Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  Another last-wave-of-the-day, this one at the end of the longest single session we had on Tavarua. The surf was big—this may have been August 24, the day my journal said was double-overhead—and we had abandoned our established policy of surfing only at high tide. The wave was ridable at lower tides, perhaps even at low tide, provided it was big enough, we saw now. I had been out nearly all day, from sketchy midtide when only the brawniest turquoise screamers cleared the reef by a reasonable margin, through peak tide and the peak of the swell, when the biggest sets actually swung wide, breaking out so far and in such deep water that they sometimes lost the reef and shouldered, rumbling straight in for five or ten seconds, big solid walls of foam with no breaking hook, until they felt the reef again and the walls stood up and resumed their wailing progress. A couple of sets had scared me, not because I took any especially bad beatings, or because I was held underwater extra-long, but simply because the waves were now stepladdering into serious size and I had brief, unpleasant visions of finding something from another realm behind the big wave I was already scratching to get over. Maybe we had no idea what this place was capable of, and the price for all this joy and good luck was about to be exacted? It was the first time I had been afraid of the waves on Tavarua. My fears were unnecessary. Nothing too heavy came. Instead, I caught and rode so many waves, through four or five distinct phases of the day, that I felt absolutely saturated with good fortune, and more deeply connected to the rhythms of the wave than ever before.

  And so came that last wave. The tide was dropping. Bryan had already gone in. The swell was also dropping. The wind had clocked around and gone light northeast—onshore—making for messy conditions and a hard-looking, army-green surface that resembled Ventura more than it did the tropics. A very solid set appeared, backlit and thundering far up the reef. I paddled over a couple, having learned a measure of patience, and took the third wave. It was bumpy but beautifully shaped, and I hurried because the onshore wind was likely to make it crumble quickly. That happened. The wave also swung around harder than most, so that the long wall ahead seemed to be hitting the reef all at once, peeling even faster than usual. I began to wish I had not chosen this wave, but it was too late to pull out or even, I realized, dive off—the tide seemed to have dropped two feet since my previous wave, and coral heads were suddenly boiling up everywhere. Worse, the wave seemed to be growing as it ran down the reef. It was now several feet overhead and the face was not clean. There were weird little sections and chandeliers falling and throwing. But it was extremely fast and I was low in the face and now it was dredging, sucking all the water off the reef. I had, again, no exit, no choice but to drive, pedal smashed to the floor. After a rapid-fire series of critical sections, surfing blind, things happening too fast for me to react except instinctively, I came skittering out into the channel. I lay down on my board, shaking. Then I struggled in, paddling against the current. On the beach, I got only halfway up to our campsite. On my knees in the sand, in the twilight, absolutely spent, I was surprised to find myself sobbing.

  • • •

  WE DIDN’T ALWAYS SURF ALONE. John Ritter and his friends came back and anchored outside the channel. There was no swell at the time, though, and they left without surfing again. Alias and Capella also came, and they got waves. Bryan and I actually served as pilots on Alias. We took that bus, finally, from Lautoka to Suva, got mail from home for the first time in months at General Delivery—our loved ones seemed to be fine, carrying on in a parallel universe—and then, finding that Mick now had mostly correct coordinates for the wave, we sailed back west on the cement ketch. Alias anchored off Tavarua, and we went back to camping on the island. A swell hit the next day, and Mick and Graham, both goofyfoots, were gobsmacked. They surfed themselves silly. Graham, in particular, was a lovely surfer. When the swell dropped, they sailed to Nadi. Capella also left. Then, as soon as the yachts were gone, more waves arrived, with a light southwest wind, the trailing wind that slipped under your board and whispered, Go.

  We went.

  By the time we left Tavarua that year, we figured nine surfers knew about the wave. That number included a couple of Aussie crew guys and it assumed that Ritter and Gary were the first to surf there. In the small world of surfing, the wave was a major discovery. In the scarcity logic of that world, it was essential to keep it a secret. We all swore a vow of silence. Bryan and I got in the habit of saying “da kine,” Hawaiian pidgin for whatchamacallit, when we meant Tavarua, even with each other. Mick and Graham, with whom we ultimately sailed away on Alias, called it Magic Island—an uninspired name, I thought (but there were worse to come).

  From a vine on the island I took a handful of tiny, bright red-and-black seeds. On the night after we left, we got roaring drunk on Alias while at anchor off a resort near Nadi. I woke up with a freshly pierced right ear and one of the bright seeds hanging on a fishhook from the hole. Within days, the ear was horribly infected. I sent the rest of the seeds to Sharon, suggesting she string them on a necklace. She did, but later told me that she never wore the necklace because the seeds gave her a rash.

  Bryan Di Salvatore and Joe the swagman, between Coober Pedy and Alice Springs, Australia, 1979

  SIX

  THE LUCKY COUNTRY

  Australia, 1978–79

  SOMEONE SENT US A COPY OF OUTSIDE MAGAZINE WITH AN ARTICLE by an old professor of mine. It was about a lost weekend of skiing and carousing in Montana. I remembered the weekend, though differently. I was surprised that anybody would be interested in our grad school revels. Maybe my grasp of American amusement was weakening with distance. The article mentioned that I was now “living the unexamined life in Australia.” Except for the Australia part, that was news to me.

  Bryan and I had landed in a beach town called Kirra, in Queensland, near the New South Wales border. We were the proud owners of a 1964 Falcon station wagon, bought near Brisbane for three hundred dollars, and had car-camped and surfed up and down the east coast, from Sydney to Noosa. It was dazzling to be back in the West, with all its comforts and conveniences, and to be surfing known spots—there were even road signs, SURFING BEACH. It was great to have wheels. Food and gas were cheap. Still, we were nearly broke. And so we rented, with our last funds, a moldy bungalow at the back of a ramshackle complex misnamed the Bonnie View Flats. Most of our neighbors were unemployed Thursday Islanders—Melanesians, from the Torres Strait, up near Papua New Guinea—and some of them possibly had views. We didn’t. But the beach was just across the road, and we had not chosen Kirra randomly. The place had a legendary wave. And the southern summer was starting up and, with it, we hoped, northeast cyclone swells.

  Bryan got a job as a chef in a Mexican restaurant in Coolangatta, the next town south. He told the owners he was half-Mexican, but fumbled it when they asked his name. He said McKnight when he meant to say Rodriguez. He didn’t have a valid work visa under any name. They hired him anyway. I found a couple of backbreaking jobs, including ditchdigging, which deserves its reputation as the worst sort of donkey work, for cash paid daily. Then I got hired as a pot washer in a restaurant at the Twin Towns Services Club, a big casino just over the New South Wales border, fifteen minutes’ walk from our place. I told them my name was Fitzpatrick. The manager said that as a condition of employment I had to shave my beard, and so I did. When Bryan came home that night, he took one look at me and shrieked. He looked genuinely distressed. He said it looked like half my face had been burned off. I was pale where the beard had been, dark brown everywhere else.

  There, there, I said, it’ll grow back.

  I blew my first wages on surfboards. Kirra is on the Gold Coast, a surfing center, and there were cheap used boards everywhere. I bought two, including a 6'3" Hot Buttered squashtail that turned on a dime and, when necessary, went outlandishly fast. It was a sports car of a surfboard, and a nice change after months of riding my sturdy travel board. Bryan also got new, much smaller boards. The year-roun
d neighborhood spot was called Duranbah. It was a wide-open beachbreak immediately north of the Tweed River mouth, very near my casino job. Duranbah always seemed to have waves. They were often sloppy, but there were gems scattered among the mush. On my twenty-sixth birthday, I got a sweet barrel on a shining right and came out dry.

  The pointbreaks—Kirra, Greenmount, Snapper Rocks, and Burleigh Heads, the spots that put the Gold Coast on the world surfing map—would light up after Christmas, people said. They would start breaking, in fact, on Boxing Day, December 26, we were assured by a nonsurfing neighbor. We laughed at the not-likely specificity but looked forward to the waves.

  In the meantime, I was falling hard for Australia. The country had never interested me. From a distance, it always seemed terminally bland. Up close, though, it was a nation of wisenheimers, smart-mouthed diggers with no respect for authority. The other pot washers at the casino, for instance—they called us dixie bashers—were a weirdly proud crew. In a big restaurant kitchen, we were at the bottom of the job ladder, below the dishwashers, who were all women. We peeled potatoes (which we called idahos), handled the garbage, did the nastiest scrubbing, and hosed down the greasy floors with hot water at the end of the night. And yet we made an excellent wage (I could save more than half my earnings) and, as employees, we had entree to the casino’s private members’ bar, which was on the top floor of the building. We would troop up there after work, tired and ripe, and throw back pints among what passed for high rollers on the Gold Coast. Once or twice, my coworkers spotted the owner of the casino in there. They called him a rich bastard and he, properly chagrined to be rich, bought the next shout.

  I had never seen the dignity of labor upheld so doughtily, not even on the railroad. Australia was easily the most democratic country I had encountered. People called it the Lucky Country. This epithet was coined by a social critic, Donald Horne, whose 1964 book of that title decried the mediocrity of Australia’s political and business culture, arguing, “Australia is a lucky country, run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.” But the phrase had lost its meaning over time, and it had been widely adopted as a sunny national motto. That was fine with me.

  The usual class markers from other places seemed wonderfully scrambled. Billy McCarthy, one of my fellow dixie bashers, was hale, well-spoken, forty, married with a couple of kids. I quizzed him one night over beers and learned that he had been a professional saxophonist in Sydney, with a day job as a foreman in a perfume factory. He had followed his parents to the Gold Coast, where he went into business with a friend mowing lawns and washing windows, growing bonsai plants to sell at flea markets, potting palms to sell on consignment at shops. He was still working as a nurseryman but needed the steady restaurant wage. He played golf, often with musicians up from Sydney to play the casino’s nightclub or other local venues. If Billy felt embarrassed to be working as a kitchen hand, I could not detect it. He was hardworking, cheerful, politically conservative, usually whistling some corny tune, always ready with a quip. Effortlessly, he made me feel welcome. Once, as I was coming into work, I heard him call out, “There he is, the man they couldn’t shoot, root, or electrocute.”

  The head chef, meanwhile, called me “Fitzie,” to which I always failed, suspiciously, to respond. The chef was the boss in the kitchen. When I once gave him shit about a garishly decorated fish being sent out, he glowered at me and said, “Don’t come the raw prawn with me, cobber.” I couldn’t tell if I had gone too far. But McCarthy and the other dixie bashers got a kick out of the exchange. They took to calling me Raw Prawn.

  Local surfers were less welcoming. There were thousands of them. The ability level was high, the competition for waves acute. Like anywhere, each spot had its crew, its stars, its old lions. But there were full-blown clubs and cliques and family dynasties in every Gold Coast beach town—Coolangatta, Kirra, Burleigh. There were also hordes of tourists and day trippers, and Bryan and I would be assumed to belong to that low stratum of surf life until we could establish otherwise. The guys we began surfing with regularly were fellow expats—an Englishman we called Peter the Pom, a Balinese kid named Adi. Peter was a cook at the casino, a solid surfer, married to a local girl. They lived in a flat in Rainbow Bay, overlooking the wave at Snapper Rocks. Adi had also married a local girl. He was a talented surfer, working as a waiter, sending his wages home. One night I took Adi and his cousin, Chook, to a drive-in to see Car Wash. Chook had hair down to his waist and was the skinniest grown man I’d ever met—“chook” is Aussie slang for chicken. He and Adi got drunk on sparkling wine and laughed themselves sick at the movie, which they called Wash Car. They thought African Americans, whom they called Negroes, were the funniest people on earth.

  The casino threw a fancy staff pre-Christmas party, giving me the chance to relive a painful part of high school that I had missed by being a hippie surfer who would sooner have gone to jail than to the prom. All the young women in the kitchen—waitresses, dishwashers, pastry chefs—were excited about the party. I could hear them giddily reviewing their dresses, dates, hairdos, the band, their after-party plans. I found that I very much wanted to go, perhaps even with a pretty waitress on my arm. But I didn’t own a long-sleeved shirt, let alone the tuxedo that I gathered was de rigueur. More to the point, it was clear that to these girls I didn’t exist. Their swains were all local bravos whom they had probably gone to high school with. I spent the night of the party in my tiny, grotty bungalow room trying to work on my novel. How I hated being a foreigner, always on the outside. The intensity of my shame and self-loathing was unsettling.

  Sharon and I wrote letters, many, and hers were usually a comfort to get, but I could hardly tell her everything. She was undoubtedly being similarly discreet. The true parameters of my loneliness were mine to cope with.

  • • •

  BRYAN AND I WANTED TO WRITE an article for Tracks, a surf mag published in Sydney. Tracks was nothing like its glossy, clean-cut American cousins. It was a newsprint tabloid. Editorially, it was rude, witty, aggro. It actually seemed to be the main Aussie youth mag, like Rolling Stone in its U.S. heyday. Huge bundles of it appeared at the newsstands every two weeks. Our notion was to make fun of the domestication of surfing in Australia. Tracks and its readers already hated Americans. When being polite, they called us seppos, short for septic tanks, rhyming slang for Yanks. More commonly, we were just dickheads. We figured we could rile them. The editors invited us to have a go.

  The target was almost too easy. Surfing was fully mainstreamed in Australia—all the clubs and contests and school teams and well-marked Surfing Beaches, complete with car parks and hot showers. I actually half liked the wholesome hoopla—and surfing’s mass appeal was, to be sure, the only reason a niche mag like Tracks could double as an all-purpose national youth paper—but culturally it was screamingly lame. Bryan and I had grown up in a Southern California where most beach towns, and beach cops, loathed and harassed surfers. My high school would have expelled us before they supported us. Surfers were bad boys, outlaws, rebels. We were, that is to say, cool. Surfing wasn’t some tamed, authority-approved “sport.” Bryan and I figured we could play up that stuff for Tracks.

  The hard part was the writing. Neither of us had ever cowritten anything, and our assumption that we shared a sensibility proved wildly wrong. We agreed on the idea for the piece, but Bryan couldn’t stand my drafts, and I despised his. Why was I being so ordinary, so predictable? Why was he being so purple, so over the top? When was he going to grow up? Was I aspiring to mediocrity? I didn’t want my name on the self-admiring juvenilia he was producing. Etcetera. I got so mad I crumpled up the pages we were arguing over and threw the paper ball at him. He later said that he nearly punched me before storming out instead.

  We had known each other for eight years at that point, and our flat, fierce disagreement over virtually every line of this ditty for Tracks made me wonder when our literary differences had become so pronounced. When w
e first met, in Lahaina, what drew us together was discovering we loved the same books. In fact, the first words I ever spoke to Bryan were, “What are you doing with that book?” He was crossing a post office parking lot with Ulysses in hand, and the familiar prongs of the big “U” on the Random House paperback cover had caught my eye. We stood there in the sun talking about Joyce, and then the Beats, for an hour or two—while Domenic waited impatiently in the shade—and it seemed inevitable that we would meet again. Of course, our tastes had never been exactly the same. I was the more dedicated Joyce fan—I later spent a year studying Finnegans Wake with Norman O. Brown, an exercise in masturbatory obscurantism that Bryan would never have undertaken—and he had an eye for genre fiction, including westerns, that I lacked. I liked Pynchon; Bryan thought his prose awful. And so on. But we were always turning each other on to new writers and, more often than not, finding the same virtues in their stuff. Bryan tended to be years ahead of the reading public—he was extolling Cormac McCarthy’s work long before most critics had heard of him—and I was glad to follow his leads. In Australia we were digging into Patrick White and Thomas Kenneally and turning up our noses at Colleen McCullough. So why did every sentence he wrote about Aussie surfing annoy me, and vice versa?