Scratching the Horizon

by Izzy Paskowitz

  I had thirty bucks in my pocket and a backpack with a pair of board shorts and a couple days’ worth of clothes. I was still bumming about Danielle, missing her like crazy. I borrowed twenty bucks from my sister, which she didn’t really have, to get myself a killer leather jacket at Adam’s bike shop, using his employee discount—basically because I thought it’d cheer me up to have a killer leather jacket.

  It did and it didn’t.

  When I boarded the plane for Tel Aviv, I was down to some loose change, but somehow I made it from the airport to Amor’s flat. Amazingly, I found that I still knew my way around. It’d been about ten years since I was last in Tel Aviv, but I had a sense of where I was, where I was going. Amor had a really nice setup across from a marina. You could see the beach from his window, and it was filled with surfers. I remembered the stories my father used to tell, about bringing those first boards through customs in the 1950s and teaching guys like Topsi to ride. I thought about our two trips to Israel as a family, and the growing popularity of the sport, especially on weekends when the surf was up and the crowds were out. And now here I was, about to start work with Topsi’s kids at a surfboard factory, across from a break where hundreds of kids lay on their bellies waiting to drop in and ride. Surfing had become a big, big part of Israeli culture. In some areas, among young soldiers especially, it was such an all-consuming passion you could look on and think you were back in California.

  The only thing missing, really, was a world-class break. The surfing wasn’t bad, but it was a lot like surfing in Florida, where the shores are buffeted by islands and you’re unable to get a clean swell. The Mediterranean can behave like a giant lake, with low pressures and an occasional wind that will drive the swells into little waves. Sometimes, when it’s especially windy, it can whip around and blow up the face of these small waves and make them taller, instead of blowing on their backs and crushing them.

  On a good day, the surfing was fine. Better than good enough, really. The water was crystal clear and warm and completely different from what I was used to back home, so there was something exotic about it, too. I really dug it, the whole scene. I dug the language, the culture, the vibe. Wound up working there for a couple months, although “working” is probably too strong a word to describe what I was actually doing at first. Basically, I was hanging out and letting these guys bounce their ideas off of me about their boards, their designs; sometimes, I’d bounce my ideas right back. We commuted to the factory on Amor’s Harley, which had a bitchin’ sidecar, so we tooled around the streets of Tel Aviv like an Israeli Batman and Robin, making the beaches safe for Middle Eastern surfers.

  On Friday nights, we’d have Shabbat dinner with Amor’s parents, Topsi and Naomi; they cooked these amazing meals, and we talked deep into the night about what was going on in Israel, among the young people especially. The Kanzapolskis’ English was perfect, but they sprinkled in a little Hebrew if they thought they needed just the right word to get a point across. Soon, whatever Hebrew I’d retained in my fog of little-kid memory started to come back to me and I could hold up my end pretty well.

  I didn’t make any money, but I got a place to stay. And food and beer. At the time, early 1980s, beer wasn’t a big thing in Tel Aviv, so I was a bit of a trendsetter on this one. Most of the folks I was hanging with seemed to think beer was filling, that it would make them fat. They’d rather smoke hash—that was their way of unwinding after a day on the beach or a day at the surfboard factory. Personally, I’d never been into weed back home. It always made me feel drowsy, dopey, paranoid. Beer was much more my thing. But hash was a whole other high, and I came to really enjoy it, so that became a part of our days, too. Surfing, food, beer, hash … the ideal recipe to chase me from my funk about missing Danielle.

  It’s not like we weren’t in touch. Over the next three or four months, she wrote me letters. (Remember letters?) Told me what was going on with her adventures. She got pickpocketed in France, had all her money stolen, so that set her back. The much-dreaded reunion with the old boyfriend—much dreaded by me !—came and went without incident, so that gave me a lift.

  After a while, my friend Dovoleh found a way to rig one of his neighbor’s lines so Danielle and I could talk on the phone and we’d have these long, loopy conversations that stretched on for hours. Each one was like that first conversation we had back home, the night of that shitty party. Just the sound of her voice was enough to get me thinking I should drop everything I was doing in Israel and find my way back to wherever she was. She returned home to California ahead of me, but we kept up with our late night phone sessions, and after a while I couldn’t take being away from her. Trouble was, I had no money for a flight home. So Amor’s girlfriend hooked me up with a couple modeling gigs, and I started doing some coloring work down at the surfboard factory, which earned me a few shekels. I’d apply watercolors to the blank boards after they’d been shaped; then we’d wait for them to dry and laminate over the fiberglass, giving the boards a hip, distinctive look. Nobody was doing that over there at the time, and it threw a little money my way and soon I’d managed to scrape together enough for a return ticket.

  Danielle came to meet me at the airport in a limo, which I thought was way cool. It belonged to a buddy of hers who lived up the street, and the guy wasn’t doing anything that afternoon, so she convinced him to go for a ride. (First time I ever had sex in a limo! Historians, take note!)

  Seeing her again was like coming up for air.

  I’d given up the apartment I was sharing with Scott, so I needed a place to stay, and Danielle convinced her folks to let me crash in her brother Damian’s room. They weren’t too keen about it, I don’t think, but Danielle could be very persuasive, I was learning. Don’t think Damian minded one way or another; we got along well enough, and it’s not like I was actually bunking with him the whole night; I’d sneak into Danielle’s room when her parents went to sleep, and sneak back in the morning.

  I’d loaned out my car, too—to my brother Abraham, which ended up being a big mistake. Oh, man, I loved that ’65 Impala. It was my first car. Bought it for $650 off this old dude, who made me drive around with him in it for a half day before agreeing to sell it to me, like he wanted to check me out and see if I’d be a worthy owner. It had sixty thousand miles on it. The chrome was in perfect shape. Hadn’t really wanted to lend it to Abraham, but he had no other way to get around and promised he’d take good care of it, and I couldn’t see letting it sit for a couple months when I was in Israel.

  It took Abraham a couple days to get the car back to me after I got back to town, but once I got my car back I was able to feel a measure of independence. Kind of tough to feel like you’re on your own and moving in the right direction when you’re living with your girlfriend’s brother in his boyhood bedroom. So the car helped, definitely. I could come and go as I pleased, and do as I pleased … until we were all woken up one morning a couple days later by the bleat of the telephone and a loud knock on the door. It was way early, still dark, and all of a sudden the house was filled with all this noise and activity. I’d already ducked back into Damian’s room, and he and I were both startled awake by two cops, who came busting into his room with their guns drawn, barking out questions.

  One of the cops turned to me and said, “Are you Israel Paskowitz?”

  I nodded.

  Then he slapped a pair of handcuffs on me and started pushing me out the door of Damian’s room. It was a crazy, chaotic scene. Danielle’s parents were half-asleep, standing in the hallway outside Damian’s room, but her mom, Sharon, was alert enough and pissed enough to go off on me. Sharon turned to Danielle and screamed, “See, I fuckin’ told you he was no good. Goddamn surfer!”

  Danielle’s dad was laughing. Danny was a cool guy. Took a lot to set him off. Plus, we got along pretty well. I think he knew one of the cops, because Danny was a volunteer fire captain and he worked with all these law enforcement types. He thought the whole thing was pretty funny. He even asked
the cops to hang back for a beat so he could go get his camera. Said he wanted to take pictures, because this was something we’d all want to remember—Doc Paskowitz’s kid, being led from Danny’s house in handcuffs.

  Damian was freaking out—mostly because of the drawn gun, I think, but also because he’d nodded off with a jarful of coins on his bed. He’d come back from a gig, was counting out his tips, and was a little bit hammered, so I’d taken the time to stick a bunch of pennies on his skin while he was passed out—you know, just to goof on him. Danielle had said I should make myself at home, and this was the kind of thing my brothers and I would do to each other all the time. An hour or so later, as Damian stumbled out of bed, with all these coins stuck to his body, I didn’t think I’d done such a good or thorough job, because they started dropping to the floor—one by one, at first, and then in clumps. Poor Damian couldn’t figure what the hell was going on. He was half-asleep, half-baked, fully confused.

  The whole scene was a little too confusing to process. Sharon was yelling at Danielle, and Danielle was yelling back at Sharon, telling her to shut up and leave me the fuck alone, and Danny was off to the side, trying not to laugh.

  Wasn’t exactly the picture of domestic bliss, I’ll say that.

  I managed to grab my passport and jump into a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, before the cops threw me barefoot into the back of their car and drove me to the station. The whole time thinking, Great, Izzy. Welcome the fuck home.

  At this point, I still had no idea why these guys were arresting me, but it came clear that Abraham had run up all these parking tickets and moving violations while I was in Israel. The car was registered to me, but whenever Abraham got pulled over they’d run the plates and he’d say he was me and that he’d misplaced his license, so now there were all these outstanding warrants for my arrest. After a while, they came looking for me.

  Ended up spending the rest of the morning in a jail cell, before I was dragged in front of a judge. There were a bunch of other cases ahead of me, all similar traffic violation stories, and it seemed this judge was giving about a week of jail time for each warrant. I did the math and figured he could put me away for a month or more, because there were four or five outstanding warrants—but luckily I was able to produce my passport, to show that I was out of the country at the time of each violation. I said I’d left my car behind and that a lot of people had access to it, but when the judge pressed me to give up some names I pretended like I couldn’t really say for sure, like the list of people who might have had a key was just too long for me to be any more specific.

  I didn’t want to give up Abraham on this, even though he’d been so quick to give me up every time he was pulled over.

  Danielle was hugely pissed, though, because the whole scene created a mess of tension between her and her parents—between us and her parents. She was pissed at me for not turning Abraham in, and at Abraham for putting me in this spot, and at her mother for being so quick to write me off, and at her father for not taking it all that seriously.

  I couldn’t be mad at my brother just for being stupid and selfish and irresponsible. It wasn’t Abraham’s fault that his stupidity and selfishness and irresponsibility ended up getting me arrested; it’s just how it shook out—and it all shook out to the good, because my passport put me in the clear.

  And because it forced Danielle and me to push our relationship to the next level and move in together. We couldn’t stay on in her parents’ house after something like this. I’d overstayed my welcome, and we rode that swell into our first apartment, knowing that whatever happened next, whatever adventures lay in wait, we would face them together.

  9

  Going Long

  Okay, so now I had one part of my life figured out, the part that said I would be with Danielle, but that still left me to figure the earning-a-living part, the surfing part.

  Turned out some of the answers found me on the beach on a day when we weren’t looking for anything more than a good time. Danielle and I were just surfing, laying in the sun, groping each other to make up for all that time we were apart … when we met an old friend of Danielle’s father, a former world champion surfer named Gary Propper. I knew Gary, but only by reputation; he was like a guru to a lot of the young surfers on the circuit at that time. He was also a bit of an entrepreneur in the entertainment world—what they used to call an impresario. He was a record producer, a movie producer, a talent manager, a publisher, an artist … basically, he was into everything. A couple years after that day on the beach, he’d help discover an obscure comic book series called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which he’d develop into a series of blockbuster movies and television shows, and he was especially plugged into the surfing world.

  Gary used to ride for Danny Brawner, who sponsored him back in the 1960s, so we built on the connection and got to talking. Gary had seen me surf. He knew I could compete, and I think he also knew I had drifted away from it in the past couple years. Eventually our talk turned to longboarding. He kept telling me longboarding was making a comeback. I hadn’t realized it had ever left, but I knew as well as anyone it had always been a kind of poor cousin to the shortboard circuit. It’s not that longboarders were disregarded; it’s just that they’d never been as highly regarded as shortboarders, at least not in recent years. Traditionally, all of the big-time, marquee champions had been shortboarders. That was the money play. Shortboarders were the ones who got the big sponsorship deals, the girls, the glory; they were the guys who could really rip. But I was always a big fan of longboarders. I’d only been riding shortboards in competition, but longboards were a big part of my experience. As kids, we each had our own longboard and shortboard atop the camper and we would switch back and forth. Doc’s thing was to get us comfortable on all types of rides, on any type of surf. I always felt I could express myself better on a longboard, like I was more in control, more myself. There was something more elegant about a longboard ride, compared to the more choppy, more in-your-face approach of a shortboard. It was like choosing between a classy limousine and a sleek sports car: each made a statement; you just had to figure out what you wanted to say.

  This powwow with Gary Propper took place around the time Corky Carroll was coming back out of “retirement” and riding in longboard contests, making a big-time name for himself all over again. For years Corky had been known as one of the founders of professional surfing, and then he stopped competing. Now he was back at it and in some ways more famous, more successful than ever. He was even doing commercials for Miller Lite, talking about “not getting filled up and groovin’ on Lite’s great taste.” That commercial made a big splash on the surfing scene, because it put it out there that we were real athletes, deserving of at least a sliver of spotlight, all of which fit neatly into Corky’s place in surfing history. A lot of folks credit him with being the first surfer to win any kind of national endorsement deal—in his case, with Jantzen sportswear and Hobie Alter, the largest surfboard manufacturer in the world back in the early 1960s—so, clearly, he was an icon of the sport.

  By the time I was done shooting the shit with Gary he had me thinking I’d enter my first longboard contest. And I did. There was a contest right in my own backyard, at San O, over the coming Fourth of July weekend, part of a Budweiser pro surf tour that would take shape over the next couple years. Some of the best surfers in the world were scheduled to attend, so I didn’t think I had a shot, but I wanted to get wet and get going, see if I could maybe measure up. I didn’t even have a decent longboard, so I had to beg and borrow. Started out on Herbie Fletcher’s nine-foot board, which was essentially the minimum length for a longboard. Technically, you could ride any board that was at least three feet over your head and still be eligible, but nine feet was the minimum standard.

  Now, the way it works in a typical pro event is that you have twenty, thirty, or forty minutes in your heat to catch as many waves as you can and then you’re judged on your top three rides. There are usually five jud
ges, and they rank you on a scale of 1 to 10; in those days, they didn’t use decimal points, so the best you could hope for on one ride was a total score of 30, after tossing out the high and low marks. Most guys, they caught maybe seven or eight waves in the allotted time, up to a maximum of ten, but I tended to be selective, especially when we were at a break I knew well. And that was certainly the case here. I’d been surfing San O since I was a kid, so I had a serious home-field advantage. There were maybe a hundred surfers in the field to start, maybe more, and they’d all surfed this wave a bunch of times, but I kept telling myself I’d surfed it longer, harder … smarter. Kept telling myself I knew that break better than I knew myself, so I was at a big psychological advantage—enough, hopefully, to make up for the fact that some of these guys were way out of my league.

  I could afford to be selective because I could pretty much predict what was coming, so I’d wait for the right wave, let the other guys in my heat battle for position while I hung on the outside, picking my spots. Yeah, I’d grown up with my father’s credo to ride every damn wave, to believe no wave was as good as the one you were on, so this approach cut against everything I’d learned as a kid—but this was a competition, which also cut against everything I’d learned as a kid. We were taught to prevail over the wave, not over the guy surfing next to us, but to succeed on the circuit you had to mix in elements of both.