CHAPTER ONE- FRIDAY, JUNE 6, 1969

            There was something almost comforting about the darkness, about not having a horizon to worry about. An oversized flashlight in my hand, the words on the pages of the palm-sized notepad, open and pushed up against the steering wheel; this was all I could really see. Notes, in cop shorthand, detective code. Still, I could hear the steady sound of waves, the rhythm occasionally changed with what had to be an outside set. I had felt, when I pulled into the lot and got out of the car, the push of night wind hit me, pass me, and get lost, dispersed in the vastness beyond the bluff. Offshore. Perfect.  

I was in the driver’s seat of my car, mine, the hand-me-down Ford Falcon station wagon, new in 1964. The Falcon was parked in the optimum location in the Swamis parking lot, dead center, front row, facing the bluff. When it got light enough, I would be able to watch the waves wrap around the point. There would be a moment where I would know I would be dropping down the stairs and paddling out. If Swamis was at all decent, it would get crowded.

            It was not nearly light enough. I closed the notepad, thumb holding my place, and tried to repeat what I had transposed from a days’ worth of my father’s notes. I opened the pad, reread the third of any pages that had real action, real adventure. A break-in, chase, and arrest. Vista, October 1967. I recited the words. I checked again, for accuracy. Close. Or closer.

I shined the flashlight on the seat beside me. A black metal file box with other note pads and a spare t shirt, for later, three scuffed and dirtied, formerly dirty-orange Pee-Chee binders, three college-ruled notebooks inside each one. I put the notepad into the pocket of the top binder, middle of three. I pulled out the bottom Pee-Chee, opened it, took out the middle notebook. Wire bound, with serrations, tear out pages. Not that I would. I pulled a ballpoint pen from the wire, left a space between the previous day’s notes, wrote, “Free. These are days where freedom and peace and war and revolution are often used in the same sentence.”

            I repeated my words. “’Love.’ I should add ‘love,’” I told myself. “People say it, don’t mean it.” I didn’t. I added, “School day. Work day. Not for me. Free! And… it sounds like Swamis is actually breaking. Got my spot. Optimum location. No one else here. Yet.”

            Putting the pen back into the binding, adding the notebook to the stack of Pee-Chee binders and notebooks, a waxed cardboard quart of chocolate milk trapped behind them, I reached into the small wooden box of eight track tapes on the driveline hump, fingered my way to the third one down, flipped it to the proper direction, and inserted it in the dash-mounted player.

            Legal. At least this one looked legal. The player would work without the car running because the guy I bought it from, Mark, friend of a friend, hooked it up the way my father’s Sheriff’s Office radio had been wired.

Mark claimed if this tape deck was stolen, he hadn’t stolen it. My surf friends Gary and Roger, and several of their friends, claimed he did, and I should have known. “Just don’t let the cops fuck with this one,” Gary said. “Get some better tapes,” Roger added.  

I pushed in “Aerial Ballet.”

I was listening, and then I wasn’t. Asleep, perhaps. I didn’t hear the two vehicles pull in, one on either side, didn’t hear the doors close, wasn’t aware two people had met at the front of the Falcon.

Wham!

The flashlight was up, instantly stuck between the spokes of the steering wheel and pointed at the man leaning toward me, straight across the hood, the flat palm of his right hand raised and ready for another slap.  The light hit the curve of the fogged-up windshield, bounced back. I turned the flashlight off. I still hadn’t recognized the man.

“It’s still fuckin’ dark, man,” he said. I recognized the voice. Sid. I would have, should have recognized the sound of his van, seven out of eight pistons firing. I must have been asleep.

“Yeah. Dark.” I didn’t recognize that voice. “Okay, Sidney; five waves and I have to go.”

“No, man, I’m doing the delivery. It’s still my job. And… I have some… green stamps I need to… redeem.”

“No. Not today. Man. Five waves and…” I waited for a completion of the sentence. “And, you know what, you aren’t going.”

“No? Just you? Fuck it, then, man; five for you means ten for me.”

Wham! Flat palm on the hood. A different hand. Passenger side. “Break of dawn, DeFreines.” There was humming. Military cadence. “Jody’s got Sid’s surfboard, got his Daddy’s Falcon, too; no sense feelin’ lonely, no sense feelin’ blue.” The cadence continued the with a lighter tapping on the hood. One finger, maybe two.

I filled in the rest in my mind. Silently. “Sound off, one, two; sound off, three four…” I stopped myself. “Jody,” I thought, “He called me Jody.”

“Jody.” A face was at my side window, close to the glass. I was startled into an uncontrollable upper body twitch. Still, I didn’t turn to look until the man was a darker shadow in the dark. “Redemption day, Jody, and… and you’re going with me.” He hit the window with a flat palm. The shadow receded.

Junipero Serra Hayes. Jumper.

I didn’t get out of the car until two metal doors slammed on the vehicle to my right, until Sid’s vague shadow passed. Other cars, headlights on, were coming into the lot from 101.

It was a pickup truck to the left of the Falcon; step-side, late fifties, brownish red and rusty red. Farm truck. I brought up a mental image of where I had seen this truck. Grandview Street, off 101, right hand side. Farmhouse, barn, greenhouses, a little shop with “Flowers by Hayes” over the sliding glass door. Jumper. Junipero Hayes.  

Everyone knew Jumper was back in the North County. No one had seen him in the water.

The mid-sixties Chevy van on my right, Sid’s, was a light gray. Factory color. It was jacked-up in the back, with overwide tires, accommodated by Sid having cut the wheel wells and glassed-on the red-primed, flared fenders. No windows. Surfboards Hawaii decal on the driver’s door. Sid. Team rider. Another asshole in the water. Of course, they were friends, Sid and Jumper. Locals. 

            I opened both driver side doors, tossed a damp beach towel over the back door, used the cover to strip out of my Levis jeans and into my driest trunks. I stuck my towel onto the roof, pulled my wallet out of the jeans, set it on the towel. I grabbed a pack of Marlboros and a Zippo lighter off the dashboard, placed them into the inside pocket of my windbreaker. I folded my boxers in with the Levis, set them on the floor in front of the driver’s seat. I set my shoes, socks already inside them, on top of my Levis. I pulled my latest board, formerly Sid’s board, out of the back of the Falcon, set it on the roof racks. I opened, locked, and closed all the doors, circled the Falcon again, making sure all the doors were locked. I wrapped my keys and wallet into the towel, clutched it to my chest with my left hand, slid the board off the racks with my right hand, stepped away and pivoted it, wax side out, into position under my arm.

            I took three breaths and walked toward the stairs.

            …

It was still dark enough that the water, other than a silver-green line at the horizon, was more black-and-white than any sort of discernible color. Carrying the surfboard that had, indeed, once belonged to Sid, I took two steps at a time down the top flight of the wooden stair system at Swamis. I stopped on the platform where the stairs made a ninety degree turn and dropped, parallel to the beach, the rest of the way down.

The platform was approximately six feet by eight feet and offered a perfect view of the lineup and the point. Because it was at a particularly steep portion of the bluff, probably sixty feet or more above the beach, galvanized chain link fencing, eight feet high, the metal posts attached to the wooden posts and railings, had been added to two sides of the landing.

The ocean, forty minutes before dawn, was horizontal streaks of grays. Still, Swamis was, obviously, lined up. Someone was getting a ride. New streaks, breaking the plane. Another surfer was on the next wave. My guess was that Jumper Hayes, on a longer board, drawing traditional lines, had been on the first wave. This was Sid. I knew Sid’s style: More turns, more aggressive turns. I could hear hoots between the only two surfers in the water, locals. Not would not have been acceptable behavior for Kooks and non-locals. Rules. Code. Etiquette. Rather rigid, strict; constantly broken, only occasionally enforced; as with all codes.

…

Running my hand along the horizontal railing on the downhill side of the platform, I felt the letters carved into the wood gone smooth with time and thousands of hands. I knew the words. “Old men stop here.” It was true. Not that a seventeen-year-old paid any attention to surfers over twenty-five, and definitely not to surfers over thirty. Old men.

There was movement on the upper stairs. Vibration, just short of rocking. Two more surfers were coming down. Both were laughing, bouncing, hurrying. I pushed closer to the corner, let them pass. I didn’t look at them, they didn’t acknowledge me.  

Taking two stairs at a time, I almost caught up with those two surfers at the bottom deck. They were on the beach and running for the water as I got to the lower platform, running like extras in a “Beach Blanket” movie. Kook move. The foundations for the supports of the six step stairway were showing, the winter waves and tides having pushed the sand south. Summer swells would return it. I leapt off the bottom step. Silent hoot.

I stuck my towel in the tangle of roots and dead lower branches of some scrub, six feet or so above the beach and fifteen feet beyond the lifeguard tower. I took off my windbreaker and t shirt, draping the red jacket over the rest of my stuff. There was, I still believed, a code that kept surfers from stealing from other surfers. Still, I wanted my valuables somewhere it was obvious they were there on purpose, somewhere I could possibly see them.

            In what had become my pre-surf ritual, I pulled a pack of Marlboros, box, not soft pack, from the windbreaker. I took out the Zippo lighter. Chrome. Freshly filled, new flint. Big flame. I lit up, clicked the lid shut. I ran two fingers over the lighter’s raised logo. “San Diego County Sheriff’s Office.” Gold on chrome.

            I inhaled, popped the lid open by hitting a corner on my other hand, and looked at the flame. Smaller. In the brightness I saw, or imagined I saw, red lights, spinning, flashing in three second intervals, coming closer. I blinked, looked to my right. I saw a painted image of Jesus, the red lights distorting his calm countenance. I followed his arm to his fingers, pointing forward, into the lights, into the sun. Blinding. I turned through the brightness and to my left, the vehicle that was the source of the lights. A reflection-distorted image of my father was in the windshield, then the open window. He was very close, passing very slowly. I couldn’t quite focus on his expression. He turned his head away. Forward.

            The flashing lights moved past me leaving only the brighter light. I blinked. I popped the lid on my father’s lighter shut. “Ten seconds,” I said. “Maybe eight. Concentrate. Can’t do this.”   

My stuff was re-wrapped and re-positioned, my cigarette was still in my mouth, and I was into the ragged line left by the high tide when a surfer on a long board took off from the outside peak. Jumper Hayes. A bit slow on the takeoff and popup, jerky on the bottom turn, he cruised through the first wall and into the slow section. With a series of subtle stalls, he lined up the inside section, and, rather stiffly, shuffled toward the nose. He hung five, pearling and spinning into a Hawaiian pullout. His board skittered in a ways before it was released by the soup and popped up. It must have been Jumper’s fifth wave. He flipped his board over, skeg up. Pulling his board up by a rail, he trudged alongside it through the rocks and eel grass toward the beach, stepping carefully, ready for the holes in the rock ledges.

Yeah, it was Jumper. He was fifty feet or so up the point when a spent wave hit my shins. He pulled the board up under his right arm and stared at me. “You,” I imagined, was the word he almost whispered, I almost heard.

“You.” I looked away. The next wave came in without a rider. Sid, on the wave after that one, made three upper body movements before he hit the trough, cranked a turn that brought him to the top of the wave and five feet down the line. Unweight, half-slide, hit the middle of the wave, crouch, hand in the wave face. Stall, stall, let go and get a partial coverup. A lot of work. Sid. If Sid was showing off for Jumper, it was wasted. Jumper was still staring at me, still moving forward.

Thigh deep, I looked back as Sid, thrashing forward, caught up to Jumper in six inches of water. Sid reached for Jumper’s shoulder. I looked away. For a second. Sid must have said something. Maybe it was just, “Hey!”

I turned back. Sid was in the air, feet over his head. So quick. Down. Sid was on his back. Jumper’s board beside him. Jumper was holding Sid’s board, like a spear, at his friend’s chest. They seemed to be frozen in these positions.

It was a definite “Hey!” Sid was scrambling, crablike, up the curve of the beach. “It’s me! Jumper! Me!”

I froze, my back to the ocean. Though I could still see the two surfers, I replayed what I had just seen in my mind in a sort of double exposure. Reach. Touch. Reaction.

A wave hit me, only temporarily affecting my balance, but wiping the image away. I was back to real time. Jumper raised Sid’s board, twisted away, and threw the board toward the higher beach. The full length of the board landed on a rail, flipped onto the other rail, and landed skeg up. I replayed those movements as I watched the two surfers.

Sid was sitting just above the scalloped high tide line, the fragments of driftwood and seaweed. Jumper was crouching next to him. Jumper may have been crying. I couldn’t tell. I looked away when Jumper, and then Sid, looked in my direction. If I expected anger that I had been a witness, what I saw was more like embarrassment.

Maybe that was more imagined than real. I turned away, threw board and my body into an oncoming wave, and paddled out.

…

REMEMBER, “Swamis” is copyright protected, all rights reserved by the author, Erwin A. Dence, Jr.

INCIDENTALLY, I GOT THIS very interesting comment from JAMES IREDELL MOSS: “My grandma (Ida May Noonan) lived on Noonan Point till her house burned down in 1893. They did not rebuild. Eventually SRF (Self Realization Fellowship) bought the point and established the temple. Now it is called Swamis. I went to San DIeguito with Cheer Critchlow, that is what eventually led me to your site.”

Thanks, James. In researching, and, yes, I have researched, I got Swamis Point listed as NONAME POINT. That it is actually NOONAN POINT is so fantastic. It doesn’t mean I’m changing the title to “Noonan’s,” but I love inside scoop. If you were a classmate of Cheer Critchlow, you and I are contemporaries. I think I had to cut Cheer out of the main manuscript, but I did take a night SPEECH class he was also taking at Palomar. Main memory of that, other than he was way more confident at public speaking than I was: Cheer said he had tried to be a professional surfer, there just wasn’t enough money for such a career. 1969, no; nowadays he would be, as he was in the pretty insular North County surfworld, a star.

Also, the Sid name if not the character is loosely based on a Surfboards Hawaii team surfer whose last name I once knew. He was featured, hanging ten, in a small ad. I did, indeed, look at a board he had thrashed in with the other used boards. “He doesn’t really care where he surfs” was the actual comment. I didn’t buy the board. Fictional Joey does.

SO, OKAY, now that I am burning potential content, Sundays are for content, WEDNESDAYS ARE FOR “SWAMIS.”