Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  From this terrible history modern surfing is descended, thanks to the few Hawaiians, notably Duke Kahanamoku, who kept the ancient practice of he‘e nalu alive. Kahanamoku won a gold medal for swimming at the 1912 Olympics, became an international celebrity, and started giving surfing exhibitions around the world. Surfing caught on, slowly, on various coasts where there were ridable waves and people with the means to chase them. Postwar Southern California became the capital of the emerging surf industry largely because a local aerospace boom provided both new lightweight materials for board-building and an outsized generation of kids like me, with the time and inclination to learn to surf. Not that the local authorities encouraged us. Surfers were typecast as truants and vandals. Some beach towns actually banned surfing. And the trope of the surf bum—brother to the ski bum, sail bum, climbing bum—has never been retired, for good reason. Jeff Spicoli, the stoned-out Sean Penn surf dude in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, muddles on righteously in beach towns all over the world today. Hawaii was different, though. At least it felt different to me. Surfing wasn’t subcultural or imported or oppositional—even though its survival represented enduring opposition to the Calvinist business values of Hiram Bingham. It felt deeply woven into the fabric of the place.

  • • •

  GLENN AND RODDY INVITED ME to a meeting of their surf club, the Southern Unit. All I knew about the club was that its members wore green-and-white aloha-print trunks, and that every Southern Unit guy I’d seen in the water, mainly out on good days at Cliffs, surfed notably well. The meeting was held in Paki Park, a little public square on the diamondhead side of Waikiki. It was nighttime, and crowded, and I hung back in the shadows. A short, loud, middle-aged man named Mr. Ching ran the show—rattling off old business, new business, contest results, upcoming competitions, all while jousting with the crowd and getting laughs, though the repartee was too quick for me.

  “No get wise,” Mr. Ching yelled, wheeling on a boy creeping up behind him.

  That, Roddy told me, was his son, Bon Ching. He was our age, but he surfed as well as Glenn. There were only a few haoles on hand, but one of them I recognized: Lord James Blears. He was a burly, golden-maned ex-wrestler and local TV host with a theatrically trained, possibly even authentic British accent. Lord Blears, besides everything else, surfed, in a ceremonial sort of way. Roddy pointed out his teenage daughter Laura, who surfed well, he said, and who seemed to me impossibly beautiful, and her brother Jimmy, who later became a famous big-wave rider.

  There were other kids at that meeting who grew up to make names for themselves in the wider world of surfing, including Reno Abellira, then a Waikiki urchin heckling Mr. Ching from the shadows, later a top international competitor, renowned for his low, crouching style and blinding speed. What dazzled me, though, were the jackets. Several people wore green-and-white Southern Unit windbreakers. These were even more desirable, if possible, than the club trunks. When Roddy urged me to volunteer for a fund-raising project being touted by Mr. Ching, I swallowed my self-consciousness and approached him for an assignment.

  I had never been in a surf club. In California you heard about Windansea, which was based in La Jolla and had some big-name members. There was also a club, supposedly based in Santa Barbara, called Hope Ranch, that for some reason sounded like very heaven to me and my friends. None of us knew anyone who belonged to it. We didn’t even know its colors. Maybe it didn’t exist at all. Still, the idea of Hope Ranch hovered, immaterial, a dream of supercoolness in our geeky, overheated wannabe brainpans.

  Now, though, for me it was the Southern Unit. The admissions process was unclear. Did I have to go out and win a contest? I had never surfed in a contest—just a few dorky “surf-offs” against other guys from my junior high in California. I was not averse to more formal competition. But first, apparently, there was fund-raising. Roddy found an excuse to not appear, but I dutifully showed up on a hot Saturday morning at the pickup spot. Mr. Ching drove a group of us, including his son Bon, to a posh-looking subdivision high in the hills above Honolulu. We each got a heavy sack of Portuguese sausage and basic instruction in door-to-door salesmanship. We were raising money for our surfing club—a wholesome cause, like the Boy Scouts. Mr. Ching said “the Southern Unit,” and the kids laughed, because he pronounced it haole-style, standard English, though it was usually said “da Soddun Unit.” Sales territories were assigned. We were to meet at the bottom of the mountain at the end of the day.

  With lonely bravado, I threw myself into the job. I banged on gates and doors, ran from angry dogs, talked loudly to old Japanese ladies who gave no sign that they spoke English. A couple of haole ladies took pity on me, but I made few sales. The day got hotter. I drank from yard hoses, but I had brought no food. Finally, famished, I tore into one of my sausages. It wasn’t tasty, but it was better than nothing. Ten minutes later I was on my knees, retching into a storm drain. I didn’t know that Portuguese sausage had to be cooked. I wondered, between heaves, if I was getting closer to or farther from the glory of surf-club membership.

  • • •

  RODDY WAS TRANSFERRED, for some reason, into my typing class. Listening to him report to the teacher, I was stunned. Like Mr. Ching in his fund-raising spiel, Roddy abandoned, briefly, his normal pidgin and spoke standard English. But this wasn’t for comic effect; it was just for the occasion. Glenn, I learned later, could do the same thing. The Kaulukukui boys were bilingual; they could “code switch.” There just weren’t many occasions in our daily rounds—indeed, almost none—when they had to drop their first language, the Hawaiian creole known as pidgin.

  But keeping my two worlds separate got suddenly trickier. Roddy and I started hanging out at school, far from the In Crowd’s monkeypod. In the cafeteria, we ate our saimin and chow fun together in a dim corner. But the school was a small pond. There was nowhere to hide. So there should have been a scene, a confrontation, perhaps with Mike himself—Hey, who’s this moke?

  There wasn’t, though. Glenn and Ford were around then too. Maybe Glenn and Mike hit it off over some shared laugh, nothing to do with me. All I knew was that, seemingly overnight, Glenn and Roddy and Ford were showing up not only at the In Crowd’s school yard spot under the monkeypod but also at Mike and Edie’s house in Kaimuki on Friday nights—when Mike’s uncle supplied the Primo (local beer) and mod Steve supplied the Kinks. The In Crowd had been integrated, with no visible fuss.

  This was at a time when the Pacific Club, the leading local private club, where much of Hawaii’s big business was conducted over cocktails and paddle tennis, was still whites-only. The Pacific Club, apparently unmoved by the fact that Hawaii’s first U.S. representative and one of its first two senators were Asian American (both were also distinguished veterans of World War II; one of them, Daniel Inouye, had lost an arm), still formally banned Asian Americans from membership. This sort of bald discrimination wasn’t un-American—legal segregation was still in force in much of the country—but it was badly out of date in Hawaii. Even the low-rent haole kids in the In Crowd were more enlightened. They saw that my friends were cool guys—particularly, I think, Glenn—and, at least for gang purposes, just let the race thing go. It wasn’t worth the trouble. It was radioactive crap. Let’s party.

  Not that kicking it with the In Crowd was the fondest ambition of Glenn, Ford, or Roddy. From what I knew, which was a lot, it was no big deal to them. It was only a big deal to me. In fact, after Roddy got to know a couple of the girls I had been telling him about—In Crowd girls I had agonized over, and had very occasionally canoodled with—I could see he was unimpressed. If the term “skank” had been in use then, he might have used it. Roddy had been suffering his own romantic torments, which I had also heard much about, but the object of his affections was a modest, notably old-fashioned, quietly beautiful girl whom I would never have noticed if he hadn’t pointed her out. She was too young to go steady, she said. He would wait years, if necessary, he said wretchedly. L
ooking at my erstwhile girlfriends through his eyes, I didn’t like them any less, but I began to see how lost they were, in their delinquent, neglected-child glamour, their sexual precocity. In truth, they were far more sexually advanced than I was, which made me timid, which made me unhappy.

  And so I developed a disastrous crush on Glenn’s girlfriend, Lisa. She was an older woman—fourteen, in ninth grade—poised, amused, kind, Chinese. Lisa was at Kaimuki Intermediate but not of it. That was how I saw her. She and Glenn made sense as a couple only because he was a natural-born hero and she was a natural-born heroine. But he was a wild man, an outlaw, a laughing truant, and she was a good girl, a good student. What could they possibly talk about? I didn’t really want an answer to that question. “There was a joy of life in him and a kind of tenderness untainted by the merely gentle.” When I read that line, written by James Salter, many years later, I thought of Glenn. Lisa, as I imagine her, might have too. No, I thought, I would just wait, impatiently, for her to come to her senses and turn to the haole boy who struggled to amuse her, and worshipped her. I couldn’t tell if Glenn noticed my hapless condition. He had the good grace, anyway, to say nothing off-color about Lisa within my hearing. (No “Spock dat”—which means “Look at that,” and which boys were always saying to each other, popping their eyes at girlish rumps and breasts.)

  Lisa helped me see Ford. I knew he was unusual for a Japanese kid. Glenn sometimes teased him, saying things about “da nip-o-nese” and what a disappointment Ford, who cared for nothing except surfing, must be to his family. But he rarely got a rise out of him. Ford had a powerful inwardness about him. He could not have been more different, I thought, from the Japanese kids in my academic classes. They looked to teachers, and to one another, blatantly, fervently, for approval. I had become friendly with some of the funnier girls, who could be very funny indeed, but the social wall between us stayed solid, and their brownnosing in class still offended my sense of student-teacher protocol. Ford, on the other hand, was from my planet.

  He had pale skin, a blocky build, with hard, chiseled-looking muscles, and a stiff, efficient surfing style that carried him swiftly down the line (across, that is, a wave’s horizontal expanse). His and Glenn’s friendship seemed to revolve around the surf, where they were near equals, but it also included a shared sense of the ridiculous, which Ford, who never said much, expressed with small, dry smiles at Glenn’s jokes. Then there was the refuge that the Kaulukukuis provided Ford from family pressures. That was what Lisa explained. She knew Ford’s family, including his hard-driving parents and college-bound siblings. The Japanese had surged to the fore politically in postwar Hawaii, moving rapidly off the sugar plantations that they—like the Chinese and Filipinos and other groups—had originally been brought to the islands to work. And they were rising commercially too. They were generally resented for their insularity—unlike the Chinese, say, they were in no hurry to marry outside their ethnic group. But their collective attitude, it seemed safe to say, especially among the older generation, was that they were not going to get ahead in America by hanging out with Hawaiians and having fun. And this, Lisa said, was what Ford rebelled against daily. No wonder, I thought, his jaw always seemed so firmly set.

  • • •

  FLYERS WENT UP for a surf contest, to be held at Diamond Head Cliffs. The organizer seemed to be just a kid at Kaimuki Intermediate—Robert, a small, smooth-talking ninth-grader who didn’t even surf. But Roddy and Glenn said he was legit, that he came from a family of sports impresarios. The contest could not have been more small-time—none of the local surf clubs was involved, and the only category seemed to be Boys Under 14. But that was me. I entered.

  On contest day, the surf at Cliffs was a sunny, windblown mess on a rising swell. None of the kids who showed up to compete were Cliffs locals—I didn’t recognize them, anyway, except for a couple from school. But they all seemed to know their way around the contest rigamarole of heats and jerseys. Some had parents with them, who had gamely made the climb down from Diamond Head Road. I hadn’t even told my parents about the event—too embarrassing. Roddy, to my dismay, didn’t show up. Glenn was there—he had been drafted to serve as a judge—but he said Roddy had been compelled to go to work that morning with their father, at Fort DeRussy, in Waikiki. I had been counting on seeing Roddy win the contest.

  Robert read out the heat lists. When we were not surfing, we huddled under thornbushes on the hillside, squeezing into patches of shade. The judges sat higher up the slope. Some of the surfers looked pretty good, I thought, though none could touch Roddy. One kid wore Southern Unit trunks, but his wave selection was terrible, and he bombed.

  I surfed two or three rounds. I was nervous and paddled hard, paying no attention to anyone else. The surf was coming up slightly, which was good, but little Robert did not have the power to clear a contestants’ area, so we were surfing in among the usual Saturday crowd. I knew the reefs at Cliffs well by then, so I moved off by myself, ewa side, where a slab of coral sat outside, at a good angle for this swell. Over there I found set waves that connected cleanly through the main part of the break. Robert had a flag system that was supposed to tell surfers when their heats were over, but he neglected to change the flags as the finals ended, and I kept surfing till Glenn paddled out to get me. It was over, he said. I got second place. A haole kid named Tomi Winkler got first. Glenn was grinning. “That drop-knee cutback,” he said. “Every time you do one, bwaah, I give you big points.”

  It was a startling result in three ways. First, Robert actually gave us trophies, some weeks later, greatly surprising my parents, who were hurt that I hadn’t invited them. Second, who the hell was Tomi Winkler? He was, it turned out, one of the low-profile haoles at Kaimuki Intermediate—a sweet, sunny guy and, as I came to know, a better surfer than me. Third, Glenn liked my drop-knee cutback. It was a cold-water maneuver, practically unknown in Hawaii, and if I had been systematically shedding my mainland style it would have been one of the first moves to go. But I was apparently still doing it, and my idol, Glenn, actually saw some grace, or at least some novelty, in it. That settled it—the drop-knee stayed.

  But this business of style, mainland versus Hawaiian, was complicated. This was true both in surfing as a whole, in every era, and in my little world. I had often heard Glenn tease Roddy about the way he surfed—“too Island kine.” He imitated his brother by crouching, sticking his ass out, extending his arms in exaggerated speed arcs, squinting like an angry samurai. It was unfair and inaccurate, but funny. Glenn would even do it sometimes while riding waves, though the war cry then was always “Aikau!” The Aikaus were a local surfing family known for their traditional styles. Like Ben Aipa and Reno Abellira, the Aikaus would later become famous in the international surfing world—renowned for, among other things, their pure Hawaiian styles in big waves. But I had never heard of them. Ford and Roddy found Glenn’s parodies irresistible. “You see the Aikaus,” Ford told me. “You see why we laugh.”

  Author, Queens, Waikiki, 1967

  • • •

  MY FIRST TRIP to the North Shore, I made with my family. It was spring, and the big swells from the Aleutians that sent huge surf to the North Shore were finished for the year. We stopped at the fabled big-wave spot, Waimea Bay. Except for the fact that the sea was flat, it looked just like its pictures. We hiked up the canyon behind the beach and swam in a freshwater pool. Dad, Kevin, and I jumped off a cliff into the cold brown water, daring each other to go higher. In feats of stupid physical daring, I had, I realized, surpassed my father, although he was athletic, not timid, and not yet forty. My family, I thought, knew less and less about me. I had been leading a clandestine life, particularly since we moved to Hawaii. Much of that was down to surfing, and it had begun back in California.

  Why had I even started surfing? In one picture-book version, the hook had been set on a shining afternoon in Ventura when I was ten. Ventura was on the coast north of Los
Angeles. There was a diner on the pier. My family ate there on beach weekends. From our booth by the window, I could see surfers out at a spot known as California Street. They were silhouettes, backlit by low sun, and they danced silently through the glare, their boards like big dark blades, slashing and gliding, swift beneath their feet. California Street was a long cobblestone point, and to me, at ten, the waves that broke along its shelf seemed like they were arriving from some celestial workshop, their glowing hooks and tapering shoulders carved by ocean angels. I wanted to be out there, learning to dance on water. The snug fracas of the family dinner felt vestigial. Even my chiliburger, a special treat, lost its fascination.

  In truth, there were plenty of siren songs playing at the time, each calling me toward surfing. And my parents, unlike Ford Takara’s, were willing to help me start. They got me a used board for my eleventh birthday. They gave me and my friends rides to the beach.

  Now, though, I seemed to be on my own. Nobody asked where I went with my board, and I never talked about good days at Cliffs or my triumphs over fear at Kaikoos. When I was little, I liked to bring my wounds home, liked hearing my mother gasp when she caught sight of blood trickling down my leg. What are you gasping about? Oh, that. I enjoyed being fussed over, injured but nonchalant. Once, I recall, I even got a perverse pleasure from being accidentally burned by another mother’s cigarette while riding in a boat. The attention, the remorse—the pain was worth it to me. Where did that guiltmongering little killjoy come from? He’s with me still, no doubt, but as I entered my teens I suddenly moved on, psychically, from my family. Tripping back down the trail at Waimea in swimsuits, I knew we looked like six kindred souls, blood-tied, a brood, but I felt like the odd one out. A cold gust of pubescent separation seemed to have caught me prematurely. Of course, when I dove face first into a coral head—this happened the following summer, at Waikiki—it was still my mother to whom I was carried, and she who took me to get sewn up.