WRESTLING ELEPHANTS

By Jamie Brisick

At the Mansplainers Anonymous Meeting (on KelpJournal.com)

At the Mansplainers Anonymous meeting we were given a maximum of twenty-five words to express our feelings

Exceed twenty-five and you were put on coffee duty

By the end of the meeting you’d have a circle of empty folding chairs

And a bunch of men huddled around the coffee pot

Arguing over how to make the perfect pot of coffee.

At the Mansplainers Anonymous meeting we went into extra innings

Overtime

Penalty kicks

They’d begin on a Thursday at 5pm

And still not be finished the following Monday.

At the Mansplainers Anonymous meeting we refused to call it MA

We didn’t believe in acronyms

We had an affinity for the multisyllabic

Though we were working on that.

At the Mansplainers Anonymous meeting we debated intermittent fasting versus time-restricted feeding, Netflix versus Hulu.

At the Mansplainers Anonymous meeting we talked about Van Nuys

Chad said he had a blowout on the 101 over there in Van Nuys

Bruce said, “In Van Nuys, you can just say, ‘I had a blowout on the 101 in Van Nuys,’ you don’t need the ‘over there,’ the ‘over there’ is kind of hurtful to Van Nuys, don’t you think?”

Chad argued that there are places where things happen ‘in’ and there are places where things happen ‘over there in,’ and Van Nuys was an ‘over there in,’ especially considering he was driving a ‘67 El Camino, and that while they were fixing his tire he went around the corner to a topless bar called the Candy Cat where he met a girl named Licorice who he exchanged numbers with and was hoping to see on the weekend

“So in the context of the larger story, if you’d have just let me finish, you’d see that ‘over there in Van Nuys’ is much better than just ‘in Van Nuys’”

“What’d we say about ‘let me finish’?” said Bruce

“Oh shit,” said Chad

The room laughed. There were many things you were not allowed to say at a Mansplainers Anonymous meeting. One of them was “let me finish.”

At the Mansplainers Anonymous meeting we were encouraged to sit in on other twelve-step meetings

So on a Wednesday evening at 6pm I found myself tucked into the Calabasas High School gymnasium with my brethren over there at Name Droppers Anonymous

They were a lot like us, and nothing like us

A redheaded Gen Zer shared how she’d dated ___________, and while dating him she’d met ______________, who introduced her to ______________, and now she’s having a show at his art gallery. Her show features photographs of famous people dining around LA, but inspired by the program, she doesn’t feature the actual famous people, but rather the aftermath of their meals. For example, she said, the caption might read “__________ and _________, Giorgio Baldi, October 9, 2015,” but the photo just shows a couple of pomodoro-smeared plates and the four empty martini glasses from _________, who we now know via testimony from ______________ was a heavy drinker, despite his handsome looks and excellent performances, most recently alongside _________________ in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.

At the Mansplainers Anonymous meeting, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, votive candles, a key chain, a dog-eared copy of Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit.

At the Mansplainers Anonymous meeting

Actually, after the Mansplainers Anonymous meeting

I brought the fellas out to my car

The engine pinged when driving up steep hills, and it had been burning through oil like there was no tomorrow

This was at the North Hollywood meeting

Filled to the gills (as the expression goes) with washed-up actors and stuck screenwriters

Parked in the adjacent Gelson’s lot, hood up, there was at first about fifteen of us

But then something beautiful happened

More men started showing up, dozens weighing in on what might be the culprit

Bad spark plugs, worn out piston rings, maybe the transmission

It was like a tailgate party, but with everyone gathered around the hood.

And while a tailgate party involves many cars, this was just one, my 2003 Mercedes G-wagon, and what by the end of the night must have been a good hundred-and-fifty of us.

 

October 17, 2023

In The Malibu Parking Lot (in Heavy Traffic III)

In the Malibu Parking Lot
by Jamie Brisick


In the Malibu parking lot, there were rules

Rule #1: Don’t drop in

Rule #2: Share your weed

Your wax

If you have a second beer, pass it along

Tomorrow you’ll be thirsty

Rule #3: Acknowledge Malibu Carl. Say hi to Parking Lot Teddy

Rule #4:

(Not so much a rule but an understanding)

There is no problem so big or complicated that it cannot be run away from

At the Malibu Wall, we chased nose rides, blow jobs, beer

At the Malibu Wall, we had no health insurance

At the Malibu Wall, a fin chop could take the whole thing down

As it had for Parking Lot Teddy

Not his own fin but a freshman from Pepperdine’s

Who’d been surfing less than a year

22 stitches

$3700 at St. John’s

Now Teddy sleeps in his van

In the alley behind Ralphs

At the Malibu Wall, there was blood

At the Malibu Wall, it was not Teddy’s

At the Malibu Wall, last we heard the Pepperdine kid had taken up golf

 

In the Malibu parking lot, I surrendered my virginity to a bronzed lioness of a regular foot named Ashley. Her skin smelled of Coppertone. Her left-go-right bottom turn was fierce. For a summer we lived in her beater van, subsisting on Jack in the Box tacos and Tecates stolen from the back of the liquor store. She called me dude, as in “Slow down, dude,” “Little to the left, dude,” “Try again, dude,” “Okay, D minus for today, now let’s go get a wave, dude.”

 

In the shimmering waters of Malibu, my mascara ran, my lipstick sprinted, my facelift pole-vaulted, my raw and unvarnished self stood soft and vulnerable across the three-foot peelers. The afternoon sun was a French kiss. The light onshore wind carried the wisdom of the ancients. Neptune three-pronged me the way a cattle rancher brands his cow. Magellan slapped me and said, “Not a 50-foot nose ride but a 360-degree odyssey, an entire life. So less of the rum and more of the captain’s log, if ya know what I’m sayin’.”

 

At the Malibu Wall, we hid behind dark sunglasses

And spoke with our hands

At the Malibu Wall, we traded sex

For a chocolate shake, large fries, and a double cheeseburger

At the Malibu Wall, it happened in the men’s room

At the Malibu Wall, Parking Lot Teddy guarded the door

In exchange for half the shake

And a couple bites of the cheeseburger

At Malibu Wall, we didn’t use fancy words like ‘transactional’

At the Malibu Wall, we were hungry

And we ate

 

In the Malibu parking lot, I wrestled with my masculinity, which spoke in a gravely, Scotch-and-Camel-non-filters tone, and at one point grabbed me by the shoulder in a way that my 2021 self found aggressive. I said, ‘Please remove your hand from my shoulder.’ My masculinity removed its hairy hand, cackled, shrugged its macho shoulders, and said, ‘What the hell happened to you?


In the Malibu parking lot, the rear hatch of a ’77 Econoline popped open. Out flew a Nike. Then a wetsuit. Then an MSA jacket. Then another Nike. Then an 8-foot Liddle displacement hull, which landed nose first, making it something like a 7’9” or 7’8” “And stay the fuck away from me you piece of shit,” shouted Ashley. I crawled out the passenger side door, retrieved my things, made my way towards the pier.


At the pearly gates of Malibu, I poured out confessions (hiding six-packs in my backpack, not sharing joints with Malibu Carl, borrowing Grossrider’s prized 9’ Yater without asking). There was a tribunal of sorts involving Bosco and Trace and Parking Lot Teddy. They told me to hold tight, disappeared into Teddy’s van, shut the door, re-emerged 20 minutes later. “Carton of cigarettes for Carl, bottle of tequila for Teddy. I’m on the wagon this week so basically I get to drop in on you every chance I get,” said Trace. I nodded compliantly. He pointed seaward. A sparkling head-high set peeled across First Point. “Carry on,” he said.

 

In the Malibu parking lot, I managed to locate my inner adolescent. He emerged from the men’s room with bloodshot eyes and beer on his breath. “I miss you,” I said. He looked over his shoulder then back at me. With a confused expression he said, “Do I know you?”

 

In the Malibu parking lot, I remembered Seaweed, who called it the workajerka.

“Every job I ever had just seemed to grab me by the back of the neck and drop me somewhere inland. I don’t do the workajerka.”

Seaweed lived out of his car, a ‘57 Comet wagon. He did not believe in deodorant (“That’s our body’s irrigation, you can’t block it up.”) He believed wholeheartedly in bongloads (“I like to put ice in there. End of a long hot summer day on the beach, an ice water bong, life doesn’t get any better than that”).

I remembered John, who’d go on to a successful art career. Malibu was part of his narrative, his education, the thing he left behind.

“One day I was pulling out of the lot and I just knew, you know? I drove out real slow, took it all in. I turned south on PCH and never went back.”

I remembered Charlie, a regular foot with a big frontside carve. Charlie was reluctantly sober. In a low ebb, nursing yet another hangover, I said, “Charlie, I think I might need to get sober.”

Charlie rested his hand on my shoulder. “Whatever you do, don’t get sober. The sober you will just be another kind of annoying that no one will want to be around.”

It was Charlie who also said: “You start hanging out in the Malibu parking lot…and you become the Malibu parking lot.”

 

In the Malibu parking lot, I spilled oil, blood, ink, semen, Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax

In the Malibu parking lot: ghosts

The ghost of Miki, Moondoggie, Tubesteak, Lance, Dewey, The Enforcer, Fruit Loop, Head and Shoulders, Seaweed

In the Malibu parking lot, beer was consumed, facts were muddled, words were slurrred

In the Malibu parking lot, summer’s ready when you are

In the Malibu parking lot, in the summer, in the city

In the Malibu parking lot, and the livin’ is easy

In the Malibu parking lot, boys in bikinis, girls in surfboards

In the Malibu parking lot, everybody’s rockin’

In the Malibu parking lot, an American songbook

In the Malibu parking lot, Woody Guthrie was a regular foot

JayZ a goofy

In the Ma

 

In the Malibu parking lot, sex in the back of Steve and Ashley’s ‘77 Econoline van, Bizarre Love Triangle by New Order on the stereo, wet wetsuits at our feet, the rail of Steve’s 8’2” Anderson pushing into my hip, the taste of Starbucks and cigarettes on Ashley’s lips

In the Malibu parking lot, we never plan these things

In the Malibu parking lot, Ashley says she loves me

In the Malibu parking lot, Steve comes back from Mexico on Friday

In the Malibu parking lot, I am not quite a red belt, but I’ve got a few tae kwon do moves up my sleeve

In the Malibu parking lot, Steve’s a jiu jitsu black belt

In the Malibu parking lot, I have an uncle up in San Francisco who keeps telling me to visit

In the Malibu parking lot, a west swell coming next week

In the Malibu parking lot, west swells like Ocean Beach

In the Malibu parking lot, a note slid under the windshield wiper of Steve and Ashley’s ‘77 Econoline van

 

In the Malibu parking lot: I was a hippie I was a burnout I was a dropout I was out of my head

In the Malibu parking lot: Two sides to every story

In the Malibu parking lot: Somebody had to stop me

In the Malibu parking lot: I’m not the same as when I began

In the Malibu parking lot: Punk rock landed with a splash

Clear boards/black wetsuits turned into leopard-spotted boards/pink and purple wetsuits

In the Malibu parking lot: Abracadabra

In the Malibu parking lot: Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Malibu Barbie

Puff a joint

Behind the lifeguard tower

Lots of sunscreen, dark sunglasses, wide-brimmed hats

In the Malibu parking lot: Development was arrested, growth was stu

In the Malibu parking lot: In the maw of Peter Pan

 

At the pearly gates of Malibu, I felt the black dog, the mean reds, the Nausea, the dark night of the soul at 3am, though it was 4pm, and sunny, and 81 degrees.

At the pearly gates of Malibu, I called upon the holy texts of Pema, I clenched my fist the way Tony Robbins would, I promised myself I’d study The Work of Byron Katie.

At the pearly gates of Malibu, Timmy was kind enough to lend me his 11’ glider, decorated in polka dots, and I paddled out on it, imagining that they were not polka dots but pills (Xanax, Zoloft, Wellbutrin) and that the waves were not oceanic waves but the blue waves of the Democratic party, scooping me up and gli

 

In the Malibu parking lot, I saw a Debbie Harry-looking woman wearing a Malibu sweatshirt. I said, “Where’d you get it?” She said, “Rule number one: Never ask ‘where’d you get it.’” I said, “Fuck off. Tell me where you got it.” She blew a bubble. As it popped on her Chapstick-glossed lips I was hit with a waft of grape Bubblicious. Nostalgia floored me. Coppertone. Wine coolers. A keg party in Woodland Hills. A Dead Kennedys show at the Whiskey. I said, “Didn’t we have sex in the backseat of a Volkswagen Rabbit behind the Jack in the Box in Agoura in, like, 1982?” She said, “Brothers Marshall.” I said, “You had sex with Brothers Marshall in the backseat of a Volkswagen Rabbit behind the Jack in the Box in Agoura?” She said, “No, idiot. I got the sweatshirt at their new shop, down there by Duke’s, next to the breakfast burrito joint, near the hardware store, a couple doors down from Malibu Divers, which, by the way, is also the title of a really atrocious porn film, made right around 1982. Maybe you know it?”


In the Malibu parking lot, tequila, vodka, Tecate, Diet Coke. In the Malibu parking lot, tomfoolery, Tom Curren, Thomas Campbell, Tomás the Argentinian parking lot attendant. In the Malibu parking lot, Marilyn and JFK, Gidget and Moondoggie. In the Malibu parking lot, graffitied on the wall: “Without art we are but monkeys with smart phones.” In the Malibu parking lot, an 8’6” Yater swapped for a 6’10” Skip Frye. In the Malibu parking lot, sea gulls attack a Jack in the Box bag. In the Malibu parking lot, high tide, high noon, high times, hi Mom. In the Ma

 

At the Church of the Open Sky that is Kiddie Bowl, I did not say three Our Fathers and six Hail Marys but rather banged seven lips and pulled into nineteen tubes


In the Cathedral of Forever Facing Seaward that is First Point, Nate dropped in on Randall, Randall called him a shoulder shark, and the N-word, and punched him in the face

They took it to the beach

Hurl a whole watermelon at the ground and that’s what it sounded like, Nate’s fists banging into Randall’s wet torso and face and head

Randall slithered free, punched the fin out of his board, held it up like a knife

Nate was fighting for much more than the wave

Or the bully that was Randall

Pinning Randall and his fin-wielding hand to the ground, Nate punched and punched

The next day Randall showed up with a gun

Guns don’t hide so well in boardshorts

In the Malibu parking lot, a row of cop cars

Randall in handcuffs

Silent applause from all of us who’d had run-ins with Randall

Randall disappeared for a few days

Nate, sadly, never came back

In the Wild West that was Malibu that summer

Frontier justice prevailed

But not really

 

 

 

October 17, 2023

“Ashley Bickteron, Unflinchingly Honest About His Work and Illness” in NY Times

AN APPRAISAL
Ashley Bickerton, Unflinchingly Honest About His Work and Illness
Last words (and works) of the artist diagnosed with ALS in 2021. A devoted surfer, he chose to live remotely in Bali, away from the buzz. It found him anyway.

“I can’t think of another artist who was both brilliant on canvas and on a surfboard,” said Paul Theroux, the writer. He was speaking of one of the artists he most admired, Ashley Bickerton, and these words of Theroux’s inspired me to plan a trip to his home: “If Gauguin had caught some waves in Tahiti then I think we’d have an apt comparison.”

Ashley rose to prominence in the mid-1980s with ironic, abstracted constructions focused on ideas of consumerism, identity and value. He had been diagnosed with ALS in 2021, and by July, when I finally visited him in Bali, he needed help bringing food to his mouth, and he could no longer paint. But there was not an ounce of self-pity. “I consider myself enormously lucky,” said the artist from his power wheelchair. “It’s an incredible luxury that I can sit here on my big veranda on the hill overlooking the Indian Ocean, spend time with my wife and daughter, work on my computer, think, dream and put my life in order.”

He was courageous, graceful, eloquent, inspired. And full of gallows humor. After a Thai feast at his sprawling compound on the southern tip of Bali, I gestured toward his wife and three-year-old daughter, who were playing on the sofa, his paintings and sculptures surrounding us, his swimming pool and spectacular ocean view, and said, “What a beautiful life you’ve made for yourself.” With a rosy-cheeked grin he said, “What’s left of it.”

Ashley died on Nov. 30. He was 63.

I had come to interview him as an adjunct to his getting his affairs in order. We’d meet in the early afternoon in his crow’s nest of an office. Seated at his desk, often sipping a Coke through a straw, he’d excitedly show me the fantasy waves he’d been building in Photoshop (a devout surfer, ALS had robbed him of his daily fix). From there we’d move on to weightier stuff — his biography, his body of work, his family. He did not want to get into the details of his diagnosis. His face lit up when he spoke about the paintings he was making for his forthcoming exhibition in New York.

“I had two big shows in New York earlier this year,” he told me. “My whole plan had been to throw everything I had into these, then come back here and quietly rot away and die on my hill. Then Larry Gagosian stepped into the picture and ruined all my plans.”

He was referring to his recent good news. Gagosian had picked him up, scheduling his first solo show with the gallery in 2023. The announcement created buzz in the art world: “Over the past few years, Bickerton has brought his practice full circle, synthesizing its heterogeneous modes and gestures into an all-encompassing visual language.”

“It was exhilarating and much welcomed,” said Ashley. “But I suddenly realized that I’m going to be scrambling to the edge of the precipice without a moment to breathe.”

 

Born in 1959 in Barbados to a clinical psychologist mother and a linguist father, Ashley’s childhood was itinerant, with stints in South America, the Caribbean, West Africa, England and eventually Hawaii, where he came to surfing at age 12. At the famed California Institute of the Arts, he studied with the conceptual artists Barbara Kruger and John Baldessari. “It was a real mind shake-up,” said Ashley. “I was basically told that everything I believed was rubbish, and that I should be ripping up bits of cardboard and locking myself in footlockers overnight and bending every rule.” He spent 12 years in New York, rising to fame in the 1980s alongside fellow Neo-Geo (for Neo-geometric conceptualism) artists Jeff Koons, Peter Halley and Meyer Vaisman.

Ashley’s early work drew from pop art, Op Art and minimalism. He became known for a mixed-media series titled as “Self-Portraits,” as “Commercial Pieces” or as “Anthropospheres,” composed of screen printed images of corporate logos. He even invented a brand for himself, SUSIE (full name: Susie Culturelux), which he said would double as an artistic signature for future art historians. In a clunky 1987-88 wall piece titled “Tormented Self-Portrait (Susie at Arles) #2” — there’s a version in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection — his Susie logo floats amid a sea of logos, among them Nike, Con Edison, Marlboro, Renault and Fruit of the Loom.

“My identity was forged in New York, my language, my sense of being an outsider,” said Ashley. “But New York never quite fit. I’m a tropics man. I was at odds with the Northeast winter.”

In 1993 he moved to Bali, where he resided until his death. Reading aloud from a manifesto he’d written some years back, he said, “Choose your material carefully. Avoid too many art fairs. And travel, limit your footprint and disappear.”

I first encountered Ashley via one of his self-portraits in Surfer’s Journal magazine in the late ’90s. Surrounded by palm trees, a near-naked woman, kids, dogs, tropical rapture, he was working bare-chested at an outdoor desk. He appeared robust, godlike. Like Gauguin in Tahiti or Peter Beard in Kenya, it was a portrait of an exotic, far-flung, fecund life. It made me wonder what the hell I was doing living in the East Village. When I told Ashley this in July, he chuckled.

“That was a sendup,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“That was a request for a bio photo from Dakis Joannou’s DESTE Foundation [for Contemporary Art, a nonprofit]. I was gleefully, intentionally shoveling horseshit. But the photo got around, and people believed it. So I ran with it.”

Ashley’s work includes painting, photography, sculpture, assemblage and every combination therein. He melds beauty and grotesquerie, playfulness and brutality. “A friend said that when I’m serious I come off as joking, but when I’m joking I’m dead serious,” Ashley told me. “That play has been central to my work.”

His “Blue Man” series plops a blue-skinned tourist into clichéd tropical settings. “He’s an avatar for the archetype of the 20th century antihero escapee from the annals of the 20th century canon of literature,” explained Ashley. “But now he’s adrift in an alienating 21st century world, trying to live his Gauguin fantasy.”

I told him I thought it a bold move, living remotely, stepping away from “the conversation.”

“If you think of the art world as a marketplace, we artists are the suppliers,” Ashley said. “And if everyone’s farming the same soil, it creates a much more monocultural, homogeneous marketplace. But if you go further afield — both mentally and geographically — you can affect the psychology, you can bring back to market something of interest that’s harder to come by.”

 

Read the full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/arts/design/ashley-bickerton-artist-appraisal-als.html

January 6, 2023

“The Dazzling Blackness” for Huck Mag

August 19, 2022

Clark Little: The Art of Waves

August 19, 2022

Raymond Pettibon’s “Point Break”

Riding Giants with Raymond Pettibon
Jamie Brisick
 
Raymond the Fabulist
Raymond likes the big stuff. Though the waves of his early surfing days at Hermosa BeachPier, in California, were mostly small and gentle, he found his lust for heavy water on a family trip to Hawaii in 1974. On a gray and windswept afternoon at fabled Sunset Beach on the North Shore of Oahu, seventeen-year-old Raymond paddled out into eight- to ten-foot surf, fell into a preternatural groove, and repeatedly connected waves from the west peak all the way through to the inside bowl. He’s been chasing swells up and down the coast of California ever since.
 
“Surfing big waves at Deadman’s, in San Francisco, taught me how to wear the wrath of the Pacific Ocean on my head and to just enjoy the pummelings,” he told me. “Mavericks is like ten football fields of freezing-ass steel-gray cruelty, with rocks and sharks—that was a lot of fun, until the media turned it into a circus. Now I’m happiest farther north. I’ll put my head down for months at a time to finish work for a show. But as soon as it’s done, I’m all loaded up with the boards and the dogs. There are spots in northern Oregon where it’s just you and God.”
 
 
I asked why he hasn’t been more forthcoming about his surf jones with the art world.
 
“Crowds,” he said. “The more you talk about breaks, the more the hurried masses will flock there. I had a bad dream the other night. I was out surfing one of my secret spots, and I look over and there’s Peter Doig and Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons out on longboards. Between waves they wanted to talk shop. I don’t talk shop when I’m in the water.”
 
Actually, none of this is true. In the two decades that I have known Raymond, I’ve never known him to surf. But he has produced boatloads of surf-themed work since the eighties. And among his many alter egos, one is a big-wave surfer.
 
At an art dinner in New York a few years ago, I sat across the table from Raymond, who sat next to the boyfriend of a fashionista. Over plates of pizza and pasta and many glasses of Nero d’Avola, I watched Raymond and the boyfriend engage in what looked like deep conversation. After dinner a group of us stepped out to the sidewalk. Someone suggested we go for a nightcap at a bar around the corner. All were in except for Raymond and his girlfriend, who said they were tired and needed to get home. Walking to the bar, I fell into step with the boyfriend. 
 
“That guy I sat next to, what’s his name, Ray—wow, so interesting!” he said.
“How so?” I asked.
“He’s a dog breeder. He breeds pit bulls that fight to the death in these highly illegal dogfights. There’s this whole underground culture. Apparently, he’s one of the top breeders.”
 
I silently chuckled. A few years earlier, I was writing a profile of Raymond, and in my efforts to better understand him, I spoke with the artist Gomez Bueno. Gomez fondly recalled a period in the early nineties when he and Raymond would go to openings, concerts, horse races, and Dodgers games together. Gomez would pull up in front of Raymond’s studio in Long Beach and toot his horn. Raymond would come out and hop in the car. Gomez would ask how he was doing, and Raymond might say, “Much better now that Paris and I broke up,” and so would begin an hourlong conversation through Los Angeles traffic about Raymond’s fucked-up relationship with Paris Hilton. Or it might be, “Been getting my moonsaults down,” and he’d launch into details of his training regimen as a pro wrestler. Or it might be about fighting in Vietnam, albeit from the Vietcong side. 
 
“It was always very creative and colorful,” said Gomez. “And I was just totally blown away by his wealth of knowledge, how he could just keep pulling up details. It was like witnessing someone creating a work of art, just with his talking. And he would never end it with, ‘I’m just kidding.’ If you were stupid enough to believe it, that was your problem.”
 
I’m reminded of a quote by Oscar Wilde: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
 
 
Raymond the Omnipresent
I first encountered Raymond’s work in the early eighties. His album covers for Black Flag sat across the bedroom from my five-foot-six McCoy single fin. His flyers were pasted at punk venues like the Whisky, Stardust Ballroom, Olympic Auditorium, and Madame Wong’s. His Black Flag logo could be seen on many a sweaty, stage-diving kid’s T-shirt. At that time, outwardly, punk and surfing appeared as almost opposites, but in fact they shared much in common. Both were on the margins; both bucked the status quo. 
 
For a couple years, I surfed by day and hit punk shows by night, but eventually the ocean consumed me. I started competing, did well, got sponsored, became a pro, and chased waves and contests around the world. That’s one of surfing’s greatest attributes: travel is baked into the deal. The blueprint was laid in the sixties by the surfing documentary The Endless Summer, and it still holds true today. 
 
In 1989, during the Australia leg of the ASP World Tour, I met and swiftly fell in love with one Ana Rita Lobregat. When we moved in together, one of the first things we did was tape the cover of Sonic Youth’s Goo on our bedroom wall. A black-and-white drawing by Raymond, it depicts a cool, modish-looking couple in dark sunglasses, he with his arm around her, she about to take a drag off a cigarette. The text reads: “I stole my sister’s boyfriend. It was all whirlwind, heat, and flash. Within a week we killed my parents and hit the road.” Raymond’s drawing added a certain “on the lam” tenor to our days. 
 
When my pro surfing career ended, I started writing for surf magazines. One winter day in 1992 I went to see the exhibition Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Raymond’s drawings featured prominently. I was struck by his manic energy, his multitudinous subjects and themes, his witty captions. At the time I knew nothing about contemporary art, but I was keen to learn. Raymond’s drawings—amid work by Mike Kelley, Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, Robert Williams, and others—provided a welcoming point of entry. 
 
I soaked up all things Raymond—his zines, his punk flyers, his catalogues, and his shows. Having recently moved back to Los Angeles after five years on the road and three years in Sydney, I was suffering from a bad case of you can’t go home again. Raymond’s artwork had been a constant. It was there in my former, pimply self, and it was here in this new self that I was trying to invent and fit into.
 
In 1998, I became the editor of Surfing magazine. Exploiting my new position, I introduced “Hot Chocolate,” a monthly column in which I wrote essays and fiction, accompanied by illustrations. For a piece about surfboard sacrifices (burn a board and the swell comes up), I contacted Raymond’s gallery in Los Angeles to see about using one of his surf drawings. I was thrilled to learn that Raymond knew and liked my work, and that he was happy to contribute. A few weeks later, I met him at one of his openings. 
 
Tall, shaggy, and bear-like, Raymond wore paint-splattered sneakers, loose-fitting trousers with a necktie for a belt, and a wrinkled dress shirt. Standing in front of a near life-size painting of a studly horse, he told me he grew up around surfers and the seminal South Bay surf shops—Jacobs, Weber, Bing, Rick. We talked about how California surfing was once escapist, quasi-transcendentalist, and how that all changed in the sixties with the arrival of Gidget, the beach party films, and surf music.
 
“I’m interested in those early, pre-surf craze days,” he said. “I like the purity, the ‘man alone at sea.’”
 
Raymond knew his surf films and also the surf photos from magazines. eHeHHe knew the mythos, the way commercial interests had sullied the purity. He knew about the icons: Miki Dora, aka “Da Cat,” the Malibu rebel who went on a global surf odyssey funded with forged checks and stolen credit cards; Greg Noll, aka “Da Bull,” the big-wave pioneer who, on December 4, 1969, rode a wave so massive and death-defying that it would be his last.
 
In recent years, Raymond has produced a flurry of surf paintings, most of them pitting a tiny surfer against a giant, spectacular wave. It’s impossible to not see the self-portrait: Raymond the artist, streaking across the pitching, heaving, throaty blue wall that is his hopes/dreams/ideas that ping around in his head. It’s also impossible to not see how he’s selected the perfect metaphor. 
 
A brief history: The sixties surf craze brought crowds to once pristine and quiet surf breaks. Hardcore surfers rebelled. “Malibu is summer. . . . Now you have to share your summer vacations with everybody. Summer has had it,” goes the famous quote by Miki Dora. Professional surfing gained a foothold in 1976, with the birth of the International Professional Surfers (IPS), but that, too, provoked a backlash. For most surfers, the allure of wave riding was its dance, its communion with nature—not winners and losers. So began a debate: Surfing—sport or art?
 
For Raymond, it is clearly the art side that appeals. The ocean is fickle. There are no goals, hoops, finish lines. The wave is a fleeting, infinite blank canvas.
 
And big-wave surfing also appeals. Since the pioneering of Hawaii’s hallowed Waimea Bay in the late fifties, big waves have always attracted the characters, the cowboys, the loose cannons. Big-wave surfing enjoyed a giant leap forward in the mid-nineties with the birth of tow-in surfing: the Jet Ski assist made it possible for the rider to match the velocity of the looming monster wave. Surfers broke into the thirty-, fifty-, seventy-, and, most recently, hundred-foot range (see 100 Foot Wave docuseries on HBO).
 
Swell forecasting, too, has advanced the cause. Up until the mid-eighties, there was no accurate way to predict swells, hence surfers had to hover close to the beach to score the good days (and hence the stereotype of the unemployed surf bum). Enter Surfline, a 976 customer-toll number that gave the day’s surf report, plus a three-day wave forecast. Swell forecasting became increasingly precise in the late nineties, spawning what the surf media calls “surgical strikes”: big-wave riders flying halfway around the world to catch the apex of the swell, which sometimes lasts as briefly as a few hours.
 
Modern-day big-wave surfers are sort of bounty hunters. They spend a lot of time tracking swells on the internet. They have to be ready to pull the trigger on a moment’s notice. Their lives revolve around this thing they get to do only a handful of days per year, and their reputations are sometimes made on a single ride.
 
***
 
In 2010, I got the assignment to write a profile of Raymond for Monster Children, an Aussie magazine. Here’s a good chunk of it, expanded and condensed and revised for this volume:
 
On a bright morning in his Venice Beach studio, Raymond Pettibon pondered his wave painting in progress. Seen from a high perch, a pier maybe, a vibrantly blue lefthander crests, the white lip about to hurl forward. An adept surfer might whip around and catch it in a single stroke, or perhaps none at all.
 
“The economy of means is one of the best things that drawing has going for itself,” he said between sips of coffee. “The great masters of drawing tend to have that elegant line. That tends to be an ongoing struggle with me within each individual work. I’ve done a number of waves before, but the point of view or take on it can get old. So I try to differentiate from that. When you can do something that seems new, the economy of the sublime—that’s what I’m trying to do.”
 
Raymond’s studio was a white-walled former furniture showroom on traffic-heavy Lincoln Boulevard. It looked as if it had been ransacked by the DEA. Dirty socks, weathered LPs, pulp novels, surf magazines, cruiser bikes, and vintage baseball mitts shared floor space with his dachshund mutt, Barely Noble. Strewn haphazardly about his worktable were newspapers, tubes of paint, lidless inkpots, a wooden baseball bat, loose CDs, an open bottle of rosé, and tortilla chips and salsa, all of which sat precariously close to or atop valuable half-finished drawings. Taped to the wall were works in progress: a buxom topless woman with a death mask; a man kissing an outstretched hand; a child’s red wagon; an apish arm and leg; a bent-over, naked woman with “This is too forward, Trick” scrawled above; and the feathery blue wave that he brooded over. 
 
Raymond’s subject matter includes Charles Manson, surfers, baseball players, trains, vixens, homicidal teenage punks, Elvis, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and the cartoon figure Gumby, who has the miraculous ability to walk into a book and enter a story (an alter ego, perhaps?). His stock-in-trade is the marriage, collision, and disconnection of image and text. Some pieces do this in a wry, straightforward manner; others are like great song lyrics: they could be interpreted a thousand different ways, and none would be wrong.
 
“My favorites are the ones that have some lyrical space beyond a strict interpretation,” he said, “the ones that I couldn’t put into any descriptive terms what I was doing.”
 
Born in 1957 and raised in Hermosa Beach by academic parents, Raymond’s childhood was filled with books, comics, basketball, baseball, and surfing. When his brother, Greg Ginn (Ginn is the family name, Pettibon is Raymond’s nom de plume), formed the seminal punk band Black Flag in 1976, Raymond was appointed chief graphic designer. He first designed their famous logo (four black bars) and then a slew of album covers. He also published zines of his texts and drawings with catchy titles, such as Tripping Corpse, The Language of Romantic Thought, and Virgin Fears. For much of the next decade he remained decidedly underground, exhibiting in small galleries and record stores.
 
As his work evolved, so did his audience. In the mid-eighties a handful of renowned LA artists—among them Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Paul McCarthy, and Ed Ruscha—embraced Raymond, and, subsequently, so did a number of key collectors and curators. Soon he would occupy an almost contradictory post. He was a bona fide global art star, his drawings and paintings shown in prestigious galleries and museums. He was also a DIY/indie icon. 
 
“Where the image stops and the words begin is not that clear cut,” he told me. “It’s more a give and take, a back-and-forth dialectic almost in between the two. Probably more times than not when I have problems it’s because I tend to overwrite, so it’s more learning when to stop.” When I asked Raymond about his tendency to annotate what he’s reading, he pulled from his pocket a fistful of wadded-up pages. “I have books lying around and I take the pages out. It could be practically anything. I do a lot of reading in transit, whether it’s a car, bus, train, whatever. I don’t read for plot. I don’t care how it ends. I read a lot slower, because I’m often trying to analytically almost break down the writing as it occurs, or as it scans. In a way, it’s rewriting of a sort.”
 
In his 1998 anthology, Raymond Pettibon: A Reader, Raymond shoehorned into 352 pages what might be interpreted as his muses, or the voices he hears in his head. Marcel Proust, William Blake, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, and Henry James are seated at the same table as Charles Manson and Mickey Spillane. It’s this mixture of high and low in Raymond’s work that I find so compelling.
 
When I mentioned that my favorite part of editing surf magazines was writing captions for photos, he perked up.
 
“That’s a skill or talent that has a lot in common with what I do,” he said. “[In my work] I think a lot of people consider the words dissonant from the image; that they’re just thrown on randomly. That’s not the case.”
“Is there a specific headspace you’re going for?” I asked. “Does it come from walks, 3 a.m. epiphanies, hangovers? Or is it simply your whole life?”
“It was, or has been at times, my whole life,” he told me. “That’s not the most attractive thing to say, there are other things to do—go out in the water, for instance. Life should be complementary with art. But the one can crowd out the other. It can be so time-consuming. I have more work in note form than I could ever get around to doing—enough for several lifetimes. I could be king for a day, and I’d still want to get back to the work. And that’s not pushed by any puritan work ethic or nose-to-the-grindstone kind of thing.”
 
We walked back to the wave painting. Raymond inspected the trough, the curling face, the snowy lip.
 
“I come from realism,” he said. “That’s my model, my default. But to do it justice it’s going to stray. I mean even with this, the wave, it’s painted vertically on the wall, the drips weren’t planned or anything but they don’t detract either. But I still don’t know how it’s going to turn out exactly. It’s getting there with some confidence, but I could always mess it up. With this sort of thing I think of the image of Turner, the great landscape painter, painter of the sea, having himself strapped to the mast of a ship while it went into the storm, experiencing that as to better describe it. His sea paintings approximate or tend toward the complete abstract, but that’s still an act of realism, of understanding reality, or at least a sincere attempt to.”
 
Raymond stared at his wave. There was nothing in the frame to gauge its size, but judging by the look on his face it was giant, maybe five times overhead.
 
And he’d yet to even start in on the text.
 
A few weeks later, Raymond’s gallery rep emailed saying that Raymond had enjoyed my visit, and that his New York show had just opened. “I just wanted to share this piece that is in Raymond’s show. I thought you would like to see it,” she wrote. Attached was a photo of one of his wave paintings. Written above the crest: “For Jamie Brisick.”
 
 
In 2013, I did another piece on Raymond, this one a Q&A for Huck, a UK magazine. Raymond had recently moved to downtown New York. We met at his studio, in a building near Canal Street. Presiding over the room was a painting of a giant blue-green wave. His brushstrokes gave it that dimpled effect brought on by a light onshore breeze, typically in the afternoon. I knew it well. I could feel my board chattering across the steep face. Raymond nodded at it and said, “It’s a challenge to extend oneself and to make it different, rather than just mechanically crank out the same types of work, which is very easy to do, but what’s the point, really?” I mentioned the surf painting he’d done with my name on it. (I’d asked the gallery about buying it, but it was way out of my price range.) “I was really touched,” I said. “Oh yeah,” said Raymond. “I sort of imagined we were sitting next to each other on our boards, and a wave came in, and I went, ‘This one’s yours.’”
 
Party Wave
Surf etiquette 101: If someone gives you a wave, you return the favor. It can be paid back during the session in question, or it can be paid back years down the track, when the giver has long since forgotten about it. In this case, it’s ten years later, and Raymond and I are out at Malibu First Point. I’m placing us here because of Malibu’s rich history, because it’s a palimpsest of shenanigans and quantum leaps. If Raymond still surfed, I could imagine this being his favorite spot. The sky is cloudless, the sun is warm, the crowd is thick, and the waves are doing what First Point does, which is peel with machine-like precision for a good hundred yards. 
 
I see Raymond and me straddling our boards side by side, eyes fixed on the carpet of shimmering blue that stretches to the horizon. A sweet, head-high wave looms and I turn to Raymond and say, “This one’s yours.” He nods, as if to say, “I remember,” wheels his board around, paddles, and pops to his feet and angles toward the pier. What he doesn’t know is that I’ve organized a surprise party, or let’s call it a “surprise party wave,” in which friends, colleagues, a critic, and a ghost will drop in, share the wave for a few beats, then kick out the back, leaving Raymond to his elegant line:
 
“Raymond always wanted to be a surfer,” says the musician Mike Watt. Raymond made the art for Watt’s first record with his band Minutemen. They’ve been friends ever since. “He obviously has a passion for it. To me, I think it’s this connect. You don’t have to have the correct words for this interface with reality. In fact, you’re part of it. You’re trying to ride it, and you’re trying to channel this force. He likes this idea, the things that make us know we’re alive. It seems this is part of his work, ‘How do I know I’m alive?’ Almost a Greek thing of ‘How do we know what we know?’ kind of shit. He likes the mystery, too, and the observer being part of the work.”
 
“I think Raymond’s surf artwork is tongue-in-cheek,” says the artist, curator, and filmmaker Aaron Rose. “Not to anger the surfers in the crowd, but I don’t know if it’s so much a homage or respect as it is a metaphor.”
 
“There’s no way on earth that Raymond has devoted as much paper as he has to surfing if it was just purely tongue-in-cheek,” says the artist John Millei. “It’s kind of like Jasper Johns and a lot of the great ironists as artists, that their work is always the very thing in its most sincere form that is also self-reflective. And in being self-reflective and self-conscious, it is ironic. And I think that is Raymond’s genius. Because Raymond is an elusive cat, right? He is such a genius at self-mythologizing. And he knows full well the place for him to reside is in the liminal space between things. He doesn’t really make paintings. He doesn’t really make drawings. They’re not paintings. They’re not drawings. They’re works on paper. Everything about his practice is about living in these liminal spaces between things, including all the content.”
 
For the last half century, the SoCal native Craig Stecyk has documented and influenced the surf, skate, and snowboarding cultures, most notably the Dogtown scene of the 1970s. When I told him about Raymond’s party wave he said, “Let me write something.” I like to imagine that he paddles into the wave, pops to his feet, draws a scroll from the sleeve of his wetsuit, and reads aloud from it—
Raymond Ginn Pettibon predicates his discourse with expressed pronouncements that he is not a surfer. Nor is he a draftsman, or a locomotive enthusiast. Nor a punk ingenue, baseball player, cartoonist, dreamscape desperado, politico, musician, Nietzschean poststructuralist, filmmaker, Mansonite, or cinema director. Throughout all the denials, Pettibon steadfastly remains both a devoted father as well as an introspective son.
 
In the chaotically forlorn ruinous expanse of Raymond’s atelier there is no discernible order. Reams of torn pages, bats, balls, swim fins, volumes of scientific inquiry, and the like are equally abandoned across the floor. The previously described jetsam is treated no differently than the haphazardly tossed artworks that characteristically also land among the drifting detritus. Interspersed throughout are incidental artifacts, which periodically are summoned forth in support of the effort. Pettibon draws as he thinks. It is a furiously constant Gesamtkunstwerk.
 
A studio pitching machine intermittently heaves erratically aimed ninety-mph beanballs. Don’t crowd that plate. Pay attention. Cogito, ergo sum isn’t the fundamental premise. Rather it’s I draw, therefore I think . . . Duco, ergo cogito. The rhythm of the line dictates disembodied abstracted veracities. Every tale in Pettibon’s milieu is irresistibly persuasive. None is based on any single correct Rubik’s Cube–like formula. True solutions do not exist. Life’s experiences are farcically a tabula rasa. Oblivion forges illusionistic responses as a defense against the echoes of the void. But sailing off the charts is the essence of navigation.
 
The artist Marcel Dzama met Raymond at an art dinner about a decade ago. They sat next to each other and fidgeted awkwardly. When dessert landed on the table Raymond pulled out a pen and drew a breast spraying milk toward it. Marcel took the pen and added a little character trying to catch the milk in his mouth. So began several drawing and painting collaborations.
 
“I really think Raymond is the William Blake of our time where he’s just as talented in his poetry as he is in his artwork,” says Marcel. “The two together are such a great combination; they improve each other. He comes alive when he’s working. And we communicate better when we’re not talking but just drawing at the same time, kind of like musicians improvising together. 
 
“Raymond writes in notebooks and books, and he’d always throw them out, and I’d take them from the trash to check them out and see what he was writing. It was fascinating to see. That creative process of how he can just take a little morsel from, I think it was Paradise Lost, and just run with it, and go to this other world with it—it’s really inspiring.”
 
“Pettibon’s work is raw and none too precious,” says Scott Hulet, a longtime editor of The Surfer’s Journal. “It looks naive and honest, like ballpoint pens on a Pee-Chee folder. The wave forms are correct, and if the artist didn’t surf, he knew surfing. Pettibon’s use of those high-minded, paraphrased quotes elevates and complexifies the compositions. Surfers like having their life’s obsession anchored with thoughtful ballast.”
 
“I think for Raymond surfing is a big sustaining idea,” says the art critic Dave Hickey. “As Lou Reed said in ‘Heroin,’ ‘It’s my wife and it’s my life.’ Surfing is a primal metaphor. If you have a dream about success, it’s about riding a big wave. If you have an anxiety dream like I did, and you’re having dinner on La Cienega, and you look up and there’s a forty-foot wave above your head . . . It’s a primal metaphor that kind of gets into your life.”
 
Rebel surfer Miki Dora (aka “Da Cat,” “the Black Knight,” “Malibu Mickey,” “the Fiasco Kid”) died in 2002, but if he were still alive he might say, “My whole life is this wave. I drop in, set the thing up, and behind me all this stuff goes over my back; the screaming parents, teachers, police, priests, politicians—they’re all going headfirst into the reef. And when it starts to close out, I pull out the back, pick up another wave, and do the same goddamn thing. Raymond’s art practice is something similar, but while we surfers fly past this cascade of worldly ills, Raymond catches it square on the head, swims in it, and turns it into poetry. I like his wave paintings. I feel kinship. I especially like the one of Gumby doing that fabulous torero-esque soul arch, with the caption: ‘Lived, loved, wasted, died. P.S. Surfed.’”
 
 
Raymond on Surfing
On a gray April morning, in 2021, Raymond and I start talking on one end of his studio, amid collages in progress strewn across the floor, which he is not afraid to step on. We make our way west, stopping at the baseball mitts to admire their aged leathery smell. Raymond shows me a half-finished surf painting: a sapphire-blue wall that is at the perfect steepness to whip around, stroke, and take off.
 
JB: What most interests you about surfing?
RP: Growing up in Hermosa Beach, it was part of my life, whether intimately or tangentially. It was part of the culture. Hermosa Beach used to have a surfing contest, and seeing David Nuuhiwa carve up a wave that was a half-foot—he didn’t have to have waves that were triple overhead to work on. I had the posters. I used to read Surfer and Surfing magazines, Greg Noll at Makaha . . . But in my experience I was stuck, I didn’t even have a car, I lived a mile and a half from the beach, and when you’re dependent on Hermosa Beach waves—how many good days are there? Not many.
 
JB: Did you surf growing up?
RP: I surfed some. I grew up really poor. I used to beg my parents for a surfboard, and they’d always use the excuse, “Well, it’s too dangerous.” And that was because that was too much money to spend on a kid. The last time I was in California I had a house a half a block from the beach in Venice, which is kind of like Hermosa Beach—if it gets above two to three feet it closes out. There’re some spots—the Breakwater, or even the Pier. Up north there’s Malibu, down south there’s El Porto, then Haggerty’s, Palos Verdes. But unless you’re part of the family, it’s a rat race. There’s a social situation in surfing that unless you’re born into it, or on the inside, then move on. I’m glad I didn’t succumb to the surfing lifestyle because it’s all-encompassing, it’s all day, twenty-four hours, seven days a week. 
 
JB: It seems to me that you’ve imagined surfing in a way that might be richer than the actual experience.
RP: I think I’m more of a realist than that in my artwork. But maybe I do blow up the culture of surfing within my artwork. There’s two kinds of surfing. There’s big-wave surfing, and there’s the surfing that is changing out of your wetsuit in the parking lot, the kind of locker-room jock culture. Big-wave surfing is of epic proportions. It has to do with what you call the sublime, going back to Edmund Burke. It has to do with making artwork about nature at its most epic, its most ferocious. Caspar David Friedrich. Frederic Edwin Church. Turner. So I’m speaking of the differences between big-wave surfing and small-wave surfing: big-wave surfing separates oneself from the parking lot and flashing some Gidget, changing out of your trunks. In the lineup it’s between you and the wave—that separates the men from the boys, it separates Greg Noll from Fabian. I used to have dreams—almost nightmares—of waves when they were so big, and being caught inside and it’s like a washing machine, and as far as you can dive down, you can get your eyes full of sand and you’re still being tossed and turned. It’s been many years since I’ve had those dreams and nightmares. I don’t dream much anymore, but that was one recurrent.
 
JB: There’s so much great visual imagery in the surf world—both still and moving images. When you’re making surf paintings, is this stuff in the back of your head somewhere, or are you trying to clear it out and work purely from imagination?
RP: I don’t draw from a photo. Usually they’re composites. They start as that and then I freestyle on them. I never learned the skills from drawing from nature, or models. On the other hand, I think it’s good, at least in my case, to have some reference as a starting point at least, rather than recalling from your dreams or your imagination or your history. Every surf drawing or painting of mine is different from the last. I’m trying to find something new in it as I start it, and then there’s fits and starts, there’s false starts, and then you’re trying to work yourself out of that hole. I could do ten surf drawings a day if I wanted to. Working big is actually easier than working small. I’m still learning each time I pick up the brush or the pen. And starting with a blank canvas or paper, I don’t have it all in my mind. 
 
JB: What comes first, the image or the text?
RP: It can be either. It’s not like I need to have in my mind this vision of the final thing. I can start with a wave, or whatever image it is, and I have the confidence that I can make something out of it with the words. And the words are something I depend on; I don’t think my wave paintings would be of much interest without the words.
 
JB: Do you find it hard to shut off? If you’re working on a piece, does it follow you home at night, are you thinking about it nonstop?
RP: I don’t know if it works within that time frame, but you see all these works in progress here, I’m still working on things until they leave my hands and go out into the world. They’re not always done in one sitting at the drawing board, they can be many years between, so it becomes a conversation that goes back and forth until I run out of room, the words get so tiny that you need a microscope to read them. My favorite thing is the writing, although I hate to separate the two because they’re dependent on each other. They’re married to each other, so why split up.
 
JB: In your surf paintings, is there something that you’re trying to get at that you’ve yet to?
RP: I never thought about that. I know that in the surfing world—going back to Phil Edwards surfing Pipeline, or Greg Noll—there’s surfers going to places no one would imagine you could surf. In those terms, no. Before we were talking about the scale, however big the canvas or the paper is. When you’re depicting surfing waves, scale does matter. With an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven you can say a lot about surfing. I don’t know, I’m kind of constrained by the size of the paper rolls, right? And I don’t think it would make a hell of a lot of difference to work on an epic scale. It’s what happens in your mind.
 

August 18, 2022

“When Life Revolved Around the Waves” - the North Shore in WSJ

In January, I spent two weeks on the North Shore of Oahu, a trip I’ve made nearly every winter since 1982. One bright Tuesday morning, I headed out for my routine surf check. Known as the “Seven-Mile Miracle,” this stretch of coastline is home to several of the world’s most hallowed surf breaks. The trade winds were light and balmy; the swell was up: 12- to 18-feet out of the northwest. 
 

August 18, 2022

Nearly Fossilized in the Dirt

We passed a pair of underwear, sun-bleached and nearly fossilized in the dirt. Further along was a bra, and then a shattered Jack Daniels bottle, and then the faded remains of a Trojan wrapper.

“Someone got laid,” said Kevin.

He said it with conviction, as if he was in on something that I wasn’t.

We climbed a crumbly hill that led out to a summit overlooking the whole of Westlake. You could see the cul de sacs, the man-made lake, the greenbelts, the tennis courts, the swimming pools, the stuff that we would soon come to know as “suburban mediocrity.”

“Looks like a bad idea,” said Kevin.

He unzipped his shorts and took a piss. I did the same.

October 25, 2021

Love Letter, Love Letter

October 13, 2021

The Beautiful Flower Will Wilt, The Beautiful Flower Will Die

1985. Ronald Reagan. “We Are the World.” AIDS. “Like a Virgin.” An exploding surf industry. A powder keg of a world champion: Tom Carroll, uber-athlete, hard charger—at giant Pipeline and at the nightclub at 1:44 a.m. I had feelings that scared me for a girl named Julie. And something dirty with Carolyn. Mostly I had a 6’2” Al Merrick thruster and three WSA West Coast Championship titles.

I turned pro that summer. To kick off my giant leap, Quiksilver, my sponsor, sent me on a photo trip to Natividad. Photo trips were a new thing. There’d always been surf trips (Endless Summer, Naughton-Peterson), but photo trips were more about getting ad shots for the brands than editorial for the mags. Also new was the “photo guy” (or “photo whore,” depending on who you were talking to). Today we call them “freesurfers” without blinking an eye. But back then the notion that you could earn a living simply by getting your mug in the mag was unprecedented.

Leading this charge was my friend and mentor, Willy Morris. His 6’2”, 220-pound frame did him no favors in the ASP events, held way too often in small waves, but he could chuck giant spray that looked great in photographs.

It was Willy who put together our trip. He and Surfing magazine photo editor Larry “Flame” Moore had been monitoring the chubasco swell; the buoys were 4 to 6 feet at 20 seconds—perfect for Natividad. Willy picked me up in front of my house at 4:30 a.m. In his new, gunmetal-gray Jetta, bought with the money he’d been making through photo incentives, we headed south to the border and followed the much-potholed 1D coastal road to Ensenada Airport. There we met up with the rest of the crew: Richard Cram, Bryce Ellis, Sam and Matt George, JP Patterson, and Flame.

The morning sun blazed. The wind whipped precariously, especially given the flimsy look of the propeller plane that would fly us the 450 kilometers south to Isla Natividad, a tiny island home to Open Doors, a beachbreak that served up whomping A-frames. It was hailed as a sort of photo studio: Prevailing winds blew offshore, and it was brilliantly front-lit by the afternoon sun.

The seating arrangement on the plane was more bus than aircraft. A handful of leathery fishermen occupied the first couple rows. They laughed a lot, mostly at us gringos. An elderly woman sat behind them. She wore what looked like a nun’s tunic, and on her lap she held a live chicken. Behind her was a wiry old man holding a leash attached to a scruffy gray goat. Our surfboards occupied the center aisle—a major fire hazard, but there was no one to regulate that stuff.
       
I did not know my fellow photo-trippers when we boarded the flight, but by the time we hit the ground at Natividad I felt like I did. Flame was meticulous, hyper-organized, possibly a germophobe. He also guarded his camera gear as if someone might steal it. Clad in Reeboks and sweatpants, Bryce and Crammy were serious athletes. They hid behind Walkmans, did the occasional forward bend, and seemed slightly put off by the Tres Mundo of it all. JP Patterson was bodyboarding’s first legit pro, and spoke of Waimea barrels. Sam and Matt exuded the “When in Rome…” spirit. They did not speak Spanish, but nonetheless joked with the fishermen, charmed the old lady, petted the chicken, scratched the chin of the goat, and poked their Heckle-and-Jeckle heads into the cockpit to chat up the pilot.
       
Approaching Natividad’s dirt landing strip, heads pressed to the windows, we saw what from above looked like excellent waves. They were exactly the pounding peaks I’d seen in recent issues of Surfing. The wind blew a strong offshore—or was that the wind kicked up from our plane? We flew so low over the surf that it was hard to tell. Our landing was immaculately smooth. The goat did not bleat. The chicken clucked only a little. We exited and dragged our gear up the landing strip and across a scrubby field to a group of cinder-block bungalows that reminded me of Fred and Wilma’s house in The Flintstones.
       
Natividad was occupied by a couple dozen families, most all of them fishermen. There were no hotels. You rented bungalows, which were really just family houses. We checked in with the family Flame had stayed with on his last trip, and walked across the center square to our accommodations. I bunked with Willy and Flame, the Aussies took the bungalow across from us, and Sam and Matt took one around the back. Our room had three cots, a couple of plastic chairs, a TV, and lots of Virgin of Guadalupe artifacts on the walls. We did not bother to unpack. We grabbed our boards and wetsuits and bolted for the surf.
       
The waves were throaty, the water surprisingly chilly. Flame set up his tripod down the beach from us and shot into the rights. I got a few, though my timing felt off and I was nervous about the camera. The others surfed brilliantly. Willy in particular rode with masterful command, picking all the right waves and hitting all the right spots.
       
We surfed until the sun disappeared behind the horizon and the sky turned to tequila sunrise, or more like tequila sunset. On the walk back we passed a gaggle of barefoot kids playing soccer on the landing strip, their shoes set up as goal posts. They laughed at us, just as the fishermen on the plane had. Matt George dropped his board and joined them for a few kicks.
       
At our bungalows we showered under a trickle of cold water that dripped from 6 inches of hose poking out of a cement wall. Then we dressed and headed over to the main house for dinner, which Flame explained worked like a B&B, albeit with all three meals. Our hosts—Familia Gutierrez, I’d learn—served up rice, beans, a baked white fish, and a lobster soup. We drank one beer each. We talked about Hawaii. Sam and Matt described a recent luau they’d attended. “Hawaiians don’t eat till they’re full, they eat till they’re tired,” said Sam. Flame told a terrible story about a guy who’d face-planted into the shallow sandbar at Open Doors and broken his neck. There were no medical facilities on Natividad, and, by the time they had airlifted him out of there, he’d downed a full bottle of tequila to kill the pain.
       
We finished our meals, thanked the Gutierrezes, and ambled back to our rooms. Willy and Flame talked about boats—the Radon Sport 21, Hobie Cats. Sam and Matt spoke passionately about a recent marathon they’d run, and, as we passed my bungalow, I understood it that I should follow them, and we said good night to the others.
“Set your alarms for six o’clock,” were Flame’s final words.

In their room, furnished much like ours, Sam laid on the concrete floor with his legs pressed vertically up the wall. “Good for circulation,” he said. Matt raved about a girl he’d met on a recent trip to Tahiti.
       
“It was like we’d known each other for 11 lifetimes, and Jame, we fell in love. It was the real stuff. I’d hurl myself in front of a train for this girl.”
       
“Where is she now?” I asked.
       
“In her little cottage up in the trees above Taapuna, probably cooking dinner for her father or shampooing her little brother’s hair. She had these breasts that looked like they carried milk for the entire world. She was a flower. A beautiful flower.”
       
“Why didn’t you bring her home with you?”
       
“Ah, no! No, Jame. It’s not like that. No. I’ve traveled enough to understand these things,” he said, and brought his hand to his heart as if pledging allegiance. “You can admire the beautiful flower. You can smell the beautiful flower.” He shut his eyes and inhaled sensually. “You can even touch the beautiful flower.” He swirled his fingers in a little circle. “But you cannot pick the beautiful flower and bring it back to smoggy, stressed-out Southern California, because it will wilt and it will die. Sam, back me up on this one. Am I right?”
       
Sam still had his legs up the wall: “You’re not always right, Matt, but you’re never wrong.”
       
Matt moved over to the TV and flipped through the stack of videotapes atop it.
       
“Oh, yeah! Sam, Jame, we have Deep Throat.”
       
He held up the sleeve and read aloud: “How far does a girl have to go to untangle her tingle? Eastmancolor. Adults only.”
       
Matt inserted the tape into the VCR, and in that little room alongside the landing strip on Isla Natividad, population about 75, we watched Deep Throat from start to finish. And for those 61 minutes, Sam and Matt George, the most talkative men I’d ever met in my life, did not speak a single word.
I couldn’t sleep that night. Too much stimulus: Linda Lovelace. Too many vivid impressions: Crammy’s backside cutback. Too much snoring: Flame. Tossing and turning—mattress coils like teeth, pillow like a stone slate—I thought about girls.

A few nights before I left for Natividad, I was headed out the door to go to a party when my father, seated alone at the dinner table, stopped me.

“You know,” he said, “when you’re with a girl, Jamie, it’s just you. It’s not Jamie the pro surfer or Jamie the guy in the surf magazine. It’s just Jamie. It’s just you standing naked, no masks, no labels. Know what I mean?”

I thought about Julie and wondered if my inability to talk to her was some kind of survival mechanism. If we’d have fallen in love, then what? Instead of falling in love with Julie, I slid into something emotionless with Carolyn, a model and occasional purse-snatcher. (I’d witnessed the latter firsthand.) I met her on a Quiksilver shoot. She was on parole for her second DUI. She was 17. Carolyn had thick brown hair and porcelain skin and pouty lips that more often than not were clamped around a Marlboro Red. Her giraffe-ishly long legs poked out of ridiculously high skirts. She called her girlfriends “hooker,” and eventually started calling me “hooker.”

Carolyn lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Encino that her absentee father paid for. She liked to have sex on the shag carpet, where we’d worm our way closer and closer to the fireplace, so that burning-hot faces and climax were synchronized. I spent about a half-dozen nights with her. And on every one of them—usually late, close to midnight—there came a knock on the door. Carolyn would raise a finger to her lips. The knocks would advance to pounds. The doorbell would go haywire. Then it would stop for an hour or two. Then it would start again. I noticed a difference in the cadence and force of the first and second round of knocks, and wondered if there was more than one man trying to get at her.

The next two days on Natividad were terrific. The swell came up a touch; the wind continued to blow offshore. The A-frame-shaped waves sometimes connected with a second A-frame, so that we’d drop down the face in a low tuck with rear arm jammed into the water to create drag to slow you down and maximize tube time, then exit the tube, pump, pump, pump, and backdoor the next A-frame, which was like an abbreviated, watery version of that tunnel we drove through on Malibu Canyon.

Willy carved huge, winged top turns. Crammy and Bryce sliced and diced. Sam and Matt seemed to take more pleasure in the recounting of the rides than the rides themselves. At dinner they were like a pair of seasoned sports announcers doing their post-game parsing. Flame spent most of the hot and bright hours standing behind his 600mm lens, though he did swim out and shoot from the water a couple of times. Open Doors broke hard in shallow water. He less swam than stood in the waist-deep impact zone and hollered us into waves. It didn’t matter if they were makeable or not. It was closer to modeling than proper surfing. We’d stroke, pop to feet, pose in barrel, then get crushed. In one rag-dolling wipeout, I felt Flame’s fins, head, and housing. It was strangely intimate. When we surfaced four seconds later, I felt like I knew him better.

These were pre-digital days, of course, so there were no photos to look at after, only Flame’s recollections. “That thing was a frothy pit,” he said of one of Willy’s waves over lunch. Hoping to get a laugh, I turned to Sam and Matt and said, “Natividad is full of frothy pits.” Matt rested a paternal hand on my shoulder and said, “Ah, Jame, that’s just the porn talking.” And for the rest of the trip that became our inside joke. And to this day, 35 years later, I’ll run into Sam and Matt and they’ll wait for the right moment and give a slight shake of the head and say, “That’s just the porn talking.”

The last day of the trip was September 17, my 19th birthday. I told Willy that morning. He told the rest of the crew. At breakfast I was casually wished a happy birthday. By dinnertime we were all celebratory. Sam wore a sombrero he’d bought in Ensenada. Matt wore a Lawrence of Arabia scarf. We ate grilled snapper with a citrus sauce and rice and beans. There was more beer than the previous nights. And as Mamacita cleared the plates from the table, Willy produced a bottle of tequila. He poured out shots. We toasted. Mamacita and Papacito appeared from the kitchen with a chocolate birthday cake topped with 19 lit candles. All sang “Happy Birthday,” the Spanish and English running over the top of each other. I closed my eyes, made a wish, and blew. The cake tasted dusty, in the same way that all of Natividad did. It was good and not too sweet, the frosting thick and gooey.
       
The fun didn’t stop there. With the tequila bottle in hand, Matt led us outside and around the back of the bungalows to a small courtyard where nearly every resident of Isla Natividad had gathered. They were waiting for us. The gringo’s birthday was cause for celebration. Cans of beer topped the sole picnic table. An elderly man in a cowboy hat played a guitar and blew into a harmonica. Kids lit firecrackers and threw them into the night. Hanging from a tree was a piñata, or a pillowcase doubling for one. After the first bottle of tequila was finished, a second one came out. There were no glasses. We swigged from the bottle and passed it along.

Once we were good and wobbly, Matt came over, kissed me on the cheek, unfurled his scarf, and wrapped it around my eyes. A blindfold. I heard Spanish-speaking voices moving closer. Someone handed me a baseball bat. I heard kids’ laughter. I smelled cigarettes. Little hands grabbed my hands and led me around in one circle, two circles, three circles, four. The laughter rose. I stumbled, nearly fell over. “Àndale!” they yelled. I stepped forward in what I thought was the direction of the piñata and swung. I hit nothing. Laughter. I stepped to the left and tried again. Nothing. I swung furiously and widely, hoots, hollers, “Àndale!”s. Then I connected. I heard the sound of the piñata’s guts spilling on the ground. I peeled off the scarf. On hands and knees the village kids picked through the contents. It was not candy, but surf stuff—leashes, bars of wax, at least a half-dozen Astrodeck tail patches, a few Nose Guards, and a bunch of stickers.

October 8, 2021

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