by Malcolm Knox
He said he had no idea how it got there.
That’s what they all say.
You raised your eyebrow and pushed up your aviators and told everybody you were shocked, shocked, that FJ was a dope fiend, and you were sure, sure, that the cops had framed him up. But then again, you said, success does funny things to some people and FJ was now the US Open champion, wasn’t he, so maybe, well, you said, maybe no, maybe yes.
You led the ‘surfing delegation’ to the courthouse and got thrown out for booing during the police evidence.
FJ got a six-month suspended sentence and a fine of $500.
With a criminal conviction he wouldn’t be able to go to the US Open the next year.
Wouldn’t be able to go to overseas legs of the brand new world championship of surfing they were talking about, starting that year.
He wouldn’t be able to go to Hawaii.
You DK was shocked.
Sitting on Greenmount Hill. This seat gets replaced every year. Some kid always burns it down.
This place like an arena: you look down into Rainbow Bay and it’s the same as the first times when you was a kid, just the blue shape of that bay with the yellow beach and the black rocks how perfect it is, waves hitting it just the right angle, all set up, and it must be the same as when a conductor looks at the orchestra before the first note or the coach and crowd looking down on the glowing green rectangle of a football field: all you can feel is the things that are about to happen. You can handle yourself here. This is your view where your happiness is.
Bury me here, Mr J-man, burn me up like them old benches, then bury me here, please Lord, if you have a last miserable scrap of mercy please do this one thing for me.
In the agaves.
Thinking about The Thing.
No Things out today: it’s four foot and offshore and lining up nice. Local kids out there. They respect me. A kid drops into a clean sandy barrel from behind the lava rock and smokes six cutbacks before he’s halfway through Rainbow Bay, and the same kid, sponsored by Quiksilver and Rip Curl and Billabong and all them others, the kid who’s already piled up dollars and points on the endorsements and the junior pro circuit, this same kid, he’s the one who’ll come up to me later and all shy ask me to autograph his board.
What would he make of The Thing?
Can’t do it to him.
Sitting on Greenmount Hill these days it’s like watching a whole history of surfing: there’s old kooks on longboards, noseriders in Okanuis, longhairs, kneelos, what they call them mini-Mals and hybrids and fishes, single fins, twin fins, thrusters, quad fins, five fins . . . blokes riding with their hands behind their backs and scratching their balls and tandeming with their dog or their girlfriend right through to fluoro wetties and rippers and flyers and stylers and what have you, kids with shaved heads and tatts in comp singlets. It left nothing behind, surfing: no fad ever died. There’s even stand-up paddleboards out there, Hawaiian antikis, handcarved from wiliwili trees with v-bottoms. All the fashions, one after the other, all staying in the water, forever.
And they all leave behind them:
Nothing.
Nothing more than a cough.
Like every wave’s an Etch-a-Sketch. Here it is, there it was. See yas later.
You can rip through a tube, cut back into it, blast out off the shoulder, and you look behind you and there’s nothing left but the next bloke on the next wave. That’s surfing. Free as air, free as water, you can’t take it home and it produces nothing.
Freedom. Nothing. Freedom. Nothing.
Same diff.
In them days when I had all that coin, Rod trying to borrow a few hundred to score some smack, he’d go:
Ya know Den, ya can’t take it with ya.
And I’d go:
Then I ain’t goin.
Plenty hot little rippers out there today. None as good as me. None revolutionising the sport. Turning it inside out, upside down. None defying gravity.
They don’t want to disappear in the barrel too long. They spend as much time flipping round in the air as they do on the wave. What they call these moves . . . what you put on a car, for the radio:
. . . yeah no . . .
They want everybody to see them: photograph them, put them in a magazine, pay them dollars to be a fricken model . . .
Kooks like FJ left a longer mark on the sport than I did.
Hits me hard, that.
These kids, the good ones, all want to be seen.
They don’t just want to surf.
They want showbiz.
That’s it:
Aerials.
Yeah and there’s this one I been scoping a while: ripping. Sort of slower on the wave than the others, but smooth and graceful almost like a girl. Big arse. Easy paddling. Cocks his wrists while he turns like MR, the wounded seagull himself.
Then when he bellies into the sand and gets out and takes a shower and tucks his board under his arm and walks up the path past me, I see he is a bird.
‘How’s it going?’
She stops like I’ve caught her in the act.
‘Oh, hi, Dennis.’
She stands dripping.
‘You can surf eh,’ I go.
She stares at the grass between us like she wants it to open up and swallow her.
‘No sweat,’ I go.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘I meant to tell you I was in town but the waves were good today and . . .’
‘No apologies eh.’
Half a smile and she goes:
‘To you of all people.’
Push the aviators up my nose (still there).
‘Me of all people eh.’
And so then we’re there, her with her fat fishy little shortboard under her arm, me with my ankles crossed in front of me and my arms spread across the back of the bench.
My bench.
Me of all people/Tall people/Tall poppy/Pop-top/Chupa- Chup/Putt-putt/Lap-lap/Chop-chop/Tuk-tuk/Plucka-Duck/Fuck-Truck/FUCKHEAD!/FUCKHEAD!!/FUCKHEAD!!!/FUUUUUCKHEEEAAAAADDDD!!!!!!!
‘You all right, Dennis?’
I’m wheezing now, me mouth flapping about, that was a bad rut just there FUCKHEAD couldn’t get out of it, just say something say something DK—
‘You know how good this wave used to be, before the sand?’
She doesn’t make a move. She’s staring at her feet so hard it’s like she thinks even taking a breath will cut me short.
‘When you were paddling into it you’d hear the thunder behind you FUCKHEAD where it was peaking and smashing on them rocks. You’d look round and see this thing like a cyclone chasing you. You’d stall, and tuck yourself into that barrel for dear life. FUCKHEAD! Every second you think it’s gunna close out in front of you and smash you, but it’s so fast it spits you down the line like you’re a pea in a pea shooter. And it keeps on going, keeps on going, you can see right down the line, a hundred yards or two hundred yards and you know you’ve got all that wave to play with, goes forever. You can’t help smiling, cos you’ve ridden it this size and in this swell before and you know it’s gunna be more fun and more life than you can ever fit in one wave. And it goes forever. It’s that good there’s no word for it, love. That good eh. It keeps firing you down and you’re thinking, this time it’s gunna close over and smash you, you’re too deep. But it doesn’t. And then at the end of the wave where it sucks up on the beach it still fires you along, it’s scary fast now, and you’re still in it. Finally you get spat out on the shoulder and you can’t believe it, you look back to where you started and it’s gunna take you five minutes to stroke your way back to where you started, not cos the sweep’s so bad, it’s cos the wave took you so far. It went forever.’
And I’m feeling good, magnanimous today, and so I let her
off her hook where she’s dangling like a side of beef waiting to be sliced into steaks:
‘You don’t have any secrets from me, love.’
Her hair’s hanging over her face, dripping down. She doesn’t look up. But see, I know how she’s feeling. She’s just caught eight ripping waves down Rainbow through Greenmount. She may be acting all sheepish and shy, but I know, I remember.
She’s on top of the world.
She’s high as a kite.
Down, down, come down to earth, little birdie.
. . . yeah . . .
She goes:
‘But not forever.’
‘Eh?’
‘The barrel at Kirra,’ she goes. ‘It didn’t go forever. You thought it would but it didn’t.’
Maybe she’s wrong on that. Maybe I could take it with me. Maybe I never went.
‘Spose so. Wanna come have a Splice?’
She comes along but with a pout.
Half of her’s over the moon cos she ripped and I saw her.
Other half of her’s pissed off at me for the same reason. Like there’s more to her.
But she’s got me wrong on that too. I don’t care whether she’s a good surfer or not. It means nothing to me. Never did mean nothing.
Wanna know what else she’s got.
Fuckhead.
So FJ was a spent force. He might of been US Open champion by default but everyone in Coolie knew who was boss, and Coolie was what mattered.
You never got beaten fair in a club conness on the Goldie. Other blokes got their names on the clubhouse honour board, but only when there was some kind of fix in with the judges. Judges had to keep them interested. So there was bribes, conspiracies, blackmailings, frame-ups, all sorts of dodgy dealings. They made a full-time occupation of stopping you winning.
So you got yourself elected president of Kirra Boardriders. It was meant to be a culture clash between the ‘professionals’, the clean-cut serious surfers à la FJ, and the ‘animals’, led by yours truly, but the so-called professionals were on the nose after FJ’s drug bust: everyone knew they were hypocrites.
Landslide.
You met in the Grand Hotel and there were blues every night, people throwing chairs and glassing each other, you never knew what that was about, being a non-violent individual yourself. You just stayed in the corner behind your aviators and lemonade.
Order.
As president you brought in membership cards for admission to the surf. Roddy had them printed out and laminated and handed out. They doubled as parking passes if necessary. There had to be a hierarchy. Some of the boys would go up to strange faces in the waves and ask for their membership cards. There was fights. Some said the surf is free. All that rubbish. So they cop a board in the head. Simple. Surf isn’t free. Surf needs order and civilisation and etiquette. A pecking order that everyone obeyed. With you at the top.
•
It fell apart cos Tink became club champion. Yeah Tink, Tink, Tink, somehow he sneaked a win. It went flat in the final at D-Bah and you never saw him over near the breakwater sneaking some tiddly rights.
Unlike FJ, Tink was a real surfer. The redhead had learnt at your knee. Every time you created a new move, a new type of turn, found a new take-off spot, Tink be out there practising it. You couldn’t keep no secrets from Tink. Little Tink. Now one of the men.
When they announced the points—Tink first, you second, Tom Peterson third, Peter Townend fourth—you pushed the aviators right up your nose till they were stuck in your forehead and you jumped up on the podium and grabbed the trophy in your capacity as club president and said:
Little Tink’s the winner, come on everybody, give him a cheer, little Tink, he’s the best surfer in the club, yeah yeah yeah!
And the boys were all cacking themselves and but nervous, they didn’t know what’ll happen next, and Tink looking like he was dying, so to put them out of their misery you went:
Yeah and yous’ll have to find yourselves a new president cos this one’s retired! Gawd save the Queen!
And you chucked the trophy down at Tink and he dropped it on the sand and they still talk to this day about you ripping up D-Bah lefts that afternoon.
You only become president cos it meant you didn’t have to pay annual club fees anyway.
Trying to fill your head with not-her.
So this was the first year of the world tour, cooked up between some self-promoters and clothes makers. You didn’t give it much time till you saw fifteen hundred bucks a conness and so that might be worth a dip.
Liked coin.
Genius with numbers.
First world tour event was Bells in August. Mid-bloody-winter. You piled in the van with Rod and Bas and wrote out a big graph with all the moves and points on it. World tour had this new scoring system, objective, points per move, so you wouldn’t get crimes like HB where one judge sat there with a three-paper bunger under his belt and he saw Rudolf Bloody Nureyev when the judge next to him is seeing Deputy Dawg. Most of the time you were so much better than anybody else not even a blind judge could stop you winning. But now you had a world title to compete for, they had to get serious.
You sticky-taped the scoring code to the windscreen and memorised it on the drive. When you got to Bells Roddy invited blokes for a C-1 at the van. Made sure they all saw your chart on the windscreen. They left defeated. If DK was doing it this scientific, what hope did they have?
Not that it all went to plan. A storm swell gave you ten-foot onshore bumpy Antarctic lumps and the board you used was undergunned, too short. You were bounced around, board chattering and jittering, and couldn’t work your turns. You were flying too fast, airborne. Meanwhile Midget Farrelly, who was coming back for the fifteen hundred smackers, was leading after two rounds.
On the Saturday night you got Rod to run you into Torquay. You broke into the shaping shed of a mate of Rod’s and spent the whole night working on a new board: longer, a heavier big-wave gun.
Rod sat on the floor smacked out of his head. Bas next to him. Two of them breathing fibreglass dust.
Next day you took your gun out and it was even bigger and bumpier. Midget had come down with flu and you ripped them to shreds, nobody seen nothing like it at Bells.
It was freezing and grey and rainy and the opposite of the Goldie. You hated Vicco but had to show them you could do it away from home.
Show them all.
She might turn up. She did last time.
There was a food fight at the preso. You didn’t throw food. You stashed a hamburger in your pocket, didn’t find it for three days, ate it stoned when it was covered in mould and lint, then went down with food poisoning.
At Torquay you got a cheque for fifteen hundred bucks.
At the preso the interviewer asked you how you managed to pull off so many moves, and you went:
I zigged and zagged between my zigs and zags.
Cracked them up.
But this was Bells, this was Victoria, Easter ’74, this was rainy and grey and squally and horrible and all you could think was:
No Lisa.
You looked through the crowd and you were the Australian champion and leading the race for the world title and you looked through the crowd and you looked through the crowd and:
Yeah still no Lisa—
been there last time.
Wasn’t just the way her head sat on her neck like it was perfectly happy right there where it was, didn’t want to be nowhere else in the world. More than that
it’s just
nah
she liked you I mean yeah love in it too, but she liked you. Nobody else ever did. Cept maybe Mo.
Could live with her, couldn’t live without her.
Rod took an advance of one hundred, for petrol money and
dog food he said, but went to St Kilda with Bas and you didn’t see them again. You had to get the train all the way to Sydney then up the coast.
Still no Lisa.
The Pit got burnt down that year, nobody knew who done it.
And nobody knew who replaced the old
sign with:
•
But still no Lisa. Ranked world number one and your heart in pieces in your chest.
‘I know you’re not my BFO.’
‘Your what?’
‘My Bi Fricken Ographer.’
A hand to her mouth, stuffing her giggle back in.
‘Sorry. That’s funny.’
We’re at Bob’s milk bar. Kids walk past and when they see me they go, ‘Yeeuuwww!’ and flash the Hawaiian two-finger horn.
‘When they see you it’s like they’ve seen a massive set wave coming,’ she goes.
‘Filling up the horizon.’
‘Yeah. Filling up the horizon.’
I take a bite of pine-lime Splice.
‘You’re a phony,’ I go.
‘What?’ She’s acting ashamed, but her shoulders are twitching, her legs are twitching, her mind’s still out there in those slippery four-foot runners . . .
Fuckhead. But calm down, don’t go back there.
Yeah . . .
‘It’s cos of the coin.’
‘The coin?’
Now she’s looking at me. Now she’s forgot her last two hours of bliss. Now she knows she’s been caught.
‘How I know you’re not my BFO.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Yeah you do.’
Cagey now, she is. Her moonface and brown shoulders. Black halter-neck top, wraparound sarong skirt. She’s having a Golden Gaytime.
‘Biographers don’t have hundreds of bucks to chuck around as bribes.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
We eat our ice creams. I sign an autograph. A bomb set comes in. All these kids, they’re ripping these days. Not a wave goes unridden. Nothing gets wasted. I should be proud of them. They’re me legacy: these masses of kids who could of shat all over FJ, Tink, Mark Richards, Terry Fitzgerald, Ian Cairns. Could of shat all over all of them bar one.
