ROAD TRIPS, it’s all a journey from where we are to where we hope the waves are. Pretty much all of my friends have hit the road recently, to various destinations. And I ventured out on the roads, despite the summer road closures and the annoying number of traffic accidents involving folks, not realizing the journey is part of the story, hitting the road just a bit too fast, too aggressively, and often, stupidly. That’ll fuck up one’s zen. Not mine.
Get there; get waves (or not); enjoy (or not) others in the water, the trails, the parking area; check out some other spots on the way home; go to Costco/Home Depot/QFC (not optional for me) and maybe FRUGALS Drive Through (part of the deal when I had to beg friends to take me with them, before my new stealth rig got roadworthy- not included if I’m alone); get home.
MEANWHILE, and all during and after the trip- We are anticipating, enjoying, assessing, picking out the most relevant waves, rides, interactions in the water, quotes worth repeating (Me, after backing off wave-“Did you really think you were going to make that section?” Guy who yelled at me but didn’t make the section-“I was trying to.”) when we tell the adventure story.
And somewhere, some time, if it’s comparing notes with another surfer who surfed different spots, or with non surfers who ask if we’ve been surfing lately, we will.
Maybe we find waves, maybe we find the sort of experience that enriches us spiritually, purifies us, transports us, changes us into someone… better.
Probably not.
I always have and can’t seem to stop taking mental notes on surf vehicles and Kooks and costumes and first class equipment owned by Kooks in costumes, rather than pretend my best ride was, like, world class, and that an old guy on a thrashed board might have a touch more soul than… yeah, I am working on all that stuff. Despite my pettiness, I can and do appreciate any surfer who gets a great ride. Mostly, faking humility, I’m just happy I can catch some waves and make some sections.
I was looking for an image of surf vehicles stuck in traffic. This photo from Heckle Photography was too cool to pass up.
MY ORIGINAL thought for this piece was what I got out of a recent video of NATHAN FLORENCE. I am a huge fan- more because of his froth/stoke/enjoyment level than that he makes money surfing killer slabs all over the world- he earns his money. Nate and his brother, IVAN, and his support crew, and his mom, and his wife, were at SKELETON BAY in Namibia, long lefts with long walk-backs. Rather than focusing on the rides, he kept track of, and went on about the workout. True enough, very impressive. At one point he had surfed and walked (or ran) a marathon distance. And then he kept going.
After years of surfing before or after work, or taking a break from work, I do try to dedicate an entire day to any surf adventure. During that day, I do try to exhaust my surf lust, build up my wave count. This is, partially, economics- waves per dollar. It is also a sort of reserve, not knowing when my next adventure might happen. No real surfer has even been SURFED OUT.
Still, I could mention surf exhaustion is part of my story. The good kind of exhaustion. In the next chapter…
SPEAKING OF CHAPTERS, I have moved ahead in the latest, hopefully final rewrite of my novel, “SWAMIS.” I will be posting Chapter Nine on Wednesday. Joey’s surf friends Gary and Roger call him from Swamis. Chulo had been killed there the night before.
Film at eleven.
Check it out.
NOW, I usually put something about copyrights with each post. This one, yeah, if you want to take it and say you wrote it for some or any reason, go ahead. OTHERWISE, see you out on the road.
I was driving my mother’s 1964 Volvo four-door. Because I never told the DMV I had a history of seizures, I did get a license, I did drive. Because my mother believed I was getting better, she allowed me to drive. Still, she looked in my direction frequently. Because my father believed I was getting better, he taught me. If I did, indeed, have some kind of brain damage, I could force myself, will myself to control the freezes my father called ‘lapses,’ and the outbursts he called ‘mistakes.’
There are stories for each sport I was pushed to try, each team I did not become a part of. Each story involved my lack of attention at some point of time critical to practice or a game. More often, I was asked to leave because, while I had not been what my father called ‘fully committed,’ I had committed violent and unsportsmanlike attacks on an opponent. Or a teammate.
I was, initially, pushed toward surfing. My father’s answer to my fears was, “If you have a lapse, you will drown. So… don’t.” It was the same with driving. “Concentrate. You’re always thinking behind. You have to think ahead. Got that, Jody?”
We were heading down the grade and into La Jolla. “Favorite part of the trip, Mom; the ocean’s just spread out… so far.”
“Eyes on the road, please.” I glanced past her, quickly, hoping to see some sign of waves around the point. She gave me her fiercest look. I laughed, looked at the road, but looked down and out again on a curve. Scripps’s Pier. Waves. “Are they testing you again, this time?”
“I don’t think so. The new doctor. Peters. She’ll, I guess, analyze whatever they found out last time with the wires and the fancy equipment.” I looked over at my mother as we dropped down through the eucalyptus trees at the wide sweeping right-hand curve that mirrors the La Jolla Cove. “So, maybe we’ll find out; either I’m crazy or brain damaged.”
“Eyes on the road, please.”
…
I was in the examination room, standing under a round ceiling light installed a few inches off center. I had a history book and a notebook set on a long, thin, empty walnut table. Both were closed. The cabinets on two of the walls were cherry. A tile countertop featured double sink. Porcelain. This was a rented space, easily converted.
The six windows on the south wall extended from about a foot-and-a-half from the floor to eight inches from the ceiling. Four of the windows offered a view of tropical plants up against a mildewed redwood fence, eight foot high, no more than three feet away. The light that could make it through the space between the eves and the fence hit several, evenly spaced, colored glass and driftwood windchimes. The sound would be muted, nowhere near tinkly.
The fourth wall had a door, hollow core, cheap Luan mahogany; with a thin frame, and several white lab coats hanging on it. There was an added-on closet, painted white, with another mahogany door, this one rough at the hinge side. Cut down and re-used. There four framed copies of diploma certificates from three universities. Two unmatched wingback chairs, each with an ottoman, were canted, purposefully, toward each other, facing the window wall.
Group practice. Shared space. I had seen two of the other doctors. One of them had done the tests; electrodes, wires, multiple requests to “just relax.” Results pending.
The mahogany door opened. Dr. Peters entered, carrying a large stack of medical records folders. She kicked the door closed, dropped the stack on the table. She removed her white lab coat, hung it on the door, turned and pointed, with both hands, at the Gordon and Smith logo on the t shirt she was wearing.
“More of a San Diego… city thing, Dr. Peters.”
“Susan. I met Mike Hynson once,” she said. “He was in ‘Endless Summer.’ I figured you’d be either put at ease or impressed.”
“Once? Mike Hynson? Professionally?”
She shuffled through the stack, breaking it into thirds. Roughly. “Funny.”
“Is it?”
“No. It’s… funny you should come back with… that. If he was a… client, I couldn’t say so. I nodded. “So… I’m not saying.”
“No.”
Dr. Peters shook her head. “I went to his shop. Really cool. It’s not like I surf or… I am petrified of the ocean.” She pulled out a folder from what had been the bottom third of the stack. “You?”
“Sure. There’s… fear, and there’s respect. A four-foot wave can kill you.” She may or may not have been listening. “Is that my… permanent record?” Dr. Peters laughed as if the remark was clever or funny; it wasn’t either. I didn’t laugh. She looked at me, nodded, and let the laugh die out. We exchanged weak smiles.
“Okay.” She pulled an adjustable stool, stainless steel, on rollers, from the corner on the far side of the closet. She motioned toward it. An invitation. I shook my head. “Or… we can both stand.”
“If it’s… okay with you, Ma’am. Dr. Peters.”
“Call me Susan. What do your… friends call you?”
“Trick question?”
“Maybe. Okay. Trick.” We both shrugged. Dr. Susan Peters waited for an answer.
“Surf friends. A couple.” Her reaction was more like curiosity rather than disbelief. “Friends call me Joey. So… Joey, Dr. Peters. I… I’m not… accustomed to calling my superiors or my elders by their first names. Respect.”
She leaned in toward me. “I’m fucking thirty… thirty-one. Joey. Okay?”
“Now I am… impressed and at ease. So… okay.” The Doctor squinted. “But, uh, Dr. Peters; you’re, I’m guessing, my doctor of record?” She nodded. “Seventh… by my count.”
Dr. Peters restacked the folders. “Court mandated. Your, um, your father set that up. How do you feel about that?”
“I was too close to turning eighteen. This was a… choice. An option. He and I… discussed it. How do you feel about… another smart ass trying to get off easy?”
“Me? Fine. Job. Most of the smartasses I deal with aren’t so… smart.” I nodded. “So, okay, Joey… your dad. He didn’t want to…” Dr. Peters backed away from the table. “No what he called ‘Psycho drugs.’” She sat down on the larger of the two wing chairs. She used one foot to pull the ottoman into position and put both feet up on it. She looked at the other chair, then at me. Another invitation. I remained standing.
“How long since you had an episode? Full?” I glanced at her folders. “Okay; three years ago, lunchtime, evidently out on the square at Fallbrook High School. Embarrassing?” I shook my head. I must have smiled. “Okay. Different topic. When you… took this option… November of last year. You had another student pinned down, foot on his throat.”
“Grant Murdoch.”
“And he was… faking a seizure?”
“He wouldn’t have done it if… I never went to Friday night football… activities. My surf friends… persuaded me… to.”
“So, you took the… prank thing… personally?”
“Prank? Yes, I did.” I closed my eyes, envisioned the episode. Ten seconds, max. I sat on the metal stool, spun around several times. “He was… really good at it. Foaming at the mouth and everything. I was… Dr. Dan, the ‘electrode man.’ Do you have any… results?”
“Inconclusive.”
“You’re… disappointed?”
“No; but skipping over how you just now called another doctor, a grownup, by his first name… the tests. it was… bad timing.”
“Because I didn’t have, like, a seizure, or even… a… spell? So, by inconclusive, you mean normal.”
“Pretty much.”
“That is… disappointing. Maybe it’s like the doctor, two doctors back, said.” I pointed to the files again. “He insisted I was just faking it.”
“Are you?”
“Inconclusive.”
“You didn’t have a… you know about the most common seizure, right?”
“Petit’ mal. Absence. Thousand-yard stare. Yes.”
“Of course. You study… everything.”
“No. Things I’m interested in.”
Dr. Peters looked toward the stack of files. She took a breath, looked at the plants outside the windows, at the chime swaying slightly and silently, then back at me. “You went back into… regular, public school, in the third grade. Tell me about that.”
“One of the… teachers… decided maybe I might not be a… retard; maybe I’m… a genius.” I waited for her reaction. Her expression was hard to read. Blank. I danced the stool around until I faced the windows and the plants and the mildewed fence. “I’m not.”
“That’s why you turned down the scholarship?”
I made the half spin back toward the Doctor, waited for her to explain how she knew that. “School records came with a note.” She had to add more. “Vice Principal Greenwald.”
“Sure.” I spun around one more time before I stood up. “I turned it down because I am a faker, a phony. I… memorize.” I gave the seat of the stool a spin. Clockwise. It moved up about three inches. “I wouldn’t be able to compete with assholes with real brains. Susan.”
Dr. Peters leaned forward, then threw herself back in the chair. “Okay. We’ll… forget about the competition aspect… for now. This… memorization. Yes. In medical school, I had to… so much is repetition. Rote, little mnemonics, other… tricks.”
“Tricks.” I swept one hand back toward the table. “Files. Pictures. Little… movies. I… wouldn’t it be great if we could…?” I walked closer. Dr. Peters pulled her feet from the ottoman. She leaned toward me. I continued. “There are the things we miss. They go by… too quickly. If we could go back, just a few seconds, get kind of a repeat what just happened. See what we missed.”
“And you can?”
“Can’t you? Don’t you… you take notes, you… Do you… rerun conversations in your mind, try to see where you were… awkward; where you… didn’t get the joke?”
“I try not to. I’m more of a… casual observer.”
“That’s me, Dr Peters; Casual.”
“Observant.” Dr. Peters stood up. The ottoman was between us, but she was close. Too close. She was about my height. Her eyes were what people call hazel. More to the gray/green color used in camouflage. “Tell me…” she said, quite possibly making some decision on the color of my eyes, “I’m trying to determine if there’s a trigger, a mechanism. Tell me what you remember about… the accident?”
“The… accident?”
“When you were five.”
“I don’t… remember that one. I was… five.”
“No, Joey, I believe you do.”
…
This wasn’t a brief remembrance of past events, this was a spell I couldn’t avoid, couldn’t think or will myself out of, and couldn’t stop. I stepped back, turned away. I shook my head as if that would keep the vision from taking hold. I tried to concentrate on… plants, the ones outside the window. Ivy, ferns, the mildew, the grain of the wood… “Like Gauguin,” I told myself, “Like Rousseau,” I said, out loud. “There’s a lion in there… somewhere.”
“Can you tell me what you remember, what you… see?”
I could not. The Doctor stepped between me and the window. She started to say something but stopped. She looked almost frightened. The image of the Doctor faded until it was gone. I was gone.
Everything I could remember, what I could see, was from my point of view.
I pulled down my father’s uniform jacket that been covering my face. I was in my father’s patrol car. Front seat. He took his right hand off the steering wheel and put it on my left shoulder.
“Our secret, huh Jody boy? Couldn’t put you in the back like a prisoner.” I didn’t answer. “Too many of you Korean War babies. I can’t believe… if they’re gonna have half-day kindergarten, they should have… busses both ways.” No answer. “Best argument for your mother getting her license.” No answer.
The light coming through the windshield and the windows was overwhelmingly bright. There was nothing but the light outside.
My father yelled something, two syllables. “Hold on!” His hand came across my face and dropped, out of my sight, to my chest.
His arm wasn’t enough to keep me from lurching forward. Blackness. I bounced back, then forward again, and down. Everything was up, streams of light from all four sides, a dark ceiling. My father was looking at me. His shadow, really, looking over and down. “You’re all right. You’re… fine.” He couldn’t reach me. The crushed door and steering wheel had him trapped. His right hand seemed to be hanging, his fingers twitching. He groaned as he forced his arm back toward his body. “We’re… fine.”
There were three taps on the window beyond my father. “Stay down,” he said. I could see my father’s eyes in the shadow. He looked, only for a second, at his gun belt, on the seat, coiled, the holster and the black handle of his pistol on top.
“You took… everything!” The voice was coming from the glare. “Everything!”
The man stepped back. The details of the man’s face were almost clear, then were lost again to the glare. Like a ghost.
“If we could just…” my father said as the suddenly recognizable shape of a rifle barrel moved toward us. Three more taps on the window. “If we could… relax.”
I could hear a siren. Closer. I tried to climb up, over, behind my father’s shadow.
“Everything!”
“No!”
There was a shot. My father screamed. Glass in front of and behind me shattered. The pieces that didn’t hit my father, seemingly in slow motion, blew at me. A wave. Diamonds. My father’s left hand was up, out. A bit of the light shone through the hole. I could hear the siren. I could see a red light, faint, throbbing, pulsing. The loudness of the siren and the rate of the light were increasing. I could see the man’s face, just beyond my father’s hand. His eyes were glistening with tears, but wide. Open. His left cheek was throbbing. I could see the rifle barrel again. It was black, shiny. It was moving. It stopped, pointed directly at me.
My father twisted his bloody hand and grabbed for the barrel.
I could see the man’s face. Clearly. His eyes were on me. Bang. The second shot. The man looked surprised. He blinked. He fell back. Not quickly. He was a ghost in the glare, almost smiling before he disappeared.
Tires slid across gravel. The siren stopped. The engine noise was all that was remaining, that and something like groaning.
“Gunny?” It was a different voice outside the car.
“I’m fine,” my father’s voice said.
“Bastard!” It was the new voice, followed by a third shot.
Dr. Susan Peters came back into focus. She looked quite pleased.
…
My mother was driving. I was looking past her, out at the horizon, down at the pier. I couldn’t help but catch her eye as we approached the top of the hill. “UCSD,” she said, “You could go there. Second semester, maybe, if it’s too late for fall.”
If I gave a verbal response at all, it was weak and meaningless agreement.
We were going down the hill at the north end of Torrey Pines when my mother said, “It’s the waiting rooms. I’ve spent too much of my life… waiting.” She reached over and patted my shoulder. This was unusual. We were both aware of this. “Next week, you can drive yourself.”
She swept her hand across the dashboard, as if touching my shoulder had been incidental. I nodded and smiled. If I wanted to reach over to touch her shoulder, I didn’t.
“Mom,” I said, somewhere near the one traffic light in Del Mar, “Would you prefer to have a son who is crazy, or one who is… damaged?”
“I have two sons,” she said, with a sound that was almost like someone clearing his or her voice, my mother’s version of a laugh. Controlled, as if she would be embarrassed to show real emotion. I laughed. Semi-controlled. “You are neither. Gifted, I would prefer to call you.” She cleared her voice. “Gifted.”
Out on the flat area north of Solana Beach, approaching Cardiff Reef, my mother said, “We could have met at Mrs. Tony’s. Then you could have surfed. Are the waves… good?”
“Pretty good. Not crowded.” The waves, at a medium tide, were really good. “She… Dr. Peters, did ask me about… when I was five?”
“Of course.” Almost to Swamis, waves visible even in the northbound lane, my mother added, “Your father does… did… take responsibility for your… problems. Blame is… different.”
“I should take responsibility for…”
“No.” She wasn’t looking at me. “We are sticking with the plan. You weren’t… there.”
“But…”
“I believe Larry is trying to… protect me.”
“Larry?”
She looked past me and out the window as we passed the Swamis parking lot. “There are very few cars. So, the waves aren’t… the way you like them?”
Before I could visualize the variety of surf conditions I had faced, from flat to out of control; glassy to blown-out; fog-bound, gray-bound, to brilliantly blue, to glaring white, I said, “Actually, Mom, the waves are exactly the way I like them.”
…
I couldn’t find an image in a quick search that showed the building when it was the Surfboards Hawaii shop back in 1969. In real life, it was my favorite, not that I didn’t feel like a kook at it or any other shop. Probably the Surfboards by Heck shop in Carlsbad was one where I felt a little more at ease. When Trish and I lived in Encinitas ’74-77, we did frequent the La Paloma, usually with guests. We saw “Harold and Maude” several times. Only recently did Trish admit she hated the movie. She did like the lay out seating.
…
Mrs. Joseph DeFreines and I were in the lobby at the Surfboards Hawaii shop. There were a few dazzlingly shiny surfboards leaned against the walls; each, regardless of the color of the tint, with perfect rail overlap lines. There were three nine foot and longer boards, on sale. The new ones were in the seven-to-eight-foot range, still long board thick. There were v-bottoms, the big thing from the previous year, and several twin fins. I had to touch the red twin fin. Six-eight. Concave under the rounded nose, downrail to fifty-fifty to downrail at the tail. Slight V-bottom.
My reaction to the board may have seemed like lust to my mother. She looked around the rest of the lobby. There was a display case with an already thumbed-through copy of the latest “Surfer” bi-monthly on the counter. There were stickers inside, including the newest one for Surfboards Hawaii; with an outline of, I guessed, the island of Oahu. There were bars of wax designed just for surfing, spray cans of Slipcheck, a few colorful fiberglass fins, removeable.
There were posters and photos on the back wall. Hawaii, mostly; a couple of framed shots of locals at local breaks. One was of Sid, hanging ten. There was a photo of Jumper Hayes doing a stylish drop-knee cutback. 1966 or so. Another photo, black and white, was of Julia Cole, arm back, leaning back, in position on a back-lit, almost transparent wave. Perfect.
My mother was looking around the shop. I had it memorized. The young woman working the front was new; attractive, of course. Surfer’s girlfriend was my guess, though her slightly softer version of the hairspray-stiffened sixties bouffant may have been to make her appear more professional. Maybe.
In past visits, some with Gary and Roger, others with embarrassingly kooky friends of theirs, the lobby area was staffed by teenagers, locals, automatically cool, and presumably, because they worked in a surf shop, good surfers. Usually there were friends of the duty sales guy hanging out. They always stopped talking when I or we came in. Judgment in a surf shop, or at any surf spot, is harsh and instantaneous. Someone else’s word, a reputation, are not enough. Proof of proficiency is required.
Despite the young saleswoman’s hip outfit, this wasn’t a boutique surf shop. Surfboards were being shaped and glassed in the larger, back part of the building.
When my mother was looking for a parking spot, three guys were sitting out on the south side of the building, white foam dust all over them, squatting or sitting, leaning against the wall in the afternoon sun. A kid, younger than me, was nearest the open side door, drinking a coke. Rodrigo. Little Rod. Half Hawaiian, half Portuguese. We had discussed our heritage in the water at Grandview. Music and foam dust were coming out of the darkness of the doorway. Enviable work, I thought. I wouldn’t have even nodded if Rodrigo, or any of the three, had looked up. That would have forced someone to acknowledge my existence or shine me on, to admit or deny ever having spoken to me.
This sounds overdramatic now. Then, it was critical.
The shopkeeper didn’t have charm to waste on kooks and hodads and teenage cowboys who come in with their mothers. Dismissive. She was sitting on a stool in the corner farthest from the front door. She had looked up from her reading when we entered, mumbling some version of, “just look around.”
It was the North County Free Press in her hands. She put it down when my mother and I approached the display case. I had waited for any sign that the young woman recognized my mother or me. She tried to hide that she had. I pointed to the closed door behind her. “Used boards,” she said, “and consignments. Go on in.”
The young woman noticed me looking at the photos on the back wall as I stopped at the door. “Sid,” I said.
“Sid. Yeah. Team rider.” She reluctantly got up, walked over, and opened the door. Doesn’t much care where he surfs.”
“He… yeah, Sid has that reputation.” I turned away, half hoping she might wonder what else the cop’s kid might know.
My mother slipped the keys to the Volvo and some cash into my hand as we followed the young woman into the back room. It was stuffed with boards; all sizes, most with dirty wax still clinging to them. The young woman walked over to the long boards; three stacks; four in one, five in the other. She looked up, spread her arms between the stacks. I tried to give the money back to my mother. She closed her hands into fists.
The young woman looked a bit disappointed when she turned around and I had pulled a quite thrashed six-eight single fin out and was leaning it against several other boards. “Sid’s?”
“Sid. And he’s called dibs on the red board you were looking at. Twin fin. Latest thing.”
“Maybe I should wait until Sid trashes that one.”
The saleswoman wasted a second determining whether I was joking. Patronizing smile.
“Do you sell trunks?” My mother looked at me to see if she had pulled a surf shop faux pax. By this point, it didn’t matter.
“We don’t,” the young woman said, with an expression my mother would later describe as ‘prissy face,’ “but… Hansen does.”
…
The surfboard fit in the back seat of the Volvo, the nose sticking out of the passenger side window. I looked at the young woman, standing outside the shop, as I loaded it. “Good,” she said, “I wasn’t… sure.” The phone rang inside the shop. She went back in.
I replayed the time at the counter: Money offered, change returned; complimentary bar of Surf Research wax and one of the rectangular Surfboards Hawaii decals. The young woman caught me looking at the photo of Julia Cole. “Julia Cole,” I said. “You must know her.”
“If I must, then, I… must. Sure. Julia. Surfs with, and kind of like… the guys.”
My mother was already in the car when I got in. “Miss Prissy doesn’t surf,” she said. “It would… damage… her hair.”
I laughed first. My mother couldn’t help herself. It wasn’t a big laugh, but it was real.
…
Wearing my new nylon Hang Tens, I paddled my new-to-me trashed and patched board all the way to the outside peak. Two surfers had caught waves on the last set. One surfer remained. “Hey, that’s Sid’s board.” It was a kid, younger than me; blonde, freckled, sunburned, and obviously ditching school to get one over on pretty much everyone.
“Was. He, uh, broke it in for me.”
“Ha.” That was it for actual conversation. Uncrowded waves were available for a short period of time before school got out and work got over. Four surfers, three wave sets. We shared, pretty much; the older guy got the best waves. All too soon there were fifteen surfers in the lineup. No hoots, little eye contact, but I was in a rhythm, ride, paddle, short wait, ride. I had some decent rides, a couple of memorable ones; and I finished up with one from the outside peak to a calf-high but fast section on the very inside.
My mother had been left in the parking lot long enough for me to feel a bit guilty. I could make out her silhouette at the edge of the bluff as I stepped over the slippery rocks and onto the sand. A woman walked up to her; a woman who made my mom seem smaller than I knew her to be. Her long dress, her shawl, her dark hair, all were moving in rhythm with the updrafts. Portia.
The silhouettes were lost as I hurried to the stairs. When I reached the top, out of breath, my mother was waiting, holding one of the towels she kept in the Volvo “to protect the seats.” Portia was at the far end of the bluff section, talking to a young couple. Beyond them, the Jesus Saves bus was parked at its usual spot, squaring-off the far end of the lot.
“You spoke to her.”
My mother followed my eyes. “Patty? Yes, yes, I did. She’s very… she’s nice.”
“Portia.”
“She spoke to me. Yes. I meant… Portia. Yes. She’s… waiting.”
“Waiting. Oh, for Chulo. Yes.”
“Yes. Flowers. Portia told me there’s an A&W here… in Encinitas.” I looked at Portia and the couple. She was taking something from the young man. Money. Change dropped from a fist; several bills unfolded and placed into Portia’s palm. An offering, perhaps. Portia pulled her hand back, put the offering into a pocket on her skirt, gave the young girl a kiss, gave the young man a hug. “Freddy,” my mother said, “We can get something for Freddy.”
“What? Yeah. Food. Freddy. Yeah.” I took the towel, moved to the edge of the bluff, felt the moisture in the whisps of air coming up the bluff.
My mother came up beside me. She followed my eyes. We looked at the crowd spread between the inside and the outside lineup, the kelp a bit farther out, the water starting to shimmer if not sparkle. “I see why you like it here,” she said.
“Portia; did she try to evangelize… you?” My mother smiled and shook her head as if the very notion was ridiculous.
“I’ll drive.”
“Do you know how to get to the A&W?”
“I know how to get to the Jack in the Box in Carlsbad. Gourmet fast food.” She shook her head. “And Mom…” She turned back toward the water; as did I. “You can pay for Freddy.”
My mother walked toward the Volvo. She opened the driver’s door and waited until I was almost at the front of her car. She pointed at the white walls of the compound, following them from where they disappeared into the shrubbery to our left, to a series of angles and large gold flower sculptures on higher sections at the highway.
“Tulips,” I said.
“Lotus blossoms.”
“Lotus. Yes.”
“Yes. I took you there. Inside. You and Freddy. He was a baby. It was… before. You were four years old, so… you probably don’t remember.”
I didn’t. I followed my mother’s eyes. Gingerbread Fred Thompson was riding his one speed bicycle from 101 and onto the grass alongside the wall on his one speed bicycle. He extended his left hand as if he was on the road, dropped over the slight curb and onto the parking lot. He cut straight across to the bluff.
“Gingerbread Fred. He comes here… every evening,” I said. “Sundown. Ritual.” My mother tilted her head and squeezed her lips together in a gesture that usually meant something was a good thing. “That’s what religion is,” I added. “Mostly. If you do something religiously, faithfully, when you’re afraid not to do it, it’s more ritual than… belief.”
My mother looked back and forth between Gingerbread Fred and me several times, then just at me. I was aware. Still, I scanned the lot again before I refocused on her. “Everyone, Atsushi, all the religions… it is merely people trying to find some answers in some… much larger mystery.”
“No, Mom, you’re… right.” I leaned over, tapping all my fingers on the roof of my mother’s car. “We… don’t… know.”
My mother held a single key, jangled the others a bit, smiled, moved into the driver’s seat. I looked at Gingerbread Fred for a moment. He was scanning the horizon. Ritual.
I DO HOPE everyone got some waves in the recent past. I DID. So, next time…
“SWAMIS,” copyright 2020, and all rights to any and all changes to the manuscript are claimed by the author, Erwin A. Dence, Jr. THANK YOU for honoring this.
Some people come to the bluff at Swamis just for the sunsets. Carpenters and insurance salesmen mixed in with the surfers, just out of the water, who had to have one more look. On this afternoon, I was one of those.
“After school, after work surfers. Medium crowd. No hassles. Sunset watchers took over the bluff. One lady, business outfit, thanked LA smog for nice orange sunset.”
It was through this crowd of sunset watchers that Portia walked, right to left, from the Jesus Saves bus at the far west end of the parking lot, to the new brick bathroom and shower facility on the 101 side of the stairs. With something bulky under her left arm, she walked as a dancer, perhaps, would, right hand out, palm down, as if floating across the horizon.
Portia was wearing a blouse that went lower than her hips, set off with a cloth sash, wide, purple. Her skirt stopped just above her ankles. Her feet were bare and tan. Portia’s two main pieces of clothing were in dark and almost competitive prints, Gypsy/Peasant/Hippie look. Her hair was long, straight, dark brown, almost black, accentuated with a band around her head that almost matched the sash. No jewelry, just a smaller version of the cross Chulo wore, hers a conveniently shaped piece of driftwood, hanging from hemp twine.
What I couldn’t describe, at that time, was Portia’s face. Pretty from a distance, she seemed to defy a closer look. Inexplicable. Or perhaps it was that, if you were close enough, she was looking at you with an intimidating intensity you couldn’t match.
You might look at her mouth rather than her eyes.
In the very middle of the pack of sunset watchers, Portia stepped between the sun and a man straddling a bicycle undersized for him. Gingerbread Fred. Portia blocked his view of that moment just before the sun exploded and spread at the horizon. It took another moment before she hugged him. I could see her face over his right shoulder. Dark, shadowed. She looked at me for another moment. Blue. Her eyes were a blue that didn’t match anything else about her.
I saw her, there, and I saw an overlapping image of her from another time. Mid-day, I was taking a break from surfing, just around Swamis Point at an area called Boneyards. Lying on the largest, flattest of the big, soft edged rocks, I was close to being asleep. Portia’s shadow blocked the sun. “Do you know Jesus?”
I didn’t open my eyes. “Whose version?”
“Yours,” she said, without any hesitation. She dropped a pamphlet on my chest and moved back, allowing the sun to hit me full on, again. I blocked the sun with a hand and opened my eyes. The pamphlet was hand drawn, hand lettered, eight-and-a-half by eleven, folded, with some vague message about some vague but wonderful Jesus. I sat up. Portia backed away, turned into the glare, danced up to two young women in street clothes, handed them pamphlets, and danced into the shallows.
This Portia, on the bluff, held Gingerbread Fred’s hand as she stepped away. I would save this image: Hands stretched between them, nothing but light behind them.
I had heard stories about Gingerbread Fred. Almost myths. Tijuana Sloughs, breaks outside of Windansea; Fred was on a list of names of surfers from the pre-Gidget past. Legends: Simmons, Blake, Holder, Edwards, Richards; their stories further enhanced with each retelling.
This was the current version of the man. He was damaged, burned out, not fully there. Korea was the rumor. Or Vietnam. Or both. Yet he was here, the bluff at Swamis Point, as he was, seemingly, religiously, for the sunset.
Legends are one thing, parking is another. Someone pulled a car out of a space two spots over from the optimum location. I ran to the Falcon, parked on the far side of the center row. Not taking the time to retrieve my notebooks and binders from the hood, I unlocked it, got in, and eased, counterclockwise, around the other cars and past the Jesus Saves bus, narrowly beating someone else, coming in clockwise, for the spot. Exciting. A little victory.
I was aware that something had blown off the hood. I opened the door carefully, to avoid hitting the car to my left, and got out. A man was holding that week’s edition of the North County Free Press, eight pages, stapled in the middle, open and up to his face.
There was an ad for a farm cooperative on the back page, a photo of me on the front. Me, behind the plate glass window. “Local Detective Killed in Mysterious Car Accident.” The heading for the lead story, right side, balanced by the photo, was “Joseph J. DeFreines, Heroic by Nature.” The by-line was “Lee Anne Ransom.” I had chuckled when I read that the first time.
I imagined what the man was looking at; the coverage and the photos from the funeral. In the featured photo, top right, page five, my mother was looking down, holding the folded American flag with Freddy, on one side, crying, me, on the other side, looking at my mother and not crying. Or he could have been looking at the photo of the crowd, San Diego County Sheriff O’Conner and a group of detectives and deputies, all in uniform, Detective Wendall holding the department’s show horse, a magnificent Palomino, the saddle empty. Wendall looked honestly broken. Or the man could have been reading the testimonials. Or he could have been reading the article on the bottom right, “Is Marijuana Now the County’s Top Cash Crop?” Also written by Lee Anne Ransom.
The man lowered the paper, held it out, still open, with both hands. He was of East Indian descent, I guessed. I had seen him before, different setting, different clothes. He was, on this afternoon, wearing workman’s clothing, heavy blue-gray pants with worn and wet knees, lace up boots with the toe areas scuffed, a long sleeve shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had a faded red bandana half hanging from his left front pocket. His hair and beard were black, both reaching just below his collar.
I looked at the man long enough to take in those details. He looked more at the paper than at me. “I can get another… copy,” he said. “They are, of course… free.”
“No. Keep this one. I have… another copy.” I shook my head. “Free. The free thing.”
“Then, thank you so much.” The man folded the paper, folded it again, tucked it under his arm, did a slight forward tip of his head. “I do some… gardening.” He moved his left hand behind him, pointing. “Outside the compound.” I returned the head tip. “Volunteer.” I did notice an accent. English accent with East Indian rhythm. Perhaps.
“Oh,” I said, looking along the white stucco wall of the Self Realization Fellowship compound, and suddenly remembering where I had seen him, “You’re a… member.”
He smiled, one of those half face smiles. Right side in this case. “Member?” He shook his head. “Loosely… connected.” English, for sure; but I couldn’t discern anything more about place or status. “I saw you once. Inside.” He nodded toward the compound, but out and up, toward the point. “The… meditation garden.”
I tried not to visualize. It didn’t work. I closed my eyes, opened them again. It was the double exposure thing, the vision. I could still see the volunteer gardener, along with another version. Same man, this one dressed in a robe. He was standing next to an older man, with even longer hair and beard, gray, and dressed in a robe made from a silkier, more colorful fabric. That man was possibly an actual Swami, or Yogi, possibly even the Swami. They were smiling. At me. Appreciative smiles. I didn’t want to explain. Anything. I jumped up from the bench and ran, down the manicured paths with hand-set stones, perfectly cared-for plants, flowers year-round.
I blinked. I opened my eyes. “I… ran.”
“You did. Yes, you do remember.”
“I was… studying. Not… anything else.”
“Perfectly fine. Meditation is… one’s own time.”
I followed the man’s eyes back to the bluff. Portia was returning from the bathrooms with a different bundle under her arms, with different clothing, a very different look. Braided strands from the front of her hair were wrapped around to hold the rest in place. There was, perhaps, a ribbon. She was wearing a loose top, long, with long sleeves, a subtly patterned or even one-color Pendleton, with bellbottom pants and sandals.
Portia was walking behind the sunset watchers. “Conservative,” I said, pretty much to myself, but expecting some comment from the volunteer gardener. No. He was gone. He was crossing the lawn by the white stucco compound wall; and was halfway to Highway 101 when the Hayes Flowers van entered the lot.
…
From FLICKR under “Sunsets at Swamis images.” Great photo. Love the glow.
I walked back to the bluff, slightly behind the row of people watching the burnt orange in the wispy cirrus clouds at the horizon fade, toward Portia. Watching the yellow van go down the far row, she took three quick steps and then stopped. I was watching Portia. The van stopped at the squared off end of the asphalt, engine idling, next to the Jesus Saves bus.
I stopped, turned, walked back ten paces, squeezed past the door on the car to the left of the Falcon. I opened the front door to my car. I stood there too long, watching Portia. She was not moving closer to the bus and the van. Waiting. She glanced toward me. I am certain she smiled. Something about our shared hesitancy.
Because I had to say something, I said, “I got a good… spot.”
“Good,” she said. “Great sunset.”
“Yes.” I glanced toward it, then back toward Portia. Her face was shadowed, but this Portia, in regular clothes, seemed younger.
“Chulo… and I, we have to go to Balboa, the, uh, Naval hospital. His friend… you must know him. He surfs. Surfed. Juni. That’s what Chulo calls him.”
Portia walked closer. She set her bundle on the hood of the Falcon. I kept the door between us. “Jumper. Jumper Hayes. He’s… there? Balboa?” She nodded. “He all right?”
“He’s alive. He was transferred there… here, from Hawaii.”
Portia, keeping her eyes on me, moved closer. Sunset watchers beyond her were looking toward the Jesus Saves bus and the Hayes Flower van. Two men, raised voices, short bursts back and forth, not quite distinguishable words. I didn’t look around.
“I have never met him. Jumper.” Portia came up, even closer. Her eyes were, with her usual dark eye makeup gone, that surprising blue color. Her hair was not naturally black. It was, at the roots, lighter. “We’re going… with Mr. and Mrs. Hayes… their car. Good citizen car. It’ll get us through the front gate.”
“The Cadillac. Yeah. That’ll work.”
Portia had to say something or walk away. The muffled back and forth at the Jesus Saves bus continued. “Your father…” I kept my eyes on her. “Chulo and me…” She touched my left hand, slid her right hand on top of it, both of our hands resting on the top edge of the door. “He… introduced me and Chulo. ‘Troublemakers,’ he called us. Got me a job. Then I got on with Mrs. Hayes. Consuela. Arrangements, mostly. Shop work.”
Portia paused to make sure I was listening or that I understood. “The religious thing. That was Chulo. Converted and all. Work camp.” She had a ‘taste’s bad’ expression, just for a moment. “Jail. East County.” You probably knew about that.”
“In Fallbrook it was known as, ‘The Great Avocado Robbery.’”
Portia laughed. She was younger than I’d thought, barely over that line I’d set between me and adulthood. “They love their avocados,” she said.
“They do. Chulo and Jumper and some mysterious guy from… somewhere. A buyer. Supposedly. Never caught him. I got that from the papers. Never… my father didn’t tell… ‘war stories.’” I laughed. “Of course, he did; just… not to me.”
Portia moved her hand to the vertical edge of the door. “Your father…” I was trying to think of a word for the look she was giving me. Earnest. Sincere. “Chulo says he did his best. The Deputy… Bancroft… Well, sorry God, but… fuck him.”
It was my turn to speak. I didn’t. I was picturing Deputy Bancroft from the few times I had seen him at the Vista Substation. Once was before he had crippled Chulo, all smiles and backslapping his fellow deputies, once, looking worried and angry, when he was trying to get the other deputies to support him. Most of them did.
The light had become grainy, the smog-enhanced colors at the horizon had gone gray. The few lights around the parking lot, just coming on, had to compete with the advance of night. The sunset show was over. Most of the watchers moved away from the bluff and, at various speeds, toward their vehicles. A few stayed on as if, perhaps, they were waiting for closing credits.
Not yet.
“Really?” It was loud. There was a softer, muffled response, followed immediately by, “Fuck you then, Chulo!” Loud and clear. Both Portia and I looked over. The Hayes Flowers van blocked the view of Chulo and the other man, but one occasional column of cigarette smoke raising up beyond the two popout surfboards revealed where the man doing the yelling was standing.
A skinny man wearing a cowboy hat went up the stairs of the Jesus Saves bus, closed the doors, started the engine, revving it quite unnecessarily.
“Asshole,” Portia said. She looked up and whispered, “Sorry. Again.”
The guy in the cowboy hat was honking the Jesus Save bus’s horn, flashing the headlights. The running lights and the inside lights in the driver’s area were flashing between the honks. The bus’s engine was racing. The Asshole rode the clutch, then popped it.
Chulo limped around the front of the van, and got in. “Different clothes,” I said. The engine was still running. He pulled the van forward and started down the bluff side lane. Counterclockwise. I stepped back, closed the front door, walked to the back of the Falcon to allow Portia room to get by. The van stopped, front doors even with me.
Chulo nodded. I nodded. “Get any… good ones?” he asked through the open passenger side window.
I could hear the Jesus Saves bus heading north on 101, grinding again between second and third gear.
“A couple,” I said, to Chulo, as Portia walked past me. She opened the van’s passenger door, set her bundle of clothes on the bench seat, held the door open, and looked at me as if she expected me to ask a question. “Different clothes,” I said, more to Portia than Chulo. “I mean,” I said, looking directly at Chulo, “this is not the, um, Jesus look.”
“People get that wrong,” Chulo said. “Jesus, way classier dresser. It’s more like, it’s a John the Baptist look.”
“Oh. Sure. Jesus. Whole cloth. Yeah.” I stepped away.
“You know the gospel.”
“Partially by choice.”
“Holy Spirit, man,” Chulo said, moving his fingers like a piano player. “Mysterious.” Portia closed the door. Chulo looked at her before he looked past her and at me. “I told them, Jody; Wendall, the State Patrolman, everyone… Plymouth. Gray Plymouth. Old guy, I said; probably didn’t even realize… what happened.”
“What about Langdon?”
“I can handle… Langdon. God… God love him.”
“He means ‘fuck Langdon,’” Portia said. “Asshole.”
“That’s how I… interpreted it.” Portia looked at me I looked away and then up. There was something about the popout surfboard on the right side of the van. It was blue, darker on the top, fading out on the rails. Different board. I took a step back to check out the skeg. “I mean… God love… him.”
“Assholes… everywhere.” Someone was beside me. Directly in front of the closed door. Gingerbread Fred. Threadbare sweater over a once white t shirt; maximum fade on his Levis, sewn-on patches of different fabric at the knees; no shoes; long and once-red hair, I assumed, grayed-out and as stringy as his beard; glasses patched and listing to the left; Gingerbread Fred was looking up. He was looking beyond the blue surfboard, beyond the palm fronds. I had to follow his eyes.
A gauze of cloud had caught the last of the day’s sunlight, impossibly mixing pink and blue in a colorless sky. Gingerbread Fred had been watching me, he had moved close to the passenger side door, and was looking between Chulo and Portia. At me.
“Boy gets it,” he said.
“Fred,” Portia said in the kindest sort of voice. “Fred’s here for the show.”
“As always.”
“Fred Thompson, the legend,” Chulo said. “Fred. Man, me and Portia; we have to get going. Juni… Jumper, he’s… they got… overrun. His platoon. He’s… wounded. He’s in Balboa.”
“Oh,” Fred Thompson said, “so Petey was right. That cocksucker DeFreines did get Jumper to fuckin’ join up. Semper Fi, motherfuckers.”
Neither Chulo nor Portia looked at me. Chulo looked at Portia. She shook her head. Chulo said, “It was supposed to be a secret, Fred.”
Fred Thompson’s expression said he wasn’t surprised. “At least Jumper had a… choice.”
“Mister Thompson. I heard… sorry; I heard you went back in.” I realized, even as I was saying the words, that I had said too much.
“Mistake. Crashed twice, shot down once.” Fred Thompson seemed to drift away for a moment. I had to look, had to see what that looked like. He came back with a snap. “Sometimes, like, the right wave can make the wipeout and the swim in… just part of the price. Worth it.” He looked at me. I nodded. He shook his head. “Sometimes… not.”
“Bad knee or not, I still wouldn’t have chosen the Marines, Fred.”
Gingerbread Fred Thompson said, “I’m no Catholic, but…” He made the sign of the cross, then threw his right hand out, fingers spread. “I do like the gesture.”
“It is a… good one.” Chulo shook his head, only slightly, did a version of the sign of the cross between the steering wheel and his chest, and revved the engine. “He’s coming back.”
“Jesus?”
“Yeah, Fred,” Chulo said, laughing. “Him too.”
Portia kissed the palm sides of the fingers on her right hand before folding them into a fist. She tapped her fist on the middle of her chest, three times, opened her hand, placed it over her heart. After five or six seconds, she wrapped her fingers around Fred Thompson’s right hand for another five or six seconds.
…
As the van pulled away, Fred held out his right hand. He looked at it, refocusing on me, beyond it, as if, perhaps, he was supposed to know who I was; as if we had, perhaps, spoken before. “We come back. We just don’t come back the same.”
I copied Fred’s smile.
“You one of their… followers?” He pointed roughly toward the highway. I shook my head. His hand staying in pretty much the same place, he turned the rest of his body toward the remains of the sunset. “So, you’re here for the… finale?”
I wanted to ask Fred Thompson about Tijuana Sloughs, about Windansea and Simmons’s Reef and San Onofre before foam boards, about Malibu and surfing before ‘Gidget,’ about Korea and Vietnam, helicopters before they were gunships. I wanted to ask why he went back in the Army after Korea.
I didn’t. I followed him through the now-empty space next to the Falcon and to the bluff, his bicycle on the ground, too close to the edge. When Gingerbread Fred looked up, I looked up. “It’s darkness, for sure, but it’s not… night. We’re in the… shadow.”
Fred Thompson, facing the horizon, extended his left arm and hand forward, level, cocking his hand back at the wrist. He extended his right, creating an almost ninety-degree angle. “Perpendicular,” he said, holding that position for a second before throwing both arms back until they were straight out at his sides. “Parallel.”
He clasped his hands behind his back. I had to step back as he spun around, one, then another revolution. “You’ll get it,” he said, regaining his balance. “You know why?” I shook my head. “Because you… are… looking.” He turned to what was left of the sunset colors.
“Shadow,” I said.
“Ha! Yes. Shadow.” Gingerbread Fred came close enough to me that I could smell his breath. Milk, perhaps, soured. I tried not to react. “You probably heard. I’m… crazy.”
“There’s… a lot of that going around, Mister Thompson.”
“Yes!” He stooped down a bit, still too close to me. “You get it.” I nodded. “This one night, clear, like now. Now, I was raised on the Bible. Not a Catholic. Not a heathen, either.” He made the sign of the cross, laughed, and raised his right hand straight up. “An explosion. There was a… rainbow. So high up… the zenith… that high. The sun was still on it. ‘Every eye shall see him,’ the Book says. End of the world. People here, in this very parking lot… they were panicked.” He lowered his right arm, stretched out his fingers, brought his arm back until his hand was between us. He, then I looked at his palm. He lowered his hands just enough to look at me. “None of us are ready for that… that Jesus.”
“I saw it! Here! I was… here, Mr. Thompson! Swamis!”
“Whoa-aaaa-ooooo!” Fred Thompson’s voice dropped from rather high to gravelly. He closed his eyes and looked up. “Can you still… see it?”
“I can.”
I couldn’t see it. I could remember, perfectly, what I saw from the back of Gary’s real dad’s Chevy Ranchero in the Swamis parking lot. My back was against the back of the cab, three towels wrapped around me, ballast for three longboards, stacked, longer to shorter, and extended out the back. Gary, Roger, and Roger’s second girlfriend were in the front, the girlfriend in the middle. I was the only one to see the bright glow, expanding, somewhere between the clear sky and space, the zenith; high enough the sun was still on it. Rainbows.
I had thought about Jesus, returning in glory, as advertised. I was sixteen. I wasn’t ready.
When I was dropped off, I peered into the cab of the Ranchero and pointed to the spot in the high sky. I described what I had seen. Roger and Gary and the girlfriend got out and looked up. The glow was almost gone, a ghost of what it had been. I got a ‘sure,’ an ‘okay,’ and a ‘sorry I missed it.” The girlfriend. She was nice. She didn’t believe me, either.
I opened my eyes. Gingerbread Fred Thompson was six feet away. “I’m sure you know this,” I said. “Vandenburg Air Base. Rocket. Explosion.”
“Sure.” He turned toward the stairs. “I have chosen to believe it was a… a glimpse at what is… beyond, that it was a tear… in the shroud.”
“I’m… fine with that. But… we… you and I, we saw it.”
“We did.” Gingerbread Fred twisted the frames of his glasses, put a finger in his left ear, and yawned. He pulled at his sweater. He clawed at his hair. “I do hope you will excuse me. I am going to… quick dip. Therapeutic.” As he was dropping down the stairs and out of sight, I looked back up at the highest part of the sky. Zenith. Shadow. Stars, planets. Closing, and later, opening credits for the next show. “A tear in the shroud,” I said, out loud.
I repeat the phrase often.
THERE ARE NO UPDATES ON SURF ON THE STRAIT. Maybe, like, October.
REMEMBER to check out realsurfers.net on Sunday. Maybe there will be an update; or some hope for waves. MEANWHILE, there are always waves somewhere, just not, like, near here.
I received this comment on my latest post, more from the serializing of my novel, “Swamis.”
Going through your posts is like Deja Vu. Graduated Vista High 67. Moved to Leucadia 69 on Phoebe street. Surfed Beacons daily. Surfed off and on until my early 60s. Dad we a Sheriff/Detective in Vista. Took me for first surf at Oceanside harbor and a baseball career went poof. Our group surfed Carlsbad north and south. Jeez, the stories. Love your Art and writing. Randy
My first response: Whaaat?
The narrator of “Swamis,” Joey, is the son of a detective stationed in Vista. So… What? Wow! Here is my somewhat calmer written response:
Randy,
Thanks for the comment. Very excited by your father having been a deputy/detective with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office AND (even more so) by your not saying I was way off in anything I’ve posted from “Swamis” so far. I want the story to seem authentic. My wife, Trish, worked as a records clerk for the Sheriff’s Office downtown, at the jail, starting out on graveyard shift in the mid-70s. When I began writing the novel, I thought the most obvious folks to put suspicion on for the (upcoming) deaths were detectives. Because she worked around some of the detectives there at the time (may have dealt with your dad at some point), Trish said, “No way,” and, perhaps, made me promise that none of the fictional detectives would be responsible in my (fictional) manuscript.
I’m sort of keeping my promise, bringing in the detective from Orange County and others as suspects.
I did have some interaction with the Sheriff’s Office in real life; got busted with some dickhead Fallbrook surf friends for heading over to South Carlsbad State Park to look for girls. Curfew violation, we were busted mostly because 15-year-old Billy McLean shot off his mouth. Five of us in the back of a CHP cruiser and taken to Vista. Also, because Trish wanted to move up, I took a couple of night classes in Police Science (mostly to protect my wife from other cops/students). From Police/Community Relations class I did discover some cops and cop wannabes had some issues.
My vision (fancy word for idea) of Joseph DeFreines is of someone dedicated to his job, old-school cop, who, like a lot of fathers from our dads’ generation, worked long hours to provide for his family. I included in earlier versions the stuff that once happened in Fallbrook on Halloween, kids gathered downtown and egging passing vehicles. I participated once, 1968; got busted with Bill Birt and his stash of rotten eggs by, if memory serves, a plainclothes cop and a deputy before we made it to Main Street. We got to break all the eggs and go our way, with a comment/warning by the detective that he knew both of our fathers. On my way to the school library, where I had told my parents I was going, two of my brothers jumped out and egged our family station wagon. I made them wash it the next day.
Hey, Randy, I was busy studying and surfing and having a girlfriend and working. Still, at probably one the most revolutionary times in surfing, I did know times were changing, rapidly, more like catching up with the North County. One of my brothers followed friends to Northern California for ‘farming,’ another eventually went to work for ICE. The other brother may have taken a few too many hits of something. Blissfully unaware, I worked and surfed and got married and had kids.
I will be posting more from “Swamis,” taking this opportunity to do a, hopefully, final polish on the manuscript.
It is very important to me that the characters and what they do seems real. If you read anything that just seems wrong, feel free to write. Or write anyway. Because I wasn’t planning on writing this extensively, and because, with an even more than usual lack of nearby surf, I am going to post this on my site. Again, thank you so much for the comment.
Oh, Wait! My next posting, Wednesday, will feature an incident at your spot, Beacons. Fiction, of course. Erwin
SURF RIG UPDATE- I am hoping that, with my stealth surf rig sporting its first new alternator since it was new, 1994, and three faulty rebuilds back at O’Reilly’s, and four new tires (went in for two- got too good a deal on a full set) to replace the Michelins that stayed too long under the car under a tree (sidewall blowouts are not fun), and a new fuel filter, and a repurposed, industrial strength rack on top, maybe the timing might just, just work out. Waves. Yes. Please.
I would include a photo, but I’m going to wait until I get a few sessions in.
MEANWHILE, I’m working on a flyer to go with the board now on display at the PORT TOWNSEND PUBLIC LIBRARY. The ‘plankholders’ are, left to right, Keith Darrock, Joel Carbon, me, and Adam James.
It is a one-of-a-kind. Guaranteed. The current thought is to sell it, with half of the proceeds going to the nonprofit FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY (and Libraries do need friends right now), and half going to the (also nonprofit) OLYMPIC MUSIC FESTIVAL (which, full disclosure, my daughter, Dru, works for).
I’m thinking $3,000.00. You are free to think whatever you want. Yes. But, if you want to make a sincere offer, contact the library. We’ll see. Raffle? Hmmm.
I backed my way through the middle of the semi-circle and back to the window. I didn’t look around to connect faces with questions and comments. I was somewhere else, imagining what magical waves were breaking beyond the hills that were my horizon, running a mental slide show of photos from surfing magazines, little movies of things I had seen. I kept one image a bit longer. It was from above highway 101, above the railroad tracks, across the empty lot just south of the Swamis parking lot. There were the dark green trees, two palm trees beyond them, one of the large gold lotus blossoms on a white stucco wall; and there were distant swells, on that horizon, already bending to the contours of the underwater rocks and reefs, ready to wrap into Swamis.
I didn’t bother to consider how long I had been detached from the reality of an event as surreal as this wake, or memorial, or potluck. That was me, detached. Everyone seemed to know this. Damaged. Some knew the story, others were filled in. There had to be an explanation for why I was, so obviously, elsewhere.
Standing at the window, all the conversation was behind me; the clattering and tinkling, the hushed voices telling little stories, the sporadic laughter.
The yellow van with the two popout surfboards on top pulled out of the driveway, a black Monte Carlo behind it. I didn’t recognize the car. I looked around the living room. Wendall and Dickson were holding court with someone over by the sideboard, a two-thirds gone bottle of some brownish liquor between them. Langdon was gone. A black Monte Carlo seemed about right. Oversized. Pretentious.
A yellow Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, top down, was coming up the hill. It passed the Hayes Flowers van. Different yellows, softer, warmer than the van’s. There was a woman at the wheel, very colorful scarf over her head, sunglasses. The Monte Carlo stopped. The VW stopped. Langdon. Yeah, it was him. He had an am out the window. The gesture was ‘turn around.’ The woman in the Karman Ghia gave Langdon a brush back with a raised hand, followed, when the Monte Carlo moved on, with the woman’s right hand, up, middle finger out. She moved her arm halfway back down, then up again.
“Yeah,” I imagined myself saying, “Fuck you… with a half twist.” I may have added the half twist with some later recalling of the day. It doesn’t matter, it’s there now.
I had seen Deputy Wilson before, at the Vista substation. He was the latest in a line of deputies identified as “New Guy.” Those who lasted long enough got to be referred to by their last name. A nickname was a higher honor. Wilson didn’t have one that I had heard. I hadn’t caught or bothered to remember his first name.
Wilson half-leaned into the Karmann Ghia once it stopped in the driveway. The woman looked away from the deputy. She saw me in the window. She pointed. She waved. I took a second, then waved back. Wilson gave me a gesture, hands out, palms up, chest high. As in, “Really?” I mimicked his gesture, palms facing each other. The New Guy let her proceed.
After several adjustments, the Karmann Ghia was pointed out, getaway position, the passenger side almost touching the two-by-six fencing on the corral. She removed her scarf. Afro. Not huge, but out there enough to make a statement. She looked at herself in the rearview mirror, pushed the sunglasses up into the Afro, prescription glasses remaining.
The woman swiveled in the seat, picked up a thirty-five-millimeter camera with a medium length telephoto attached, used the top of the windshield to stabilize it, and aimed it at me. Snap.
I was in the center of the window, my arms still out. I moved backward and sideways, back into the room, bumping into a man I knew from somewhere; someone from the PTA or the School Board, or somewhere. “It’s that pushy Negro reporter woman,” he said. “Writes for that hippie rag. She did a big… ‘expose’ on the water district. Don’t know how she got past the Deputy.”
“Wilson. The Deputy,” I said, suddenly realizing where I had seen the man’s photo. “The hippie rag, the expose; favorable rates for certain… constituents, as I recall. The Enterprise didn’t run the story for another two weeks. And… wait; you’re still the director.”
The Water District Director looked at me for a moment before turning away. “Wendall,” he said, brushing past Mr. Dewey. I didn’t look away quickly enough. Mr. Dewey smiled. He may have mistaken my look for a nod. He was already headed my way as I turned back to my spot in the middle of the picture window.
“I heard that, Joseph,” he whispered. “Good one. We need an alternative to the war mongering, corporate loving press.” Mr. Dewey was somewhere over half-sloshed, sloshing some sort of brown liquor in one of my father’s cut crystal glasses. “The North County Free Press. I should make it required reading for my Social Studies class.” Mr. Dewey leaned in a little too close to me. “I mean…” I leaned away. “…You read it… right?”
I tried to correct my overreaction by leaning in toward Mister Dewey as if I was ready to share a secret. “You know, Mister Dewey…” I looked around the room, back to the teacher. “Most of these people do, too.” I whispered, “Also. And… there’s some… nudity. Sometimes. Hippies, huh?”
Mr. Dewey nodded and went into some forgettable, mumbled small talk. War in Asia, civil rights, threats to the middle class. It was less than a minute later when Mr. Dewey pointed my father’s glass, with Detective Wendall’s whiskey sloshing around in the bottom, toward the photograph of my parents. “Never understood… guy like Joe DeFreines; almost a John Bircher… conservative. He was a Marine, fought the Japs, big war hero.” He took another sip. “Korea, too. Also. Another war we didn’t win. And then…”
Mr. Dewey seemed to realize he had gone a bit too far with this. He tipped the glass up high enough to get the last of the whiskey.
“Well, Mr. Dewey, Sir; it’s traditional, really, isn’t it? Kill the men. Take the women.”
Mr. Dewey looked into my father’s glass. Empty. I looked around the room, past the dining room, and into the kitchen as if I was looking for someone in particular; long enough for Mr. Dewey to notice, to feel just a bit more uncomfortable. I turned back toward the window.
“You know, Joseph; your father was a busy man.” I knew he was looking from the unfinished garage to the unfinished fencing. “I’m not teaching summer school this year.” I shook my head a bit, trying to understand. “I have time, that’s all. If I had a place like… this, I…”
“Yeah. Needs… time. Work.”
Mr. Dewey tapped the empty glass on the window. “The Falcon wagon? That yours… now?”
“I am making…” A chuckle stuck in my throat. “Guess so.” Mr. Dewey cleared his throat. “I passed the… driving tests.”
“You. Of course.”
I whispered, “They didn’t ask, I didn’t admit… anything. I am getting… better.”
“Of course, Joseph.” Mr. Dewey turned and looked at the selections of food that were still on the table as three different women brought in an assortment of desserts. He patted my shoulder as fourteen other men and seven women had done, coughed out some whiskey breath, and headed to where my father’s partners, Wendall and Dickson, were filling glasses no one had yet asked for.
“Better,” I whispered to myself and the window and the Falcon and the property that needed time and work.
…
The reporter woman was standing next to my father’s partners. She declined a drink in a fattish sort of glass, three-quarters full, offered by Dickson. “Smooth,” he said, offering it again with a look that was really a dare. She was asking questions I couldn’t quite hear; questions that seemed to make the detectives uneasy.
The reporter was holding out a notepad, three quarters of the pages pushed up, and was tapping on the next available page with a ballpoint pen. Dickson made a quick grab for the notepad. She pulled it back. Quicker. Dickson pulled a very similar, palm-sized notepad from his inside coat pocket, opened it, went through some pages, shook his head, closed the notepad, put it back into the pocket. The reporter closed her notepad.
“So,” the reporter asked, “The official word is no word?”
“Correct.”
Wendall pulled a pack of Winston non-filters from his left outside coat pocket, a Zippo lighter with a Sheriff’s Office logo, exactly like my father’s, from the right pocket. He opened the top with a forceful snap on his wrist, looked around the room, pointed toward the kitchen. Partway through, Mrs. Wendall tried to stop him. He pointed to the cigarette in his mouth with the lighter and headed to and out the open sliding glass door.
I moved a bit closer to the reporter and Dickson. “No, Detective Dickson, I am not getting any help from Downtown,” she said. I moved closer, between the pineapple upside down cake and a plate of frosted brownies. I took a brownie. “You could just tell me how an experienced driver could…” Dickson looked at me. The reporter looked at me, took the glass from the sideboard, downed it in one gulp, stepped toward me. “You,” she said. “Lee Ransom.” She extended a hand before the alcohol she had thrown down her throat forced her to spread her fingers, lean back, and open her mouth wide enough and long enough to emit a totally flat and involuntary, “Haaaauuuuuh.”
I made a quieter version of the sound she had made, leaned back at the waist, and said, “Oh. The Lee Ransom.”
Dickson laughed and said, “Smooooth.”
Lee Ransom moved closer to me. “Oh?” She paused for the exact same time as I had. “Meaning?”
“Oh, as in, I thought Lee Ransom must be…”
“White?”
“A… man.”
“Do I write like a… man?”
“Yes. A… white… man.” Lee Ransom couldn’t seem to decide if I was putting her on. “College educated, new journalism, ‘I’m part of the story’… white… writer. Good, though. I read you… your… stuff.” I looked at Dickson. “He reads it.” I made a quick head move, all the way left, all the way right, and back to Lee Ransom. “They all read it.”
Lee Ransom may have wanted to chuckle. She didn’t. She extended her hand again. “Thank you, Jody.” Dickson snickered. I took Lee Ransom’s hand, trying to use the grip my father taught me, the one for women. I imagined him, telling me; “Not too strong, not too long, look them in the eye. No matter what they’re wearing… cleavage-wise.” Lee Ransom was in black; tasteful, one unbuttoned button short of conservative. I didn’t look at her cleavage or her breasts. I was aware of them.
“My friends call me Joey.” I did a choking kind of laugh. “Private joke.”
Lee Ransom gave me a ‘I don’t get it’ kind of smile.”
“You. My mom. Talking. Probably… not.” I nodded toward the hallway. A woman was leading a couple toward the living room. “Sakura Rollins,” I said, “Since you’re taking notes.”
“Thank you… Joey.” Lee Ransom tapped on her closed notebook. “She and her husband, Buddy, own a bowling alley. Oceanside. Back Gate Lanes.” She nodded toward the couple. “Gustavo and… Consuela Hayes. Flower people. Poinsettias…. Mostly.”
Sakura Rollins came into the living room from the hallway, stopping close to Dickson. Mrs. Hayes turned to thank her, taking both of Mrs. Rollins’ hands in hers for a moment. Mr. Hayes exchanged a nod with Dickson, declined a drink, put a hand on his wife’s shoulder, turned her toward the door, walked with her toward the foyer. Neither of them looked to their left, into the living room. The husband walked to his wife’s left, between her and the rest of us. They both bent, slightly, to look at the flowers. The woman rearranged the pots and vases, slightly, before they went onto the porch.
I mouthed, “Flower people.”
Lee Ransom turned toward Sakura Rollins. Mrs. Rollins, her expression blank, shook her head before Lee Ransom could ask her anything.
Theresa Wendall walked up to Dickson from the kitchen, leaned around him to look down the hallway, then looked at Sakura Rollins as if asking for some sort of confirmation. Dickson set down a glass and wrapped his right hand around Mrs. Wendall’s upper arm. She took a breath, gave Dickson a look that I didn’t see, but one that caused him to release his grip.
Sakura Rollins followed Mrs. Wendall down the hallway. Mrs. Wendall stopped, allowing Mrs. Rollins to open the door and announce her. “Theresa Wendall.” Permission. Access. Mrs. Wendall went into my parents’… my mother’s room. Sakura Rollins closed the door, leaned against the wall between that door and the door to Freddy’s room, and pointed toward me, twisting her hand and pulling her finger halfway back.
Mrs. Rollins met me halfway between the door and the open area. She put a hand on each of my shoulders. “Ikura desuka,” she said, her voice soft and low. “It means… ‘How much does it cost?’ Not in a formal way. Slang. Soldiers. It is… can be… insulting. Thank you for not asking your mother.”
“I didn’t… ask… you.”
“No, and you wouldn’t.” She tilted her head. “Your mother…”
“I have… other questions.”
“Yes. There’s time.” Sakura Rollins released her right hand. “You’re… doing well, Joey.” She pointed toward the living room. “Your parents… strong.” I wanted to cry. “As are you. As strong as you need to be.”
I backed up, three steps, did a half bow, unreturned, turned, and headed back toward the living room.
Lee Ransom was declining Dickson’s latest drink offer, a half glass this time. She walked over to my father’s lounger. I followed. “Shrine,” I whispered. She looked closely at the scar on the palm of my father’s left hand. “It’s just… just the one hand,” I said. “Half stigmata.”
Lee Ransom may have smiled as she leaned in toward the portrait. I almost smiled when she looked back at me.
…
I had to sit on my mother’s little bench on the porch to put my shoes on. Lee Ransom stepped down onto the concrete pad, the part of a sidewalk my father had completed. “Optional today,” I said.
“I… should have,” Lee Ransom said, “to show proper respect.” We both looked at her practical black shoes. She looked toward the many cars parked on the lawn and in the driveway. She pulled her sunglasses down and over her regular glasses. She pointed at the Falcon. “You just… keep the board on top?” I nodded, stood up, jumped off the part of the porch without stairs. “So, Joey; which one of these cars is your mother’s?”
Freddy, a toy revolver in his hand, ran past Lee Ransom, jumped off the porch, swung around me, and fired five shots as the younger Wendall brother ducked behind someone’s car, making a mouth sound with each shot, following the volley with “Got ‘cha!”
“I think he ducked,” I said as Freddy crouched and hurried down the lawn and took shelter behind the Wendall family station wagon. Wendall’s kid popped up, took a shot at Freddy. “Dick Tracy model. Snub nose 38.” Lee Ransom and I had made it down to the flatter, gravel and bare earth part of the property. She was still looking at the various cars. “I gave it up. Guns. Switched to…” I went into some version of a swashbuckling stance… “Swords.”
The younger Wendall brother ran in front of Lee Ransom and me. She swiveled, threw back her coat, drew two fake pistols from fake holsters, and shot at the kid. Two shots. The younger Wendall kid looked surprised, but instantly grabbed at his chest, both hands, staggered dramatically, and fell to the ground.
“Regular Annie Oakley,” I said.
“Well,” Lee Ransom said, blowing the fake smoke from the end of each fake pistol, “Where I came from, we played cops and robbers with real… cops.” She fake-holstered the fake pistols. “Real guns, too.” She shook her head and laughed.
I was about to tell her I never played the cop, always the robber, but we both turned when we heard someone being slammed up against someone’s car. “Surrender, Jap!”
Larry Junior had Freddy off his feet and pinned against the Wendall’s red station wagon. Freddy dropped his pistol and looked at me with a desperate, ‘You have to help me’ look. Larry Junior’s expression, moved from Freddy to me, was a defiant, “Do something, Jap” look. The younger Wendall kid leapt to his feet. Lee Ransom took a step back, then a few more, in the direction of her car.
Theresa Wendall, carrying a large Corning Ware serving dish with a glass cover in both hands, came out of the front door. Wendall and Deputy Wilson came around from the back of the house. “Lawrence Oliver Wendall, Junior,” Mrs. Wendall said, quite loudly.
Lawrence Oliver Wendall, Junior looked at his mother, stepping off the porch. He looked at his father, throwing a cigarette butt onto the lawn. He looked at Freddy. My brother’s expression had become something close to a smirk. Larry Junior looked at me, just coming around the front of the Buick, left hand out, right hand in a fist. He let go of Freddy.
Theresa Wendall’s high heels failed to make the transfer from concrete to lawn. She fell forward, the dish ahead of her. Launched.
None of this happened in slow motion. All of us on the lawn and the porch were frozen when the Corning Ware dish hit the splotchy lawn, the glass lid skimming like a rock on the water before skidding to a stop on the gravel. The contents of the Corning Ware dish were belching out as it hit on one edge and flipped forward just enough to hit the next edge. Then the next. It landed upright, one-fourth full, amazingly close to the lid.
A few moments later, in slow motion, I mentally replayed what I had seen. Ten seconds, maybe. I was standing at the hood of the Wendall’s station wagon, my right hand still in a fist.
Everyone else had moved.
Freddy and Larry Junior and Larry’s younger brother were on their hands and knees, scooping food and bits of grass and gravel into the Corning Ware dish, chipped but unbroken.
Deputy Wilson was crouched down but not helping. He was looking at me. “I said, Jody, I notice you have chickens.” He nodded toward an unpainted plywood chicken coop with just enough of a fenced yard for six hens and a rooster.
“Chickens. Yes… we do.” I looked toward the porch, expecting to see a crowd. No one. I looked at our chicken coop, back at Deputy Wilson. “We don’t let them out, Deputy Wilson. Coyotes.”
Deputy Wilson nodded, stood, straightened the crease in his uniform pants. “Scott,” he said, “Scott Wilson, Jody.” He adjusted the tilt of his hat, turned away, showing his clean hands to the three kids whose hands were lasagna sauce colored.
“Scott,” I said, quietly, “Joey. Joey, not Jody.”
“I worked on cases with… Your father knew his shit.”
I had already looked away, but turned, nodded, and smiled, then turned away again. Polite enough, I thought. Deputy Scott Wilson took the dish from Larry Junior and walked toward the DeFreines family chicken coop.
Theresa Wendall was sitting in the driver’s seat of the station wagon, door open. Her husband was standing between her and the door, leaning over rather than crouching. Her left hand was on his right arm. She was crying. Detective Larry Wendall removed his left hand from the door and put it on his wife’s left hand. He kept it there for a moment, then lifted her hand from his arm, shifted slightly, and opened the back driver’s side door.
“I can help you turn around. Okay?” Mrs. Wendall didn’t answer. “Theresa?”
Theresa Wendall made the slightest of gestures with her left hand before moving it and clutching the outside ring of the steering wheel. Her husband waited a moment before coming closer. This time he crouched. “I shouldn’t have talked to her, Larry.” It wasn’t a whisper.
“Probably not.”
Deputy Scott Wilson came back with the emptied dish, took the glass lid from the younger Wendall kid, handed it to me. Toward me, as if I should be the one returning it. I looked at the three kids before I took possession of the dish. Both hands.
I approached the station wagon. Theresa Wendall looked past her husband, used the left sleeve of her dress to wipe both of her eyes before regripping the steering wheel. Detective Wendall stood up, stepped back, turned toward me. He looked embarrassed, almost angry. He slammed the back passenger door, reopened it as he passed, turned, and took the dish from me. Lid in one hand, dish in the other. He set them on the roof and turned toward his kids, Freddy, Deputy Wilson, and me. He lit up a cigarette, went around to open the very back door.
“Lasagna and Bermuda grass,” Mrs. Wendall said, breaking into the half-laugh kind of crying. “Probably improved the taste.” She looked at me for some reassurance, some sort of sympathetic response. I barely knew the woman. Cops’ wives. I knew something about what that meant, what it required. “Your mother,” she said. “I am just so… sorry.”
I have no idea what I look like in these situations. Not cold and uncaring is my hope. Helpless is what I was.
A few moments later, I was over by the Karmann Ghia trying to convince Lee Ransom this wasn’t worth taking notes on or photos of. “Personal,” I said. Larry Junior and the younger Wendall kid were in the red station wagon, now, with some direction from Deputy Wilson, turned and pointed down the driveway. Freddy was leaning into the back seat window. All three kids were laughing.
Only a small percentage of those coming out of the house had to put their shoes back on. Deputy Scott Wilson was back directing traffic. Wendall lit up a cigarette with the butt of his previous one, waved at his children, and headed back up to the house. Theresa Wendall, eye makeup mostly wiped off, waved at me, and because I was standing next to her, Lee Ransom, on her way out. The younger Wendall kid did a finger shoot at Lee Ransom on the way by.
Lee Ransom jerked to one side, shot back. Just one finger gun, this time. She looked at me. “Regular Annie Oakley, huh?” She looked at the horse that was leaning over the barbed wire and over the front seat of Lee’s car.
“Tallulah,” I said. “My mother’s… pet. Mostly.”
“Like the actress; Tallulah Bankhead.”
“Yeah. From the old movies.” I stepped over to the little room adjacent to the covered stall, all constructed of plywood, still unpainted. I pulled out a handful of grain, closed that door, pulled up the plywood cover on Tallulah’s stall. The horse looked at Lee Ransom. Both walked over toward me. “My dad called her Tallulah Bankrupt.”
Lee Ransom held out both hands, cupped together. I transferred the grain. She fed it to Tallulah, the horse’s head through the opening, with me still holding the cover up. I stuck the hinged two-by-two onto the sill to prop the cover as Tallulah ate and snorted, and Lee Ransom giggled.
“Joey, what do you know about… grass; that whole… thing?
I looked back at the house, looked at the cars passing by. I took out a pack of Marlboros from the inside pocket of what had been my dad’s black coat, lit one up with two paper matches. “I’m the wrong person to ask, Lee Annie Ransom. No one tells me… anything.”
Lee Ransom brushed at Tallulah’s mane, ran her hand down the horse’s face, held the horse’s head up. “Someone told me that… if you…” She leaned over, blew a breath into Tallulah’s nostrils. “They’ll remember you.” She let go of the horse, pointed to my pack of cigarettes.
I pushed the pack toward the reporter, took the cigarette out of my mouth to light Lee Ransom’s. I blew some smoke into the stall, inhaled, blew a semi-clean breath into Tallulah’s nostrils. The horse reared back, hitting my face on the way up and back. I reacted. Lee Ransom took a drag on her borrowed cigarette, let out most of the smoke, and observed.
Though I didn’t do anything to Tallulah. I must have looked as if I wanted to. I did… want to. The effects of washing out the stall had rotted out the plywood just enough that my shoe punched through. I had to kick it back and forth several times to get my foot back out.
Lee Ransom came up very close to my face. She blew a very slight bit of breath toward me. Cigarettes and the vague remains of the whiskey, a bit of the skanky cheese and vinegar from a salad. “I don’t fucking believe you. Joey. You see, you observe… everything.”
“No. Not nearly.”
“Enough.” Lee Ransom turned away. “Tallulah, lucky Joey didn’t hit a stud, huh.”
“Lucky.” I turned, started walking toward the Falcon.
“Joey.” I stopped. “When your dad got that… wound… You were there. Correct?”
I stopped, crooked my left leg, butted the cigarette out on the sole of my shoe, turned halfway around, twirling the filter between a finger and thumb. “I was five, as you know, but that is the story.”
“It is. Yes. Your dad saved your life.”
I almost waited too long before responding. “He is… was… it’s his nature to be… heroic.” I turned fully away from Lee Ransom.
“Yeah. And, uh, which car did you say is your mother’s?”
“I didn’t say.”
“No, you didn’t. But, Joey, really, I could use a quote… from you.”
“Make up one. Fine by me.”
Lee Ransom had her camera up and aimed at me. “Half stigmata!” She took a photo.
“Swamis” copyright 2020, Erwin A. Dence, Jr. All rights to the original work and all revisions held by the author.
COMING UP in the next chapter, next Wednesday: Joey and Dangerous Dave confront DUDE/HEAD JERK bullying JULIA COLE at BEACONS.
MEANWHILE, still dealing with bad alternators for my eventual surf rig. I will probably still be whining about it next SUNDAY. Hope you’ve got swell coming your way.
The plan was for me to talk at the recent SURF CULTURE ON THE STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA AND THE SALISH SEA EVENT, with my stealth plan to recite a poem I wrote when I still was thinking the show of a wide range of surf-centric art would be part of something bigger, bringing in other lovers of the Pacific Northwest waters, scientists and environmentalists and people who fish or harvest oysters, tugboat captains, and we had some of those… but they weren’t talking about their special connections… and either did I.
Chickened-out. Or, throwback to the 60s, “Haired-out.” I did talk, kind of off the cuff. Here, and I’m not saying it would have been better, is what I wrote:
photo courtesy of Sideslip Surfboards
Art, Surfing, and Barrel Dodging
IMAGINATION connects surfing and art. Surfers imagine how they’re going to cruise or glide or dance on waves… or rip them up. Artists look around, or they, perhaps, stare at a blank canvas and imagine some piece of artwork. It starts with the IMAGE.
The image is, quite possibly, perfect, perfectly rendered, real. Or there are variations, slight or major changes, embellishments, color, perspective, shape, shading, formatting.
REALITY. This is tougher. Image to reality.
Surfing requires getting your gear together and heading out. Maybe you have reason to believe there will be good waves. EXPECTATION. ANTICIPATION. Even if someone broke a major rule of etiquette and called you, you can’t be entirely certain the waves are chest high and perfect. So, you’re anxious, excited.
You arrive, gear assembled. It’s time for the GREG NOLL MOMENT. Not at third reef pipeline. I’m sure you have that image cataloged in your brain somewhere. Every surfer takes that moment, mind surfing a few waves, putting yourself in the picture. You will wait for a lull, jump in and… surf. Timing, timing, COMMITMENT. You either wade or you leap.
For a writer or an artist, a blank page or an empty canvas can be daunting, even frightening. Getting started can easily be put off with real life chores and commitments. Eventually you make the first sketchy strokes. Wading. Or leaping.
It shouldn’t really be surprising that things don’t go as you hoped. Your words or colors or that six wave set that catches you inside, or wave selection, or just plain PERFORMANCE don’t go as you had imagined. Almost never. Still, you’re doing… okay.
Okay. Let’s say you have a piece of art that you’re pretty satisfied with. Not fully stoked, not ready to sign your name to it. You could do more to it, maybe improve it. But you could also, by continuing, destroy it, lose some quality you almost accidentally, but happily achieved.
Twisting and squeezing this metaphor; you’re surfing down the line, high on the wave face. The wave is getting critical. You could tuck into a barrel you may not make it out of, risk getting pitched over the falls, or you could drop down, attempt to go under and around that section, maybe connect back with the green wave face on the other side.
BARREL DODGING. The result is a less than memorable, could-have-been great ride. And you still might have been wiped out by the broken wave.
The rides that are memorable, the ones that make whatever sacrifice we tell ourselves we’re making to surf, or write, or pursue some sort of artistic accomplishment, are the sections we didn’t think we would make, barrels we didn’t think we would come out of. But we did. Sometimes, even if we didn’t make the wave, we were in there.
I believed I would be a successful artist, or writer, or both, at about the same time I started surfing. If I was grateful any time I got a good ride, I wasn’t satisfied with anything but getting better. I would get frustrated and even angry when my performance in real life, hard, tedious, overwhelming, that Cinerama, surround-sound, twenty-four-seven real world didn’t live up to my great expectations. Pretty standard story.
There are waves, specific rides I remember. Name a spot I’ve surfed, and I will tell you my best ride there, or a perfect wave on which I blew the takeoff, or I didn’t grab the rail when I might have made it if I had; or, here’s an example: Warmwater Jetty, 1970. I pulled out, over the top of a steep section, and watched from behind it peel off perfectly for fifty more yards.
There are things I drew or painted or wrote that I hold, or held, in high regard. And there are all the other drawings and paintings and stories. If I go back and check out works from my past, I am occasionally surprised. Time has given me a chance to be more objective. Some are good enough I can’t believe I did them; others are not.
If we actually had movies, videos, some actual real-time, real-life visuals of any of us surfing, we would learn something our mental GoPro misses. Not as smooth, not as graceful, not as deep in the barrel as we imagined.
With art, there is something to read, or look at, or touch. Almost none of it is perfect. Or sacred. The truth is almost nothing is perfect. If we insist on perfection to be happy or satisfied, we won’t be. Still, we don’t want to settle for ‘good enough.’ We can set a project aside, repaint, redraw. Or we can hit ‘save as’ and keep writing, keep editing. Or we can take that step of putting the brush or the pen or the pencil back onto the surface, boldly going somewhere just past where our imagination has taken us. Or we can tuck in and hang on.
Wipe out or come out.
Either way, the possible gift is another moment we might remember. Art, surfing, life. If our memories aren’t as tangible, as real, as any story or song or painting or sculpture or assemblage, our mental images are what remains, and almost all that remains, of anything we’ve seen or read or experienced.
As surfers, as workers, as artists, as people who are in this real world with other real people, we seek to form new images, future memories.
The best memories, of the near perfect and near-weightless, blissful moments, allow us to forget the anxiety, the fearful and the hateful times we’ve experienced, the real and psychological pain we’ve felt.
These images are our personal art collections, and, hopefully, they last as long as we do. If there’s a message in here it’s this: Be brave when you can.
STEALTH SURF RIG UPDATE: First, the GOOD NEWS: The ladder racks that never really fit on my work van, with some blacksmithing and cursing, fit on my (equipped with gutters) surf rig. Heavy duty, yes, but the racks I bought for the van were only $65, and I couldn’t find any surf racks for anything near that. BAD NEWS: My second rebuilt alternator developed a high-pitched squeal (not of delight), first heard when I took George Takamoto to Dialysis. “Bad bearing,” George said, with no slack given to me for purchasing cheap. I took it to the auto electric specialist the next morning. He agreed with George. I took it around the corner to O’Reilly’s. Their guy tested it, said it was working, noise (varied in intensity- pretty quiet at this time, must be from something else. SOMETHING ELSE! WHAT?! Later that day, I started the car, opened the hood, stuck my finger on the back of the alternator. I could lessen the squealing. Stephen Davis and I went down with the info to Colin (I’m just going to spell his name the M-Word accepted way). He agreed the alternator was the problem. I went around to O’Reilly’s. The manager agreed, ordered another one. NEXT DAY, third alternator installed with the usual amount of drama and irritation. Worked fine… for about twenty miles. Maybe.
Same squeal. Same lack of compassion from George, same shock from Steve, same questioning from Trish. SOOO, checking out the ratings (now) on the rebuilt alternator, I discovered it has a one out of five. SOOOO, I ordered a supposedly new one through Amazon, four-plus rating, though it looks suspiciously like the ones that failed. To be delivered Monday; the bad part being if it’s another bad part, I don’t think I can exchange it. Should have listened to George. “I’d have bought the BOSCH… Erwin.” “Of course you would have… George.”
I will update on WEDNESDAY when I add the next pages from “SWAMIS.” Hopefully, neither the car nor I will be squealing.
All rights to original work on realsurfers are reserved.
It was still early afternoon. I was in the living room, ignoring everything behind me, facing but not really seeing anything out the large, 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 and across the struggling lawn 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. This was the car my mother and brother and I rode in from the funeral. Other vehicles were arranged just off the driveway, on the clumpy grass that filled in areas of ignored earth on its own. Later arrivals parked on the lower area.
Parking. I have some sort of obsession with getting in, getting out, getting away.
I was vaguely aware of the music coming from the stereo radio and turntable built into the Danish modern console in the living room. I was slightly more aware of the conversations among the increasing crowd. Little groups were spread around the room, some 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. This would not have been my father’s choice of music. His would have been from the cowboy side of country/western; high octave voices capable of yodeling, lonesome trails and tumbling tumbleweeds, the occasional polka. It wasn’t my mother’s choice, either. She 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.” Pause. “You don’t need an invite or a gift.”
Someone behind me was repeating that line, mistiming the pause, his voice scratchy and high. Not high, just not my father’s voice. “Joseph,” the man said. I turned around. Yes, 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 was not shaking hands on this day. I didn’t believe it was to be expected of me. “You know my daughter, Penelope.”
“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.
Remembering an incident in which Mister Dewey was involved, I stared at him too closely, for too long, trying to determine if he was remembering it. Also. I believed he was.
Ten seconds, maybe. When I refocused, Mister Dewey and the two people he had been talking with previously, a man and woman who wasn’t Mrs. Dewey, were several feet over from where they had been. The woman and Penelope Dewey were looking at me. Mr. Dewey and the man were not. I 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 cop.
If I was troubled, I wasn’t trying too hard to hide it. I was trying to maintain control. I moved, more sideways than backwards, to the window. It was not a good time for me to freeze, to disappear into a memory 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. “They change lives. But…”
“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, Wilson, 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. Sure. Practical.
The next vehicle, thirty or so seconds later, was a delivery van painted the same bright yellow as the Cadillac. I noticed the surfboards on the roof as the Deputy waved it through. Two fat, early sixties popout surfboards, somewhere around nine-foot-six, skegs in the outdated ‘d’ style. One board was an ugly green, fading, the other had been a bright red, now 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. Evangelist. Reborn. Jumper’s friend before the incident that sent them both away.
Chulo’s long black hair was pulled and tied back; his beard tied with a piece of leather. He was wearing black jeans, sandals, and a t-shirt with “Flowers by Hayes” in almost-chartreuse, day-glow letters. 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.
That wasn’t enough. I looked into the glare and 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 Volvo, two cars behind my Falcon, four cars behind a converted school bus, “Follow me” in roughly painted letters on the back. The Jesus Saves bus. It was heading into a setting sun, white smoke coming out of the tailpipes. We were just east of the Bonsall Bridge. The bus was to the right of the lane, but moving forward. One car passed, the Falcon passed, the car behind it, all disappearing into the glare. The cars in front of me were going for it. 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. Not immediately. The Jesus Saves bus stopped on the side of the road, front tires in the ditch. I was looking at the ditch, at the bank beyond it. 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.
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. Still, the papers had the basic truth of what happened. What was unknown was who was driving the car that Detective Sergeant Joseph Jeremiah DeFreines avoided. “A gray sedan, possibly European” seemed to be the description the papers used. Because the San Diego Sheriff’s Office and the California Highway Patrol had shared jurisdiction, a task force had been formed with officers from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office. Detective Lieutenant Brice Langdon was heading the unit, actively seeking the driver of the gray sedan.
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. One woman 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. I returned the favor with a “Sure thing” gesture and smile.
I wouldn’t. I didn’t. Yams and dark green things, drowning in a white sauce. No.
Two kids, around ten and twelve, Detective Lawrence Wendall’s sons, Larry Junior being the elder sibling, were shooed out of the kitchen by Mrs. Wendall. She looked at her husband, temporarily promoted to Detective Lieutenant, leaning against a sideboard with a drink in his hand. He was 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.
Wendall waved his glass toward his wife as if kids running through a wake is normal. Mrs. Wendall noticed me and pointed to the food and the plates and smiled. Again, I went with the “Sure thing.” Response. Freddy ran out of the kitchen, past Mrs. Wendall, and toward the door. Normal.
Mrs. Wendall may have wanted me to notice that the concerned neighbors and friends were using real plates that members of another group of wives and daughters were busily bussing and washing and making available for new guests. She may have been checking to see if I was doing anything other than “Holding up.” I mouthed “Fine,” and nodded, and made gestures suggesting I was already full, and that the food was delicious.
If it was expected that children of anyone only recently deceased should let mourners know they shouldn’t let our sorrow ruin their day, I was trying.
Freddy pushed the door from the foyer to the porch 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 rapidly failing dichondra.
Chulo, holding a five-gallon bucket in each hand, walked through 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, short and slicked down, and no facial hair. He was wearing shoes my father would refer to as, “Italian rat-stabbers.” Showy. Pretentious. Expensive. Fashion investments; need to be worn to get one’s money’s worth.
Langdon was my guess. 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.’ Especially Langdon and his… former partner.” Chuckles. “They put people in ‘Disney jail’,” another non-cop said.
Langdon looked across the room. Chulo lowered his head when their eyes met.
“Joint task force,” 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 looking at me. Most looked away when I made eye contact.
Langdon didn’t. He gave me a sort of pained smile.
“If you have to look at people, look them straight in the eye,” my father told me, “There’s nothing that scares people more than that.”
The other two detectives at the Vista substation, Wendall and Dickson, Larry and Dan, did not look away from me. They looked at Langdon. I didn’t see his reaction. My father’s partners were wearing their funeral and promotion suits, with 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 worn dress uniforms at the funeral.
Wendall was, in some slight apology for his height, hunched over a bit and leaning against the far wall next to the sideboard that usually held my mother’s growing collection of trinkets. Dickson had moved some of my mother’s collectibles and was acting as official bartender. The hard stuff, some wine, borrowed glasses. The beer was in the back yard.
Langdon had been carrying a bottle of obviously expensive wine, as if he was cool enough to not need a glass. He offered Dickson a drink. Shared, no glass. If you were cool, you’d take the offer. Dickson took the bottle, took too long a drink, and handed the bottle back, almost empty. Dickson saved the smirk until Langdon turned away. Wendall and I caught the smirks. Langdon finished the last of the bottle, set it on the main table next to the yams, and walked into the kitchen.
Wendall and Dickson looked toward me and smiled. So, I smiled. My father had been on some sort of investigation in Orange County involving Langdon. If there was an irony in his being at my father’s memorial, I was only partially aware.
I looked at the mourners as I walked toward the foyer. I would try to remember each face. I walked around the borrowed table set where our couch would have been, to my father’s chair, moved two feet over from its regular spot, oriented toward the big window rather than the TV in the console. It provided a good place to look at the people in the rooms, foyer, hallway, kitchen, living room.
The lounge chair, oversized, for once, was uncovered. The fabric was practical; heavy, gray, with just the faintest lines, slightly grayer. There was, in the seat, a matted and framed portrait I had not seen before, a photograph blown up and touched up and printed on canvas, coated with several layers of varnish. A noticeable chemical smell revealed the coating had not yet fully cured. There it was, my father in his Sheriff’s Office uniform, oversized enough that the portrait was set across the armrests.
The pose was this: Stern expression; arms crossed on his chest, low enough to reveal the medals; just the right amount of cuff extending from the coat sleeves; hands on biceps, a large scar on the palm of my father’s left hand almost highlighted. No ring. My father didn’t wear rings. Rings might have suggested my father might hesitate in a critical situation, might think of his wife and children. White gloves that should have been a part of the dress uniform were folded over my father’s left forearm. Gloves would have hidden the scar.
I didn’t study the portrait. I did notice, peripheral vision, others in the rooms were poised and watching for my reaction. I tried to look properly respectful, as if I had cried out all my tears. Despite my father disapproving of tears, I had.
There was an American flag, folded and fit into a triangular-shaped frame, leaning from the seat cushion to the armrest on one side of the portrait. A long thin box with a glass top holding his military medals, partially tucked under the portrait, was next to the flag.
If I was expected to cry, or worse; break down, to have a spell or a throw a tantrum, the mourners, celebrants, witnesses, whoever these people were, the less discerning among them, they would have been disappointed. Some, who had never saluted the man, saluted the portrait. This portrait was not the father I knew, not the man the ones who truly believed they knew him knew.
No. I walked past the detectives without looking at them, went down the hallway and opened the door to what was to have been a den. By that time, it was more storage than den. My father’s oak desk, originally belonging to the U.S. Postal Service, was elsewhere, out in the garage. I returned to the living room with two framed photographs pressed against my chest. I did my fake smile and set the portraits on the carpet, face down. I took a moment before I lifted the one on top, turned it over, and leaned it against the footrest part of my father’s chair.
Several self-invited guests moved closer, both sides of me and behind me. One of the guests said, “That’s Joe, all right.” Wendall said, “Gunner,” and toasted. Others followed suit.
This was my father. An ambered-out photo of a younger Joseph DeFreines in his parade garb; big blonde guy in Mexican-style cowboy gear, standing next to a big blonde horse with a saddle similarly decked out with silver and turquoise, oversized sombrero at his chest. My father’s other arm, his left, was around the shoulders of a smaller man, his sombrero on his head. Both were smiling as if no one else was watching.
There was no wound on my father’s left hand.
“Gustavo Hayes.” Another voice. Another asked, “What’s with Joe in the Mexican outfit?”
I lifted, turned, and leaned the other photo against the footrest. It was a black and white photo. A woman’s voice said, “Oh, Joe and Ruth. Must be their wedding.” Another woman’s voice said, “So young. And there is… something… about a Marine in his dress blues.”
“It was… taken,” I said, “in Japan, color-enhanced… painted… in San Diego.” I looked at the photo rather than at the people. My father’s arm was around his even younger bride. She was in a kimono. “The colors of the dress, my mother always said, ‘are not even close to the real colors.’ She said our memories… fill in with the… the real colors.”
I had spoken. I wanted to disappear.
…
“Swamis” copyright 2020 Erwin A. Dence, Jr. All rights reserved
I transformed a rusted, ugly-color-painted lamp post into this, something that Trump (or Trump devotees) would definitely give a second look, probably a wink, and possibly a touchy/feel; all in exchange for a twenty-nine year old vehicle that had been parked under a tree for a couple of years. This car will soon, hopefully, be my new surf rig, latest in a long line of old cars and vans, most of which died of blunt trauma or were just driven until the cost of repairing the latest mechanical dealie to fail (and they all fail eventually) was greater than the replacement cost.
Or… maybe not. My last surf rig, a hard-to-kill Toyota, gave me well over a hundred thousand miles of mostly worry free driving (discounting when it broke down in front of Frank Krippen’s NxNW surf shop, mice damage in the dashboard, and I had to bribe the repair shop to get someone to reach a hand in there) before the waterpump (YouTubed as an expensive repair) went out and… yeah, if I were in any way mechanically inclined (not even a latent gearhead), or if I could get someone to work on it, I would probably not have given it to my favorite local tow-truck driver (shout out to Kirky).
What seems like MAGIC is when something that should work the first time actually works the second (or third) time.
SO, happy as (going through a list of possible metaphors, almost all of them too political) can be, I picked up the newly revived rig, drove it straight to JiffyLube, got a couple of lightbulbs replaced, oil change, new wipers, and advice on replacing the cap for the pressure relief bottle (the only way to refill the radiator on this model- weird). OKAY. So, fresh gas and on to O’Reilly’s, where, magically, they had the part AND it worked.
Drive home, wash the car, open all the windows so some of the overwhelming mildew smell might dissipate. NEXT DAY, move it over by my work van to transfer some tools. NOPE, wouldn’t start and was stuck in the driveway. OKAY, break out the Costco jumpstarter box. Started. Move it out of the driveway, call GEORGE TAKAMOTO, longtime friend and mechanic now with medical issues that backup his desire to not be working on and under other people’s broken rigs. ADVICE, yes. NEW BATTERY. “That should do it. Definitely. One hundred percent.” Okay. Costco. In the work van.
NEXT DAY (or the day after), the new battery installed, take the rig, surfboard on top on a (hopefully temporary) SOFT RACK. Cruise here, there, work, everything’s fine. Go to check out a sort of surf spot, down where the cell phones don’t work, and all these lights start coming on, the gages start failing.
SO, not the battery. ALTERNATOR, surfers who are also disappointed at the lack of even hope of something rideable say.
I’m skipping the part where I was afraid to drive it back to Quilcene. In the old days, yes, but even this car will start running rough (then not at all) if there isn’t enough juice to the COMPUTER. So, I parked it at a friend’s house, called my daughter, DRU, to rescue me for the (she and Trish keep count) sixth time. Trish did rescue me in Port Angeles with the surf shop breakdown. Trish said this was too much to ask, why didn’t I call my friend STEPHEN R. DAVIS for a ride home. Okay. Thanks, Steve.
So, order an alternator from O’Reilly’s, pick it up the next day, jump start the car at the previously mentioned and unnamed (because he wasn’t thrilled at my rig being there, even less thrilled that I might want to work on it there) friend’s house, cruise it over (barely made it- computer shutdown) to Steve’s place, install the rebuilt alternator. Not as easy as the last one I replaced myself, 1975 Chevy truck.
LITTLE HICCUP HERE. The cheaper alternator came without a pulley and, try as Steve and I did, we couldn’t get the old one off. SO, I went to three different places to see if they could. NOPE. OUT TO LUNCH. Okay, so I went to a guy who specializes in car electric shit, and he zipped the pulley off, no problem, said, “It doesn’t have a fan,” and added it would burn out quickly without one. SO, he added a turbo fan, reinstalled the pulley. Shout out to COLLINN (yeah, two ‘n’s, just like on his shirt, not sure about the ‘l’s).
Install. Hook up the battery and the tester. Boom. Worked. WAIT! No. NOOOO!
TESTING, testing. The next plan was for me to install the evidently-not-dead and recharged old battery, and either George or I would drive it to Quilcene after his dialysis appointment (part of the reason for his reluctance to wrench). BUT FIRST, test. “NOPE, alternator’s dead.” We left it, again, still, at Steve’s.
NEXT DAY- Back to O’REILLY’S. Trade out. Tomorrow. Morning.
I would have given COLLINN the pulley and the turbo fan, but he doesn’t work Fridays and doesn’t accept walk-ins after 12:30 on the days he does work. Too much chatter, not enough work.
I would give a shout out to O’Reilly’s for not charging me extra for the upgraded alternator, with fan and pulley, but that would mean forgiving them for selling me a bogus part the first time (and this wasn’t the first time- bad fuel pump for my van- drop the gas tank a second time- nightmare).
REINSTALL. Check the feedback with the tester thingie. PERFECT. 14 amps, even with everything on.
MAGIC! So, I’ve now driven it to Port Townsend and back. I am going to get it over to Takamoto’s house for a full going-over, but I am feeling a bit more confident. OH, AND I would have posted a photo of my new rig if I didn’t want to go stealth a few times before it’s too easily identified.
BEST OF LUCK TO YOU with your surf and non-surf rigs.
Remember to check out the next installment of “SWAMIS” on Wednesday. I am almost ready to attempt to have a second page at realsurfers.net to accommodate my novel.
A reminder- “Swamis” is fiction. I will be attempting to put the chapters on another page, and will continue to post on Wednesdays with other content on Sundays.
CHAPTER FOUR- 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 developer. 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, 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 the hills, a yellow light descending from the ridgeline. Morning. There were, I knew, 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.
…
I was at the dinette table in the kitchen, head down, 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, 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. “You didn’t think they’d send a copy to the school? Jody?”
I stood up, lifting my chair up high enough that the metal legs, even though they had plastic shoes at the bottom, wouldn’t scrape the oak flooring. I looked at my father. He was looking at my mother. She sniffled, again, 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 house in Fallbrook, the middle-class starter home. The Magarian Tract.
Though we had been at the ranchette for more than four years, and because I really didn’t need the stuff, and 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 lifted one marked “Cowboy stuff” and took out the legal sized envelope.
As I walked up the hallway, I heard my father ask, “You thought I’d just sign this, Ruth?”
“You always have.”
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 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 and said, “thank you.”
My father was looking at several other pages. Legal size. 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, took two steps toward her, let out the breath slowly. He handed her the papers with his right hand. She took them with her left, picked up and handed him the brown lunch sack with her right.
“Not mine, Ruth. Never was. You could… this could give you… freedom. Ikura desuka?”
My father almost never spoke Japanese. My mother froze. My father’s expression was one of instant regret.
“Freedom, Joe?”
I replayed the words. “E’-kew-rah des-kah.” Again. “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 paused, 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. 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.
The house phone was on a table just outside the formal dining room. Our mother picked up the receiver and dieled 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 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. Roger started the next summer. 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 passenger door, backseat of their mom’s Corvair, said, in an unnecessarily whiny voice, “I’m glad it’s all cool with you, Gary.”
“It is, Princess; 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, gave me a look I took as that 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. “Sophomore.”
“Thanks for the info, 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.”
The outside ringer for the telephone went off. We all looked toward the house. Freddy ran. I set my books down on the grass, walked around the front of the Falcon.
“Joey. I left some money… on the counter. Take the Volvo. You and Freddy can go to that Smorgasbord place he likes. 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.”
“A couple of days. That’s all. You know I can’t really leave… my boys.”
“Or Tallulah.”
“Or Tallulah.” My mother got into the Falcon. She chuckled. “Stick shift. Hope I haven’t forgotten how.”
“Daddy! He wants to talk with mom. Joey!”
“Three on the tree, Mom.” I closed the door for her. “You’ll be fine.”
My mom started the Falcon. “I called the station. Your father was out. I talked to Larry.”
“Larry? Wendall.” She nodded. “What did you tell… Wendall?”
“Nothing. I just… no, nothing. I said everything was… fine. Like always.”
My mother had that 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 down the driveway and left, down La Canada.
I looked toward the west. The sun was high enough. There was enough time for a few waves between school and dark if I went 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 door. Freddy was on the porch. 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, the phone still in his hand. I took it 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 ‘money’ symbol. He was too busy blubbering. I leaned down toward my brother. “No, Dad; I couldn’t stop her.” Pause. “I am sorry about whatever Margaret, and Wendall, and everyone at the substation… thinks.” Pause. “Insolent? No.” Pause. “Dad, the clues were all there; you were just… busy.” Pause. “Hello. Hello.” Dial tone. “Dad?”
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. “You could have stopped her, Jody.” I didn’t respond. Freddy screamed, “Everyone’s right; you’re a god-damned retard. Retard!”
“Let’s go then, Freddy.” 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.”
“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. “Uncle Larry.” Pause. “No, I don’t know where. Jody?” I shook my head. “Joey!” Out the door and down the path, Freddy still calling my name, all I heard was, “Retard.”
“Swamis” copyright 2020, Erwin A. Dence, Jr. All rights reserved
The photos don’t do the board justice. I mean, if I do say so myself. The board will be on display at the THIRD OCCASIONAL SURF CULTURE ON THE STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA AND THE SALISH SEA EVENT, this Friday, June 30, Port Townsend Library, 6pm.
CHAPTER TWO- SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1968
My nine-six Surfboards Hawaii pintail was on the Falcon’s factory racks. I was headed along Neptune, from Grandview, toward 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 out at the preferred lineup for righthanders. They all knew each other. If one of them didn’t know me, the asshole detective’s son, others would clue him in. There was no way the local crew and acceptable friends would allow me to catch a set wave; maybe a wave all of them missed or none of them wanted. No. One of the surfers would act as if he was going to take off on some smaller waves, just to keep me off them.
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. 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 paddled back, staying prone on my board, tacking back and forth. A wave was approaching, a decently sized set wave. I wanted it.
“Outside!” I yelled, as loud as I could; loud enough that four of them, including Sid, started paddling for the horizon. I paddled at an angle, forty-five degrees from straight out, 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. Maybe I looked 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.
Just before Moonlight Beach, a late fifties model Volkswagen bus, two-tone, white over gray, was almost 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. Those three were wearing nylon windbreakers, towels around their waists. Duncan’s and Monica’s were different, but both were red with white, horizontal stripes that differed in number and thickness. Ronny was wearing a dark blue windbreaker with 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 almost fell back. Three steps before I regained my balance. I stared.
Julia Cole. She was wearing an oversized V-neck sweater, beige boys’ nylon trunks, bare legs, and huarache sandals. She looked upset, 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 a step toward the middle of the road, away from her. “An Angel?” Another head shake, another step. She took two more steps, forty-five degrees from straight, 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 took a sideways step, my eyes back on her. She smiled. “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. “Yeah.”
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. She 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 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. We were very close.
“If you were an… attorney. I could… use an attorney.”
“Oh. No.” I leaned back before I stepped back. “Not yet.”
“Okay, then. You can’t help.” Julia Cole loosened the tie holding her hair. Sun-bleached at the ends, no darker than dirty blonde at the roots. She used the fingers of both hands to straighten it.
“I can… give you a ride.”
“Look, Fallbrook…” It was Duncan. Again. He walked toward us, toward 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 was still smiling 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.
No one got a ride. I checked out several spots, 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.
Real Surfers 