Monthly Archives: September 2024

Recap of “Swamis” plus Ch.6,Part One, plus More

Posted on by under "Swamis" the novel, aggressive surfers, Erwin Dence surf illustrations, hipster surfers, northwest surfing, old surfers, Original Erwin t-shirts, surf culture, surf fiction, surf novels, surf sessions, surfing the strait of juan de fuca

This drawing will, of course, have to be reversed, white-to-black, to go on (future) t-shirts. There are some new hoodies and long-sleeved shirts ready at D&L LOGOS on Monday. I’m pretty excited, as is TRISH. She special ordered one for her, “cost just a little bit more… honey.” “Sure.”

This design, a little larger than the practice ones I had printed. I have to figure out how much they’re costing me, and then… some will be available. I got one xxl, for me, but I may have already sold it.

OKAY, a lot of stuff this week. If your time is limited, SKIP the story. Not classic, all time. Next time… Do read the “Swamis” chapter. Thanks.

IN the ‘every session’s a story’ catagory… I had to go surfing the other day, last chance before my third eye surgery. I was aware, because, despite the rules, news of waves breaking and being ridden spreads, and I missed opportunities because my once-repaired but re-damaged fin box on my beloved but abused HOBIE needed repair, and I was focused on working and trying to buy another board. BUT, the dude with a board within reasonable driving distance wanted too much (as in, it’s listed for $500, out there for 8 weeks, and he won’t take less) for a board that is actually heavier than mine. SO, I purchase resin, hot cure catalyst, and some glass, cut the box loose, fill the hole with glass and resin, slam it back in, half-glass the whole unit in, fin and all. Foolish, knowing how the small waves and big rocks on the STRAIT eat fins.

I did all this on a painting job, the board on the rack of my VOLVO. It dried, I retied it to the rack AND I was ready for the next day’s pre-dawn takeoff. Enroute, I passed an accident on 112, almost to Joyce, a car on its top in the ditch, and it had been there long enough that there were cones and people with signs, and a lit-up display that read, “Accident Ahead.” It turns out three people, none wearing seatbelts, were hurt, two flown out. SO, maybe I should slow down.

AND I DID, but… you know how straps can be noisy? Mine were, increasingly so. It was a while after I arrived at my destinatiion, three people in the water, that I noticed my board was… Ever see people driving down the road with mattresses poorly tied to the roof? YEAH. But I was lucky. And the waves were what we… okay me, what I call FUN. I knew most of the dawn patrollers, met Ian’s wife (forgot her name- sorry; four syllables- don’t want to guess), and KEVIN, a Port Townsend surfer I had heard about. Iron man, stayed out about four hours straight.

SINCE, evidently, surfing is more dangerous after eye surgery than heavy lifting, I can hold on to memories of a decent session until… next time.

BECAUSE IT IS DIFFICULT to go back and pick up the earlier chapters, I am going to provide a recap of “SWAMIS.” Yes, even the ‘catchup’ is a lot of reading.

“Swamis” Recap

CHAPTER ONE -Monday, Nov 13, 1968-

Seventeen-year-old JOEY DeFREINES is talking with his court appointed psychologist, DR. SUSAN PETERS. Joey’s father, San Diego County Sheriff’s Office DETECTIVE LIEUTENANT JOSEPH DE FREINES made the deal following an afterschool incident at Fallbrook Union High School during which Joey put his foot on GRANT MURDOCH’s neck. Dr. Peters asks if, once bullied, Joey has become a bully.

TWO- Saturday, August 14, 1965-

13-year-old Joey tries surfing at PIPES. JULIA COLE is out, already accomplished. She says boy surfers are assholes, surfing is hard, and she stays away from cops and cop’s kids.

THREE- Sunday, September 15, 1968-

Joey tricks SID and other locals in the lineup at GRANDVIEW, gets a set wave. Sid burns Joey and tells him he broke the ‘locals rule,’ that being that locals rule.

Joey, driving his FALCON station wagon, comes upon a VW VAN. Locals DUNCAN, MONICA, AND RINCON RONNY are looking at the smoking engine. They are unresponsive if not hostile to Joey, but Julie (to her friends) asks Joey if he’s a mechanic or an attorney. “Not yet,” he says. There is an attraction between Julie and Joey that seems irritating to, in particular, Duncan.

FOUR- Wednesday, December 23, 1968-

Joey has a front row spot at SWAMIS. He has already surfed and is studying, notebooks on the hood of the Falcon. Arriving out of town surfers want the spot. Joey, hassled by one of them, informs BRIAN that he has a history of striking out violently when threatened, and says he’s on probation. Joey has an episode remembering past encounters, witnessed by the out-of-town surfers and Rincon Ronny, who seems impressed and says those kooks won’t bother Joey in the water. “Someone will,” Joey says, “It’s Swamis.”

FIVE- Thursday, February 27ut-

At breakfast at home in Fallbrook, Joseph DeFreines confronts his son (who he calls JODY) about an acceptance letter from Stanford University Joey hid. Joey’s father is also upset with his wife, RUTH, for some reason, and leaves in a huff, saying he’ll take care of it.

Joey and his younger brother, FREDDY, get a ride home from surf friend, GARY, and Gary’s sister, THE PRINCESS. Ruth is loading the Falcon, says she spoke on the phone with DETECTIVE SERGEANT LARRY WENDALL, and says she will, as always, be back. Freddy blames Joey. Their father calls as their mother pulls away. Joey, looking for the keys to his mother’s VOLVO, speaks briefly, somewhat rudely, with his father. Freddy says he’ll wait for their father. The phone rings. It’s ‘uncle’ Larry. Joey runs toward the Volvo.

SIX- Tuesday, March 4, 1968. PART ONE-

There is a post-funeral wake/memorial/potluck at the DeFreines house. Joey, avoiding the guests, is standing in the big west-facing window. MISTER DEWEY, a teacher at Fallbrook High, says he is surprised that Joey’s ex-Marine, ‘practically a John Bircher,’ father is married to a Japanese woman. “Traditional,” Joey says, “Kill the men, take the women.” Mister Dewey expresses interest in the property Joey’s father never had the time to work on.

A delivery van from ‘Flowers by Hayes’ comes up the driveway, guarded, for the wake, by DEPUTY SCOTT WILSON. The driver of the van is CHULO, a surfer several years older than Joey. Chulo was arrested along with JUMPER HAYES for stealing avocados. Chulo was crippled during the arrest, went to work camp, became a beach evangelist.

Joey has an episode, during which he replays the accident in which, while driving the Volvo, he follows the Falcon and another car around the smoking JESUS SAVES BUS. Joey’s father, in an unmarked car, passes very close to him and pulls off the highway at high speed. JeJ

Chulo was driving the Jesus Saves bus.

Detective Wendall and DETECTIVE SERGEANT DANIEL DICKSON are at a makeshift bar in the living room. ORANGE COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE DETECTIVE LIEUTENANT BRICE LANGDON, dressed in a just out of fashion Nehru jacket and rat-stabber shoes, isn’t popular with the two remaining detectives from the VISTA SUBSTATION, or with the other civilians and deputies from the San Diego Sheriff’s Office.

THERESA WENDALL, putting out food, tries to talk to her husband. He avoids her. Their two boys are running through playing cowboys-and-Indians as Langdon seems to corner Chulo.

CHAPTER SIX- TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 1969  

It was still early afternoon. I was in the living room, ignoring everything behind me, facing but not really seeing anything out the west-facing window. A Santa Ana condition had broken down, and a thousand-foot-high wall of fog had pushed its way up the valleys. The house was situated high enough that the cloud would occasionally clear away, the sun brighter than ever. The heat and humidity, raised by the number of people in our house, caused a fog of condensation on the plate glass.

Below me, cars were parked in a mostly random way in the area between the house and the separate and unfinished garage, and the corral. Continued use had created a de facto circular driveway up the slight rise from the worn and pitted gravel driveway, across the struggling lawn, and up to the concrete pad at the foot of the wooden steps and front porch.

A bright yellow 1964 Cadillac Coupe De Ville convertible, black top up, was parked closest to the door.  Other vehicles were arranged on the clumpy grass that filled in areas of ignored earth. Later arrivals parked on the lower area. The Falcon was parked close to the county road in keeping with my parking obsession; with getting in, getting out, getting away.

I was vaguely aware of the music coming from the turntable built into the Danish modern console in the living room. Stereo. Big speakers in opposite corners of the room, the volume where my father had set it, too low to compete with the conversations among the increasing crowd, the little groups spread around the room. Some were louder than others. Praise and sympathy, laughs cut short out of respect. Decorum.

Someone had put on a record of piano music; Liberace, or someone. My father’s choice would have been from the cowboy side of country/western; high octave voices capable of yodeling, lonesome trails and tumbling tumbleweeds, the occasional polka. My mother preferred show tunes with duets and ballads by men with deep, resonant voices, voices like her husband’s, Joseph Jeremiah DeFreines.

 These would not have been my father’s choice of mourners. “Funerals,” he would say, “Are better than weddings.” He would pause, appropriately, before adding, “You don’t need an invite or a gift.”

Someone behind me repeated that line, mistiming the pause, his voice scratchy and high. I turned around. It was Mister Dewey. A high school social studies teacher, he sold insurance policies out of his rented house on Alvarado. His right hand was out. I didn’t believe shaking hands was expected of me on this day.

“You know my daughter, Penelope,” he said, dropping his hand.

“Penny,” I said. “Yes, since… third grade.” Penny, in a black dress, was beside Mr. Dewey, her awkwardness so much more obvious than that of the other mourners. I did shake her hand. “Penny, thanks for coming.” I did try to smile, politely. Penny tried not to. Braces.

 I looked at Mr. Dewey too closely, for too long, trying to determine if he and I were remembering the same incident I was. His expression said he was.

When I refocused, Mister Dewey and the two people he had been talking with previously, a man and Mrs. Dewey, were several feet over from where they had been. I half-smiled at the woman. She half-smiled and turned away. She wasn’t the first to react this way. If I didn’t know how to look at the mourners, many of them did not know how to look at me, troubled son of the deceased detective.

If I was troubled, I wasn’t trying too hard to hide it. I was trying to maintain control. “Don’t spaz out,” I whispered, to myself. It wasn’t a time to retreat into memory, not at the memorial for my father. The wake.

Too late.

“Bleeding heart liberal, that Mister Dewey,” my father was telling my mother, ten-thirty on a school night, me still studying at the dinette table. “He figures we should teach sex education. I told him that we don’t teach swimming in school, and that, for most people, sex… comes… naturally. That didn’t get much of a laugh at the school board meeting.”

“Teenage pregnancies, Joe.”

“Yes, Ruth.” My father touched his wife on the cheek. “Those… happen.”

“Freddy and I both took swimming lessons at Potter Junior High, Dad. Not part of the curriculum, but…”

“Save it for college debate class, Jody. We grownups… aren’t talking about swimming.”

  Taking a deep breath, my hope was that the mourners might think it was grief rather than some affliction. Out the big window, a San Diego Sheriff’s Office patrol car was parked near where our driveway hit the county road. The uniformed Deputy, still called “New Guy,” assigned to stand there, motioned a car in. He looked around, went to the downhill side of his patrol car. He opened both side doors and, it had to be, took a leak between them. Practical.

The next vehicle, thirty seconds later, was a delivery van painted a brighter yellow than the Hayes’ Cadillac. Deputy New Guy waved it through. I noticed two fat, early sixties popout surfboards on the roof, nine-foot-six or longer, skegs in the outdated ‘d’ style. One was an ugly green, fading, the other, once a bright red, was almost pink. Decorations, obviously, they appeared to be permanently attached to a bolted-on rack. The van was halfway to the house before I got a chance to read the side. “Flowers by Hayes brighten your days.” Leucadia phone number.

Hayes, as in Gustavo and Consuela Hayes. As in Jumper Hayes.

A man got out of the van’s driver’s seat, almost directly below me. Chulo. I knew him from the beach. Surfer. Jumper’s partner in ‘the great avocado robbery’ that sent them both away, Chulo returning, reborn, evangelizing on the beach, with a permanent limp.

Chulo’s long black hair was pulled back and tied; his beard tied with a piece of leather. He was wearing black jeans, sandals, and a day-glow, almost chartreuse t-shirt with “Flowers by Hayes” in white. Chulo looked up at the window, just for a moment, before reaching back into the front seat, pulling out an artist’s style smock in a softer yellow. He pulled it over his head, looked up for another moment before limping toward the back of the van.

The immediate image I pulled from my mental file was of Chulo on the beach, dressed in his Jesus Saves attire: The dirty robe, rope belt, oversized wooden cross around his neck. Same sandals. No socks.

Looking into the glare, I closed my eyes. Though I was in the window with forty-six people behind me, I was gone. Elsewhere.

…

I was tapping on the steering wheel of my mother’s gray Volvo, two cars behind my Falcon, four cars behind a converted school bus with “Follow me” painted in rough letters on the diesel smoke stained back. The Jesus Saves bus was heading into a setting sun, white smoke coming out of the tailpipes. Our caravan was just east of the Bonsall Bridge, the bus to the right of the lane, moving slowly.

My mother, in the Falcon, followed another car around the bus. Another car followed her, all of them disappearing into the glare. I gunned it.

I was in the glare. There was a red light, pulsating, coming straight at me. There was a sound, a siren, blaring. I was floating. My father’s face was to my left, looking at me. Jesus was to my right, pointing forward.

This wasn’t real. I had to pull out of this. I couldn’t.

The Jesus Saves bus stopped on the side of the road, front tires in the ditch. The Volvo was stopped at a crazy angle in front of the bus. I was frantic, confused. I heard honking. Chulo, ion the Jesus Saves bus. He gave me a signal to go. Go. I backed the Volvo up, spun a turn toward the highway. I looked for my father’s car. I didn’t see it. The traffic was stopped. I was in trouble. My mother, in the Falcon, was still ahead of me. She didn’t know. I pulled into the westbound lane, into the glare, and gunned it.

When I opened my eyes, a loose section of the fog was like a gauze over the sun. I knew where I was. I knew Chulo, the Jesus Saves bus’s driver, delivering flowers for my father’s memorial, knew the truth.

…

Various accounts of the accident had appeared in both San Diego papers and Oceanside’s Blade Tribune. The Fallbrook Enterprise wouldn’t have its version until the next day, Wednesday, as would the North County Free Press. All the papers had or would have the basic truth of what happened. What was unknown was who was driving the car that Detective Lieutenant Joseph Jeremiah DeFreines avoided. “A gray sedan, possibly European” seemed to be the description the papers used.

”The San Diego Sheriff’s Office and the California Highway Patrol share jurisdiction over this part of the highway. Detective Lieutenant Brice Langdon of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office is acting as a liaison with the Highway Patrol in investigating the fatal incident.”   

Despite the distractions, what I was thinking was that Chulo knew the truth.

Chulo would be depositing the four new bouquets in the foyer, flowers already filling one wall. I looked in that direction, panning across the mourners. The groups in the living room were almost all men. Most were drinking rather than eating. Most of the groups of women were gathered in the kitchen.

A woman wearing a white apron over a black dress brought out a side dish of, my guess, some sort of yam/sweet potato thing. Because I was looking at her, she looked at the dish and looked at me, her combination of expression and gesture inviting me to “try some.” There was, I believed, an “It’s delicious” in there. Orange and dark green things, drowning in a white sauce.

“Looks delicious, Mrs. Wendall.”

Two kids, around ten and twelve, both out of breath, suddenly appeared at the big table, both grabbing cookies, the elder sibling tossing a powdered sugar-covered brownie, whole, into his mouth, the younger brother giving a cross-eyed assessment of his mother’s casserole.  

“Larry Junior,” Mrs. Wendall half-whispered as she shooed her sons out the door. She looked at her husband, leaning against a sideboard serving as a bar. He followed his boys out the door with the drink in his hand, half-smiled at his wife, as if children running through a wake is normal; and was no reason to break from chatting with the other detective at the Vista substation, Daniel Dickson, and one of the ‘College Joe’ detectives from Downtown. War stories, shop talk. Enjoyable. Ties were loosened and coats unbuttoned, the straps for shoulder holsters occasionally visible.

“Just like on TV” my father would have said. “Ridiculous.”

Freddy, out of breath, came out of the kitchen, weaving through the wives and daughters who were busily bussing and washing and making plates and silverware available for new guests. I handed him two cookies before he grabbed them. He grabbed two more.

“They went thataway, Freddy,” Detective Dickson said, pointing to the foyer.

Freddy pushed the screen door open, sidestepped Chulo, and leapt, shoeless, from the porch to what passed for our lawn, Bermuda grass taking a better hold in our decomposed granite than the Kentucky bluegrass and the failing dichondra.

Chulo, holding a metal five-gallon bucket in each hand, walked through the open door and into the foyer. He was greeted by a thin man in a black suit coat worn over a black shirt with a Nehru collar. The man had light brown hair, slicked back, and no facial hair. He was wearing shoes my father would refer to as, “Italian rat-stabbers.” Showy. Pretentious. Expensive fashion investments that needed to be worn to get one’s money’s worth.

Chulo had looked at me, looked at the man, and lowered his head. The man looked at me. I didn’t lower my gaze. I tried to give him the same expression he’d given me. Not acknowledgement. Questioning, perhaps.

Langdon. He must have been at the funeral, but I hadn’t felt obligated to look any of the attendees in the eye. “Langdon,” one of the non-cop people from the Downtown Sheriff’s Office, records clerks and such, whispered. “Brice Langdon. DeFreines called anyone from Orange County ‘Disneycops.’” Chuckles. “They put people in ‘Disney jail’,” another non-deputy said.

“Joint investigation guy,” one of the background voices said. “Joint,” another one added. Three people chuckled. Glasses tinkled.  Someone scraped someone else’s serving spatula over another someone else’s special event side dish. Probably not the yams.

Chulo took the arrangements out of the buckets and rearranged the vases against the wall and those narrowing the opening to the living room. He plucked some dead leaves and flowers, tossed them in one of the buckets, backed out onto the porch, closed the door. I became aware that I had looked in that direction for too long. Self-consciousness or not, people were, indeed, looking at me. Most looked away when I made eye contact.

“If you have to look at people, look them straight in the eye,” my father told me, “Nothing scares people more than that.”

Langdon looked away first, turning toward the two remaining detectives at the Vista substation, Wendall and Dickson, Larry and Dan. They both looked at Langdon, critically assessing the Orange County detective’s fashion choices. I didn’t see Langdon’s reaction.  

My father’s partners had changed out of the dress uniforms they had worn at the funeral and into suits reserved for public speaking events and promotions, dark-but-not-black. Both wore black ties, thinner or wider, a year or two behind whatever the trend was. Both had cop haircuts, sideburns a little longer over time. Both had cop mustaches, cropped at the corners of their mouths, and bellies reflecting their age and their relative status. Both had changed out of the dress uniforms they’d worn at the funeral

 Wendall was, in some slight apology for his height, hunched over a bit, still standing next to the sideboard that usually held my mother’s collection of display items; photos and not-to-be-eaten-off-of dishes. Dickson was acting as official bartender. The hard stuff, some wine, borrowed glasses. The beer was in the back yard.

Langdon had brought his own bottle. Fancy label, obviously expensive wine, cork removed, a third of it gone. Langdon’s thin fingers around the bottle’s neck, he offered it to Dickson. Smiling, politely, Dickson took a slug and reoffered it to Langdon. Langdon declined. Dickson pushed the bottle into a forest of hard liquor and Ernest and Julio’s finest. Langdon shrugged and looked around the room. Dickson displayed the smirk he’d saved, caught by Wendall and me.

Langdon saw my expression and turned back toward Dickson. The smirk had disappeared. Langdon walked toward me. He smiled; so, I smiled.

“I’ve heard about you,” he said. The reaction I had prepared and practiced disappeared. I was pretty much just frozen. “I see you know…” He nodded toward the foyer. “…Julio Lopez.” Langdon didn’t wait for a response. “From the beach?” No response. “Surfers.” No response. “You and I will have to talk… soon.”

I had to respond. “How old are you, Detective Lieutenant Langdon?”

“I’m… twice your age.” I nodded. He nodded. “College. College… Joe.” He smiled.

I may have smiled as I looked around Langdon at Dickson and Wendall; both, like my father, twelve or more years older than Langdon, this assuming he knew I was seventeen. I did, of course consider why he would know this. Wendall gave me a questioning smile. Dickson was mid-drink. 

“I don’t know if you know this… Joseph: Your father was involved an investigation… cross-county thing, involving… me.”  Langdon was, again, looking straight into my eyes. I blinked and nodded, slightly. “Yes. So… if there is any irony in my being… here, it is that Joseph DeFreines was, ultimately…” Langdon was nodding. I was nodding. Stupidly. “…a fair man.”

Langdon did a sort of European head bow, snap down, snap back, and tapped me on the shoulder.  I had half expected to hear the heels on his rat-stabber shoes click.  

COPYRIGHT STUFF- All rights to original content reserved by author/artist, Erwin A. Dence, Jr.

THANKS, AS ALWAYS, for checking out realsurfers.net. Get some waves when you get the chance! And remember, sharing is… caring; that set bomb you let some kook take and blow the takeoff on… well, that was nice. OH, and, just remembered, the controversy on whether it’s justified to drop in on someone who took your wave continues. I saw it, I tried it. Twice. AND I felt… kind of justified. AND, when two guys dropped in on an alleged backpaddler, I was left outside with undisputed priority. GREAT!

All Things being Equinox, “Swamis,” Ch6-Part 1…

Posted on by under "Swamis" the novel, northwest surfing, old surfers, oregon surfing, Uncategorized

…and, perhaps, something, not too deep or crazy, on the chains of morality.

BUT FIRST- I asked for a followup report from TOM BURNS, judge at last weekend’s WESTPORT LONGBOARD CLASSIC. “What I can tell you, Erwin, is that the best surfers won.” OKAY, so, guessing, normal contest deal, competitors butt hurt for underscoring, local bias, etc.

BUT TODAY, the CAPE KIWANDA LONGBOARD CLASSIC, in its 25th year, is Live streaming (got it on my big screen- doesn’t make the waves look better- WAIT!- just saw a rare good one). I did scroll through some yesterday, saw a local surfer from the Olympic Peninsula not advance. No doubt underscored.

EQUINOX STUFF- I tuned into local Port Townsend radio station KPTZ yesterday, expecting to hear something about organic gardening or cold water plunging. Instead, I heard “Summer’s Almost Gone” by the DOORS. What! It was enough to keep me from checking out the news on NPR. Yeah! THE MEMORIES the song brought to me were enough to push me to call my old friend, RAY HICKS. And I would have if September isn’t the craziest time of the year for house painters.

1968. RAY, BILL BUEL, PHILLIP HARPER, and I were headed back to Fallbrook from a surf session at Oceanside or Grandview, smoking cigarettes, listening to our favorite band on a 4 track tape. The song comes on. We’re probably singing along. There’s a fill after each of the verses. “Where will we be… when the summer’s gone?” My adding “We’ll be in school” seemed to fit perfectly, heading toward our Senior year. My cohorts disagreed. Vigorously.

RAY HICKS, 1968

This is not the STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA, but it is a similar view. I have always kept track of where the sun sets as each year spins on. The foothills of Camp Pendleton have long been replaced by the eastern slopes of the Olympic Mountains, the sun moving from south to north to south across the ridges. I don’t keep track of the mysterious tracks of the moon; full moon, yes; connected to the tides changes, critical element of surf forecasting/guessing. So, we’re halfway to winter, surfers switching the forecast logic with the hope of swell, the ebbing and flowing hope and, yes, anticipation. Winter’s almost here. Almost here. Where will we be, when the winter’s here… I guess we’ll see.

THE MORALITY THING- We are all taught some guidelines to what constitutes a moral life. Restraints, perhaps. No, definitely. We all want to justify our actions, twisting the boundaries when necessary. No, I’m not making excuses for wave-hogging. It’s sociopathic, possibly, occasionally, doing something one knows is wrong, and then doing it again. STILL, we generally behave within our individually-set boundaries. Almost as if we have to. THE POLITICAL PART- If you are taught from birth to take advantage whenever you can, to screw over others in every interaction, pay attorneys rather than those providing services or products and then ask for my vote, well… no.

CHAPTER SIX- TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 1969  

It was still early afternoon. I was in the living room, ignoring everything behind me, facing but not really seeing anything out the west-facing window. A Santa Ana condition had broken down, and a thousand-foot-high wall of fog had pushed its way up the valleys. The house was situated high enough that the cloud would occasionally clear away, the sun brighter than ever. The heat and humidity, raised by the number of people in our house, caused a fog of condensation on the plate glass.

Below me, cars were parked in a mostly random way in the area between the house and the separate and unfinished garage, and the corral. Continued use had created a de facto circular driveway up the slight rise from the worn and pitted gravel driveway, across the struggling lawn, and up to the concrete pad at the foot of the wooden steps and front porch.

A bright yellow 1964 Cadillac Coupe De Ville convertible, black top up, was parked closest to the door.  Other vehicles were arranged on the clumpy grass that filled in areas of ignored earth. Later arrivals parked on the lower area. The Falcon was parked close to the county road in keeping with my parking obsession; with getting in, getting out, getting away.

I was vaguely aware of the music coming from the turntable built into the Danish modern console in the living room. Stereo. Big speakers in opposite corners of the room, the volume where my father had set it, too low to compete with the conversations among the increasing crowd, the little groups spread around the room. Some were louder than others. Praise and sympathy, laughs cut short out of respect. Decorum.

Someone had put on a record of piano music; Liberace, or someone. My father’s choice would have been from the cowboy side of country/western; high octave voices capable of yodeling, lonesome trails and tumbling tumbleweeds, the occasional polka. My mother preferred show tunes with duets and ballads by men with deep, resonant voices, voices like her husband’s, Joseph Jeremiah DeFreines.

 These would not have been my father’s choice of mourners. “Funerals,” he would say, “Are better than weddings.” He would pause, appropriately, before adding, “You don’t need an invite or a gift.”

Someone behind me repeated that line, mistiming the pause, his voice scratchy and high. I turned around. It was Mister Dewey. A high school social studies teacher, he sold insurance policies out of his rented house on Alvarado. His right hand was out. I didn’t believe shaking hands was expected of me on this day.

“You know my daughter, Penelope,” he said, dropping his hand.

“Penny,” I said. “Yes, since… third grade.” Penny, in a black dress, was beside Mr. Dewey, her awkwardness so much more obvious than that of the other mourners. I did shake her hand. “Penny, thanks for coming.” I did try to smile, politely. Penny tried not to. Braces.

 I looked at Mr. Dewey too closely, for too long, trying to determine if he and I were remembering the same incident I was. His expression said he was.

When I refocused, Mister Dewey and the two people he had been talking with previously, a man and Mrs. Dewey, were several feet over from where they had been. I half-smiled at the woman. She half-smiled and turned away. She wasn’t the first to react this way. If I didn’t know how to look at the mourners, many of them did not know how to look at me, troubled son of the deceased detective.

If I was troubled, I wasn’t trying too hard to hide it. I was trying to maintain control. “Don’t spaz out,” I whispered, to myself. It wasn’t a time to retreat into memory, not at the memorial for my father. The wake.

Too late.

“Bleeding heart liberal, that Mister Dewey,” my father was telling my mother, ten-thirty on a school night, me still studying at the dinette table. “He figures we should teach sex education. I told him that we don’t teach swimming in school, and that, for most people, sex… comes… naturally. That didn’t get much of a laugh at the school board meeting.”

“Teenage pregnancies, Joe.”

“Yes, Ruth.” My father touched his wife on the cheek. “Those… happen.”

“Freddy and I both took swimming lessons at Potter Junior High, Dad. Not part of the curriculum, but…”

“Save it for college debate class, Jody. We grownups… aren’t talking about swimming.”

  Taking a deep breath, my hope was that the mourners might think it was grief rather than some affliction. Out the big window, a San Diego Sheriff’s Office patrol car was parked near where our driveway hit the county road. The uniformed Deputy, still called “New Guy,” assigned to stand there, motioned a car in. He looked around, went to the downhill side of his patrol car. He opened both side doors and, it had to be, took a leak between them. Practical.

The next vehicle, thirty seconds later, was a delivery van painted a brighter yellow than the Hayes’ Cadillac. Deputy New Guy waved it through. I noticed two fat, early sixties popout surfboards on the roof, nine-foot-six or longer, skegs in the outdated ‘d’ style. One was an ugly green, fading, the other, once a bright red, was almost pink. Decorations, obviously, they appeared to be permanently attached to a bolted-on rack. The van was halfway to the house before I got a chance to read the side. “Flowers by Hayes brighten your days.” Leucadia phone number.

Hayes, as in Gustavo and Consuela Hayes. As in Jumper Hayes.

A man got out of the van’s driver’s seat, almost directly below me. Chulo. I knew him from the beach. Surfer. Jumper’s partner in ‘the great avocado robbery’ that sent them both away, Chulo returning, reborn, evangelizing on the beach, with a permanent limp.

Chulo’s long black hair was pulled back and tied; his beard tied with a piece of leather. He was wearing black jeans, sandals, and a day-glow, almost chartreuse t-shirt with “Flowers by Hayes” in white. Chulo looked up at the window, just for a moment, before reaching back into the front seat, pulling out an artist’s style smock in a softer yellow. He pulled it over his head, looked up for another moment before limping toward the back of the van.

The immediate image I pulled from my mental file was of Chulo on the beach, dressed in his Jesus Saves attire: The dirty robe, rope belt, oversized wooden cross around his neck. Same sandals. No socks.

Looking into the glare, I closed my eyes. Though I was in the window with forty-six people behind me, I was gone. Elsewhere.

…

I was tapping on the steering wheel of my mother’s gray Volvo, two cars behind my Falcon, four cars behind a converted school bus with “Follow me” painted in rough letters on the diesel smoke stained back. The Jesus Saves bus was heading into a setting sun, white smoke coming out of the tailpipes. Our caravan was just east of the Bonsall Bridge, the bus to the right of the lane, moving slowly.

My mother, in the Falcon, followed another car around the bus. Another car followed her, all of them disappearing into the glare. I gunned it.

I was in the glare. There was a red light, pulsating, coming straight at me. There was a sound, a siren, blaring. I was floating. My father’s face was to my left, looking at me. Jesus was to my right, pointing forward.

This wasn’t real. I had to pull out of this. I couldn’t.

The Jesus Saves bus stopped on the side of the road, front tires in the ditch. The Volvo was stopped at a crazy angle in front of the bus. I was frantic, confused. I heard honking. Chulo, ion the Jesus Saves bus. He gave me a signal to go. Go. I backed the Volvo up, spun a turn toward the highway. I looked for my father’s car. I didn’t see it. The traffic was stopped. I was in trouble. My mother, in the Falcon, was still ahead of me. She didn’t know. I pulled into the westbound lane, into the glare, and gunned it.

When I opened my eyes, a loose section of the fog was like a gauze over the sun. I knew where I was. I knew Chulo, the Jesus Saves bus’s driver, delivering flowers for my father’s memorial, knew the truth.

…

Various accounts of the accident had appeared in both San Diego papers and Oceanside’s Blade Tribune. The Fallbrook Enterprise wouldn’t have its version until the next day, Wednesday, as would the North County Free Press. All the papers had or would have the basic truth of what happened. What was unknown was who was driving the car that Detective Lieutenant Joseph Jeremiah DeFreines avoided. “A gray sedan, possibly European” seemed to be the description the papers used.

” The San Diego Sheriff’s Office and the California Highway Patrol share jurisdiction over this part of the highway. Detective Lieutenant Brice Langdon of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office is acting as a liaison with the Highway Patrol in investigating the fatal incident.”   

Despite the distractions, what I was thinking was that Chulo knew the truth.

Chulo would be depositing the four new bouquets in the foyer, flowers already filling one wall. I looked in that direction, panning across the mourners. The groups in the living room were almost all men. Most were drinking rather than eating. Most of the groups of women were gathered in the kitchen.

A woman wearing a white apron over a black dress brought out a side dish of, my guess, some sort of yam/sweet potato thing. Because I was looking at her, she looked at the dish and looked at me, her combination of expression and gesture inviting me to “try some.” There was, I believed, an “It’s delicious” in there. Orange and dark green things, drowning in a white sauce.

“Looks delicious, Mrs. Wendall.”

Two kids, around ten and twelve, both out of breath, suddenly appeared at the big table, both grabbing cookies, the elder sibling tossing a powdered sugar-covered brownie, whole, into his mouth, the younger brother giving a cross-eyed assessment of his mother’s casserole.  

“Larry Junior,” Mrs. Wendall half-whispered as she shooed her sons out the door. She looked at her husband, leaning against a sideboard serving as a bar. He followed his boys out the door with the drink in his hand, half-smiled at his wife, as if children running through a wake is normal; and was no reason to break from chatting with the other detective at the Vista substation, Daniel Dickson, and one of the ‘College Joe’ detectives from Downtown. War stories, shop talk. Enjoyable. Ties were loosened and coats unbuttoned, the straps for shoulder holsters occasionally visible.

“Just like on TV” my father would have said. “Ridiculous.”

Freddy, out of breath, came out of the kitchen, weaving through the wives and daughters who were busily bussing and washing and making plates and silverware available for new guests. I handed him two cookies before he grabbed them. He grabbed two more.

“They went thataway, Freddy,” Detective Dickson said, pointing to the foyer.

Freddy pushed the screen door open, sidestepped Chulo, and leapt, shoeless, from the porch to what passed for our lawn, Bermuda grass taking a better hold in our decomposed granite than the Kentucky bluegrass and the failing dichondra.

Chulo, holding a metal five-gallon bucket in each hand, walked through the open door and into the foyer. He was greeted by a thin man in a black suit coat worn over a black shirt with a Nehru collar. The man had light brown hair, slicked back, and no facial hair. He was wearing shoes my father would refer to as, “Italian rat-stabbers.” Showy. Pretentious. Expensive fashion investments that needed to be worn to get one’s money’s worth.

Chulo had looked at me, looked at the man, and lowered his head. The man looked at me. I didn’t lower my gaze. I tried to give him the same expression he’d given me. Not acknowledgement. Questioning, perhaps.

Langdon. He must have been at the funeral, but I hadn’t felt obligated to look any of the attendees in the eye. “Langdon,” one of the non-cop people from the Downtown Sheriff’s Office, records clerks and such, whispered. “Brice Langdon. DeFreines called anyone from Orange County ‘Disneycops.’” Chuckles. “They put people in ‘Disney jail’,” another non-deputy said.

“Joint investigation guy,” one of the background voices said. “Joint,” another one added. Three people chuckled. Glasses tinkled. Someone scraped someone else’s serving spatula over another someone else’s special event side dish. Probably not the yams.

Chulo took the arrangements out of the buckets and rearranged the vases against the wall and those narrowing the opening to the living room. He plucked some dead leaves and flowers, tossed them in one of the buckets, backed out onto the porch, closed the door. I became aware that I had looked in that direction for too long. Self-consciousness or not, people were, indeed, looking at me. Most looked away when I made eye contact.

“If you have to look at people, look them straight in the eye,” my father told me, “Nothing scares people more than that.”

Langdon looked away first, turning toward the two remaining detectives at the Vista substation, Wendall and Dickson, Larry and Dan. They both looked at Langdon, critically assessing the Orange County detective’s fashion choices. I didn’t see Langdon’s reaction.  

My father’s partners had changed out of the dress uniforms they had worn at the funeral and into suits reserved for public speaking events and promotions, dark-but-not-black. Both wore black ties, thinner or wider, a year or two behind whatever the trend was. Both had cop haircuts, sideburns a little longer over time. Both had cop mustaches, cropped at the corners of their mouths, and bellies reflecting their age and their relative status. Both had changed out of the dress uniforms they’d worn at the funeral

 Wendall was, in some slight apology for his height, hunched over a bit, still standing next to the sideboard that usually held my mother’s collection of display items; photos and not-to-be-eaten-off-of dishes. Dickson was acting as official bartender. The hard stuff, some wine, borrowed glasses. The beer was in the back yard.

Langdon had brought his own bottle. Fancy label, obviously expensive wine, cork removed, a third of it gone. Langdon’s thin fingers around the bottle’s neck, he offered it to Dickson. Smiling, politely, Dickson took a slug and reoffered it to Langdon. Langdon declined. Dickson pushed the bottle into a forest of hard liquor and Ernest and Julio’s finest. Langdon shrugged and looked around the room. Dickson displayed the smirk he’d saved, caught by Wendall and me.

Langdon saw my expression and turned back toward Dickson. The smirk had disappeared. Langdon walked toward me. He smiled; so, I smiled.

“I’ve heard about you,” he said. The reaction I had prepared and practiced disappeared. I was pretty much just frozen. “I see you know…” He nodded toward the foyer. “…Julio Lopez.” Langdon didn’t wait for a response. “From the beach?” No response. “Surfers.” No response. “You and I will have to talk… soon.”

I had to respond. “How old are you, Detective Lieutenant Langdon?”wh

“I’m… twice your age.” I nodded. He nodded. “College. College… Joe.” He smiled.

I may have smiled as I looked around Langdon at Dickson and Wendall; both, like my father, twelve or more years older than Langdon, this assuming he knew I was seventeen. I did, of course consider why he would know this. Wendall gave me a questioning smile. Dickson was mid-drink. 

“I don’t know if you know this… Joseph: Your father was involved an investigation… cross-county thing, involving… me.”  Langdon was, again, looking straight into my eyes. I blinked and nodded, slightly. “Yes. So… if there is any irony in my being… here, it is that Joseph DeFreines was, ultimately…” Langdon was nodding. I was nodding. Stupidly. “…a fair man.”

Langdon did a sort of European head bow, snap down, snap back, and tapped me on the shoulder.  I had half expected to hear the heels on his rat-stabber shoes click.  

THANKS FOR CHECKING OUT realsurfers.net. Copyright 2020. All rights reserved.

WESTPORT Longboard Classic, “Swamis” Ch.5…

Posted on by under "Swamis" the novel, old surfers, real surfers, surf culture, surfing novels, surfing Swamis, surfing the strait of juan de fuca

IT’S FINALS DAY at the WESTPORT LONGBOARD CLASSIC and realsurfers has a correspondent embedded in the event. Longtime explorer on the coast and the Strait, TOM BURNS, is a *judge, and has agreed to send a few photos and some commentary my way.

PHOTOS- Logo; O’Dark Thirty a Westport; Photo from the ‘memorial wall’ of TOM LE COMPE (RIP), one the ‘harbor boys,’ and one of the first to surf the jetty in the sixties, and Tom Burns; a shot of ‘The Corner” early this morning; Someone Tom didn’t give me a name for; and BARRY ESTES (RIP) with Tom from a RICKY YOUNG contest back in the late 1980s and 90s.

I competed in several of those contests, pushed to do so by my friend from my shipyard days, RAPHAEL REDA. I didn’t meet Tom there. I met him on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Tom, a month or so older than me, was years ahead of me in knowledge of where and when to find waves, but still has a fairly high ratio on the skunk-to-score chart. Tom is, among surfers I know, the preeminent name dropper, with a long history, great memory, and a willingness to talk story. We quickly discovered we have some friends in common, Drew Kampion and Pathfinder Darrell Wood to name drop two, AND Tom was perfectly willing to adopt some of the colorful folks I’ve run into: Tugboat Bill, Big Dave, Concrete Pete, folks without nicknames.

*I helped out at the precursor to the Longboard Classic, the CLEANWATER CLASSIC, a couple of years. Not surfing, I was volunteering and sort of representing SURFRIDER. Not satisfied to stand on the beach with a flag, I pushed my way into being a spotter for the judges, Tom being one of them. I refused to leave. Partially because I do bring the fun, and I do watch a lot of WSL contests on the computer, Tom convinced the head judge to allow me to be a judge the next year. I brought the fun. Too much fun for the head judge. I got in trouble for not matching the other judges’ assessment of rides. “6.5? No, I gave it a 4.6. I mean… really? 6.5?” I wasn’t asked back. Tom wasn’t either. Somehow I was his fault.

EVIDENTLY TOM has served his time in judge purgatory.

OF COURSE, being as tribal as anyone, I’m rooting for surfers from the Olympic Peninsula. We’ll see.

I am up to Chapter 9 on the re-re-re-reedit and tightening of “SWAMIS.” Remember, this material is copyright protected, all rights reserved. Thanks for honoring this, and thanks for reading.

CHAPTER FIVE- THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1969

Our house in the hills between Fallbrook and Bonsall was a split level, stucco house, aluminum sash windows, composite roof. Someone else had started building from some plans purchased from a catalog. My parents could save money, they were told, by finishing the lower level and the garage. They could replace the plywood shed at the edge of a corral with a small barn that would provide room for a horse, a side area for hay and tack. New fencing. More trees. A garden. A covered patio off the kitchen, or, perhaps, a bay window.

 My father promised the patio, and then the bay window. He was working on it, but he was working. Working. There was, outside the sliding door, a concrete slab, with paving stones leading around the corner and down to the driveway. The two-story portion of the house featured a plate glass window, four foot high and eight feet wide, in total, with crank out, aluminum sash windows on either side. This window offered a view to the west, over scrubby trees and deep arroyos, of the hills, some rounded, others more jagged, with ancient boulders visible on all of them. Mission Avenue was hidden below and between. Mission, the road that linked Fallbrook with Bonsall, Vista, Oceanside, everywhere west, everywhere worth going to.

Looking out this window, I felt almost level with those hills. Morning light, descending, brought out the details of the ribs and rocks. Afternoon shadows crept from it until the hills once again became a blank shape. There were waves of hills in irregular lines between my hills and the unseen ocean. I had spent time looking away from my studies, imagining the hills in timelapse, the sun setting at one place in winter, another in summer, lines off clouds held back at the ridgeline, breaking over the top; torn, scattering. I had imagined the block as transparent, the ocean visible, late afternoon sunlight reflected off the water and into the empty skies.

… 

The light outside was still neutral when I moved to the dinette table in the kitchen, a bowl of oatmeal, a tab of butter on top of it, in front of me. There was a glass pitcher of milk between my setting and the other two. There were four lunch sacks on the counter. Two were a light blue, one was a shade more orange than pink, the fourth was the standard lunch sack brown. My mother, already dressed and ready for work, took a carton of Lucky Strikes from a cupboard and put a pack into the brown lunch sack.

She looked out the window over the sink. She sniffled.

My father, in one of his everyday detective suits; coat unbuttoned, tie untied; leaned over from the head of the table. “Go get it, Jody.” The ‘now’ part of the command was unspoken. His voice was calm. Almost always. I didn’t move. I didn’t look up from my oatmeal. “Stanford, Jody; you didn’t think they’d send a copy to the school?”

My father’s questions demanded an answer or a response.

I stood up, lifting my chair up high enough that its metal legs, with plastic shoes at the bottom, wouldn’t scrape the oak flooring. I looked at my father. He was looking at my mother. She sniffled several times but didn’t turn around.

My bedroom was at the end of the hallway, past my parent’s and my father’s den on the right, the guest bathroom, Freddy’s room, then mine on the left. There were pictures taken from surfing magazines on several walls, a cluttered desk between the closet and a bunk bed, the bottom bunk converted into a space for books and toys and cardboard boxes taped and marked, stuff from our previous house.

Though we had been at the ranchette for more than four years, because the garage had never become water and weather tight, most of the boxes in my room remained stacked and taped and marked. Grease pencil. Yellow, mostly. Some black. I opened an untaped box marked “Cowboy stuff” and took out the legal sized envelope.

As I walked up the hallway, I heard my father ask, “Is this who we are now, Ruth?”

“Not we, Joe. Me. You… didn’t want to be…”

“Involved? No!” I heard a thump, hand to a solid surface. Less than a slam. “Fool that I am, I am… and have been involved this whole time.” 

My parents almost never raised their voices. My father didn’t have to, my mother just… wouldn’t. I’ve been asked about my parent’s relationship many times. Japanese war bride, ex-Marine. My answer will always be, “They had a certain dynamic.” The answer could as easily be, “It wasn’t what you might think.” Whatever they thought.

My parents were standing at the counter to the right of the double sink. I placed the envelope on the tablecloth, next to my father’s plate. Sausage and eggs. Uneaten. Cup of coffee. Half full. I sat down. I looked over. My father signed at the bottom of two pages. My mother refolded them into thirds and put them into an envelope. She set the envelope on the left side of the sink, on top of several other loose papers. Legal size. Eight and a half by fourteen inches.

“I’ll fix it, Joe. Today.”

My father grunted, stepped around my mother. He was looking at the pages, shaking his head. He looked toward his wife. Her back was to the sink, both hands behind her on the edge of the counter. She looked at my father’s hands as he folded those papers in half. He took in a breath, turned toward her, let out the breath slowly. He handed her the papers with his right hand. She took them with her left hand, handed him the brown lunch sack with her right.

“Ruth. You could… This could give you… freedom. Ikura desuka?”

My mother only rarely spoke Japanese, my father almost never. My mother froze. “Freedom, Joe?” My father’s expression was one of instant regret.

I replayed the words. “E’-kew-rah des-kah.” Again. “E’-kew-rah des-kah.” There was something in the flow, the rhythm of my mother’s native language I had given up trying to capture. “E’-kew-rah des-kah?”

…

My mother and the envelope and the papers were gone. My father set the brown lunch sack onto the counter, took two more packs from the carton of Lucky Strikes from the cupboard, unfolded the two folds on the lunch sack, put them in, refolded the sack. Not as neatly. He took two steps toward the sliding glass door, looked at his feet. “Socks,” he said. “Jody, you won’t be surfing… or working at Mrs. Tony’s; none of that shit.” He looked at the envelope on the dinette table. “Stanford.” He threw his left hand out and down, ends of his fingers touching the Stanford logo. “You… you earned this, Jody. You’re going.”

“Going.”

My father looked toward the hallway, looked at me. “It’ll be… she’ll be fine. I have to…”

“Go. Yes.”

Freddy came into the kitchen. “Daddy?” Our father responded with a weak sideways nod. Freddy followed him through the living room, into the foyer, out onto the front porch. The front door slammed.

When Freddy returned, our mother was back in the kitchen. My brother, not even trying not to cry, looked at her, and then me, as if whatever was happening was our fault.

“Freedom,” I whispered, my left hand, in a fist, over my mouth. “Ikara desuka.”

The house phone was on a table just outside the formal dining room. Our mother picked up the receiver and dialed a number on the phone’s base. “No, I am well,” she said. “Annual leave. ‘Use it or lose it.’ I have accumulated…” She chuckled. Fake. “No. They’re both fine. I will be in tomorrow.” She looked at me. “Thank you.” She put the phone back on the base. “Joey, I will need the station wagon. You and Freddy… Better hurry; you will have to take the bus.”

Freddy asked, “What about taking your car, Mommy?” Our mother looked at me and shook her head. I shook mine. Freddy looked at me. “What did you do this time, Jody?”

…

            Gary and Roger were my closest surf friends. Roger started board surfing the summer I did, 1965. Gary started the next summer. By the time we were seniors, many others had tried surfing. Most didn’t stick with it for long. Though Roger lived closer to me, Gary offered to give me a ride home.

            I was riding shotgun. Gary’s sister, squeezed tightly against the backseat passenger door of their mom’s Corvair, said, in an unnecessarily whiny voice, “Glad it’s all cool with you, Gary.”

“It is, yeah; it’s cool with me.” Gary glanced over at me. “The Princess has a license, but our mom won’t let her drive without… supervision.”

“Well, thanks again for the ride, Gary; and for going by Potter for… Freddy. Oh, and thank you…”

“Princess,” Gary said.

The Princess blew air out of the side of her mouth. I looked around and over the seat. The Princess shook the wrist of her left hand and gave me a look I took as suggesting the raspberry was meant for her brother rather than me. Freddy was not quite as tight against the door on the driver’s side. Neither tried to talk to, or even look at the other.

“So, Joey,” Gary asked, “what do you think of Roger’s latest girlfriend?”

“She’s a sophomore, you know,” the Princess said, looking at me. “Sophomore.” I gave her the expression she was looking for. The relationship was wrong. And creepy.

“Roger’s business, Princess. Now, Joey, maybe, after school… days are getting longer. We could do Oceanside pier. Tamarack, if I drive.”

 “Four gallons of gas, two quarts of oil; that sound about right, Gary?”

“Or Joey; we could go in Roger’s stepdad’s Mustang.”

The Princess mumbled a quiet, “Fuck you, Gary,” as her brother downshifted, unnecessarily, at the first of several uphill curves. Freddy’s laugh and repetition of the words were louder and clearer.

“Or Princess and some of her friends… Juniors… no sophomores, could go with us,” Gary offered. The Princess let out a high-pitched, “Ha!” and a low-pitched sort of extended grunt sound. Freddy giggled. “Or, if we can’t go surfing after school, maybe me and you and Roger could ditch and go all day.”

Gary looked at me and winked. I shook my head, but I did smile. “Or maybe next week… or so, if we have all our stuff ready, boards loaded, we could make it to Grandview. Swamis. Somewhere… good.”

“Possible. Timewise.”

“Cool.”

The princess’s head suddenly appeared between Gary and me. “Most of you Fallbrook surfers aren’t even partway cool,” she said. “And besides, my friends won’t even cruise town in this crappy car; and besides that, it would be creepy.” The Princess looked at me and seemed to realize her face and mine were way too close. Still, she didn’t move away.

“Creepy,” I said.

“And they might find out Gary’s surfing just isn’t all that… cool,” the Princess said, almost smiling before she fell back into the seat and against the door.

We arrived at our driveway. The Falcon station wagon was still there, my nine-six pintail on the rack. The Falcon was backed up to the curved gravel pathway that went up the slight grade to the front door. Bender board and stakes had been installed for a while, ready for concrete.

“Board on the roof. Obvious Hodad move, Joey.”

I looked up at Gary’s Hansen surfboard hanging over the hood of the Corvair. “Obvious.”

Gary used the area between the unfinished garage and the temporary shed at the corner of the corral to turn around. The Corvair had barely stopped when Freddy jumped out and ran for the house. The Princess jumped out and ran around to the front passenger door. I took a few seconds to get my books and folders out of the seat. She leaned on the open door and checked out the ranchette. Disapprovingly.

Gary popped the clutch on the Corvair halfway down the driveway. There was a second cloud of black smoke as Gary, unnecessarily double-clutched, attempting, unsuccessfully, to get scratch in second gear. There were a few drops of oil soaking into and staining the insufficient gravel on the decomposed granite driveway.

My mom was standing at the front driver’s side door of the Falcon, Freddy pressed against her and between her and the seat. She was looking at me. “You know I’ll be back,” she said, for both Freddy and me.  She looked over at the old horse casually eating grain on the near side of what she called a paddock. “I can’t trust you boys to properly take care of Tallulah.”

A bell on the two-story part of the house rang. “Telephone,” Freddy said, dropping books as he ran. I set my school stuff on the grass and walked to the front of the Falcon.

“There’s some money… on the counter. Take the Volvo. Later. Six-thirty or so. You and Freddy can go to that Smorgasbord place he likes. Or Sambo’s.”

“Sambo’s… closed, Mom.”

“Oh. Yes. You know how to find the Rollins Place; right?” I nodded. “No eating in the Volvo. Right?” I shook my head.

“Mom,” Freddy yelled, “It’s Daddy.”

“Tell Freddy your father knows where to find me.” Our mother got into the Falcon. She chuckled. “Stick shift. Hope I haven’t forgotten how.”

“Daddy! He wants to talk with mom. He wants her to wait… for him. Jody!”

“Waiting,” our mother said, shaking her head. “Not waiting.”   

“Three on the tree, Mom.” I closed the door for her. “You’ll be fine.”

“Fine.” My mom smiled, turned away, started the Falcon. “I called the station. Your father was out. I talked to Larry.”

“Larry? Oh. Sure. What did you tell… Wendall?”

“Nothing. I just… no, nothing. I told him to tell your father… I was going to… straighten everything out, that it would be… fine. I will.”

“If it’s about… college… I will, of course, go.”

“Of course. It isn’t… I have to go.”

 My mother had her determined look on her face; determined to be strong, to not cry; even if the strength wouldn’t last, even if the tears would flow as soon as she went down the driveway. She popped the clutch. Accidentally. The back tires threw some gravel and the Falcon stalled. She hit the steering wheel, restarted the engine, eased the clutch out, moved the car over to the fence for the corral, reaching her left hand out, calling for her horse.

“Tallulah.” The horse turned around for a moment.

I looked toward the west. There would have been enough time for a few waves between school and dark if I had gone to the pier. I wasn’t crying. Freddy, clearly, was.

“Jody. He wants to talk to you. Jody!”

            The doors to the Volvo were locked. Of course. I ran up the path to the porch. Freddy was just inside the door. The phone’s base was on the floor, three feet from the table. The cord to the receiver was stretched to its maximum length. Freddy tried to press the phone to my chest as I tried to pass him. The keys to the Volvo were hanging, along with other rings of keys and a rabbit’s foot, on a crudely shaped horse’s head Freddy had made at summer camp.

I grabbed the keys. Freddy pushed me. I pushed him down and took the phone from him. “Freddy, stop the blubbering. Dad?” I wasn’t really listening. I tried to direct Freddy toward the kitchen, rubbing my fingers together in the gesture for ‘money.’ I leaned down toward my brother. “Yes, Dad; still here.” Pause. “I am sorry about whatever Betty Boop and Wendall, and everyone at the station… thinks.” Pause. “Insolent? No.” Pause. “I don’t know. Freddy and I are going to…” Pause. “David Cole?” Pause. “Too late. Hello.” Dial tone. “Too late.”

I looped the long cord as I headed toward the kitchen, put the receiver onto the base, the base back on the table. Freddy stayed on the floor, his back against the frame of the opening between the foyer and the living room. “Stop her, Jody.” I didn’t respond. Freddy screamed, “Everyone’s right; you’re a god-damned retard. Retard!”

“Let’s go then, Freddy; you fucking baby.” My voice was as even as I could manage. I grabbed the cash from the dinette, walked back, stood over him. “Come on.”

Freddy laid out flat. He shook his head. “I’ll wait for Daddy. Dad.”

“He’s not… Freddy, there’s pizza in the refrigerator. You can heat it up in the oven, or, I don’t know, God-damned retard like me, you can… goddamn eat it cold.”

The phone rang. Freddy rolled to his stomach, jumped up, and got to the phone on the second ring. “Daddy?” Pause. “Uncle Larry.” Pause. “No, I don’t know where. Jody?” I shook my head. “Joey!” Out the door and down the path, all I heard was, “Retard.”

I’M NOT POLITICAL, BUT… I couldn’t help but notice, this week, with citizen don refusing to acknowledge that he got trashed and thrashed in the debate, that he also went back to his greatest wiffs and denied the sexual assault issue he also, very expensively, lost, saying the woman he assaulted was not his type, not ‘the chosen one.’ ALSO, this week, asked if he had any apologies to make about, like, anything, the elderly douche said he had nothing to apologize for.

Speaking of which, I couldn’t help but wonder if JESUS ever apologized for telling the truth. “Oh,” you say, “but Jesus paid a terrible price.” So, who pays the price for someone who only tells lies?

Again, not political. Get some waves.

Surf Friends, Shared Photos, “Swamis”- Chapter 4, and, of course, MORE

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FIRST- THANKS. I like to tell people, when I am begging them to let me use something they said or wrote on my SITE (personal preference over ‘blog’), that realsurfers.net has an audience of tens of people from all around the world. For this I am grateful. If I can get through to one lone surfer in China, pining to know there are never any waves on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, great.

I DID SURF, and there is, as always, a story; joining constantly frothed out KEITH DARROCK, on his ongoing mini-slab tour, at a super-sketchy spot with his pre-attempt warning, “You are going to get SO WORKED.” And I did. Leash ripped off by rogue wave, Hobie on a rock, fin at an angle way off perpendicular to the deck, me swimming, then having to get back up the cliff. So, worked… BUT I did get some great on-the-shoulder angles of some of Keith’s barrels, and I got some shoulder takeoff rides. And I survived. NO PHOTOS, but REGGIE SMART did witness the spectacle through binoculars. “Either Erwin has a really long leash or he lost his board.” NO, he evidently didn’t witness any of my successful rides. THE HOBIE WILL LIVE ON! Maybe.

ADAM ‘WIPEOUT’ JAMES heading out. Photo (used with permission) by ERIN KATE MURPHY. Erin and her husband, SEAN, and their son (sorry I forgot his name) all surf. More like rip. OH, I did have to promise never to take off in front of her AND to let her have any wave I may have wanted. Worth it.

BIOLUMINESCENCE and NORTHERN LIGHTS, or some other PHENOMENON. Photo by Adam James.

OFTEN, sitting in a parking lot somewhere, waiting for some tide shift or some hoped-for swell to show up, other surf seekers show up. RAJA, who achieved local fame years ago by sticking my lost paddle in an offshore dolphin, the remnant of an old boat tie-uo, is sporting an ORIGINAL ERWIN t shirt. Raja has been involved in several of my stories over the years, including when I burned DANE PERLEE and his friend. INCIDENTALLY, the paddle was rescued and removed by my friend, STEPHEN R. DAVIS. So, SURF FRIENDS, bonded by some, some, something.

I didn’t ask CLINT THOMPSON, bi-coastal surfer and super craftsman on wooden boats, if I could use his photo. Hopefully he’s okay with it. I should say tri-coastal, since Clint goes between Port Townsend and his family home somewhere in Florida, where, he says, he’s halfway between the Gulf of Mexico and the coast. Clint, when we first met, was highly critical of my wave-hogging, no etiquette way of surfing. Perhaps because I’m older and slower, or maybe because crowded conditions often have a number of kooks (no, I don’t want to say that), or perhaps because I do try not to burn people i know (and I know a lot of surfers), Clint did say, a year or so back, “I want to see you dominate.” Well, other than surfing radical conditions with rabid rippers (knowing my place in that lineup), I always try.

Me on a peak. When I called TRISH from the LOWER ELWHA gas station to tell her about how her man nearly drowned, she said, “Well, you wanted to go.” When she told me I need to get this painting project finished, I sent her this photo (by Steve Davis). She texted back, You’re giving me a heart attack! OMG!!”

I am reading a memoir by legendary boat designer and surfer, TIM NOLAN, shown surfing his home break, Abalone Cove in Palos Verdes, way back, and at a Surf Culture Event in Port Townsend a couple of years ago. It’s incredibly hard to have people read one’s stuff AND give feedback. Mine, so far, is that TIM has great stories BECAUSE he’s done some extraordinary things… and continues doing things. His most recent words of wisdom related to surfing, particularly for older surfers (he is older than me), is “You’ve got to want it.” The stories are there, AND his watercolors and photos illustrating the stories are great. As with any and all writing, it comes down to focusing and editing.

After several people have been unable to get through the earlier versions of my novel. “Swamis,” I did get some encouraging feedback from one of my longterm clients, SANDRA STEELE, a woman who reads detective/mystery books voraciously, and, in fact, gave me a box full of them. I read all of one, parts of several others. She said, “I didn’t throw it at the fireplace,” adding, “It seemed… hopeful.” “Is that good? It’s kind of turning into more of a… love story than…” “Yeah, I see a lot of Trish in there.” “Well, yeah.”

IF YOU DON’T READ ANY FARTHER, “Swamis” and other original material is protected by copyright; all rights reserved by the author/artist/photographer. Please respect this. And thanks,

                                    CHAPTER FOUR- WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1968

            Christmas vacation. I had surfed, but I wanted a few more rides. Or many more. I had the time, and I had the second-best parking spot of the full lot at Swamis- front row, two cars off center. It was cool but sunny. I was dead center on the Falcon, leaning over the hood. I checked the diving watch on my wrist. It was fogged up. I shook my wrist, removed the watch, set it on the part of the Falcon’s hood my spread-out beach towel didn’t cover; directly over the radiator, the face of the watch facing the ocean and the sun.

            Spread about on the towel was a quart of chocolate milk in a waxed cardboard container, the spout open; a lunch sack, light blue, open; an apple; a partial pack of Marlboros, hard pack, open, a book of paper matches inside; and three Pee-Chee folders. One of the folders was open. A red notebook, writing on both sides of most pages, was open, five or six pages from the back.

            A car stopped immediately behind the Falcon. Three doors slammed. Three teenagers, a year or so younger than me, ran down the left side of my car and to the bluff.  Jumping and gesturing, each shouted assessments of the conditions. “Epic!” and “So… bitchin’!”

They looked at each other. They looked over me at their car, idling in the lane. They looked at me. The tallest of the three, with a bad complexion, his hair parted in the middle, shirtless, with three strands of love beads around his neck, took a step toward me. “Hey, man.” He lifted two of the strands.  “Going out or been out?”

            “Both. Man.”    

“Both?” Love Beads guy moved closer, patting the beads. “Both. Uh huh.”

“Good spot,” the driver, with bottle bleached hair, a striped Beach Boys shirt, and khaki pants, said. I nodded. Politely. I smiled, politely, and looked back and down at my notebooks. He asked, “You a local?”

I shifted the notebooks, took out the one on the bottom, light blue, opened it, turned, and looked out at the lineup, half-sitting on the Falcon, hoping my non-answer was enough for the obvious non-locals.

 A car honked behind us. Love Beads raised his voice enough to say, “At least go get the boards, Shorty.” The Driver ran toward his car. As Shorty reluctantly walked away from the bluff, Love Beads gave him a shove, pushing him into me. A possibly accidental nudge.

Shorty threw both hands out to signal it wasn’t his fault. Behind him, Love Beads Guy said, “You fuckers down here are fuckin’ greedy.”

“Fuck you, Brian,” Shorty said before running out and into the lane.

Love Beads Guy, Brian, moved directly in front of me. He puffed out his chest a bit. He looked a bit fierce. Or he attempted to. “You sure you’re not leaving?”

I twisted my left arm behind my back and set the notebook down and picked up my diving watch. When I brought my arm back around, very quickly, Brian twitched. I smiled.  I held my watch by the band, close to its face. I shook it. Hard. Three quick strokes, then tapped it, three times, with the pointer finger of my right hand. “The joke, you see, Brian, is that, once it gets filled up with water, no more can get in. Hence, Waterproof.” I put the watch on. “Nope, don’t have to leave yet… Brian.”

Brian was glowering, tensed-up. “Brian,” Shorty said as he carried two boards over to the bluff and set them down, “You could, you know, help.”

Brian raised his right hand, threw it out to his left and swung it back. I took the gesture to mean ‘shut up and keep walking.’ I chuckled. Brian moved his right hand closer to my face, pointer finger up.

I moved my face closer to his hand, then leaned back, feigning an inability to focus. “Brian,” I said, “I have a history…” Brian smirked. “I used to… strike out, and quite violently… when I felt threatened.” I blinked. “Brian.”

Brian looked around as if Shorty, packing the third board past us, might back him up. “Quite violently?”

“Used to… Brian. Suddenly and… violently.” I nodded and rolled my eyes. I moved closer to his face. “But now… My father taught me there are times to react and times to… take a moment, assess the situation, but… watch, and be ready. It’s like… gunfights, in the movies. If someone… is ready to… strike, I strike first. I mean, I can. Because… I’m ready.” I moved my face back from Brian’s and smiled. “Everyone… people are hoping the surfing is… helping. I am not… sure. I’m on… probation, currently; I get to go to La Jolla every Monday, talk to a… shrink. Court ordered. So…” I took a deep breath, gave Brian a peace sign.

“Brian,” Beach Boy, at the driver’s door of his parent’s car said, “we’ll get a spot.”

“Wind’s coming up, Brian,” I said, pointing to the boards. “Better get on it.”

“Oh, I have your permission. No! Fuck you, Jap!” Brian moved back and into some version of a fighting stance as he said it.

“Brian. I’m, uh, assessing.” I folded my hands across my chest.

Brian may have said more. He moved even closer, his mouth moving, his face out of focus; background, overlapped by, superimposed with, a succession of bullies with faces too close to mine; kids from school, third grade to high school. I couldn’t hear them, either. Taunts. I knew the words: “Retard!” “Idiot!” “What’s wrong with you?”

 My father’s voice cut through the others. “They don’t know you, Jody. It’s all a joke. Laugh.” In this vision, or spell, or episode, each of my alleged tormentors, all of them boys, fell away. Each face was bracketed by and punctuated with a blink of a red light. Every three seconds. Approximately.

One face belonged to a nine-year-old boy, a look of shock that would become pain on his face. He was falling back and down, blood coming out of his mouth. Red light. I looked at the school drinking fountain. A bit of blood. Red light. I saw more faces. The red lights became weaker, and with them, the images.

The lighting changed. More silver than blue. Cold light. I saw my father’s face, and mine, in the bathroom mirror. Faces; his short, almost blond hair, almost curly, eyes impossibly blue; my hair straight and black, my eyes almost black. “Jody, just… smile.” I did. Big smile. “No, son; not that smile.”

I smiled. That smile.

Brian’s face came back into focus. I looked past him, out to the kelp beds and beyond them “Wind’s picking up.” I paused. “Wait, I already said that. Did I, Brian?”

I turned toward the Falcon, closed the blue notebook, set it on one side of the open Pee-Chee, picked up the red notebook from the other side. There were crude sketches of dark waves and cartoonish surfers on the cover. I opened it and started writing.

“Wind is picking up.” I may have spun around a bit quickly, hands in a pre-fight position. It was Rincon Ronny in a shortjohn wetsuit, a board under his arm. Ronny nodded toward the stairs. “Fun guys.” He leaned away and laughed. I relaxed my hands and my stance. “The one dude, the… shitless guy…”

“Brian. Shirtless.”

“Yeah. That dude. You may have… Fuck, man; he was scared shitless.”

“It’ll wear off.” I held the notebook up, showed Ronny the page with ‘Brian and friends’ written in larger-than-necessary block letters, and closed the notebook. “By the time they get back to wherever they’re from, Brian would’ve kicked my ass.” I looked around to see if any of Ronny’s friends were with him. “I was… really… polite, Rincon Ronny.”

“Polite. Yeah. From what I saw. And it’s just… Ronny. Now.”

I had to think about what Ronny might have seen, how long I was in whatever state I was in. Out. I started gathering my belongings, pulling up the edges of my towel. “I just didn’t want to give my spot to… fuckers. Where are you… parked?”

“I… walked.”

I had to smile and nod. “You… walked.”

Ronny nodded and looked at my shortjohn wetsuit, laid out over my board.  “Custom. Impressive.” I nodded and smiled. “One thing, Junior; those… fuckers, they won’t fuck with you in the water.”

“Joey,” I said. “Someone will.”

Ronny mouthed, “Joey,” and did a combination blink/nod. “Yeah. It’s… Swamis. Joey.”

Ronny looked at the waves, back at me. A gust of west wind blew the cover of my green notebook open. “Julie” was written in almost unreadably psychedelic letters across pages eight and nine. “Julie.” Hopefully unreadable.

I repeated Ronny’s words mentally, careful not to mouth them. “From what I saw.” And “Joey.”                                   

FINALLY, I do have a limited number of Original Erwin t shirts at TAIT TRAUTMAN’S NORTH BY NORTHWEST SURF COMPANY (NXNW). Stop by if you’re cruising through Port Angeles on the way to or from your next surf adventure. And GOOD LUCK!

“I just want to get wet,” Other Lies, and “Swamis,” continued

Posted on by under "Swamis" the novel, Erwin Dence illustrations, getting barrelled, northwest surfing, old surfers, real surfers, surf fiction, surf novels, surfing blogs, surfing the strait of juan de fuca

FIRST LIE: “I just want to get in the water,” or any variation on this (purposefully not talking about the folks cruising SURF ROUTE 101 and, I guess, everywhere, with Walmart plastic kayaks, canoes, wavestorms) by someone who actually surfs. Okay, shouldn’t have excluded Wavestormer Troopers, BUT…

…here’s the (a) story: So, three sessions ago, fighting a radically outgoing tide and small, choppy waves, I had one of those go-outs in which I, objectively, SUCKED. Two sessions ago, on a borrowed SUP, same spot, even smaller waves, I, subjectively, did OKAY. Or, at least, better… BUT, tasked with packing a board heavier than my Hobie on a long trek back, and unable to just drag someone else’s board across the soft sand and the scrub, I allowed, for the first time in my career, someone else to pack my board part way. It was his board. I was… grateful.

So, next session I packed in my MANTA board. I had finally coated over the paint with resin, and figured, if the waves were the usual, minimal, I could, at least, jump into a few. The waves lived up to my expectations; minimal. AND, NO, even if I said I just wanted to get in the water, which I didn’t, I would be lying. I wanted o RIP. I always want to rip. I didn’t. I let frothed-out ripper KEITH ride the board. He did rip. I watched. I caught ONE WAVE, belly ride, totally tubed, with enough juice to propel me down the line and into the gravel shelf. YAY!

MANTA and slightly lost Hobbit.

OH, and Keith put a ding in the Manta. That’s one of the costs in surfing. Occasionally getting h orumbled is another. STILL, next time I get wet…

SECOND LIE: “I’m not political.” Add to this, “I am willing to talk.” That part is true. I am working on a project proposal for a guy who is running for the state senate as a republican. So, in discussing the job, politics did come up. I said that, probably, 70 percent of people agree on 75% of things, that where the radical 30%, 15 in each direction, left and right, come together is distrust of the government. The potential client agreed. THEN, because he is also part of the nebulous percentage of people who consider themselves religious (there is a scale on this), I added that we are all raised with certain morals, and, if we go against these, we, in our own minds, sin. So, because we want to consider ourselves ‘good people,’ we try to live up to our own sense of morality.

HE AGREED. What I actually (or also) meant, or meant to imply was, that if a person is raised by a parent who used every device and trick to fuck over people in order to enrich himself, that person’s moral backstop, compass, guidebook, whatever, is… different.

BECAUSE I couldn’t help myself, and, actually, I MIGHT DO MORE, I drew a couple of, possibly, kind of political illustrations. I found out a few things: A LOT of women do not want to see even a negative image of Fred Trump’s son, a NASTY piece of work. I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong: there might be, like, 15% who think… SHIT, I can’t imagine why they’d have anything other than disgust, AND, if they defend him on some false and thin pretense, I might believe they have an incredibly strong resistance to the gag reflex, and/or are lying.

Again, I am willing to talk.

“SWAMIS.” Since I am serializing the novel, I should recap: 1. Joey is at the court-appointed psychologist’s office; the conversation coming around to whether he has moved from being bullied to being a bully. 2. Joey’s first meeting with Julie at Pipes.

CHAPTER THREE- SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1968

My nine-six Surfboards Hawaii pintail was on the Falcon’s rust and chrome factory racks. I was headed along Neptune, from Grandview to Moonlight Beach. The bluff side of Neptune was either garage or gate and fence, or hedge, tight to the road. There were few views of the water. I was, no doubt, smiling, remembering something from that morning’s session.

There had been six surfers at the outside lineup, the preferred takeoff spot. They all knew each other. If one of them hadn’t known about me, the asshole detective’s son, others had clued him in. There was no way the local crew and acceptable friends would allow me to catch a set wave. No; maybe a wave all of them missed or none of them wanted. Or one would act as if he was going to take off any wave I wanted, just to keep me off it.  

As the first one in the water, I had surfed the peak, had selected the wave I thought might be the best of a set. Three other surfers came out. Okay. Three more surfers came out. Sid was one of them. I knew who Sid was. By reputation. A set wave came in. I had been waiting. I was in position. It was my wave. I took off.  Sid took off in front of me, ten yards over. I said something like, “Hey!”

Rather than speed down the line or pull out, Sid stalled. It was either hit him or bail. I bailed. Sid said, “Hey!” Louder. He looked at me, cranked a turn at the last moment. He made the wave. I swam.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, back at the lineup. The four other surfers there were laughing with Sid.

“Wrong, Junior; you broke the locals rule.” Sid pointed to the lefts, the waves perceived as not being as good, on the other side of a real or imagined channel. “Local’s rule. Get it?” Trying to ignore the taunts of the others, I caught an insider and moved over.

After three lefts, surfed, I believed, with a certain urgency and a definite aggression, I prone-paddled back to the rights, tacking back and forth. A wave was approaching, a decently sized set wave. I wanted it. 

“Outside!” I yelled, loud enough that four surfers, including Sid, started paddling for the horizon. I paddled at an angle, lined up the wave at the peak. Though the takeoff was late, I made the drop, rode the wave into the closeout section, pulling off the highest roller coaster I had ever even attempted.

There had been no outside set. I kept my back turned to the water as I exited, not daring to look up at the surfers on the bluff, hooting and pointing. I did look up for a moment as I grabbed my towel, my keys and wallet and cigarettes rolled up in it, tromped up the washout to Neptune Avenue, trying not to smile.   

Driving, almost to Moonlight Beach, a late fifties model Volkswagen bus, two-tone, white over gray, was blocking the southbound lane. Smoke was coming out of the open engine compartment. Black smoke. Three teenagers were standing behind the bus: Two young men, Duncan Burgess and Rincon Ronny, on the right side, one young woman, Monica, on the left. 

There was more room on the northbound side. I pulled over, squeezed out between the door and someone’s bougainvillea hedge, and walked into the middle of the street, fifteen feet behind the van. “Can I help?” 

Duncan, Ronny, and Monica were dressed as if they had surfed but were going to check somewhere else: Nylon windbreakers, towels around their waists. Duncan’s and Monica’s jackets were different, but both were red with white, horizontal stripes that differed in number and thickness. Ronny was wearing a dark blue windbreaker with a white, vertical strip, a “Yater” patch sewn on. Each of the three looked at me, and looked back at each other, then at the smoking engine. The movement of their heads said, “No.”

Someone stepped out of an opening in the hedge on the bluff side of the road, pretty much even with me. I was startled. I took three sideways steps before I regained my balance.

Julia Cole. Perfectly balanced. She was wearing an oversized V-neck sweater that almost covered boys’ nylon trunks. Her legs were bare, tan, her feet undersized for the huarache sandals she was wearing. She looked upset, but more angry than sad. But then… she almost laughed. I managed a smile.

“It’s you,” she said. It was. Me. “Are you a mechanic?” I shook my head, took another step toward the middle of the road, away from her. “An Angel?” Another head shake, another step. She took two more steps toward me. We were close. She seemed to be studying me, moving her head and eyes as if she might learn more from an only slightly different angle.

I couldn’t continue to study Julia Cole. I looked past her. Her friends looked at her, then looked at each other, then looked, again, at the subsiding smoke and the growing pool of oil on the pavement. “We saw what you did,” she said. I turned toward her. “From the bluff.” Her voice was a whisper when she added, “Outside,” the fingers of her right hand out, but twisting, pulling into her palm, little finger first, as her hand itself twisted. “Outside,” she said again, slightly louder.

“Oh,” I said. “It… worked.”

“Once. Maybe Sid… appreciated it.” She shook her head. “No.”

I shook my head. “Once.” I couldn’t help focusing on Julia Cole’s eyes. “I had to do it.”

“Of course.” By the time I shifted my focus from Julia Cole’s face to her right hand, it had become a fist, soft rather than tight. “Challenge the… hierarchy.”

I had no response. Julia Cole moved her arm slowly across her body, stopping for a moment just under the parts of her sweater dampened by her bathing suit top. Breasts. I looked back into her eyes for the next moment. Green. Translucent. She moved her right hand, just away from her body, up. She cupped her chin, thumb on one cheek, fingers lifting, pointer finger first, drumming, pinkie finger first. Three times. She pulled her hand away from her face, reaching toward me. Her hand stopped. She was about to say something.  

“Julie!” It was Duncan. Julie, Julia Cole didn’t look around. She lowered her hand and took another step closer to me. In a ridiculous overreaction, I jerked away from her.

“I was going to say, Junior…” Julia was smiling. I may have grinned. Another uncontrolled reaction. “I could… probably… if you were an… attorney.”

“I’m not… Not… yet.”

Julia Cole loosened the tie holding her hair. Sun-bleached at the ends, dirty blonde at the roots. She used the fingers of both hands to straighten it.

“I can… give you a ride… Julia… Cole.”

“Look, Fallbrook…” It was Duncan. Again. He walked toward us, Julia Cole and me. “We’re fine.” He extended a hand toward Julia. She did a half-turn, sidestep. Fluid. Duncan kept looking at me. Not in a friendly way. He put his right hand on Julia Cole’s left shoulder.

Julia Cole allowed it. She was still smiling, still studying me when I asked, “Phone booth? There’s one at… I’m heading for Swamis.”

            A car come up behind me. I wasn’t aware. Rincon Ronny and Monica watched it. Duncan backed toward the shoulder. Julia and I looked at each other for another moment. “You really should get out of the street… Junior.”

            “Joey,” I said. “Joey.”

            She could have said, “Julie.” Or “Julia.” She said neither. She could have said, “Joey.”      

No one got a ride. I checked out Beacons and Stone Steps and Swamis. I didn’t surf. The VW bus was gone when I drove back by. Dirt from under someone’s hedge was scattered over the oil, some of it seeping through.

OBLIGATORY COPYRIGHT STUFF: I reserve the rights to any and all of my original works. Please respect this. Erwin A. Dence, Jr. Thanks.

HAPPY LABOR DAY! I do hope you’re getting WET and BARRELED! The next time (and any time) I get in the water, remember, “I’M HERE TO SURF.”