The Course of True Love
Icy spindrift needles my face and I hunker down, turning to avoid the worst of it. Ol’ Yella, my wetsuit, is mucho leaky and cold sea water is freezing my frijoles. I’m Rubber Duck, surfing this winter blow hammering Malibu. The waves are giganzo, but I am centred, keen as a samurai.
I love my glassed balsa-wood surfboard. It’s old school, a wide-hipped V-J pig board. I’m sitting-up with my legs dangling in the water and getting blown around. I’ll have to paddle soon to face the next set.
The other guy out here is old, forty-something, over six feet tall, and skinny; Dr Death, the Voodoo Man. I nod and shake my head at him. He grins back. We’ve surfed the same spots off and on, but we’re not friends. We’re undeclared competitors.
Dr D is a study in black, has sunken cheeks, and his hair is in rastas. His wetsuit is sleek, exaggerating how long and un-fleshed he is. When I look away, my mind sees a skeleton, a Dia de los Muertos surfer. All he needs is a top hat to complete his gear.
Appropriately, his surfboard is silver with black pin-striping, making it look like a Salem tombstone. On its deck there’s a winged angel’s face rising from a ball of stylized flames around a swastika. The angel’s eye sockets are vacant, its mouth open in a silent scream. Dr D creeps me out.
To give him his due, Dr Death is a world-class surfer whose real name is Azrael Pink, no kidding. He looks Somalian, but he’s from Compton. So far, Azrael’s tanked too. Big waves are fast waves and neither of us has been able to paddle up the speed to catch one, but he’s nearly made it a couple of times. Big surf is seductive; tantalizing.
If you want to know the truth, I don’t know what I’ll do if I manage to hook-up. I’m visualizing an epic ride; me sliding down the face of a huge comber arms akimbo and, crouching, straight into the tube. When I come out the other end, my almost ex-girlfriend Jenny will see me and waive, jumping up and down like a pompom girl after some football ape scores a touchdown. One magical ride will make everything copacetic between her and me.
Oh yeah, sure it will.
Right now, she’s huddled under a serape on the beach. Jenny and Azrael are the only other humans in sight. He looks like the Grim Reaper and Jenny like a sandpile; yesterday’s castle, its crenelated ramparts crumbling to dust. If a shark ate me, Azrael would keep on surfing and Jenny would fold her blanket and go home, brushing sand off her feet before getting into her car. The surf would just keep pounding in.
Nobody surfs Malibu in February. All the stoners and mole people, Hollywood-Class homeowners, go to Vegas or Palm Springs. Charlie Chan, their year-round private security pig, doesn’t bother shooing us off the beach this time of year. We come through the never-repaired hole in the fence and get straight into the water. He doesn’t care. Surfers attract tourists and Charlie owns a Taco Bell on the Camino.
‘Look mother, there’s a couple of them hippies surfing. One of em’s a nigger, the other’s hard to say, might be a spic. Who’d a thought of that, a hippie nigger, go figger. I’ll pull over so you can get a pitcher. Don’t let the girls out of the car.’
Leave the girls, redneck trash. Surfers just are. We don’t come in your racist taxonomy.
I know Jenny’s thinking about stranding me. Feature trying to hitchhike south in my gnarly old wetsuit carrying a board. Good luck with that! Jenny and me haven’t been doing so good. She’s transferring to San Jose State next semester and I’m stuck in Dumbbell English at Orange Crust College. If I don’t get my grades up, I’ll lose my draft deferment and be surfing Vietnam in no time. I don’t give a fuck. Why not Vietnam?
SJ State was just voted Playboy Magazine’s Party School of the Year.
Go Jenny, go! You’ll find a better-quality surf bum up north. Sure you will.
We both know we’re about to crash and burn. She’s planning our break-up like a bridal shower, probably thinking about it right now. The only question is when we’ll have The Big Fight; how to spin fault to me for her friends and parents.
‘Richie’s such a loser! I should have listened to you. He’s got zee-row ambition, all he thinks about is dope and surfing.’
And, pussy, Jenny, pussy too, but not just you. You didn’t invent it.
If Jenny’s knocked-up that will toss in a pinch of drama and amp-up her parents’ involvement, but the endgame is a no brainer. Like I just said, I really don’t give a rat’s ass anymore, so go Jenny, go!
Back to right now, all I can visualize is wiping out and breaking my board into flotsam. I’d quit, concede the day to Dr D, except Jenny will give me a huge serving of Valley Girl caca as soon as I hit the beach.
‘Grow up, Richie. You should make a coffee table out of that ratty old surfboard. It’s like you, sooo yesterday!’
I can see it in her posture. Why hurry in to endure that abuse? Cold cojones is nothing compared to Jenny’s bitch riff. I wish we could cut straight to her dramatic knock-out punch, avoid the preliminary sparring. Hell, I’ll take a dive ten seconds into the first round.
So, for the time being, I’ll clock waves hoping for a miracle table-turner.
Take that, Jenny Miller, you just dumped the surf king of Orange Coast Class of 1968. Didn’t I tell you, I’ve got a job offer to be a surfing stunt double on Hawaii Five-0?
I think I’m getting hypothermic; I’m daydreaming and not paying attention to the incoming. I hear voices in the storm. One of them’s Bobby Ferris, a dead kid I used to hang out with.
Bobby Ferris
Bobby was a freckle-faced, blue eyed boy with a shock of strawberry-blond hair forever falling down his forehead. Chubby and apple-cheeked, he looked like Doris Day’s kid brother in every Hollywood movie ever made. If he’d survived to adulthood, I think he’d have resembled Robert Redford or Harrison Ford. He was that kind of good looking.
The gang at Fremont High used to whisper with awe that Bobby was a ‘rat’s ass guy.’ That meant that he didn’t care, give a rat’s ass, about what people thought, particularly adults. He said and did exactly as he pleased.
Being ‘Rat’s Ass’ was an incredibly cool status, indicative of being well beyond parental or even school system control. You didn’t get that jacket easily, however, you paid for it by surviving parental beatings and systematic institutional cruelty. Bobby’s angelic looks and slightly lopsided smile disguised a hardrock, all-American sociopath, a future John Dillinger or Dick Nixon. Too bad we never got to know which.
An example: When I was a Sea Scout Bobbie came to our weekly meeting one Tuesday night, apparently to join up. God knows who brought him there. Bobby had disappeared from school suddenly a few months earlier and I missed him.
Anyhow, our leader, Skipper Davis, introduced three or four new guys, asking each to stand up and tell us where he went to school, lived, and what his parents did. When he finally got to Bobbie, the Skipper said, ‘Boys this is Bobby Ferris. Bobby would you stand and tell us something about yourself?’
That was a mistake and I leaned in to hear Bobby’s response.
Bobby said, ‘My name’s Robert T. Ferris, Jr. My dad’s a whore-monger. Fuck you.’ and sat down.
Skipper Davis said, ‘Okay boys, let’s break up into pairs and practice our sailors’ knots.’
Bobby didn’t come back to Sea Scouts the following week or ever again. Things might have been different if he had.
#
I first met Bobby during 8th Grade gym class. We were playing football, a game we all loved for its chaotic violence. It was an opportunity for running amok so long as we maintained a semblance of team organization and there was a ball someplace nearby.
Our class was particularly lawless because Jonesy, Coach Jones, liked to wander over to the tennis courts to chat with comely Miss Ryan, the girls’ rookie gym teacher. He apparently didn’t realize that Ryan was lesbian, batting for the other team. Or maybe he was just checking out her young charges. Half of us thought he was an old perv, not a dimwit. In either case, Jonesy paid our class no attention. If we kept our gym shorts on and stayed near the playing field, we could commit any mayhem.
I was pretty good at football because I was fast and liked running over people. One day, I was making an end sweep and only Bobby, the new kid, stood between me and the goal line. Relishing our anticipated collision, I made no effort to evade him, simply accelerated. Bobby grinned. Not even pretending to tackle me, he brought his right knee up soundly into my testicles as we collided. I fell over backwards and lay on the ground retching like a gaffed codfish.
When I regained speech, I squeaked in Mickey Mouse falsetto, ‘You’re dead Ferris, you faggot cocksucker’ or some similar schoolboy imprecation.
That’s when Bobby surprised everyone. Instead of giving me a boot in the face, he dropped down to one knee in front of all the other kids and said, ‘I’m sorry. I meant to do that, but I’m sorry anyway. It must really hurt.’
When I regained my feet, Bobby came up and offered me his hand, repeating his apology. I accepted it and for the rest of his time at Fremont we were inseparable. We couldn’t hang-out together after school because we lived on opposite sides of town. Bobby was bussed in from North Fremont, the wealthy neighborhood, supposedly to help our ‘racially imbalanced’ school achieve some government-approved percentage of whites.
Although Bobby was unquestionably apple-pie Anglo, I know South Fremont got him because he’d been expelled from the school in his own end of town, a resume detail he was proud of. He had an easy swagger, even on his first day with us, and was the most glamorous kid I ever knew. When he walked into a class, he pulled a kind of respect. We knew who was really in control.
#
As it turned out, that night at Sea Scouts was the last time I spent in Bobby’s company. I saw him around town driving his dad’s big-assed green Cadillac and at Carpenter’s Drive-In Restaurant, but we just winked and nodded. I didn’t have a car and wasn’t old enough to drive. Still shy around girls, I envied Bobby’s comfort with them. He always had a pretty gidget handy.
Then, one Tuesday night outside our scout meeting there was a screech of tires, a heavy thump, and horns honking. We all ran to find out what had happened.
I can still see Bobby when I close my eyes. He was crumpled, looking like a chubby Raggedy Andy doll in the yellow-green wash of the overhead street lamps. It was raining and his blood was swirling into the gutter. A girl was standing on the other side of the street screaming.
An old Chevy with a shattered windshield was in front of Bobby slewed at an odd angle, its driver’s door wide open. Coach Jones sat behind the wheel with his face in his hands. He was keening at the top of his lungs and rocking himself back and forth. He didn’t sound human.
I dodged through passing cars to get to Bobby, but he was seriously dead, his skull cracked and leaking brain matter. He had lipstick on his face; his rat’s ass grin ruined by broken teeth. I was trying to rearrange his Hawaiian shirt to pull it over his tummy when Skipper Davis dragged me away.
Cops arrived and ran us to the curb, but we all stood around watching what they did to Bobby. He lay there a long time in the weird glow of the overhead lighting and flickering orange of the road flares. After they bagged him, I could still smell his blood mingled with sulphur from the flares. Broken glass glittered like pirate’s treasure in the street.
Bobby had been drinking beer in the backseat of the Caddy and making out with Lois Vasquez, a senior from North Fremont. Apparently, he had to pee and lurched out of the car right in front of Jonesy.
I saw a broken whiskey bottle on the floorboard of Jonesy’s car, but he was never charged with anything. He went away for a time, but not to jail. He had a nervous breakdown. When he came back, he left Miss Ryan alone. He looked slack-jawed and vacant. I thought maybe he’d gone alky, but kids said he was shell-shocked.
That’s my memory of Bobby Ferris. He’s lying in the street with his bellybutton peeking out from a bloody Hawaiian shirt, his rat’s ass grin broken and smeared with lipstick.
Jonesy’s gym class wasn’t fun anymore. He made us play by the rules.
Saint Elmo’s Fire
I’m back in Malibu again and things are strange. The surf is building, and spume is writhing like a living thing on the surface of the water. Without my board I almost wouldn’t know where spindrift ends, and water begins.
The air smells electric. You can feel the lightning in it. When I spread my arms, a blue glow encases them and little sparks crackle at my fingertips. It’s Saint Elmo’s Fire, a surf miracle.
Dr Death is visible in silhouette against the horizon. It’s golden now because the sun is low in the sky, just beginning its dip into the Western Pacific. It’s time to wrap this up.
As I look out toward him, Dr D is gently lifted by a perfect swell. It’s not the biggest wave, but its form is beautiful. I make one last single-minded effort to get up to speed and can feel the wave building behind me, relentless as time. God, my heart is hammering in my chest. I’m hardwired into the electric surf.
Cowabunga!!
I’m on top of the biggest wave of my life. As I pop up, I can feel its massive power, like a diesel locomotive rumbling beneath my bare feet. My whole body is glowing with Saint Elmo’s Fire and everything I do has a dreamlike quality, a perfection beyond my skill. I am utterly, totally in the zone, a child in the loving arms of Mother Ocean.
The tube surrounding me is vast and filled with life, a magical golden tunnel made just for me. When I shoot out the other side it feels like rebirth. And suddenly, magically, the melting sun has gilded the sea.
I kick-out in brilliant whitewash laughing for sheer joy. Then, there is a moment of total stillness, as if the Cosmos has paused. In that timeless crystal blink, I am in the presence of, infused with, loving deity.
Azrael Pink, Dr Death himself, shouts and raises his clenched fist in the Black Power salute; respect from the master. I return it awkwardly and the moment dissipates. Still euphoric, I walk born-again to the shore, touched like the Apostles at Pentecost.
Jenny Miller, my now ex-girlfriend, se fue’, is gone. She even took my best huaraches. My wish for a simple ending with her has been granted, but that seems trivial in comparison with the joy I feel at just being. Holy God, life is good!
I walk out to the highway with my board under my arm and hitch a lift the moment I get my thumb out. Everything is perfect.
It’s About Time
It’s Lisabeth, my daughter, dropping in on Alexa, Amazon’s family values home-spying device. Lizzy has set up my Alexa for video surveillance and enjoys catching me at some mischief. I sowed dragon’s teeth.
I had an unpleasant spell, a brain fart, awhile back and I’m under house arrest at the beach cottage. I made a plea deal with Lizzy and Luke, her twin brother, to avoid incarceration in a geriatric detention centre. I continue to live alone, but subject to the kids’ random electronic snoopery and daily visits by a health aide.
Okay, you guessed it, Jenny was pregnant. We had a shotgun wedding and several years of trying to make marriage work ‘for the kids’ before Jenny flew the coop. But here’s the kicker, after our divorce we got along better than ever. With the pressure off, we became friends then lovers again, happily sharing the twins’ upbringing.
My beloved jailers are wonderful kids, but when Lizzy gets wind in her spinnaker, she’s bossy like her mother. Luke and I are both intimidated by her.
Jenny Miller, my life partner and best friend, died a few years ago here at the cottage with me, of cancer and a benign overdose. I’m a mole-man now, living alone on the beach in Malibu.
Did you notice? There’s a big storm up today and a couple of kids are out there surfing it. I wonder if time is a mobius strip, an infinity loop. I think those kids might just be Azrael Pink and me.
We’re all duckies in the storm.
