mother got pregnant with Kevin, she went to bed for six months. This all happened during the purported golden age.

  During that same age, my dad seemed to have a thousand jobs. He was a set electrician, a set carpenter, a gaffer, a gofer, on shows live and taped and stage. Of all his jobs, my favorite was gas station attendant. He worked at a Chevron station in Van Nuys—not far from Reseda, where we lived then—and we could deliver him lunch. He wore a white uniform to pump gas; all the attendants did. I thought the chevron insignia on the uniform’s starched short sleeves was dashing in the extreme. He worked as a stage manager on a children’s TV program called The Pinky Lee Show, which my mother and I watched mainly for glimpses of him offstage in his headset. Even I understood dimly that my father was frantic about supporting us, which was why he was nearly always at work. I also got, at some level, that even though he was our household hero, out in the big world wearing headsets and chevrons, he was also, in his own way, as dependent on my mother’s support as I was.

  We were dutiful, if not particularly enthusiastic, Catholics. Mass every Sunday, Saturday catechism for me, fish sticks on Friday. Then, around my thirteenth birthday, I received the sacrament of confirmation, becoming an adult in the eyes of the church, and was thunderstruck to hear my parents say that I was no longer required to go to Mass. That decision was now mine. Were they not worried about the state of my soul? Their evasive, ambiguous answers shocked me again. They had been big fans of Pope John XXIII. But they did not, I realized, actually believe in all the doctrine and prayers—all those Oblatios, Oratios, frightening Confiteors, and mealymouthed Acts of Contrition that I had been memorizing and struggling to understand since I was small. It was possible that they didn’t even believe in God. I immediately stopped going to Mass. God was not visibly upset. My parents continued to drag the little ones to church. Such hypocrisy! This joyful ditching of my religious obligations happened shortly before we moved to Hawaii.

  • • •

  AND SO, on a spring Sunday morning, I found myself slowly paddling back from Cliffs through the lagoon while my family sweated it out up at Star of the Sea in Waialae. The tide was low. My skeg gently bumped on the bigger rocks. Out on the mossy, exposed reef, wearing conical straw hats, Chinese ladies, or maybe they were Filipinas, bent, collecting eels and octopus in buckets. Waves broke here and there along the reef’s outer edge, too small to surf.

  I felt myself floating between two worlds. There was the ocean, effectively infinite, falling away forever to the horizon. This morning it was placid, its grip on me loose and languorous. But I was lashed to its moods now. The attachment felt limitless, irresistible. I no longer thought of waves being carved in celestial workshops. I was getting more hardheaded. Now I knew they originated in distant storms, which moved, as it were, upon the face of the deep. But my utter absorption in surfing had no rational content. It simply compelled me; there was a deep mine of beauty and wonder in it. Beyond that, I could not have explained why I did it. I knew vaguely that it filled a psychic cavity of some kind—connected, perhaps, with leaving the church, or with, more likely, the slow drift away from my family—and that it had replaced many things that came before it. I was a sunburnt pagan now. I felt privy to mysteries.

  The other world was land: everything that was not surfing. Books, girls, school, my family, friends who did not surf. “Society,” as I was learning to call it, and the exactions of Mr. Responsible. Hands folded under my chin, I drifted. A bruise-colored cloud hung over Koko Head. A transistor radio twanged on a seawall where a Hawaiian family picnicked on the sand. The sun-warmed shallow water had a strange boiled-vegetable taste. The moment was immense, still, glittering, mundane. I tried to fix each of its parts in memory. I did not consider, even passingly, that I had a choice when it came to surfing. My enchantment would take me where it would.

  • • •

  HERE’S HOW RIDABLE WAVES FORM. A storm out at sea churns the surface, creating chop—smaller and then larger disorganized wavelets, which amalgamate, with enough wind, into heavy seas. What we are waiting for on distant coasts is the energy that escapes from the storm, radiating outward into calmer waters in the form of wave trains—groups of waves, increasingly organized, that travel together. Each wave is a column of orbiting energy, most of it below the surface. All the wave trains produced by a storm constitute what surfers call a swell. The swell can travel thousands of miles. The more powerful the storm, the farther the swell may travel. As it travels, it becomes more organized—the distance between each wave in a train, known as the interval, increases. In a long-interval train, the orbiting energy in each wave may extend more than a thousand feet beneath the ocean surface. Such a train can pass easily through surface resistance like chop or other smaller, shallower swells that it crosses or overtakes.

  As waves from a swell approach a shoreline, their lower ends begin to feel the sea bottom. Wave trains become sets—groups of waves that are larger and longer-interval than their more locally generated cousins. The approaching waves refract (bend) in response to the shape of the sea bottom. The visible part of the wave grows, its orbiting energy pushed higher above the surface. The resistance offered by the sea bottom increases as the water gets shallower, slowing the progress of the lowest part of the wave. The wave above the surface steepens. Finally, it becomes unstable and prepares to topple forward—to break. The rule of thumb is that it will break when the wave height reaches 80 percent of the water’s depth—an eight-foot wave will break in ten feet of water. But many factors, some of them endlessly subtle—wind, bottom contour, swell angle, currents—determine exactly where and how each wave breaks. As surfers, we’re just hoping that it has a catchable moment (a takeoff point), and a ridable face, and that it doesn’t break all at once (close out) b
ut instead breaks gradually, successively (peels), in one direction or the other (left or right), allowing us to travel roughly parallel to the shore, riding the face, for a while, in that spot, in that moment, just before it breaks.

  • • •

  THE SURF CHANGED as spring progressed. There were more swells from the south, which meant more good days at Cliffs. Patterson’s, the gentle wave between wide panels of exposed reef out in front of our house, started breaking consistently and a new group of surfers materialized to ride it—old guys, girls, beginners. Roddy’s younger brother, John, came too. He was nine or ten, and fantastically nimble. My brother Kevin began to show some interest in surfing, perhaps influenced by John, who was about his age and kept his board in our yard. I was surprised. Kevin was a terrific swimmer. He had been diving into the deep end of the swimming pool since he was eighteen months old. Pigeon-toed, he had a piscine ease in water, and was an expert bodysurfer already at nine. But he had always professed indifference to my obsession: it was my thing; it would not be his. But now he paddled out at Patterson’s on a borrowed board and within days was catching waves, standing, turning. He was clearly a natural. We found him a used board, an old Surfboards Hawaii tanker, for ten dollars. I was proud and thrilled. The future suddenly had a different tinge.

  With the first big south swell of the season, the Bomb broke. I stood with Roddy on the seawall to watch it. The main peak was so far out, we could see only the first wave of each set break. After that, it was all just shining walls of whitewater and spray. The surf was giant—at least ten feet, the biggest waves I had ever seen. Roddy was silent, staring desolately out to sea. Surely this was out of the question for him. There were two guys out there. Did he know them?

  He did.

  Who were they?

  Wayne Santos, he sighed, and Leslie Wong.

  The surfers were only occasionally visible, but we saw each of them drop into monsters. They surfed intently but stylishly, didn’t fall, and each kicked out at high speed over the reef beyond Patterson’s. Wong and Santos were amazing surfers. They were also adults. Glenn and Ford were out at Cliffs. Surely this wasn’t the day for Roddy to make his debut at the Bomb. Sighing deeply, he agreed it wasn’t. We tossed our boards in the water and started the long paddle to Cliffs, which would be plenty big for us on a swell like this.

  Kevin got hurt—hit in the back by a board at Patterson’s. I heard people calling me. It’s your brother. I paddled in, frantic, and found him on the beach, people standing around him. He looked bad—pale, in shock. Apparently he had gotten the wind completely knocked out of him. Little John Kaulukukui had saved him from drowning. Kevin was still breathing heavily, coughing, crying. We carried him up to the house. Everything hurt, he said, every movement. Mom cleaned him up, calmed him down, and put him to bed. I went back out surfing. I figured he would be back in the water in a few days. But Kevin never surfed again. He did resume bodysurfing, and as a teenager became one of the hotshots at Makapu‘u and Sandy Beach, two serious bodysurfing spots on the eastern tip of Oahu. As an adult, he has had back trouble. Recently an orthopedist, looking at a spinal X-ray, asked him what exactly had happened when he was a child. It looked like he had suffered a massive fracture.

  • • •

  EVERY SCHOOL HAD A BULL—a toughest guy. Kids from different schools would ask each other, Who da bull at your school? The bull at Kaimuki Intermediate when I arrived was a guy named, unbelievably, the Bear. It was like some bad Wall Street joke—Da Bear was Da Bull—except nobody had heard of Wall Street. The Bear was huge, naturally. He looked about thirty-five. He seemed benign, even befuddled. He was Samoan, I think. He was always surrounded by a deferential retinue, like a Mafia don. But the Bear’s group dressed like slobs—they may actually have inspired my early impression of Kaimuki “natives” as poor and raggedy. They looked, really, like sanitation workers who had just finished work and were looking forward to that first beer. They were all far too old for junior high. Scary-looking but usually in the safe middle distance, they seemed timeless.

  Then something happened. It had nothing to do with the Bear, but it caused him to be deposed. And for me, it changed everything. I didn’t see how it started, exactly, although I was right there. It was lunchtime. The In Crowd was in its usual spot. I was talking to Lisa, with the usual stars no doubt in my eyes. Lurch, the haole outcast giant, passed by. Somebody said something, and Lurch replied. He had a deep, shy voice and he did look like the TV character he’d been cruelly named after—the lugubrious butler on The Addams Family. He had sad eyes, a broad forehead, a wisp of mustache, and he walked hunched over, hoping to disguise his height. Normally he skulked away from insults, but this time something must have gotten under his skin. He stopped. Glenn was standing near him. He told Lurch to keep moving. Lurch didn’t move. Glenn approached him. They got into a shoving match. Then they started throwing punches.

  It was a strange sight, a comic mismatch. Glenn wasn’t short, but Lurch was a full foot taller. Glenn couldn’t reach his opponent’s chin except by getting in very close. Lurch was clumsy and couldn’t land a punch, but he saw his chance, wrapped Glenn in a bear hug, then lifted him off his feet. He spun Glenn against his chest, one huge arm around his neck. Now the gathering crowd could see Glenn’s face. Lurch was choking him, really choking him. Glenn’s eyes bugged out. It was clear that he couldn’t breathe. He was thrashing, but Lurch’s grip was unbreakable. A very long moment passed, with Lisa screaming, Glenn thrashing, and no one else moving.

  Ford Takara appeared. He walked up to Lurch, cocked a fist quickly, and hit him very hard under the jaw. Lurch’s eyes rolled up in his head. He dropped Glenn. Then he collapsed himself, falling straight down, and as he fell Ford landed a second shot to his temple. Then the truly weird thing happened. Ford led the gasping, injured Glenn away, and the In Crowd set upon the fallen Lurch. We kicked, punched, scratched. Lurch, probably more from despair than physical incapacity, put up little defense. I remember Edie, Mike’s sister, raking his arms with her nails, then lifting her hands triumphantly, like a fairytale harpy, to show the blood she had drawn. Other girls were gouging at his face, pulling his hair. This blood-frenzy went on for a good while until the cry went up, “Chock!” We scattered. Mr. Chock was the school’s vice principal for discipline, and he was hurrying to the scene.

  When did I realize that I had taken part in a disgusting crime? Not soon. In the immediate aftermath, I was elated. We had defeated the evil giant, or some such crap. In retrospect, I had perhaps exorcised for myself some of the terrors of life without a gang—my time at the business end of a two-by-four, say. Of course, Ford was the hero of the day. And his performance had been so dramatic, so decisive, that people were already starting to say he was the new bull of Kaimuki. I found that confusing. Would he not have to fight the Bear to claim that title? Apparently not. These things turned on popular emotion, not organized competition. But did Ford even want to be the bull? I doubted it, and I knew him better than all the kids who were just learning his name did. Still, maybe there was a Ford I didn’t know—a killer, who craved power. There was clearly a me I didn’t know—a rabid rodent of some type.

  The official fallout from the mauling of Lurch was asymmetrical. Ford was not punished. Lurch became scarce around school. Glenn became a wanted man. The rest of us were not punished, although Mr. Chock seemed to come around more and give us long looks known locally as “da stink eye.” Glenn ran away from home. Mike, always good for an escapade outside the law, became Glenn’s accomplice, helping him hide. The two of them would appear brazenly on campus at lunchtime to show the colors. Mr. Chock would come barreling down the road in his car, chasing the two boys across the cemetery and into the kiawe grove where the Kaulukukuis lived. Cop cars would sometimes join the hunt. This cat-and-mouse seemed to go on for weeks, although it was probably just a few days.

  • • •

  STEVE, WHO LOVED THE KINKS, was over at
our little house. He surfed competently, and we were changing into trunks, headed out to Patterson’s.

  His fiery contempt for Oahu aside, Steve was a sweet kid. He was brown-skinned and pigeon-breasted, with a tiny body, a big square head, enormous eyes, and a middle-class command of English. His father was a rich, grumpy haole, and his dark-skinned birth mother long gone. Like Roddy, Steve hated his stepmother, who was Asian. They lived in Kahala. Steve’s worldliness let him pass as haole—he certainly wasn’t anything else. But he had a gift for mimicry, and he could speak many brands of pidgin.

  “I like see,” he said, in a voice that was part geisha, part pure island naïf. And with that he lifted my T-shirt and studied my bare boy parts. I was too shocked to react. “Nice,” he said softly, then dropped my shirt.

  I was in a phase of desperate shame about my balky puberty and could not take the compliment. Steve’s suave sensuality was from some borderless, unknown world.