We were headed in different directions, clearly. I had started as a teenage lyric surrealist, language-drunk à la Dylan Thomas, and had been slowly trying to sober up. I was now more interested in transparency and accuracy, less enamored of showy originality. Bryan remained enchanted by the music of words—what he once called “the incredible foot-stomping joy of a well-turned phrase.” He loved pure captured dialect, cracked vernacular humor, vivid physicality, and a knockout metaphor, and he disliked nothing more than a lazy stock expression.
I voted to abandon the article, or at least to have it carry only his byline. But Bryan was determined that it should have both of our names on it. So we dialed back his stuff to the point where I could agree to sign it. We used our real names, which was lucky, because the piece caused an unexpected stir. Peter the Pom, who knew us only by our fake work names, actually asked me if I had read it. Some local guys were seriously irritated, he said, by all the exuberant insults from these American wankers. Bryan and I quietly decided to deny authorship, if pressed. We had hoped to piss off readers. We did not want to get hounded off the Gold Coast. Tracks traditionally published wonderful abusive letters, and we got ours. I liked “I wouldn’t spit on you mongrels if you were on fire.” Bryan liked “May your earlobes turn to assholes and shit on your shoulders.”
• • •
I MET A WOMAN, SUE. She told me I was “as mad as a two-bob watch.” She meant it as a compliment. I liked her enormously. She was a big-mouthed, bosomy, bright-eyed mother of three. Her husband, a local rock musician and heroin addict, was in jail. We lived in fear of his release. Sue and her kids lived in a high-rise beach town called (talk about mainstreaming) Surfers Paradise. Sue was a bon vivant. She loved avant-garde music, art, comedy, Australian history, and all things Aboriginal. She knew lots of Gold Coast gossip—which cokehead surf star had shopped his mates to the cops, which cokehead surf star was rooting his sponsor’s wife. She also knew the beautiful, eucalyptus-forested highlands behind the coast, where cattle grazed and kangaroos bounded and scruffy back-to-the-landers lived in a cannabis-soaked version of the Aboriginal Dreamtime. We passed days up there when the surf was flat. Sue’s kids, who ranged in age from eight to fourteen, made me a great jokey collage, with cute koalas skeptically surveying the strutting of Gold Coast flaneurs. Then I got a midnight phone call. The husband had been released. Sue had received a heads-up, bundled the kids into her rattletrap car, and was already hundreds of miles from Surfers Paradise. “Off like a bride’s nightie,” she said. “Off like a bucket of shrimp on a hot day.” She sounded chipper, all things considered. They were en route to her mother’s place in Melbourne, more than a thousand miles away. She would catch me on the flip side. I should watch out for her husband.
Sue was not really an example of this, but a lot of Australian women seemed to be sick of Australian men. “Ockers,” as they were called—the name came from a popular TV show—drank too much beer, loved their mates and football first, and treated women shabbily. Whether this generalization was true or fair, I could not say, but Bryan and I, once we had been in Kirra long enough to make it clear to the natives that we were resident, began to feel like the innocent benefactors of a mass sexual disillusionment. Compared with your typical ocker, we were sensitive, modern guys. Gold Coast women had time for us. Even when we behaved caddishly, we seemed to be an improvement on the local brand. I missed Sue, and was happy to continue not meeting her husband, but my heartsick wallflower phase passed, thank God.
I got a new job, as a barman at the Queensland Hotel in Coolangatta, which was an old-fashioned pub during the week and a rock and roll club known as the Patch on weekend nights. (Sue and I saw Bo Diddley there.) I learned to pull pints of beer properly under the close supervision of a career barman named Peter. Peter told me that if I got anything wrong, the customer had the right to throw the beer (but not the glass) in my face and demand a repull. The list of punishable errors was long: too much head, too little head, flat beer, warm beer, too little beer, any hint of soap in the glass. This news had its intended effect: I pulled scared and carefully. Weekday nights were slow and easy. Friday and Saturday nights at the Patch, which was in a big, dark, barnlike building out behind the old pub, were madness, with screaming customers six deep at the bar, blasting punk rock, and ten thousand rum and Cokes. The summer tourist season was starting. After work, I would walk down the beach road back to Kirra, grateful for the silence, stopping at the top of the point where the great wave was said to break, peering into the sloshing blackness beyond the base of the jetty. All the Gold Coast waves we had surfed so far had been sweet, warm, soft, a little sloppy. People said Kirra, when it broke, was a rocket-fueled pointbreak with crazy, hammering power. That was hard to picture.
• • •
THE FIRST CYCLONE SWELL HIT, of course, right on Boxing Day. Kirra woke up. The hard-to-picture became the can’t-look-anywhere-else. But the wave was a strange, ungainly beast, nothing like a California pointbreak. Large amounts of sandy water were rushing around the end of the jetty, forming a torrent down the coast. It was overcast and glary that first morning, the ocean surface gray and brown and blinding silver. The sets looked smaller than they were, seeming to drift almost aimlessly onto the bar outside the jetty, then suddenly standing up taller and thicker than they should have, hiccuping, and finally unloading in a ferocious series of connectable sections, some of the waves going square with power—the lip threw out that far when it broke. It was hard to believe that this wave was breaking on a sand bottom. I had never seen anything like it. The crowd was bad at dawn and rapidly getting worse. We got amongst it, as the Aussies say.
I probably caught three waves that day. Nobody would give me an inch. The downcoast current turned the whole place into a paddling contest. Nobody spoke. The paddling was too grueling, and the least pause or inattention meant yardage lost. I was in good shape, but the top locals were in obscenely good shape, and this was what they lived for. Near the top, near the takeoff, the current got even stronger. As a set approached, you had to sprint upriver at a precise, not obvious angle, somehow putting just enough distance between yourself and the flailing, growling pack so that you were the one person in the pit as the water dredged off the bar, and then swerving and, with a last few hard strokes, catching the wave before it pitched. Then, assuming you stuck the takeoff, you had to surf it, speed-pumping like crazy on one of the fastest waves in the world. It was a lot like work. If you made a wave, though, it felt worth it. It felt worth anything. This, I thought, was a wave I could get serious about.
It didn’t have the open-ocean size or broad-faced beauty of a Honolua Bay. It was a far more compact, ropier wave. The first hundred yards had an amphitheater feel, with spectators lining the jetty at the point, the guardrail along the coast road, a steep green bluff that rose behind the road, and even sometimes a parking lot in front of the Kirra Hotel, a large plain pub tucked under the bluff. Beyond that it was open beach, and when the swell was big and the angle was right, a ride could run on for another two hundred yards, unobserved, an empty, ecstatic racetrack. It wasn’t a mechanical wave. It had flaws, variety, slow patches, close-outs. Concussion wavelets off the jetty or the inside bar often ran back out to sea, marring the third or fourth waves of a set. But the cleaner waves had a quality of compression that was, sometimes literally, stunning. The heaviest waves actually seemed to get shorter, they gathered so much force as they began to detonate across the main bar, a shallow stretch known as the Butter Box section. Even with a sand bottom and a makable-looking wave, it was a deeply intimidating section. You had to come into it fast but stay low on the face, be ready to duck when the thick lip threw horizontally, and then somehow stay over your board through an ungodly acceleration. The Butter Box section gave new meaning to the old surf imprecation, “Pull in!” There was only one way to make it—through the barrel, pulling in.
I had surfed my share of frontside tubes, from that reliable inside se
ction at Lahaina Harbor Mouth to a slabby mutant wave in Santa Cruz called Stockton Avenue, where I snapped boards in half on three-foot days and was lucky not to get hurt on the shallow rock reef. But Stockton was a short, freaky wave—a one-trick pony. Kirra was just as hollow, and it was a pointbreak. It was as long as Rincon or Honolua, and hollower than either one. And the bottom, again, was sand, not coral or cobblestone—an unprecedented setup, in my experience, at a great pointbreak. The sand was not especially soft, I learned. I hit it so hard once, in the Butter Box, that I came up with a concussion, unable to say what country I was in. Another time, also in the Butter Box, and not on a big wave, I got my leash wrapped so tightly around my midsection that I could not breathe. On yet another occasion, same section, my leash tore through my rail and ripped half the tail off my favorite board. So the sand was a blessing, certainly, but the violence of the wave remained—inseparable, as always, from its fierce appeal. That steel thread.
The pecking order at Kirra was disconcertingly long, and the guys on top tended to be national and world champions. Michael Peterson, a two-time Australian champ, ruled the lineup when we started surfing there. He was a dark, brooding, brawny character, with a thick mustache and a crazy look in his eye. He took any wave he wanted, and he surfed like a demon, with a wide power stance and savage hacks. One morning, I noticed him staring at me. We were near the takeoff spot, and I was paddling hard, as always, trying to beat the pack to the next set wave, but Peterson stopped paddling. “Bobby!” he cried. I shook my head no and kept going. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. “You’re not Bobby? You look exactly like my mate who’s in jail! I thought they’d let him out. Bobby!” After that incident, I often found Peterson staring at me in the water. We became nodding acquaintances, even though I spooked him, and I felt the pecking order ease around me when other guys noticed me and the legendary Peterson exchanging little g’days. I was happy to take the break. Like everybody else, I just wanted more waves.
Paul Stacey, a Kirra local, heading into the Butter Box, Kirra
Bryan and I had the advantage of living about as close to Kirra as it was possible to live—unless you lived at the Kirra Hotel, which had no rooms. I checked the jetty every night on my walk home from work, and if there was any hint of a swell, we would hit it before first light. It turned out to be a great surf season, one of the best in memory, people said, with at least one solid swell virtually every week in January and February. One cyclone, Kerry, smashed through the Solomon Islands and then seemed to drift around the Coral Sea for weeks, pumping out powerful northeast swell. Our early-morning go-outs were often fruitful, yielding fresh waves with, for an hour or two, relatively few people. There was a regular predawn crew, not all of them especially hot surfers. There was a gawky, friendly, bearded guy who rode a big-wave gun, hardly turning at all, and who always yelled, as he jumped to his feet and set his line, “I got a lady doctor.” I happened to know the next line in that song: “She cure da pain for free.” She did.
• • •
KIRRA, BEING A CROWDED, famous right, was not Bryan’s kind of wave. He surfed it faithfully, and managed to find the seams in the mob, the uncrowded early sessions, the inflection points in the series of sandbars where he could get his waves, but he was not committed to the dogfight in the same way I was, or to chasing the grail that on great days was made incarnate over and over in the vortex of the Butter Box (which we took to calling simply the wild section). He seemed to like Australia as much as I did—the incorrigible cheekiness of Aussies, the amazing wages, the rich slang, the sunshine, the girls. But he wasn’t writing, which was worrying. He had finished, on Guam, a novel set in a small town in the Idaho panhandle. It was terrific, I thought, even better than his Bildungsroman about his surf buddies in high school. He had sent it off to an agent in New York. This was the kind of grown-up follow-through I had never dared. (I now had two novels sitting in a drawer, read only by friends.) The manuscript hadn’t yet found a publisher. Bryan wasn’t discouraged by the delay, he said, but he seemed to have entered a fallow phase.
He read insatiably—fiction, biographies—sitting in an old wicker chair that he propped by the front door of our bungalow. I found, in a junk shop in Coolangatta, a tall stack of old New Yorkers selling for a penny apiece, bought a few hundred, and gave them to him for Christmas. He put the pile on one side of his chair and started methodically working his way through them. They became an hourglass of our time in Kirra—a hundred mags down, two hundred to go. Meanwhile, I was banging out chapters of my railroad novel, having finally found a story line. We shared an ancient typewriter, donated to us by Sue. Bryan typed long, droll letters to friends back home about our adventures in Oz, some of them nonfictional. Occasionally he read out passages that he thought would amuse me. One that stuck in my mind, but did not amuse, described the two of us as a physically improbable pair of traveling surfers. He was too fat, he wrote, and I was too skinny. It was true that I was skinny, and that he was a bit plump, but my vanity recoiled at this expanded self-deprecation. My reaction was odd, partly because I had always tried to ease tensions with Bryan—and I had done this even more with Domenic—by compulsively making myself the butt of jokes and stories. But my body, apparently, was off-limits for mockery, at least in any way that suggested weakness or, God forbid, unmanliness. Bryan had a better attitude. He gave his students no choice except Clint Eastwood, whom he did not remotely resemble. This shtick was, of course, part of his ladykilling charm.
Speaking of bodies, the Gold Coast was an open-air object lesson in how I was destroying mine through surfing. Looking around at Australians who spent a lot of time in tropical sun for which they were genetically unprepared—most were of Northern European ancestry—I could see my own sorry medical future. Every other surfer, even teenagers, seemed to have pterygia—sun-caused cataracts—clouding their blue eyes. The scabby ears and purple noses and scarily mottled arms of the middle-aged were fair warning: basal-cell carcinoma (if not squamous-cell, if not melanoma) ahead. I already had pterygia myself, in both eyes. Not that I took any preventive measures, or that surfing in colder places was necessarily any less damaging. My years in the freezing ocean in Santa Cruz had given me exostoses—bony growths in the ear canal, known as “surfer’s ear”—which were now constantly trapping seawater, causing painful infections, and would eventually require three operations. Then there was the usual run of surf injuries: scrapes, gashes, reef rashes, a broken nose, torn ankle cartilage. I had no interest in any of this at the time. All I wanted from my body was for it to paddle faster and surf better.
• • •
I DID BECOME, AT KIRRA, a paddling machine. My arms basically stopped getting tired. Getting to know the downcoast current helped. It was constant, but it had vagaries, weak spots, eddies—sometimes, at different tides, even deep slow troughs slightly outside—and its patterns changed with the swell size and direction and the movement of the sand. There were relatively few guys exploiting those vagaries, and we got to know each other. We competed so hard, trying to make each stroke count, that we rarely spoke, but a rough wave-sharing arrangement emerged nonetheless, out of some combination of necessity and respect. I began to get more waves. And I began to learn what to do with them.
It was the opposite of surfing Tavarua, in most ways. That was an empty, immaculate coral-reef left, breaking in Edenic abundance. This was an ultra-crowded, sand-bottom right in the Aussie Miami Beach. And yet both were long, demanding, superlative waves that required fast, fine edgework and rewarded close study. The key to surfing Kirra was entering the wild section at full speed, surfing close to the face—pulling in—and then, if you got inside, staying calm in the barrel, having faith that it just might spit you out. It usually didn’t, but I had waves that teased me two, even three times, with the daylight hole speeding ahead, outrunning me, and then pausing and miraculously rewinding back toward me, the spilling lip seemingly twisting like the iris of a camera lens o
pening until I was almost out of the hole, and then reversing and doing it again, receding in beautiful hopelessness and returning in even more beautiful hope. These were the longest tube rides of my life.
Which raised the question of claiming. The best thing to do, by far, if you came flying out of a deep tube was nothing. Keep surfing. Act as if such things happened to you all the time. This was difficult, if not impossible. The emotional release of some little celebration was practically a physical necessity. Maybe not an obnoxious fist pump, or arms thrown up touchdown-style, but some acknowledgment that something rare and deeply thrilling had just happened. On one of the bigger days we got at Kirra, when the sets were swinging wide and breaking in slightly deeper, much bluer water than usual, I pulled into a tube that was oblong, not cavernous, and saw the ceiling ahead begin to shatter—to chandelier. I bowed my head, crouching low, expecting the ax, but held my line and squeaked through. As I came out, astonished, rising and trying to stay cool, I noticed Bryan among the paddlers going over the shoulder. I heard a few hoots, but nothing from him. Later, I asked him if he had seen the wave. He said he had. He said I had overclaimed it. I had come out with my hands raised in prayer, he said. Pretty lame. That wasn’t praying, I said. It was just a little thank-you. My hands had been clasped, not raised. I was mortified. Also angry. It was a childish thing to care about, but his disdain for my elation seemed mean. Still, I vowed never to claim again, no matter how great the wave.
Greatness is relative, of course. On that same big swell, perhaps that same afternoon, I was walking back after an extra-long ride that had carried me halfway to Bilinga, the next village north—carried me so far that paddling back seemed silly. I had decided to walk to Kirra and try to punch through up near the point. I was alone on the beach. The swell was peaking, the wind offshore, the waves now seemingly nonstop. Far outside, I saw a tiny surfer in red trunks pull into a big blue barrel, emerge, disappear, and emerge again. It was a guy I had never seen before, surfing at a speed I had rarely, if ever, seen before. He kept doing it—disappearing, emerging. He seemed to be riding in the wrong place on his board—too far forward—but somehow turning from there, making small adjustments that kept him in the barrel for ridiculous amounts of time. He kept going, and his stance, I could see as he got closer, was casual, almost defiant. He claimed none of the barrels he threaded. He was getting one of the best rides I had ever seen, and he was acting as if he deserved it. I actually couldn’t understand, technically, half of what he was doing. Nose turns inside the tube? It reminded me of the first time I saw a shortboard in action—Bob McTavish at Rincon. What I didn’t know was that this kid in red trunks was the newly crowned world champion, Wayne “Rabbit” Bartholomew. He was a local boy, just home from the international contest circuit. Physically slight but fearless in big waves and absurdly talented, he was the Mick Jagger of surfing, endlessly lauded in the mags for striking rock-star poses in heavy situations. He had grown up surfing Kirra, and the ride I saw was a master class in how it could be done, if you happened to be the best surfer in the world.
Barbarian Days Page 23
