First thing I did was move in with my friend Bob Bueno, at his place in San Clemente. Abraham and I moved in with Bob together, but I don’t think we contributed to Bob’s expenses in any kind of meaningful way. Not at first, anyway. It’s more like we just crashed there, as long as it was okay with Bob—and, lucky for us, it was okay with Bob for a good, long while.
Every young, upstart surfer with no education and no plans should have a friend like Bob Bueno. He was a sweet, funny, giving Mexican dude we’d met a couple summers before, and he was like our savior. He’d moved to San Clemente from La Puente, up in the San Gabriel Valley, and for him the contrast was startling. He used to say it was like he’d died and gone to heaven, to be able to live and work in such a beautiful setting, surrounded by beautiful things. But he wasn’t the type to take his good turn for granted. He was a hard worker who made good money in construction and who really enjoyed spending that good money. His fridge was always stocked with good food and good beer. He worked up near L.A., so there was a long haul back and forth. It meant he was always putting in serious hours, but he never complained; he was always happy to come home and kick back and enjoy the hell out of what was left of the day. He surfed a little, too, which I think was part of his motivation for moving to the area. That’s how we met, surfing. I had my lifelong, hard-core San O pals, but through Bob I met a bunch of kinder, gentler, more laid-back surfer dudes—guys who hit the beach when they could. Guys who’d give you the shirts off their backs before they’d ever drop in and pinch one of your waves. And Bob was the most generous soul on dry land, happy to have me and Abraham underfoot, along with anyone else who needed a place to crash.
My deal was to focus on my surfing, to get as good as Jonathan, to line up some sponsors and see if I could make a living at it. Wasn’t much of a living to be made, but I was young and stupid and determined, so I went after it. Bob’s place was right by Trestles, so I knew the beach, knew the break, knew the locals. Wasn’t the worst place to ride out the next bunch of waves and crank things up a couple notches until something good had a chance to happen. I was riding piece-of-shit, hand-me-down boards, whatever I could scrounge or borrow, just trying to focus on eating right and surfing hard.
Abraham got a job right away, as a box boy at a local supermarket called Alpha Beta, but I continued to just go to the beach and surf. Didn’t have the head for anything more than that. Didn’t have the background, either. I mean, when you don’t go to school, when your parents leave you to fend for yourself on the beach, you don’t exactly have much of a foundation, and for the first time I realized what I might have lost, all those years outside the classroom. It’s not just that I might have needed a high school diploma, if I ever hoped to get a decent job, but I needed the discipline, the focus, the follow-through that would have found me in school.
All of which meant my best bet was to find my way on a surfboard. There were plenty of contests in the area, although occasionally I’d hitch a ride to a competition down in Mexico. Wasn’t really any prize money back then, just bragging rights and gear and maybe a couple sponsors looking to get you to wear their shorts or use their wax. Early on, my best showing was at the San Miguel Pro, down in Baja, where I finished fifth out of a field of over one hundred. It was a huge validation, to make it to the finals, against all those guys. I went up against all these big names—so it felt absolutely great. It also earned me a hundred bucks or so, but more than that, it meant I could compete; it meant I had a shot.
I should probably mention here that the idea of competing on a surfboard is antithetical to a true, hard-core surfer. Yep, that’s a big word for a true, hard-core surfer. For me. “Antithetical.” Doesn’t come up in my everyday conversation, but it popped into my head and I looked it up and it fits pretty well here. It means it goes against my nature—our nature as watermen. And yet, at the same time, it doesn’t—because, let’s face it, we compete for waves all the time. We compete for position. We fight the hassle of work and family and all the pressures of the world around, just to get into the water. That’s a kind of competition, don’t you think? In a way, that’s what was behind Doc’s decision to step away from the workaday world and raise us kids off the conventional grid, just so we could surf and surf and surf. It’s because he didn’t want to have to compete for those small pockets of freedom and wonder he found on a board, didn’t want us kids to have to compete for our own version of the same, but at the same time it’s because he’d faced down whatever he thought the world expected of him and come up with his own approach instead. In his own way, he’d already competed … and won. And now all there was left to do was surf.
But competing in a contest is a whole other deal. It’s not like a race, where there can be a clear winner. There is no clock, no fast and finite set of rules, no way to defend yourself or protect your lead. It’s all about style and approach and degrees of difficulty. On our own, we don’t measure or judge. We don’t rank ourselves against our buddies, or spend our days worrying about a bunch of subjective scores that may or may not have anything to do with our rides. We just rip. We look at each other and think, Yeah, that guy’s got it going on. Or, Nice try, fella. We know where we stand and what we can do and none of it much matters. It’s not like any other sport, where in order for you to win someone else has to lose. It’s not a battle. It’s more like a state of mind.
Okay, so if that’s the way I feel—if that’s the way most surfers feel—then why do we bother competing? Why do we fly all over the world, to the biggest, baddest, most remote breaks known to man, just to line up against each other and have at it and hope like crazy we make it to the final heat? It cuts against who we are, but at the same time it is who we are. Or here’s a better way to put it: it allows us to be who we were. It keeps us going. After all, if we didn’t compete, we couldn’t afford to ride all of this gorgeous, state-of-the-art gear, we couldn’t afford to skip out on work, we’d have to hold a real job, and we’d be expected to put in time at that real job, time that would take us away from surfing.
And so, yeah, it was a big boost to post such a strong showing down in San Miguel, against such a deep field, at such a young age. I had made a giant splash, only it didn’t come out of nowhere. Folks in and around surfing already knew who I was, because of my dad and the way we lived. We were like mini-celebrities in the surfing community. Wherever we went in those days, there’d be a reporter looking to do a story on us, or a news crew hoping to get some footage of all us Paskowitzes, riding eleven across. My dad had a bunch of friends who’d found a way to make a living out of the sport—shaping boards, making or marketing gear, writing for surfing magazines … not to mention all the guys who’d gone on to become true champions. So the Paskowitz name alone might have opened doors for me eventually, and I would have been completely fine with that, but making it to the finals in this one contest early on meant it wouldn’t just be the Paskowitz name doing the opening. It’d be my name, too.
I still had to work, though. Still had to put in my hours, somewhere. Ended up working at a Carl’s Jr. burger joint, about a hundred yards down the road from Bob’s house. Seemed like a reasonable commute. Plus, we ate there all the time, so it made sense to punch their clock and get a deal on their food. Hadn’t counted on how miserable I’d be, in this ridiculous outfit I had to wear, seeing all my buddies running in and out of there all day. It was a big hangout for our crowd, and it was embarrassing to be seen in this campy hat, this cheesy triple-knit polyester uniform they made us wear. I felt like that character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High who had to wear a pirate costume to work. Plus, just to add to the indignity, we had to pay for our own uniforms. They took the money out of our paychecks. I only lasted a couple weeks, which wasn’t exactly long enough to pay down my uniform advance, so for weeks afterwards I’d get these calls from Carl’s Jr. management, telling me I owed them seven dollars and forty cents. That’s what it ended up costing me to work there.
Not too long after that I got a jo
b working with my friend John Meade, cleaning boats at Newport Beach. John was an ex–coast guard guy I’d met on the beach who had a thriving sideline business maintaining boats for high-end yachtsmen. The money was good, and I got to be outside on the water all day. The drag was I had to ride the bus from San Clemente to Dana Point, so John and I could drive to Newport Beach together. I looked up one day and realized I’d gone from not working at all, to working at a burger joint down the street, to commuting an hour back and forth and putting in the same long haul Bob Bueno logged. But I didn’t really have any other options. I was too young for a driver’s license; even if I could drive, there’s no way I could have afforded my own car. I couldn’t afford to just surf all day, so I sucked it up and cleaned boats.
Turned out to be a great job. It was good, honest work. The money was decent, the hours flexible. I ended up working with John for years and years, even after I started having some big success on the circuit. I’d come home from my world travels, after blowing through whatever prize money I’d managed to collect, show up at the marina, and get right back to work.
* * *
I didn’t stay at Bob Bueno’s for long. Didn’t want to overstay my welcome—although I don’t think Bob would have ever kicked me out. For a while I stayed with a mutual buddy of ours named Lyle Fuller. He lived in a beautiful house in San Clemente with his mom, Patricia; they were kind enough to take me in for a stretch, and I was smart enough to take them up on it.
Lyle and I made our share of trouble together. The absolute biggest of trouble came about on a whim. We were hanging around one day, thinking it’d be nice to head down to Cabo for an adventure. Neither one of us had a whole lot going on at that point, and John Meade never minded if I grabbed a couple days every here and there, so Cabo sounded like a good idea. Lyle drove a Subaru Brat, a mini-truck with the two useless seats in the cab facing back. I thought it was such a cool ride, but it wasn’t very practical—soon another friend of ours was fixing to join, a guy named Gilbert Roybal, so the Brat was out. It only sat two people up front, and nobody was too keen on riding all the way down to Cabo in the open cab, facing back. Plus, we needed all that room for our gear.
For a while it looked like we’d have to scratch our plans, which was basically what happened to most of our grand schemes and big ideas, but then I hit on what I thought was a perfect solution: the family camper. In the big-ideas department, this was huge. My folks were off on some remote, landlocked adventure. By now, Moses and Adam had gone off on their own, so it was just David and the three youngest, Salvador, Navah, and Joshua, at home with them. The camper was less and less necessary as our little family unit got smaller and smaller, and that winter Doc was storing the vehicle with my aunt Josephina and uncle Emilie, at their place in Paris, California, right off the Ortega Highway. Aunt Josephine was my mother’s oldest sister. We all called her Auntie Grandma, and she and my uncle had a big spread, ten acres or so, which made a convenient way station for the camper when it wasn’t being used.
I still remember the way my dad always complained, driving our campers down the Ortega Highway, that it was a treacherous stretch of road. Our campers always had shitty brakes, and you had to press down on them as hard as you could as you came down that pass to the main road. It was a bitch and a bear.
This rig was another in our long line of Class C campers, with the big cab-over built on top of a standard, one-ton Ford body. The only “custom” piece to the ride was the surfboard rack Doc had fitted to the roof, which was big enough to hold up to forty boards, or a whole bunch of other crap if we were traveling light.
I called ahead to Auntie Grandma, told her I was coming. Told her my father said it was okay to grab the camper and head down to Mexico for a surf competition. This last part was just a white lie on top of a big-ass lie. There was no contest, of course; I just figured it would throw my aunt off the scent if I made it sound like it was a road trip with a purpose, instead of just a road trip for no apparent reason. I needed to dress up my lie every which way, because my father would have never given me permission to take the camper, for a whole bunch of reasons—mainly, I didn’t have a driver’s license.
I hated that I was lying to my aunt, because she’d always been good to me, good to my family. But when you’re sixteen or seventeen and you’ve spent your entire life watching your father stretch the truth to get what he wanted or needed or thought he deserved, lying comes easy. No, I’d never seen him lie to family. He was honest with my mother; he was honest with us kids. But a lie is a lie, and I always felt like I came to it naturally, like there was some default mode in our hard-wiring … and Auntie Grandma didn’t suspect a thing. She might have, though. She might have known I was too young to drive, but I guess she just didn’t put two and two together. She was too busy trusting me.
I suppose we could have squeezed into Lyle’s Brat, but we had a nice momentum going with the camper. We liked that we wouldn’t have to worry about a place to crash. We liked having all that room.
I took the wheel to start. Before heading out, we stopped at a Triple A office in town. One of our guys had a membership card, so we loaded up on maps, figured out a route, an itinerary. I’d made the drive a bunch of times, but never without my dad. All I knew was to head south and keep going.
First leg of the drive went great. Made it past Tijuana, no problem. Started thinking we would make it to Ensenada and hang for a bit—because, back then, Ensenada was a happening spot. There were tons of kids our age, California kids down for the day or the weekend, so we pulled into town, got something to eat, had a few beers. Probably, I had a few too many, because our pal Gilbert didn’t think I was in any shape to drive. He was right, I’m sure. Gilbert didn’t drink—or, at least, he didn’t drink that day. Made sense to let him drive for a while; the idea, all along, was to share the driving. Before I gave him the keys, though, I explained to Gilbert about the brakes. I told him they were a bitch and a bear. Told him the rig was a little top-heavy, and reminded him that it was a scary road, with a lot of twists and turns to it.
Now, Gilbert was a tiny guy, maybe five feet in socks. He looked like a little kid trying to drive a school bus, but he was a decent driver. I sat with him up front for a bit, until we pulled out of town. The steering wheel was one of those lap-height, oversized, counter-steering types, with a whole lot of play in it, but Gilbert seemed to get the hang of it. After a while, I told him I was going back into the camper to lie down. Lyle switched places with me and got in front, and I climbed into the cab-over and tried to sleep. If there’s one thing I was good at, after logging all those years, all those miles, it was falling asleep on the move. The rhythm of the road was like nature’s Ambien, and, mixed with the beers, I was gone within a couple kilometers. I wasn’t in a deep sleep, though. It was more like a half sleep. I could feel the camper lurching this way and that way, my body being rolled to one side or the other with each shift.
And then, I was shaken from my half sleep by a sudden lurch to the right side of the camper. I popped right up off the pillow, and as I did I could feel the rig kind of dip into a rut on the shoulder of the road. At that point, I could just imagine Gilbert up front, trying to spin that oversized, counter-steering wheel the other way, to adjust, and it turned out that’s just what he was doing, only he threw the rig into such a sudden hard left we flipped over on our side. It was a massive camper and we’d been moving at a decent clip, so once we flipped we kept going and going, just sliding along with our own weight and momentum. Behind me I could hear the sick, scary sounds of the appliances coming off one wall and crushing into the other.
There was a tiny window in the cab-over, and I’d had it open, but now that we’d flipped I was in danger of slipping right through it, so I straddled the frame of the window to keep myself from flying out. I put myself in this weird, spread-eagle position, and I tried to brace myself against the side walls like Spiderman. I knew we would crash eventually, but while we were sliding I had all this time to fra
ntically figure how to position myself to keep myself in one piece and inside the cab. Of course, I had no idea how we would hit, or what we would hit, but I was scrambling just the same.
Well, just as I was bracing myself, and straddling that cab-over window, I noticed we had crossed to the other side of the road, into oncoming traffic, and I could see a truck coming our way. I could hear it, too. The driver was leaning or pulling on his horn, so there was this long, loud peal. We were in the middle of a big straightaway. The truck driver had been going at his own decent clip, headed down a small incline; he’d seen us spinning up ahead and slammed on his brakes, but he couldn’t bring his rig to a full stop before smashing head-on into our side, spinning us around and around and right off the road.
Once everything stopped, I shook myself alert and realized I was covered with fuel. Also, I saw that the back wall of the cab-over compartment had been crushed and pressed all the way to the front, locking me in. The only way out, really, was the narrow, viewfinder window in the front, but I did a quick survey and saw there was nothing within reach that I could grab to bust out the window. There was just me and my bare feet, reeking of fuel.
Lyle and Gilbert were screaming at me from outside the vehicle. Somehow, they’d made it out. They asked me if I was okay. I hollered back that I wasn’t hurt, but I was stuck. Suddenly, I was overcome with a sense of urgency. I panicked, thinking the rig would burst into flames at any moment, so I started kicking violently against the window, trying to bust through. Ended up cutting right through the bottom of my foot. (I still have the scar!) Pushed away the glass and managed to fit my way through.
Scratching the Horizon Page 14
