All the figures in this novel are products of the imagination. Any resemblance to living persons is unwitting and purely coincidental. I thank my surf consultants Ray Klein and Andy Shonley.
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://www.d-nb.de abrufbar.
ISBN USA Print: 978-3-96258-019-3
ISBN Germany Print: 978-3-96258-020-9
ISBN E-Book: 978-3-96258-021-6
All rights reserved
English Edition, 2018 PalmArtPress, Berlin
Copyright © 2015 by mareverlag, Hamburg
PalmArtPress
Pfalzburger Str. 69, 10719 Berlin
Publisher: Catharine J. Nicely
www.palmartpress.com
Cover photo: Chris Racer / Ray Klein Collection
Surf-club photo: Kevin McAleer’s personal archive
Printed in USA
This book is for
PETRA REISDORF
THE DROP
KOOK
RADICAL JACK
GET STOKED!
THE INCREDIBLE DAY
THE SHAUN
CAVEAT SURFER
LOCAL COLOR
BUFFALOED
NFC
KAKALA
SURF PUNKS
KILLERS
KICKOUT
SURF CLUB
GLOSSARY
Über den Autor
Swells begin the process of becoming surf when the depth of water is shallower than one-half the distance from crest to crest – the wavelength. As the swells roll into shallow water, the bottoms of the orbiting swells are slowed by the drag, or friction, of the bottom. The waves begin to pile up as the bottom of the surface wave slows and the top portion proceeds at full force. Since the bottom of the wave is slowing down, crests begin to peak and the wave becomes steeper. When it becomes so steep that the face of the wave can no longer support it, the crest topples forward into the trough.
This is surf, and this is what we wait and hope for.
Peter L. Dixon
The Complete Book of Surfing
THE little shop smelled of fruity surf wax and factory-fresh rubber and neoprene. It was so jammed with surfboards and wetsuits and dacron-polyester surfwear that you could barely walk through the place without brushing up against something. Flipping through a surf magazine with his thonged feet on the glass counter was a guy wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of yellow nylon trunks with scalloped slits in the sides. He had bleached-blond hair and bleached-blond eyebrows and a bleached-blond mustache and the hair on his legs stood out from his baked brown skin like a stubborn culture of white fuzz. We knew him. Or at least his name. We’d browsed through here a couple times before and heard him being called “Flea.”
“Hiyadoon,” he said.
“Good,” said Jim. “We need a couple boards.”
“New ones?”
“Used.”
“Got plenny of those,” said the Flea, kicking his feet down and scaling his magazine beneath the counter. “Whujya have in mind?”
“Something progressive,” said Jim.
“Progressive?” said the Flea. “Progressive compared to what?”
Jim and I exchanged looks. I kept my mouth shut. Before entering the shop he’d told me to be cool and let him do the talking – you couldn’t let these Malibu locals know you were a beginner or else they’d rip you off major.
“Uh, like, you know,” said Jim uneasily. “Something … state-of-the-art.”
The Flea gave him an unblinking deadpan.
“Yeah man, I like get your idea and all, but couldya be a little more specific? I mean, ya wunna amp or ya lookin’ for trim or what?”
Jim mulled that one over. If he knew the difference between amp and trim then he was a better man than me.
“Amp,” he ventured.
“Ampage,” quoth the Flea, who slapped his thongs over to a stand of boards and pulled out a lilac-colored specimen with a white deck emblazoned with a rainbow comber, the surf shop’s logo. “Here’s a primo six-six. Twinfin swallowtail with fluted wings and good laminar flow for quick water release.” He tilted the board Jim’s way. “So ya might wunna look at that.”
Jim took it but didn’t seem too pleased. He’d heard that for your first board you needed something over seven feet – good laminar flow notwithstanding.
“You got something a little longer?”
“I thought ya wanted to amp.”
“I do.”
“So like give me a little help, dude, what exactly you lookin’ for?”
“Something over seven feet.”
“All you care about is length?” said the Flea. “I mean wutchya gonna do, surf the thing or turn it into a coffee table? There’s like other stuff involved. What’s the board ya got now?”
I glanced over at Jim in his T-shirt with the words SURF INSTRUCTOR WAIKIKI BEACH splashed across the chest. He didn’t have a board. Jim Kalahani, full-blooded Hawaiian, but not a full-fledged surfer yet.
“It was blue,” I said with quick inspiration.
“It’s not blue anymore?” demanded the Flea.
“No, it’s still blue,” I said, “but he sold it a while back.”
“Right,” said Jim.
The Flea looked at us as if we’d just stated our firm belief that Hang Ten was some ancient Chinese philosopher.
“And I’m looking for trim,” I announced.
“Trim,” muttered the Flea.
He scanned the rack and drew out a longer, slightly thinner board with the same rainbow logo. He rattled off its specs – “Seven-three, rounded pin, solid glass job, no stress marks” – then gripped the board with both hands and made a show of drilling his thumbs into its underside. Nothing happened.
“Ya see?”
“Looks good.”
“So there’s that,” he said handing me the board.
I cast my unschooled eye over it. I knew next to nothing about surfboards, and what information I did have was confused. I was aware for instance that the fin steered the board but I had somehow got it fixed in my mind that its raked-back form functioned as a shark decoy – that a shark coming across it would think it was another shark and split. (Why a shark would be swimming on its back, I hadn’t got around to asking myself.)
“How much is it?”
“Hunnert bucks,” said the Flea.
“Sold,” I said.
“And one-ten for the swallow,” he said, indicating Jim’s board.
“All right,” said Jim.
We reached for our wallets.
“And I guess you’ll be needing a leash,” said the Flea to Jim, “since ya prolly sold it with your board.”
Jim bought one; I didn’t since of course my “old board” would have already had a leash.
“How about wax?” suggested the Flea. “Water’s gettin’ warmer, gonna need some summer wax.”
We bought a few bars.
“And wetsuits? Vests are real good for summer,” said the Flea. “Prevent chest rash and whatnot. Got a couple here that’re real light and limber … ”
We purchased two Body Glove zip-fronts, then escaped before he could offer us a week of start-up surfing lessons.
We strapped our boards to the racks on Jim’s car and took off down Pacific Coast Highway. The sky was metallic blue, a dazzling sunlight edged everything in gold, and the inrushing air tickled our nostrils with the salt tang of the ocean. It felt good to be driving beachside with our own set of wheels and boards on top. Up until then Jim and I had always hitched rides to the beach with his father who worked as bartender at a Malibu seaview restaurant called the Tonga Lei. Summer mornings we’d leave behind the muggy swelter of the San Fernando Valley with Mr. Kalahani at the wheel and ride down Las Virgenes Road through the olive-brown hills that doubled for Korea in the television series M*A*S*H, and Jim always kept the radio tuned to KMET which featured a surf report at 9:00 a.m. that started at the Mexican border and made its way up the coast. This is the Ocean Breeze Surf Shop in San Diego came the drawling deviated-septum surfer voice. Today we got a low-pressure system making for some hotdoggy three-to-five-foot surf with occasional larger sets. A slight grit taking the bloom off that morning glass but still very workable and can only get better with the low … Welcome to the space world of cosmic surfing, earthlings, this is Tamarack Mack’s in Carlsbad. Got some solar cruelty in the offing and it’s hottin’ up in the water too, some grinding overhead barrels that might be hazardous to the health of the Surgeon General but they’re just what the surf doc ordered … Roger that, Carlsbad, this is Paradise Surfboards in Newport Beach and we got some Orange County juice pumpin’ in – a clean swell outta the southwest that’s just startin’ to blaze. I give it six on the fun-o-meter – six foot and hollow! Awhooo! …
Arriving at the Tonga Lei, Mr. Kalahani would start by polishing glasses while Jim and I caught the bus on PCH and rode it north to Zuma Beach, bellyboards braced between our knees. Jim had once rented a surfboard for the day at Waikiki and I’d picked up rudimentary bodysurfing on family outings to Santa Monica Beach, but it was Zuma where we got our first real lessons in wave-riding. Here we learned how to judge the swells, time a takeoff, and keep cool on wipeouts as we got tossed around like gnats in a highspeed blender. After swallowing our limit of saltwater we’d emerge from the surf and pick our way through all the dead jellyfish and kids digging for sandcrabs and then flop onto our towels before switching to our backs and staying propped on our elbows while watching the beads of water dry on our chests and breathing an air spiked with the fragrance of suntan oil as tinny transistors sounded from neighboring blankets and loudmouth mothers warned their children not to go in the water if they’d eaten the potato salad in the past half-hour.
After a while we’d return to the Tonga Lei. Arriving there with bellyboards under our arms and sand still caking our ankles, we’d pass between carved tiki gods into a chill dark lobby and grope our way through to the lounge, its thatch ceiling hung with exotic lamps and its walls decorated with South Sea artifacts. Propped on the bamboo-trimmed bar were middle-aged men in cardigan sweaters rolled to mid-forearm and scooping salted peanuts out of iridescent abalone shells and sipping vivid drinks with parasols and plastic monkeys hanging from the rims. Stationed behind the bar was a stocky chocolate-skinned guy with thick black hair parted on the side and a double row of white Chiclets teeth: Mr. Kalahani. Our authentic kanaka barkeep. In his aloha shirt and in this kitsch tropical paradise, you half expected him to grab up a yuke and start crooning Tiny Bubbles, hula girls in coconut bras swaying in from the wings.
“Hey you litto bit guys, how da surf?”
“Righteous.”
“You hungry? You wunna eat?” he’d ask slyly since after five hours in the sand and sea we needed grub wiki wiki. “Got da lomi salmon, da kalua pig. Broke da mout! Ono ono!”
Mr. Kalahani would set us up with a couple tall cokes with cherries skewered on green toothpicks bobbing in small cubes of ice, then we took our place in a red naugahyde booth in that part of the restaurant built on pilings over the water and affording a view to the pier. Beyond the pier we could make out the white lines of breakers peeling off the first point at Malibu, and just ahead of the white were upright figures, sovereign and in command.
Surfers. Real ones. Guys who rode waves standing up.
Jim was a year ahead of me at Saint Teresa’s Elementary, and when he graduated and enrolled at Reseda High we temporarily parted ways. We were still traveling in different circles a year later when I made entrance with honors at an all-boys Jesuit school where in the spring I joined the track team and started polevaulting. I showed some aptitude for the event. That first season I was good enough to train with the varsity and chalk up a personal best of thirteen feet, which was also cutoff for making the Los Angeles Times “Best Marks” list appearing every week and where it was parenthetically noted that the youngster who had scaled this worthy and honorable height was only a frosh. With polevaulting I’d found my niche. Not only was it a sport at which I could excel but it seemed to attract the type guys I liked being around. The polevaulters weren’t athletes in the conventional sense but nature boys swinging through the treetops, trapeze artists gliding through the ether and flipping and twisting above the fray, free spirits and renegades who conveniently forgot to wear the prescribed necktie to school on meet days, habitually violated the team hair code, and who wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing some hokey letterman’s jacket.
And they surfed. When the Santa Anas gusted, they let the polevault-pit cover billow out and pretend a wave was throwing out over their heads. On that same pit, lolling in the sun and waiting for practice to begin, they also talked surfing. “Was out at C-Street last weekend with a real nice south runnin’,” one would begin. “Maaan, you shoulda hit Salt Creek,” another would say, “it had these perfection lines.” “That’s a buncha bull,” a third would weigh in, “Creek walls up on a south.”
And I would lie in the pit and listen …
“Ever surf Santa Maria Rivermouth?”
“Nope, but I hit Hazard Canyon last winter and that place spits.”
“Hazard Canyon? Where’s that?”
“You know the Diablo plant? Just north of there.”
“Nuke water territory.”
“Zackly. But man, this place spits. Just like Pipeline, breaks on a reef, and if you make the drop, baby, you’re gold.”
“What if you don’t make the drop?”
“You eat some reef.”
“How’s that reef taste?”
“Not tasty – I broke a rib there once.”
“Be happy that’s all you broke.”
“Yeah, it mighta been my board.”
In the past couple years surfing had been pushed to the back of my thoughts, but now the youthful longings came surging back. Here was a world of raw vitality and daring that made even polevaulting seem like tame fare – while reducing practically everything else I’d experienced to the level of Disneyland. Kid stuff. Yes, in fact, were I to be honest, the peak of adventure in my life to that point had been automaton pirates in a fake Caribbean and a jungle-boat cruise with pneumatic hippos rising from the water to be shot by a cap-gun wielding teenager at the helm of a boat on underwater rails that always guided you safely past. This surfing world had nothing safe about it. The nomenclature itself imparted a dangerous thrill. It was a world of “dawn patrols” and “cleanup sets,” “close-outs” and “wipeouts,” “elephant guns” and “surfaris” to places like Shark’s Cove and Razor Blades and Hazard Canyon. It was a world I had to discover for myself, and when track season ended freshman year I gave Jim Kalahani a ring and told him I was thinking of buying a board.
“Me too,” he answered promptly. “I got my car now. We can go together.”
That’s what I’d hoped he would say, since at fifteen I still wasn’t driving. But it was more than that – here were my own private cherished thoughts in exact accord with another’s. We’d never discussed the matter before and I felt a conspiratorial pleasure, as if divulging our mutual plan to run off and join the circus.
But having taken the first step and purchased our boards, the trick now was in finding a place with waves minus the crowds. Malibu was out of the question. It had the best surf, perfect for learning on, with waves so consistent and rides so long it was almost like surfing under controlled conditions, but the water traffic was fender-to-fender. And highly competitive. To surf Malibu your maiden outing was like straying onto the Indianapolis 500 your first day behind the wheel. Malibu and Zuma were the only two places we knew, and afternoons Zuma was off-limits to board surfing.
We headed south. The first couple spots we cruised were pointbreaks like Malibu, salients of land jutting seaward and producing sets of tapered waves, ideal for our purposes but swarming with guys. Then a short while later some jetties hove into view with rideable waves and no overabundance of human specks. We pulled across the highway onto a slab of asphalt with foxtails growing up out of its cracks and fronting a cheesy nightclub called the Sunspot Café. We joined a white Datsun pickup at far end of the parking lot, then walked back across the highway for a better view of the set-up. Descending at a sharp angle from the highway were pell-mell chunks of granite like those of the jetty, where the chunks met the sand were surfboards leaning against them and sunbathers on brightly patterned beach towels, and beyond that lay a tan swath of beach and a sapphire ocean with the swell lines shading into turquoise as they thinned into translucent waves.
We scurried back across the highway to retrieve our boards, then braved traffic once more and clambered down the salt-rimed granite to the sand. We placed our towels at the foot of the rocks and spent the next ten minutes giving the decks of our boards a lavish first coat of wax, which wafted a coconut-pineapple smell. I waited for Jim to tie his urethane leash to his board and velcro it to his ankle, then we walked down the sloping beach with little tarballs dotting it and waded into the slowly deepening water. It was swimming-pool temperature and lapped coolly against my hot skin. When the ocean reached my trunks I climbed onto the board, set its nose slightly higher than the tail, got my weight properly distributed, then began working my arms back and forth, cutting the water with my hands and the board sliding through the foam-laced blue, little rills of water bouncing the nose as I angled out toward the breakers.
When we’d made it out with the other guys, I looked around. What now? It was a lull and everyone was sitting on their boards with arms braced on their thighs and rising and falling with the swell. I tried sitting too. I pushed up on my board, brought my legs around to the sides … and keeled over into the water. I tried a couple more times with the same result. If you concentrated and gripped the protruding nose of your board with two hands you could hold an unsteady seat, but it was fatiguing. And frustrating. Here I was trying to learn to stand and couldn’t even sit! Jim was having no better luck. So we skipped sitting and stood – on the ocean bottom. The water was to our necks. When a wave came we turned shoreward, wriggled onto our boards and paddled into the swell. It seemed to work.
“It’s easier to stand,” said Jim.
“I will never sit again.”
But that’s all that worked. As soon as I tried rising to my feet I lost my balance and took a dunking. Same with Jim. He blamed it on his board.
“At Waikiki they had these real heavy boards,” he grumbled. “This one’s all light and tippy.”
“But you got two fins and I only have one. You should be a lot more stable.”
“I can’t figure it out either.”
We finally succeeded in rising to our feet and maintaining our balance – in the whitewater. That’s not what we were shooting for. On our bellyboards we’d always taken dumpers straight off for the bounce in the trough, but with surfboards you wanted to slide the length of a wave, not be pushed into shore like so much flotsam. The key was getting from prone to upright in one smooth motion as the wave took over from your paddling and before you bottomed out on the drop. It required split-second timing. At first in attempting this the nose of my board kept diving beneath the surface as if it had a chunk of lead in it. I scooted back on the surfboard to remedy the problem, but this presented its own difficulties. Either I had trouble getting into the wave or else, once standing, I’d stall, my board drifting apathetically out the back.
After an hour or two we headed for the beach. Though we hadn’t “surfed,” the technical fluency would come with time. And we’d had our baptism – a full-immersion one at that.
We lay on our towels, basking in the sun and our initiate status.
“Hey Jim, why you think they call him the Flea? He doesn’t look like a flea.”
“Maybe he’s got ’em.”
A guy strolled over. He was about eighteen, had cracked lips and salt-stiffened blond hair, and the skin of his nose was peeling up like paint on a weatherbeaten fence. He was shirtless and wore a pair of low-hanging jeans that showed the waistband of his paisley-print boxer shorts. He was smoking a cigarette. We exchanged hellos and he glanced at my board.
“That a Robbie Dick?”
“Robbie who?”
“Robbie Dick.” He bent down to indicate some writing beneath the fiberglass that said R. Dick. “Robbie’s a friend of mine.”
“He make the board?”
“That’s right. Hey ya mind if I take it out for a spin? Wasn’t gonna hit it today, but things are pickin’ up real nice.”
I tried to gauge his reliability.
“Come on, I won’t hurt it,” he said. “And if anything happens to the board, you get her.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “She’s my deposit.”
A short distance off a girl lay stretched on a towel, soaking up vitamin D. She was slithery with oil and her skin like lacquered walnut against the tangerine bikini. She was manipulating a spray bottle that fanned a cool mist over her body. Okay – he wasn’t going anywhere.
“Way to be,” he said. “Even throw my pants into the deal.”
He shed his jeans, flipped the board under his arm and trotted down to the surf in his paisley-print boxer shorts. He started paddling toward the jetty and when he reached the end of the long finger of angular rocks he didn’t stop there but continued round to the other side and disappeared from view. Hey! Where was he headed?! I jumped up and started running for the jetty’s far side and was just in time to see him paddling for a wave pushing across its tip. He was paddling straight for it – straight for the jetty! Oh, why hadn’t I bought a leash! Then the wave humped and he sprang to his feet. It looked like he was going to smash up but at the last second he made a slick turn and maneuvered the board safely past the rocks and proceeded to ride the wave expertly, performing little squiggles across the wave face while keeping just ahead of the white-maned crest until he ended his ride by angling over the wave’s back while still standing on the board as it came to rest in calm water and with the cigarette still in his mouth.
On the way back to my towel I passed the girlfriend. Her eyes were closed and she was absorbed in the act of tanning. I got absorbed in it as well. She was on her stomach now, her bikini top untied, so from the side you could see the dirty whiteness of her breast crushed against the towel while her bottom was barely covered by a minuscule triangle of bikini, the cloth daringly low on her hips. I squinted one eye and raised my thumb to the other, blotting out the scrap of bikini: the effect was one of total nudity.
“Relax,” said Jim when I returned. “The guy knows what he’s doing.”
“Easy for you to say.”
I craned my neck, watching Paisley-Print flirt with the jetty some more, and time passed. A yellow lifeguard truck with red torpedo floats lining its racks lumbered by. A biplane buzzed overhead pulling a gold banner advertising COPPERTONE in brown letters, flat and unruffled as a plank-wood sign. Off in the distance floated a supertanker, its dark hull silhouetted against the horizon where the sky shaded into a pale band of blue. Then Paisley-Print paddled in, board intact and hair still crisp and dry. With a firm thrust he planted my board in the sand as if setting a man-size exclamation point to his performance.
“Clean stick.”
“Solid glass job,” I replied.
“Have a good one.”
“You too.”
Concern had turned to pride. My new purchase had been test-piloted by a real live surfer and proclaimed good! A memorable day! But this could also be a problem. If people kept wanting to borrow my board, I wouldn’t be able to get much surfing done myself. Maybe I could rent it by the hour, make a little cash on the side. A while later Jim and I gathered up our stuff, climbed the rocks, and crossed back over the highway. Paisley-Print and his girlfriend were sitting on the lowered gate of the Datsun pickup, rinsing the sand from between their toes with water from a plastic bottle.
“Rad truck,” I said by way of conversation.
“Thanks.”
“You carry your stick in back?”
“Right.”
“Bitchen.”
The girl had a Farrah Fawcett hairdo, blow-dried and feathered in layers, and she wore a T-shirt which made public the fact that she was Slippery When Wet. I wasn’t sure what that intended to convey, but my adolescent mind took its own erotic initiative by conjuring an image of her propelling down a Slip ’N Slide, the jets of water playing about her luscious sun-tanned body and speeding her in my direction at the end of the long rubber strip. Coming my way! Girls like her had always seemed unattainable, hopelessly beyond me, but these were the babes you got when you were a surfer. And now I was one! With my clean Robbie Dick stick!
Jim and I loaded our things then took off down the highway. He turned to me with a pained expression.
“Did you say bitchen?”
“Sure, it’s a word.”
“From the sixties. Don’t embarrass me like that again.”
WHOOMPH!
“Wuzzat?”
“I dunno, a sonic boom?”
I looked out and saw my board bouncing crazily down PCH like a punted football. It tumbled and skidded and finally came to rest on the highway shoulder, cars whizzing past. I yelled at Jim to pull over and then dashed back down the road, the gravel pavement prickling my bare feet.
When I surveyed my board I wanted to leave it. Or just shove it in the middle of the highway and have some eighteen-wheeler finish the job. It was battered and scarred, the solid glass job covered with little spiderweb ruptures. I truly wanted to leave it. But finally I made myself pick it up and plodded mournfully back to Jim’s car, putting the board on the racks, pulling the bungee cord over it, and setting the metal hook – which I’d neglected to do the first time around.
WHEN I got home I sat staring in numb horror at the board. What now? I was too embarrassed to take it into a shop, and any repair job would probably be equal in cost to simply replacing the thing. Assuming it could be repaired. Would it even float? Or just sink like a stone and sleep with the fishes? That’s what it resembled – the victim of a gangland hit.
As things stood it wouldn’t even make a decent coffee table.
But I didn’t sulk long. The next afternoon I pedaled my ten-speed to the Reseda branch of the L.A. Public Library and found a book called The Complete Book of Surfing that had a chapter on “Board Care and Repair.” From there it was off to Builder’s Emporium where I purchased a bolt of fiberglass cloth, some laminating resin and a pint of gloss-coat resin that came with a tube of catalyst and thickener. Then I rode home, grabbed a couple sawhorses from the carport, laid down newspapers on the back porch and resined and patched into the wee hours. June bugs sizzled through the night. Moths fluttered up against the Coleman lantern. At the end of the operation I was queasy and high from sniffing all the fumes, but I’d gotten through the first stage of repairs.
Next day I smoothed over the rough edges of fiberglass with sandpaper, stuck on masking tape, applied the gloss coat, let that sit, and the same evening polished it with fine black sandpaper.
It looked alright.
Considering.
When Jim came to pick me up for the beach next day, I showed him my handiwork. He was impressed. So that he might remain so, I kept quiet about the book.
That second day it happened. We were back at the jetty. I paddled for a wave and the tail of my board rose and I felt the downward rush and got nimbly to my feet and found myself cutting diagonally across the face, away from the gnarl, on the green edge of the swell – surfing – doing it! Then I coasted ahead of the wave and hopped off my board and it was over. Just a ten-yard ride on a little two-footer, but it was like I’d grabbed a high-voltage cable.
An electric sensation.
I caught more rides. The trick I’d discovered was to arch my back as I dropped down the wave, creating a rearward shift of weight to counteract the nosedives I’d experienced the first day. (What my book called “pearling.”) I didn’t draw Jim’s attention to my new-found success and he didn’t let on that he saw me, but he saw me. Then after a while I started flubbing up, losing the lately acquired knack, so I paddled in, figuring I’d quit while I was ahead.
I sat on the beach watching the swell lines unfold and waiting to see Jim crack his first wave. The sun was at its zenith as if kited high by a wind that was starting to blow the surf to pieces. Beyond the breakers the blue bay was flecked with billowing white sails. I dug my toes in the sand and let the warm rays caress my face. After some time I opened my eyes again and saw Jim paddling for a wave. It was a late takeoff and when finally he jumped to his feet he got hung up at the lip and the wave broke past his board and for a brief moment he was riding the back of the comber – then a half-beat later he disappeared into the whitewater like a trapdoor had opened. When he bobbed to the surface I grinned and waved.
“Well?” I asked when he came walking up the beach.
“These waves are different from Waikiki.”
“You’re in California now, buddy.”
“And this board’s all over the place – I can’t get it to settle down.”
“Borrow mine.”
“I have to get used to this one.”
“Whatever you say, goofy foot.”
He shot me a dirty look.
“I surf with my left foot forward, that makes me a regular foot,” I explained. “You surf with your right foot forward, that means you’re goofy foot.”
“Wherejya hear that?”
“I just know it.”
“Where from?”
I couldn’t tell him about The Complete Book of Surfing. You were less of a surfer if you acquired your know-how from books. A surfer was a natural man whose talent and savvy were inborn. If I told Jim about the book then he might discount my success and put it down to rote learning. That was the last thing I wanted since this was the first time I was besting him at a sport where we were competing head to head. He could run faster than me, throw or kick a football farther and consistently beat me in one-on-one, but here was a sport where I could likely hold my own. And it wasn’t as if I had more experience either. We’d started the exact same day, we’d left the starting blocks together, and like it or not that means you’re racing.
Jim was up and surfing the next day and his cockiness made a rapid comeback. One time we were walking down to the water when he stopped in his tracks.
“Hey man,” he said. “You’re carrying your board all wrong.”
“How should I carry it?”
“Like you got it but nose forward.”
I switched it around.
“Fin on the inside.”
I flopped it over and stood at attention, as if doing small-arms drill. “Anything else?”
“Tilt it up.”
But I’d been reading my library book and waited for my openings. One afternoon we were out surfing the jetty.
“Big undertow today,” he declared.
I pounced.