6
The Other Last Dime
A lot of folks, they hear how we grew up and they get to thinking we were on some long and winding and never-ending road to nowhere.
Well, we were and we weren’t.…
It’s not like my parents threw darts at a map on the wall of our camper and left it to fate or chance to figure where we’d go next. We followed the seasons. We followed whatever job leads or opportunities my father was able to line up. We followed the tossed-off recommendations of road warrior surfers, who might have mentioned a sweet spot for us to park our rig and catch a few waves for the next while. There was at least some rhyme and reason to our comings and goings. And there was a rhythm to them as well. Wherever we were, however we happened to land there, we fell into a nice, simple routine. We were vagabonding nomads, yeah, but there was a structure to our lives—at least, a little bit. Didn’t much matter to us kids if we woke up on a beach in Florida or Texas or Rhode Island or all the way down at the tip of the Baja Peninsula, or even in some motel parking lot, tucked way in the back where the streetlights didn’t quite reach, long as we could surf and hang and make our little pieces of trouble. We were like sea turtles, I guess. Our home was on our backs, and once San O opened up for us it meant we would always circle back to Southern California. It gave us a place to come home to; it meant we could have our friends and be a part of a community, without the hassle of going to school and staying in one place all the time; it meant we could be at home all year long, in our sea turtle sort of way, and then when summer came around we could be really and truly at home.
The thing of it is, the high-concept hook of how we lived—nine kids growing up in a twenty-four-foot camper! surfing all day, every day! the call of the open road!—really only lasted seven or eight years, stretching from the time Navah and Joshua were born in the early 1970s to round out our clan, to when Jonathan and Abraham and I started lighting out on our own, 1978 or so—basically, from when I was eight or nine until I was fifteen or sixteen. For those years, the one constant was the camper. The backdrop kept changing, the view outside our window, but the camper was our steady frame of reference. We ran through two or three rigs over the course of those years, but on the inside they were much the same. When I close my eyes and think back to when I was a kid, to those seven or eight years when we were all together, I see us in some version of camper, coming back from the beach after a day in the sun, or bunched together at our tiny table, sucking back whatever gruel my mother would set out and call breakfast, or heading off on some new adventure, watching the world unfurl outside our window. That is what I see of my childhood.
Sometimes, the routine was in the getting there. Oh, man, we crisscrossed the country so many times, it’s like I spent half my childhood looking out the grimy windows of our ratty-ass campers, taking in the sights. We had a bunch of different ways to pass the time. My mother used to sit in the back with us, while two or three kids would sit up front with Doc. It was always considered a great treat to sit in the cab with my dad and help navigate, but personally I preferred the freedom we had in the back. We didn’t have to sit still. We could lie down and stretch out. Mom would play her favorite operas for us on the tape player, or maybe another classical recording. In her one attempt at homeschooling, she taught us to recognize the works of all these great composers—and to this day most of us can hear a piece of music and get close to identifying it. With her music in the background, we’d pair off into groups of two or three or four and play a road game or board game. Some of us would read, or write in our journals. Or maybe we’d just let the rickety-rack of the road lull us off to sleep.
Probably our favorite thing to do on road trips was play a game we called Pilot to Bombardier. Don’t know who gets the credit for inventing this one—or the blame. Wasn’t exactly good, clean fun, but it was fun. And endlessly amusing. Here’s how it worked: One of us would take the lookout post by one of the rear windows. That person would be the pilot. Another one of us would take his position over the toilet. That person would be the bombardier. Remember, my father had removed the holding tank and receptacle, so the toilet was really just a hole in the floor of the camper, which came in pretty handy for this particular game—the object of which I’m guessing must be coming clear.
The key to the game was in the timing, and in choosing our targets. Also, it helped if the bombardier hadn’t taken a dump in a good long while and was raring to go, on command. The pilot would check out the traffic behind us. The ideal target, we all believed, was a convertible, but it was just as good to find a conservative-seeming couple dressed in their Sunday best. The more prim and proper the target, the better. The cleaner the car, the better. Frankly, any target would do, as long as we hit it, although direct hits were pretty rare. Everything had to go just right. The bombardier had to have just the right consistency in his “load” so it would splash against the pavement in such a way that it would bounce and explode at the same time, and if that same time happened to catch a windshield about a car length behind us we counted it as a great victory.
It was a real team effort, and what’s amazing to me now, looking back, is that none of our victims ever hightailed up to us after they’d been strafed by one of our Paskowitz bombs. I mean, they had to have known that the steaming pile of shit that had just exploded onto their windshields had come from the camper directly in front of them, right? That stuff doesn’t just fall from the sky. But in all those years, over all those miles, no one ever chased us down or pulled up alongside our driver side window and motioned for my father to pull over.
My father had to know what was going on. He had a mischievous sense of humor, so I’m guessing he found all of this pretty damn funny, but he’d never show it. My mother was a whole other story, though. She absolutely did not approve—which was probably one of the reasons she rode in the back with us so often, to keep us from playing. Whenever she was up in front with my dad and she’d hear us howling in the back of the cab, she’d holler back to us. She’d say, “Are you boys playing that disgusting game of yours?”
We’d bite our lips to keep from laughing, and hang back for a bit until one of us had to go again.
* * *
One winter, mid-seventies, we lit out for New England. My father had been hired on as a kind of town doctor on Block Island, just off the coast of Rhode Island. It was like the land that time forgot, that place, with grand old buildings and a rich seafaring history and good old-fashioned Yankee charm. There was even a decent surf scene, except it was a little too cold to surf when we hit town.
First thing I remember about that Block Island trip was that we almost didn’t make it there. The folks who ran the ferry from the mainland didn’t want to take our camper on the vessel, which put us in a jam. Everything we owned was in and on that camper. And it wasn’t just our home; it was also our ride; we needed it to get around. And so, after a whole lot of back-and-forth, my father somehow managed to persuade the dockmaster to let us drive our rig onto the ferry.
For some reason, the hands on board called the ship Corky. I’d read enough to know that most ships had names, but I never knew people actually called them by those names. Our arrival had caused a big stir, so everyone kind of abandoned their posts to check us out. They kept telling us that Corky was a sure, strong ship. “Corky’s sailed the world’s oceans,” one member of the crew said.
But then, once we pulled away from the dock, the ferry started to list and moan, and all of a sudden the crew started freaking out—like they weren’t sure how Corky would handle our weight. They thought we were going down!
By some miracle, we made it across to Block Island without sinking. Once on the island, we Paskowitzes drove to a gigantic white Victorian house, which came with the job. The house was huge! We were all completely excited to spill out of the camper and race inside to claim our own rooms. Just the idea of being able to sleep through the night without getting your hair stepped on every time someone had to go to the bathroom
… it was such a luxury, such a thrill. Adam ran upstairs and claimed two rooms for himself—one to sleep in and one to study in. He was our little scholar, with all his chemistry and biology books, so he spread his stuff all around and let it be known this was his space. There were three or four floors of bedrooms, so we each grabbed our own. I don’t think the bedrooms were furnished, so we’d have to make do with our sleeping bags to start, but nobody minded, and as the sun went down that first night we all settled into our separate rooms and went to sleep.
We tried to, anyway. There was a storm that night, with big booms of thunder, big cracks of lightning, and it just about scared the piss out of me. After a couple hours of tossing and turning, I started to panic—a little bit. Finally, I made my way to my parents’ room. I was maybe twelve years old, maybe thirteen, but I wasn’t too old to sleep with my parents on a dark and stormy night, in a big, strange house. Apparently, the rest of my sibs all felt the same way, because when I opened the door they were already there. Every last one of them! Curled on the floor in their sleeping bags. And they were all sound asleep, which meant they’d given up on their own rooms way before I’d given up on mine.
And that’s how we slept, the whole rest of our time on the island. All of us in that great big house, with all those rooms, packed tight into our parents’ bedroom just like we were back in the camper.
* * *
I have very specific memories of our trip to Florida, which came a couple years later, when I was about fourteen. The trip marked a kind of turning point for our family. For the first time, I caught a glimpse of my father carrying himself in a less-than-heroic way, and I didn’t like how it made him look. Shook me up pretty good, but I don’t want to get ahead of the story. I remember crossing through Texas and hugging the Gulf coastline as we snaked our way past Louisiana and Mississippi. Once we left Texas, the air seemed suddenly different—the people like from some other time and place. We ended up camping in some sketchy-looking places on the Gulf and on into the Panhandle, but this didn’t seem to bother my father too terribly much. We had that whole safety-in-numbers thing going on. Plus, we were such a rolling novelty, most folks could only look at us and scratch their heads.
We were really scraping, on this trip. Money was especially tight. We never had a ton of money, even back when my father was peeling off ten-dollar bills from that great wad of cash he used to carry. But the trip to Florida felt like the beginning of a jam. I remember money being a constant topic of conversation between my parents, although they made an effort to keep the talk from us kids. Still, it’s tough to keep secrets when you’re living in a camper, so some of the tension filtered through. There were a lot of whispered conversations, as I recall. A lot of comments about money being tight, although it’s not like my father was ever too terribly worried about not having any money. Wasn’t really any kind of big deal to him, but being broke did change our circumstances. It meant we had to stretch in order to eat and gas up the rig and pay for our other supplies. It meant we had to think about things we’d never given a thought to.
In fact, another one of those “last dime” stories I hinted at earlier might have taken place as we passed through Louisiana, because (as I learned later) our prospects then were pretty damn bleak. (And because once we got to Florida they went from pretty damn bleak to really fucking grim.) In the Surfwise documentary about my family that was released in 2008, my brothers remember that we were at a roadside rest stop on the coast of Louisiana when this story happened. I remember that it happened on one of our drives back from Mexico to California. And my father … well, he doesn’t remember the story at all. I’ll tell it from my Mexico-based perspective, but I’ll leave room for the fact that it might have happened on this pass through Louisiana. I suppose it’s even possible that something like this happened more than once—because, as you’ll see, the story is mostly about being down-and-out and up against it, and we were certainly down-and-out and up against it a time or two.
In my version, we were driving back from Mexico in the camper. We’d just crossed the border and were headed back up the 5 freeway, really excited to be back in California. We’d just come from a long stay in Mexico down at the tip of Baja, at a funky shack on the beach we rented from an old-time photographer named Ken Kay. That was a particularly cool trip, because Ken let me use a lot of his gear. He was only there for a couple days when we arrived and then he bolted, but before he left he taught me a lot about underwater photography and how to take pictures out in the break, adjusting the aperture and the speed in order to shoot my brothers surfing. He also showed me how to pinch the grease off your nose and rub it around the perimeter of the lens to give the picture a kind of blur.
The waves were unbelievable, some of the best we’d ever surfed, and I should mention here that as we got older this last was becoming a bigger and bigger deal. I must have been about thirteen or fourteen, and I was getting pretty good. Already I’d won a bunch of San O competitions, and a couple other contests here and there, but more than that, I was beginning to appreciate what it meant to ride some serious surf, what it meant to exert my will on a board—to ride the wave instead of letting the wave ride me. In fact, all my brothers were kicking things up a notch, which I guess is inevitable, unavoidable, if you lived to surf the way we did. I can remember one contest around this time, in Padre Island, the biggest of the Texas barrier islands, with some nice Gulf swells. There were separate age divisions for each one of us, right down to Adam, and we ran the table; there was a Paskowitz on top in every category, and Doc was jazzed about that. The local papers picked up on it, too, which was happening more and more whenever we breezed into some new town; there’d be an article about this nutty Stanford doctor with a camperful of champion surfer kids, and folks would head down to the beach to check us out.
So now here we were down in Mexico, each of us a kind of amateur champion, each of us really learning to rip, all day long. And here’s the thing: When we were younger, we all had started out on my father’s hand-me-down Hobie board—a big, heavy monster none of us could carry. We had to help each other haul it down to the beach. But slowly we graduated to smaller, newer boards, and we each developed our own style. There was always a huge competition among us brothers. Even when we were just out by ourselves, doing our own thing, we competed with each other. Early on, it was just the oldest four of us. We went at it hard, always looking over our shoulders to see what the other brothers were doing. We didn’t want to miss a trick. Even when I took off on my own wave, I’d check them out, just to make sure I wasn’t missing out on some new maneuver, some twist or turn I could add to my repertoire, some way to get better. We’d all inherited my dad’s approach, catching every wave and riding it all the way in, so a lot of times we’d take off all at once, especially when we were at this beach in Mexico, where we pretty much had the break all to ourselves.
One thing about this photographer’s house: it was covered with dogs. Don’t know if they were Ken Kay’s dogs or just a pack of wild dogs that had the run of the place, but there were a whole bunch of them. I remember one dog in particular, a skinny short-haired retriever we all called Crab Dog. You could point to a hole in the sand and he’d dig out a crab; then he’d play with it and chase it all over the beach.
Poor Crab Dog was hit by a car one day, right in front of the house where we were staying. The house was on a remote road, wasn’t a whole lot of traffic, but we heard a yelp and a tire screech and we raced outside to find Crab Dog half-dead, half-alive, just lying in the road. It was so incredibly sad. There were just a few of us kids around, big and little, and none of us knew what to do, so I raced inside for my dad’s .22, which was almost always along for the ride. He’d taught us older kids how to use it, so I came back out and pointed it at Crab Dog, thinking I’d do the humane thing and put him out of his misery, only when I went to shoot him I ended up missing completely. (Guess my dad had been so busy showing me how to use his damn rifle he’d forgotten to teach me how to
aim.)
It was so lame! So sad! I was at point-blank range. Crab Dog had his mouth open, and he was panting furiously, his tongue hanging down to the pavement, so I figured the thing to do was go for his mouth, but I didn’t hit anything. Not even his tongue, which was hanging way, way out. So I reloaded and this time put the barrel right at his forehead, and this time I didn’t miss.
We were all crying. Some of us were too old to be crying, but we were bawling like babies. Don’t know where my parents were, but we were all a little older at this point, a little more independent, even though we were crying. Anyway, it was just us kids, and after that we picked up the dog and gave him a good and proper burial. For a long time, nobody spoke.
The drive back to California that year was spectacular. The weather was perfect, the wide-open spaces breathtaking. Doc usually took his time when the camper was fully loaded, but on this trip things seemed to be moving especially slow. We drove along some really radical ridges and cliffs and past these gorgeous bays on the Gulf side of Baja. We’d stop every now and then for a swim, because the water looked so clear and warm and inviting. I remember one stop, on the Pacific side, in a lagoon-type spot where we could see the whales cresting offshore. It was a magical thing to see and I raced inside the camper for my camera, but by the time I came back out the whales had moved on.
Turned out the real reason Doc was taking his time on this return trip was because he was especially low on cash. He thought if he nursed our last few drops of gas he could squeeze an extra couple miles out of the tank. I remember gassing up at one of the last gas stations in Mexico and we didn’t have enough to fill the tank. We still had a couple hundred miles to go, and we started to think we might not make it. For the rest of the ride to the border, it was like a race against the fuel gauge.
Scratching the Horizon Page 11
