Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  Surfing Guide to Southern California didn’t trade in nostalgia, however. It was too optimistic and hardheaded for that. The book was a meticulous, thoroughly practical breakdown of nearly three hundred surf spots between Point Conception and the Mexican border. It was thickly illustrated with surf shots, aerial views of the coast, and maps, and was dense with specific information about swell directions, tidal effects, underwater hazards, and parking regulations. But its greatest pleasures were in its clear, dry prose, its sage judgments about the quality of different breaks, its little puns and inside jokes, and its discreet but deeply felt enthusiasms. Obscure local heroes like Dempsey Holder, who had been riding alone, for decades, a spooky deepwater big-wave spot called Tijuana Sloughs, hard by the Mexican border, quietly got their due from the guide’s authors, Bill Cleary and David Stern. And Cleary and Stern kept a sense of wry perspective in the face of the contemporary mess. Their caption for a shot of a large swarm of kooks struggling to ride the same six-inch ripple: “Surfing, an individual sport, in which lonely man pits his hard-won skill against the wild forces of the mighty ocean . . . Malibu, west swell.”

  • • •

  DOMENIC’S GRANDPARENTS had made a barnful of wine from a vineyard that no longer existed, and it was all turning to vinegar in blue plastic Purex jugs in the barn behind Domenic’s house. We took to helping ourselves to a jug on weekend nights, drinking it slug for gasping slug in the dark on the edge of a storm culvert behind the barn. The warm valley night would turn woozy, hilarious. I loved Domenic’s imitations of his addled, goodhearted grandpa, whose favorite exclamation was, for some reason, “Murphy, Murphy, Murphy!” I once tried to make my own contribution to our drinking cache by raiding my parents’ liquor cabinet, pouring half an inch from each bottle into a milk carton. Never mind that I was mixing bourbon with crème de menthe with gin—the tiny individual thefts would never be noticed. And they weren’t. But Domenic and I got sick as dogs from the concoction. Only the loose supervision at his house let us get away with our heaving and hangovers.

  Not that drinking was considered a big deal there. Wine flowed at meals, European-style. The contrast with my house was, as usual, stark. My parents were both, for reasons noted, very light, cautious, social drinkers. They had plenty of friends who could put it away, and their liquor cabinet was always stocked, but their kids never got even a whiff of wine. Half noticing their abstemiousness as a teenager, I marked it as just another symptom of their “uptightness.”

  But it was marijuana that drew the line between us and them, that bright generational line between the cool and the uncool. My timidity about pot, as I first encountered it in Hawaii, vanished when, a few months later, during my first year of high school, it hit Woodland Hills. We scored our first joints from a friend of Pete’s. The quality of the dope was terrible—Mexican rag weed, people called it—but the quality of the high was so wondrous, so nerve-end-opening, so cerebral compared to wine’s effects, that I don’t think we ever cracked another Purex jug. The laughs were harder and finer. And music that had been merely good, the rock and roll soundtrack of our lives, turned into rapture and prophecy. Jimi Hendrix, Dylan, the Doors, Cream, late Beatles, Janis Joplin, the Stones, Paul Butterfield—the music they were making, with its impact and beauty amplified a hundredfold by dope, became a sacramental rite, simply inexplicable to noninitiates.

  And the ceremonial aspects of smoking pot—scoring from the million-strong network of small-time dealers, cleaning “lids,” rolling joints, sneaking off to places (hilltops, beaches, empty fields) where it seemed safe to smoke, in tight little outlaw groups of two or three or four, and then giggling and grooving together—all of this took on a strong tribal color. There was the “counterculture” out in the greater world, with all its affinities and inspirations, but there were also, more immediately, the realignments in our personal lives. Kids, including girls, who were “straight” became strangers. What the hell was a debutante, anyway? As for adults—it became increasingly difficult not to buy that awful Yippie line about not trusting anyone over thirty. How could parents, teachers, coaches, possibly understand the ineluctable weirdness of every moment, fully perceived? None of them had been out on Highway 61.

  Becket, living down in ultra-conservative Orange County, got the word slightly later than we did in suburban L.A. He had grown eight inches in a year and was suddenly, at six foot five, a varsity high school basketball player. His teammates were a crew-cut, God-fearing lot, and they didn’t believe me when I told them, on a visit to Newport, that pot, the evil weed that was then all over the news, was also in their upscale beach town. If they gave me ten bucks and a ride to the pier, I said, I could score them an ounce in an hour. They called my bluff, and I got them an ounce in half an hour. We got loaded in the point guard’s parents’ house on Lido Island, and I went home the next morning.

  Two months later, asleep in the little room that I shared with Kevin and Michael, I heard a tapping at the window. I looked outside, and there was Becket. It was a Friday night, and he and his friends had a house for the weekend, he whispered, no adults around—I should come with him back to Newport. His friends were waiting down the driveway in a car. This midnight visit, this proposal—the situation was unprecedented. But what snapped me awake was Becket’s shirt. It was diaphanous—very thin and rather shiny in the moonlight. The shirt was so utterly not him, it told me everything I needed to know. Apparently it had been a long two months on the Newport Harbor High basketball team. The mass conversion to stonerdom by the players struck me at first as funny. Later, though, as some of them crashed out of the program, and even out of school, I was not proud of my role, however incidental, in the collision between some of Newport’s teenagers and their families and the global social shock waves of 1968.

  It wasn’t so different at my school, William Howard Taft High. The campus was already riven by Kulturkampf, mainly because of Vietnam. Team sports were effectively out of the question for students opposed to the war—the coaches were the most rock-ribbed members of a generally conservative, pro-war faculty and administration, and they were not shy about ragging on kids they suspected of being commies. I had two English teachers, Mr. Jay and Mrs. Ball, who changed my life’s course by introducing me to the difficult pleasures of Melville, Shakespeare, Eliot, Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Dylan Thomas, and, most devastatingly, James Joyce. I saw now, in Ventura, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea. The hobos from the old fairgrounds at C Street now came scuttling out of Dubliners. I became, in my own mind, Stephen Dedalus, privately sworn to silence, exile, cunning. (Regrettably, my hero was afraid of the ocean.) Los Angeles was a pallid stand-in for Ireland. But it had its own cultural bogs and treacheries.

  I did go out for the track team, strangely, in the tenth grade, competing as a pole vaulter. Vaulters formed a little team within the team. The coaches knew little about vaulting, and were not about to risk their necks trying to demonstrate good technique. So we basically taught ourselves. We were excused from the grueling fitness drills the rest of the team performed, and our practices, we were often told, bore an unfortunate resemblance to long, lazy bull sessions. It was something about the vast amounts of lounging we did on the big foam-filled turquoise cushions that served as pits. Vaulting was a glory sport in those days, and vaulters were considered prima donnas. In fact, the flashy, antiauthoritarian vaulters were suspiciously regarded, often with reason, by the coaches and their more loyal athletes as Thoreau-reading, dope-smoking, John Carlos–loving hippies. I loved vaulting—the smooth upward snap and twist when you got the pole-plant right (not the rule with me), the never-long-enough moment when you threw back your arms, flicking the pole back the way you came, at the apex of the vault. But I did not go out for track again the next year.

  More important, even to me, Domenic did not go out for football. In the tenth grade, he and I had been split up—sent to different high schools because of our respective addresses. He went to Canoga
Park High, where Pete, who was a football player, had been ballyhooing the arrival of his fast, brawny little brother. So Domenic played. He was a halfback, and he liked the game, but practices were long, and the conditioning season started in summer. Football was eating up time when he could be surfing. Also, he and I missed each other. When he told me that he was transferring to Taft, I was delighted. But I was unnerved when he said that the main reason he was transferring was me. I would have done the same for him, I think, had it occurred to me. Still, I worried I might disappoint him. In any case, he said, he was finished with football. Life was too short to spend another day running wind sprints for the Man.

  With Caryn Davidson, in front of Kobatake’s rooming house, Lahaina, 1971

  FOUR

  ’SCUSE ME WHILE I KISS THE SKY

  Maui, 1971

  “YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR PROBLEM IS? YOU DON’T LIKE YOUR OWN kind.”

  This blunt assessment of me came from Domenic in 1971. Our respective politics, it seemed, were diverging. We were eighteen. It was springtime. We were camping on a headland at the west end of Maui, sleeping in a grassy basin under an outcrop of lava rocks. A little pandanus grove helped block the view of our campsite from the pineapple fields up on the terrace. This was private property, and we didn’t want the farmworkers to spot us. We were raiding their fields at night, trying to find ripe fruit they had missed. We always seemed to be camping on somebody else’s property in those days. Here, we were waiting for a wave.

  It was late in the season, but not too late for Honolua Bay to break. That was our hope at least. Every morning at first light we would stare out across the Pailolo Channel, toward Molokai, trying to will the north swells to appear, their dark lines latticing the warm gray waters. It felt like something was stirring, but that could have been wishfulness on our part. After sunrise, we hiked around the point into the bay, studying the shorebreak against the red cliffs. Did it seem stronger than yesterday’s?

  Our lives, Domenic’s and mine, had been like an unraveling braid for the past couple of years. The proximate cause of our disengagement was a girl: Caryn, my first serious girlfriend. She and I had found each other as high school seniors. My plans to bum around Europe with Domenic after high school became plans to bum around Europe with Caryn. We all ended up going, but we didn’t see each other over there as much as we had planned. Then I went back to start college, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Caryn came with me. Domenic stayed on in Italy, living with relatives in the village where his father was born, in the eastern Appenines, working in a vineyard, learning Italian. (Domenic liked his own kind fine. I envied that.)

  Now Domenic was living, for reasons that undoubtedly made sense then, in a converted milk truck at a beach park on Oahu—scraping by on odd jobs in paradise. I was on my freshman spring break, and my family was living in Honolulu again, so Domenic and I had reconvened there. Both of us had, like everyone who grew up on surf mags, dreamed since childhood of surfing Honolua Bay. But it was odd, in a way, that we were here, waiting on waves, since we had both quit surfing years before.

  It happened when I turned sixteen. It wasn’t a clean break, or even a conscious decision. I just let other things get in the way: car, money to keep car running, jobs to make money to keep car running. The same thing happened with Domenic. I got a job pumping gas at a Gulf station on Ventura Boulevard, in Woodland Hills, for an irascible Iranian named Nasir. It was the first job I had that wasn’t devoted exclusively to the purpose of paying for a surfboard. Domenic also worked for Nasir. We both got old Ford Econoline vans, surf vehicles par excellence, but we rarely had time to surf. Then we both fell under the spell of Jack Kerouac and decided we needed to see America coast-to-coast. I got a job working graveyard shifts—more hours, more money—at a grubby little twenty-four-hour station on a rough corner out in the flatlands of the San Fernando Valley. It was a place where Chicano low riders would try to steal gas at 5 a.m.—Hey, let’s rip off the little gringo. I got a second job parking cars at a restaurant, taking “whites” (some kind of speed—ten pills for a dollar) to stay awake. The restaurant’s patrons were suburban mobsters, good tippers, but my boss was a Chinese guy who thought we should stand at attention between customers. He badgered and finally fired me for reading and slouching. Domenic was also stacking up money. When the school year ended, we pooled our savings, quit our gas station jobs, said good-bye (I assume) to our parents, and set off, zigzagging east, in Domenic’s van. We were sixteen, and we didn’t even take our boards.

  We got as far south as Mazatlán, as far east as Cape Cod. We dropped acid in New York City. We subsisted on Cream of Wheat, cooked on a Coleman camping stove. It was 1969, the summer of Woodstock, but the flyers for the festival plastered around Greenwich Village mentioned an admission charge. That sounded lame to us—some kind of artsy-craftsy weekend for old people—so we skipped it. (My newsman’s intuition, never great, was then unborn.) I kept uninteresting journals. Domenic, a nascent photographer, was in his Walker Evans period, shooting white street kids in South Philly, runaway girls asleep on the banks of the Mississippi. Years later, Domenic’s first wife, a worldly Frenchwoman, refused to believe that we slept chastely side by side all summer in that van. We did, though, and our friendship flourished in the daily onslaught of the unfamiliar. I felt less compelled to self-mock; Domenic seemed relieved to be rid of the popularity that defined him at school. We relied on each other completely; the perils and the laughs were shared. In Chicago we met a scary guy who we later decided must have been Charles Manson. I got served my first drink in a bar—it was a Tom Collins—in New Orleans. I read Edith Hamilton’s translation of The Odyssey propped on the steering wheel while driving across North Dakota. We got too close to grizzly bears in the Canadian Rockies. We surfed only twice that summer—once on borrowed boards in Mexico, and once in East Coast slop in Jacksonville Beach, Florida.

  This is what I mean by quitting surfing. When you surf, as I then understood it, you live and breathe waves. You always know what the surf is doing. You cut school, lose jobs, lose girlfriends, if it’s good. Domenic and I didn’t forget how to surf—it’s like riding a bike that way, at least when you’re young. We just diversified, and I, for my part, plateaued. That is, I had been steadily improving since I started, and at fifteen, while hardly a contender, I was a little ripper. My rapid progress stopped when I got interested in the rest of the world. We didn’t surf in Europe. Santa Cruz, a beach town in Northern California, has good waves, so I had been getting in the water, but on my own schedule, not the ocean’s. The old nothing-else-truly-matters obsession was in abeyance.

  • • •

  HONOLUA BAY was about to change that. We didn’t hear the swell start to hit in the night because the trades were offshore, blowing the rumble of waves striking the headland’s boulders back out to sea. But Domenic, taking a piss at first light, saw the surf. “William! We got waves.” He called me William only on serious occasions, or as part of a joke. This was a serious occasion. We had run out of food the night before, and had been planning a run to Lahaina, the nearest town, which was twelve miles away, for provisions. That plan was postponed indefinitely. We scavenged for nutrients—gnawing old mango rinds, scraping out soup cans, choking down bread previously rejected as moldy. We grabbed our boards and jogged around the point, screaming “Fuck!” and hooting nervously at each gray set that passed the headland, darkening on the final turn into the bay.

  We couldn’t tell how big it was, even after we got there. The bay itself was unrecognizable, at least to us, who had only seen it flat. There were waves breaking clear from the point to the cove, hundreds of yards, waves so beautiful that, as they hurled themselves into the offshores, they made me a little queasy. But this was not a classic pointbreak, in the mold of a Rincon. There were big sections, especially outside, that looked unmakable, and a rock bluff maybe fifty feet high that stuck out into the surf line, with a narrow beach that ha
d formed just above it, at the bottom of the cliffs. There was certainly no obvious place to paddle out. Too impatient to hike all the way to the palm grove at the bottom of the bay and paddle from there, we picked our way down a steep trail to the narrow beach between the point and the bluff. The surf looked solid but not huge. The sun was still not up. We waited for a lull, dancing in the broken coral rocks rolling in the shorebreak. Then we sprint-paddled into the lines of whitewater, angling away from the point but keeping a wary eye on the bluff just downcoast.

  We made it out to clear water. Slapped fully awake by the few sharp blows of whitewater received on the push-through, we paddled around in circles, trying to see the reef in the still-faint light. Where was the takeoff spot? We seemed to be straight off the big bluff, but the water depth was hard to gauge. Faint boils appeared around us as small sets rolled through, exploding against the cliffs. Then the first real set arrived. It came straight to us. Meaning: the waves, visible from half a mile off, first stood up and broke near the point, reeling but uneven, and then formed a long, unmakable wall, at the downcoast end of which was a broad, heartstopping hump—a great bowl section that feathered for a good while before it broke. And that was where we were waiting, straight off the bluff, in the middle of the big bowl section. It was the prime takeoff spot.

  We each caught a wave in that first set, each pushing bug-eyed over a heaving ledge. The drop was challenging, the acceleration intense—there was a moment of unwanted weightlessness—but the faces were smooth and there was actually time, in the course of a drawn-out, skittering first bottom turn, to get a good look down the line. And the wave tapered cleanly away from the takeoff section, flawless as a nautilus shell. It was exactly what you hoped to see after such a drop. We each rode far down into the bay. The wave, as it stood up along the reef, bent sharply toward the cliff but never seemed to get any closer to it, speeding up across shallow slabs, slowing down in deeper water, then speeding up again, getting glassier and smaller all the way, though still with a light offshore plume. Domenic must have been on the second one, because I remember pulling out far inside and seeing him half crouched in a peeling, gray-blue hook, dragging one hand in the face.