Oddly, I didn’t mind it. I had reached a stage where I actually felt quicker, better-balanced, more capable than most of the people around me, and I enjoyed weaving through them, calling them off waves, scaring them off waves with sharp turns, snagging waves to myself, driving my Mini-Feather hard through the sweet curves of inside Malibu like a sports car through a racecourse.
The larger satisfactions of the shortboard were to be found elsewhere, away from the crowds. First and foremost were tube rides, or barrels. A shortboard could fit much deeper and tighter inside a wave than a longboard. True barrels—successful passages through the inner chambers of a hollow wave—were suddenly more attainable than they had ever been. At Zuma Beach, Oil Piers, Hollywood-by-the-Sea in Oxnard, anywhere that got hollow, hard-breaking waves, a new code of risk and reward obtained, with a blown mind, in the best sense of that ominous phrase, now a real, happy possibility. “Pulling in”—trying to find the barrel by angling close to the wave face when it broke, rather than angling shoreward, toward the flats—was not without its dangers, to be sure, if one didn’t safely emerge from the tube, which one usually didn’t. Hollow waves normally break on shallow rocks, reefs, and sandbars. Falling off in the heart of a hollow wave can lead—often does lead—to a collision with the bottom. One’s own board also becomes something of an unguided missile.
The barrel disaster I remember most clearly from that first shortboard summer, though, was of a different type. It happened in Mexico, at a remote Baja reefbreak known as K-181. I was camping there with the Beckets, who by then had acquired an old school bus, which they had converted, adding bunks and a kitchen, for backcountry family use. The surf was good-sized, glassy, empty. Bill and I were exploring the performance limits of our tiny new boards. I pulled into a deep, smooth, blue-green barrel, and was straining every nerve toward the sunlight ahead, the sloping shoulder. Just as I thought I was coming out cleanly, there was a horrible chunk, my board stopped dead, and I flew over the nose. It seemed I had run over Becket. From inside the barrel, I never saw him paddling toward my wave, caught inside, trying to punch through. He had seen me disappear, figured I might still be in there somewhere, and quietly abandoned ship. So I had only struck his board, not him. Still, my fin had cut deep through his rail, nearly to the stringer. Our boards were actually stuck together, in a hideous tangle of smashed fiberglass and foam, and we had to struggle to get them apart. The damage was all on his side. He was heartsick, but he was good about it. After all, I had been looking God in the face before he got in my way.
• • •
BOARDMAKERS WERE STUCK with shops full of longboards they couldn’t sell. Some surfers were stuck with new longboards, bought on the eve of the revolution. That was the predicament of two friends of mine. Call them Curly and Moe. All their savings had gone into boards that were now suddenly obsolete—beautiful but embarrassing, no longer presentable at any self-respecting surf spot. Then somebody told us about homeowners’ insurance. A stolen surfboard could be claimed, it was said, and reimbursed at the purchase price, if your parents had homeowners’ insurance. Curly and Moe were fairly sure their parents had it. Nobody was going to steal their boards—they could not have given them away—but maybe, we thought, we could ditch them, report them stolen, and they could collect enough money to buy shortboards. It was worth trying. And so we drove out into the Santa Monica Mountains, far up a fire road, then carried the two boards on a trail deep into the brush until we came to the top of a cliff. There may have been some ritual mumbling. Certainly there were some strong emotions. Moe’s board, in particular, was immaculate—a Steve Bigler signature model, the deck a pale blue tint, the rails a solid copper—and I knew that owning and riding it had been his deepest desire for years. But he and Curly each stepped to the edge of the cliff and hurled their unfashionable boards into space. They hit the rocks far below, cartwheeling, snapping, settling horribly into gnarled manzanita.
I don’t remember if the insurance scam worked. I do know that that mint-condition Bigler, simply left in a garage, would be worth thousands of dollars today. What interests me, though, is what was in my head. I know I saw nothing wrong with insurance fraud, just as I saw nothing wrong with drug smuggling, or with anything else I considered a victimless crime. Draft dodging, still well in the future for me but already upending the lives of the older brothers of friends, I vehemently endorsed. The Vietnam War was wrong, rotten to the core. But the military, the government, the police, big business were all congealing in my view into a single oppressive mass—the System, the Man. These were standard-issue youth politics at the time, of course, and I was soon folding school authorities into the enemy force. And my casual, even contemptuous attitude toward the law was mostly a holdover from childhood, when a large part of glory was defiance and what you could get away with.
But a more conscious, analytic, loosely Marxist disaffection was also taking root in my politics in my midteens. (And disaggregating, intellectually and emotionally, the mass of institutional power—sorting out how things actually worked, beyond how they felt as a whole—would turn out to be the work of many years.) In the meantime, surfing became an excellent refuge from the conflict—a consuming, physically exhausting, joy-drenched reason to live. It also, in its vaguely outlaw uselessness, its disengagement from productive labor, neatly expressed one’s disaffection.
Where was my sense of social responsibility? Not much in evidence. I marched in peace marches. I was still a good student, which really proved nothing except that I liked to read and was hedging my bets. I became a math tutor for a while for a couple of nerdy African American girls in Pacoima, a poor town at the east end of the Valley. I doubt they got much from our sessions. I know I felt like an impostor—a kid their own age playing teacher. My mother, who somehow managed to stay politically active while raising four children, roped me into canvassing door-to-door for Tom Bradley, Sam Yorty’s opponent for mayor, in our precinct in Woodland Hills. Bradley would be, if he won, the first black mayor of L.A., so it felt like a historic election. Bradley polled well in our precinct, and we were optimistic. Then Yorty won the election, and the precinct breakdowns showed that our neighbors had evidently been lying when they told us canvassers that they would vote for Bradley. It was a well-known phenomenon, apparently, among white voters, these voting-booth reversals. Still, I was outraged, and my cynicism about organized politics and the broad mass of what I was learning to call the bourgeoisie deepened.
Robert Kennedy was assassinated, as everyone knows, on the night of the 1968 California primary. I watched the news on a small black-and-white TV, sitting cross-legged on the foot of my girlfriend’s bed. Her name was Charlene. We were fifteen. She was asleep, believing I had left after our evening’s usual heated, inconclusive cuddle. I had stopped, however, to watch the TV after I saw that Kennedy had been shot. It was after midnight and Charlene’s parents were out watching the voting results with friends. They were Republican Party activists. I heard them pull in the driveway and come in the house. I knew that Charlene’s father, who was an older man, always came in to kiss her good night, and I knew, well, the way out her window and how to catfoot it down to the street. Still, I sat there, unthinking yet cruelly resolved, until the bedroom door opened. Her father did not have a heart attack at the sight of me, calmly watching TV in my underwear, though he could have. I snatched up my clothes and dived out the window before he said a word. Charlene’s mother called my mother, and my mother gave me a serious talk about different types of girls, emphasizing the sanctity of “good girls,” such as Charlene, who belonged to some debutante club. I was embarrassed but unrepentant. Charlene and I had never had much to talk about.
I actually spent more nights in those years at Domenic’s house than at my own. Like the Beckets’ perennial beach party in Newport, it was a looser place than the prim, do-your-homework home my parents ran. The Mastrippolitos lived in a big, dark, rambling two-story house that dated from the early days of
the San Fernando Valley, from before the subdivisions like ours came. There were still orange groves across the street. Domenic’s mother, Clara, was an early devotee of right-wing talk radio, and she and I would have blistering arguments about civil rights, the war, Goldwater, communism. She loved William F. Buckley’s TV show, Firing Line. I would watch only when my hero, the actor Robert Vaughn, who was not only the Man from U.N.C.L.E. but was some kind of political scientist, with a PhD from UCLA, came on the show. Vaughn was an articulate liberal—he later published his dissertation, a critical history of Hollywood anticommunism—and in my opinion he demolished the polysyllabic poseur Buckley.
Domenic’s father, Big Dom, didn’t give a damn about anything but sports. He was officially a liquor wholesaler, I think, but he was really a bookmaker. He worked from home, and always had half a dozen TVs and radios going in his den, broadcasting different games and races of special interest. He rarely wore more than his bathrobe, and was constantly distracted, constantly on the phone, scribbling figures, squinting through the smoke from his cigarette. But he would occasionally come out and join in rowdy family games of gin rummy around the dining room table. Some days the family was suddenly rich and needed to spend cash fast—buy a new car, anything. Other times were grim and money was tight, especially after Big Dom got busted and was sent away for a while. But the general atmosphere was, again, loose. Many strays collected around the Mastrippolito house—alcoholic friends of Clara’s with nowhere else to go, hoodlum friends of Pete’s with nowhere else to go. Me. I felt welcome always, even as a deluded commie symp. Domenic’s house was worlds away from my house, where Time and the New Yorker were always neatly stacked and a third slice of bacon in the morning was verboten.
Domenic and me, Mastrippolito family picnic, ca. 1967
• • •
MY FATHER WANTED ME TO write a magazine article. He had taken up photography, and become surprisingly good at it. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising, since he was in the film business and knew all about lenses and cameras. His favorite subjects were his children, and he filled albums with our pictures. He also took some surf shots of me, Domenic, and Becket at Rincon, Secos, and Zuma, and that was where he got the article idea. He saw that I was always glued to the surf mags. He knew I liked to write. If I would just write a story for a surf mag, he would supply the pictures. I tried to explain that the surf mags didn’t care about writing, they cared about pictures, and that he would never in this life take a photograph they would publish—not unless he moved to the North Shore and followed the top surfers everywhere for a couple of winters and got very, very lucky. Nonsense, he said. The article was the thing. If it existed, he could supply adequate pics.
This argument drove me crazy. One reason was my dad’s obtuseness and refusal to listen to me, although I knew I was right. Then there was the way it underlined for me the distance between the ordinary, merely competent surfing that my friends and I were doing and the extraordinary, newsworthy, heroic exploits of the guys one saw in the mags. Mostly, though, it was the extension of another, more general argument between us. My father saw that I was always scribbling in notebooks, writing letters, papers for school. He knew I had been in ninth grade an editor on my junior high’s literary magazine (in the heyday of California public schools, even junior highs had literary magazines), where poems and stories of mine appeared. What I needed to do next, he said, was start writing for real publications. It didn’t matter what it was—sports roundups, ad copy, obits. The point was the discipline, the deadlines. He was thinking, I gathered, of a local newspaper, although I didn’t know if Woodland Hills even had a paper. What he was really thinking about, I guessed, was his own hometown, Escanaba, where he had gotten his start as a cub reporter. His career in journalism had veered into TV and film production, but he still knew how it worked, or believed he did. And he probably did know; I just couldn’t listen. My favorite writers in those days were novelists (Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Norman Mailer!) and poets (William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg!), not journalists. I had no interest in newsrooms. Also, I was petrified of being told that something I wrote was no good. So I wrote nothing for publication, not even for the high school paper.
My father, for all his Depression kid’s workaholic drive, had a dreamy, beachcomber side. He loved to skulk around harbors; my earliest memories of him are full of ships, piers, seagulls. Messing about on boats really was his idea of bliss. Before he was married, he lived on a sailboat anchored in Newport Bay. It was a small, sleek wooden sloop, and I liked to study the black-and-white snaps I found of him at the tiller—eyeing the windline, the luff in the jib, pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth, intent but thrilled, age twenty-two or twenty-three. The story was that my mother’s first condition for getting married was that he move off the boat. It was gone before I came along.
I didn’t share my father’s passion for sailing, but I did love the water, and even saw it, from an early age, as my own medium of escape from dull striving, from landlocked drudgery. I remember a summer day on Catalina Island. We had sailed over, twenty-six miles, on our Cal-20, which was the bargain-basement fiberglass sloop of choice in California at the time. We were moored in Avalon Harbor. The harbor had wonderfully clear water. When a passenger ship known as the Great White Steamer came in from the mainland, local kids would swim out to it and shout for the tourists on deck to throw coins. I was probably eight or nine and I joined them, chasing the dimes and nickels that fell near me, twisting and flashing into the turquoise depths. We stored in our cheeks the coins we snatched as we shouted and battled for more. I remember swimming back to my family’s boat and spitting my haul into my hands in the cockpit. I had enough for a corn dog on shore, maybe even one for Kevin. It was nonsense, but I had this vague idea that I could be completely happy as an idler, even a beggar, around the water. I wonder if my father saw that, and if it worried him because he had some of it too.
In reality, he had built a good balance between an endlessly demanding job and a famously bankrupting hobby, sailing, and had done so on a tight budget, without sacrificing time with his family. He became a bit of a tyrant, it was true, a weekend Bligh at the helm, when things went wrong, which they regularly did. He and Kevin and I once pitchpoled a Lehman 10 after going over the falls backward on a freakishly huge wave at a normally placid boat-launch spot called Carpinteria Beach. The mast spiked the bottom, snapped, and went through the hull. The three of us were thrown like bucked-off bull riders into the rigging. While the wreckage washed in, Kevin, who was four or five, immediately started diving to the bottom, still wearing sneakers, to retrieve shiny objects like Dad’s silver-plated lighter. I can still see his expression of triumphant delight each time he surfaced with some lost treasure.
What could rightly have worried my dad about me and surfing was the special brand of monomania, antisocial and ill-balanced, that a serious commitment to surfing nearly always brought with it. Surfing was still something that one did—that I did—with friends, but the club thing, the organized-sports part, was fading fast. I no longer dreamed about winning contests, as I had dreamed about pitching for the Dodgers. The newly emerging ideal was solitude, purity, perfect waves far from civilization. Robinson Crusoe, Endless Summer. This was a track that led away from citizenship, in the ancient sense of the word, toward a scratched-out frontier where we would live as latter-day barbarians. This was not the daydream of the happy idler. It went deeper than that. Chasing waves in a dedicated way was both profoundly egocentric and selfless, dynamic and ascetic, radical in its rejection of the values of duty and conventional achievement.
I slipped away from my family at an early age, and surfing was my escape route, my absence excuse. I couldn’t go to Ventura because I had a ride to Malibu, where the waves were sure to be better. I would sleep at Domenic’s. I couldn’t go sailing because I had a ride to Rincon, or Newport, or Secos, and there was a swell. My parents let me go with so little protest
, it seems strange now. But it wasn’t strange then. Child rearing had entered, at least in the suburbs where we lived, an era of extreme laissez-faire. Of course, I could, up to a point, take care of myself, and my parents had three younger ones to worry about. My sister, Colleen, ended up being the sailor from our generation.
• • •
THE DREAM OF back-to-nature surfing solitude had a predictable by-product: rank nostalgia. A high percentage of the stories I wrote in my journals involved time travel, most often back to an earlier California. Imagine going back to the days of the Chumash Indians, or the Spanish missions, if you could just take a modern surfboard with you. Malibu had been breaking exactly like this, unridden, for centuries, eons. You would probably be worshipped as a god by the locals once they saw you surf, and they would feed you, and you could ride great waves with perfect concentration—uncontested ownership, accumulating mastery—for the rest of your days. There were a couple of photos in Surfing Guide to Southern California that illustrated, to my mind, just how narrow a margin in time we had all missed paradise by. One was of Rincon, taken in 1947 from the mountain behind the point on a sheet-glass, ten-foot day. The caption, unnecessarily, invited the reader to note “a tantalizing absence of people.” The other was of Malibu in 1950. It showed a lone surfer streaking across an eight-foot wall, with members of the public playing obliviously on the sand in the foreground. The surfer was Bob Simmons, a brilliant recluse who essentially invented the modern finned surfboard. He drowned while surfing alone in 1954.
Barbarian Days Page 10
