Scratching the Horizon

by Izzy Paskowitz

  And then to find myself surfing in the final heat with the great Skip Frye and a local surfer named Andrew McKinnon, and Chris Slickenmayer, another famous shaper … well, it didn’t get any better than that.

  Now, to be on the outside in a final heat with Skip Frye is to be in the presence of a true champion, a true gentleman. And a true craftsman. Skip and Doc were great pals from the San Diego area; I’d known Skip my whole life, just about, and I always loved watching him surf. Talk about grace: the man fairly floated out there, like a pelican gliding over the waves. He made it look effortless, with his arms spread beautifully at his sides, like he was getting ready to take flight, but at the same time he’d carve these elegantly aggressive turns and really push the limits of what you thought was possible on a longboard. He was something to see, really—and here I was, up as close as could be.

  The way it worked for this contest, best I remember, was that there were only the four of us in the finals. The heat ran forty-five minutes, longer than I was used to, and there were subtle gradations in the scoring—meaning you could go out to five-tenths of a point and score a 7.5 or an 8.5 on a ride, instead of just a straight 7 or 8. This tended to make for a tighter leaderboard, which I guess was the idea, to build up the excitement for the fans.

  Oh, and about that leaderboard … it was much more obvious who was winning and losing in such a big-time event. Back home, there’d usually be a scorer’s table, and the results would be tabulated by hand, and then some serious-seeming people would pass a score sheet around and eventually someone would announce the results. (It could take a while!) Here in Australia, it was almost instantaneous, which it had to be when you had one hundred thousand people waiting to find out what was what. Doesn’t seem like such a big deal now, because these days everything’s done by computer and the scores appear immediately on a jumbo scoreboard, but at the time it was all new to me. Australia was the first time I ever competed that I knew where I stood before the event was finished, because they kept announcing the scores over a public-address system, and posting them for all to see.

  Okay, so here’s an anti-, anti-surfing move—and I share it here as a kind of antidote to the way Herbie Fletcher pulled his nine-foot board out from under me.

  I’ll set the scene: I was out there with Skip Frye, just the two of us, waiting for a wave. I was in probably the best shape of my life, wearing tight pink shorts, riding a pink board. (Don’t know why, but pink was my color that year. That’s what Hobie had me pushing, only we called it punk rock coral, which made all the difference.) Time was running out. Up until this point, it had been a very small day, with mostly waist-high waves. All four finalists were tallying similar scores in the 4.5–5.5 range.

  Nothing major. Nothing to set any one of us apart.

  And yet even though the waves were kind of ho-hum, it was a spectacular day. Not a cloud in the sky, which I guess was part of the problem, far as the waves were considered. There was no real breeze, nothing to kick up the current and give us something to ride. But the crowds were great, the energy off the charts, and now here we were, hoping we’d get to catch at least one more wave before the final horn.

  Just then, Skip and I spotted the wave of the day rolling towards us. We both knew this wave could make or break our tournament. Wasn’t one of those waist-high jobs, looked like it might even break over our heads, so I whipped my board around and started to go for it. As I did, I locked eyes with Skip. We were only a couple feet apart.

  He just looked at me and said, “Take it easy, Iz. You got this.”

  I couldn’t believe it—and yet, at the same time, I could. Skip Frye didn’t try to take the wave from me. He just gave it to me. He didn’t have to, but he did. It was a beautiful, beautiful thing. He didn’t even try to go the other way, alongside. It would have been nothing for the two of us to split the wave; it was big enough for both of us. But he just waved me on, told me to go for it, like a true gentleman surfer.

  And it ended up costing him. There were only a few minutes left in the competition, and there wasn’t another wave like it the rest of the heat, so I ended up destroying this one wave and putting up a sick score—a 10, double what we’d all been posting. (My one and only perfect score!) And even as I rode that wave to the championship, I thought what it meant for a guy like Skip Frye to just hand me the title. Also, what it meant a couple years earlier, when Herbie Fletcher took back his board. Skip had had his day in the sun, and he wanted me to have mine; that’s all. He was just that cool. It made him happier than if he’d won the thing himself, just to see me happy, and I’ve made it a special point to give that wave back to other surfers over the years. A bunch of times. Not to balance things out, but because I want to be more like Skip Frye than Herbie Fletcher.

  Once, I was head-to-head at a world championship event in Haleiwa with Rusty Keaulana, the son of Doc’s old pal Buffalo Keaulana, a classic big-wave surfer. I was on the inside when the wave of that day came in, and all I needed to do was stand up and ride it in. I was in position. But I went the other way so Rusty could take it, because I’d learned to be just as happy to see my friends win as to win myself. (Rusty wound up winning that tournament, pretty much on the back of that one wave.) That’s how I felt whenever my brother Jonathan beat me, head-to-head. Really and truly. That’s how Skip felt, seeing me win. Really and truly. And that’s how I felt here, really and truly, because I wasn’t about to jeopardize a lifelong friendship, hanging on the beach at Makaha together since we were toddlers, just to win a fucking contest.

  Skip Frye taught me that—but, I suppose, I knew it all along.

  * * *

  The footnote to that Coke Classic title was that I won a bunch of money—about three thousand dollars, more than I’d ever won in a single contest. There was an awards ceremony on the beach, after which I grabbed Danielle by the hand and made for the nearest bank, so I could cash the check and blow all the money.

  The great thing about Australia and surfing was all the bank tellers knew who I was. I didn’t need any ID. I just burst through the doors to cheers and shouts of, “Good on ya, mate!” and cashed my check like it was nothing at all. Spent about fifteen hundred dollars on a sexy cocktail dress for Danielle. She wasn’t too happy with me for making her buy it, but there was a fancy ball that night for the winners and I wanted us to be stylin’. I found a slick little something to go with my short, Elvis ’do and the rockabilly look I was wearing back then. Then I rented us a limo, to take us to the hotel where they were holding the fancy ball that night.

  We turned some heads when we hit that party. Better believe it. It was killer. We drank and danced and drank some more. Got back to Ian’s place around two o’clock in the morning, and had another couple nightcaps with him, but after all that drinking and dancing and merrymaking I couldn’t sleep. Plus, I think I drank myself sick, because I ended up in Ian’s bathroom, hugging the toilet. I might have even nodded off, my head at the base of the bowl. I was in sorry shape, but at one point I opened my eyes and saw a conga line of roly-poly pill bugs, marching to a hole in the baseboard behind the toilet. It was like a scene out of a cartoon. Struck me just then as the most absurd thing.

  Don’t know what those bugs were really called, but the folks Down Under called them slaters. You know the bugs I’m talking about? You touch them, ever so slightly, they scrunch up into a little tiny ball. Back home, we called them roly-poly whatevers. Down Under, they were slaters. I’d seen them around, but never this many, marching in formation.

  Somehow, in the middle of a full-on drunk, completely fucking blotto, I found a marking pen and crawled all the way to the back of the bowl, to the tiny mouse hole–type opening in the wall where the line seemed to form. Then I drew a proper door around the opening, and a sign above the hole that said: “Welcome all slaters!”

  Then I passed out and forgot all about it.

  It wasn’t until some months later that Ian found my drawing. By that point, Danielle and I were back home in Ca
lifornia. Ian had dropped something behind the bowl and got down on all fours to fetch it, and there in front of him was this cartoon mouse hole with my welcome message on it, and he could only smile to himself and wonder what the fuck I was doing down there in the first place.

  10

  Hitched

  It was inevitable we’d get married. Not “inevitable” as in “unavoidable” or “predictable,” but it was clear early on there was a course we were meant to chart. We were like a force of nature. From the moment Danielle picked me up at the airport in her friend’s limo, really, I knew we’d be together always, always, always.

  Took her parents a while to come around. Her father and I were cool, but Danielle’s mom wasn’t too happy with me after I was taken from her house in handcuffs; don’t think she was too happy with me before that, actually, but the handcuffs didn’t help. She was cool with me eventually, though. I suppose she would have liked it if I had a better job, or better prospects, or a better education—hell, even just a piece of a shred of a tiny little fragment of an education would have helped. My future mother-in-law, Sharon, was a strong woman, but she could tell Danielle and I were a team, so she gave us her blessing. She even agreed to pay for our wedding.

  My father was a little disappointed that Danielle wasn’t Jewish. Oh, my parents loved Danielle, and they loved the Brawners, but Doc would have liked it if I had kept the faith on this one score at least. After all, he’d done his part to repopulate the tribe, with eight Mexican-Jewish sons, but it was probably his secret wish that each of us would have eight Jewish sons as well, and here I was, first to the altar, with a shiksa bride—just like him! He came around, though. Guess he figured he had eight more kids to marry off and that one of them would fall for a card-carrying Jew and produce a proper Jewish grandchild. (He’s still waiting!)

  Danielle wanted a traditional Catholic wedding, which was okay by me, but I did go to the trouble of seeking out a rabbi to perform at least a part of the ceremony—just to balance the scales. I thought we could do it up like one of those cartoon shorts they used to show at the movie theaters, before the main feature. We could say a couple prayers, maybe stomp on a glass, and then move on to the big show. Danielle was totally up for it, so we made some phone calls, started asking around. There were a bunch of rent-a-rabbis in Southern California, natch, but you’d be surprised how few of them wanted to share the stage at a Catholic wedding, especially in this off-to-the-side way; they all wanted to run the show.

  Also, money was an issue. Danielle’s mom, Sharon, was footing the bill, but I’d already been in and out of her doghouse too many times to ask her to pay for a rabbi, so Danielle and I were on our own for this part. And so we looked long and hard for a rabbi who’d take the gig on our terms. Finally found a guy in San Diego who agreed to meet with us for lunch at a deli, to discuss our plans. It was understood that Danielle and I would be paying for lunch—anyway, it was understood by the rabbi, who showed up and ate like a pig. He ordered a ton of food, plus a container of chopped liver to go. This last is what’s known as chutzpah, a term Danielle would forever after associate with this gluttonous rabbi, who finally told us his fee for the ceremony was twenty-five hundred dollars. It seemed a little high, especially since the priest who was actually marrying us was only charging a couple hundred bucks, so we thanked the rabbi for his time and for doing his part to give Jews a bad name and sent him and his chopped liver on their way.

  That was it for me on the rabbi front. Figured I’d given it my best shot.

  Danielle and her mom found a beautiful church for the ceremony—St. Edward’s, overlooking the ocean in Dana Point—and then I realized our wedding date conflicted with a contest I meant to enter off the San Clemente Pier. I was back and forth on whether or not I should compete. Wouldn’t go so far as to say I was torn, but I was starting to fray. Why? Well, I was in the middle of a great run and I needed the points for my standing on the national circuit. Also, I always looked to compete in events around town, to make the most of my home field advantage, so I checked in with the tournament organizers to see if I could pinpoint the exact time of my heat and maybe find a way to towel off and still make it to the church on time.

  Danielle wasn’t too happy about this, and she said as much. I’m paraphrasing here, but I believe what she said was, “If you’re even a minute late, I will fucking kill you.” Or words to that effect. In truth, she only gave me a little bit of hell, probably because a part of her thought it was way cool, to be marrying this rad surfer dude who had to catch a couple meaningful waves before tying the knot. Probably, I should have had the sense to let them go and let the day just be about my beautiful bride and our beautiful wedding and our beautiful future together, but nobody ever accused me of having a whole lot of sense.

  I had it all worked out—in my head, at least—and the night before the wedding we gathered at St. Edward’s for a rehearsal, and while Danielle and her bridesmaids were figuring where to stand I was huddled with my groomsmen, going over last-minute plans for getting from the beach to the church the next morning. We ran through all these different scenarios, to make sure we had everything covered. The wedding was called for ten o’clock; my heat was set to go off at six thirty; wasn’t a whole lot that could go wrong, really. A couple of the guys were also planning to surf, including my brothers Jonathan and Adam, but there were enough non-surfers in the group to cheer us on, help ferry us back and forth, and make sure we had everything we needed.

  At one point during the rehearsal, I caught sight of my dad, standing around in a pair of worn-out shoes I recognized from when I still lived in the camper; the soles were coming apart from the tops, and he’d put caulking around the seams to hold the whole mess together. I took him aside and told him he couldn’t wear those shoes to my wedding rehearsal, and then I slipped out of my own shoes and handed them to him.

  I said, “Wear these.”

  It seemed way more appropriate for the rad surfer dude groom to be barefoot than for the father of the rad surfer dude groom to be walking around in a pair of shabby kicks that wouldn’t have even made the cut at the Salvation Army.

  Oh, and speaking of shoes, I’d gone out and bought all my groomsmen a pair of creepers to wear at the wedding. Remember creepers? They were a big punk-rockabilly craze in the late 1980s, so I bought a bunch from a British company called Nana for the wedding party. Mine were black with a leopard print—totally smokin’. My idea was we’d all line up for our groomsmen photo and look so spectacularly handsome in our custom creepers we’d have to hire extra security just to keep the ladies out of the shot.

  * * *

  The wedding was shaping up to be a big, big deal. It was certainly a big deal in the Paskowitz family; we could fill a room and call it a party all on our own. Plus, we’d invited all these legends of surfing—friends of ours, friends of Doc, friends of my father-in-law. Tubesteak and the rest of the Tracys would be there, of course. Gary Propper, Hobie Alter, J Riddle, David Nuuhiwa, the Patterson brothers, Raymond and Ronald … just a sick, sick lineup of all-time great surfers. I was the first among my siblings to get hitched, so most of my aunts and uncles and cousins were there, on both sides, plus Danielle’s large family … in all, over two hundred people, which made it like a highlight of the San Clemente–area social calendar. Folks were coming in from as far away as New York and Hawaii, so we were all pretty psyched.

  Scott Ruedy was my best man, and my brothers were groomsmen, along with Danielle’s brother, Damian. Don’t think all the Paskowitz boys came to the pier on the morning of the wedding, but Abraham was definitely there, and Jonathan and Adam were competing, so they were there, too. The guys who weren’t surfing were all dressed for the wedding in their monkey suits, looking snappy and out of place for six o’clock in the morning on the beach. My buddy Matt Archbold, one of the greatest shortboarders in the world, was there and for some reason he was dressed out in an embroidered Mexican poncho. Other guys were wearing smoking jackets, or fancy Ha
waiian shirts, or whatever their wives or girlfriends had told them was appropriate. We must have made an odd picture, in our various styles of formal dress, still in our various stages of early morning sleep, descending on this scene for my preliminary heat, but to our thinking it was all part of the celebration. It all tied in.

  Understand, I wasn’t just surfing to go through the motions, or selfishly avoiding my husbandly responsibilities; this wasn’t some last act of rebellion or a swan song to my misspent youth. No way. The competition was important. It was a big-time, Hobie-sponsored event—a sanctioned leg on the national tour, which was just getting started. But at the same time it wasn’t just about needing the points to add to my yearlong total and securing my spot in the standings; I was also in it to win it. There was serious prize money involved—twelve hundred dollars as I recall, which I’d recently learned would have almost bought me half a rabbi. And I’d be going up against a strong, competitive field. I’d been in a zone for a good long while, and my goal was to keep a good thing going.

  The waves were on the small side, but this was more of a problem for the other surfers than it was for me. I knew this sweet spot on the north side of the pier, where you’re almost hugging the barnacles, that would put me in a prime position to catch the best of the swell as it came in. I was on my pink board, on the inside, ready to ride my way into the finals. And that’s just how it happened. I caught my few waves and when the horn blew the guys came down to the shorebreak to meet me. A couple of them—already drunk, probably; or, possibly, still drunk from the night before—threw me on their shoulders and walked me out of the water, while I was still wearing my wet suit. Someone brought champagne, so we started passing the bottle around. I didn’t even stop at the scorer’s table to see if I’d made it through, because I knew I’d nailed it. Wasn’t that I was cocky or superconfident, just that I knew no one was catching the same waves as me.