Barbarian Days Page 8
He was from Virginia, and he called my mother “ma’am” and grown men “sir.” He had thick, wavy black hair, olive skin, and a dark purple scar under one eye that he said had come from a hockey puck. He did play ice hockey, it turned out, but that didn’t stop me from imagining that the gash on his cheekbone was really a Civil War scar. Besides being in seventh grade—in junior high school!—Painter had a natural air of command, some pubic hair, two webbed toes that for some reason impressed me greatly, plus many ideas and swear words that were new to us. He also had an enviable indifference to pain that, along with his strength, allowed him to dominate our games, particularly the mainstay, tackle football. He quickly became the top dog in our little neighborhood pack, displacing a surly, sallow kid from Pittsburgh named Greg.
Painter liked to pick on me, even physically torture me—I was the youngest member of the pack—but he also took me under his wing. He joined a hockey team that played out of Tarzana Ice Rink. Tarzana—named after an actor resident who was one of the early movie Tarzans—was the next suburb east. Painter, once he had made the hockey team, persuaded me to try out. Hockey was not a big sport in Los Angeles then, and the members of our league’s far-flung teams tended to be kids recently moved to the area from Canada or Wisconsin, Scandinavians who could skate rings around us locals. Painter did what he could to sharpen my game, firing pucks at me in his garage. But I knew I had no hockey future—I still saw myself ending up most likely as a pass receiver for the Rams, although I was not ready to rule out pitching for the Dodgers. I only lasted one season on the ice.
But that season gave me the chance to see my father skate. He came down to the rink when he could to watch our early Saturday practices, and once or twice stayed for the first public session of the day. I had seen his skates, rusted and neglected, in our garage forever. They were old-fashioned speed skates, with extraordinarily long blades, Hans Brinker gear. The Tarzana Ice Rink had nothing like them, certainly. Now he got them down and polished them up, and after my practice we took to the fresh ice together. He skated bent forward at the waist, with his hands clasped behind him, pushing off effortlessly, smiling to himself. Slowly he picked up the pace, and the rink began to seem small as he took the straightaways in a few flashing strokes. The routine for public sessions was to alternate the mood and rules with each song on the rink’s P.A., so that Couples Only skated to sappy doo-wop, Girls Only skated to “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” and so on. Men and Boys Fast skated, for some reason, to Dion’s “Runaround Sue,” a song I loved, and I urged my dad to light the afterburners for those three minutes. He didn’t seem too sure about that, but he started pumping his arms and cross-stepping on the turns, and I was very sure that I had never seen anyone skate so fast. On the way home, I demanded tales of all the races he had won back in Michigan as a kid. Later I convinced myself that if it hadn’t been for World War II canceling the key Games, he would definitely have gone to the Olympics—if not as a skater, then as a miler, or a ski jumper.
• • •
STEVE PAINTER ALSO HELPED turn me toward surfing. His interest was unrelated to the old-school involvement with the ocean of people like the Beckets—or, for that matter, the Kaulukukuis. It derived instead from the fad that had swept America a few years before—the Gidget movies and their spin-offs, surf music, surf fashion. Large numbers of kids on both coasts had bought boards and started surfing. Magazines, particularly Surfer, had become the main conduit of the surf subculture’s self-celebration, and Painter and his junior-high friends read the mags avidly and talked, with increasing authority, in the new language they found there. Everything was “bitchen” or “boss” and anyone they didn’t esteem was a “kook” (an insult usually reserved for an incompetent surfer—the term derives from kuk, a Hawaiian word for excrement).
It didn’t strike me at the time, but it was telling that I never saw a copy of Surfer in the Beckets’ house. They would have been interested in it—hell, a friend of theirs from San Onofre had started it—but they undoubtedly had better things to do with seventy-five cents.
For most inlanders, the road to surfing ran through skateboarding. This was certainly true in Woodland Hills. We all got skateboards, and turned certain steep streets into skate parks. The emphasis was on speed, carving, kick turns, and tail spins, not jumps. Handstands were considered a bitchen trick, though hard on knuckles. The upper playground at my school turned out to have a long, bowled asphalt bank that provided a great facsimile of an ocean wave. From its apex behind the handball courts, it was a big, fast, relatively short right or, going the other way, a long, steep, perfectly tapered hundred-yard left. Skating the school bank on weekends was so exciting it felt illegal. Actually, it was—we had to climb the fence to get in. The pleasures of riding that bank, especially the left, which we called Ala Moana, were only a few notches below the thrill of riding a wave standing up at San Onofre.
Getting to the coast from Woodland Hills was difficult. It was twenty miles away, over the mountains. Painter and his friends were old enough to hitchhike; I wasn’t. My mother, with her passion for the beach, had started taking us to Will Rogers Beach State Park as soon as she got her own car. I must have been seven or eight then. The car was an elderly, sky-blue Chevy, and we used to drive through Topanga Canyon. Just before the canyon’s mouth, we would hit a wall of sea fog. As we turned south on Pacific Coast Highway, my mother would say, “Smell the ocean. Doesn’t it smell good?” I’d mumble, or say nothing. I never liked the smell of the ocean. Something was apparently wrong with me. A fishy stench enveloped the coast, seeming to emanate from the pilings under the flat-roofed houses jammed together on the ocean side of the road. My nose curled against it.
The ocean itself was another story. I waded into the waves at Will Rogers, diving under pummeling lines of foam, thrashing toward the main sandbar, where the brown walls of the big waves stood and broke. I couldn’t get enough of their rhythmic violence. They pulled you toward them like hungry giants. They drained the water off the bar as they drew to their full, awful height, then pitched forward and exploded. From underwater, the concussion was deeply satisfying. Waves were better than anything in books, better than movies, better even than a ride at Disneyland, because with them the charge of danger was uncontrived. It was real. And you could learn how to maneuver around it, how long to wait on the bottom, how to swim outside, beyond the break, and, eventually, how to bodysurf. I learned actual bodysurfing technique in Newport, watching and imitating Becket and his friends, but I got comfortable in waves at Will Rogers.
Still, it was not a proper surf spot, and there was little chance that outings with Mom would ever take us to one. But then my father developed an interest in Ventura, an old oil town forty miles north of Woodland Hills. Specifically, he noticed that one could buy an old duplex rental unit a few blocks from the beach in Ventura for eleven thousand dollars, which is what he did. After that, I spent what seemed like the majority of my weekends weeding and gardening in a cold sea breeze around that duplex on Ayala Street. Other modest investments followed, and then a leap into new-house construction: identical two-story rental duplexes, all with carports and a newfangled rough-wood exterior. Ventura had no allure then as a beach town—too cold and windy, too far from anything. But my father saw the future—freeways, a marina, overpopulation—and he talked friends into co-ventures that allowed him to keep building. Meanwhile, I began to notice that Ventura was wave-blessed. I had that vision over a chiliburger on Ventura Pier.
The Finnegans, Ventura, 1966
• • •
FOR MY ELEVENTH BIRTHDAY, my father took me to the Dave Sweet Surfboards shop on Olympic Boulevard, in Santa Monica. From the rack of used boards, I chose a solid, sunbrowned 9'0" with blue-green paneled rails and a fin built with at least eight different types of wood. It cost seventy dollars. I was five feet tall, weighed eighty pounds, and could not reach my arm around it. I carried it to the street on my head, feeling se
lf-conscious and scared of dropping the board, but as happy as I had ever been.
It wasn’t an easy winter, trying to learn to surf. Even though the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA” (“Let’s go surfin’ now, everybody’s learnin’ how”) was on the radio, I was the only kid at my backwater school who had a board. We spent most weekends in Ventura, so I got in the water regularly, but California Street was rocky and the water was painfully cold. I got a wetsuit, but it had short legs and no sleeves, and neoprene technology was still in its infancy. At best, the little wetsuit took some of the sharpest chill off the afternoon wind. My father liked to tell a story about a day when I got discouraged. From the warmth of the car, he had been watching me flounder—I imagine him smoking his pipe, wearing a big fluffy fisherman’s sweater. I came in, my feet and knees bleeding, stumbling across the rocks, dropping my board, humiliated and exhausted. He told me to go back out and catch three more waves. I refused. He insisted. I could ride them on my knees if necessary, he said. I was furious. But I went back out and caught the waves, and in his version of the story, that was when I became a surfer. If he hadn’t made me go back out that day, I would have quit. He was sure of that.
In the seventh grade, I finally moved on from the hill-girdled intimacy of my elementary school to an enormous, anonymous junior high out on the floor of the valley proper. There I started making friends on the basis of a shared interest in surfing. Rich Wood was the first. He was short, aloof, a bit roly-poly, sarcastic, a year older than me. But he had a tidy, graceful style that suited the long, satiny, gently folding waves at California Street, and he slipped into the scrum of a surrogate family—mine—with an ease that was surprising at first, considering how reserved he was, how little he had to say for himself. It made more sense after I met his family. His parents were a matched set of short, leathery golfers who were rarely around. Rich had a much older brother, and it seemed like their parents had already checked out on raising kids, moved on to some internal Florida. Rich’s big brother, Craig, could certainly have driven them to it. He was a hard-charging, muscle-bound hot-rodder of some sort, cocky and loud. He claimed to surf, but I never saw him in the water. Craig had named his penis Paco and he always had stories about Paco’s adventures with women.
“Paco been doing some damage, cabrón!”
When Rich started going with a girl, Craig would demand to smell his fingers when he came home from dates—he wanted to verify his kid brother’s sexual progress. Rich and Craig could not have been less alike.
Rich and I studied California Street together. He was strangely circumspect about where he had learned to surf. He had learned his chops somewhere, obviously. But he was vague. “Secos, County Line, Malibu. You know.” I didn’t, really, except from the mags and from Steve Painter. We applied ourselves, anyway, to California Street together—the lineups, the locals, the tides, the invisible ribs of rock under the dark kelpy water, all the idiosyncrasies of a long, somewhat tricky wave. Nobody spoke to us, and we found takeoff spots that were intermittent or overlooked and that suited our abilities, so that we could surf without interfering with anyone. But we also studied with fanatical intensity the moves of the top local guys, and discussed them into the night in our bunks in the duplex that my family had started using as a beach house. We got to know a few of their names: Mike Arrambide, Bobby Carlson, Terry Jones. How did Arrambide sideslip through all those middle sections? What was that crazy, quick-step first turn that Carlson did on the drop? Was he really switching stance (going from right-foot-forward to left-foot-forward)? Rich and I were still mastering the basics—clean takeoffs, hard turns, tight trimming, walking the nose—but we had to learn from the big guys because there were few kids our age at California Street, and none, we realized, who surfed better than us.
I actually got as much pleasure from watching Rich himself surf as from watching anyone else. His balance was solid, at times impeccable, his hands expressive, his footwork refined. He rode a big board that was pigmented a solid white. He got far less confident, less aggressive, when the surf was over four feet, but he had the makings of a small-wave master, and I was proud to surf with him. We would always be outsiders in small-town Ventura, but in time we were getting curt nods of acknowledgment in the water from some of the regulars.
My parents took to dropping us off at dawn, when it was often foggy and always glassy, and only picking us up in the late afternoon. There was no beach at C Street, as we learned to call it, just rocks and a low, crumbling bluff, huge oil storage tanks, grimy fields, and, farther up the point, some abandoned fairgrounds. Even farther up the point, in a grove of trees, was a hobo jungle, which meant you had to keep an eye out for shabby characters coming down the shore from that direction, since our towels and lunches were stashed in the rocks while we surfed. The onshore sea breeze usually sprang up and ruined the waves by lunchtime. That made for long afternoons huddling around driftwood fires under the bluff, waiting for our ride. Once, when the wind was particularly biting and wet, we dragged old tires into a pile and lit those. The heat was magnificent, but the thick, stinking column of black smoke blowing into town brought a police car, and we ran with our boards—not easy—and hid in the fairgrounds. At the end of those days, finally back at the duplex, Rich and I, still in our wetsuits, would share a hot outdoor shower, thirty seconds a turn, the one in the cold counting off the time aloud, then knocking the other guy out of the stream, until the hot ran out.
• • •
THE CLOSE, PAINSTAKING STUDY of a tiny patch of coast, every eddy and angle, even down to individual rocks, and in every combination of tide and wind and swell—a longitudinal study, through season after season—is the basic occupation of surfers at their local break. Getting a spot wired—truly understanding it—can take years. At very complex breaks, it’s a lifetime’s work, never completed. This is probably not what most people see, glancing seaward, noting surfers in the water, but it’s the first-order problem that we’re out there trying to solve: what are these waves doing, exactly, and what are they likely to do next? Before we can ride them, we have to read them, or at least make a credible start on the job.
Nearly all of what happens in the water is ineffable—language is no help. Wave judgment is fundamental, but how to unpack it? You’re sitting in a trough between waves, and you can’t see past the approaching swell, which will not become a wave you can catch. You start paddling upcoast and seaward. Why? If the moment were frozen, you could explain that, by your reckoning, there’s a fifty-fifty chance that the next wave will have a good takeoff spot about ten yards over and a little farther out from where you are now. This calculation is based on: your last two or three glimpses of the swells outside, each glimpse caught from the crest of a previous swell; the hundred-plus waves you have seen break in the past hour and a half; your cumulative experience of three or four hundred sessions at this spot, including fifteen or twenty days that were much like this one in terms of swell size, swell direction, wind speed, wind direction, tide, season, and sandbar configuration; the way the water seems to be moving across the bottom; the surface texture and the water color; and, beneath these elements, innumerable subcortical perceptions too subtle and fleeting to express. These last factors are like the ones that the ancient Polynesian navigators relied upon when, on the open seas, they used to lower themselves into the water between the outriggers on their canoes and let their testicles tell them where in the great ocean they were.
Of course, the moment can’t be frozen. And the decision whether to sprint-paddle against the current, following your hunch, or to stop and drift, gambling that the next wave will defy the odds and simply come to you, has to be made in an instant. And the deciding factors are just as likely to be non-oceanic—your mood, the state of your arm muscles, the deployment of other surfers. The role of the crowd is, in fact, often critical. Other surfers can signal approaching waves. You watch someone paddle over the top of a swell and you try to assess, in the last i
nstant before he disappears, what he sees outside. It helps if you know the paddler—whether he is liable to overreact to the sight of a big wave, whether he knows the spot well. Or you may look down the line, upcoast or downcoast, at someone who may have a better view of what’s in store for you than you have, and try to gauge his reaction to what he sees. He may even try to signal which way you should be moving—to give you a jump on whatever is bearing down on you. For the most part, though, the crowd is just a nuisance, a distraction, distorting your judgment while you jockey to get a wave to yourself.
At California Street, Rich Wood and I were just young apprentices. But we were serious about the work, which did not go unnoticed by the more experienced hands, who began to give us waves occasionally. The way Rich and I pooled our notes, studied each other, quietly competed—this too was, for me, fundamental. Surfing is a secret garden, not easily entered. My memory of learning a spot, of coming to know and understand a wave, is usually inseparable from the friend with whom I tried to climb its walls.
• • •
I TOOK OBSESSIVE CARE of my old Dave Sweet, fixing every ding, every shatter that cracked or broke the surface before it could soak up seawater. California Street, especially at high tide, was hard on boards. The basic ingredients of a ding-repair kit were polyester resin, catalyst, fiberglass cloth, and a block of polyurethane foam, but I slowly accumulated a workbench full of tools and supplies: saws, files, brushes, a power sander, all grades of wet and dry sandpaper, masking tape, acetone. I could do hot coats, gloss coats, quick-and-dirty overnight jobs, or patches so painstaking they became invisible. The elaborately inlaid fin on my beloved Sweet was always getting battered on rocks, and so I built up, over many nights in a cold garage, an inch-wide “bead” of fiberglass strands around its outer edge to protect it. It was the memory of similar labors, I believe, and the desire not to repeat them, that caused surfers to enlarge their reputations among other beachgoers as madmen by sprinting across sharp rocks after lost boards, unconcerned about damage to their feet.