The Life

by Malcolm Knox

  But still no waves.

  No Lisa.

  The Australian team got in some practice in their green and gold boardies. They went down the coast to Trestles and jagged some waves. You didn’t go. You couldn’t leave your hotel room without being mobbed. Them Americans.

  You decided you didn’t like Americans.

  The Australian team come back to Huntington. There were boredom riots outside the Travelodge and Bolivian marching bands inside. Not a wave in sight.

  You wrote postcards to Mo but never got them out your door.

  You had postcards piled up beneath the ashtrays, the roaches, the mirrors, the wallpaper art, the dead dreams in your hotel room.

  You never been in a hotel before.

  That was all you wanted to tell her.

  Then Lisa showed. Big smiles: Hollywood style. She cut a deal. CBS, EMI, A&E, R&B, R&D, OMG, something like that, you didn’t get all the letters involved. She leapt on your neck and sucked the tongue out of you and locked you in your room for three more days. Your shrine piled up outside the door. Lisa went and raided it. She hadn’t done no gear in her month in LA, she was hanging out for a party.

  You didn’t tell her you’d kept yourself nice for her.

  She heard about everything you were meant to have done.

  She didn’t care.

  You wanted to tell her they weren’t true, the stories. But they were good for your image.

  Lisa cared about your image.

  So you let the stories ride.

  She didn’t care.

  She brought her guitar and played for you in the middle of the night.

  Her songs were bad now.

  American songs. New ones.

  She’d picked something up.

  In Hollywood.

  She had this shine in her eyes. She was gunna make it big. She wasn’t her anymore. She was Lisa Exmire. And you were DK.

  She had a vision.

  The way she showed her dimple, it didn’t come out by itself no more.

  She made it come out when she wanted it. Her dimple was her performing seal.

  She was going American on you.

  You didn’t like America. Too full-on that joint.

  The day Lisa turned up there was waves. But you were jack of this place. You hadn’t surfed since you been there and felt like rubbish the morning of the first heats.

  You crossed the Coast Highway and nearly got cleaned up by a crew of bikies and a Mack truck.

  You walked down the broken concrete steps to the sand and nearly tripped over with your board.

  The Australian team screwed up. Tink, Simon Anderson, Terry Fitzgerald, Mark Richards—what a team. They been in the Travelodge too long. They screwed up.

  All except FJ, who moved to another hotel. To get away from you.

  Blond FJ, the golden boy, the corporate man, the clean liver, the kid with the home swimming pool, the one who knew to keep it together, the future world champion. FJ kept it together. He surfed like DK.

  DK surfed like, like you don’t know what you surfed like. You sat out in the line-up and looked at the pier and wondered what it was all about. You watched the thirty thousand on the shore and got scared. You tried to swallow but you’d forgot how your swallowing-muscle worked. You panicked. Lumpy four-footers rolled in and you hadn’t wanted a wave so badly since you were born, but you couldn’t get down on your chest and paddle. You just sat there and let them go through and let the Americans take them, trim them, waste them. Meanwhile you DK was sitting there out the back trying to remember how to get his throat to swallow.

  What a waste.

  Your US championship.

  Screwed.

  You had nothing in your belly, no buzzing, no calm, just nothing. Like you’d died. You weren’t tired. You were light-headed. Like you’d floated away from this.

  The hooter sounded for the end of the heat.

  You saw the dot painting of thirty thousand faces, quiet.

  You hadn’t paddled for one wave. Your competitors had caught six or seven each, wasted them all.

  DK sat there, they wrote, like Mahatma Gandhi in non-violent protest.

  Nobody knew what you was up to.

  Then, just as the hooter went, a bomb set come through. You been sitting further out than anyone and now you were on the spot.

  You saw the set and you swallowed.

  Wait for number three. Lucky number. You picked off the third of the set. You took off late and dropped in the pit. You hooked the board right and hung on the rail with your left hand. You went into a crouch on a high line.

  It closed down around you: deep dark green gut.

  Deep dark green gut.

  Where they can’t see you.

  Time stopped. So quiet in there. Nobody to see you. No Americans.

  Five, six, seven seconds in the green fricken cathedral. Nobody else rode a tube all that week.

  Five, six, seven weeks . . .

  It spat you out and you ripped up the rest of the wave: cutback, into the foamball, out again, up for a hack on the lip, down the drop again, and another barrel, power on, power off . . .

  . . . yeah . . .

  You got two barrels on the one wave.

  Then you paddled in.

  Thirty thousand going bananas.

  Big stink among the judges.

  It wasn’t that they judged you as being too late. They were all as stoned as the surfers, the judges were. They scored your wave.

  Big stink was, two judges scored you a 20 out of 20—enough to get you through to the next round, seeing the guys in your heat had got nothing better than 6s and 7s in their scoring waves.

  And the other three judges scored you 3s and 4s. Not enough points.

  Huge stink. How could some judge score you a 20 and the bloke next to him score you a 3?

  No worries about you being after the hooter. There’d of been a riot if they hadn’t scored your wave.

  But the three judges who scored you 3s and 4s:

  They hadn’t seen the two barrels. They saw you drop down in the first barrel and disappear and they figured you’d wiped out . . . and then they looked down at their pads and wrote the scores while you were inside barrel one, barrel two . . .

  Huge stink.

  DK was eliminated. No television footage, no instant replays, no proof that what the two 20/20 judges had seen was for real. The other three didn’t believe them.

  So there was a riot anyway.

  •

  Lisa rode with you in a limo out of there: HB burning behind you. The bikies, the hippies and the surfers all united, joined forces in protest.

  Lisa’s eyes shining. The fires of HB shone in the glaze of her eyes.

  DK’s done for them what nothing’s ever done before, she said. Given them a common cause.

  You looked out the back window: the Travelodge in flames, the judges’ tent in flames, columns of grey smoke piling high into the blue California sky. All because three judges hadn’t seen DK in his two barrels.

  Common cause.

  Since she come out of Hollywood, Lisa didn’t call you Dennis anymore. Didn’t even call you you. Now you were third person. You were DK.

  You drove to the airport with a suitcase full of dope and postcards for Mo. When you got to LAX, Lisa kissed you and said she was taking the dope.

  You didn’t understand.

  I’m coming back soon, she said.

  You didn’t get it.

  Off you go! She nudged you with a smile bright as a golden globe. She wheeled out her dimple.

  Then you realised her guitar wasn’t in the limo. Or her suitcase. Or nothing. Just your stuff.

  You got out the car in a daze,
hadn’t been paying attention. Now Lisa waving through the back window blowing kisses at her mighty DK. Her dimple gone professional.

  You pushed your aviators up the bridge of your nose.

  The rest of the Australian team was on your flight, except for FJ. Little blond rich boy snuck under your guard. While the beach burnt, while the town went up in flames, Frank Johnson was still surfing for the judges.

  The new judges.

  While you was on a plane home, the kid from Coolie won himself a US Open title.

  The future world champion.

  You were going to mess somebody up.

  That type of thing.

  When you was still DK, that’s the word they used for you when you was a pylon in the corner of the party:

  Incommunicado.

  Like you was the fricken Latin Pope or something.

  A rattle at the aluminium security grille. Bad diagonals shaking all over the shop.

  You holed up in your room. Turning up the radio. BBC World Service, NPR, Deutsche Welle Radio.

  Block her out.

  Mo at the shopping centre or up the bingo hall or in the dining room having her lunch or playing cards with a mate.

  The Thing in the corner of the living room, cruelling the diagonals.

  The BFO smashing down the security grille.

  You in your room, hands mashed against your ears.

  Your radio on maximum.

  The BFO showing her true colours.

  ‘I know you’re in there, Dennis!’

  Like she’s the cops.

  Incommunicado.

  You come home to Kirra and Snapper and D-Bah and Rainbow and Greenmount, where the US Open champion surfed.

  You hand-delivered Mo her postcards.

  Rod been looking after Keiths Surf Boards while you was away. Rod and his white mate, Harry with the baggie pants. And Basil, Rod’s gnarly offsider.

  They always said you was a homicidal maniac in the first comps back after the US Open. This lunatic charging out of the bushes eyes the colour of fire. This wild animal who went out to tear Frank Johnson limb from bloody limb.

  They always said.

  They always do say.

  But you weren’t that fussed at first. Out on Greenmount headland, on the park bench that replaced the one you and Rod had burnt down with a bong-making exercise went wrong. You had your morning surf and was watching FJ with his snowy mop, walking up and down his longboard, dancing on the waves like he was doing the fricken tango, that sort of thing. Arching his back. Soul surfing. Judges still loved that crap.

  There never was any such thing as soul surfing, or not by the early seventies.

  Don’t listen to what they say.

  There’d been pop-out surfboard factories and Surf-O-Rama and shaping machines and Gidget and magazines and wetsuit models since before you surfed and they’d already burnt out, sold out, soul surfing nothing but a myth. Surfing was spoilt by 1960 let alone ’73. All wrecked. The only pure surfing left, innocent surfing, golden age surfing, was in you, back when you was too young to know about all that other crap. The golden age of surfing is when you’re twelve years old and the days last for fifty hours and every day the surf is glassy and huge and nobody else is out and you catch a hundred perfect rides in a session. It’s when you see someone else carrying a board and you stop and ask them which break they’re going to, and you get talking and you walk off to that break together. See the golden age is always happening to some twelve-year-old, then he wises up and surfing’s all went commercial, it’s overcrowded and it’s ruined and he has to live the rest of his life pining for the good old days.

  And when he sees someone else on the way to the beach with a board under their arm, he hopes they get run over by a car first.

  Golden age bulldust.

  You were still a bit rusted-on and ratty after all that Mexican weed and hadn’t surfed good since you been back. Part of you was watching FJ and almost admiring him.

  But then you felt someone sit next to you. Plonk down so heavy it half tilted the seat up, seesaw mudgeridoor.

  Reckons he’s the ducks nuts.

  You pushed your aviators up your nose. They were there.

  So was Mo.

  Ever since he’s back, he’s giving radio interviews and filling newspaper pages and the whole bloody star of the show eh. Nearly as bad as when he saved that tourist.

  You didn’t say nothing. You had a headache that your post-surf number hadn’t put out. Local weed wasn’t doing the trick after all that Acapulco G. Have to have some shipped in.

  Look at him in them pink boardshorts. Who’s he reckon he is?

  You didn’t say nothing. You didn’t say, US Open champion Mo that’s who he is.

  Mo kept digging at FJ. Not going off her head. Just whining next to you like a mozzie in your ear.

  Digging at you.

  Saying:

  How he collected his press clippings in a scrapbook.

  How he had photographs of himself blown up into posters and sold them.

  How he had his own brand of T-shirts.

  How he talked about himself as a ‘professional’.

  How up themself his folks were.

  How he whipped you at HB.

  How he never beaten you in one comp in Australia.

  She didn’t want you to match FJ: like make more money or go professional or collect your own fricken scrapbooks.

  She wanted you to get out in the water and thump him.

  So you did.

  They talked about that morning for years: how it was better and bigger and longer at Kirra, but instead DK went out at Greenmount just cos FJ was there. FJ already had a crowd to watch his sleek rollercoasters.

  And DK humiliated him. While FJ painted curves and curls into the waves, DK demolished them. When you’d done with a wave it was cut to pieces, a mess of busted lips.

  You made him look like a kook.

  His hands behind his back.

  His toes on the nose.

  You smashed him and the local grass wasn’t even working for you no more.

  But that was Mo: if there was one human on the earth who hated losing more than you did, it was her.

  You surfed angry that season. The place changing. Too many new faces. Old faces gone. Not that you ever talked to them, but now they weren’t there you were missing them.

  Some tragedies: blokes who had to move away from the waves. Sometimes they got called up for national service, Vietnam, and that was that. Vietnam was still round them days. Yous never got drafted cos somehow Mo got you and Rod an exemption. Flat feet or family providers or what have you. Mo could scam pretty good when she needed to.

  Sometimes blokes went to Vietnam and never surfed again—got ironed out by Cong. Or there was draft dodgers like Wayne Lynch, best surfer in the world before you come along, his ball dropped in the ballot and he disappeared into deepest darkest Vicco where he lived in a humpy and hid from the police inside fifteen-foot Southern Ocean barrels. Vietnam took him out of the equation, out of the line-up.

  But most of them was everyday tragedies: blokes had wives, kids, couldn’t work out how to get their surfs in. You felt sorry for them. Like they been kicked out of paradise. Responsibilities. You couldn’t imagine it. Be like dying. Sure you appreciated one less body in the water meaning more waves for you but you didn’t like seeing the old school drift away. They never guessed it but you liked familiar faces. Father Aplin, Mr Paterson. Both got involved in other responsibilities and couldn’t fit their surfs in so much. Stopped worrying about missing big swells. Big hole in their lives. Kind of a hole in yours. You felt sorry for them. If it happened to you you’d kill yourself.

  The problem was—the problem always is—no surf. They’d
pumped sand from the Tweed out to Kirra Point and it stopped breaking. When there was no surf the soul of the place went black. Kirra Point never broke now, so the heart of the town did.

  The Queensland police was coming down on what they saw as the druggie surfing culture. You didn’t know what they were on about. All the surfers you knew were workers. Plumbers, butchers, teachers, newsagents, a priest. One or two board shapers. Honest working men.

  But the Queensland police had it in their heads that surfies were drug-dealing drongo hippie dole-bludging dropouts. There was this big theory that the end of Kirra created a vacuum and all the smack dealers moved in. Which was rubbish. You wouldn’t of tolerated hippies or drongos. No time for them at all. Or blow-ins from Briso or New South selling their gear. You could of maintained order right through the Gold Coast the way you maintained it on your wave. No sweat. But would they listen to you?

  You should of been the new govt but instead they made you a target. Cops followed you round, not the Black Maria but unmarked cars, behind corners, sneaky sneaky. Parked across the road from your shop. Never advertised themself or give it away but you know they’re there. You knew. You knew. They never broke down your door at four am like they did the others but you knew they was watching. You knew everything. That’s what they didn’t understand. You were in a surveillance drone like an Airfix model on the breezes high above, you circled looking down, looking down. They thought they was following you on your chopper to Bob’s milk bar to the waves to Bob’s milk bar to the shop to Bob’s milk bar to the waves . . . but really you were following them, from high in the sky, your all-seeing eye.

  Pure natural genius.

  So even though you was the biggest target in a town of big targets, you were never busted. Never once. Or not yet.

  FJ was, but. Which was very strange!

  Frank Johnson, golden boy in pink boardies, US Open champion, who never smoked any substance, sat on one schooner of shandy all night, never put a foot out of line, wasn’t even in the Huntington Travelodge, clean Frank, the operator, the commercial brain, the US Open champion:

  Busted with a piece of buddha stick and a gram of hash in his locker at Snapper.