Scratching the Horizon

by Izzy Paskowitz

  At some point, I came up with the name Surfers Healing, in part because it emphasized the healing aspect of what we were trying to do, but here’s what I didn’t tell people at the time: the “Healing” part of the name had as much to do with me as it did with these kids.

  At some other point, we decided to do some fund-raising. In addition to being a world-class surfer, Nick Hernandez was also a great musician; he played in a band called Common Sense that was pretty popular in the San Clemente area, so he got his guys to do a benefit for us at The Coach House in town, ended up raising over ten thousand dollars. It was more money than we’d imagined—and a great, great start. We’d been pinching boards and other equipment from Surf Camp, but this allowed us to purchase some vests and other gear. It allowed us to get all our paperwork in order and set us up with insurance and all that good stuff.

  It even allowed us to think about taking our show on the road and bringing a Surfers Healing event to Hawaii, which we were able to do in 2000. We decided to hold it on Waikiki Beach, right in front of the Duke Kahanamoku statue, which had become a real surfing landmark. Folks would travel from halfway across the globe just to drape a lei over Duke’s neck, so it seemed like a fine and fitting spot. And it turned out to be such a validating moment for us, for me. Why? Because I’d put the word out to everyone I knew in the surfing world, looking for volunteers. We didn’t have the budget to fly in our San O volunteers to help run the event, so I tried to recruit all my old Hawaiian friends, guys I used to compete against. Guys my father used to surf with as a young man. I was really diligent about it, working the phones, sending e-mails. I put it out there that this was something I was doing for my son, and for other families with kids like Isaiah, and that I needed their help. My goal was to get about ten guys, because we were told there might be as many as fifty kids turning out for our event. Ended up bringing all these amazing, dedicated guys to the beach that day, from all over the island—seventy-five volunteers in all! Seventy-five! It was just incredible, and a lot of these guys hadn’t seen each other in years and years. Some of them, their fathers used to surf together, and now they were able to reunite over this good, good cause and reconnect.

  Danielle came out with all three kids, and it was a hugely rewarding, affirming experience for all of us. Told us we were moving in the right direction. There were hundreds and hundreds of people out on the beach. There were reporters, sponsors, extended families. We even had my buddy Zane Aikau and some of his cousins and uncles, renowned Hawaiian watermen, taking our special kids out on these kick-ass ocean canoe rides, so there was a real sense of island lore and legend that attached to what we were doing.

  (Zane’s late uncle, Eddie Aikau, is probably the most famous waterman to ever surf Hawaii’s big, big waves, and as a lifeguard he was credited with making some of the most epic saves in Hawaii’s surfing history, so having Zane and his family join our effort was a huge validation for us.)

  The thing about Oahu is it’s very territorial. It’s a supersmall island, but folks are so dug-in to their routines and customs a lot of these guys could live and surf within twenty miles of each other and still never see each other. For years, they’d never see each other. That’s why it was so amazing to see guys like Eddie Rothman, from the north shore, turning up on the south shore for our event. And Rusty Keaulana and his west side crowd … they were out in force, too, so it was a great big deal.

  What we were doing really seemed to mean something to these good people. We seemed to mean something to these good people.

  Really, it was magic—and the most amazing piece was we didn’t have to tell a single one of these great Hawaiian watermen how to communicate with an autistic child. I didn’t need to show them what to do, or give them the benefit of my experience. It was instinctive. And it all flowed from Oahu to now: as I write this, we’re looking ahead to our fourteenth Surfers Healing season, surfing with over twenty-five hundred autistic kids, spread over seventeen camps throughout the summer, in Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, South Carolina, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, up and down the California coast—and this year, for the first time, in Canada.

  Kind of amazing to think it all connects to that fateful day on Blobber Beach with Isaiah. To that ever-present Sarah McLachlan song “Adia.” To those first few wild rides with kids like Dov and Sonic Blue. To the simple notion that a child with autism should be encouraged to reach for all that life has to offer—and that a washed-up pro surfer who took way too long to connect to his own autistic child is just the guy to help with the reaching.

  15

  The Family Biz

  I suppose I have Isaiah to thank for pushing me towards the next phase of my career. And it’s not just because I finally realized I needed to step away from the tour and find a way to make a real living and a real difference at home, although that was definitely a part of it. More than that, it was through Isaiah and some of the special friendships he developed that I was introduced to new people, new ideas, new ways of building on whatever was left of my surfing career.

  Specifically, it was through Isaiah’s best bud, Jacob Antoci, that we met our good friends Jeff and Natalie Antoci. (Or, I should say, the late, great Jeff Antoci, because our pal is no longer with us.)

  You have to realize, to even be able to use a phrase like “best bud” in regard to Isaiah was itself a major blessing, because it’s not like he had any friends. He didn’t really connect with people. Even people in my own family. It still pisses me off to think how some of my brothers would react, the few times we’d visit; they’d trail Isaiah with a bottle of Windex, wiping down everything my kid touched; it’s like they thought they could somehow catch his autism.

  This disconnect was especially true when it came to other kids, even other kids who were cut the same way. But for some reason Isaiah formed a real bond with Jakey. Their teacher called us in one day to talk about it, to suggest the boys get together outside of school. Apparently, Jakey would have the same kinds of meltdowns in school and then de-escalate and lapse into a kind of comatose zone, same as Isaiah. The teacher would look up, and Jakey would be laying on Isaiah’s lap, decompressing, and Isaiah would be stroking his hair or petting him, and I heard that and thought, Whoa. It was pretty heavy.

  Danielle got together with Jakey’s mom, Natalie, first, and after a couple visits Jeff and I joined in. We all got along great. Jeff was a good, good guy, and soon as we got to talking the floodgates kind of opened for each of us. We’d been down the same road, carrying the same heartache, so we had a lot to talk about. That’s how it’s been over the years, when I meet families through Surfers Healing. You learn someone has an autistic child, you know exactly how they live their lives. You know their days. You know the kind of shit they have to deal with, the stares from strangers, the hassles, the meltdowns, the constant attention they need to devote to their kid. We have a different look about us, I think, a different way of seeing the world—because our world is nothing like everybody else’s world.

  Isaiah and Jakey, they were simpatico. They’d follow each other around. Even when they were apart, they seemed to be on each other’s minds, to where Isaiah would sometimes say Jakey’s name, from out of nowhere. Or he’d hear one of us mention the Antocis and he’d brighten. So it was a great, full-on family friendship, and it really blossomed. Jeff and I got along so well we started taking the boys on trips. Eli came with us on one trip, Elah came on one trip, and Jakey’s brother, Joey, came, too. We always had a blast. We’d mix it up, depending on what was going on at home, on who was around. We’d hop into Jeff’s van and head to Palm Springs, or wherever, mostly just to give Danielle and Natalie a break.

  After a while, Jeff and I got to talking. He had a great business mind. He worked in commercial real estate, and he’d managed to build this network of connections, all over the country. He knew how to work a situation to advantage—not in a shark-like, cutthroat way, but in a chill and decent way. People really responded
to him. Whatever new business idea or venture we talked about, he knew someone connected to it, at some high level or other, so he became an important mentor to me. And he had my back. I had no background for this type of thing, so I was looking for someone I could trust who would talk me through these new twists and turns, maybe point me in the right direction—and Jeff emerged as that someone, before long.

  In the water, I knew what I was doing; out of the water, I had no fucking clue.

  * * *

  Jeff was an incredible friend to the entire Paskowitz family, helping us navigate a landgrab that took place over control of the Paskowitz Surf Camp. Can’t think how else to explain the mess my brothers and I nearly made of what was essentially our only asset as a family; best way to tell it is to just tell it.

  What started back in the early 1970s as an informal, thrown-together way to bring in some money and spread the joy of surfing had become an important part of our Paskowitz legacy. My father knew a good thing when he stumbled across it, but he also knew the power and poetry of the Hawaiian spirit. He knew what it meant for an islander to extend a warm welcome to any haole. It was considered an honor, even an obligation, to teach people to surf—like you were sharing a profound gift, so that was a big, big part of what he was up to here. He even came up with a line to express this thought, which we still use in our camp advertising—“Share the aloha!”

  The money was good, too. Not great, but good enough for him to keep at it, year after year.

  As we got older, Doc put us to work. We’d hang with the campers who matched up with us in age, and eventually we learned how to be instructors, and as we left “home” and disappeared into our own, separate lives we kept coming back to San O on our own each summer to help out at camp. It was what we knew, who we were. And it was a way for us to keep tabs on each other, to reconnect as a family. Even when I was on the professional circuit and surfing out of my mind, I enjoyed being a part of it. I’d pass up certain tournaments, if it meant I’d miss a whole summer of camp … that’s how much the tradition had come to mean to me. And my brothers and sister all made their own sacrifices to be there, too, whenever they could.

  At some point, my father couldn’t keep running it the way he always had. He and my mom wanted to move to Hawaii, where the water was warm and he could surf every day and stop moving around, from beach to beach. He was getting too old for this shit, he said. But he wanted the camp to continue, and to be a kind of anchor for our family, so he handed the reins over to Abraham. Don’t know how or why Abraham got the nod, but he was happy for the gig—and he did a good job with it, for a while. Basically, he ran it the way my father had always run it. He took out ads in all the surf magazines. He reached out to past campers. And that was that.

  After a while Moses took a crack at it, and then David ran the show for a couple years, but towards the end of the millennium his focus seemed to be elsewhere. David had all these crazy ideas about Y2K and the end of the world as we knew it, and he seemed to check out on running the camp, so my father looked to me. I’d finally ended my surfing career, and I was kind of floundering, struggling to find something to do, so my father came to me one day and said, “Israel, I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time. This is something you’ve earned. If you want it, it’s yours.”

  I was touched that he put it just this way, but at the same time I wasn’t surprised. He was very particular about surfing, my old man. He placed great weight on what I’d been able to accomplish on the tour. He respected the kind of surfer I’d become, that I’d faced down the big waves he could never handle as a young man, that I’d almost drowned off Réunion Island, that I’d tamed all these monster waves and out-dueled all these surfing giants and helped to put a shine on the Paskowitz name throughout the sport. It’s like it meant more to him than anything my other siblings had done—and I don’t mean to suggest that I agreed with him on this, or that it was any kind of fair assessment, but this was how he’d always looked out at the world.

  With him, surfing was all.

  I grabbed at the opportunity like it was a lifeline, but I had no idea what I was doing. I had zero business skills. I’d never heard of a business plan—wouldn’t have recognized one if you rolled it up and hit me over the head with it. But I told myself I was the right guy for the job because I’d earned my chops as a surfer, so where David and Moses and Abraham hadn’t been able to make a go of it, I’d have a shot.

  It’s like I was starting from scratch, though. David had done such a loose job of it, he didn’t even have a database. There were no files, no spreadsheets, just some handwritten notes on four or five pages of a legal pad, with the names and addresses of past campers. That was it.

  (Don’t know that a spreadsheet would have been all that much help to me, back then, because I was completely computer illiterate. I could turn one on, but that was about the extent of my technical skills.)

  This was where Jeff Antoci was incredibly helpful—at least, this was his first piece of incredible help. He had a lot of strong ideas. He told me to focus on what I had, not on what I was missing, and what I had was a lot of experience chasing sponsors. I knew that world, knew how to play that game, so I went at it hard. I started making a bunch of calls. I reached out to all these different surfboard makers and accessory companies, trying to create something out of nothing. Somehow, I managed to get the Roxy/Quiksilver folks interested in starting an all-girls camp with us; we’d had a ton of girls surf with us over the years, but we’d never run a dedicated all-girls session, and here we got Roxy to kick in some money and some product and support from their pros. It was a huge success, too. They cut a check to us for forty-five hundred dollars and on top of that they donated a neat gift bag for each camper, filled with about a hundred bucks’ worth of stuff—T-shirts, sunglasses, wax … whatever. They even helped convert one of our buses and dress it out with the Roxy logo. It was totally bad-ass, and they got a lot of nice coverage out of the deal, but then when I went to pitch them on the men’s side the following summer it was slow going. I was dealing with a bunch of different suits, but they worked in the same damn company; they saw what we were doing with Roxy and had a good idea what we were capable of doing for the Quiksilver line, at relatively little cost, but I couldn’t get them to buy in. And it’s not like I was asking for a ton of money.

  My pitch was that we were bringing authenticity to their brand. We had some authentic surfers in the water with our campers, and we were creating dozens of new surfers each week, so I thought if a company like Quiksilver could start making an impression on these campers at the outset they’d be customers forever. That’s how it was with me, back when I started out. Whatever boards I surfed first, that’s what I reach for now. Whatever gear I wore as a kid, that’s what I wear now. For example, I’m big into Billabong; it’s such a great product, and they’ve made such a mark, it’s the only wet suit I’ll use. There might be other great wet suits out there, but Billabong has made me a customer for life, and that’s what I was selling here, with Quiksilver—a way to build customers for life.

  But they weren’t buying. Even for the low, low price of fifteen thousand dollars, which would have bought them a full season of signage and sponsorship and prominent mention in all of our camp advertising, they weren’t buying.

  So Jeff and I tried to think of other companies we could approach with the same pitch. At around this same time, I was talking with Kevin O’Malley, publisher of Men’s Journal, who’d just done a tremendous story on us, and through him I met a bunch of influential designers and fashion folks, who were just starting to operate on the fringes of the surf apparel industry. They were dipping their toes in our waters, guess you could say, so Jeff and I started to realize it made all kinds of sense to target some of these mainstream companies, where promotional budgets were beyond ridiculous. To a company like Quiksilver, for example, a fifteen-thousand-dollar sponsorship deal was a big item; to a company like Tommy Hilfiger, it was a speck, so I made a quick
side trip with Danielle to the MAGIC men’s apparel show in Las Vegas, to chase down some high-end sponsors.

  Now, it’s no accident that Jeff and I were thinking in Tommy Hilfiger terms, because Kevin O’Malley had introduced us to one of their Macy’s buyers, so we had an in. Ended up meeting with Andy Hilfiger, who was in charge of the jeans line, and we started talking about this new line of board shorts the company was introducing that year. Andy was all excited to show them to us, and completely bummed that we didn’t seem to share his excitement. I had to be honest. The shorts were total bullshit to a real surfer, completely lame, and I said as much to Andy. The colors, the styling, the functionality were all wrong. Told him how the whale net they’d sewn into the crotch—the mesh nut sack you see in department store swim trunks—had no place in a true board short. Told him how real surfers like to ride commando, but these guys didn’t know that. They knew fashion. They knew design. And here they were coming out with this nothing line that surfers and wannabe surfers just wouldn’t wear, so I figured I’d give it to him straight, figured I had nothing to lose. And to Andy’s great credit, he listened to me on this. He recognized that if he wanted to break from the mainstream and find a way to get hard-core surfers to wear his shorts and whatever else he was putting out, he’d need a little bit of cred; he’d have to throw in with someone who could lend some genuineness to the brand.

  Out of all this we signed a fifteen-thousand-dollar one-year deal with Tommy Hilfiger, which was all the money in the world to us—enough to help us purchase some new equipment and enhance the camp in a bunch of ways. Wasn’t game-changing money, but it certainly got our year off to a nice start. Don’t know how we hit on that figure, because I imagine these guys wouldn’t have blinked if I’d asked for twenty or thirty thousand dollars, but I wanted to build a long-term relationship with the company; I didn’t want to scare them off, so I got them to make us a bunch of shorts without the whale net in the crotch, which we gave to our campers and instructors, and they cut us a check, and we were in business.