The Life

by Malcolm Knox

  Don’t you call me an uneducated man. It come late, it come with a curse, but by hell and damnation it did come.

  No tables or chairs, just throw pillows and throw rugs, Indian fabrics, incense stinkers, ratty seagrass mat on the floor.

  Colour TV.

  Clock radio.

  Shortwave radio.

  Stereophonic record turntable, Sennheiser headphones.

  Me posters.

  Me trophies.

  Bear trap outside the window.

  A portable motion-detector alarm aimed at the door.

  Don’t you call me an uneducated man.

  Can’t stop thinking about it.

  It won’t fit in the Sandman. Sorry Mo.

  Roof racks?

  Everyone’ll know. They’ll see DK’s panel van with a Thing on the roof. Sorry Mo.

  Trailer?

  Ditto.

  Walk it down to Rainbow Bay? It’s nice for learners there.

  Ha fricken ha.

  But:

  Can’t stop thinking about it.

  In the slop, down the secret spot, windiest mushiest dirtiest days, when nobody else will be anywhere, the only days I’m game to go:

  The Thing’s the only board that’ll ride.

  That’s why they invented Things.

  For fatsos and beginners.

  Fatso beginners.

  It’s the only thing that’ll go. Only thing that’ll bear my weight. Only thing that’ll give me a ride.

  The Thing.

  Must of cost Mo six pension cheques.

  Them Things cost a thousand bucks and this one looks new.

  Sorry, Mo.

  Mo organised for the Australian champ to get his passport. Took weeks, cos there wasn’t no birth certificate. Mo scored him a suitcase.

  Mo packed his suitcase.

  Mo got him to the airport.

  Then you’re on your own, son.

  He missed his plane. Phoned Mo, she come and picked him up.

  In the car:

  You had one job, Dennis. One job.

  Eh?

  To check the time of your flight.

  Next day, reissued ticket, Mo packed his suitcase.

  Mo got him to the airport.

  Too early this time:

  Got the day wrong.

  Phoned Mo, she come and picked him up. Didn’t say nothing.

  But:

  Next day, Mo got him to the airport. He was crying like a baby, full nervo in the parking lot. The stress of it and he didn’t want to be let go and she didn’t want to let him go.

  Waited with him till he went through immigration.

  Saw the jetliner take off.

  Didn’t want to let him go, and inside the plane:

  He didn’t want to let her stay behind.

  Lisa was already over there, waiting for you in California. Nineteen seventy-three. US Open, Huntington.

  Lisa trying to score a record contract. You didn’t want to think about what she had to do for that.

  You were gunna tear them apart.

  The hell of the flight. You didn’t know how to work your light. You didn’t know how to work your window. You didn’t know how to eat your food.

  You, not drinking, not passing out, not sleeping, not able to work your window.

  Not safe off the surface of the earth.

  Just add water.

  A wreck when you arrived in LAX. A wreck when they piled you in a hire car driven by a Californian surfer in boardies and a bearskin coat. A wreck as you looked out the window in the middle of Los Angeles looking at fields of—

  Oil wells pumpjacks pumping pumping heads up heads down demented woodpeckers, like this kid at school you remembered who could do nothing but sit in his chair and rock forward and back, forward and back, forward and back into his own lap. You were the only one in the class who wouldn’t bark him out.

  A wreck when they helped you out in the lobby of the Huntington Beach Travelodge.

  The lobby swarming with surfers. You could tell from their shoulders. Surfer shoulders.

  Surfers with their shoulders whooping it up, hitting the big time, America, California, time of their lives. Meeting old buddies in the lobby.

  You feeling sick.

  Man in a business suit standing next to you at the reception desk, saying:

  I’d like to check out.

  The hotel staffer: Sir, but I don’t believe you’ve checked in yet?

  That’s right, thank you, I’m leaving. Who are these people anyway?

  Sir—welcome to the 1973 US Open Championship of Surfing.

  You’d of checked out with him. You pushed your aviators up so many times you wore a red hole in the bridge of your nose. You crept to the lift, up three floors and bolt down the corridor to your room.

  Never been in a hotel room before.

  •

  Minibar. Room service. Television of your own. Sharing with FJ. His gear all stacked neat by his bed, in the shelves, hanging on the hangers.

  You feeling sick.

  You wondered where Lisa was. You been meant to meet her at LAX. You’d forgot. Now you remembered but it was too late.

  You’d forgot everything.

  Inside your room looking in the cupboards, in the bathroom, in the minibar:

  For her.

  There was this opening-night party. The Australian national surfing team was waiting for you in the lobby in green and gold Australian blazers looking like the Olympic Games march-past.

  Terry Fitzgerald, Ian Cairns, Mark Richards, Peter Townend, Glenn Tinkler, Col Smith, Simon Anderson.

  And Dennis Keith.

  You’d changed into a suit Lisa bought you before she left:

  Velour. Deep purple.

  Never a finer group of Australian surfers:

  TF, Ian Cairns, MR, PT, Kinky Tinky, Smithy, Simon.

  And Dennis Keith.

  Three future world champions.

  And Dennis Keith.

  They were rolling round the lobby laughing at you. These monkeys, these zoo animals in green-and-gold blazers were laughing at you.

  Where’s the team suit? TF said.

  You didn’t know about no team suit. You didn’t know about teams full stop. This was surfing not rugby.

  Yeah, Smithy drawled, making like drug-fucked, but nah!

  You had him up against the wall hand clawed round his throat before he’d drawn breath. The others pulling you off him. In your deep purple velour suit. In their national blazers. And gold slacks. And white Panama hats. All ready for the opening ceremony.

  •

  After the official function you raced to your room but couldn’t sleep, parties everywhere, walls banging, boys, birds. Still no Lisa. Putting you out of your misery a knock on the door:

  DK?

  You opened up.

  You sweet mate?

  Since when had Kinky Tinky started calling you DK? What was wrong with Dennis? What now, the bloodnut want you to call him GT?

  Still in your velour suit. Standing at your hotel room door. Parties everywhere, walls banging, boys, birds.

  Tink held out his hand in a bunch.

  Welcome to America, DK.

  You looked at his fist. He cracked the bunch. You looked at him. Pushed your aviators up.

  Guess we should just blow it now, Tink said and come in.

  You and he watched TV.

  First taste of Mexican, he said. Acapulco Gold. Not the worst thing you’ve ever done eh.

  Fully blasted, watching TV. Welcome to America, DK.

  You looked at Tink.

  So where’s the
party?

  The stats would be quoted back at you over the years like it was your wave-by-wave score. Even the BFO reels them off:

  Hotel guests for US Open Championship of Surfing: 154

  Hotel capacity: 120

  Value of towels stolen: $1000

  Value of other hotel items stolen: $5000

  Value of unaccounted minibar purchases written off: $10,000

  Value of unauthorised room service charges: $3000

  Number of six-ton Ford trucks driven into the lobby, demolishing six indoor plants and the guest services desk: 1

  Number of swimming pools emptied after guests found doing the business in water: 2

  Number of rooms gutted by fire: 3

  Number of times Huntington Beach Travelodge would host a surfing championship again: 0

  •

  These days, like when the BFO gets hold of them, these kinds of numbers get a laugh, like something heroic, the gold old days, the wild days. But in the gold old wild days it was no joke.

  Yous were a disgrace. Surfing was trying to get serious, get professional, and you and 153 others had turned the official hotel into a bomb site, a tip.

  California police in and out. Trying to get statements, they got sucked into the parties.

  Here pal, cop this for a statement. You handing a California policeman a big bunger. All or nothing.

  You were portrayed as the leader.

  You were never the leader.

  You were the king.

  Each morning you opened your hotel room door to a pile of joints, bags of dope and pills, condoms and board wax. Tink said people been coming all night to donate, help you get through the open. Apparently you been telling people you couldn’t surf without ‘medication’.

  They’re Americans, Tink said. They don’t get our sense of humour.

  You were on your knees scooping it all up.

  Who says I was joking?

  FJ, who hoped to beat you in a surfing event once in his life, had got himself transferred out of your room, so you were sharing with Tink now.

  The jammy redhead been in hotels before. Course he had. These blokes went to hotels and motels and even hotel-motels on holidays with their parents. Tink showed you how the stuff worked. The showers, the doors, the alarm clock, the television, the radio, the room service, the minibar.

  He showed you the way down to the pool.

  The problem was what the problem always was when there was a problem:

  No surf.

  You’d read about Huntington Beach, the famous HB, Surf City USA. You’d read about it and heard talk about it and for now that was all you were going to learn about it, cos when you were there there was nothing to see.

  Flat.

  Huntington had this big long pier with concrete and rotten wood pylons. South was a chunky right-hander which sometimes went left direct under the pier. Guys were known to ride heavy waves through the maze of pylons and out the other side. North was a channel to paddle out and another wave that was wonky and sometimes sizey both ways.

  Not a bad wave. Not that you’d of known. Sometimes at night you rush out on your balcony cos you thought you heard a wave breaking, but it was only cars dragging on the highway.

  But HB wasn’t about the wave. When it was breaking, the wave was as okay as about three hundred waves in Queensland.

  What HB was about was the scene. And in ’73, HB had more surf clothing and surfboard shops and hangers-on than you thought could exist in one shopping centre, more of The Life here than any place on earth.

  You went into none of it. You didn’t like shops.

  There wasn’t just surf shops. There was beer bars, tiki bars, a bikie joint called Club Tahiti that pumped out Black Sabbath and The Who, heaps of second-hand junk stores. Everything was for sale no matter how crap. There was duplex unit blocks and a whole lot of industrial-looking buildings that didn’t have signs or names. There was tatt parlours, auto-repair shops, two-storey motels, always two-storey in a kind of L-shape around a car park, coated in this sick yellow peanut-butter stucco like God had spewed on them and nobody could wash it off. There was weedy vacant lots and alleyways running off the Coast Highway into dark corners. Here and there a crippled palm tree as convincing as plastic palms on a birthday cake. This Surf City was a long way from the good old Goldie.

  The only normal ones was the Mexican fishermen who hung at the bottom of the pier. You could of talked to them, but you didn’t cos you didn’t ever talk to strangers. Mo said never do that. HB also had hippies and dropouts and acid heads who would paddle out when it was flat and dream they were scoring ten-second barrels. Didn’t matter about the size of the wave, man.

  They didn’t even know there was an international surfing scene.

  They didn’t even know there was anywhere.

  You didn’t like hippies even though your hair was long.

  You kept getting woke up by sirens, police sirens day and night, ambulance sirens, motorbikes motorbikes motorbikes howling up and down the highway strung between the Travelodge and the beach like a ring of barbed wire. Up at the north end where the waves were said to be all right sometimes, nobody never surfed: these were the hangs of the gangs from the inland empire, and nobody dared to go up there, they shoot you in the water for a laugh and not even the cops pull them up.

  HB had a murder a night. When guys dropped in on the locals at HB, they come in to shore not to find their tyres slashed, like they might on the Goldie, or the fins snapped out of their boards. When guys dropped in on HB locals they came in to knives. There was graffiti on the walls and heavy bikie dudes in dark clubs up against the grey highway.

  Some locals reckoned they’d bought themselves an extra five years of peace with their war tactics. Defence is attack. Attack is defence. Five years they didn’t get overrun yet.

  If HB wasn’t your local and you still went there for a surf, they said you had to park your car right up on the boardwalk so you could see when someone was swiping your radio.

  All too heavy for you.

  When there was no surf in HB the surfers got bored and went the bikies.

  When there was surf in HB the bikies got bored and went the hippies.

  The US Open was always at HB and it drew thirty thousand. If they didn’t like a result they flip cars and torch the judges’ tent and go on a spree and smash the windows of the shops and loot loot loot.

  That was HB, a hot stinking ugly concrete dune rancid with hate and boredom and no waves.

  Even the sea smelt bad outside your window, no medicine from King Neptune here: instead, tar and car smoke. Horizon lit up at night with oil rigs.

  So apart from one quick walk on your second night, darting through the smeary yellow light dribbling out the tatt shops and beer bar windows, terrified the bikies sitting in the garages might say something to you, you never left the Travelodge in two weeks of waiting for waves.

  Inside the walls of the Travelodge it was worse.

  Them American surfers, they got ideas in their heads. They always had to tell themself stories. They talked too much. Yapping, always yapping. And when you was there, yapping big yarns about DK.

  The shrine of dope, Quaaludes, mushies, angel dust, they turned it into a ritual, built it and left it outside your door every morning. They showed a Super 8 movie of you doing Big Kirra. They’d went down to Australia to shoot Nat, and ended up shooting you.

  You’d never known they were there.

  They built you out of stories what you did at the hotel: how many times you surfed the pool on a cut-down Mal, how many times you skateboarded the car park hanging on the back of someone’s van, how many times you banged some groupies in the jacuzzi, how many trips you took in one night, how many this, how many that, competing with each other to make DK into
the biggest craziest wackiest mother that ever come by and none of it was true, none of it was you.

  Here’s what they were like:

  You sneaked wasabi into their food, and when they ate it and their heads blew off they were stoked, cos DK had done it.

  You slammed your door in their faces, and they were stoked, cos DK had done it.

  This night when half the world tour was in your room and there was a bang at the door.

  Police! Police, open up!

  The story went that one top surfer flushed out an ounce of coke down your toilet. The story went that one top surfer who wouldn’t think of dumping his ounce climbed out along a six-inch ledge and nearly killed himself getting to the next balcony. The story went that one top surfing official tried to flush himself down the toilet.

  When the door opened, it wasn’t police. It was some junior pulling a prank. His penalty was he had to carry everyone’s boards to and from the beach when the conness started, and pull out in favour of an alternate who was in the room, and pay a couple of individuals a sum of money.

  You didn’t remember none of that. You remembered being stoned in a corner of all the parties with a lemonade you were pretending was a vodka. That’s all you remember being: a pylon.

  Still no surf.

  Still no Lisa.

  You wrote Mo postcards.

  •

  It possible to fall for someone cos of the way her head sits on her neck? One of the things about Lisa

  I mean

  you couldn’t get it out of your brain the way her head was poised on her neck, centre of her balance, when she walked. Everything else swayed side to side, swinging hair, swaggering hips, rolling arms, but her head was just so fricken still.

  Couldn’t get over that.

  You didn’t do nothing with them groupies.

  You go off with them for an hour and listen to them gabbing and then when they took a breath and said, You wanna bang now? you go, Love, I’ll give you this bag of whiz if you go back to your friends and tell them I was the best root in your life eh.

  Dunno why you did that. Spreading rumours.

  But like they say, there was one thing worse than people talking about DK all the time.

  People not.

  So that was your action with the birds. Spend an hour listening to them, pay them off to spread stories. Crazy sometimes.