by John Decure
If you surf, you know it’s mostly a waiting game, a test of patience and wave-knowledge and timing and sometimes sheer luck, looking for an open face that will offer you a shot of speed, a sliver of self-expression. If you don’t surf and you’d happen to see a girl like me out here in the night, a wetsuited figure poised and motionless in the recessed orange glare of PCH, staring into the brink of nothing, well, who knows what bad thoughts you might think. But you could not be blamed for thinking them.
A flat calm settles onto Third Point. Mother Ocean is dawdling, toying with her lone admirer’s patience. I’m jonesing for the freedom quest, for the one wave that will change me, transport me, fuel my sagging spirits, make sense of everything. Sure—just a friendly, happy-go-lucky little session, no pressure at all.
Your approach is all wrong. Freedom is not about marshalling force. Relax.
Yet nothing is rolling in, nothing, at least, to compare with the modest three-wave set that zippered toward the cove while I was suiting up by my car. I squint harder, but there is not a thing to see, on this, the most intensely studied and stared-at patch of water on earth.
First Point Malibu: hallowed ground, the epicenter of California surfing. But that was half a century ago when the place was still rural ranchland, before Gidget and the beach blanket movies came along and the hordes descended. Before my time. Now if I want a wave to myself out here I have to wait for a black-lacquer night like this.
My eyes are still adjusting to the absence of light, and slowly the crude shapes began to morph into lines of swell. Up close, the surf seemed a shakier proposition than it had appeared from shore: waist-high shadows running too fast along the glowing ribbon of exposed cobblestones that give the point its classic form. But that Crazy Wind, the Santa Ana, is picking up, gusting, whipping my hair into my eyes and passing a steady, grooming hand over the ocean’s surface, commanding order.
Reluctantly, I let a too-small set of perfectly shaped swells roll by beneath while ruminating on this fierce desert wind, how it will kick up more dust and dirt and inland filth than you can imagine and blast it all the way out to sea for days, making your throat itch, your eyes squint, the skin around your private parts tighten up, just the way mine used to when I’d interview a witness in lockup.
Cops like to say Santa Anas make people do bad things, the way a full moon supposedly brings out the werewolves.
You know that’s bullshit.
Of the many bad-people-who-do-bad-things I’ve had the distinct misfortune to know, they all seemed to share a common affinity for conjuring lame excuses for their misdeeds. The devil-wind made me do it. That song on the radio reminded me of my ex, and hell, I just went nuts. Damn pizza-pie moon followed me all the way home. Swear to God it was mocking me.
Self-serving drivel. Look—are you another one of those weekenders who sit around philosophizing and never even take off, or do you actually surf?
Another gust of offshore, intent on pushing me around. I shiver, drop to my deck and paddle farther up the point. When they’re not chattering at me, the Santa Anas—the official meteorological term for the Crazy Wind—are busy polishing the ocean’s surface into a fine mill grain. At last a set comes down the rocks, each wave peeling thin and ruler-straight with a white-rocket trail of foam building and zippering through the black maw of space, mesmerizing little crystal-spinner lips exploding into delicate roostertails. I paddle chin up, my head happily tilted sideways, choose the third wave, streaking high through three or four tight sections, jiving and arching with the pitching lip, guided more by sense than sight. It is a good ride by objective standards, a fine one by my own. By some miracle my head clears and I realize full well what I’m doing out here: reclaiming my sanity, no less. The ride ends and I consider going in, but the thought of lying awake in bed two hours before dawn, staring at shapes on the ceiling to the sound of Reevesy’s snores humming through the walls provides zero impetus.
I’ve kicked out well inside, almost to the pier, and the light shining down on the pilings makes it harder to see back up the point from where I’d come, like standing under a porch light staring into solid night. I drop prone to begin the paddle back out, hair breezing across my eyes, and as I pause to wipe clear my vision, a strange thing happens. There, up the point—a flash of movement, a shadow, a streak of white slicing across the last wave to roll through. A rough form, an outline.
A surfer.
Another shadow rider, unfazed by darkness, come to join you. Can it be? See? You’re not so original after all…
No, not in these near-blackout conditions. Not likely.
But yes—there he is, and he’s very, very good! Perched on a classic nose-rider, stalling and stomping the tail, fluidly cross-stepping back up to the tip to accelerate, whipping a cutback, then back off the bottom again, raging through another critical section in an easy, confident crouch. More details emerge as he comes nearer: black trunks, black hair, a lithe, muscled torso. I’m not seeing this, except I am.
To me, he is instantly recognizable: Miki Dora, the original Black Knight. Malibu’s greatest surfer ever. In his prime.
I don’t know those fluid moves firsthand, but from studying the rider in grainy snippets of a half-dozen old surf movies, memorizing the limp, controlled disdain, the bullfighter’s casual defiance.
But this is impossible. He’d taken his leave of this place in the sixties, declaring the scene dead and buried, a farce. Traveled the world to search for the perfect wave, always on someone else’s dime. Went to jail for credit card fraud, got out, and went surfing again. Never, ever returned to Malibu, though his name is perpetually spray-painted on the wall just below the parking lot.
Dora Lives.
That’s just a saying, a connotation, something to do with the rebel spirit of surfing, or what’s left of it. Not much more than a pose anymore, but surfers can be sentimental that way.
Dora doesn’t live, not literally. We’d crossed paths briefly in Jeffrey’s Bay, South Africa, where I’d gone to decompress from law school and the bar exam. He was in his sixties then and going gray, drove a four-door beater with broken window handles, and was worried about his upcoming cataract surgery. Hardly the dashing figure of surf lore, but he was lonely, like me, and starved for good conversation—which I supplied—about the law, politics, film, World War II, and a hundred other subjects. There was tennis, a trip to a farmer’s market one rainy Saturday, and afternoon tea at the B-and-B straight uphill from Supertubes, where I was renting the servant’s quarters for two weeks. I saw Miki out in the water only once, though; he was waiting way, way outside, at Boneyards, anticipating the arrival of a bigger wave that no one else had the patience to wait for. When I paddled over and said hi, he acted like he didn’t know me. If his aloofness hadn’t reminded me so much of myself, I’d have been hurt. So I told myself I wasn’t. I stroked back down toward the point, but before I reached the takeoff spot, a head-high beauty popped up out of nowhere and shot me all the way through Supers and down into Impossibles. It was the best wave of my life. I called it a session and bellied in on a line of whitewater. Sat on the sand for an hour, maybe more, waiting for Dora to rip one to shore. Yet his wave never came. My flight to Capetown left at ten the next morning, so I had to be up early to catch a bus to the airport. Walked down to Supers one last time. The swell had dropped overnight and the point was deserted. No Miki.
Good-bye, friend. And thank you for that wave yesterday.…
He fell terminally ill a few years ago and finally came home to California—Santa Barbara—to spend his last days with a father he rarely saw. I’d read every word I could find on the subject of his demise in newspapers and surf mags, because Dora always had meaning for me beyond just his prowess as a surfer. His rejection of what surfing had become—which, of course, was inevitable because surfing is so damn cool, so damn fun, it just had to come to ruin—was to me almost poetic, as I lived daily with the same nagging hollow sense of disappointment. But his love and devotion to the pursuit of
perfection, the act, the dance… well, in my hopes and dreams and prayers and secret aspirations, I could relate.
He also had his imperfections and contradictions. His staunch opposition to the commercialization of surfing never slowed him from making a buck on the side, if the price was right. Dora’s noble, unwavering pursuit of perfection plays less virtuously upon closer inspection as well, if you factor in the reports of scamming and fleecing of friends and admirers that helped fund his extended sojourns. Always swift to excoriate the surfing press as exploitative, he’d just as quickly publicly trade on his fame to gain an advantage.
Yeah? So what?
His flaws only made him more compellingly human to me. Like Malibu and California and surfing itself, Dora was flawed and complicated and not easily definable while also capable of great beauty and complex originality.
Special—very special.
The offshore blows PCH car sounds into the lineup. Some unlucky delivery driver, gripping his steering wheel against the gusts. I stop stroking, content to wait forever for one more wave, if that’s what it takes. Just being out here is a gift. Within seconds a wave rolls in, right to me—God, or Poseidon, showing his sense of humor.
Don’t take yourself so seriously…
I swing around, hook into the lift and surge, track an inside rail high in the face, and go, turning and burning, baby, tenderly caressing the hook, my toes and the memory of ten thousand other rides guiding the way.
Miki Dora is dead.
But I just saw him!
The Crazy Wind has claimed me.
Coming in over rocks sharp and slippery, the buzz of that final ride makes the traverse less arduous. My eyes have better adjusted to the night, and as I walk up the sand, I turn back toward Second and Third, hoping to glimpse him but sighting nothing.
Just like South Africa.
A crunch of shells sounds behind me; a repulsive stink of body odor taints the desert breeze. The tail of my board bucks sideways under my arm. I screech wildly, hoping to rattle my attacker.
He grunts when I whack the board back into his ribs, lets go just as I spin forward, my own momentum knocking me off balance. Resist, then remove the resistance—like pulling out the chair from under your opponent. An old trick, but it works, landing me facedown, my gums tasting a million cold gritty granules.
A kick to my ribs, then another. No air in my lungs—
Breathe!
No shit, but I can’t inhale without screaming pain!
Scrunching fingers, I make a grab at two big handfuls of sand and—ssflllattt!—fling them just as the third kick should land between my teeth. Surprise: another explosion of pain, this time in my breastbone.
Boot? Fist? Board? Oh, what’s the difference? Scream again, as if this is what dying’s like and it ain’t happenin’, no matter what.
Aaaarrrrhhhh!
No apparent effect. No air in my lungs. Should I be taking notes on my demise?
Kick! Not air, goddammit—kick something hard and solid! Oh, fuck…
Then… lightheaded, eyes closed, and the view inside my eyelids is quite pretty, like a star-shower, the stars, how they pop and chirp, and a white light floods in through my ears, filling my head with…
11
CRAIG WEAVER, MEDICAL DOCTOR
I’m on call twenty-four hours for my patients, but the truth is, the phone almost never rings. Tonight it did. A young man with a deep, lilting voice, disturbed about his roommate and friend, Bradlee Aames.
Oh boy.
She’d just left their apartment.
At this hour?
He knew it sounded crazy, but hey, that was Bradlee. She’d done it before, but tonight, for some reason he’d felt compelled to watch her taillights recede down their congested little Venice Beach block. That was how he’d noticed another car, an American sedan, he thought, pulling out behind her. He’d found my business card sitting on her bed and figured I was her psychiatrist.
“Least I was hoping,” the roommate said. “’Cause, uh, maybe she could use one, eh?”
“I’m not her doctor,” I said. “Or her therapist. We’re acquaintances. We just met.”
“If I might say, you don’t sound too broken up about the present intrusion. Thanks for that.”
The concerned roommate probably thought I was trying to get into her pants, but at this hour, I didn’t really care.
“Okay. Call me Craig.”
“David. My pleasure. Sorry to have to ring you like this.”
“Never mind. So, where could she be headed in the middle of the… sorry, I don’t know what time it is.” I reached for my wristwatch on the nightstand.
“I’m on it—spot on. Malibu point.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“Sure is, Craig. She likes to surf there.”
The fear and loathing aspect of my downtown LA adventure rushed back to me. My eyes swept the unlit bedroom. The dim outlines of rogues and miscreants crouched in the darkest corners, ready to leap. I flipped on the lamp by the bed, the phantasms fading away. My breath rate increased. Exhaling slowly, I steadied myself.
“Of course.”
“You sound like an insightful bloke. Bet it makes you a good psychiatrist.”
Moments like this, I honestly have no idea what I’m projecting. Insight? Not hardly.
“I hope so, David.”
That qualified as big-time hedging. My comprehension of the situation was a full step behind. Still barely awake, I robotically dressed and found my car keys. I wasn’t entirely over the scare I’d gotten in that downtown alley, so before I ventured through the door, I took a peek outside the side window. Nothing—just an indistinct view past my apartment’s front walk. Parched brown crabgrass fizzing up through the cracked pavement; a dirty white soccer ball left out by the kid next door; garbage cans lining the street curb.
No scary monsters to greet me when I stepped outside. (Yes, I’ve got an active imagination.) The first thing I noticed was the calm. No boom box crackling on the apartment stoop across the way, no freeway whine humming through the treetops. The Toyota’s seat was crackly cold and the interior reeked of a week’s dirty laundry, which I’d stuffed into a duffle bag to take to Mom’s but forgotten about completely after my LA adventure. I felt a stab of remorse, realizing how effortlessly I’d faded Mom into obscurity. She’d cooked my favorite, beef stroganoff with white rice instead of noodles, then sat there, alone, watching the sauce congeal from across the dining table while on the TV in the corner, the national news gave way to tabloid shlock, final Jeopardy, and Pat and Vanna showing a star-struck ex-Navy goofball what he’d just won. Mom, with no greater ambition than to study the void that Dad left, to sit for hours, pressed into that outdated brown captain-of-the-ship recliner, the lone oddball piece of furniture in an otherwise impeccably tasteful home, slowly twirling the stem of her wineglass. Last week, she’d upset herself when she tried to recall the sound of his voice but couldn’t. I made matters worse when I pointed out that it was just as well. Dad rarely had anything very nice to say anyway; more often than not, his intellectual bent was about as cool as my uneaten stroganoff.
At the first stop sign, I jumped out and stuck the duffel in the trunk. Then I rolled down the windows to get rid of the stink.
Dinner with Mom tonight; her peace offering to the son that hadn’t come around since the last Dad argument. And I hadn’t even called her to beg off.…
But this is too much emphasis on my mother—Jung would certainly disapprove.
How it goes, I guess—because the truth is, by the time I picked up David Reeves, the concerned roommate, by the curb on a street called Superba a few blocks west of Washington, the thought of going after Bradlee Aames tonight had faded Mom right out of my conscience anyway. In court, in the hallway, in that alley; the half-smile, those wary, appraising, bold eyes. It was like she exerted her own gravitational force.
The roommate, a handsome chap, wore tight jeans and a v-neck sweater ov
er a tee. His hair was short on the sides and in back, but a thick sandy wave spilled over his forehead. The silver wristwatch was either a Rolex or a damn good copy. I thought he was nuts to be standing alone on a dark street in Venice sporting the thing.
Apparently everybody called Mr. David—did he say “Daw-veed?” I’d missed that detail on the phone—Reevesy, so he invited me to, as well. He thought maybe he was overreacting tonight, so I rid him of that notion by telling him about Bradlee’s little escapade downtown.
“You must like her,” he said when I wrapped up my narrative. “I mean, to come out so soon for another fun adventure.”
“I’m the helping type,” I said as coolly as I could manage. “It’s sort of my business.”
But secretly I felt nicked by the suggestion that she meant more to me than I might admit. Bottom line, it bugged me to know I could be so quick to objectify a mentally compromised female; and yet, the truth: I just couldn’t help but picture her naked. Sure, I’d studied Freud in a core survey course, sharing my professor’s smirking condescension toward the Father of Psychotherapy’s vastly overreaching central premise that sexual desires dominate our consciousness. Well, that was fifteen years ago, and a lot of TV dinners and nighttime soaps had come and gone since then, enjoyed by yours truly in the company of none. I no longer dismissed Freud, don’t you know. Women were my patients, God’s most wonderful, complex, vexing creatures, in need of guidance and support, which I was none too glad to supply. Yet I also coveted them, lusting after the splayed forms of exploited strangers in dirty mags and blue films; grunting, alone with my shame, my face taut with empty pleasure.
The carnival lights on the Santa Monica pier caught my eye as my Toyota piped through the tunnel and onto the coast highway. I craned behind me for a view.
“There’s a fun spot,” I said to Reevesy. “My dad used to take me there.”
“Oh, really?”
“This one time, on a Boy Scout outing, I ate way too much ice cream and hot dogs and peanuts and cotton candy to hold it together on the Ferris wheel. Staggered off the thing and barfed all over the ticket lady just as she reached out to steady me. My dad had to take me to the…”
