Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  I still didn’t have even the reproductive basics straight, and my parents were too shy on the subject to be any help. I discovered the miracle of ejaculation by myself, one agitated night. That was helpful, and quickly became a habit. I was like most boys my age, no doubt, except none of the boys I knew discussed it. My constant erections were a source of constant embarrassment, confusion, and intense fondness for doors that locked. I pioneered a new solo route, on small days, from Cliffs back to our house near Black Point, circling outside the reefs rather than inside through the lagoon. Out there, in the blue depths, no one on the beach or in the houses behind the beach could see me. I rolled off my board in azure water, taking a break from the long paddle for a delirious bit of what some pidgin speakers called, unpoetically, “hammer skin.”

  • • •

  ONE NIGHT there was a tremendous rainstorm, the kind that seems to happen only in the tropics. In my bed, above the din of the rain, I started hearing hollow, familiar bumps. It was the noise, I realized, of surfboards colliding. I jumped up, ran outside, and saw five or six boards floating out of our yard and into a river that had formerly been our lane to the beach. Our street, Kulamanu, and our lane formed, it seemed, a main funnel for local storm runoff. I chased the boards down the hill in the dark, pulling them from the hedges, or from wherever they briefly hung up, lugging them to safe ground in neighbors’ yards. There was Roddy’s bone-white Wardy, my slate-blue Larry Felker, Ford’s baby-blue Town and Country. There was John’s board, Kevin’s old tanker. Where was Glenn’s board? Ah, jammed nose first under the landlady’s steps. None of the boards reached the ocean, where the stream running down the path could be heard emptying loudly even as the rain let up. My shins were bruised, my toes stubbed. The boards were probably all dinged, but no skegs were broken. I caught my breath, then carried each board slowly back up to our yard, wedging them all more firmly in their bamboo enclosure, although the deluge was over. Trash cans littered the street. It had been a downpour for the record books. Why did I seem to be the only person in Honolulu who had woken up?

  • • •

  THEY CAUGHT GLENN. He was sent to the Big Island. This, Roddy said, was better than “juvey,” which was where they sent Mike. Glenn Sr. had convinced the authorities that Glenn would be strictly monitored by his old-fashioned aunties on the Big Island, which Roddy said was true. He probably wouldn’t even get to surf. That seemed to me sickeningly harsh. But everything felt a bit queasy without Glenn. Roddy and John were subdued. Lisa looked like she had been seriously ill. Roddy wasn’t as free to surf Cliffs as he had been before—his dad always seemed to need him down at Fort DeRussy. Really, I thought, he just wanted to keep an eye on Roddy. Maybe he blamed himself for Glenn’s running wild. Nothing seemed like a colorful woodcut of old Hawaii now.

  Sometimes Roddy invited me down to DeRussy. It was an interesting place, at least when we weren’t stuck sweeping sand off walkways, which was his dad’s preferred way to keep us busy. DeRussy sat on prime Waikiki beachfront property, flanked by high-rise hotels. Thousands of servicemen (“jarheads,” we called them) showed up every week there, on R&R from Vietnam. Glenn Sr. worked as a lifeguard. Roddy and I would sneak into the gardens and lobbies of the neighboring hotels, and while one of us stood lookout, the other would dive in and plunder fountains and wishing wells for coins. Then we’d go buy chow fun, malasadas (Portuguese doughnuts), and pineapple slices from a street cart.

  But the most interesting part of DeRussy, by far, was the surf out front. Summer was coming, and the Waikiki reefs were starting to come alive. Roddy introduced me to Number Threes, Kaisers Bowl, and Ala Moana. These were some of the surf spots I had heard about before we moved to Hawaii. They were crowded and, in the case of Ala Moana, frighteningly shallow, but they were beautiful waves, and the trades blew offshore on this side. Riding those breaks made me feel, as the pidgin phrase has it, “big-time,” at least when I surfed decently.

  I also started surfing Tonggs, down at the diamondhead end of the long swoop of city shoreline that includes Waikiki. This was where Tomi Winkler, winner of the Diamond Head Surf Contest, lived with his mother. The wave at Tonggs seemed to be nothing special—a short, crowded left that couldn’t handle much size, breaking in front of a row of high-rises and a seawall. But a lot of good surfers, including Tomi and his buddies, were locals, and they urged me to wait for nearby spots that would light up on big days, particularly a fearsome right peak known as Rice Bowl. Rice Bowl, they said, was town’s answer to Sunset Beach—the great wave on the North Shore. I wondered how Rice Bowl compared with the Bomb, but something told me not to ask. All the guys I met at Tonggs were haoles. Everybody I knew from Cliffs and Kaikoo’s was what the Tonggs guys would call a moke. Maybe these haoles had never heard of the Bomb. (They had, but they called it Brown’s.) Maybe Rice Bowl was a haole wave. (It wasn’t.) Maybe everything would be simpler, I thought, if the Southern Unit just gave me a pair of club trunks and I confined myself to surfing with Roddy and Ford. I never got those club trunks, though.

  Ford seemed lost without Glenn. He still surfed Cliffs daily, but it was different. He would take his board from our yard without even checking to see if I was home. At school he seemed to have no interest in exercising any of the droits de seigneur that came with being the bull—a title that the Bear had reportedly relinquished with a weary smile. Ford was too shy even to claim a girlfriend, which seemed to me insane, especially since the school year was about to end.

  • • •

  WHEN THE NEXT big south swell hit—it was the biggest swell yet—I found myself at Rice Bowl. The wave broke on the ewa side of Tonggs, across a channel and farther out, and I watched it from the seawall. It looked to be what people said—a small-scale Sunset. Not that I had ever surfed anything on the scale of either break. But there were a couple of guys out at Rice Bowl, and I thought it looked manageable. The wind was light, the channel looked safe. The waves were big and hard-breaking but makable, even precise. The whole setup seemed far less wild than the Bomb. I paddled out. I don’t remember any companions.

  For a while, things went fine. The other guys acknowledged me curiously. They were much older. I caught a couple of clean waves, each of which startled me with its power and speed. I tried nothing fancy. I just stayed over my board, drawing a prudent line down the face and toward the shoulder. Paddling back out, watching other waves—peering into the area that surfers call the impact zone, or the pit—I could see that Rice Bowl broke very hard indeed. The noise alone was something new to my ears.

  Then a big set came, waves in a category for which I was not remotely prepared. We were already surfing a very long way from shore, I thought, but I started paddling seaward from what I had believed was the main takeoff spot. I had obviously been wrong about where I was on the reef. Rice Bowl had another personality, which it was now revealing—vast, horizon-blotting power, the whole ocean seeming to gather itself toward one outer reef. Where could such a set have come from? Where were the other guys? They had vanished, as if forewarned. I was a fast paddler—light on my board, with long arms—and in my skittishness I had gotten an early start. I knee-paddled, digging hard, angling toward the channel now, trying to keep my breathing deep and even. When the first wave of the set began to feather, it was still far outside, and I felt my strength start to flag. Was I going in the wrong direction? Should I have started for shore when these silver death mountains first appeared in the distance? Had I been heading for the worst possible place all along—the outer reef where these waves would actually break? It was too late to change course. I paddled on, my mouth sour with nausea, my throat dry with panic, my breath short.

  I made it over the set, which had four or five waves. It was a close enough thing that I went airborne over the top of at least one, and was drenched with offshore spray by each of them, and I was shaken to the core by the sound of the waves detonating a few yards behind me. I was convinced that if I had been caught in
side, I would have died. This conviction was a first for me. This was the fear line that made surfing different, here underscored extra-heavily. I felt like Pip, the cabin boy in Moby-Dick who falls overboard and is rescued but loses his mind, undone by visions of the ocean’s infinite malice and indifference. I paddled far, far around the Rice Bowl reef, on the Tonggs side, light-headed, humiliated, back to shore.

  And that was the overwhelming memory of surfing in Hawaii that I took back to the mainland the following week, when the first season of Hawaii Calls wrapped up and we abruptly packed and moved. I would be back, I told my friends. Write. Roddy said he would, but he didn’t. Steve did. Lisa did. But she was starting high school. I tried to accept it: she would never be mine. A big sister, at best. I started ninth grade at my old junior high in L.A. I surfed, I surfed. Ventura, Malibu, even Santa Monica, anywhere my friends and I could get somebody to drive us. I preened here and there about surfing in Hawaii, but I never mentioned Rice Bowl. Nobody was interested in my stories anyway.

  • • •

  THEN WE MOVED BACK, exactly a year after leaving. My dad got a job on a feature called Kona Coast, starring Richard Boone—crusty old haole fisherman gets enmeshed in Polynesian intrigues of some sort. We couldn’t get our old Kulamanu house back, and ended up in another cramped cottage farther down Kahala Avenue, with no good surf nearby.

  The day we arrived, I took the bus to Roddy’s house. The Kaulukukuis had moved. The new tenants had no information.

  The next day, I got my mother to drop me with my board on Diamond Head Road, climbed the trail down to Cliffs, and, to my joy, found Ford out surfing, still on his baby-blue board. He seemed genuinely happy to see me—more talkative than I had ever seen him. Cliffs had been good all spring, he said. Yes, the Kaulukukuis had moved. To Alaska.

  To Alaska?

  Yeah, the Army had transferred Glenn Sr. there. That seemed too crazy, too cruel, to be true. Ford agreed. But that’s what had happened. Glenn, back from the Big Island, had run away again rather than move. But Roddy and John had gone glumly along with their dad and stepmom. They lived on some military base in the snow. This picture refused to come into focus. Where was Glenn, then? Ford made a strange face. In Waikiki, he said. You’ll see him around.

  I did. But not right away.

  Waikiki became my home break. That was partly the season, partly logistics. The surf was good in summer all the way from Tonggs to Ala Moana, and there were lockers at Canoes, a central spot, right on Kalakaua Avenue, where I could keep my board for the price of a combination lock. So I left my board in the outdoor lockers at Canoes and caught the bus or, if my allowance was exhausted, quietly hitchhiked around Diamond Head each morning at dawn. I spent long days learning the breaks off the crowded, hotel-lined beaches.

  Each spot had its locals. I made some friends. Waikiki was a dense nest of hucksterism, tourists, excitement, crime. Even the surfers all seemed to have hustles—some of them legitimate beach jobs, like taking tourists out to ride waves in outrigger canoes or giving them surf “lessons” on giant pink paddleboards; others much shadier, involving gullible tourist girls or friends who worked in the hotels and could get room keys. The kids I met in the water mostly lived in a ghetto called the Waikiki Jungle. Some were haoles, usually living with waitress moms; most were locals with big multiethnic families. There were hot surfers at every break—guys to study and emulate. I asked everybody I surfed with about Glenn Kaulukukui. And everybody said they knew him. He was around, they said. They just saw him last night. Where was he living? Not clear.

  Finally, out at Canoes one afternoon, I heard, “Focking Bill.” It was Glenn, paddling up behind me, laughing, grabbing my rail. He looked older, a little haggard, but dauntless, still himself. He peered at my board. “What’s this?”

  It was a nose-rider—a new model known as the Harbour Cheater, with a “step” in the deck that supposedly made it plane better when one was up on the nose. The board was my most prized possession, earned by endless hours of weed pulling after school. It was tinted—not pigmented—a pale yellow. Transparent tints were the style that year. I even loved the discreet black triangular Harbour sticker. I held my breath while Glenn checked out my board. At last he said, “Nice.” He even seemed to mean it. I exhaled, unnerved by the vastness of my relief.

  He was evasive about his living arrangements. He was working as a waiter, he said, living in the Jungle. Not going to school. He would show me the restaurant where he worked, slip me a teriyaki steak. Roddy was doing okay in Alaska. Cold. They would all be back “bye’m’bye”—but Glenn gave the pidgin expression a darker turn than the singsong treatment it usually got. He actually sneered, not trying to hide his anger toward the Army.

  We surfed together, and I was startled to see that Glenn had improved dramatically. He wasn’t just a good young surfer anymore. Still smooth, he was now a showstopper.

  But I never saw the restaurant where he supposedly worked. Indeed, I rarely saw him on land. We surfed Canoes and Queens and Populars and Number Threes together, and I actually had trouble understanding some of what he was doing on waves, he was surfing so fast, turning so hard, transitioning so quickly, especially off the top. Climbing and dropping, stalling into the tube, squaring up to the breaking lip in a stable, high-velocity crouch. There was something new happening in surfing, and Glenn seemed to be in its vanguard.

  Nose-riding was, I suspected, not part of it. I had become adept at hanging five, hanging ten, cross-stepping up to the tip and back as a wave allowed. I had the right ultra-light frame for it. David Nuuhiwa, the world’s best nose-rider, and one of my heroes, was also tall and thin. But my Harbour Cheater was far from the most radical specialty model being ridden that summer, 1967. There were others, like the Con Ugly, that had sacrificed all other aspects of performance to maximum time on the tip.

  Still, for all its ethereality, its improbability and technical difficulty, I was starting to lose interest in nose-riding. Mixed in with the slow, gentle, outrigger-bearing, tourist-clogged mush at Waikiki, there were shallow reefs, at Kaisers and Threes and even Canoes, that produced, particularly at low tide, hollow waves—waves that created, as they broke, honest-to-God tubes. And I began that summer to find my way into the spinning blue bellies of a few waves, and even to emerge, occasionally, on my feet. Everybody talked about getting “locked in,” but the thing itself, these tube rides, had the quality of revelation. They were always too brief, but their mystery was intense, addictive. You felt like you had stepped through the looking glass for an instant, and you always wanted to go back. The tube, not nose-riding, felt like the future of surfing.

  People said Glenn was on drugs. That seemed plausible. Drugs—marijuana, LSD—were everywhere, especially in Waikiki, most especially in the Jungle. It was the Summer of Love, whose epicenter was San Francisco, and we seemed to get a steady traffic of envoys from there, each bringing new music, lingo, and dope. I knew kids my age who smoked pot. I was too timid to try it myself. And when my little friends and I found ourselves once or twice at parties in tumbledown surfer shacks in the Jungle, where strobe lights wheeled, the Jefferson Airplane thundered, and big guys were probably getting laid in the back rooms, we stole beers and fled. We were only ready for so much experience. I wondered where the hell Glenn lived.

  My parents, as with Kaimuki Intermediate, seemed to know nothing about my demimonde life in Waikiki. But I almost got them involved after Dougie Yamashita stole my surfboard. I was beside myself with rage, fear, frustration. Yamashita, a Canoes fixture and street punk a bit older than me, had asked to borrow my board for a few minutes, then never brought it back. I was persuaded by savvier Waikiki hands to keep adults out of it. Instead, I enlisted a broad-shouldered kid known as Cippy Cipriano to find Dougie and get my board back. Cippy was a hired gun—he would beat up other kids, no explanation required, for five bucks. He surprised me and took my case for free. People said he had other scores to
settle with Dougie. In any event, my beloved yellow Cheater was soon returned, with only a couple of new little scratches. Dougie, I was told, had been on acid when he took it, and should not therefore be held responsible. I didn’t buy that. I was still livid. But then, the next time I saw him, I found I didn’t have the nerve to confront him. This wasn’t junior high school. I didn’t have the In Crowd behind me. Dougie no doubt had a large family full of tough guys, always happy to stomp little haoles. He ignored me, and I returned the favor.

  I saw almost no one from the In Crowd. Steve, still stuck on the Rock, said the gang had broken up. No one, he said, could fill Mike’s shoes. For some reason, we laughed ourselves sick at the image. There had been something clownlike about Mike. I phoned Lisa regularly, but always hung up, mortified, when I heard her voice.

  “Gloria,” by the Irish rock band Them, had been the big song on the local hit parade when I was at Kaimuki Intermediate. We all went around singing it. “G-L-O-R-I-A, Glo-o-o-o-r-ria.” In 1967 the song on the radio in Honolulu was “Brown-Eyed Girl,” by Them’s singer-songwriter, Van Morrison. It wasn’t a big hit, but its lyrics had the kind of Gaelic poetry that killed me in those days, and the tune had a rushing plangency too, almost Island-style. It was an elegy for lost youth, and for years it always made me think of Glenn. The song had something of his fugitive, laughing beauty in it. What I pictured was him remembering Lisa. She was the brown-eyed girl. I didn’t really know what had happened between them, but I idolized them both, and I liked to think that they had once been happy “standing in the sunlight laughing / hiding behind a rainbow’s wall.” But it was typical of me, somehow, to put all this into other people, to romanticize their affairs. And it was typical, too, of the perversity of pop culture to start recycling “Brown-Eyed Girl” decades later as elevator music, supermarket music, until I couldn’t stand to hear it. Every band on earth has covered it. George W. Bush had it on his iPod when he was president.