None of these things seemed to make an impression on my mother, but there was something about this assertive young doctor that caught her interest. At some point, my mother’s girlfriend disappeared into the crowd, and my father sat talking with my mother for the longest time. When he learned she was from a big family, he turned to her and said, “Someday, you will be the mother of my eight sons.”
It was a bold prediction, a killer come-on line, but that was the kind of confidence my father had started to carry; that was his way; and it must have struck something in my young mother. Maybe it was the way he’d just come out with it, plain as day. Maybe she admired his brass. That’s what they called it back then, brass. These days, it’d be “balls.” He said whatever popped into his head. There was no filter.
They looked into each other’s eyes and saw something of themselves. (Sounds kind of cornpone, I know, but that’s how they always told the story.) Physically, they could not have looked more unalike—a tall, Mexican opera singer and a chiseled Jewish surfer. But it turned out they were more alike on the inside than different on the outside. Soon, they were spending all of their time together—talking, planning, dreaming. After just a couple weeks, before they had time to think things through, they quit their jobs and piled into my mother’s shit-box of a car, an old Studebaker, and drove to Mexico—towards the Gulf coast, at first. My father taught my mother to surf. They fished, spent what little savings they had, and dreamed of a life without responsibility to anyone or anything but each other. For months, they managed to get by. They lived out of my mother’s car, just parked it right on the beach, where they caught lobsters and crabs and whatever fish came in close to shore. My father was happier than he’d ever been, and my mother was happier than she thought she’d had any right to expect; she’d never once imagined that a man would come along and lift her from the sameness of her life and collect her in such a great adventure. It felt to her like the kind of epic love stories they wrote operas about.
It was while they were down in Mexico living out of that old Studebaker that my father proposed to my mother. This was the woman of his dreams, he thought. A woman who shared his ideals and his idealism. A woman who wouldn’t throw back any crazy notion he’d throw at her. At that point, his only crazy notion was fathering seven sons—he wanted to do his part to repopulate the Jewish state of Israel, he said—but that was crazy enough for the time being. As far as my mother was concerned, I don’t know that my father was the man of her dreams. A nice Jewish surfer (who happened to also be a nice Jewish doctor) wasn’t exactly high on the fantasy list for most young Mexican women. But he was smart and handsome and strong and confident. He made her smile, she said.
And, it was down in Mexico that my oldest brother, David, was probably conceived. My parents didn’t get married until they moved back to California, but by that point their adventure had already begun—and my father’s big, bold come-on line had already started to come true. My mother would deliver many, many children—many, many sons. (She would end up going his prediction one better, giving him eight sons and my baby sister, Navah.) My parents would live a life of purpose and meaning. No one day would look like another. They would not be tied to routine or to anyone’s expectations but their own.
What this might mean, what their lives might look like … they had no idea. But they would see.
2
Surfing by Osmosis
One thing I need to make clear straightaway: there’s no such thing as an official record in my family. Sorry, folks, but there’s no paper trail of documents or school records to track our comings and goings. No travel itinerary or gas receipts to help retrace our steps. We moved from here to there, up and back, around and around, without writing anything down or thinking there was any reason to remember any of the details.
Not the best way to start in on this memoir-writing business, but I want to tell it straight. You see, the deal in my family was to focus on the present. We didn’t care so much about where we’d been or where we were going, only where we were and what we were doing, just then. We lived in the moment, long before the phrase became something you’d see on a bumper sticker.
We rode whatever wave we were on at the time. (Hey, that’d look sweet on a bumper sticker, too!)
My father always jokes that we have a good collective memory, only it’s no joke. There are eleven of us, and I’m afraid no single one of us remembers everything; some of us don’t remember shit—but at least one of us remembers a little something about almost everything, and there are enough bits and snatches of memory among us to tell a couple good stories. That’s always been our thing; poll the family, and you’ll eventually find someone who gets it right; put together enough of our bits and snatches and you’ll get at least a fuzzy version of a clear picture. The trick comes in knowing who to believe and who’s completely full of shit.
My earliest memories are of my parents—and as memories go they’re all positive and pleasant and perfect. I was a happy baby. This is what I’ve been told, but it’s also what I remember. Whatever early memories I’ve held on to are pumped with feelings of warmth and well-being. I remember thinking my father could do no wrong. He was so big, so strong, so handsome … he filled the room with his presence, his personality. First time I ever heard the Greek legend of Zeus, it made me think of my father. My older brothers all had a similar take. Like me, as little kids they remember feeling completely safe and taken care of by my father—and a little bit in awe of him. The man cast a kick-ass shadow. (Still does!) My mother, too, but my father was the dominant personality in our little lives. He ran the show—and, once we were a little older, we also got that it was definitely a show. The more we surfed and bounced around the planet, the more I got that he liked being the center of attention; he liked what our family came to represent to surfers and beachgoers, the free-spirited, anything goes–type mind-set that attached to our lifestyle.
For my younger siblings—meaning the ones born after me—I’m guessing their experiences were different. By the time they came along, there were a bunch of older, rambunctious brothers on the scene, and we might have been the more dominant personalities in their lives; we might have set the tone of their childhoods. But for the oldest, including me, it was definitely my father. He was like Superman, to us. He was our Zeus, our God. Whatever he said, we listened. Whatever he did, we wanted to do. We moved to his rhythms.
First house I remember living in was in Hawaii, on the southeastern side of Oahu, in a place called Koko Head. I was about three or four years old—which meant there were just five or six of us kids. Don’t remember much about the house, apart from pictures and family stories, but I do remember it was in a neighborhood of tract houses that all looked the same. Even the people who spilled from those houses looked the same—dark-skinned, dark-haired Hawaiians all, except for us. Weren’t a whole lot of Mexican Jews in the tract houses of Koko Head, I guess.
I also remember that our Koko Head house was tiny, just a couple rooms, and that it sat on a beautiful hill, and that my paternal grandparents came to stay with us there for a stretch, and that when they did we were crowded on top of crowded. Also, it’s where I first went to school—barefoot, which was more of a Hawaii thing than a Paskowitz thing. A lot of the kids went to school barefoot in those days. It’s like shoes and sneakers were optional, which in our family worked out great because we probably couldn’t afford them anyway; we had too many damn feet.
There was another house in Hawaii, before Koko Head, this one on the western side of Honolulu County, in a little place called Makaha. The bay behind that house is a world-famous surf spot. That’s where we were living when I was born, and the house came to us on the back of one of my father’s stories. For all I know, this one might have even been true. The way my father always told it, he’d been living on the Big Island of Hawaii. He’d given up medicine to become a fish photographer. This was part of his plan to pare down his existence and live more honestly, more purposefully. Someho
w, in his head, this translated as having nothing to do with money—or, at least, as little to do with money as was practical, or possible. Wasn’t exactly the best idea in the world, to try to carve a bare-bones living by taking pictures of fish, but my father couldn’t always separate his pie-in-the-sky ideas from his workable schemes; this one might have fallen somewhere in between. My oldest brother, David, had already been born, and it’s possible the next in line, Jonathan, had also arrived. My mother was pregnant—although this wasn’t any kind of telling marker. My mother was always pregnant. She used to tell people she was pregnant or nursing for more than ten years straight, without letup, and if you look at our birth certificates and do the math you’ll see she’s about five years short. There were about fourteen years between my oldest brother, David, and my youngest brother, Joshua, so it was almost fifteen years, really, if you count from the time she was pregnant with David to when she was finished nursing Joshua.
(In all that time, we must have sucked all the calcium right out of her, but she never lost a step; she had as much energy as any of us.)
Anyway, my father got it in his head to quit being a doctor. He liked that he understood about the human body and was in a position to help people, but he didn’t like all the hassle and paperwork that came with it, so he bought a used camera and tried to make a living taking pictures of fish. After a while, he got the idea to take pictures of people. One idea followed from the other.
“What’s the greatest photograph in the world?” he used to ask us, whenever he told this story. Even though we’d heard the answer a dozen times, we’d still stumble over the question. It was like an old vaudeville routine. We all knew our parts, and my father played the lead.
“What’s the greatest photograph in the world?” he’d ask again—sometimes clapping his hands together, like he was about to share some ancient piece of wisdom. “I’ll tell you. It’s one that you’re in. A picture of yourself, that’s what people want. After that, the second-greatest picture in the world is a picture of a fish, and if you can find a way to put the person and the fish in the same picture … well, then maybe you’ve got something.”
So this was his big idea, his grand plan to support his young family, and after trying it out on the Big Island for a year or so he realized he’d probably have better success on Oahu, where there’d be more people to photograph. Maybe not more fish, but more people. So he and my mother threw their few possessions (and their few kids!) together and made their way to Oahu, where my father soon talked his way into an extended stay in a small hotel on the beach, probably in exchange for some photographs and free medical advice. Like I wrote earlier, he was big into bartering, my old man. It’s like he was living in the Wild, Wild West, swapping and trading for everything. Bottom line: if he was living in a hotel room on the beach with his wife and small children, you can bet he wasn’t paying for it.
They couldn’t stay in that hotel room forever, of course. My father had to find a way to get established, to provide for his family, so he started asking around. One thing about my father, he was great with people. He could talk his way into or out of pretty much anything, and here he fell in with a local Chinese man who had some sort of connection to Henry J. Kaiser, the great shipbuilder and steel magnate, who had settled in Honolulu and become a real estate developer. The connection to Kaiser was always a little vague to us kids, but my father set it out like an important part of the story, and maybe it was. In later years, my father claimed he’d even met old man Kaiser a time or two, although the circumstances of those meetings were never entirely clear—and never quite the same, from one story to the next. My father remembers that they were friends. Who knows, maybe they were. My guess is they were more like acquaintances—and by “acquaintances” I might mean they shook hands, once or twice. Either way, Kaiser had built a new development on the western side of the island, in Makaha, and my father learned from his new Chinese friend that they were having trouble selling the houses. This part checks out. Back then, Makaha was fairly remote and only the true die-hard surfers were willing to live that far from town, but the true die-hard surfers didn’t have any money. My father must have seen all these empty houses as an opportunity, because he put it out that he would very much like to see this development and possibly consider buying a home there.
Only problem was that my father was like every other surfer in Makaha Bay; he had no money and not a whole lot of prospects. This would become the running theme of his life—of all of our lives. Same goes for almost any other die-hard surfer, then as now. Surf long enough, hard enough, and there won’t be a whole lot of time left for mundane, workaday realities like earning a living or building a savings account. Spend too much time worrying work or long-term security and you’ll cut into your time in the water.
Either way, you’re screwed.
Back then, all Doc had were his medical degree and his used camera, so he and his new friend got to talking. My father told him his story. He told him about his plans to step away from medicine and become a photographer. He told him of his time in Israel, and his determination to live a simple, healthy life. He told him of his plans to have eight sons, and announced proudly that he was well on his way. He told him of his love of surfing. And he didn’t just talk about himself, my father. He pumped his friend for details on his story, his worldview, his passions … and he listened with great interest, another one of my father’s great gifts.
After a few days, the Chinese man took such a liking to my father he told him he’d like to sell him one of his houses in Makaha. It turned out he’d invested in Kaiser’s development and all he had to show for it were some empty houses. He figured he would do well to help this interesting young doctor and his family get established on Oahu. He probably also figured it would be easier to sell his other houses if he could show people some nice, young families living in the neighborhood, so he turned to my father and said, “What can you afford as a down payment?”
My father gave this some serious thought. He said, “Well, what’s the smallest amount you’d take?”
Now it was the other guy’s turn for some serious thought. He was a businessman, after all. And yet there must have been something in my father’s tale of dreams and woe that sparked something in his new friend, because it got this guy thinking he wanted to help my father out, even if it would be a losing proposition on paper. He finally said, “Whatever you think is fair. Whatever you can afford.”
This was my father’s favorite part of the story to tell. Usually, he dressed it up by reaching into his pocket, the way he said he’d done when he was sitting with his friend. In most versions of the story, they were sitting in the lobby of the hotel where my parents were staying and my father reached into his pocket and came out with a dime. That’s it, just one dime. It was all he had on him, ten lousy cents.
With great fanfare and showmanship, he slapped the dime on the table between them and said, “That’s all I have.”
The great kicker to the story was the Chinese gentleman saying, “I’ll take it.”
Probably, the truth was a whole lot less dramatic. My father didn’t end up buying the house, but my family did end up living there, with that one dime as a deposit. There’d be another few “last dime” stories that would become part of our family history, and I’ll share them as I move along with my story, but I like this one for the way it shows my father as a bold, adventurous, likable young man, willing to abandon his worldly possessions (and even his profession) for a half-baked ideal—namely, that he could find a way to get by on a good heart and the best intentions. I always thought it was kind of amazing, kind of remarkable, the way he could get others to throw in with him. Like his surfer pals, who made a place for him as one of their own. Like the lifeguards on the beaches of Tel Aviv, who took to surfing like they’d been born to it. Like the Chinese guy, who put my parents into their first house.
Like my mother, most of all.
Just to be clear, my mother was a strong-willed,
talented, fiercely proud Mexican-American woman. Still is. A lot of folks we met over the years seemed to think she’d taken a kind of backseat to my father in the way we were raised, the choices we made as a family, but that wasn’t at all the case. Yeah, my father was the dominant personality, the front person, but my mother was with him all the way. We might have moved to his rhythms, his whims, but she accepted them as her own. That’s how much she loved my dad, I always believed. So much that she was willing to drink whatever batch of Kool-Aid he was pouring at the time. If he believed in a thing wholeheartedly, then she did as well, even if it cut against whatever ideas about family and parenting she might have come to on her own. And it’s not like she ever resented my father for having to set aside her dreams for his. It wasn’t like that, with them. She was so crazy in love with him that nothing else mattered.
We filled that first house, before long. And the one after that. (And the one after that.) I was born in 1963, fourth in line after David, Jonathan, and Abraham, and I was quickly followed by Moses and Adam. Basically, we kind of burst onto the scene one after the other. We were our own little population explosion. We all slept in one big room—the living room, I think—almost like a litter of puppies. My parents threw a bunch of mats down on the floor and that was it. If we were tired, we’d just drop off to sleep, wherever we happened to be. In the morning, we’d stow the mats and clear the room for whatever else was going on.
During the day, we went to the beach. All day, every day. My father would surf. Maybe David and Jonathan were starting to find their way on a board at four or five or six. The rest of us just splashed around in the shorebreak, learning to swim, getting comfortable in the water. We were like tadpoles—just a bunch of brown, big-bellied boys. In later years, we’d be leaned out and wiry, but when we lived in Makaha and in Koko Head we were like fat little calves, all plump and happy. One of the highlights of those days for me was going to the market with my mother. She shopped at a place where they gave free samples of poi. They had a bunch of tiny tasting spoons and you were only supposed to take a small amount, but I’d really get into that poi bowl and eat my fill. My brothers, too.
Scratching the Horizon Page 4
