Scratching the Horizon

by Izzy Paskowitz

  You travel all that way for a tournament, it’s not like you’re in a rush to leave. At least, I was in no rush to leave, so I tooled around Biarritz for a couple days with Jeff Kramer and another pal of ours from back home, Devon Howard, who’d also been knocked out early. Worked out great for me, because those were the only guys who’d drink wine and eat snails with me; everyone else was so provincial they’d only eat McDonald’s. We hit the town a couple nights running, drank ourselves silly, spent a completely wild and crazy night listening to some unreal music and watching a bunch of gorgeous lesbians make out on the dance floor. Spent a bunch of money we didn’t really have, which was when I decided to sell my two remaining boards; I sobered up and realized that way I’d at least come out ahead. I mean, it’s not like I’d laid out the money for them in the first place; they came from my own line, which my brother Moses was helping me to market, and it didn’t cost me all that much to replace them—so, yeah, those babies were gone.

  (A word or two on the Izzy-designed boards I was pushing in those days. They were pretty cool, actually. Innovative, too. What I did was take my shortboard experience and marry it to my longboard chops and design a line of high-performance longboards that were unlike anything else on the market. They were ultralight. Plus, they had the shape and details—down to the rails and the design of the fin setup—that were more like you’d find on a modern shortboard, so surfers were really diggin’ them. They weren’t your typical classic longboard noseriders, but back when I weighed only 165 pounds I could noseride anything. We sold a whole bunch of them, made a whole bunch of money, and for a while it looked like we might have stumbled onto a nice sideline business. It was all fine and dandy until Moses ran off to the north shore of Oahu and treated himself to a winter vacation that stretched a little bit longer than our budget, and on top of that he’d left me behind with all the factory bills and very little inventory, so that was the end of the Israel Paskowitz Longboards line.)

  Before the money could burn through my pockets on that “lost” trip to France, I loaded up on souvenirs for Danielle and the kids, but that didn’t begin to make up for what I cost my family by being away. Or what I cost myself. It was shameful, really. Inexcusable. And yet I’d go through some version of these same motions for a good long while, tournament after tournament, before finally getting my priorities straight and setting things right.

  For years after this pointless trip to the south of France I would pass Elah’s room and notice the porcelain doll I brought back for her and each time it was like a kick to the stomach. Each time it reminded me of the selfish, gutless, clueless ways I responded to Isaiah’s autism, disappearing for weeks at a stretch, chasing meaningless money in meaningless tournaments in what was fast becoming a meaningless career.

  I should have been home. Absolutely, I should have been home.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Danielle was filling up the spaces where I should have been, doing what she could to keep it together. Isaiah was in free fall. He went from having a perfectly normal vocabulary of forty or fifty words at two years old, to three or four words at the age of three, and it was downhill from there. He started having these wild and violent mood swings. The bigger he got, the harder it became to control him—and he was a big, big boy. Every once in a while, in a moment of calm, he’d point to himself and say, “Want to fix the little boy.” Want to fix the little boy! Can you imagine, hearing something like that from your kid? Knowing full well that he knew full well that he was somehow broken inside?

  It tore me up.

  You never knew what would set Isaiah off—or, I should say, I never knew what would set him off, because I was never around, and even when I was around my head was someplace else.

  There was never enough money. My professional career, which had never brought in a ton of money, was now a charade; I fooled myself into thinking I was earning a living by selling off sponsor surfboards and pocketing my per diem. But I couldn’t fool Danielle. She knew the deal. She’d stopped working after Isaiah was born, which meant we were now without health insurance, too. We kept it going for about a year, through COBRA, but after a while the payments were out of reach.

  Things were not good.

  Without even telling me, Danielle tapped into all these different social service programs. She started getting food stamps and signed up for a WIC card, through a federally funded health and nutrition program for women, infants, and children. It must have been so hard for her, to have to stand in line with all these desperate, hurting people and ask for help. To have her hand out. To have our hand out. But she sucked it up and did what she had to do—basically, because I couldn’t bring myself to hold up my end.

  Just to be clear, it wasn’t humiliating to have to ask for help. No, that was the brave and noble and responsible thing for Danielle to do. That’s why those programs are in place, to help folks in need, and we were certainly in need. The humiliating part was on me, for putting my beautiful wife in the tough spot of having to go through these motions on her own. For checking out and leaving it to her to sort through how to deal with Isaiah, how to find the time to pay good and positive attention to Elah and Eli, how to put food on the table … and on and on.

  I should have been working full-time with John Meade, instead of chasing some elusive wave, or some vague notion I still carried about what it meant to be a champion surfer. There was a real opportunity with John, but I had to commit to it. I couldn’t expect the job to lead anywhere if I kept taking time off to surf, or to travel to these out-of-the-way contests. As it was, I wasn’t qualified to do anything more than wash a boat, or polish the brass on some of the gorgeous yachts John serviced, but I could have learned a related business. I could have turned it into something more. A lot of John’s guys, they learned to skipper boats, they learned to buy and sell, they learned their way around the marina.

  Summers, when Danielle and I needed extra money, I could always drop in at the family surf camp, which was still going strong, but that was my dad’s gig—and, after a while, my brothers’. They’d pay me ten, twenty, thirty bucks a day, depending on the enrollment that week, depending on what they needed me to do, so there was no real money to be made there, more like a tip than a salary. It’s no wonder Danielle had to swallow her pride—our pride!—and sign on for all these entitlement programs. There’s no other way we could have made it, but what’s amazing and crushing and upsetting was that she never said anything to me about it. She just did what she had to do, very quietly, with whatever dignity she could bring to it.

  Maybe she tried to tell me what was going on and I couldn’t hear it, but it finally came clear to me one day when we went shopping together. We’d filled our cart with whatever it was we absolutely needed, and when we reached the checkout counter Danielle pulled out this WIC card. I’d never seen it before, never heard of the program. I thought at first we’d somehow qualified for a credit card and Danielle had been holding out on me, but then she explained what it was and I was mortified, horrified. It had never occurred to me we were in such bad shape. It should have, but it didn’t.

  Danielle looked at me like I was a difficult child. “Wake up, Izzy,” she said.

  There’s a lot she didn’t tell me, back then. A lot I refused to see or hear. For example, I never knew that Danielle put a bolt on the door to Eli’s bedroom because she couldn’t trust what Isaiah might do if he was alone with the baby. Can you imagine? To be running a household with three little kids and having to worry that one of them might do serious harm to another? To have a husband who’d checked out in such a way that he didn’t even know you were getting food stamps?

  Oh, man, it’s embarrassing how unavailable I was for Danielle and the kids. I was in my own little world. I was in absolute denial, about everything. And I hated that I was so disconnected from what was going on at home, but at the same time I couldn’t see how to plug back in. I didn’t know how to be around Isaiah, how to be the parent of a child just out of reach. I di
dn’t know how to provide.

  Basically, I didn’t know shit.

  Surfing, that’s all I knew.

  * * *

  Luckily, mercifully, a couple things happened to shake me awake about Isaiah. For years, I couldn’t deal with the thought that there was something wrong with my beautiful boy. I refused to accept it. I’d see him playing with his Hot Wheel cars in this wildly inappropriate, totally off way (for example, lining the cars up on their sides) and think he was going through a phase. Or he’d run off and start flapping his arms and screeching, completely out of control, and I’d convince myself he was letting off steam. I’d listen to Danielle riding me that we needed to get Isaiah some help, and I’d just tune her out. It’s like I thought I could wish him whole … you know, just make him normal by willing it so.

  But instead I looked away. I disappeared into what was left of my surfing career—which, frankly, wasn’t much. One day I found myself alone in a beautiful oceanfront suite at a Hawaiian resort. Somehow, I’d weaseled these great accommodations from my sponsor, and it would have been nothing to bring along Danielle and the kids, but it hadn’t even occurred to me.

  I hadn’t surfed too well that day, got knocked out early, but ESPN was covering the event and it was part of my deal to do color commentary for the network if and when I was eliminated. So there I was, out on the beach, still relishing the surfing spotlight. Didn’t matter that it was shining on someone else; it was close enough. But then the sun went down and I went to my room and wondered what the hell I was doing with my life. I turned on the television, started flipping through the channels. After a while, I landed on Forrest Gump, just as it was getting started, so I threw a couple pillows behind my head and settled in to watch. By the end of the movie, I was bawling my brains out. Caught myself thinking of Tom Hanks, playing Isaiah as an adult. Thinking that the best, best, best we could hope for Isaiah was that he’d grow up to be like Forrest Gump. And it just shattered my heart, to where I started bawling all over again, only this time I was crying for Isaiah, not for some fictional character. I was crying for what he’d miss, for the boy his brother and sister would never know, for Danielle.

  For me.

  Want to fix the little boy.

  So what did I do? Well, I emptied out the minibar, for one thing. And when there was nothing left to drink I went down to the lobby bar, where I found a couple guys I knew on the tour. They could see I was distraught, slid over to talk, asked me what was up. So I told them. Don’t think I’d ever told anybody on the tour about Isaiah to that point, at least not in such an explicit, emotional way. Don’t know why I opened up to these guys, but it just came out. It’s like I had all these bottled-up things to say and share and the pressure had been building up and building up and it all burst forth.

  Of all the people I could have opened up to that night, I happened to land on these two sweet guys who listened to me rant and ramble with all the patience and kindness in the world. At the other end one of my buddies turned to me and started telling me about his nineteen-year-old sister. I’d known this guy for years and years, and I had no idea he had a disabled sister, in such a bad way. She still slept in a crib. Still wore diapers. Still didn’t speak. And he wasn’t telling me in a can you top this? sort of way, but to let me know that I wasn’t alone. That folks find a way to deal, whatever it is they’re dealing with. And it absolutely floored me, that this great surfer could move about with such grace and composure with everything that was going on back home. That he could still function and be a great human being, and a really nice guy.

  It must have killed this poor guy, to see his sister suffer and struggle, to have to suffer and struggle through her … but at the same time, it didn’t kill him.

  It took another incident to get my head completely out of my ass, and this one found me at Huntington Beach, at the butt end of yet another tournament I didn’t win. Danielle and the kids had come down for this one, and she was so fed up with me at this point that whenever Isaiah started to have one of his meltdowns she’d hand him off to me. Didn’t matter if I was surfing, or giving interviews, or doing something for one of my sponsors. It was like a game of Isaiah tag and it was my turn to deal with him.

  Well, Isaiah had a major, major fit, and Danielle threw up her hands to let me know this was happening on my watch, and next thing I knew there was this huge fucking spectacle, with my crazy-ass son running up and down the beach, flapping his arms and screaming, “Neeeeeeeee!” The entire professional surfing world was on that beach, from Kelly Slater on down, along with sponsors and fans and photographers, friends and family, and everyone seemed to stop whatever they were doing to check out Isaiah, and it just tore me up. To have to see his behavior through the eyes of these great, fearless watermen, guys I’d looked up to my whole life … it felt like the worst wipeout ever, multiplied out by about a million. Knocked the wind completely out of me, and as I started chasing Isaiah, zipping all over the beach like he was on fire, I got a picture in my head of what we looked like to all these people. For the first time, I saw Isaiah through the eyes of the world; I saw the two of us, together, through the eyes of the world.

  I caught up to Isaiah, finally, managed to pin him to the sand and hoped like crazy I could get him to calm down. And as I was holding him close, brushing back his hair, trying to talk to him in a soothing voice, I thought, Enough of this shit, Israel. Might as well just deal with it.

  * * *

  Still, I kept surfing.

  Yeah, this thunderclap of clarity had come over me about Isaiah, and yeah, I realized I needed to be a more available parent and partner, but I couldn’t bring myself to give up on my career just yet. In fact, it took a good long while for me to finally quit on the idea that I could compete at the top, top level. For years, each time a tournament showed up on my calendar, I’d do a quick gut check and convince myself I could win. I was like Christian Bale in The Fighter, desperate to prove I still had it.

  The Fighter comparison works all the way around, because you could see everybody’s role shift in our family each time someone moved up or down a rung on whatever ladders we were climbing. In the movie, the mother was out as manager and the brother was out as coach … and then they were back in place. The mother needed the ex-champ, Christian Bale, who needed his brother, the up-and-comer Mark Wahlberg. They all needed each other, even though they each would have done better on their own. In the Paskowitz version, one of us would be soaring and doing okay for a while, making decent money. And then, after another while, someone else would start to soar and we’d all line up behind him instead, finding ways to hold him back or hoping like crazy he’d take the rest of us along for the ride. For years, we’d relied on each other to set us right when we had some trouble making our own way.

  Truth was, I was drinking and partying too much to be competitive. I didn’t recognize this at the time, but looking back it’s absolutely clear. Looking back, I had no business thinking I could win anything. On a good day, I could still bring it, but the good days didn’t come around so much anymore, and there was less and less to bring. I talked to my father about my struggles on the tour, my worries back home, but his head was someplace else. He didn’t really get what was going on with Isaiah, he didn’t have a whole lot of tolerance for sickness or weakness or frailty of any kind, and money troubles, to him, were nothing. In his mind, surfing was all. Health, good nutrition, physical fitness … they were right up there, too. He’d made these things a priority, and he’d raised us kids to keep them a priority, and that was that.

  But that wasn’t really that, of course. Took me a while to realize my father’s hard-line, narrow views as a kind of failing; took my siblings a while, too. In fact, most of us struggled as we settled into our adult lives. Not all at once, and not in the same ways, but we had our rough patches. We weren’t trained to do anything but surf; we had no education, no viable prospects; we were like drowning rats, scrabbling onto any piece of dry land or opportunity, hoping to find so
me way to hang on and make a little bit of a living.

  For a while, this meant trying to make money in the surf world, or in some related business. And from time to time, one of us would make a go at … something. Jonathan had some success early on: he’d had his run on the tour; then he jumped on a good opportunity working for a sunglasses company and rode it hard for as long as he could. I had my day in the sun, too, making okay money and winning championships and shooting commercials for Nike, until my sun started to set. Adam, a couple years later, had some big-time success of his own, as the lead singer of the grunge rock group The Flys. They had a couple hit singles, like “Got You (Where I Want You)” and “I Know What You Want,” and for a while Josh toured with the group as well, but then that kind of unraveled, and it was time for another Paskowitz to shine.

  And so it went.

  It’s like we were taking turns, only I started to notice that if one of us was doing well and making good money he tended to stay away—I guess because a big part of our dysfunction as a family was an inability to keep our hands out of each other’s pockets, or to stay out of each other’s way. We’d get together on the beach at San O from time to time, or maybe during the summer at Surf Camp, and there was an unspoken thing among us that anyone who had money was meant to share it—or, at least, to pick up the tab. And so, in the beginning, we didn’t see a whole lot of Jonathan, who seemed to hide out behind the sunglasses he used to sell. After that, I kept my distance. And then Adam gave us a wide berth, too. I can still remember going to one of his shows and having to wait in line with all of his fans while he took a shower, just to see him backstage afterwards.