Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  Author, Rincon, 1967

  But the time came, eventually, for me to get a higher-performance board than my clunky Sweet. Steve Painter weighed in. It would have to be a new board, he said, and it would have to be a Larry Felker. Painter and I never surfed together. I still listened to his stories about tearing apart ten-foot Topanga, which was a pointbreak south of Malibu that I had not surfed mainly because the coast there was closed to the public. Somehow Steve and his friends had become, at least in his stories, mainstays of the elite Topanga crew, and the waves there were, according to him, often huge and always superb. For me, our lopsided friendship in the neighborhood had ended one summer night when a bunch of us were sleeping out on the lawn in someone’s backyard and, to the horrified delight of our companions, he urinated in my mouth. That was a torture too far. I stopped hanging around with him.

  But I still deferred to him in certain matters of surf cool, and so I went to see Felker, who had the only surf shop in Woodland Hills. Felker was not a well-known shaper, but he did make beautiful boards. My parents agreed to pay half—this would be my thirteenth birthday present—and so I ordered a slate-blue 9'3", with a white glass fin and an inlaid wooden tailblock. It would take months to deliver. I went to work cutting lawns and pulling weeds for money.

  • • •

  WHAT HAPPENED TO RICH WOOD? A door opened, a door closed—my unconcern seems strange only now. A new school was built and I was sent there on the basis of my address; he was not, and I never saw him again. My family continued to go to Ventura. The Beckets, on a rare foray north, visited us there—fourteen people piled into a two-bedroom place.

  My new surf partner was Domenic Mastrippolito, who was as formidable as his name. He was the uncrowned king of our class at the new school. He had an older brother, Pete, who was dark-haired and rowdy—Domenic was blond and calm—and it was Pete and his roughneck ninth-grade friends who first brought me to Domenic’s attention. Like cockfighting aficionados, Pete and his gang enjoyed sending younger boys into battle. They even bet on the outcomes, it was said. When I was twelve, they roped me into fighting a skinny, snaggletoothed badass named Eddie Turner. The bout was held in a three-walled handball court at school, with a bloodthirsty crowd forming the fourth wall. There was no escape, and the fight went on approximately forever, with no one’s bloodlust left unslaked. I was the underdog, but somehow prevailed. And my name was thereby attached, in certain circles, for years to Eddie Turner’s, although he went on to much bigger things, like prison, while I returned to obscurity. Domenic, when we became friends later, would tease me about Eddie Turner—all the money Pete had lost on that fight, and how poor Turner was never the same.

  It was odd becoming Domenic’s friend. He was the best athlete in our class—fast, broad-chested, strong. Girls found him painfully handsome. When we got older, I heard him compared in art class to Michelangelo’s David. And he had that sort of masculine beauty, even some of that hero’s presence. I felt, popularity-wise, quite out of my league. But Domenic also surfed. Through Pete, he had access to big guys who had driver’s licenses, which meant he could get to the beach. And yet it was obvious that the guys in Pete’s crowd weren’t serious surfers, and that Domenic was included on their jaunts basically as a mascot. So when he started coming with my family to Ventura, and trying to find his place in the C Street lineup, it was as if his real surfing career was just starting. He was keen. He didn’t have the ballroom dancer’s talent of a Rich Wood, nor any of my skinny-kid nimbleness on the deck. He was more like a hard-hitting linebacker on a surfboard. But he took his spot around the driftwood fires, and in the thirty-second hot-shower drills. I found my balance beside his charisma by becoming a niche comedian, specializing in self-mockery. I made fun of myself and was rewarded by his sharp, brayed guffaws. We were inseparable for years.

  It was to Domenic that I wrote daily letters after we first moved to Hawaii.

  • • •

  RECALLING ALL THIS, I’m struck by how much violence defined my childhood. Nothing lethal, nothing horrifying, but basic to daily life in a way that seems archaic now. Bigger guys bullied, even tortured, smaller guys. It didn’t occur to me to complain. We boxed in the street; adults didn’t bat an eye. I didn’t actually like to fight—certainly not to lose—and I don’t think I’ve been in a serious fight since I was fourteen. But it was so much the Middle American (not to mention the Hawaiian) norm when I was a boy that I never gave it a critical thought. There was no gruesome violence on TV then—and no video games of any sort—but the cartoons we watched on Saturday mornings were old-school sock-’em-ups and we blithely carried that antic aggression into the world. I had a friend when I was very small, Glen, whom I could “take” in wrestling. He got so frustrated that he got his mother to buy him a can of spinach, which he ate straight from the can, just like Popeye did when he needed strength. We wrestled immediately. I won, but I told Glen that he definitely seemed stronger, which was not true.

  It wasn’t all antic, of course. I watched one or two very bloody fights between older guys—donnybrooks even worse than my brawl with Eddie Turner. They had a pornographic fascination. Such fights were theater of cruelty, devoid of empathy among the watchers—a distilled, super-dramatic version of the merciless ostracism to which certain kids were subjected. Mobthink. Lurch. My politics—which are my father’s, basically: a hatred of bullies—have their roots in the horrors of those adolescent days, and in the searing glimpses of myself I caught.

  Straight-up carnage had a fascination that was different, less social. Ricky Townsend’s parents had a book—an art book, I think—that contained a painting of a soldier in World War II at the moment his body was destroyed by a shell. He was still running, his eyes wide in agony, with his limbs and torso just a waterfall of blood. A group of us would sneak into the room where the book was kept. A guard would be posted while we studied the forbidden image. It was shatteringly intense, a shame-filled treat. So this was what the moment of death looked like. We played army all the time, with little plastic G.I.s. But the reality of war, which some of our fathers knew firsthand, was never broached with us. It was a secret that the adults kept from us, for good reason.

  Some dads were brutes, ready to turn their full strength against their kids. Not mine, thankfully. But corporal punishment was still the rule, at home and at school, even at the Saturday catechism classes I was obliged to take, where the nuns brought a wooden ruler down hard on trembling, outstretched knuckles. At school it was “swats” from the boys’ vice principal—grab your ankles, try not to soil yourself or cry. My fourth-grade teacher, who had been in the military, as she often reminded us, pulled my ears so hard when she was annoyed that she left me feeling deformed. Again, it never occurred to me to complain. Nobody, as far as I knew, thought that what she was doing was wrong.

  At home, because my father worked long hours, most of the physical discipline fell to my mother. She sometimes threatened to kill us, usually while she was driving—that would shut us up—but the beatings she gave us were not especially wild or brutal. Her spankings hurt less and less, in fact, as I got older. And so she started using a thin belt, then a thicker belt, then a wire coat hanger—those hurt more. I never fought back, but these were primal power struggles, quite painful emotionally for me, and probably for her too. Still, I thought they were normal. Irish Catholic normal, anyway. But then there came a day, when I was probably twelve, when my mother could no longer make me cry. She wore herself out. I would not whimper or cower. She wept, as I recall. And that was the end of it. Nobody hit me again.

  Not long after that, what was considered normal changed. Kevin got his full share of beatings, I think, but Colleen much less, and Michael none at all. The social consensus on hitting kids had been collapsing in America for a while. Dr. Benjamin Spock’s revolutionary Baby and Child Care, published in 1946, was my mother’s go-to advice manual—Dr. Spock himself was one of her heroes—and its popula
rity had been slowly shifting public opinion against spanking. When the culture wars of the ’60s heated up, Spock was prominent on the antiwar left, and beating children came to seem, at some point, to many people, including my parents, medieval. I liked to tell myself that the old-fashioned thrashings I got had been good for me, that they had made me tough, and I half believed it. Mr. Responsible always had a constructive take. Certainly I never blamed my parents. But their behavior was, as I see it now, not a small part of the ambient low-grade violence I lived in as a midcentury kid.

  Surfing had, and has, a steel thread of violence running through it. I don’t mean the roughnecks one encounters in the water—or, very occasionally, on land, challenging one’s right to surf some precious spot. The displays of strength, skill, aggression, local knowledge, and deference that establish a working hierarchy in the lineup—a permanent preoccupation at every popular break—are a simian dance of dominance/submission that’s usually performed without any physical violence. No, I mean the beautiful violence of breaking waves. It is a constant. In small waves and weaker waves, it’s mild, benign, unthreatening, under control. It’s just the great ocean engine that propels us and allows us to play. That mood changes as the waves get more powerful. Surfers call power “juice,” and the juice becomes, in serious waves, the critical element, the essence of what we are out there to find, to test ourselves with—to recklessly engage or cravenly avoid. My own relationship with this substance, with this steel thread, has become only more vivid over time.

  • • •

  THE SECOND TIME we lived in Honolulu, in that come-on-baby-light-my-fire summer of 1967, Domenic flew over to visit, staying with my family. We surfed Waikiki together. I tried to show him the sights. I even took him out to look at Rice Bowl. He had heard my tales of the Sunset Beach of the South Shore. We sat on our boards at Tonggs on a brilliant morning, looking across the channel. Suddenly, a clean set stood up and broke at Rice Bowl. It didn’t look particularly big—there wasn’t much swell that day. Domenic suggested we paddle over there. I said no. I was too afraid of the place. He went without me. A few more sets came through. Domenic lined it up well, considering that he was out alone and had never seen the spot before. He rode several waves without falling. It was six feet at the most. I had surfed bigger waves at Cliffs, even some at California Street. Domenic and I would ride much bigger waves in the years ahead, including more than a few at the real Sunset Beach. Still, I sat there, immobilized by terror, in the channel at Tonggs. I knew that I was failing a basic test of nerve. Defeats, humiliations—craven avoidance—burn into memory so much more deeply, at least for me, than their opposites.

  THREE

  THE SHOCK OF THE NEW

  California, 1968

  THE NEW THING IN SURFING—THAT WHICH GLENN KAULUKUKUI had seemed to me, in Waikiki, to be in the vanguard of—was, it turned out, the shortboard revolution. By luck, I saw its foremost progenitor in action the following winter, just before the underground movement surfaced. He was an Australian named Bob McTavish. I saw him at Rincon, a pointbreak north of Ventura that I had started surfing with Domenic when we could cadge a ride that far. Rincon, now known kitschily as the Queen of the Coast, was then known simply as the best wave in California, a long, hollow, wintertime right of astonishing quality. It was a big day, low tide, late afternoon, and we were resting on the rocks in the cove when somebody shouted and pointed to a brawny set standing up against the sky out at Second Point. Few people surfed Second Point, also known as Indicator, at that size. The great wave at Rincon was First Point. One paddled up to Second Point to escape the crowd on small days, settling for inferior waves. There were stories about huge perfect days when it was possible to surf all the way from Second Point through First Point and down to the cove, some eight hundred high-speed yards, but I had certainly never seen it done.

  Now someone was doing it. He was doing it, moreover, on a board that seemed to have jets installed on the rails. My eye actually had trouble following the bursts of speed that each banking bottom turn produced. The rider would be suddenly ten yards ahead of where he was supposed to be, according to the physics of surfing as I understood them. He was getting comparable acceleration off his top turns. The result was that he was making it through long, heavy sections that would normally have ended a ride. It felt like, each time I blinked, some film in my head skipped, and the surfer reappeared farther down the line than he should have been. If you read some of the early published descriptions of surfing—Jack London’s and Mark Twain’s, each occasioned by visits to Hawaii, are the most often quoted—you’ll find them full of clumsy efforts to render action that was too quick, complex, and foreign to the observer’s eye to make any visual sense. That was how it felt to watch McTavish thread that eight-foot wave at Rincon. He rode through the First Point takeoff zone, past the crowd, as if it were just another section to outwit, and continued, blazing turn after blazing turn, all the way to the cove.

  There are few corny Colosseum moments in surfing—it’s not that kind of sport—but I remember people running across the beach, me among them, to greet McTavish as he reached the sand. We mainly wanted to see the board. It was not like any surfboard I had seen. It was outlandishly short by the standards of the day, and the bottom was V-shaped, with two chines getting steadily deeper and more pronounced toward the tail. I had no words—not even “V-bottom”—to describe what I was seeing, and no notion who McTavish was. He was short, grinning, powerfully built. All he said was “G’day” as he trotted past, starting the long jog back to Second Point, his homemade monstrosity under his arm.

  Nothing was the same afterward. Within months the surf mags were full of V-bottoms and other radical new designs, all dramatically shorter and lighter than the boards people had been riding for decades. The revolution was emanating from Australia and Hawaii, its gurus McTavish and a couple of Americans, George Greenough and Dick Brewer. Their test riders were some of the world’s top surfers, most notably Nat Young, an Australian world champ. But California, then still the sport’s imperial capital, eagerly converted en masse to the new faith. Surfing itself changed, with the speed and ultra-maneuverability of the new board. Nose-riding was a dead letter overnight. (Ditto drop-knee cutbacks.) Tube rides and hard, flowing, short-radius turns, banking vertically off the lip and riding always as close as possible to the breaking part of the wave—these weren’t exactly new ideas, but they were all newly elevated as the goals of progressive surfing, and they were all being realized at levels never seen before.

  It was 1968. Across the West, with its restless youth, a great many things—sex, society, authority—were being rethought or sharply questioned, and the little world of surfing rose, in its way, to the insurrectionary moment. The shortboard revolution was inseparable from the zeitgeist: hippie culture, acid rock, hallucinogens, neo–Eastern mysticism, the psychedelic aesthetic. The peace movement, just entering its boom period nationally, never developed a coherent surfers’ wing (the environmental movement has been another story), but the world of surfing became, however incoherently, and pace Francis Ford Coppola, broadly antiwar. Many surfers dodged the draft. Even famous surfers, guys who could hardly paddle out anywhere without being photographed, but who were now wanted by the authorities, tried to go underground.

  By spring I had my first shortboard. It came from a big boardmaker named Dewey Weber, in Venice Beach, who was scrambling, like every boardmaker, to meet the new demand. The model I got was called a Mini-Feather. It was bulbous and primitive, but for the moment it was state-of-the-art. Mine was 7'0". I could carry it by the rail, in one hand. I put my hard-earned second Harbour Cheater, which hardly had a ding yet, up in the garage rafters and never rode it again. At fifteen, with a solid command of the basics, I was at a good age to make the switch to shortboards. I was still very light, but strong enough to put the Mini-Feather up on a rail, hit the lip without losing control, and make the late drops that a small board, with its poor flotation
and slow paddling speed, required. (Longboards, as they were suddenly being called, float higher in the water because of their greater foam volume, and thus paddle much faster.) I knew more surfers now who were old enough to drive, and so I started ducking out of family weekends in Ventura—California Street was a bit slow and mushy for shortboards—and surfing the south-swell spots closer to Los Angeles. Secos, County Line, First Point Malibu.

  First Point Malibu was the center ring of the surfing circus, and had been so since the Gidget days of the late ’50s. It was ridiculously crowded even when it was terrible. On good days it was a beautiful wave, a long right mechanical pointbreak, peeling along a tapering rock shelf all the way to the sand. There were a few top-flight surfers who still surfed Malibu, despite the crowds, but most had fled. The undisputed king of the spot when I first surfed there was Miki Dora, a darkly handsome, scowling misanthrope with a subtle style perfectly suited to the wave. He ran over people who got in his way and scorned the mindless surfing masses in well-turned quotes in the mags, all while flogging his signature-model surfboard, Da Cat, in adjacent ads. But Da Cat was a longboard. With the arrival of the shortboard, many surf legends were shoved rudely into irrelevance. First Point Malibu became even more of a madhouse than before. With longboards, it had been possible, at least in theory, for a small number of surfers to share a wave. The frantic, quick-turning style required by shortboards, their need to be always in or very near the breaking part of the wave, meant that there was really room for only one guy on a wave now. The result was bedlam.