We must have had twenty boards loaded onto the roof, tied down in our improvised, homemade way, and as my dad pulled into the city he drove under an overpass and sent them flying. He miscalculated, was all. Or he wasn’t paying attention. I was sitting in the back, minding my own, learning my prayers, when I heard this sick, horrible, banging-clanging noise: the whole fucking roof rack was clipped off the top of the camper. Fell right back down onto the highway behind us. We all turned in the direction of the noise, and you could see sparks kicking up off the road where it hit.
Oh, man, we were freaked! By some weird rush hour miracle, my dad managed to cross a couple lanes of traffic and pull the camper to a stop on the right shoulder, just a football field or so up the road from what was left of our surfboards. There was just enough room for us to park, and soon as we did the big kids all spilled out of the rig and scrambled to collect our gear, which had been scattered all over the road. The real miracle was that no one was hurt. All those boards flying every which way, bouncing and flipping and skipping across the pavement and the hoods of the oncoming cars … and yet there wasn’t even a fender bender or a cracked windshield.
Kind of amazing, really.
The boards didn’t fare too well, though. About half of them had been split in two, but as we dragged them in bits and pieces back to the camper my father announced that we would fix them up or turn them into belly boards. This was the Paskowitz way: nothing was ever wasted; everything was recycled, refurbished, and put to second and subsequent use.
This time, we didn’t bother tying everything up top. We just threw all those battered and broken boards into the back of the camper and rumbled into the city. We didn’t have far to drive, anyway. I think we drove directly to the shul. We pulled right up front and parked alongside this magnificent old building, and I went straight inside with my father to meet the rabbi. Don’t remember if my grandfather was there to meet us or make introductions. And I don’t think I was really dressed for the occasion—probably, I was wearing my usual Shabbat outfit, a weird combo of a buttoned-down shirt and a blue blazer with a full-Windsor tie over a pair of board shorts—but I had other things on my mind.
The rabbi spoke with a deep, daunting voice. He was nice enough, and welcoming enough, but I think I kind of cowered in his presence. It’s like the weight of the entire history of the Jewish people was suddenly pressing down on me, and I choked. I’d thought I knew all the prayers, all the blessings, but they flew right out of my head. The rabbi took me aside and helped me through the material.
When Saturday morning came around and it was my turn to read from the Torah, I choked again, but then I finally figured out to treat it like a piece of music. I’d listened to the tape of the rabbi chanting my portion so many times, over and over, it had been burned into my memory. Music I knew. Hebrew I didn’t know. So I went with the music, and soon as I did the stuff came pouring out of me. I stumbled a couple times, but the rabbi stood behind me and fed me my lines—not all of my lines, but a word or phrase to help jump-start my muscle memory until the tune kicked back in for the next while.
I sang my little sun-splashed heart out.
At some point during all the sweep and big emotion of the moment, I stepped outside myself for a beat and tried to take it all in. I tried to embrace what it all meant. My grandparents were there. My aunt Sonia was there, with all my cousins. My brothers and sister were there, of course. It was kind of mystical, kind of wonderful—and, yeah, kind of weird, too. I mean, here we were, going through these ancient motions in a storied, moneyed Manhattan synagogue—a solid, certain place that had almost nothing to do with our uncertain life on the road—and at the end of the day we’d climb back into our camper.
But not before I collected some great gifts. Best of all, I got my first high-end surfboard—a Gerry Lopez Lightning Bolt, a stinger-swallowtail model that had been made for me by a legendary surfboard maker named Danny Brawner, who in another ten years or so would become my father-in-law.
(More on that in another few chapters.)
I flipped for that board. Struck me as just about the most beautiful board I’d ever seen, and I was thinking I was just about the luckiest bar mitzvah boy in recorded Jewish history. My brothers were probably crazy, stinking, drooling jealous that I got such a sweet ride out of the deal, and we all took turns riding the crap out of it—until it was stolen from our campsite at Campland, an RV park in San Diego where we stayed for a couple weeks the following summer. I was crushed. We all were, I think, because it was the nicest board in the family.
Luckily, I got another, more lasting gift—a beautiful Nikonos II camera, which I managed to keep for a while longer. But it wasn’t about the gifts, really. Even at thirteen, I appreciated the significance of the moment, the connecting fabric that now wrapped around me and my older brothers, as well as our father and grandfather, and every card-carrying Jewish male who’d ever walked or surfed or chanted Torah. But it was a neat bonus that I now had a professional-type camera to record it all with—and, briefly, a professional-type surfboard to keep me pushing, reaching, striving in the water.
Turned out I was the last of my brothers to have a bar mitzvah. By the time I was thirteen, our camper was full up with rambunctious teenage boys. Our lives, which had always been a little bit crazy, were now a whole lot bigger and busier. And crazier. We began to develop our separate interests, our own friends, so there wasn’t really room for any kind of formal ritual. Wasn’t really room for any kind of formal anything. We were being pulled in so many different directions, all over the country, we seemed to lose this one, all-important connection to who we were and where we’d been.
* * *
Sometimes, our Mexican border–crossing stories seemed to bump into our broken-surfboard stories, or our on-the-road shit stories overlap with one of our rite-of-passage stories. That’s about what you’d expect from a fucked-up American surfing family, right? Everything all bundled up neat and tidy and knotted into one of my dad’s special blivet bags we used to leave by the side of the road.
For this one, we were goofing around on a beach in Mexico, back when we were kids. I was eleven or twelve. Moses, who figures in this story, was ten or eleven. We weren’t very far from the California border, probably at the K-181 surf break, about 120 miles down the Baja Highway. These days it’s a serious surf spot, but in the middle 1970s it was quiet, desolate. Basically, we filled up the beach all by ourselves.
The day started out like any other. The brothers would break off into groups of two or three and hit the water. My father would go off to surf on his own, maybe catch up with some friends on the beach. And my mom would hang back with the little kids. At this spot we were even more spread out than usual. There’s a popular rock reef at K-181, with a heavy kelp bed that makes for a lot of fun lefts, but on this day we’d found this perfect little cove area, and to get to it you had to kind of hand-board or shimmy down a small cliff. The place was remote, but once we got down there we didn’t want to leave. We were going at it hard, and there were some decent waves, and at one point one of us big kids snapped a board right in half. This happened sometimes, with some of our old, ratty-ass equipment. No big thing. And what also happened sometimes was that the little kids would splash around in the white water on the broken pieces of surfboard. That’s what happened here—and again, it might have been no big thing. But Moses was laying on his belly on one of these half boards, along the shorebreak, just as a powerful wave came along and flipped him over in a violent, sudden way.
As Moses rolled over, the board rolled with him in such a way that it pierced the sand and he was thrown on top of it in a straddling position … right on the fin. The fin on this particular board was ridiculously sharp, and thin, and tapered almost like a scythe. Lodged itself right up his ass. It was such a fluke, freaky thing, but dangerous as hell, because the blade of this board tore about a foot into Moses’ rectum and into his colon. I don’t think he even screamed—anyway, I don’t remember a
scream, just the kind of commotion that made us turn our heads and check it out. By the time Jonathan and I got to him, Moses was completely still, almost in a standing position, with this broken board hanging from his butt. He was in shock. And right away we could tell it was bad. His bathing suit was cut. There was blood—not a lot, but some. Oh, man, it was bad, bad, bad.
One of us raced to fetch our father. He got to Moses double-quick and did what he could to remove the board and inspect the wound. He could see there was a substantial amount of tissue damage, figured there’d been a lot of internal bleeding. Moses’s ass was basically cut in half, so we went into fire drill mode. We grabbed all our stuff from the beach, clambered up that cliff, threw everything into the camper, and got our boards tied on up top … all in the time it took Doc and a couple of the brothers to get Moses back to the vehicle. Everyone was crying, and completely panicked.
Dad got in the back with Moses and wrapped him in a blanket. Don’t remember who drove, to start, but we knew we had to really hustle. Doc didn’t think there was any good place in Mexico we could go to get help, so the idea was to book it to the border and hit the first hospital in California. He didn’t think Moses was in a desperate spot just yet, but then as we started driving Moses’ temperature began to spike. We were stuck in some heavy traffic. I think it was a weekend, and there were a lot of day-trippers down from California, making their way back north. As we got closer to Tijuana, things started to back up. My dad remembers that there was a bullfight letting out just as we were crawling into town, so that backed things up even worse.
At this point, my father was up front doing the driving and my mom was in the back, tending to Moses. He was comfortable, but as his temperature climbed he seemed more and more out of it. It had been about four hours, and my father knew that if we didn’t get Moses to a hospital soon he’d be in real trouble. Getting across the boarder was always a bitch, but this one time, when we were desperate for some smooth sailing, it was a bitch on top of a bitch. We went from a crawl to a standstill.
Finally, my dad found a cop and called him over. Doc’s Spanish was lousy, and so was the cop’s English—not a good combination, as far as getting our situation across, so my father figured he’d show him what was what. He led the cop back into the camper and the guy took one look at Moses and kicked it into gear. He ended up ditching his own vehicle and getting into ours and driving us across the border himself. Took us along all these back roads and emergency lanes—and, even, into oncoming traffic for a stretch. It was probably the hairiest ride I’ve ever been on.
By the time we crossed into California, Moses’ temperature was up to 105 or so. Doc didn’t quite know what to do, so he headed for the house of a colleague he thought might be able to help in an emergency. He thought maybe Moses was developing sepsis. This was back before cell phones, of course, so we couldn’t call ahead to see if my father’s doctor buddy was home. We just pulled up to this guy’s house, and Doc frantically explained the situation, and the guy dropped whatever he was doing and drove with us to the closest hospital, where I think he had admitting privileges.
Thank God he was home.
Meanwhile, the rest of us were all in the camper, watching this whole drama unfold, worrying like crazy about our brother, doing what we could to keep it together. A few of us hopped out at the doctor’s house and waited out the emergency there, but my parents continued on with Moses and the doctor right in the camper. They didn’t even bother to call an ambulance. They just peeled off.
On the way to the hospital, with the doctor driving, Moses looked up at my father and said, “Hey, Dad, you’re not gonna be mad at me if I don’t surf anymore, are you?”
I heard that later and thought it was just about the saddest, sweetest thing.
Moses made it to the hospital. They rushed him into surgery and fixed him up. After, he had to wear a colostomy bag for the longest while—don’t think he took a proper shit for about a year. He had to shit out of his stomach, essentially, but he was okay. And, soon enough, the rest of us were all okay, too. It got to where we could joke about it, and we had no choice but to joke about it, really, because when you’re a kid and you’re living in close quarters like that and one of your brothers has to shit through his stomach into a bag … well, you have to tease him mercilessly about it.
Basically, it’s your job.
I’ve got to hand it to Moses, though. He was tough. And he gave as good as he got. He’d get back at us at night, when everyone was asleep. There was a simple, paper clip–type apparatus that held his colostomy bag shut; he’d have to roll up the bag and clip it shut to keep it from leaking. Once Moses got comfortable with the routine and how everything worked he’d open up that bag late at night, releasing what amounted to a couple thousand farts into our tiny, unventilated space. I’d never smelled anything so deadly, so toxic in my life. One by one, we’d be startled awake by the smell, and there’d be Moses off in the corner, giggling into his sleeping bag. The little shit.
About a year later, we were back at San O for the summer, and Moses was finally ready to shit on his own. We made a whole ceremony out of it, a whole party. For the ceremonial shit, Moses went to the old kook shacks, which was what we called the plywood shitters they used to have at the park campsite. The whole family gathered around for the blessed event. The Tracys were there. All the friends we’d made over the years. There were like thirty, forty people, all bunched up outside the latrine, waiting for Moses to take his first legit shit in just about forever—and when he was done, he put it in a little bag and held it out for all to see, like it was a stinking trophy.
Everybody cheered.
That night, we had a big party. Lots of food. Lots of music. A real celebration. We all remember it for the big deal that it was. Even the Tracy boys remember it, all these years later, although they remember it as Moses’ bar mitzvah—which I find pretty hilarious. I guess this means they have no clear idea about our traditions and rituals. To them, it makes sense that Jews shit into little bags and call it a rite of passage.
But it was a rite of passage, in a sick little way. It was a coming of age for Moses, a symbolic shift from being sick to being well, but it was also a transition for our whole family. At least, that’s how it seemed to me. To almost lose Moses like that, and to now have him back, whole … well, it combined with us losing the camper in Florida a couple years later, with us older kids having to take on jobs, with Doc letting us know we’d run out of money, to leave me feeling like the ground beneath our feet was a bit unsteady. To have to watch my dad pinch those few items from that dairy, it kind of rocked my worldview. I went from thinking that nothing could ever go wrong, that nothing could touch us, to knowing full well that our time together was precious, and that we were precious to each other, and that if we didn’t take time to nourish and nurture what we had it’d all turn to shit.
7
Break
One by one, we lit out on our own.
Jonathan was the first to leave. David was the oldest, but he stayed on in the camper into his twenties. Jonathan was the rebel child, the one who made the biggest trouble, the most noise; he wore his hair long, back when we were all still sporting the clean-cut, leaned-out look that had become a part of the Paskowitz family mystique. David was more about toeing the family line; he was my father’s deputy, there to uphold authority. Jonathan was there to cross that line, to go against authority.
He was also the best surfer of the bunch, by far. I used to watch him all the time, trying to pick up on this or that. He had all these sick moves, used to surprise the crap out of me, watching. Always looked like he was surprising the crap out of himself, too, with some of the tricks he pulled, the confidence he showed. My other brothers, they were all strong surfers, but there was a kind of grace about Jonathan on a board. Like he was dancing, almost. Like he was answering every question the wave threw at him. When we started surfing in all those competitions, Jonathan was always the one to beat. He was the
one the locals came out to see, the one they’d heard about, and most times he didn’t disappoint. If the waves were with him, he’d rip, and the rest of us would do our thing and sometimes catch a trophy or two, but Jonathan was definitely the star.
Guess it was inevitable he and my father would clash. Mostly, it was over a bunch of small arguments, a growing rebellious streak, which I guess is how it happens in most families. Only here, we weren’t like most families. We were nine kids, of various stripes and sizes, living like surf rats in the back of a crappy camper, following the urges of our loopy, freethinking parents. At sixteen or so, Jonathan got it in his head that he was ready to live on his own, so he went off to find what work he could, wherever he could, and to find a way to compete in more of a full-time, full-on way. He lined up a couple low-end sponsors, who kept him in decent equipment and made it possible for him to find a place to live and move about on his own. Wasn’t about money or glory for Jonathan, I don’t think, so much as it was about independence, making his own mark. I looked on, at fourteen or fifteen, and picked up on that, too.
Soon, Abraham followed Jonathan, only not by his own choice. My dad actually tossed him from the camper, for some youthful fuckup I’ll leave for Abraham to tell. He might have left on his own, soon enough, but the upshot for me was that my buddy was gone. Abraham and I had done everything together, since we were superlittle, and I couldn’t see hanging back without him. Really, that’s what it came down to. Hadn’t been thinking of leaving, but it felt to me like I was about to be left behind. Already our little family dynamic had been upended, with Jonathan gone, and I didn’t like how my days were looking without Abraham, so I told my parents I was going off to live with him for a while.
Wasn’t a lot they could say: it’s not like my prospects were any bigger or better staying on with them; it’s not like I had school or a job or any other pressing worry. So I bolted. I was fifteen years old, and I was gone. No real plan. No real thought, other than it seemed like a good idea at the time. In the moment, it didn’t strike me as any kind of big-deal decision. And it’s not like my parents set out any kind of point-of-no-return ultimatum; I knew if things didn’t work out, or if I had any kind of change of heart, I could always find my way back to the camper. There wasn’t any kind of blowup or tension; it just felt to me like it was time to go, so I went.
Scratching the Horizon Page 13
