Kook

  I had been talking to Jack Hill, the ex-con, on the beach. He operated heavy equipment when he wasn’t surfing or shaping boards or seeing his parole officer. He liked the idea of our project and sold me a short spring wetsuit very cheap. When I paddled up to the dozen surfers at the pier, they slid their eyes over me in a way I would later learn to recognize—it meant: Fucking kook. Not gonna let him get a single wave. If he gets in my way, gonna fuck him up. End of conversation. Big Jack called out, “Hey, Pete! Come over here. Cool. You surf here before? Okay, this is a left, this is your wave.” The rest of the surfers had been waiting for their own wave, many for a quarter of an hour. With one sentence, barely above speaking voice, and one sweeping glance over the lineup, he had made a proclamation to the tribe: Back off, new kid gets the wave.

  “Thanks,” I murmured, catching a quick glimpse of ten stony faces. “Hi, guys.” I actually waved like a Miss America contestant. And then I prayed. Pete, you better not, no way, kook out and miss this frigging wave. Or wipe out once you catch it. I must have been living right. God granted me a reprieve from total kookiness. I paddled as hard as I could, angled left, and caught the wave. I stood up and rode it left. I rode it as far as I could. I almost fell to my knees in the foam and thanked heaven.

  Two weeks into this first month I drove over to the French board-shaper Bruno’s shop. It’s a little garage-door unit a few miles from the beach in an industrial area of Huntington, up against the 405 freeway. It was evening. I called through the doorway and I heard the sander stop. Bruno came out covered in fine foam dust from the board he had been shaping. It stuck to his thinning unkempt hair and two-day stubble like snow. He is short, about my height, five-eight, but he has shoulders as broad as a door and arms like Popeye. Sparkling blue eyes.

  We pulled out two beat-up lawn chairs and opened them beneath a stunted little palm tree growing out of a chain-link fence at the corner of his building. We sat beneath the tree in the gathering cool and drank Perrier. I told him that I had gone out that morning to Bolsa Chica and caught a few rights beside some dolphins and longboarders.

  “Oh, yah, those old guys,” he said. “They spend all the morning in the parking lot talking about their boards. Afraid to surf, I think. Yah, yah. You see the little stands they have? Paw! They set up next to the truck and put the board on and talk, talk, talk. Surfing is not about talk. Paw!” He blinked foam out of his lashes. “Nice tree, eh? Good shade!”

  I stared at him. “Bruno, the sun is down. It is all shade out here.”

  “Yah, well.” He was unfazed. He said that the electric company had come by again today and told him to cut it down. “I had to—how you say?—bribe the fucking guy with a discount board or he cuts him down on the spot. Tant pis.” Bruno told me that he was going back to New Caledonia next week to shape boards for the locals and surf.

  “Bien,” he said, screwing the cap on his Perrier. “You want to see your six-four?”

  He meant a six-foot-four shortboard. I was beside myself with excitement. First custom surfboard. A shortboard, as I was learning every day out at the Cliffs, demanded a lot more effort than a longboard. They were harder to paddle out because they were a lot slower, they were harder to paddle into and catch a wave for the same reason, and you had to catch the wave right where it was breaking, which meant you had to have perfect timing and be super quick on the pop-up and takeoff. You couldn’t, usually, sit way down on the easier shoulder and take off on the forming wall before the break even got to you, the way you could on a longboard. A shortboard was just too slow. The swelling wave just passed right under you. No, you had to get all up in there and look the dragon right between the toothy jaws. Because this is where the wave is steepest and fastest, and on a shortboard you need the speed. Shortboards are also a lot less stable. The payoff is that once you’re up and riding the wave you have the maneuverability, the nimbleness of a swallow; when you get back on a longboard it can feel like a container ship. I was excited that Bruno thought I could handle it.

  Bruno and I had become friends in the spring, just before Kim and I launched our big trip. Michael had introduced us and I told him about my project—kook to big fast wave in six months—and he agreed to sponsor me. Which made me probably the only sponsored kook in the history of surfing.

  I had liked him right away. Bruno was from the harsh, stony North Atlantic coast of Brittany and he had been something of a legend in France. He opened the first surfboard factory and shop in the northwest of the country and organized the first competitions. Once he started making boards, they were all the rage. I liked him because he always surprised me. The first time we met, he wanted to talk less about surfing and more about the sustainable, floating, spherical house pods he wanted to build to help solve the housing shortage. They would be made of something like fiberglass, make their own energy and fresh water, and would be anchored to the seabed on long shock cords that could withstand hurricane seas.

  Before he began shaping my boards, we thought it would be fun to get to know each other a little better and go surfing. In May, two months before Kim and I embarked for California, Bruno and I headed down to San Onofre, to a classic longboard break called Old Man’s. A “longboard break” means the wave comes in soft and slow, ideal for beginners. I hadn’t surfed in so long, but I was excited and eager to show Bruno that I could, well, stand up. We paddled out together and at the first waist-high wave I turned, popped up, and crashed straight down into another beginner. When I came up, the nose of the beautiful longboard Bruno had loaned me was cracked like an egg.

  I was crushed. I paddled out to Bruno. “Hey! I broke your board.”

  “First ride? I don’t know how many boards I will have to make for you for Mexico.” I felt bad. “Tant pis, we can fix.” Then a smile spread across his face. “Peter the Destroyer.” He grinned. “Every board I make for you will have a picture of a Navy destroyer on it.”

  Bruno agreed to supply us with six boards in all, an entire quiver. They included two shortboards and a 7–6 single-fin, old-style gun. Bruno told me that the short quad fin was for when I got strong enough and fast enough to take off right at the peak where the wave was breaking.

  “You mean I will be a shortboarder?”

  “Yah, why not?”

  “Everybody says that if you start surfing after thirty, you will always be a longboarder.” I was now forty-eight.

  Bruno didn’t deign to answer. He cocked an eyebrow. I knew he thought that most people, in general, were just too stupid. He was a Celt from Brittany and he even thought the French were stupid. “The gun,” he said, “is for Mexico. If you get into some big waves. It will get you out of trouble fast.” He smiled. Big waves—I couldn’t imagine. I was having a hard enough time just getting up on the board.

  Now, on this hot August evening, he disappeared inside his shop and came back out with a freshly glassed and sanded shortboard. It had four fins in the tail, a quad, for more responsiveness. It was beefy in the middle, a bit thick, and a hair wide, to give me a little more flotation and make it easier to paddle and ride than a pro’s shortboard. He flipped it over and held it, deck up. There was the Bruno fleur-de-lis up near the nose, and down below the hip of the board was a blue rectangle in which was blazoned the stately menacing silhouette of a Navy destroyer; USS PH. Below it a torpedo held the words IN SURF WE TRUST.

  I looked at the board and up at Bruno. He was grinning.

  “The Destroyer, eh? Peter the Destroyer.” When Bruno smiled it was all the more charming because he looked embarrassed to be doing it, to be breaking his Celtic reserve, and that gave it a goofy dissonance.

  I was speechless. I couldn’t believe my beautiful board. I had never had anything made just for me in my entire life. Not true. My father had written me poems, my artist mother had made me a dazzling sculpture, and my high school girlfriend had woven me a blanket. But this—this—this was a damn surfboard!

  Bruno laid it across two sawhorses, vanished inside, and came out with
a brick of base wax. He tore off the wrapper. “Here,” he said. “You know how?”

  “Not really. I just rub it on, right?”

  He twisted his mouth with his usual contempt for a stupid idiot world.

  “Why they don’t teach this? Go in circles, comme ça? Light. Yah. You rub too hard and she creates heat, flattens the bumps. You want the bumps. Like so.”

  I laid the edge of the brick against the smooth glass and rubbed overlapping circles. The wax caught and stuttered against my palm, moved on. Gradually, like the image in a developing photograph, the stuttered tracks of the brick collected more wax on each light pass and an even pattern of bumps appeared, a lovely rash of white on white, a nubby swirl of traction. The black destroyer now looked like it was sailing through a blizzard.

  Can I tell you how much I loved surfing then? I was standing in a concrete jungle on an August night several miles from the shore. I could hear the thrum of the 405 highway somewhere nearby. I was waxing my first custom board and I was stricken with the beauty of surfing, the whole endeavor.

  There is nothing you can say about a surfboard that you cannot say about a sailboat, an airplane, a ski. The artistry follows the function and the beauty is in the marriage. The grace of line is an expression of potential force. Motion holds its breath in every swelling curve. The trembling flank of a horse, warm under the palm, could not be more loaded with motion. But a board, if it is made by an old-school, traditional shaper like Bruno, is made just for you. He may ask where you like to surf and your skill level, but his assessment is mostly intuitive and is made in the first quick glance as you meet—the breadth of your shoulders, your animation, the length of your limbs, your quickness to laugh, all somehow as important as your height and weight and ability. One night at his town house, as Caroline, his six-foot-tall fashion-model wife, got her kit together for a shoot the next day, Bruno showed me schematics of specific boards on his laptop that he had been inputting for several years. These were all boards he had made, and the designs, drafted using a three-dimensional CAD program, each contained some two hundred measurements that precisely described thicknesses and curves, rockers and scoops. He could, if he wanted to follow the growing trend, take these designs to a computer-linked foam-carving machine and have a power tool shape the boards to spec. But he doesn’t work that way. As many measurements as he records in his drawings, even a board out of his computer can’t compare to what he shapes by hand from the foam blanks. Every board he creates is a unique animal with its own personality and potential for brilliance.

  But usually, when someone like me comes in and asks for a board, a 6–5 pintail thruster, say, with a hard edge and loose tail, he will take one look at the person, ask a few questions, and then some board he made perhaps twenty years ago in France for someone of a similar size and ability will pop into his head. Along with some idea of how to modify it just a little, to be perfect for this surfer. And he will shape the board from memory, by feel.

  I wonder where else in the world today this kind of craftsmanship survives. There must be tailors with this level of mastery. Or carpenters or chefs. Master board shapers are still doing it, tucked away in shops in Orange County and Ventura, Australia and Hawaii, but every year there are fewer of them. They can no longer compete with the cheap factory boards from Asia.

  Now, in the gathering dusk outside of Bruno’s shop, I picked up my waxed, perfect 6–4 and lay it inside the Beast like it was Excalibur.

  MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

  For the next two weeks I sought waves where I could learn in peace. I liked Bolsa Chica, because the beach ran for miles and it was wilder. Sometimes my only audience were seals and dolphins. Usually, though, there was a Dawn Patrol of corporate guys who worked for Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Martin Marietta. They were reserved and single-minded. They needed x amount of waves to balance their day as weapons manufacturers. These men were all about metrics. The problem is that waves are a limited resource. Decent, rideable waves can come in bunches, or one may not show up for twenty minutes. And sets, the three or four waves that come in a group and are noticeably bigger, they may roll in only every half an hour. It’s hard for a novice to understand, when you look out at the ocean and see wave following wave, that often only a small percentage of these are surfable. So the Dawn Patrol got surly if you took a wave from their plus column. They showered under the outdoor spigot and changed into suits in the parking lot. At first, I yielded to these Type A’s. I figured they were on a much tighter time constraint than me, and if one paddled aggressively around me closer to a peak I’d been waiting for and took my wave, well, he needed it more than I did, and I could get the next. Also, since I was likely to wipe out anyway, best not to waste a wave. But after watching the same company men steal my wave again and again, I got surly myself. I held sustained interior dialogues. I looked to the ocean, saw three dolphins porpoising by, slipping through the long sunlight like glistening spirits; I breathed deep of the salt Pacific and praised the peaceful life of surf. Then I looked at the shaved neck and hundred-dollar haircut of the company man on a ten-foot longboard, a board designed to sit far out and take everyone else’s wave. This guy had just caught a long right, and then paddled right past me into position for the next one. And I thought, Fuck that. What happened to courtesy? Why does the world bend for people in a hurry? Why doesn’t the world bow to the ones who aren’t in a hurry? Why are these guys in a hurry anyway? To make money. To make stealth destroyers. Destroyers! I looked down at my pulsing 6–4.

  I am the Destroyer!

  I said it to myself in the proper French accent. Fuck these Type A pricks. I looked straight at the guy and paddled around him, on the peak side. I could see the dude’s blood pressure rise, could see it in his face. Insubordination! He was probably an executive. When one of these assholes scowled at me, I yelled, “I may kook out and miss this wave, but this board is double-glassed and I really don’t give a shit if boards collide.” In other words, if you drop in on me, cut me off when I catch this next wave, I will just keep going and listen for the crack of fiberglass. We sat eight feet apart for five minutes and I took the next good wave.

  From then on, the rules were changed. Of course, sometimes, if the guy was really big, or was with his buddies, or looked more like a San Bernardino Mongol than a cryogenics engineer, I’d just swallow it and move off and find my own peak. It was tribal out there. I realized that the strain of the aloha spirit that surfing was bringing out in me was extremely aggressive. Like, Aloha—now back the fuck off my wave.

  In my third week I had a revelation. I returned to Seal Beach, where Kim was still in school with the Michaels, and paddled straight out to the pier. I looked around and realized that the lineup was all kooks. In fact, I was the least kooky. I couldn’t believe it. Where was the gang? Must have been Free Tattoo Day down at Harley’s. I was on my Bruno 9–0 longboard, the one I had broken my first time out. He had patched it, with a large graphic of a whizzing torpedo on the nose—a warning, I guess, to others. These others couldn’t find the right position to sit in. They were waiting for the wave in the wrong place. Even I could see that. And they paddled like beached walruses. I could paddle straight out and catch every wave I wanted. Wow, this was what it must be like to be really good, how the experts were always getting all the waves and I just sat there. Then I caught a set wave left, probably shoulder-high, and I rode it swiftly down the line. I was whizzing north. I was a speeding bullet, or torpedo, of euphoria.

  Just then, just in front of me, a balding dad shoved his daughter on a foam board straight into the beach. Straight into my path. I yelled. He hadn’t even looked right, up the wave! In that instant I saw as if in freeze-frame both their faces: his was a mask of surprise and wide eyed horror; she just looked wonderstruck, like she was being washed with the colored lights of a close encounter. It was a close encounter. I collided with the girl and we both wiped out. I came up yelling.

  “Jesus Christ!” I shouted. “You could
have killed both of us! The surfer on the wave has the right-of-way! You got to look! Look up the wave before you just shove your daughter into a car wreck!”

  They stared at me like I was completely crazy. Then the man remembered his role and started to yell back. Then he realized he had no case. He picked up his daughter’s board. It was cracked. The man’s shoulders slumped and I could see him deflate. “It’s broken,” he murmured. “I just got it for her.” He looked up at me, eyes accusing. “You should go down to Huntington or somewhere. Or learn to control your board. This is a beginner beach.”

  Yeah, right, I thought. You’re in my house now, Little Man. I breathed. I paddled back, still feeling righteous, out to my wave, the wave I owned for the first time, and as I sat and watched the man and his daughter get out of the water and carry their board back to the parking lot, the righteousness began to erode and I felt like a shit. Of course he was right. Jack Hill wouldn’t have hit the girl, he had more control standing on his head. I hadn’t even been here a month and I was already getting proprietary and aggro. Not even pitying the lesser kooks who waited while I rode wave after wave. Damn. I was acting just like the Military-Industrial Complex out at Bolsa Chica.

  I called Andy, who had been transferred suddenly to Seattle. I told him the story. “Surfing is changing you,” he said. “You were my most gentle friend.”

  Ouch. He laughed. “I remember kayaking, having to wait for you, because you were busy fishing some spider out of a pool and taking him to shore. Remember that?”

  “I still do that,” I said defensively. “Just yesterday I paddled a half-drowned pigeon in to the beach. She kept falling off the pier’s seawall into the water.”

  “Yeah, well. Other surfers aren’t as cuddly, huh?”

  “No. Tell you the truth, I just want to kill most of them.”

  “You the man. Call me if you need a lawyer. I know a bunch of defense attorneys.”