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“Swamis” Chapter 9- Day after Chulo is Murdered

Posted on by under "Swamis" the novel, surf fiction, surf novels

CHAPTER NINE- WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26, 1969      

My room was on the wrong side of the house for late afternoon light. It isn’t like I needed windows for studying. Still, when the phone rang, I closed the two books that were open on the thrift shop desk, pulled out the latest copy of The North County Free Press from under a third book, stuck it inside a Pee Chee folder, and hustled up the hallway.

“DeFreines residence.” Pause. “Roger and Gary?”

In a phone scam we had devised and successfully worked twice before, “Gerry Lopez” meant the waves were good, “Micki Dora” meant they weren’t.  “Jim Morrison” and “Jimi Hendrix” hadn’t worked on two other occasions.

“Joey!” I had to move the handset away. “Accept the charges! Joey!”

“Okay. Thank you, operator.”

Between Gary screaming some indecipherable series of syllables, I heard, “You should… have… been… here.”

 “It can’t be that good, Gary.”

I let the long cord at the back of the phone base drop. The cord unwound as I walked into the living room. I set the base on the top of the stereo console. If I had set it on the coffee table, the cord to the handset would reach my father’s lounger. He designed that way. I walked toward the big window. Four feet short. 

Outside, Freddy was walking backwards, leading Tallulah around the corral, dropping pieces from a leaf of alfalfa. On the phone, Gary and Roger were yelling over each other at me.

“What? Wait; burned up? Swamis? At the wall. Who was it?” Pause. “Okay.” I walked back to the console, turned on the television. “Channel eight?” The TV took a while to warm up. “They’re there?” Pause. “No news. Old movie. Dialing for Dollars. Bob Dale.” Pause. “Detectives? Which detectives?” Longer pause. “Langdon, and… fuck no, he’s not in charge.”

Gary and Roger were both inside the phone booth at the 101 side of the original parking area. Others were waiting to use it. “Roger, how many is ‘an amazing number of people?’” Pause. “That many? And they’re… crowding up to the rope?”

In my imagined image, a hundred people were standing on the asphalt, looking over the rope. Most of the grassy area along the wall to the SRF compound was behind the line. There was, according to Gary, on the wall, twenty feet or so from the Southeast corner, a burn mark that “pretty much matched the gold bulbs on top of the wall. That was where the guy was burned up.”    

“Who?” Pause. “No, of course the cops aren’t saying. I mean, someone’s saying… something.” Gary interrupted Roger. “Someone said… who? ‘Limpin’ Jesus.’ Fuck, man!”

 “Fuck!” I took a breath. “Chulo.” I ran several images of Chulo through my mind: Chulo with the robe and the wooden cross around his neck, Chulo behind the wheel of the Jesus Saves bus, Chulo at the wake, Chulo with Portia in the Swamis parking lot. “Chulo?”

“Chulo. Yeah.” Other voices were demanding time on the phone.

“Call me back. When you get home. When it’s… free.”

Outside the window, Freddy, his face close to Tallulah’s, looked up and flipped me off.

“Good evening, San Diego.” I refocused on the TV screen. “Phillip Reed. I usually cover Criminal Justice… court activities, that sort of thing.” Phillip Reed almost winked, almost smiled. “I will be standing in for a week or so. A little deserved vacation time for our esteemed colleague… the real anchorman. So, to begin: Whoa! Horrific murder overnight at Swamis, a beach park in the North County. We have a crew on site. Film at eleven.”

            …

Our porch light and the weak lamp from the foyer were pretty much all the light. Gary and Roger were practically dancing in and out of my shadow. Our shadows extended down the slope of the yard.

“So, Joey,” Roger said, “There was a station wagon. In the lot. Like, nine passenger size. Painted-out windows. ‘CBS’ and ‘Channel Eight’ were lettered on the side.”

“But it, the murder, it happened… last night?”

Gary shoved Roger out of the light. “Yeah, but there were still a couple Sheriff’s Office patrol cars, a motorcycle from the Highway Patrol, and a tan Buick with a Del Mar Fair decal on the back bumper… Obvious cop car. And the tall detective, he’s…”

“Wendall.”

“Yeah; and the chunky one… he showed up in a stripped-down VW. Practically a dune buggy. Can’t be street legal. He…”

“I’ve seen it. Dickson. But what about… Langdon, Roger; what was he doing?”

“Creepy guy,” Gary said. “Mostly he was walking back and forth, acting like he wasn’t checking everyone out who was hanging on the rope.”

“He did talk to this black chick; not, like, nicely. She has to be the one who… She’s taking photos, maybe she’s talking to, you know, Wendall. And…”

“Langdon wasn’t stoked on that. He was mostly giving your guy, Uncle Wendall, shit.”

I ignored Gary’s comment. Roger stepped in front of him. “So, then, the chick from channel eight… very cute, she and a cameraman, and another dude, they’re over at the bluff.”

“So, of course, we all cruise over there. Everybody did.”

“All the… local surfers… Joey.”

“Roger means… you know who; she was there.”

“I didn’t ask.” Gary moved to one side of my shadow, Roger to the other. “Okay, so she’s there. Julia Cole. Thanks. Her boyfriend… he there, too?”

Roger punched Gary in the shoulder. “Julia Cole. Told you he’d ask. Pay up.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“He didn’t ask.”

“How did she… seem?”

“Hard to say,” Gary said.

“Hard to say, Joey.”

…

“Joey, you awake?”

“No, Freddy, I am not.”

I opened my eyes. I was on the couch, leaned back, a notebook spilled open on my lap. Other papers and books were spread on the coffee table. The television was on but the sound was off. Freddy moved several more notebooks and sat down to my right.

“Me, neither.” Our mother was just visible in the kitchen. The phone was on the coffee table. “He’s up,” Freddy yelled, half leaning over me. “But are you… awake? I mean, really.”

“Atsushi, the news is…” Ruth DeFreines walked over to the television, turned up the sound. “The news is… bad.”

“Atsushi,” Freddy said, “Mom called you by your Jap-a-nese name. At-su-shi.”

“Middle name, Butt-lick.” Freddy tried to grind his elbow into my right leg. I shoved him away. “Oh, I believe your Jap-a-nese middle name means ‘guy who licks butts.’”

“No, Atsushi.” Freddy shoved me, harder. I stood up and assumed a fighting stance. Freddy laughed. “Hakaru means ‘better son.’” I dropped my hands, slid my feet next to each other, and fell back into the couch. Freddy leaned over me. He whispered, “And also, ‘guy not to be fucked with.’”

“Okay,” I said. We both smiled. I shoved Freddy away.

“Boys.”

“Our top news story…” It was Phillip Reed. “The horrific murder, last night, in Encinitas. You will, no doubt, remember our intern, Pamela Hodges. Well, she’s graduating from San Diego State, and she led a crew up to the North County… today. We now have the film.” Phillip Reed let out a noisy breath. “Stand by.”

My mother was in position, standing in front of the console. Freddy moved to her left, I to her right. The screen went blank for a moment, followed by a shot of the ocean on an obviously sunny and cloudless day.

“Pipes,” I said. “Down from Swamis.”

“It is a very sad day here at a very lovely spot.” It was a woman’s voice. Pamela Hodges. The image panned to the right, north, past the wave line at the beach break, past the waves at the point. The image refocused on a palm tree hanging on the bluff.  

The image abruptly switched to a young woman in a sport coat and skirt, standing, seemingly alone, on the bluff, a microphone too close to her face. Pamela Hodges looked to her left, possibly a signal to the cameraman. “Although the information we’ve received from the Sheriff’s Office detectives is… minimal…” The young woman repeated the eye shift, adding a head nod toward her left. The camera angle stayed on her. “What we do know is…”

            The camera panned away from Pamela Hodges and through a crowd watching her. Someone, off camera, had the onlookers move aside. Still, some were caught looking as the angle zoomed in on the white compound wall at the far end of the parking lot, then continued panning to the right.

            “The Jesus Saves bus,” I said. “It’s usually there.” Stupid. “No, of course. No.”

            Close to the highway end of the wall, three uniformed deputies, out of focus, were standing behind a rope stretched between wooden sawhorses. There was a burn mark, almost matching the gold lotus blossoms on the top of the wall. The scene was as Gary and Roger had described it, as I had imagined it would be.

“Behind this wall is the Self Realization Fellowship. A place of peace and meditation. All that was shattered when, last night…” The image pulled back. The deputies were in focus for a moment. Members of the crowd were in focus for a moment. All strangers, then Gary, Roger, Julia Cole, Duncan Burgess, Rincon Ronny. Pamela Hodges was out of focus for a moment. “Last night a young, so-far-unidentified man, was beaten, positioned near the wall and set alight.”

The image stayed on Pamela Hodges too long. She couldn’t hold the expression. She looked down, let out a breath to keep herself from smiling. She was on TV.

The image switched to Phillip Reed at the station. He did look serious. “We do have some further information. We also have more from Pammy… Pamela Hodges. Pammy just graduated from State… San Diego State… It’s coming up, after these messages.” 

“Phillip Reed.” The phone rang. “He knew your father.” She looked back toward Freddy and me as she walked toward the kitchen. “Too late for… cocoa?”

Freddy elbowed me. “Did you see your ditching-school, dickwad friends?” I nodded. “Gary and Roger? Truant… and smoking.”

I didn’t answer.

As our mother was returning, a mug in each hand, Freddy said, “He’s gone, mom.”

“Leave him alone, Hakaru.”

 I had been gone, replaying the few moments from the coverage: Gary and Roger, front and center as the camera panned and zoomed. Both were smoking. Gary was smiling. Julia Cole, Duncan Burgess beside her, was taking photos of Pamela Hodges and her crew. Julia lowered her camera when Gary, rather than just passing in front of her, stopped. Duncan extended a hand to push Gary further. Gary looked at Julia. Roger looked at the TV camera and lowered his cigarette. Both of my surf friends moved into the crowd.

It was Julia Cole’s expressions that ran through my mind, again and again.

Freddy elbowed me again. “Pammy’s back, Atsushi.”

“The name of the victim, evidently beaten, possibly, according to witnesses from last night, posed in a sitting position next to the wall, has not been released. There is…” Pamela Hodges moved her microphone around in a sort of wave. “There is speculation among the local surfing… community that the victim is… one of them.” The reporter looked to her right. She appeared angry but quickly reset her practiced neutral expression. “Speculation.”

“It was Chulo,” my mother said.

“You get that from Wendall?”

“Larry? No. Someone at the station. Betty Boop… your father called her. Margaret.”

“Why would… Margaret… call?”

“Larry. Wendall. We were supposed to… He had to go on base, anyway. We were going to have lunch. Just at the PX. Snack bar.” I tried not to react. “He didn’t, of course. This. Chulo.”

On the screen, Pamela Hodges took a deep breath. “We do have a witness, someone who was here last night.” The TV reporter turned to her right. There was a space between her and the witness. “Fred Thompson.”

“Gingerbread Fred! Shit!” I didn’t look around to see my mother’s reaction.    

Fred Thompson didn’t move. He looked straight into the camera. Pamela Hodges, also looking into the lens, sidestepped toward him. “Can you tell our viewers what you saw?”

Gingerbread Fred blinked, looked at the microphone in front of him, looked sideways for an instant at Pamela, then looked back at the camera. Intently.

“Fred,” Freddy said, moving closer to my side. “Like me.”

“Not like you, Frederick Hakaru DeFreines,” our mother said, putting a hand on Freddy’s head, “You’ll get a haircut.” She gave Freddy a push, turned and looked at my longer-than-the-dress-code-allowed hair. “Not like you, either.”

Gingerbread Fred moved his hands toward the camera. “Light. Bright light. Poof. In the air.” He paused, blinked several times. “Damn fools. Gasoline, the vapors… they… flash.” He started to cry. “I knew Portia was… waiting. I tried to help. Can’t run… anymore.” Pause. Blink. “They were running. Away… to their car. Black. Lights… out.”

Still looking straight at the camera, Gingerbread Fred Thompson went from a low growl to engine sounds. “Loud muffler.” He got louder. The reporter started to pull the microphone back. Fred moved with it. He didn’t look at her, he looked at us. “The… other guy was on fire.”

Fred threw his hands out to his sides, spreading his fingers. Pamela Hodges stepped back. The camera stayed on Gingerbread Fred, but the field of vision widened. Lee Anne Ransom, behind and to Fred Thompson’s right, was taking photos. Julia Cole, Duncan, Ronny, and Monica were to his right. Petey Blodgett stepped between Ronny and Monica. Fred dropped his hands and took a step back. Petey took two steps forward and, once even, put an arm around Fred’s shoulders. Fred looked at Petey for two seconds, then half spun toward him, his head dropping to Petey’s chest.

“No, no!” Pamela Hodges stepped between the two men and the camera. She was out of focus, the microphone in her left hand, her right hand making a slicing motion across her throat. The image went fuzzy, then black.  

Phillip Reed appeared. “Stand by folks.” He looked to his right. Questioning look. He turned back to the camera, flipped his left hand up. “Okay then, folks, we’re following this drama a bit longer.” The camera stayed on an angry Phillip Reed a half second too long.

Our phone rang. Loud. Freddy and I both jumped. Our mother stepped away and answered it. “You’re, oh, downtown. Yes, Larry, we are watching it. Channel eight.”

On the screen, Deputy Scott Wilson pushed between Julia and Duncan, stepped between Petey and Gingerbread Fred and Pamela Hodges. He turned his back to the camera. A man wearing dark glasses and a black coat with a Nehru collar was just visible, standing behind and between Duncan and Ronny.

“Langdon,” I said, looking at my mother, still on the phone. “Gingerbread Fred.”

“Yes. They…” She put her right hand over the speaker. “Larry says it was a major… mistake, letting him… be… there.” My mother, listening to Larry Wendall for a moment, had a half smile on her face. She took her hand off the speaker. “Langdon’s mistake.”

“No one will know that” I said, loud enough for Wendall to hear.

“No,” she said, repeating Wendall’s word. She dropped her half smile, picked up the phone base, walked toward the dining room.

On the screen, Detective Langdon stood to one side as the locals followed Deputy Wilson and Gingerbread Fred through the crowd. Non-surfers filled in the gaps. Pamela Hodges tried to regain her composure. Lee Anne Ransom stepped into the shot and took several photos of the TV reporter. Pamela flicked her left hand at Lee Anne. A ‘go away’ gesture. Langdon turned and walked away. Lee Anne followed him.

Pamela Hodges let out a big breath, put on a smile. “And now, will this lovely weather continue? Back to Phillip Reed in the studio.” She waved. “Pamela Hodges reporting.”

Ruth DeFreines, without the phone, came back into the living room. She turned the television off, pulled the louvered doors from each end of the opening. She put a hand on her younger son’s head, turned it until his body followed, pushing him toward the hallway.

“Mom,” I asked, “what about… Portia?” My mother stopped. She didn’t turn around. “What did Wendall… Larry, what did he say about… her?”

Ruth DeFreines turned back toward me. She tightened the knot on her silk robe. “She is safe. We must be… patient.”

“Must be?”

“You are not going over there tomorrow, Atsushi. Larry says…”

“Friday?”

“Saturday is the soonest. Earliest. Only because you have to go to work. Mrs. Tony will know all about it by then.”

“I’m sure she will. Saturday.”

OH, Yeah- “Swamis” and all revisions are Copyright protected. All rights reserved by the author. Thanks for reading. Remember to check for other content on Sundays. Check forecast, check out realsurfer.net.

“Swamis” Chapter 8- Joey has a spell, buy’s Sid’s board, surfs afternoon Swamis, Joey’s mom talks with Portia…

Posted on by under "Swamis" the novel

                        CHAPTER EIGHT- MONDAY MARCH 24, 1969

 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.

“Swamis” Chapter 7- Joey, Portia, Chulo, Gingerbread Fred- Swamis Curtain Drop

Posted on by under "Swamis" the novel

                        CHAPTER SEVEN- WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19, 1969

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.

“Butchy Bancroft,” I said. “Yeah. He’s, uh, he’s changing tires. Escondido.”

Portia shrugged. She may have smiled.

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.

“Swamis” Chapter 5, Part 2- Memorial for Joey’s Father, Spilled Casserole, Mr. Dewey, Lee Ransom

Posted on by under "Swamis" the novel, surf fiction

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.    

“I was hoping to speak to your mother, Jody.”

            “Joey. I go by… Joey.”

            Dickson laughed. “Pet name. Jody.” He laughed again. “Private joke.” Laugh.

            “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.

Barrel Dodging, Inspiration, and Eventual New Surf Rig

Posted on by under Seattle surfers

This is the piece I didn’t read at the THIRD SURF OCCASIONAL SURF CULTURE ON THE STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA AND THE SALISH SEA EVENT. I kind of free-balled on what the piece may or not say:

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.

Unless you live at a beach, 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, COMMITTMENT. 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.

Not me, obviously, and possibly a set up for the next section rather than barrel dodging the first section.

SIDE (SLIP) STORY- In between rides, I told BIG DAVE, who will sideslip a steep section, plow through a barrel or even a closing-down section rather than drop down and go around it, something like, “You know, sometimes, in order to make the wave, I kind of go through a slower section and then…” “Oh,” he said, “What part of __redacted___ are you from?”

FUTURE SURF RIG- I’ve been waiting for, and finally got my new surf rig. Great! Then, something wasn’t working. NEW BATTERY. Then, something else. Possible ALTERNATOR. I’m working on getting it worked on. I will update on WEDNESDAY, with the next installment from “SWAMIS.”

COPYRIGHT STUFF- Both local newspapers used stuff I wrote as a press release for the EVENT, edited it to suit their purposes, and published without giving me credit. IF YOU want to take anything from the above little piece, help yourself. THIS PIECE ONLY.

OTHERWISE, good luck in getting a few barrels, a few cruisers, and home safely.

Summer Solstice Soul Sacrifice Averted

Posted on by under surf culture events, Uncategorized

Here’s the story, in photos: Adam “Wipeout” James shaped the board from a cedar slab last year with the intention of sacrificing it on the Summer Solstice, the goal being to improve the waves in the northwest. Those are his two boys posing with the quite obviously rough-shaped board. EMMET (yeah, that’s how they spell it), top, and Calvin, nicknamed Boomer, bottom. Somehow that pagan burning didn’t happen, but this year, yeah. The board was on the fire at Joel’s house, June 21, 2023, ready to go.

BUT, somewhere before dusk, cooler heads (I’m guessing, it was a party, and, though I semi-forced an invitation, I was not there) prevailed. Specifically Chris and Keith. The discussion involved the possibility of painting it up and using it as prop or decoration or something at the upcoming SURF CULTURE ON THE STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA AND THE SALISH SEA Event, Friday, June 30, 6pm, Port Townsend Public Library. “Sure.” OKAY, BUT Then, “Why not try it out in some crappy windswell?” Again, not judging the judgment of others. Net result: Numerous wipeouts by the participants, though rumor has it that Aaron actually got a decent ride while totally burning Keith. Rumor. Again, I wasn’t there.

AFTER THE CARNAGE, Keith decided to do some damage control. Whipped out the plane, some glue, started in. He gave up on the sanding. I took over. Last photo, first coat of varnish.

THE CURRENT PLAN IS for me to paint it however I want. THANKS, I would anyway. I do want to preserve the natural cedar look, but… we’ll see. I will post some photos on Wednesday and will have the board ready for the EVENT. There is some discussion on ownership of the board. ADAM, because he supplied the slab and did the initial work, JOEL, because Adam gave it to him, Keith, because he put it back together, Erwin, because I’m going to make it, um, better. Chris, for his efforts in saving it from the pyre, and Aaron, for successfully burning and riding it… no, probably not. STILL, up for debate.

AS FAR AS my recent sit in on the KPTZ blues program with Barney Burke… Errrg! It didn’t go as I had, in my ridiculous and delusional scenarios in which I was smooth and cool and articulate, and my harmonica didn’t jam when I was trying to jam, hoped. Oh, I was cool and chatty when the microphone was not hot. I AM KIND OF THINKING, the quote from Nietzsche about looking too long into the abyss; maybe someone stuck a microphone in his face and asked him to speak to… some unknown and unseen audience, or just… the void. So, yeah, daunting. Scary. I could have done better.

It did affect my decision about speaking at the EVENT.

“Swamis” Chapter One- Conclusion

Posted on by under "Swamis" the novel

It’s Wednesday. Swamis day. ON FRIDAY, June 23, I will be on the radio. KPTZ, 91.9 fm, Port Townsend, Washington, Barney Burke’s Blues show, 8 to 10 pm. You can stream it if you’re out of range. I will be talking about the upcoming SURF CULTURE ON THE STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA AND THE SALISH SEA EVENT and, maybe, possibly, be reciting some lyrics to blues songs I have written, possibly playing some harmonica. It can’t possibly be as cool as I imagine it could be, but… tune in.

I did a bit of a stall on my second wave. I rode the third wave into the shallows, moved up to the nose, attempted a Hawaiian pullout in the little reform. Copying, emulating; it’s part of learning, of getting better.

Though I claimed I had no surf heroes, Jumper Hayes and Chulo Lopez had been two of mine when I made the switch from Styrofoam surfies and canvas surf mats. June, 1965, just out of Junior High, begging my mom to take me to Tamarack. Jumper and Chulo Lopez were three years older, and were, as expected, not welcoming of even casual contact or communication with kooks.

Sid was outright hostile. Two years older than me, Sid was thousands of waves behind Chulo and Jumper, thousands ahead of me. There were “Watch out for that guy” comments on the beach, everyone watching him when he took off. Sid, obviously proud of his reputation as an asshole, had some undeniably good moves. He had moved up in the local hierarchy when Chulo and Jumper dropped off the scene. Trouble with the law. Stolen avocados. My father was involved. Detective. He did not share details. Unprofessional.

Chulo had come back with a love for Jesus and a definite limp. Now Jumper, as rumored, was back. Damaged.  

The sun was clearing the hill behind Swamis, and the trees on the bluff, and was hitting the horizon. The bluff would be a shadow on the waves for several hours. Surfers, checking the waves from the parking lot or the top of the stairs, were silhouettes, backlit. I counted the individuals. Six. Now seven. I looked at the stairs. In the deep shadow, Sid was two stairs ahead of Jumper, almost to the platform. A surfer coming down the stairs stopped.  

Or Sid stopped him. The stairs were too far away for me to hear words or see clearly. Body language. Jumper’s head was down. My guess was the other surfer wanted to say something to Jumper, or, at least, some sort of acknowledgement. Sid pushed him aside. Sid and Jumper continued up the stairs. The other surfer went down two steps, turned, raised his free hand in the air, a full-on flipping of the bird. “Eagle.” If he comboed the gesture with a “Fuck you,” it wouldn’t have been loud enough for Jumper or Sid to hear.  

…

The shower seemed a bit warmer than the ocean. Still wet, I put my windbreaker on and zipped it up. I put my keys and wallet in an outside pocket. I tucked my board under my arm, flopped my towel and t shirt over it. I looked back at the water as I went up. There were five surfers at the inside peak, six on the outside. I stopped at the landing to zip the jacket down enough to allow me to dig my dad’s lighter and my Marlboros from the inside pocket. I leaned my board against the ‘old men stop here’ rail and lit up. I wasn’t old.  

Exactly halfway up the top set of stairs, I could feel the vibration. More surfers. I didn’t look up. I moved to my left. I looked at the bluff, various shades of tan, shadows in the creases on the last of Swamis Point, the calved-off rocks and decomposed sandstone in a pile on the beach. I inhaled. When the vibration became a rocking motion, I turned and blew the smoke toward the middle of the stairway. Dick move.

There were two of them, each carrying a surfboard, but side-by-side, three steps up. Both stopped and let the smoke dissipate. Both looked down at me, my mouth open, lips in an ‘o’ shape. Oh.

I nodded. Neither returned the nod.

We did know each other; Duncan Burgess and Julia Cole, longtime locals, my age. Class of sixty-nine. San Dieguito for them, Fallbrook for me. That my mother and brother and I had just moved to Leucadia did not make me an instantly accepted local.

Julia Cole had her new pink board, almost matching her oversized sweater, under her right arm. There was a strap, something like a guitar strap, beaded, several colors in a Southwest native design, over her left shoulder and attached to her large gray bag. It was almost large enough to carry laundry or sports equipment, but of a heavier material. Leather. Worn and dirtied. She jumped the bag from step to step.

“Julie,” I said. “Duncan.” Neither answered. The silent equivalent of a put-down, loud and shared.

They kept coming down, side-by-side, Julia Cole closer to me, Duncan Burgess on the other rail. I squeezed closer to the outside rail. I had to look at Julie. I wanted to believe she would turn toward me, if only just enough to have me in her peripheral vision. If she did look at me, she would not look away until I did. Not her. Not Julia Cole. They were three steps below me when I said, “Jumper was out.” They kept walking.

After a moment of following them, I looked up the stairs, squinting into the sun. There was someone at the top of the stairs, parking lot level. I lost focus. Rather, I replayed the moments it had taken for Julia Cole to pass. Julie. Her right arm had been around her board, a reddish-brown towel draped and balanced on the board’s rail. The bag, hanging from her left shoulder, had pulled at the neckline of her sweater. She had allowed the bag to rest for a split second on a stair as the cigarette smoke clouded the space between us. She had blinked. She had looked at me. A look of contempt. Or hurt. Serious. Cold. As if I had betrayed her.

I had. In this vision, or version of a vision, I seemed to zoom in on her eyes. Translucent. So green.

I blinked. I shook my head. I had seen Julie’s green eyes before. This was another little mind movie, other images to be stored away. Not too deep.

Julie and Duncan stopped for a moment at the landing. They looked at the lineup. Julie said something to Duncan. Duncan looked around and up the stairs. At me. I inhaled. Heavily. I held the smoke as long as I could and exhaled as hard as I could. With the air as dead as it ever was, in that brief period between the offshore breeze and the onshore updrafts, the cloud hung in the air, as much of it spreading down as up or out. I crushed the cherry between my thumb and pointer finger, flicked it as hard as I could with the use of my middle finger. Julie and Duncan watched the last of the flight of the cigarette butt, down and into the groundcover plants inadequately covering the sandstone, down the steeper drop to the scrub brush above the beach.

Julie and Duncan looked at me, then beyond me, higher up the stairs. I had to look. Again. I squinted against the sun. Again. Someone was sitting, three steps down from the parking lot. The sun, just clearing the trees, was still behind him. He was looking at me, elbows on his knees, a hand on each side of his face. Jumper Hayes. Though his face was in shadow, I still believe he was smiling. He would wait. 

I closed my eyes and ran a thousand chaotic scenes, faces and phrases, black and white photographs, red lights and sirens and gunshots, before I stepped away from the railing and started up the upper stairs. “Redemption day, Jody,” Jumper had said, “You’re going with me.”

…

Jumper Hayes, dressed in white pants and a yellow t shirt with “Flowers by Hayes” in semi-psychedelic letters, stood when I got to the stair tread two below him.

“Redemption day?”

“Yes, Jody.” Jumper moved to one side, motioning me to pass by. “I hear you’re going by Joey now.” I may have chuckled. Jumper did chuckle. “I figure we have three possible… suspects… left. Joey.”

Jumper Hayes followed me to the Falcon. Optimum spot. Sid’s van was gone. The pickup was gone. A bright yellow van with two old longboards on top and “Flowers by Hayes” painted on the side was in its place. I set my board on the Falcon’s racks, my towel on the hood. I took the keys out of my windbreaker, unlocked the tailgate, and cranked the window down.

Jumper Hayes walked between my car and the Flowers by Hayes van. He opened the back doors, walked back, pulled my board from the Falcon’s rack. He walked, with a noticeable limp, between our vehicles, with my board over his head. I cranked the back window back up, locked the tailgate, unlocked the driver’s door, and opened it.

I was lighting up a Marlboro when Jumper returned. “I figure… four… Jumper.”

Jumper smiled, leaned close to my face, leaned back, snatched the cigarette from my mouth. “I was told you quit.”

If I was ready to strike, Jumper was ready to defend. He smiled first.

“I did.” I held out the Zippo lighter with the Sheriff’s Office logo for a moment. Jumper nodded. I opened the door, set it on the seat. “But then…” I looked around the Swamis parking lot, stopping for a moment on a 1969 Jeep Wagoneer with fake wood paneling.

“You were brave, Jody.”

“I was a fool, Jumper. Nothing changed.”

“Bravery, foolishness… yeah; but things did. You and Julie, that’s…”

Jumper had an annoyingly sympathetic expression when I spun around. He didn’t drop it. I looked at the two popout surfboards on top of his family business’s van. “You have a… real board… inside?”

“Real in 1967. Before the revolution. Before… Well, since I’m still a Jarhead, technically… guess a Marine doesn’t need a spleen…” Jumper’s laugh was almost apologetic. My smile, in return, went from probably weak to possibly surprised, something short of shocked, before I turned away. Jumper laughed again. He wasn’t apologetic. “I can get us on base. Maybe we can get a few waves at Trestles on the way back home. Hmm?”

“Trestles, huh?”

“San Onofre… at least.”

“San Onofre’s… fine.”

“Fine, then. Illegal to surf Trestles anyway.” Jumper Hayes laughed, pointed at his bright yellow t shirt, pointed at me. I shook my head. He nodded, laughed, and headed toward the van.

Thanks for reading, “SWAMIS,” copyright Erwin A. Dence, Jr. All rights reserved.

Erwin on the Radio, Blues, Excuses… more

Posted on by under "Swamis" the novel

The big cultural event is coming up, and I’m going to be pimping it on the local Port Townsend radio station (KPTZ, 91.9, available for streaming on your devices, hearing if you’re anywhere east of Pillar Point and South of North Whidbey Island) next Friday.


FRIDAY NIGHT BLUES with Barney Burke
Friday 8-10pm
Barney’s been hosting the Friday Night Blues since the launch of KPTZ and he’s always live on the air. He’ll get your feet tappin’ with all kinds of classic blues (and plenty of live tracks) plus a half-dozen soul and R&B tunes.
June 23  Longtime Quilcene painter/writer/artist/surfer Erwin Dence sits in with Barney Burke to discuss blues lyrics and local surf-inspired artists and other highlights of the upcoming Third Occasional Surf Culture on the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Salish Sea event at the Port Townsend Library on Friday, June 30 at 6pm. Having Erwin Dence live in the studio will be one of those fasten your seatbelt moments … more compelling that an NPR driveway moment, even.
 
Barney texted me he was going to mention me during last Friday’s show. I tuned in too late, missed it, had to go to the archives the next morning. Yeah, good intro, tough to live up to. I will try.

Now, I did go on another show, Ron McElroy’s ‘Free Spin,’ to promote the first SURF CULTURE EVENT, about ten years ago. I was supposed to be on for about seven minutes, I got Ron talking about how he was in a car that went over the cliff at Santa Cruz… and survived. I am a competitive talker. I was on the show for about forty minutes.

THIS TIME, I got the opportunity because Barney Burke and I both once wrote for the Port Townsend Leader, I did some painting for him (how I meet some great folks- and others), and because I sent him the lyrics for fifteen or so blues songs I have written. Blues. SO, YEAH, we’ll see how that goes. I am bringing my harmonica, and I’ll be ready to talk, recite some lyrics, and try hard not to swear, belch, actually attempt to sing, or melt down on air. Yeah, it’s fuckin’ hard for me to keep a civil tongue.

I do have a couple of things I wrote that I plan on reciting at the SURF CULTURE ON THE STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA AND THE SALISH SEA EVENT. They were written as songs, but, because I’m pretty good at talking, even reciting, singing… no.

THE DIFFERENCE between reciting and singing is kind of like the difference between speed-walking (possibly still an Olympic event) is with speed walking, both feet are never off the ground at the same time. I will try.

OKAY, HERE IS WHAT I wrote for this Sunday’s post:

                                    EXCUSES

It might actually happen that no one asks you why you missed the last swell window. You, a person who monitors forecasts and buoy readings, who said last time that the next time you’d not miss the chance to maybe, just maybe… score. Even before you got the after-session (as is proper- depending on who they are shared with) reports from several sources and several spots, you knew, while you were doing whatever you were doing in the place of driving and hiking and waiting, that you were missing it. And you were. And you knew it. Confirmed. 

There was no one but you to blame, no one but you to hear your explanation of exactly what was more important than loading up, driving out, catching a few waves, maybe after the tide evened out or the swell found its way to where you were waiting, watching, hoping.

Excuses. You give me your list, and I’ll give you mine.

Yeah, my surf rig is dead, and I’m trading out work to get a replacement, and the job is not quite done. No, I’m not willing to take my work rig, with its less than wonderful miles per gallon rating and the current, inexplicable (retail compared to the per barrel crude oil cost) and  high price per gallon. Yes, the forecasts are almost always iffy. Winds can wreak a strong swell, tides can be too high or too low, perfect tide and wind conditions can’t beat a swell that angles somewhere else.

Excuses. Here is my quote on people’s excuses: The laziest people have the best excuses.

It’s not laziness. Though I’ve said for as long as I’ve known Trish (55 years) that surfing is the other woman, and that there have been ‘surf or me’ moments, I must add that WORK is the cruel mistress that has most often kept me painting, sometimes on the bluff, with perfect and glassy waves being enjoyed and missed and misridden well within my view.

Oh, and if I’m being this honest, I must add that poor life planning is part of the reason that an old fart still is working. Oh, and laziness-wise, though I’ve done it throughout my work life, I seem to be increasingly unwilling to even talk myself into racing out for a quick session, and back for work. No, I want the all day option. 

Or, if I just happen to be working close to some wave possibilities… sure; amazing how one can shake off the tiredness with cold water and a some tantalizing wave possibilities.

Next time, next time, next time…

I’m a couple of days short of getting my new-to-me surf rig.

Yes, it will double as a work rig on those days I don’t need a big boy van full of tools and dropcloths and ladders. WORK RIG. Surf rig. YES! And I’ll go stealth for as long as I can.

As with the anticipation for the next swell window, I can hardly wait.

Thanks to Barney Burke for the opportunity. I’m positive it won’t be as I imagine it, but I’m sure it will be… interesting. REMEMBER to check out realsurfers.net for the remainder of Chapter One of “SWAMIS” on Wednesday, tune into KPTZ 8pm on this coming Friday, and make plans to be at the Library, uptown Port Townsend for the Event, Friday, June 30. Oh, and please respect my copyrights.

“SWAMIS” Chapter One, Part One

Posted on by under "Swamis" the novel, surf novels

CHAPTER ONE- FRIDAY, JUNE 6, 1969

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I pushed in “Aerial Ballet.”

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

Wham!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Junipero Serra Hayes. Jumper.

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

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

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

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

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

            I took three breaths and walked toward the stairs.

            …

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

Reggie Smart Art

Posted on by under "Swamis" the novel, northwest surfing, surf art

If I had to choose just one image from those Reggie sent me, it would probably be the tattoo on, like, a live person. I’ve known Reggie a while, worked with him a lot, surfed with him many times, and he is still kind of an enigma to me. He always has a quick answer to anything rude or sarcastic I’ve ever said to him, and his self-identifying stories (and I’m not challenging them; sure, maybe he was named after a dealer on Third and Broadway [hope I got that right]) have a sort of (effective) shock value to me, someone who considers himself worldly.

Proud enough of his Irish genes to have a big “Ireland” tattoo on his body, Reggie’s forebears must have included some Leprechauns, and (yes, I looked this up) maybe a Kelpie (known for luring others into the water and the out-surfing them) or two. Reggie has this habit of showing up at my job sites and, more worthy of not here, at surf spots when I’m there. Sometimes we both actually score. I have been trying to not greet his paddling into the lineup with a “Fuck you, Reggie!” and/or a flip-off, single or double.

FRIENDLY GESTURE, I insist. BUT, Reggie has also filmed me on his phone, then, through super clever editing, made something amusing or funny for his many instagram followers. Evidently the secrecy part is crucial. He may refer to me as “Erwhistle,” something like that, but when another surfer in a parking lot referred to me by that name, I did resist sharing the FRIENDLY GESTURE with him. “Yeah; friend of Reggie’s, huh?”

SO, without further commentary, here are some selections of REGGIE SMART ART:

OKAY, so, um, not sure who this is, or what story the images selected tells, but I am pretty sure it isn’t Reggie. One of the nicknames earned through a careful diet (ask him, I’m obviously on a different regimen- vitamins and Oreos) is Reggie Good-Abs. No offense to this guy. ALSO, remember Reggie’s original art is copyright protected.

I do plan on having new posts on Sundays. I do plan on having other artists represented. TWO WEEKS AGO I did the once-only thing of texting everyone on my smart phone’s contact list with a message about TIM NOLAN’S artwork. It worked pretty well, hit-wise. LAST WEEK I featured NAM SIU. I have received a lot of text feedback. One recent one was, “DIGGING THE NEW ART.” I texted back, “What about the old (like, mine) art?” No response. YET.

NOW, I WILL ALMOST DEFINITELY add some of my art, as well as some recent outtakes from “SWAMIS” sometime this week. OKAY, Wednesday; let’s shoot for that. I am posting this one early, and remember, you can just scroll down… down, down, old art.

OH, AND if you see Reggie and can’t help but give him a FRIENDLY GESTURE, you might expect a response like, “Oh, you saw my stuff on Erwhistle’s site, huh?”