WRESTLING ELEPHANTS

We entered surfing through the back door. In the mid-seventies, skateboarding was still a wave-riding surrogate. The carves, kick turns, and Berts; the attraction to banks and bowls; the way we’d duck and drag our hands under overhanging foliage—these were surf moves adapted to pavement, though we didn’t know it at the time. I’m reminded of Ralph Macchio, whose famous “wax on, wax off” strokes would later become his defensive blocks in “The Karate Kid.” Which is to say that it was all in our muscle memory, we just had to translate it to water.

We were on a family trip to Hawaii in the summer of ’78, staying at a hotel with sweeping views of Waikiki Beach. We had no idea that this was the very spot where the great Duke Kahanamoku got a mile-long ride in 1917; where Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, Montgomery Clift, and Babe Ruth caught their first waves in the fifties; where, legend has it, a strapping Waikiki Beach Boy and a smitten haole (foreign) girl made love while riding tandem during a moonlight surf in the sixties. Nor did we know about Jack London’s visit in 1907, during which he became so enraptured by surfing that he called it a “royal sport for the natural kings of earth” in a now-legendary magazine article that historians cite as the seed that would later sprout Gidget, the Beach Boys, Frankie and Annette, Malibu Barbie, and all the rest. We only knew that Cousin Jeff had recently wallpapered his bedroom in surf posters, and that he raved fanatically about “hang fives” and “tube rides.”

And so it was on a bright August morning that my brothers and I rented mustard yellow soft boards from a paunchy, silver-haired beach boy who warned us to “Neva turn your back on da ocean.” We paddled out clumsily, got whacked around by even the feeblest of white wash, found it astonishingly difficult to straddle our ten-foot boards without tipping over, found it nearly impossible to align ourselves with the wave at the proper time—too soon and the swell would continue on without us, too late and we’d “pearl” (go head over heels)—and exited the water two hours later humiliated, not to mention sunburned and nipple-rashed. But we were persistent. For the next three days we surfed from dawn till dusk, and by the end of it we were up on nearly every wave.

It wasn’t the actual surfing that hooked me, but rather the way it played back in my head as I tried to fall asleep at night. The thrill of stroking, stroking, stroking then suddenly being raised up as if by some divine hand; the precarious pop from prone to feet; that giddy buzz of standing tall in a Bruce Lee fighter stance as the whitewash tickles my heels and the shimmering blue whooshes past—all of it returned in visceral detail. It was if I were under a spell; as if salt water had entered my veins.

Congratulations to Mr. McCoy! ‘A Deeper Shade of Blue,’ his opus, won Best Documentary at the X-Dance Film Festival in Salt Lake City.

Here are some shots from a recent visit to his office in Newport Beach, Sydney…

“I see what happens to Dick almost as the opposite of a collapse: a standing firm, an assertion rather than a weakening of will. This is why Dick’s failure is accompanied by the affirming sense that he is not falling short of but living up to his destiny, fulfilling it. E.M. Cioran got as close as anyone to the mysterious heart of ‘Tender’ when he said of the Fitzgeralds’ time in Europe—“seven years of waste and tragedy,” as Fitzgerald himself termed it—that in this time “they indulged every extravagance, as though haunted by a secret desire to exhaust themselves.” Elsewhere, without even referring to Fitzgerald, Cioran writes that “the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest…will set failure above any success, he will even seek it out. This is because failure, always essential, reveals us to ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything.”

(lifted without permission from ‘Otherwise Known As The Human Condition’, Graywolf Press, 2011)

...in a Sonic Youth book.

Middle age surprises. Crack-addicted friends with bad chips on their shoulders in 1992 have since made peace with themselves, started families, replaced missing teeth, and become altogether wonderful people. Great womanizers who cavalierly juggled supermodels in their twenties now find themselves alone, with suspicious suntans and too many Chrome Hearts rings on their fingers.

In my early-thirties, terminally single, I found it hard to get through dinners with happily married couples with young children. Their comfort and stability reminded me of all that I lacked, and my free-spirited, peripatetic lifestyle did vice versa. Now I’m on the other side of this. My single friends describe in gloating detail their sexual conquests.

Most fascinating is the whole “older I get, better I was” epidemic, especially when it comes to surfing. At Waikiki Beach a couple years back, I met a haole surf instructor who spoke in thick pidgin and advertised himself as an ex-pro.

“What years?” I asked.

“Late ‘80s, brah.”

“Which tour?”

“ASP and PSAA.”

I competed on the ASP and PSAA tours from 1986 to 1991 and I’d never seen this guy before.

A minor surf and skate pro from the ‘80s claims on his website to have “inspired the Dogtown scene and helped spark the SoCal surf/skate/snow culture.”

I have watched one of my contemporaries’ bios change throughout the decades. In the ’90s he was a “former East Coast surfing champion.” In the ‘00s he became a “former U.S. Champion.” Recently he has graduated to “former Top 16 ranked pro.”

Following this trend, I’d like to amend my own biography:

—I did not deliver a pizza to John McEnroe in 1986 but rather John McEnroe’s wife, Tatum O’Neill, who invited me in, offered me cocaine and beer, and gave me a blowjob in the Jacuzzi.

—I grew up not in the Valley but Venice Beach. My father is serving a life sentence for murdering my mother. I was raised by Kent Sherwood, Jay Adams’s stepdad. I teethed on Cadillac Wheels, catamaraned down Bay Street with Uncle Tony Alva, lost my virginity, age 11, to the ‘Malibu Grinder’ in that famous gangbang the Colony crew still talk and high-five about.

—Jello Biafra, my godfather, hurled me off the stage at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go at a Dead Kennedys/Cramps show in 1980. I was 12. After crowd surfing through “Chemical Warfare,” Connie Jacobs, with pink Mohawk and pink pubic hair (how do I know this? she showed me), burned a mi vida loca tattoo into the back of my neck.

—Madonna and I not only ate sushi and smoked a joint and had rough sex in the alley behind Femme Nu in Waikiki after the Rolling Stone shoot (see below), but also she brought me along on her ‘Like A Virgin’ tour, and paid me handsomely to dazzle with my Gene Simmons-like tongue, much to the chagrin of Jellybean Benitez.

—Tom Curren still has a tough time looking me in the eye after the three times in a row I beat him in WSA quarterfinal heats.

—During that scandalous and prolific stint between my second Palme d’or and my hang gliding accident, I was not snorting methylenedioxypyrovalerone as Vanity Fair erroneously reported. I was doing tai chi and eating raw food.

—And for the record, yes, she was a senior at Beverly Hills High, but no, she wasn’t seventeen, she was sixteen-and-a-half.

—Brad Pitt, alls I can say is I apologize, the whole thing went down before you entered the picture.

http://www.surfline.com/surf-news/the-surf-skate-connection-chapter-six_61950/

Just when I was sure I’d kicked my inflatable love doll addiction…

My most vivid Halloween memory is of a haunted house in Encino that had a trough full of slimy goo. In a pitch black room, a stranger, presumably a zombie, would take your hand and guide it into this strange confection. It was warm like urine, and full of what felt like bones, cartilage, sea anemones, rubbery sausages, livers, hearts, brains, cigarettes, and dead goldfish. It smelled of blood, rubbing alcohol, open heart surgery. We’d try to imitate it in the school cafeteria. Tom La Verdi would dump his milk into his half-eaten bowl of spaghetti. Jeremy Dash would add a banana peel. Ronnie Sachs would spoon in some chocolate pudding. John Thorsen would pepper in some pizza crusts, an apple core, and a regurgitated peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We’d decorate it in swirls of ketchup and mustard, and sprinkles of Pop Rocks. Peter Bishop, bully that he was, would add what he referred to as “the cherry on top”: a deeply hawked loogie. Then we’d dip someone’s hand in it, or hurl it at an enemy.