Surfing Jamaica

STREET ART?

The woman I’m lucky enough to call my wife told me a fascinating story. Yesterday, she and a couple friends were walking down Essex Street. In the hubbub of the crowd, a man suddenly tapped her on the shoulder. “Pardon me miss, you’ve got ketchup all over you.” She looked down at her hip and sure enough, a streak of fresh bloodred ketchup. He quickly pulled a napkin out of his pocket and proceeded to wipe it off. It happened so fast that all my beloved, curvaceous wife could do was say, Thanks. After he whisked off down the street she was struck with a sense of violation. She was quite convinced that he was in fact the Ketchup Man: one pocket filled with pilfered ketchup packets from McDonalds or wherever, the other with napkins.

Being of the male gender, I understand the fascination with dribbling gooey substances over our intimate’s bodies. But on the street? Atop a pair of black jeans and black cotton tank top? I imagined him back in his dinghy hovel, stroking himself to this perverse, very public interaction.

The one good thing that came out of it was our idea. My wife is directing a TV show about street art. I’m going to assume the identity of Ketchup Man, and be interviewed as the brainchild behind this sick, original act. I’ve always loved attention, never quite had the balls or ingenuity to be a tagger, and now get to pose as this fictitious (or not) Ketchup Man. I’ll have a drawer full of ketchup in my dimly lit studio wallpapered with Hustler centerfolds and exhausted tubes of KY and the like. I’ll be unshaven and exploiting my paunch. I’ll make up tales of grateful women, bowing in thanks to my chivalrous work with the napkin. There’s something really lovely about the guy who slyly squirts the ketchup, then quickly offers to clean it up, don’t you think?

SHARK?

It’s been a busy year for shark attacks in Sydney. First, a navy diver is mauled by a large bull shark in Sydney Harbour while—get this—doing an “anti-terrorism training exercise.” The following day, the husband of a pregnant wife gets a good chunk of his arm bit off by a Great White while surfing the ever-popular South Bondi. On the way to the hospital, thinking he’s a goner, he instructs the surfer who rescued him to, “Tell Lisa that I love her.” He survives. Two weeks later, a fifteen-year-old kid is hit while surfing North Avalon with his father, losing a chunk of his leg and a whole lot of blood.

I got to experience the aftermath of this one morning at South Bondi. I’m straddling my borrowed 6’3” Warner thruster, marveling at the transparency of the turquoise water, when an overhead wave appears. Our cluster strokes out to meet it when suddenly a large, dark, unidentified corpus streaks across the looming swell then quickly disappears.

A wonderful moment follows. The two-dozen of us break into groups. There’s the terrified beginners who immediately spin around and stroke for shore, mewling hysterically about giant fins. There’s the calm and graceful bikini-clad girl, who politely asks her neighbors if it was indeed a shark. There’s the three or four stone-faced locals, who show not the slightest hint of fear, in fact huddle together as if preparing to take on whatever beast. And then there’s the rest of us, confused, quietly shit-scared, in a kind of limbo.

Throwing a shark into one’s immediate vicinity is a great litmus test. Primal fears surface. True colors come out. Some years back, a renowned surf photographer was shooting Teahupoo from a dinghy, his longtime girlfriend at his side, when suddenly a massive set came. In that terrifying moment when the heaving wave was about to swallow the boat he did not gallantly protect his girl, but rather dove for the bottom. Last I heard they were no longer together.

In the late ‘80s, my tourmates and I played a game called “Faces of Death,” in which we’d zap around beach towns in France, Spain, Portugal, and Australia pulling massive, screaming handbrake slides as close as possible to unsuspecting pedestrians, which drew some magnificent facial expressions as well as a few dives into nearby bushes. Once we pulled one on Top 16-ranked Dave Parmenter, who was notorious for his Clint Eastwood-like demeanor. Dave barely flinched. From this simulated near-death experience we concluded that he was the Real Deal.

I did not ponder these things as I bobbed in the waters of Bondi Beach, but rather sat with my feet on my board so as to eliminate dangling limbs. I scanned the depths and listened to my heartbeat, which sounded vaguely like the theme song from Jaws. And then finally the beast emerged, this time breaking the surface and doing a dolphin-like dart across a looming swell, revealing flaps and flippers and a shiny brown torso, a seal not a shark, thank god, and all went back to normal at Bondi.

BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HANDSOME MEN (or, Derek Rielly Talks About Sydney)

Derek Rielly is handsome, whip smart, and currently topping my “Men I’ll Sleep With When I Come Out Of The Closet” list. He’s also the founder of Stab, by far the most X-rated surf magazine in history. In my quest to get up to speed on 21^st century Sydney (as opposed to my dated, nostalgia-tinged version), I interviewed him after a sunny, offshore, double-overhead session at South Bronte. He wore a white headband, white vee-neck tee, Louis Vutton high-cut shorts, and snowy white tube socks pulled up to his knees. He resembled a late-‘70s Bjorn Borg with an Oscar Wilde wit. At one point he whipped out a ping-pong paddle.

Define Sydney’s personality, character, etc.

Like most joints, walk a few hundred metres down the road and you’ve gone from gold-rimmed, red lens aviator, sunshine yellow with vintage belt, electric blue RL Black Label shirt with epaulets and two breast pocket boat shoe-wearing gorgeousness to black polar fleece hoodies and tracksuit pants far too short and far too big. But, if we must generalise, Sydney is a shallow city where making it big is everything. There is no design consciousness or anything world-class except its fabulous harbor and northern peninsula.

Tell us about the tall poppy syndrome.

It exists only in the imagination. You get famous, you make a little money, and you start to get paranoid about who’s your real pals and who’s in it for the connection or to shower under your money. Are the famous above criticism?

Best and worst things about Sydney?

The architecture is ghastly. Wartime and pre-war shanties and morose apartment blocks abutting astonishingly ordinary high-rises and developer Meriton’s crude attempts at dense housing. That said, I do understand the basic concept of the psychology of taste and realise beautiful Sydneysiders may wish to commune with their ugly side. The weather is fabulous. The women are all-time. The drugs are expensive. The food is great, and great in the quality-produce kinda way, not in the Michelin Hat kinda way, but that’s here as well. The waves are varied, but rarely of excellent quality.

Anything else that might help the foreign surfer better understand Australia?

If you want to understand Australia, you can apply the usual template over it, i.e., big cities are inclusive and exciting while the outer areas are insular and dull. But, it’s these dull places where you’ll find good waves. Australians like to fight and root at night. If we can’t get a root we get furious. Livid, even. And then we fight.

BROTHERLY LOVE (Of The Drunk and Half-Naked Sort)

Above, the Fabulous Marshall Brothers share a wave at Santa Monica Pier…

Perform a sort of disco dance in the shorebreak…

Smile handsomely for the camera…

Knock back beer by the carton-ful in Japan and stir up all kinds of fun…

Then express their love for each other on the Kamakura street.

Trace and Chad are the founders of the GLSA (Gay & Lesbian Surfing Association). Their motto: “Come on in, the water’s just fine!”

BOOKWORM

My fascination with KCRW’s “Bookworm” began on that manic stretch of eastbound 10 between Fairfax and La Brea. I was in the #2 lane, infuriated at a certain frosted Escalade with vanity plates, when Michael Silverblatt’s slightly nasal but oddly compelling voice came over the airwaves and saved me from road rage. He was talking to writer Jonathan Lethem about his latest book, and topics bounced from intellectual property to advertising to Los Angeles to Emo. There was something incredibly personal about their dialogue, as if the conversation could go anywhere. From there I became a “Bookworm” junkie, downloading and lapping up interviews with Norman Mailer, John Updike, David Foster Wallace, Paul Theroux, Salman Rushdie, Joan Didion, et al. I found myself learning as much from Michael as I did from his subjects.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Michael’s early love of books and literature was guided by his parents, a dedicated fourth grade teacher, and congenitally poor eyesight (“I liked reading because when a book was in front of my face, it completely occupied the field of vision.”). He went to college at the State University of New York, where he was exposed to “a passion of ideas, politics, literature.” In grad school at John Hopkins University, however, he became disillusioned with academic life. He moved to Los Angeles in 1980, where he wrote screenplays, worked at bookstores, and read voraciously.

In 1988, at a dinner party, he was overheard discussing Russian poetry by the general manager of KCRW, Ruth Seymour. She invited him to start the show that would become “Bookworm,” and the rest…is a rail against road rage.

This year marks Bookworm’s twentieth anniversary. To celebrate, I thought I’d talk to him about books, literature, education, and how we can become better readers. As the Bookworm jingle says, “You are a human animal. You are a very special breed. For you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.”

A tall, bespectacled man in his mid-fifties, Michael was gracious, passionate, and much like on air, willing to talk about anything. Along with introducing me to Angelini, his favorite Italian restaurant, he walked me through his Fairfax District office, which is a one-bedroom apartment converted into a library. It should be noted that books not only covered the floor-to-ceiling shelves, but could also be found in closets, cupboards, and sinks. It should also be noted that Norman Mailer called him “The Most Important Reader In America.”

Ladies and gentleman, Michael Silverblatt…

 On Bookworm:

“I came here as a reading geek. I wanted to talk week after week to writers who most spoke to me. But I realized very quickly that if I wanted listeners to try my books, I’d have to try theirs. It had to be a two-way street. And that’s what an interview is, too. An interview on the air is so much more than what gets said. You hear the laughter, the emotional flow. And it’s only then that the listener starts to feel comfortable and really listen. That’s the point at which they say, “I might read that book.” And I want to get the reader to that point. And it really involves a lot of give and take, a lot of emotional sharing.

I generally read about six to eight hours a day, and try to read the author’s complete work before I interview them. And you’d be surprised at how few authors have ever met someone who’s read everything they’ve written. I’m like a mirror to them. And then they start trying to see themselves in the mirror, and then we’re really in something like the equivalent of a psychoanalytic transaction between a person and their image, and that’s when you get the things that are generally interesting.

I think we have a spiritual and imaginal dimension that I never hear referred to, so I wanted my half-hour to be a place where every kind of seriousness about the value of life—its preciousness or its wastefulness, its insanity, its possibility—could be a valued subject for conversation. And I wanted listeners to say, ‘God, I never hear people talking about this.’”

On Reading and Unforgettable Language:

“Reading is the act of being alone with another person’s imagination, and hearing whatever that imagination wants to reveal to you. It’s a great condition for acceptance; for being willing to take in the unknowable, the surprising, the mysterious—that’s what I love. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s horrifying, sometimes it’s emotional, but most of all it’s unexpected. You can’t win a reader by telling a reader what he or she already knows. The memoir thinks it can, or thinks that somehow some spectacular story of drugs and incarceration or whatever—that that’s the unusual. The unusual is the unexplored aspect of the everyday with a writer who has the ear to recognize the unknown and to put it in a language that makes it unforgettable.

In the Nabokov book, Ada, when Van kisses Ada on the mouth, it’s a first, and it needs unforgettable language. And he thinks, ‘a hot boiled strawberry, still hot.’ Yes, that is your lover’s tongue in your mouth in your first taste of it! It has the lividness of the flesh, which is like the strawberry, and everything is there.

Those who keep alive to the moment by moment of emotion, and translate it into images that remain unforgettable—that is the hypnosis, the dream, of reading. Marilynne Robinson, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize winner Gilead, calls it ‘the continuous dream,’ that writing is putting the characters, the writer, and the reader in a dream that doesn’t break—you have entered the stream of the underground imagery that is with us every moment, waking or sleeping. A writer who is sensitized to that is writing unbroken, dreamlike, jewel-like prose, and that really is what we’re always looking for.

When you’re looking for the book to read, open the book up anywhere and see how many lines you have to go before you find an unexpected, surprising word. If you only have to go two lines before you find the word you wouldn’t have thought of but will never forget, that’s the book to take with you.”

On Writers and Their Inherent Comfort with The Uncomfortable:

“Those moments late at night when we’re all alone and we feel frightened—those are a writer’s moments. Those are the places where a writer begins; where the emotions get unsettled, where you want to explore a thing you’re too frightened to say but suddenly there it is… And that’s the moment when your ordinary non-writing person calls someone up, wants to get on the phone, wants to distance it.

Everyday we live surrounded by incongruous, often antithetical, opposing feelings. The writer is the person who is saying, ‘Look, the human is a grab bag of everything.’ Emerson says, ‘Consistency is the hobgoblin of small lives.’ We become consistent only by ruling so much of the human equation out. The writer wants to restore the density and richness—the impossibility—of that equation. We want to feel that our lives are magical, and to experience that magic is, to begin with, to recognize that, of the same person at the same moment, we love them and we hate them. We wish they would go away and we can’t bear to be without them. That is the state that language at its best is trying to describe. Two directly opposed things at the same time. That’s what a genius does.”

On Thrillers, Mysteries, Self-Help and Bestsellers:

“Books that make the bestseller list nowadays are mostly Thrillers and Mysteries, or in some way, are involved in Self-Help, telling you how to live a better life. Most great writers don’t like to give advice. Problems get examined, understood, felt—writing brings you close to an experience that can be understood through writing, but not solved through writing. If you think about it, Mysteries and Self-Help are looking for a solution. Can you solve the mystery? Can you solve the life problem? A writer isn’t really interested in that. Nothing is going to bring Romeo back to Juliet, but it’s one of the greatest love stories ever, because every moment is seen and felt in language that any of us can repeat, and cause someone else to fall in love.

It’s a paradox, but great writing is useless. It doesn’t get you on the airplane if you’re afraid to fly. It doesn’t put money in your account if you’re short. All it can do is connect you to the essence of life, which is moment by moment seeing, feeling, thinking, living, examining, reliving, dreaming. When people aren’t close to these things they’re robots. And most of the bestsellers are teaching robotics.”

On How To Become A Better Reader:

“One becomes a better reader mostly by reading. Always by keeping a dictionary at one’s side. Don’t look it up later, look it up right now. In the first years of reading, don’t read in bed before falling asleep; the book will be taken over by dreams. V.S. Pritchett used to say, ‘They’re called the Great Books because they’re greater than other books.’ They’re not called the great books because they’re hard or taught in school. It is possible that a Great Book, written 150 years ago, will no longer be great for these times. Sometimes books fall asleep. So if you read a book and you say, ‘I don’t like this,’ just put it aside, but go to another Great Book.

The most important thing is being able to tolerate incomprehension. We have a weird culture now because almost everyone who reads in America was taught that you never read what you don’t understand. In previous years, yeah, you were taught to read, but in addition to the reading assignment, the third grader would have stories by Edgar Allan Poe and essays by Emerson and poems by Longfellow—this is as recent as one’s grandparents. If you grow up doing this, you learn that the incomprehensible becomes comprehensible with time. Instead, people are nervous and terrified of not understanding something. They haven’t been taught how to sit and not understand something. So we have a whole nation of people who, if they don’t understand it right now, that’s it. Learning to sit with something a little above your level is something that Americans in general need to learn.

Another thing: When you’re starting a book, choose a day and sit down and don’t get up until you’ve read a hundred pages. If that’s preposterous to you, than read seventy pages.  This means sitting down for around three hours and developing a stamina to read a hundred pages. If you read a hundred pages in one sitting you’ll be committed to the book. If you can do that, you discover before long that a five-hundred page book is really fifteen hours, or five days. Suddenly War and Peace doesn’t seem like an unconquerable voyage into the unknown future.

I often say to people that reading is a form of meditation. You’re sitting and the eye is going from left to right, from left to right, from left to right—you’re doing the thing that anyone doing meditation is doing. Your metabolism changes. I think your blood flow changes. It’s really a fascinating state of mind.”

 On the Art Novel:

“I think literature runs against everything you’re taught as a child, which is essentially, ‘Don’t talk to strangers.’ Literature is hearing from strangers, and recognizing that to live in the world, you have to hear what the stranger has to say. A work of literature really has to say, ‘I’m going to be ugly and strange at times, but I am going to be so fascinating that it will be time worth spending. Because there’s a world about which you do not know, and don’t we want to enter another world, aren’t we tired of what we know?’

A great artist digresses. When we think of digression we think of triviality, someone who can’t stop talking. But a great artist knows there’s no such thing as digression. You’re talking about the same thing, ultimately, all the time. William H. Gass, a great critic and novelist, made the bon mot, the epigram, ‘A pork chop thrown into the garbage is garbage. But a pork chop thrown into Proust is Proust.’ In a great artist anything that the artist puts it will belong, ultimately, because the artist has a dense and eternal sense of form. Whereas the popular artist tends to have a sense of pace.

The kind of novel that I like most, for better or for worse, is what I would call the Art Novel. It’s often without social context; it may even be without characters. The art novel believes—and I’m in agreement with this—that what you believe or identify with when you’re reading a great novel, is not any character, but with the prose, with what it’s trying to make you believe, and then the way it rips your beliefs down. And in the process of seeing language being used first as a telling medium, then as a convincing medium, and then as a destructive medium, in which what you accepted is revealed to not have actual existence, but only philosophical or notional existence.”

On Spreading the Good Word:

“I regard myself as sort of like a pilgrim. I’m here to help spread the culture of the word and the book and the generosity of the human imagination. The imagination is boundless. The imagination can be infinitely extended. The imagination can reduce things a hundred times its size.

When I came in I thought it was all about reading, and more people should read. That’s not really the way I think anymore. I think now more people should be hearing about the unusual truths of emotion and language that occur, among other places, in literature, in great art, in movies—that they should be growing more comfortable with how strange we are inside.”

On Developing Brain Space:

“The literary culture, as I knew it as a young person, is probably over. And it’s not a happy thing. People are not as smart—I’m not as smart—as the people I first started listening to when I started reading writers. Hearing these people talk was thrilling. They’d get angry and passionate, or funny, or they’d really take each other by the neck verbally and strangle each other. It was incredible to hear this passion of ideas, politics, literature.

And this is what Obama is talking about. We have to educate our kids again. Education is not being stressed. The qualities that went into being a great teacher are no longer valued. The idea of college as being a place where you go to make social contacts—this has to go, too. Or we’ll be living in a greedy, stupid, unkind, inhumane world. It’s a real matter of simple human choice.

People who were not made to memorize things when they were kids don’t have the brain capacity of memory. That’s something that gets developed. When you do that, it doesn’t matter whether you remember what you’ve memorized, it’s that you’ve done it and held it in your mind for a month or so, until the test or what have you. It’s that you’ve developed the mental space for it. It’s about developing the intellective capacity to know something.”

On Death and Resurrection:

“Is literature dead? No. There are always people who love it and love it passionately. The question is: What will cause it to resurrect? That it will seems unquestionable to me. The kind of imagination in novels, stories, poems, plays, essays—this is ineradicable. It has had a significant downgrade but the level of astonishment people have in reciting these statistics is an indication of how vibrant and vital these things had been, and that we simply await the return of their vitality. Everything dies; many things come back, often in revitalized and fuller forms.

This is a time, one of many really, where the culture feels itself to be dying. You ask someone about reading—dying. About the earth—dying. About Broadway shows—dying. About records and CDs—dying. This is the great era of culture death. That’s a fascinating phenomenon. And it will be read about in the future.”

Michael Silverblatt recommends:

—David Foster Wallace 

—Joan Didion

—William H. Gass 

—Marilynne Robinson

—John Barth

—Donald Barthelme 

—Jorie Graham  

—John Ashbery 

—Thomas Pynchon 

—Nicole Krauss

 —Junot Diaz

 —Annie Proulx

For More Bookworm visit: http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw

This piece originally appeared in the Seven-Year Anniversary issue of Malibu magazine: http://www.malibumag.com/

TWELVE GLORIOUS DAYS IN SYDNEY (And Six Beautiful Bastards)

Andrew Farrell lives in South Bondi. He’s a Series Producer of a TV show called “Deadly Women,” which makes his life quite interesting. When he’s not lapping up the surf and sunshine, he’s researching gruesome murders committed by women. 

Andrew is one of many colorful characters I imbibed red wine with during my 12 glorious days in Sydney. Below are a few more –

Derek Hynd rides finless surfboards. Because of the drag reduction, he flies across the wave at a faster pace than most of his three-finned brethren. He also spins 360s, like lots of them, sometimes six or eight or ten per wave.

Above is a page from one of the many notebooks he kept when he worked as a coach/journalist on the ASP tour. In the late 80s I had the perverse pleasure of being one of his understudies. There was no gray in Derek’s direction. “You’re up on the first wave or you can kiss this heat goodbye,”  he’d warn me at water’s edge as I was about to do battle with superior opponents, often wagging his pen in my face. At the time I thought I was learning how to be a competitive surfer, but with hindsight I was learning about writing.

Jay Harrison is a photog/expat Kiwi who, after a decade or so run in NYC, moved to Bronte, where he lives with his delightful ladyfriend, Alise. I stayed on their couch. Ate their muesli. Drank their wine. And felt very grateful for their hospitality. I also watched Jay pull into a heaving barrel at South Bronte.

Then there’s the eternally smiling and charismatic Derek Rielly, lover of fine womens and prolific writer for Stab. I asked him to describe Sydney’s civic character. Here’s what he said:  ”What a multi-faceted question this is. Like most joints, walk a few hundred meters down the road and you’ve gone from gold-rimmed, red lens aviator, sunshine yellow with vintage belt, electric blue RL Black Label shirt with epaulets and two breast pocket boat shoe-wearing gorgeousness to black polar fleece hoodies and tracksuit pants far too short and far too big. But, if we must generalize, Sydney is a shallow city where making it big is everything. There is no design consciousness or anything world-class except its fabulous harbor and northern peninsula.”

Aside from being a handsome bastard with a swift cutback, Kane Skenner is a fashion photographer and collector of rare/out-of-print books. The boards in the background are all his, as is the moody storm-over-sea photo, which he shot from a panoramic perch over Whale Beach, Kane’s former home and occassional stomping ground.

Jack McCoy is hard at work on a film that traces surfing’s roots, though not so much the stuff available via google, wikipedia, etc, but the lesser known, “oral history” version. I saw bits and pieces when I stayed in his Avalon studio. It looks to be something magnificent.

The above beautiful bastards helped make my 12 days in Sydney unforgettable, and I feel lucky to call them friends.

POOL, AS IN SKATEBOARD

I was ten-years-old and Dogtown-obsessed, and though I’d yet to actually step foot on a surfboard, I’d seen Super Session twice and had Gerry Lopez’ tube riding stance so deeply etched in my brain that the plum tree that created a tunnel over the sidewalk at the end of our street was less flora and concrete than it was the Banzai Pipeline. My two older brothers and I rode Logan Earth Skis, Bennett trucks, and Road Rider 4s and wore Vans deck shoes, Op cord shorts, and long sleeve tees deliberately frayed and oversized because that’s what Alva, Jay-boy, Biniak and Shogo wore. We were middle class valley kids trying to look poor and our scabby knees, puka shell necklaces and sweat-matted hair parted way off to the side were badges of defiance.

     We listened to Zep, Nugent and Peter Frampton, and skated Toe Nails, the Toilet Bowl and Jungleland. On weekends, when my mom was visiting her twin sister in West LA, we’d get dropped off at Kenter, Revere or Bellagio—schools with wave-like banks and hostile locals. We’d made a pact that should anyone ask, we’d say we lived in Santa Monica. I still remember my well-rehearsed response: “26^th and Wilshire. I go to Franklin, my bros go to Lincoln.” It was disastrously uncool to admit you were from the valley.

     But there was another equally depressing issue gnawing at me, and this was the fact that I’d never skated a pool. Kevin had once, Steven had sort of, but for reasons related to orthodontist appointments, fishing engagements, or after school specials that had seduced me at precisely the wrong times, I’d always missed out. Pools were like good waves—they’d happen for a fleeting couple of hours. If you were there you scored. If you weren’t you had to hear about it for weeks on end. And while classic surf sessions are generally killed by boring stuff like onshore winds or shifting tides or dropping swell, pool sessions came to abrupt, dramatic finishes that often involved irate homeowners, fang-bearing German shepherds, and billy club-wielding cops—huge street cred on the elementary school campus, in other words.

     The Box Pool’s appeal was twofold. It was located in the backyard of an abandoned house off Sunset not far from the Playboy mansion, and I was being taken there by my older cousin Jeff, who surfed, smoked pot, and was slated for a “Who’s Hot” in next month’s issue of Skateboarder.

     We rode the Wilshire bus to Westwood, skated across UCLA, scurried along a dangerously narrow and curvaceous back street, and arrived at the bottom of an ice plant-covered slope.

     “Right up there,” said Jeff, pointing to a mesa of eucalyptus trees.

     Like most of these pool assaults, it was a back door entry. We crawled through a hole under a chain link fence, bushwhacked through a forest of weeds, then parted the foliage to see what looked like a scene straight out of Dogtown and Z-Boys. Shirtless, suntanned, stringy-haired skaters traded runs in a blindingly white, rectangular pool with turquoise tile. A giggly blonde in Dittos and sun hat rolled joints and sipped Heineken. Aerosmith’s Get Your Wings played on an 8-track tape deck.

     I entered sheepishly, cousin Jeff coached me into my first run, and as I roared down the slope, up the transition, into that weightless, astronaut-like sensation of ‘getting vertical’, kick turned, then out of the transition, up the slope, and back in line behind my stringy-haired peers, I felt euphoric, at least three years older. Adrenalin coursed through my veins, serotonin washed about my head, and a newfound confidence spiraled in my belly. I thought of Larry Bertlemann in Super Session: “Anything is possible!”

     On my second and third runs I got progressively higher, and by my fourth I got two wheels out over the round hole where the light had been, which I used as a kind of target. I heard cousin Jeff announce to our fellow skaters, “And this is his first pool!” which meant everything. And then on my next run I got even higher, so high, in fact, that I felt like I was floating, which I was—my rear wheels were literally in the light hole.

     The next couple seconds are hazy but according to Jeff’s colorful recount, my trucks locked in the light and I went spilling down headfirst. I remember seeing stars, a huge bump on my head, and a throbbing right thumb. And then in the calm, be cool manner that would define the era, I remember cousin Jeff picking me up, hoisting me over his shoulder, and carrying me out of the deep end and onto the steps, where the giggly blonde suddenly turned all maternal.

     Cousin Jeff’s next move was straight out of the Dogtown handbook. He borrowed the Heineken from the girl and told me to take a big gulp. Then he borrowed the joint and said something like, “Suck it in real deep and hold it in for as long as you possibly can.”

     The next few hours were by far the most surreal of my entire ten years. We went to a matinee showing of King Kong at the NuWilshire Theatre. I remember slurping from a big, ice cold Coke then passing out. The next morning, head still throbbing, right hand heavily swollen and black and blue, my mom took me to Cedars Sinai where I was diagnosed with a mild concussion and a fractured thumb. And while the following three weeks of having to wear a cast and not being allowed to skate have vanished from memory, that split-second of weightlessness between kick turn and disaster are still vividly with me.

WHIFF (or, why I steer clear of the fast stuff)

I was seventeen and delusional and Carl Lewis was breaking world records and the Stones had just released Dirty Work and godhead Gordon Gekko was proclaiming “greed is good!” and I blame all the above for my foolishness. That and the fact that I had my eyes on a pro surfing career, sixteen years of Catholicism which manifested in “binge/purge” self-flagellation, and a sun-drenched short attention span, which is to say that one day I’d read about Ivan Lendl’s intense training program in Tennis and go sprint a few miles on soft sand, and the next I’d become possessed by Iggy Pop’s Raw Power and aspire to challenge myself on more, shall we say, Belushi-esque fronts. The tug o’ war — or better yet, the head-on collision — of these conflicting ideologies never dawned on me. I repeat: I was seventeen and delusional.

     So I’m at a friend’s girlfriend’s Pepperdine University graduation lunch at an upscale French restaurant in Malibu, nibbling a tarte a la tomate, sipping Dom Perignon, when my pal Teddy kicks me under the table, nods in the direction of the men’s room, wipes his hands with his flamingo pink cloth napkin, and excuses himself.

     I obediently follow him through the “WC” door and into the toilet stall.

     “A little sumpin’ sumpin’ before the main course,” he says, and pulls from his sport coat a wrap of the white stuff. He deftly scoops up a tiny mound with his overgrown pinky fingernail and I — fffff — snort it right up, nearly swallowing his finger in the process. He does the same, we check ourselves in the mirror, sniffle like a couple of flu-addled Eskimos, then join the Last Supper-like table with ear-to-ear grins.

     I should tell you that aside from the time cousin Pete and I rubbed a bit of residue on our gums when we were thirteen and Dogtown-obsessed, I’d never properly done cocaine. I’d heard it referenced in endless songs (Clapton, Stones, Grandmaster Flash), I knew about Belushi’s last hurrah in Bungalow #3, and I’d seen Woody Allen’s famous sneeze scene in Annie Hall, but I hadn’t a clue about its euphoric properties, how divinely agreeable it was with my inhibited, inferiority complex-ridden temperament.

     Pre-men’s room I was surrounded by a bunch of preppy, Benz’s-on-their-sixteenth-birthdays, spoilt rich kids. Post-men’s room I could not have felt more for Carolyn with the nose job and pretentious table manners, Joel with the hairy chest, gold chain and suspicious tan, and Sophia who lunched at the Ivy, summered in the Hamptons, and failed to make eye contact with our affable Hispanic waiter. These were my co-conspirators. I wanted to mmmwwwaa, mmmwwwaaa them on both cheeks, stick my tongue in their ears, make confessions.

     We picked at our salads and chattered excitedly. There was talk of all night cramming for finals, Sunday afternoon martini gatherings at Bianca’s parent’s Colony house, and the best hotels to stay at during Cannes. Shortly after the grilled Norwegian salmon steak with champagne-raspberry sauce arrived, Teddy gave the secret nod, and then again prior to the crème brulee and espresso. We inhabited a world far from sororities, fraternities, summer internships at Paramount and William Morris; we were essentially beach bums with decent cutbacks and logo-bedecked thrusters, but thanks to the gak, we were all team spirit, charming the pants off our friend’s girlfriend’s grandma, tapping glasses with tea spoons and making toasts, spouting on about new chapters and golden futures.

     The party moved over to the graduating girl’s beachfront apartment on Malibu Road, which could easily have been a set from Wall Street or Less Than Zero or a west coast Bright Lights, Big City. Nagel prints covered the walls of the track-lit living room, Wham! played on the stereo, mulleted men in shoulder-padded Armani suits cavorted on the black leather sofa with frost-tipped women in Thierry Mugler dresses while the waves slapped and hissed a mere tennis ball’s toss away. That I would attend parties that would parody this heyday of mine twenty years down the track was of course far beyond my myopic imagination. We wore our Zinka and Jimmy’Z and Reebok high-tops with total conviction. Self-irony was beyond us.

     There were a good eight or ten more snorts throughout the night. Teddy was a huge hit. I was that naïve that it took about five handoffs of those mini paper football folds for me to figure out he was dealing the stuff. I remember huddles around the glass coffee table, rolled up hundred dollar bills, index fingers smearing upper gums, single nostril sniffles, cum-like beads of dripping snot, and possibly some of the most senseless conversation in all history. I remember tapping my feet to Shiela E’s “The Glamorous Life” and grinding my teeth to Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough.”

     I never danced. Unfortunately, I spent my teens and twenties thinking that dancing was uncool, which cost me dearly on the sexual front. In fact when I stop and ponder this now I imagine myself a kind of forty-year-old Ebenezer Scrooge, only instead of neglectful fathers and Tiny Tims, there are curvaceous blondes in cut-off pink sweatshirts and sleek brunettes in fishnets and push-up bras smacking gum and calling me to the dance floor with determined, pink nail polished index fingers, and instead of whimpering with regret like Scrooge, I slug myself in the jaw repeatedly.

     There was no sleep that night. The six or seven of us that decided we were too jacked to drive grabbed pillows and writhed in fetal positions on couches, bean bag chairs, and the faux zebra skin throw rug. I remember listening to ocean, the couple having sex in the next room, the drill sargeant-like voice of my guilty conscience. The NSSA Nationals were a couple months off and what the hell was I doing going on a fifteen hour cocaine, champagne, beer and vodka bender? Had I not been so wired up I may have been able to sleep my way back to common sense, but as it were I spiraled into self-disgust. I felt that same dirty feeling I felt after sleeping with bad perfumed, cigarette-smoking girls I was philosophically at odds with. Which left one obvious solution: Go surfing.

     I tip-toed out of the house and hopped into my powder blue ’66 Karmann Ghia I’d bought a few months prior from Kirk Murray, a Malibu local hero who, when he’d handed over the keys, said “I’m just happy to let her go to someone who can surf,” which paralleled that final scene in Big Wednesday when Matt Johnson passes his board onto the wide-eyed gremmie, only in this case there was money involved: two grand cash. It was a great first car. I distinctly remember the “St. Christopher Be My Guide” button resined into the center of the steering wheel, and the “Live to Ride, Ride to Live” wings stuck on the back window, which even furthered the sense that I was being sworn in, that the keys were to something far more than just a car.

     I burned past the high tide shorebreak of Zuma which six or seven times a year transforms into Off The Wall-like perfection, careened through the curves of Point Mugu where minus tides coupled with strong north wind swell gave us tiny glimpses of Queensland pointbreaks, whirred past the farmlands and domestic abuse-addled barrios of Oxnard where Mexican hookers with pot bellies peddled their skanky wares in front of the paderia at lunchtime, then turned left into Ventura Harbor where Santa Clara Rivermouth’s shapely sandbars had become the spot of choice for me and my contest-obsessed pals.

     But it was unsurfable. There was swell, but the tide was so high, the banks so deep, that rather than break they’d double up into a heaping shorebreak. And so I did what I always did when my conscience was eating at me and the pro surfing carrot dangled in my mind. I ran beach sprints. Sweat out the sins of last night, I reasoned. Good things come to those who train.

     This is where, with hindsight of course, I envisage Lendl and Iggy at war. The tennis racket vs. the microphone stand. Snowy white Adidas shorts and shoes vs. beer-soaked Levis and steel toe motorcycle boots. Only I had nothing in common with either. I was a sensitive, hungry suburbanite desperate to scale my way out of the mire of mediocrity.

     I stripped down to my skintight lycra boardshorts, smeared a gob of Bullfrog across my nose, popped something like AC/DC’s Back In Black in my mustard yellow Walkman, and began trotting toward the rivermouth. I hadn’t had a sip of water since, what, lunch yesterday? I sprinted and sprinted and sprinted. I’d set my eyes on a piece of driftwood or Doritos bag fifty yards ahead and make that my goal. I huffed up the fertilizer-scented offshore breeze, I felt my heart banging against my breastbone, I wiped the salty sweat from my forehead. And then after forty minutes, when I felt good and purged, I got back in my Ghia and headed home.

     The 101 from Ventura to where I lived in Westlake Village was a good thirty minutes drive. Denny’s, auto malls, monolithic shopping centers, miniature golf courses, and farmlands flanked the highway. It was like a pendulum of lukewarm America swinging back and forth before my eyes.

     The fatigue set in right around the Camarillo Grade, a two-mile incline that forced me into the slow lane. By Newbury Park I was fighting to keep my eyes open and by Thousand Oaks I was letting out blood curdling screams every half-mile or so to scare myself back to wakefulness. When I hit the turning signal for Hampshire Road I felt a huge wave of relief. Pass the Kmart with the grindable banks, pass the cul de sac where Brittany the magical French kisser lived, pass the mini mall where Ron kicked the shit out of the black belt in 10^th grade, and I was home. I was mentally rehearsing my arrival: toss board and wetsuit in garage, wash feet with hose, plop face down in bed…

* * * * *

I remember urgent voices, blinding light, and stale coffee breath. I can’t recall whether the “How many fingers?” actually happened or whether this was pasted over from some TV or movie I’d seen, but such is the nature of memory in the 20^th century. I remember looking around and piecing together the emergency room, reaching down to my legs to make sure they were still there, feeling a surge of powerful emotion, as if I’d just been through something traumatic, though I wasn’t sure exactly what.

     “Do you know where you are?” asked the doctor.

     “I was driving and, umm…”

     “You’ve been in a car accident. You went head-on into a tree…”

     “Wha—”

     “Your car’s totaled. Fortunately you didn’t hit anyone. Can you remember anything?”

     It felt like being hit by arrows, the questions were too fast for my fuzzy head. I muttered an “Umm—”

     “You were at a stop light. The woman in the car next to yours says you were convulsing, as in having a seizure. Are you epileptic?”

     “No.”

     “Experienced seizures in the past?”

     “No.”

     “Relatives with epilepsy, seizure disorders?

     “No, not that I know of,” I said, then after a brief inner debate gushed it all: “Look, I did cocaine last night. Like a lot of it. I think we started around two in the afternoon and didn’t stop ‘til well past midnight. I also drank a lot of vodka and then went running—“

 * * * * *

There were X-Rays, MRIs, CAT scans, and various blood tests. It appeared there was nothing wrong with me, though there was a slight blemish on one of the brain scans, which looked exactly how my seizure felt: bright, overexposed, like staring into the sun for too long. The doctor said it could easily have been a flaw in the machinery, but to be safe he prescribed me 500 mg of Dilantin, which I diligently popped every morning for four years.

     Because VWs have the engine in the front and not the back, my Ghia was left with a kind of swallow tail carved into the nose. I think I sold it to the local junkyard for fifty bucks. The worst damage, I’m sure, was not the post-traumatic shame I suffered for the next week or so, but rather the toll it took on my poor parents. At the time my oldest brother was in the thick of his losing battle to heroin. That I should end up in the emergency room for drug-related reasons is unforgivable.

     Did I mess with cocaine again after this disastrous initiation? Indeed. But not for six or seven years. I was at a house party in Newport Beach, Sydney when yet another dealer friend was chopping up lines. Just a little snort, I thought to myself, just to see what it does. I ended up flat on my back, looking up at the party from that same belittling angle I’d viewed the doctors and nurses from the first time around. And then, foolishly, another time at a Fourth of July party in Venice Beach, which resulted in exactly the same: lightheadedness, spins, crash landing, shame, embarrassment.

     The moral of the story? Some of us are a bit slow to see the obvious (me+cocaine=death), and guardian angels are hovering invisibly in the ether, though they should be called upon as little as possible.

JAPAN: Blood, Sex & Tears (Interspersed With A Bit Of Surfing)

My interest in Japan is twofold: On one hand, I’m curious about Japanese surf culture, how a sport that’s fundamentally individualistic and renegade fits into a society built on the group, obedience, playing by the rules. On the other, I’m trying to purge myself for sins committed in Japan some two decades ago.

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