Scratching the Horizon

by Izzy Paskowitz

  It was like a wonderland, that place, a playground. And the thing of it is, our parents never had any idea where we were. Life at San O was pretty much like it was on every other beach we called home in those days. We’d set off in the morning and wander back for dinner. That was the drill, same as always, only here there were miles and miles of beach to explore, and acres and acres of open land reaching way up into the hills overlooking the water. And tons and tons of kids, who descended on San O for the day, for the week, for the summer …

  The Tracy kids knew their way around, but my brothers and I caught on quick. Soon, we were ducking in and out of the storm pipes that were cut into the hill every here and there. We were on a constant recon mission to figure where those pipes went. Some reached all the way beneath the dirt road on the other side of the campground and all the way out to the freeway—probably a mile or more. Some were so small you had to crawl through them on your belly, and some were big enough you could almost crouch, or maybe turn yourself completely around and double back to where you started. It got to where we knew the maze of pipes pretty well and we had our own special haunts. There was one series of pipes that led to a spot we called the Butt Cave—either because it reminded us of the secret hole in the hills on Batman, which led up to the Batcave, or because all you could do once you crawled inside was slither around on your butt.

  You could walk along the beach and tell which kids were hanging in those storm pipes, because we’d all have these little scrapes and scars on our backs from crawling up against all that corrugated metal without our shirts. Welts, even. They were like badges of honor. Some of the little kids who were too chickenshit to crawl all the way up into the hills would even scrape their backs, just to brag that they’d been in on the same deal.

  Eventually, we started taking girls up there, which was a whole other adventure. Wasn’t much you could actually do with these girls, once you got them up into the pipes, because there was no room to maneuver (and, granted, it wasn’t the most romantic setting), but it was still the thing to do. We’d grab a flashlight, because even during the day it would be pitch-black once you crawled your way in and most of the girls we knew weren’t into the pitch-blackness.

  Once, I caught a bunch of shit for taking this one girl up into those hills. We all knew her brother, who ended up becoming a big-time Hollywood producer, and she hung with us every now and then, and she was totally into the storm pipe scene. They lived in a big-ass mansion in Beverly Hills. The reason I caught shit was because we got stuck on the wrong side of the power plant gates after dark, when they closed the place up. We had to walk back up the cliff and then hike all the way around the road, and it was almost ten o’clock at night by the time we stumbled back to the campground and walked right into a bunch of high-beam headlights. Apparently, Doc and this girl’s father had gotten all these campground dads together to go out looking for us and they were driving around using their cars as searchlights. Soon as they saw us, our dads started yelling and yelling, mostly at me—hey, I was the guy, so it had to have been my fault, right?

  I don’t think my dad would have been all that pissed if the girl’s father hadn’t been all that pissed—and, man, was that guy pissed! He actually came at me, like he wanted to take a swing, but Doc jumped in and held him off, and once that happened I don’t think my father was all that mad anymore. Not at me, anyway. He’d flipped his anger onto this other guy, instead.

  Very quickly, my dad became an authority on the ways of the beach. A lot of the places we stayed we were off by ourselves, but at San O we were part of a community, which I guess made him a kind of community leader. He came up with a bunch of rules you had to follow. The Tracy boys called them Dorian’s Beachcomber Rules, and they were the unwritten laws of San O. Here’s an example: Doc was big into beachcombing, which was not a whole lot different from cockaroaching on dry land. Here on the beach, though, he wasn’t looking for handouts so much as leavings. The first (and, really, only) rule of beachcombing was it only counted first thing in the morning. If you were out at dawn, looking for stuff people left out overnight—towels, T-shirts, bikes, shoes—it was there for the taking. But if you found any of this crap during the day, or even late at night, it wasn’t really fair game, because someone might come back for it.

  And he practiced what he preached, my old man. Every morning, he’d step from the camper before first light and start prowling around. He wasn’t just looking for other people’s crap. He’d surf, pray, exercise … but he’d keep his eyes open as he went about his business. If he saw something that looked like it had been abandoned, that was wet with morning dew and had clearly been out all night, he’d grab it, but only if it was something he thought we needed; that was another key rule of beachcombing—it had to be something you could actually use, or maybe trade for another something you could actually use.

  One morning one of the Tracy boys found a boogie board that had been left by the side of the exit road to the park. It was Michael, who we all called MT.

  (By the way, for whatever reason, most of the Tracy boys went by their initials. There was PT [Patrick], MT [Michael], JT [John], and Moe, whose real name was Stephen, so he should have probably gone by ST.)

  MT was a couple years older than me, and he matched up with my oldest brother, David, only they had a real falling-out over this one boogie board. What happened was MT had been out early, first thing; he’d spent the night in one of the caves up in the hills, and as he was heading back he came across this board, and right away he was thinking of my dad’s beachcomber rules. And then he went those rules one better. He went around the beach all that day, asking if anybody’d lost a boogie board. Nobody claimed it. Nobody recognized it. Nobody knew anything about it, so MT figured it was free and clear. He ended up swapping it out to some guy for some sandwiches and beer—which was in keeping with my dad’s secondary rule, because MT was hungry and thirsty.

  Well, cut to a couple hours later, or maybe even the next day, and David saw the new “owner” with the board and started claiming it was his. Started saying things like, “Hey, man, you stole my board.” But then the story came out that the guy had traded for it with MT, so David went after MT, and there was a whole mess. It became this big, big deal, and for a while it looked like there’d be a real rumble over this one stupid boogie board. David got some of his buddies together, and MT got his buddies together, and it was a real standoff. Eventually Doc got wind of what was going on and came to smooth things over. He set up his own little beachcomber tribunal. He looked at MT and said, “Did you, Michael Tubesteak, find this board by the side of the road at first light?”

  (By the way again, Doc addressed all of Tube’s kids in this way, like their dad’s nickname was their family name.)

  The way it shook out was Doc took MT’s side, which ended up pissing David off mightily, but one of my dad’s big things was that rules were rules, and David had no choice but to accept his decision. That didn’t mean David couldn’t go around the beach talking shit about MT and stirring up trouble, and for a long time there was a whole lot of tension flowing from this one beachcomber/boogie board incident. But once Doc weighed in, the matter was meant to be closed.

  * * *

  Even with a sheriff like Doc, we kids couldn’t help but make our share of trouble at San O. For example, we were in the bad habit of skulking around the campground looking for booze. You see, once Nixon and Reagan turned the beach into a state park, the state put in these camping facilities as well, so my family usually parked our rig there for most of the summer, and over time we pretty much had the run of the place. That’s where my dad got the idea to run the Paskowitz Family Surf Camp, which he did the very first summer they opened up San O. Nobody was doing anything like it. There were surf schools, of course. And you could walk up and down any beach and find someone to give you surf lessons. But Doc’s idea was to get people to live and surf and play together for a couple days and really absorb the entire culture of the sport. So he recr
uited me and my older brothers to help out in the water and my mom to help with the cooking, and set up a bunch of tents for the campers. And do you know what? People came. Adults, kids, families … people heard what we were up to and wanted in, so the camps were successful, right away. All of a sudden, there was money coming in. Not a lot, but enough to keep us at it, summer after summer. Enough to cut short our vagabonding each spring and keep us coming back to San O on something of a real schedule.

  Getting back to the trouble we couldn’t help but make, most folks, they camped out at the beach for just a couple nights, maybe a week or so. That’s how it worked with the Tracys. But we camped out like it was our own backyard, so we kids knew which campsites to target; we knew where the heavy drinkers parked their rigs.

  Now, there’s no defending our actions on this. (Stealing is wrong, kids! Don’t try this at home!) But let me go ahead and try: we were underage, and we couldn’t think of any other way to get beer; we didn’t think of it as stealing so much as helping ourselves. We’d wait until the middle of the day, when everyone was down at the beach, or sometimes we’d hit early in the morning, when everyone was asleep. We’d scope out these big-ass coolers and make off with them. We were a happy band of little idiots, because we’d move about in groups of eight or ten or twelve. Not exactly stealth, a group of that size, but we must have thought there was safety in numbers.

  Once, we recruited a kid named Joey Conroy from the beach to do our dirty work. Somehow, we’d convinced him it was his turn. We’d spotted a sweet cooler, figured there’d be a ton of beer in there, or maybe some wine, and it was just sitting out for the taking. Only trouble was, a couple of rough, surly guys were sleeping right next to the cooler. So all of us Paskowitz and Tracy kids kind of hung back in the bushes while poor Joey Conroy went out and did his thing. He was superquiet about it, ended up pinching a big jug of wine, but just as he was making his getaway one of the surly guys woke up and said, “Hey, what the hell you doing?”

  Naturally, Joey started running like crazy, and the guy chased after him, and the rest of us just started laughing like crazy. Gave ourselves away, we were making so much noise, so as one guy was chasing down our buddy two other guys came chasing after us. Then Joey must have panicked, or tripped, or something, because he dropped the jug of wine, and it shattered on the asphalt they had all over the campground area. We ran in all different directions—but, idiots that we were, most of us ran straight back to our own campsite. So of course these guys started banging on the door of the camper, and Doc came out and had to apologize and make things right. He ended up replacing the wine and adding in another couple jugs as a kind of peace offering.

  Doc wasn’t too happy with us that time. He didn’t like it that we were starting to drink, because he made it a special point to never touch any alcohol, but he was smart enough to know we were just a bunch of stupid kids, letting off steam. It’s not like he thought we’d crossed over to the dark side or anything, but for the most part we managed to keep him out of the loop. The place was so big, stretching all the way to the power plant on one side, and all the way to Nixon’s Casa Pacifica on the other, we eventually got smart enough to spread out and make our mischief where he couldn’t find us out.

  One of our favorite activities was throwing shit off the cliffs overlooking the beach. This, to us, was big, big fun. Patrick Tracy and John Tracy, PT and JT, were really good at making life-size dummies. They’d find some thrift-store clothes, and stuff them with newspaper, and get them looking real lifelike. Then we’d drag these dummies up to the cliff, to a spot that jutted out over the beach or the campsite or parking lot area. Each time out, we’d have the whole thing choreographed. We’d have a group of us down on the ground as plants and another group up top with the dummy. At some point, one of the guys up top would just start beating the crap out of the dummy, and yelling all kinds of shit, while the group of us down below would point and start screaming things like, “Oh my God, look! He’s gonna kill him!”

  What’s amazing to me is that people always fell for it. Not just once or twice, but a bunch of times. We moved around, of course, and we picked our spots, so we didn’t do our thing in front of the same group of people, but we’d get everyone’s attention and people would gather around and there’d be this great, horrifying scene. It was all rehearsed, and we played it up, really sold the drama. Oh, man, we were such a bunch of little shits. Once, we were so convincing a lifeguard actually left his station and started sprinting up the hill to try to save the dummy, and as he got halfway up we threw the dummy down and some poor woman on the beach actually collapsed. Really and truly. At the time, we all thought she’d had a heart attack, but I think she just fainted. (At least, I hope she just fainted.)

  For a while, the cooler pinching overlapped with the dummy tossing, and we thought it was funny to toss the coolers off the cliff after we’d picked them clean. Looking back, this was insanely stupid of us, because someone could have gotten hurt, and because we ruined a bunch of perfectly good coolers.

  We’d hang back in the bushes, eyeballing these great big Coleman coolers, the metal ones with the heavy-duty handles, and we’d try to keep superquiet, waiting for just the right moment. Usually, the superquiet would be broken by one of the Tracy boys, making like Yogi Bear and saying, “I have a hunch, here comes my lunch,” which was a phrase, frankly, us Paskowitz kids had never heard. We’d never heard of Yogi Bear. A talking bear who hangs out at national parks, stealing picnic baskets? What the hell was that?

  That’s how it was with us and our pop culture references. Once we hit the road, we didn’t watch much television. We knew some shows—like Batman and The Brady Bunch and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters—and then there were others, like Yogi Bear, that completely passed us by.

  Once or twice each summer, we’d head to the Tracy house in Lakewood, check out their television, root around in their fridge, maybe stay the night. They always had the not-so-good-for-you kinds of cereal, and we cleaned out their cupboards soon as we burst through the front door. One of the first times we went over there, I sat in front of the television the whole time, fisting so much cereal into my face I got diarrhea—whether from all that television or all that cereal I’ll never know.

  For these reasons, and I guess a whole bunch of others, my mom wasn’t too crazy about the Tracy family, not at first. She didn’t think they were the best influences. I mean, Tube wore his hair in a ponytail. The boys all had long hair. She blamed them for introducing us to beer, and she knew they smoked weed and would probably turn us on to that before long. For their part, I’m not sure what the hell the Tracy family made of us. Tube told us that when we drove to Lakewood to visit he could hear our camper rattling down the street for miles, like we were some beach blanket version of the Beverly Hillbillies—a pop culture reference I somehow managed to get at the time.

  But in the end my mom got along pretty well with Tube’s wife, Phyllis, and my father got along great with Tube, and after a couple years my folks just gave up complaining about the other stuff because we’d become like family. But at first my mother definitely felt they’d been a disruptive, negative influence. And do you know what? She was probably right. They were a disruptive, negative influence, but without their disruptive, negative influence we wouldn’t have had half as much fun. And it’s not like all we did with the Tracy kids was make trouble. Hell, no. In fact, mostly what we did was surf. All day long. All this other stuff took place when the waves were crap, when the weather was lousy, when we needed a break—because, really, it was all about the surfing. It was at San O that we learned to surf a world-class break, and it was at San O that we developed enough confidence as surfers to start teaching other folks how to get up on a board and have at it.

  And it was at San O, really, that we got our first taste of competition. My dad started entering us into all these different contests they’d run out on the beach, most of them organized by the displaced San Onofre Surf Club guys, who I guess got over
the invasion of their private beach pretty quick. Tube had his kids entered as well. It was like the San O version of Little League. Usually, there’d be a couple different events every weekend, and soon there was a Paskowitz at or near the top of almost every leaderboard, which was way cool.

  Doc told us that surfing wasn’t any kind of competition, that it was a very personal experience that didn’t need to be judged or quantified or measured against anyone else’s very personal experience. But at the same time he was pretty damn stoked that we were winning a lot of the events.

  And once we got our first taste of competition, we wanted more. Back then, even in the middle of summer, there weren’t a whole lot of events scheduled in the middle of the week, so we started staging our own. We divided ourselves into teams and ran our own contests. I was on the Oinky Surf Club, which we named after my brother Moses, who was kind of big. (Sorry, Moses.…) Wasn’t the best name for a surf club, but it made us laugh; I think it even made Moses laugh. We made membership cards and everything. And then, on the other side, there was the Sigmund Surf Club, which they named after Salvador. They didn’t bother with membership cards—because, hey, they weren’t as cool as us.

  I even went out and recruited some of those gnarly Hole-in-the-Wall guys from Huntington Beach—serious, kick-ass surfers like Randy Lewis, who went on to have a big-time career as a shaper when he was done competing. He was eventually elected to the Surfers’ Hall of Fame in 2010, but to me and my brothers and the Tracy boys, trying to outduel each other in our own do-it-yourself events, he was just a world-class ringer—the best surfer on the beach, come to help us claim our crown. As soon as Randy and his buddies showed up on the beach and flashed their Oinky Surf Club cards, Abraham and MT and the other Sigmund surfers knew they were screwed.