The Life

by Malcolm Knox

  For you but, green was more like philosophical. You wanted to use it for your surfing. You didn’t giggle. It clarified things for you. It was like it took a snapshot of everything around you, made the world stand still so you could stroll about in it like a waxworks museum. Weed helped you see the patterns underneath. Weed helped you focus on one thing at a time. Made you a real brainiac. You did your school leaving exams stoned. You outdone everyone’s expectations.

  Rod and them others, they passed out when they had too much.

  When you had too much, you felt ready to focus.

  Nineteen sixty-nine. Summer of no love.

  Rod’s despair: when you smoked weed, you knew you could surf better. That’s what he saw, that first night he give it to you.

  •

  If there wasn’t waves for a few days you panicked. Nothing to do with the dope. How it was ever since the first Big Flat. You couldn’t function till you got a few waves. It was like your medicine. When the surf was flat or blown-out, you could go into a full-on panic which would turn into a full-on rage at Rod or one of his crew. They were scared witless of you.

  You thought the ocean had stopped moving forever.

  You were grieving.

  But yeah, the waves come again and you’re sweet. Your morning routine was set. Up in darkness, down in the rat cellar selecting boards. Wash your hands and fill a mixing bowl with muesli and milk. Scarf handfuls of dried apricots and sunflower seeds and slivered almonds. You were a health freak. Ahead of your time. While all them other boys was wasting their bodies on beer, chips and hamburgers, your body was a machine tuned for one thing.

  You could hear the waves break on Snapper and the buzzing ball in your stomach rev up another gear.

  Make that stomach caramel: roll yourself one from Rod’s gear, calm you down and set you up and focus you.

  A board under each arm, down the hill. Light breaking. You scope the waves. Pick one board and put the other under the clubhouse at Rainbow. It stunk of wee in that clubhouse. They never cleaned the troughs. You hated it and never went in that toilet. Surfers are pigs, unclean animals, you wished you didn’t have to know them. Salt water rot their brains.

  Walk round the rocks and jump off and be first out. This was central: they know that no matter how early they got up, the best they could hope for was second to DK.

  Set the tone.

  You wait for the small grower, the one didn’t look big but drew all the water, that’s the first one you paddle into.

  The one knocked the froth off.

  The one settled you.

  You wouldn’t do much on it: no cutbacks, no reos, no pulling into barrels, just trim along on a high line like an old-fashioned logger rider, soul surfing, cruising your first wave.

  Get your feet in the wax.

  And that with the pre-dawn joint and the muesli get you all set up.

  Others be out with you now, chirping their good mornings and gdays.

  And you, you’d be ready for war.

  Shit, total shit next day too and you beauty I think as I get out of bed hearing the rain hammer the diagonal security grilles and soon I have poor Mo behind the vinyl steering wheel and down it is to the secret spot and . . .

  . . . yeah . . .

  My pride well swallowed, digested, sit in my intestines, broken down by me gastric juices . . .

  Mo in the car with her Tracks on the bluff over the secret spot.

  Getting a taste for it I paddle into the slush and this is so bad you laugh inside, such shit, mush, total rubbish and I have my sense of humour back. First chuckle in about thirty-five years, first laugh along with myself since Hawaii.

  Progress.

  Laughing thinking, So this is why nobody but kooks go out in crap onshore mush crap . . . cos it’s crap! That I find funny. I never surfed rubbish like this my entire life. These waves are like a teenager’s bedroom, only messier. And no power, no lift. On one wave I’m going and get up on one knee, but the old gun is wobbling away and losing power in the slush and it slows down and I slow down and over we go, face plant.

  The water’s brown and seaweedy and rippy and sandy and has the sick freshwater smell of run-off and I love it I love it I love it.

  How’d I ever forget it?

  After thirty minutes I’ve had enough. Still not a wave. Still King Kook. But crazy-happy. Dunno what’s got into me.

  I belly one in and the stick gets spat out on the sandbank. I froth about but the leash acts like a slingshot and fires the gun back at me and I’m not ready as I look up and . . .

  . . . yeah no . . .

  It comes back how pain has a colour. Getting held down under two waves at Pipeline or Big Kirra, when you think you’re about to drown, that colour’s bluey grey.

  When you go down on razor-sharp reef and dragged on your back and knees, that colour’s red.

  When you snap your hamstring or Achilles, that’s green.

  When you went in a hollow Burleigh cement mixer and the compression of the wave caught your foot and broke every bone in it, bits and pieces of foot-bone sticking up through the skin—that’s purple.

  When you get a fin chop or a board in your face, that’s yellow.

  The colours of the pain you see behind your shut eyes.

  I’m seeing yellow. Hands at my face. Knowing already it’s the eye.

  Stumble on the sand. Stick dragging on the leash like a dog doesn’t want to finish his walk.

  Clutching me face. Yellow.

  Mo’s with me and got a towel to my eye and we’re in the driving rain on the beach in the secret spot and she’s trying to get a look at me and she’s like the risen moon her big white face and halo of white hair, all I can see out me one good eye.

  In the Sandman panel van sprayed purple and orange, back down the track, back onto the highway safe into Queensland, Mo pulling over again to have another look.

  ‘Didn’t get yer eye anyway,’ her voice goes. ‘Just above it.’

  Mo used to be a nurse. Or worked in hospitals anyway.

  My yellow dims down to normal colours, blacks and deep reds.

  ‘Am I all right?’

  ‘Yer all right love.’

  We drive on.

  I pass out.

  On me bed in clean boardies and sleeping T-shirt. Bandage over the cut above me left eye. Sore and swollen but I didn’t need to go to hospital, didn’t need stitches.

  Voices. Ladies, the kitchen.

  I go to the door. Mo and the BFO at the melamine table. Biscuits and tea.

  I back back in my room and pull the door shut.

  Please Mo don’t say a word.

  The voices, on and on.

  Please Mo not a word.

  I drink my tea. Hands shaking.

  Lie back down.

  Please Mo . . .

  Mo used to work in hospitals.

  I blacked out.

  Mo changed me clothes on me when I was blacked out.

  She says a word about this to the BFO, DK will not be answerable for his actions.

  Competition had a bad name till you. Nat give up and went native at Angourie. Some went off to India like Beatles with their gurus. Keith Paull had found his inner guru in a gold top mushroom from the Pigabeen Valley and arrived at a preso driving his van into the pub then running out in nothing but ugg boots and rolling round in the shore break and telling a TV reporter he was an oyster. Deadset. Ted Spencer was a Hare Krishna. Midget Farrelly was in ‘self-imposed exile’, whatever that was. Rolf Aurness won the world title at Bells, said, Far out, and walked into the sunset.

  Higher plane where they didn’t need to win no more. All them hippie-dippies on their trip about It’s not about winning, man and You only talk about who won when you’re too
tired to surf . . . and No surfer, no matter how much he rips, can ever look as good as an unridden wave . . .

  And yeah right this was the end of the sixties and nobody wanted to win no more. Winning was old hat. Uncool. Capitalist. Selling out to the man.

  And but so you thought:

  Yeah!

  That summer you won the state seniors against the men, as well as Tink, FJ, all the kids. Rod made quarters.

  Not a wave went by when you weren’t thinking about her.

  March 30, 1969. You DK was interviewed in a rust-coloured Anthony Squires blazer and gold-thread Miller shirt and moccasins on the preso stage where they give you the trophy which was another gold-painted plastic man on a surfboard on a wave. You looked at yourself and got paranoid about what you were wearing. Everyone be laughing at you. You screwed up again. In a full-flow sweat you coined your signature speech. Interviewer said,

  So DK, what was your inspiration out there today? You were totally stoked!

  You said:

  Well yeah . . . but no!

  End of interview.

  You were thinking of her.

  Well yeah . . . but no.

  A line from one of them little songs she cooed in your ear on Greenmount Hill in the agave trees under the fingernail moon.

  They didn’t need to know that.

  You were one of the first to use the leash, the leggie. The longboard boys called them ‘kook cords’. Definitely uncool to have a safety line joining you to your board. Nobody used one, nobody good anyway. Nobody’d even heard of them. Surfers kept hold of their boards.

  But you saw something else.

  Eyes only for the barrel.

  You were the barrel rider.

  And hardly any them other guys tried to get inside the tube, not in a comp anyway, cos wiping out meant they waste all their energy swimming in to pick up their board. So they wouldn’t try for barrels. For them it was all about an elegant trim and hopping off with their stick in their hands.

  For you it was all about the green cathedral.

  You got Mo to make you this cord out of an occy strap and some cloth to tie it round your ankle. You drilled a hole in the base of the fin and tied the strap through it.

  It wasn’t cool, it wasn’t what surfers done, but with your leash on you could take the risk and if you got wiped out your board was right there with you, no swimming necessary.

  You used it and you won and you were The Great DK, and within a couple of years there was leg ropes getting sold round the world and all the others were on the leash too trying to get in that green room with you. Before long your leash was making a lot of breaks available to kooks, now they could keep their boards no matter how often they got wiped out and so they come out to Kirra, Lennox, even Snapper behind the lava rock, and you prowling the beach with your fishing knife cutting kooks’ leashes so they wouldn’t come out into your breaks, but it was too late, you weren’t careful enough of what you wished for, you been too damn smart and started yourself a trend, the whole world following you.

  Always following you.

  •

  In ’69 you DK was on fire. Winning the state title qualified you for your first national opens, and your first trip to Bells Beach, Victoria.

  You knew about Bells. Posters on your walls. The world knew about Bells. You weren’t that much of a hick. You knew the whole wide world: Bells, Jeffreys Bay, Margaret River, Pipeline, Haleiwa, Sunset, Huntington. You were gunna surf all them places and you were gunna kill every other surfer out there. Kill kill kill.

  You were going to surf all the posters on your bedroom wall.

  But you had to do Bells first.

  First things first.

  Easter ’69. Rod drove you down in Gary Trounson’s panel van. Yous had bugger-all coin but someone had got hold of a bag of red-headed buds so yous were set. The windscreen was smashed in but Rod fixed it by ripping out the passenger side window and clamping it in front of the steering wheel. So you, in the passenger seat, froze your eyes out with no windscreen and no side window.

  Cold didn’t bother you. Wind blowing out your lighter or your mull did. You hunched under the glovebox, your hand over the light and the billy.

  Basil sat in back. You had your favourite cassette, Santana by Santana, and played it all the way except when Rod got the squirts and put on Disraeli Gears. For all them days on the road that was all yous listened to, end on end, them two albums. Yous choofed all the way and camped on the side of the road. Two days later yous were at Bells, national titles, and the sight of it at the end of that long road the Southern Ocean, the freeze-dried toenail of the mainland, spun you out so bad that Rod and Basil lost you in the crowd and only found you when they smelt the cloud coming out the deserted dunes east of the beach.

  What’s up bro? Rod went.

  You looked at Rod and hated him. Yous both wandered in the same Disneyland and Rod lapped it all up. Hotshots from your bedroom walls: Peter Drouyn, Wayne Lynch, Terry Fitzgerald. Up-and-coming shortboard superstars: Peterson, FJ, Tink, Rabbit, Mark Warren. Rod walked round his mouth trapping flies.

  And the big news: Nat Young making a comeback in the conness. Roddy was wetting himself. Stoked. You was wetting yourself. Definitely un-stoked.

  He found you crouched over an emergency billy in the dunes. Settling.

  Yeah.

  For four years you been asking Rod if you looked like Nat Young on a wave. Rod, did I look like Nat on that one? And Rod said, every single time, Yeah nah in yer dreams Den.

  Every time the same.

  He settled down in the sand and you packed him a cone. Yous called them C-1s. As in C-Ones.

  Know what? Rod said, his voice a croak as he held the smoke. Ya don’t look like Nat when ya surf.

  You wanted to go to the panel van and hit the road home. That was all you wanted since that sick moment when you drove in and seen all the flags and the banners and the people and Nat Nat Nat . . .

  Nah, Rod said. Yer better.

  The buzzing ball went caramel. Inside, you felt nothing. But ready to surf again.

  Yer the best here, Rod said. Only bad luck or cheatin judges can stop ya.

  You thought Rod was crazy. It helped.

  The pair yous got up and walked over to the big hullabaloo and found the BBQ and hoed into the sausage sizzle. Basil got in there and nicked a sossie or ten. Everything sweet.

  You went and had a free surf, and Rod made money by parking the van across two spaces and selling them when the car park was filling up. Someone come up to him and pull open the van door and go:

  Hey man, can you repark so I can fit my wheels into the space?

  And Rod:

  Sure man. Two bucks and it’s yours.

  Did it every day.

  Did it every year he went to Bells. Made a load of coin.

  He always said they had to improve their parking situation there. Reckoned they should put up a three-storey garage with timed meters.

  Yeah but . . .

  Easter ’69 . . .

  Next morning you got up and had your first doob and your bowl of muesli and washed your hands and put on your wetsuit and . . .

  Rod where’s me wetty?

  Rod crawled out of Gary’s shaggin wagon.

  You put it in, he said. Rubbing his eyes.

  Nah you did eh!

  Brothers, brotherly love, brothers at war.

  You had no wetty. Bells, sixteen degrees in the air, fifteen in the water, everyone in steamers, and you DK was going in the first round of the conness in boardies and a T-shirt.

  Nobody knew who you was, you was just this mad Queensland cunt in shorts. You were tall, your hands was buckets and your feet was flippers, but you were also young. Your first pro conness.

&nbs
p; No one-on-one heats them days. Just you in a bunch.

  Five blokes in the line-up.

  Except the five had Mark Warren, Peter Drouyn, Wayne Lynch and Nat.

  Nat’s Nat, that’s that.

  You didn’t watch them on their waves. Bells was working well, offshore and five foot. Nat took off, Peter took off, Warren took off.

  You paddled and hassled and tried to take charge of the long right-hander like it was Snapper.

  You got one and pulled your moves:

  Hack, cuttie, roundhouse, hack, cuttie, roundhouse . . .

  Motion in poetry.

  Bells was easier than your home waves, fatter on the take-off, big fat long rollers, offshore spitting spray in your face.

  You cut them to pieces. You smashed them. You killed them.

  You come out the water octopus-blue. Coldest in your life. You saw Rod up in the stand and give him a thumbs-up. He give you one back.

  You hadn’t clocked any of the others in the heat but you knew like you’d always know deep down when you was the best out there . . .

  Killed them. Smashed them. Cut them to pieces.

  When you come in on your last wave, you done a massive bottom turn with your front to the wave, back to the shore, and your shorts split open down the back seam. People thought you were mooning the judges but you weren’t, it was just your boardies split, accidents happen eh.

  Didn’t matter. Crowd went berserk.

  •

  And you—

  You DK was judged fifth of five.

  Out in round one.

  You and Rod standing side by side as they read out the results:

  Young, Lynch, Drouyn, Warren, Keith.

  Young, Lynch and Drouyn to progress to the next round.

  Warren and Keith, see yers next year.

  Out in round one.

  Rod wanted to blue with someone. He charged into the judges’ tent, raging.

  You already walking off to the dunes.

  Stick under your arm.

  Blue.

  You were on the back tray of the panel van. Somewhere over the dune crowds were cheering round two.