It isn’t some kind of trick. I erased some good stuff; epic stuff. It is not unlike the sessions we miss; always chest to head high, bigger on the sets; the only wind the gentle offshores that groomed the empty A frames and barely makable walls; the lineup made up of best friends willing to give up a bomb for another bomb. Yeah, just like that.
Part of the reason I had to delete some images is the DE FACTO RESTRICTIONS I produce realsurfers under. There are, of course, no actual rules covering what spot I can name, and therefore, because of my influence with my tens of real and possibly real surfers in my worldwide audience, blow up; and only a few people have told me I cannot ever, ever say there are waves, ever, ever on the Strait of Juan de Fuca; BUT it is in my best interest to self monitor.
I have been mulling over, if not considering, if not laser focusing on the ALMOST OFFICIAL RULES OF SURFING, none of them passed by any legislative body other than self appointed regulators and wave counters. Although I hate, or at least hesitate to start any sentence with ‘Back in the day,’ back when BIG DAVE RING was surfing, he would often, without any substantiating evidence, say, “The wave counters on the beach say you’ve had enough; better go in.” And I would say, “Who?”
Here, if my copy and paste works, is where I’ve gotten to so far:
The Freedom Trap- Preamble
It’s lovely to say that surfing represents freedom, and it does. It can be a very liberating experience. It should be that riding the visible, moving, tangible manifestation of energy, waves; wind born in chaos, smoothed and groomed by the miles traveled, shaped by underwater canyons and mountains, reefs and rocks, and delivered to a beach near you. For free.
By some real or imagined extension, surfers are free; free-thinking, free of the conventions and rules put up as roadblocks by those without the courage to throw away their inhibitions and crash into the wild, lawless surf.
Free. Undaunted. Unrestrained. ETC…
This photo of SMILING DAN is a replacement for one that MIGHT have some sleuthing surf dick saying, “OH, I recognize that parking lot. It’s that new place down by Westport. ‘Country Clubs’ I believe the locals call it. Rabid bunch of surfers/golfers/rockhounds/dog walkers; no bags- watch your step if you go down there- yeah, and… I’m going to zoom in on his watch; see if I can get the time and date. And, anyway, he’s smiling; that there’s a clue.”
Okay, that is correct. Smiling Dan is, despite repeated warnings, smiling.
WHAT I DO LOVE, though not as much as surfing, is the gossip and chatter between surfers; in the parking lots, in the lineup, on the beach, in the comment section of every YouTube video. The sarcastic ones are the best. OKAY, I went back and re-found this one, commentary of a wicked day at BIG ROCK. I did, back in the day (sorry) live nearby, did surf Windansea, never attempted that crazy slab. So: “This wave looks soooo fun! I’m a low intermediate adut-learner and just got a new CI mid length. I’ll be out there the next big swell. If you see me in my white Sprinter van, stop byy and say hello.” @jakemarlow8998.
Perfect. Other worthwhile comments judged a dude harshly for dropping in, twice, at Lunada Bay (never surfed there), celebrating the justice delivered when his board broke. Blowing up spots and just how many surfers were out at, say, SWAMIS, were subjects prominently discussed. “Eighty-seven people out and five surfers getting all the decent rides” is a paraphrase of one I didn’t go back to give accreditation. I agree.
Do surfers JUDGE? NO, except constantly. You should assume that you are presumed to be a kook until you prove otherwise, and then you’re no more than another surfer, like, not as good as the surfer judging your surfing, until you get a great ride; and even then you can be demoted with one blown takeoff. One accidental drop in can get you pegged as a shoulder hopper, one accidental drift can get you labeled a backpaddler. Too many waves while the people in the channel get a smaller share… wave hog.
I’m not making accusations. As with a meaty-but-scary barrel opportunity, I’m dodging.
RIPPERS AND CHARGERS- Here’s the discussion. ONE, can you fit your surfing into one of these categories? TWO, which is better? COUGAR KEITH said he’s happy being a charger if being a ripper goes along with unnecessarily exaggerated arm movements. SHORTBOARD AARON, undisputedly a ripper, says a ripper can choose to charge, whereas a charger… Yeah, yeah, I get it.
I AM, of course, still, still working on perfecting (it was just polishing) my manuscript, “SWAMIS,” the fictional story centered in 1969, or ‘back in the day’ to some.
Sorry for blowing up Country Clubs. Happy Almost New Year!
I haven’t updated my “Previously” recap of my novel, but we’re still at the post funeral memorial or wake for Joey’s father.
I WILL HAVE some photos and comments on my latest session attempt for SUNDAY, but, with elections upon us like a wave we saw on the horizon that is suddenly WAY BIGGER than we were ready for, I, non-political as I am, have some thoughts I’m trying to work through on just why the fuck anyone would vote for the guy, knowing what an absolute example of everything disgusting and vile and hateful any silver-spoon asshole can be. HATEFUL is, possibly, the key. Voters trying to hide behind some phony wall of “Oh, he’s, you know, not all that bad, and anyway…”
IT MIGHT BE that some folks think the guy will punish the “They” and the “Them” these voters hate. They. Them. YEAH, he said he will, and he has thugish backers who have promised to help. ONE PROBLEM might be that, HISTORICALLY, when things go to shit in a country, the whole country gets hit with the shit. AND covered in it.
THERE IS NO AMERICA to save AMERICA. Everyone is an infidel to someone. Everyone is a ‘them’ or a ‘they.’ Good luck, vote your conscience. But first, check to make sure you have one.
THINK IT THROUGH. VOTE BLUE. AND, with this, I apologize for ranting. I would rather talk about surf predictions and post-dictions, and I will. SUNDAY.
CHAPTER SIX- PART THREE- TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 1969
I was sitting on my mother’s little bench on the porch, tying my shoes. Lee Ransom stepped down onto the concrete pad, the part of a sidewalk my father had completed. “Optional today,” I said. “Shoes.”
“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 out the door, 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 both sides of her coat, drew two fake pistols from fake holsters, and shot at the kid. Two shots from each hand. 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 never played the cop, always the… robber.”
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 gave me a desperate ‘you have to help me’ look. Larry Junior’s expression, at Freddy and then 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, and looked at me.
Theresa Wendall, holding 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. Wendall threw a lit cigarette onto the lawn. He looked at Freddy but did not let go of him. He looked at me, just coming around the front of the car, left hand out, right hand in a fist. He let go of Freddy.
Everyone stopped.
Everyone except Theresa Wendall. Her 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 belched out she lost control. 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 the Deputy. “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… not really; I watched… you know. Your father knew his shit.”
“Yeah. He… the chickens… lasagna; they’ll eat it. I mean, the… spilled part. Scott.” Deputy Scott Wilson took the dish from Larry Junior and walked toward the 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’ll help you turn the car around. Okay?” Mrs. Wendall didn’t answer. “Theresa?”
Theresa Wendall made the slightest of gestures with her left hand before 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,” she said. It wasn’t a whisper.
“It’s… all right.”
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. Mrs. Wendall was attempting to turn the station wagon around with some direction from Deputy Wilson. 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 small shed 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 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 stopped myself from screaming but kicked a hole in the rotting plywood siding. Lee Ransom took a drag on her borrowed cigarette and let out most of the smoke. I pulled and kicked my foot several times before it was freed from the plywood.
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.”
“Only what concerns… or relates… People believe I know… things.”
“Aha!” She was close again. “See? That’s something I… I interviewed, sort of, your father… several times. When people think you know more about them than you do… he told me this… They tell you… more.” Lee Ransom took a double hit on the cigarette, held the smoke in for longer than I would have been comfortable doing. She exhaled slowly, down. “I didn’t know shit about you. Now I do.” She inhaled again, the smoke trickling out as she continued. “Now I know more. And…”
“And?”
“Not enough.” Lee Ransom turned away. “Tallulah, lucky Joey didn’t hit a stud, huh.”
“Lucky.” I took a deeper than usual drag, held it longer than usual.
“Joey. When your dad got that… wound… You were there. Correct?”
I 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, and… that is the story.”
“The story is 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 and walked toward the house.
“Good. Quote. Yeah. Thanks. But, Joey, which car did you say is your mother’s?”
“I didn’t say.”
“But Joey… Joey.” I turned around. Lee Ransom had her camera up and aimed at me. “Half stigmata!” She took three photos. Snap, snap, snap.
“SWAMIS.” Copyright Erwin A. Dence, Jr. All rights reserved by the author.
It’s almost Wednesday. TO SAVE TIME that might be spent scrolling, the recap/review, the ‘previously’ the “Swamis” So-far follows. Thanks for reading, or attempting to. I’ll have other content on Sunday, probably with updates on local Olympic Peninsula surfers going elsewhere, Meanwhile, find some waves.
CHAPTER SIX- PART TWO- TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 1969
I looked at the mourners as I walked toward the foyer, trying to remember each face. I walked around the borrowed table where our couch would have been. My father’s chair had been moved two feet over from its regular spot, oriented toward the big window rather than the TV in the console. It provided a good place to look at the people in the rooms, foyer, hallway, kitchen, living room.
The oversized lounge chair was, for once, uncovered. The fabric was practical; heavy, gray, with just the faintest lines, slightly grayer. There was, in the seat, a matted and framed portrait I had not seen before, a photograph blown up and touched up and printed on canvas, coated with several layers of varnish. A noticeable chemical smell revealed the coating had not yet fully cured. There it was, my father in his Sheriff’s Office uniform, oversized enough that the portrait was set across the armrests.
The pose was this: Stern expression; arms crossed on his chest, low enough to reveal the medals; just the right amount of cuff extending from the coat sleeves; hands on biceps, a large scar on the palm of my father’s left hand almost highlighted. No ring. My father didn’t wear rings. Rings might have suggested my father might hesitate in a critical situation, might think of his wife and children. White gloves that should have been a part of the dress uniform were folded over my father’s left forearm. Gloves would have hidden the scar.
I didn’t study the portrait. I did notice, peripheral vision, others in the rooms were poised and watching for my reaction. I tried to look properly respectful, as if I had cried out all my tears. Despite my father disapproving of tears, I had.
There was an American flag, folded and fit into a triangular-shaped frame, leaning from the seat cushion to the armrest on one side of the portrait. A long thin box with a glass top holding his military medals, partially tucked under the portrait, was next to the flag. If I was expected to cry, or worse; break down, to have a spell or a throw a tantrum, the mourners, celebrants, witnesses, the less discerning among whoever these people were, they would be disappointed. Some, who had never saluted the man, saluted the portrait. This portrait was not the father I knew, not the man the ones who truly believed they knew him knew.
No. I walked past the detectives without looking at them, went down the hallway and opened the door to what was to have been a den but had become storage. I returned to the living room with two framed photographs pressed against my chest. I did my fake smile and set the portraits on the carpet, face down. I took a moment before I lifted the one on top, turned it over, and leaned it against the footrest part of my father’s chair.
Several self-invited guests moved closer, both sides, and behind me. One of the guests said, “That’s Joe, all right.”
Wendall displaced the person to my right, moved close enough to bump me, said, “Gunner,” and toasted. Others followed suit.
The first, ambered-out photo, was of a younger Joseph DeFreines in his parade garb; big blonde guy in Mexican-style cowboy gear, standing next to a big blonde horse with a saddle similarly decked out with silver and turquoise, holding an oversized sombrero with his hand on the brim. My father’s other arm, his left, was around the shoulders of a smaller man, his sombrero on his head. Both were smiling as if no one else was watching.
There was no wound on my father’s left hand.
“Gustavo Hayes,” a voice said. Another asked, “What’s with Joe in the Mexican outfit?”
I lifted, turned, and leaned the other photo against the footrest. It was a black and white photo. A woman’s voice said, “Oh, Joe and Ruth. Must be their wedding.” Another woman’s voice said, “So young. And there is… something… about a Marine in his dress blues.”
“It was… taken,” Wendall explained, “in Japan, where they… met, color-enhanced… painted… in San Diego.” I looked at the photo rather than at the people. My father’s arm was around his even younger bride. She was in a kimono.
“The colors of the dress,” my mother always said… she said, ‘they are not even close to the real colors.’ She said our memories… fill in the… real colors.”
I had spoken. I wanted to disappear. I was, perhaps, not out of tears.
I backed my way through the middle of the semi-circle and 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, trying to perfectly reimagine a photo from a surfing magazine. The view was from across highway 101, above the railroad tracks. across the empty lot just south of the Swamis parking lot. There were, on the horizon, distant swells on a field of diamonds, already bending to the contours of underwater reefs. To the right there were dark green shrubs and trees, palm trees beyond them. Further to the right, large gold lotus blossoms sat atop the corners of a white stucco wall.
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 one of the Downtown Detectives over by the sideboard, a two-thirds gone bottle of some brownish liquor between them. The Downtown Guy finished off Langdon’s bottle of wine, looked at the label, laughed, and moved the bottle next to the other empties. He looked around the room, and laughed again, louder.
I looked back out the window. A black Monte Carlo seemed about right. Oversized, pretentious. An investment, likely purchased before he made Lieutenant up in Orange County.
A yellow Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, top down, was coming up the hill. It passed the Hayes Flowers van. Different yellows; the car’s color softer, warmer, on the orange rather than the green side. 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 at some later recalling of the day. It doesn’t matter, it’s there now.
Deputy “New Guy” Wilson half-leaned into the Karmann Ghia. The woman looked up. 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 her image 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. Me in the center of the window, my arms out, hands on either side of the opening.
I moved backward and sideways, back into the room, bumping into a man I knew from the PTA or the School Board, 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.”
“New guy,” I said, suddenly realizing where I had seen the man’s photo. “The hippie rag published that… expose; favorable rates for certain… constituents, as I recall. The Enterprise didn’t run the story for another two weeks. And… 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. I returned 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 orangish-brown liquor in one of my father’s cut crystal glasses. The North County Free Press. I should make it required reading for my Political Science 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… in the Pacific. War hero.” He took another sip. “Korea, too. Also. A war we didn’t win. He fought the Japs, and then, he and your mom…”
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, and said, “I have a theory.”
“Well, you are the Political scientist, Mr. Dewey.” I turned away.
Mr. Dewey grabbed my arm. “I think, Joseph, that he wanted all the Okies and all the new people to think he was… one of them.”
“Or…” I looked at Mr. Dewey’s hand. He dropped it. “It’s tradition though, really. Isn’t it, Mr. Dewey? 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 a particular person. I turned back toward the window. Mr. Dewey followed me, setting the glass on the sill.
“You know, Joseph; your father was a busy man.” Mr. Dewey was looking from the unfinished garage to the unfinished fencing. “I’m not teaching summer school this year.” I shook my head a bit, waiting for more. “I have time. That’s… If I had a place like… this, I…”
“Yeah. Needs… time. Work.”
Mr. Dewey tapped on the window. “The Falcon wagon? That yours… now?”
“I am making… payments.” 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 cars and the property that needed work. “I better be.”
…
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 Lucky Strike 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 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, shooting a look toward the Downtown Guy, who returned a wave and followed Wendall. I moved 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. “Could,” he said, downing one of the pre-filled glasses. “Won’t.”
The reporter looked at me, took a 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, only slightly, 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 length of 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 or too foolish to edit my thoughts before I spoke. “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 and said, “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 wearing a black skirt, knee-length, with a not-quite-black coat, unbuttoned, over a long-sleeved shirt; tasteful, one unbuttoned button short of conservative. I didn’t look at her cleavage or her breasts. I was aware of them.
“My friends call me Joey.” I did a choking kind of laugh. “Private joke.”
Lee Ransom gave me a ‘I don’t get it’ kind of smile.
“You. My mom. Talking. Probably… not.” I nodded toward the hallway. A woman was leading a couple toward the living room. “Sakura Rollins,” I said, “Since you’re taking notes.”
“Thank you… Joey.” Lee Ransom tapped on her closed notebook. “She and her husband, Buddy, own a bowling alley. Oceanside. Back Gate Lanes.” She nodded toward the couple. “Gustavo and… Consuela Hayes. Flower people. Poinsettias…. Mostly.”
“Flower people,” I said, looking at Lee Ransom until she did a half-smile, half-head tilt.
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 and 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.
Lee Ransom turned toward Sakura Rollins. Her expression blank, my mother’s best friend 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 apply some small pressure pushing his partner’s wife forward as he released 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… she so enjoys having someone she can speak… Japanese with.”
I nodded. “She does, Mrs. Rollins, but… but… thank you.”
“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. We are as strong as we need to be. Yes?”
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 toward the portrait. I almost smiled when she looked back at me.
“Swamis” Recap
CHAPTER ONE -Monday, Nov 13, 1968-
Seventeen-year-old JOEY DeFREINES is talking with his court appointed psychologist, DR. SUSAN PETERS. Joey’s father, San Diego County Sheriff’s Office DETECTIVE LIEUTENANT JOSEPH DE FREINES made the deal following an afterschool incident at Fallbrook Union High School during which Joey put his foot on GRANT MURDOCH’s neck. Dr. Peters asks if, once bullied, Joey has become a bully.
TWO- Saturday, August 14, 1965-
13-year-old Joey tries surfing at PIPES. JULIA COLE is out, already accomplished. She says boy surfers are assholes, surfing is hard, and she stays away from cops and cop’s kids.
THREE- Sunday, September 15, 1968-
Joey tricks SID and other locals in the lineup at GRANDVIEW, gets a set wave. Sid burns Joey and tells him he broke the ‘locals rule,’ that being that locals rule.
Joey, driving his FALCON station wagon, comes upon a VW VAN. Locals DUNCAN, MONICA, AND RINCON RONNY are looking at the smoking engine. They are unresponsive if not hostile to Joey, but Julie (to her friends) asks Joey if he’s a mechanic or an attorney. “Not yet,” he says. There is an attraction between Julie and Joey that seems irritating to, in particular, Duncan.
FOUR- Wednesday, December 23, 1968-
Joey has a front row spot at SWAMIS. He has already surfed and is studying, notebooks on the hood of the Falcon. Arriving out of town surfers want the spot. Joey, hassled by one of them, informs BRIAN that he has a history of striking out violently when threatened, and says he’s on probation. Joey has an episode remembering past encounters, witnessed by the out-of-town surfers and Rincon Ronny, who seems impressed and says those kooks won’t bother Joey in the water. “Someone will,” Joey says, “It’s Swamis.”
FIVE- Thursday, February 27ut-
At breakfast at home in Fallbrook, Joseph DeFreines confronts his son (who he calls JODY) about an acceptance letter from Stanford University Joey hid. Joey’s father is also upset with his wife, RUTH, for some reason, and leaves in a huff, saying he’ll take care of it.
Joey and his younger brother, FREDDY, get a ride home from surf friend, GARY, and Gary’s sister, THE PRINCESS. Ruth is loading the Falcon, says she spoke on the phone with DETECTIVE SERGEANT LARRY WENDALL, and says she will, as always, be back. Freddy blames Joey. Their father calls as their mother pulls away. Joey, looking for the keys to his mother’s VOLVO, speaks briefly, somewhat rudely, with his father. Freddy says he’ll wait for their father. The phone rings. It’s ‘uncle’ Larry. Joey runs toward the Volvo.
SIX- Tuesday, March 4, 1968. PART ONE-
There is a post-funeral wake/memorial/potluck at the DeFreines house. Joey, avoiding the guests, is standing in the big west-facing window. MISTER DEWEY, a teacher at Fallbrook High, says he is surprised that Joey’s ex-Marine, ‘practically a John Bircher,’ father is married to a Japanese woman. “Traditional,” Joey says, “Kill the men, take the women.” Mister Dewey expresses interest in the property Joey’s father never had the time to work on.
A delivery van from ‘Flowers by Hayes’ comes up the driveway, guarded, for the wake, by San Diego Sheriff’s Office DEPUTY SCOTT WILSON. The driver of the van is CHULO, a surfer several years older than Joey. Chulo was arrested along with JUMPER HAYES for stealing avocados. Chulo was crippled during the arrest, went to work camp, became a beach evangelist.
Joey has an episode, during which he replays the accident in which, while driving the Volvo, he follows the Falcon and another car around the smoking JESUS SAVES BUS. Joey’s father, in an unmarked car, passes very close to him and pulls off the highway at high speed. JeJ
Chulo was driving the Jesus Saves bus.
Detective Wendall and DETECTIVE SERGEANT DANIEL DICKSON are at a makeshift bar in the living room. ORANGE COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE DETECTIVE LIEUTENANT BRICE LANGDON, dressed in a just out of fashion Nehru jacket and rat-stabber shoes, isn’t popular with the two remaining detectives from the VISTA SUBSTATION, or with the other civilians and deputies from the San Diego Sheriff’s Office.
THERESA WENDALL, putting out food, tries to talk to her husband. He avoids her. Their two boys are running through playing cowboys-and-Indians as Langdon seems to corner Chulo.
SIX- PART TWO- TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 1969
The wake/memorial continues with various guests praising Joe DeFreines. There is a large portrait on display with the scar on Joey’s father’s left hand showing. Joey’s mother, Ruth, is led to her room by GUSTAVO and CONSUALA HAYES. Those seeking to talk with Ruth are vetted by MORIKO ROLLINS. Theresa Wendall is allowed to go in. Reporter for the North County Free Press, LEE RANSOM, gains access to the property, passing by Deputy Wilson by waving at Joey, in the window, with Joey returning the wave. Langdon seems to be following Chulo away from the property. Lee Ransom questions the detectives on information about Joe DeFreines’ accident.
“Swamis” is copyrighted, all rights reserved by the author, Erwin A. Dence, Jr. Thank you for respecting this. See you. Oh, and Fuck Cancer, and remember, Project 2025 wants to take away porn, even, maybe, surf porn.
I probably should have split this into two parts. Thank you in advance for reading. You aren’t required to do it in one sitting. I apologize for annoying ads; it’s because, since I haven’t made any money on this (vanity?) project, realsurfers, I pay the minimum to Word Press. Hence, ads. I inserted a photo of, basically, the view from where Julia Cole’s mother’s house would be, to break up the chapter.
Though the manuscript (not a secret) lacks focus, mostly due to a stubborn desire to make side characters seem real, I have been trying to narrow in on the relationship between Joey and Julia. There’s more of that after the sunset photo.
SIDEBAR, with apology- The professor in a watercolor class I took at Palomar Junior College had a habit of grabbing my work before I was finished. “Done,” he would say. Of one painting I was ready to overwork and ruin, he asked if I loved the woman I was trying to render, his argument being that I should concentrate on shading and form, the pieces, or, since I lacked the skills for truly rendering an image, I could go for something impressionistic.
I don’t believe I’ve over-described Julia Cole, and since the narrator cannot know what she is thinking, we (presumptuously including you) have to rely on how she behaves. Yeah, like the way it should be. Maybe. Do I love Julia/Julie? YES, and if any character has to be real, complicated, vulnerable, tough, for me to consider her properly rendered, it is she. Or is it ‘it is her?’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN- SUNDAY, MARCH 30, 1969
I didn’t get up early enough to surf. Rather, I didn’t leave early enough. I got onto I-5 from 76, got off at the Tamarack exit. Eight surfers out at the main peak in front of the bathrooms. Too small for Swamis, too crowded at the main peak at Pipes. I passed by the turn that would lead me to the grocery store, drove through the parking lot at Cardiff Reef. There were waves, but they were cut up by the shifting sandbars, chopped up by water flowing out of the lagoon on a big tide shift. Outgoing. Still, surfers were taking off on peaks, bogging down on flat sections the shorter boards couldn’t float over. I never got out of the Falcon, but I did stop, between cars, when a larger set hit the outside peak. The five surfers in the water were caught inside. Even that wave flattened out, split into two weaker peaks, and got wobbly in the outflow from the lagoon.
Eleven minutes early, I parked the Falcon in the spot closest to the southwest corner, visible from the double door entrance. I grabbed three loose carts, pushed them together, and aimed for the entrance.
Weekends. Easter vacation. Excuses to go to the beach. A higher percentage of the customers at the San Elijo Grocery, Mrs. Tony’s to locals, seemed to be tourists, down or over from somewhere else. The state park across the tracks and the highway, extending along the bluff at Pipes to the lower, flatter area at Cardiff Reef, contributed customers. Suntan lotion and creams for sunburn, floaties and cheap shovel/pail/rake kits contributed to the independent grocery store’s bottom line.
Almost all the west, ocean-facing wall was glass. The view was of the road, the railroad tracks, the highway, the four-year old shrubbery that was just beginning to provide privacy for campers at the state park. The windows started at four feet from the floor, allowing for bags of dog food and fertilizer and compost, cheap beach chairs and portable barbecues, and extended twelve feet, four short of the sixteen-foot ceiling. The rolldown shades that only partially mitigated the afternoon glare were up.
The middle of three registers was empty. Mr. Tony was at the first register, his voice and laugh echoing off the exposed trusses and half-painted plywood ceilings, bouncing off the windows. He was just finishing up a story I had heard enough times to whisper the punchline as my boss revealed it to an obvious camper. “Can’t get that at no Piggly Wiggly!” Someone from the southeast was my guess.
Mr. Tony dropped the smile when he saw me. I dropped my arms to my sides, slightly out from my hips, palms out, to show I was wearing the appropriate clothing: Chinos, sensible shoes, long-sleeved shirt with a collar, no hippie beads. My hair, over my ears for the first time in my life, was slicked back. I would wet it in the customer’s men’s room occasionally.
I stepped toward the counter, ready to bag groceries. Mr. Tony handed the customer his change, watched me place the items in a bag, then nodded toward the back of the store.
Halfway down the center aisle, I couldn’t miss hearing Mr. Tony with his next customer. “All these hippies. Kid’s thinking he’s foolin’ me with the hair; figures I’m okay with the duck’s ass, greaser look. Pretty soon the kid’s gonna look like a pachuco. Huh, Guillermo?”
Mr. Tony and Guillermo both laughed. “Pachuco.”
The grocery store’s office was behind the wall that held assorted beach and camping gear, tents and sleeping bags, lanterns. A string of Christmas lights, always on, framed the entrance to the storage area. A set of smaller lights framed a hand painted sign hung on the area’s most prominent post. “No public bathrooms.” There was always incoming freight in with the stacks of boxes and partial boxes of non-perishables the Tony’s had gotten a special deal on. Frisbees, hula hoops, tiki torches, garden hoses. Seasonal decorations were also stored there: Plywood Santas, American flags. There was a table for painting the paper signs for bargains and produce prices, bottles of red and green and blue and yellow paint, worn brushes stuffed in dirty water in an oversized pickle bottle.
The door to the inner office was unpainted and unmarked other than a fading message in grease pencil. “Not a bathroom.” The door was almost always open because Mrs. Tony was almost always there.
Mrs. Tony was sitting on the far side of her ping pong table desk, straight back from the door. Clear view. She had yelled “Jody” before I entered the storage area. She began moving aside stacks of invoices and customer account cards, each no less than a six inches high, to maintain her view. She looked up at the clock above the door, pulled out my card from the smaller of three stacks to her right, made a note with the pencil she kept in her hair, stabbed between the rollers and bobby pins and a scarf. Mostly red on this day, with white flowers.
“Jody,” she said again, standing up, “Did you see your apron?”
“Oh. I… get my own apron?” She looked at me as if I had said something rather rude or really stupid. “I mean, thank you, Mrs. Tony.”
“Yeah. Go help Doris.” She pointed through the doorway. “Good?” I nodded. I could see my Pee-Chee notebook under a stack of other papers immediately in front of here. She shook her head, waved her pointer finger. “I haven’t gotten a chance yet, Jody.” She glanced at the clock again. I checked it on the way out. 10:03.
…
Doris, late forties, about the same age as Mr. and Mrs. Tony, was ringing a woman up at the middle register. I walked up, trying to re-tie the cloth string on my new green apron. “Mr. Tony’s at the ‘so glad to see you’ register,” she said as I moved into bagboy position.
I looked over. Tony was talking to and laughing with a man, a bit older, dressed in a gray suit, fedora to match. There were no groceries on the counter.
Doris’ hair was also in curlers and covered with a scarf, hers in several shades of light green. Her customer was wearing a dark dress, with pearls, and what I had heard referred to as a ‘Sunday-go-to-meetin’ hat.’ The woman asked, “Saving your good hair for your man, Doris?” Doris smiled and kept ringing up the groceries. Quickly, most of the prices memorized.
The woman nodded toward the man with Mr. Tony, both now at the front windows, each with a foot up on a pile of bags of dog food. She looked at the prepared pie on the counter. “We’re skipping the sermon, Doris, but we’re definitely going to the social.” She looked at me. “That’s where you hear all the good shit.” I did a sideways nod, tried to appear both impressed and mildly shocked.
“Right about that, Connie,” Doris said. She and Connie laughed. I nodded. I smiled. “Careful with Connie’s pie there… Jody.”
Connie looked at the name, hand sewn, in white, onto my green apron. “Jody? JODY. I’ve got a niece in Arizona named Jodie. JODIE.” I pinched a spot on the apron below the name. I pulled it forward. I looked down at it, looked back at customer Connie as if I might have grabbed the wrong apron.
Connie looked at Doris, looked at the total on the register, looked toward a tall, thin, metal shelving unit just to the right of the cash register, equidistant between the middle and south register, and attached with two strands of metal rope to a metal I beam post. Three wide, five high, each of the shelves contained an approximately even number of tan colored cards. The shelving unit itself was set on top of three wooden milk crates. With a metal gridwork inside to hold and separate glass containers, the crates were built to interlock when stacked, “Story’s Dairy” and “Fallbrook” was stenciled on the sides of each of the crates.
Doris stepped toward the shelf. “Pie’s got to pass for homemade… JODY,” Connie said. ”I have a nice serving dish, out in the car. Should work well enough with the hypocrites and sinners.” I looked at the pie, looked at the shelf Doris pulled the card from. Four down, middle. L-M-N. The pie wouldn’t pass. I nodded at Connie and smiled. She may have missed it. She was adding here initials to the card. “I meant the other hypocrites and sinners, of course, Doris.”
…
Mid-day rush. I was rushing between Doris’s counter and Mr. Tony’s; bagging, smiling at the customers; smiling bigger when Tony said something that might not have been deservingly amusing or clever; smiles Tony had to know were fake, smiles few customers bothered to analyze. I nodded at customer comments, most of which didn’t concern the weather, did concern the damn hippies or the damn tourists or the damn surfers. “At least you’re not one of those,” at least one of the customers told me. Smile.
For the third time on this day, Mr. Tony used someone questioning my name as an excuse to break into his version of the Jody Cadence. “Jody’s bagging groceries, bringing carts back, too…”
Mr. Tony stopped, laid his left hand out and open, and toward me, and waited. This was my cue to join in the joke, add another line. This time it was, “At the San Elijo Grocery, the surf’s always in view.”
We did the “One, two, one two” together. Mr. Tony laughed. I tried not to look embarrassed. Part of the job. So glad to see you.
At two o’clock, Mrs. Tony came to the front to relieve Doris. She made sure I saw her shove my Pee-Chee folder into the shelf under the counter. She pulled an oversized watch with half of the wristband from one of the big pockets on her apron, didn’t really look at it. She made sure I got the message. Keep working.
There was a lull around four. I was at Mr. Tony’s register. “Joe DeFreines’s kid,” he was telling this customer, a regular, probably thirty years older than Mr. Tony. “Jo-dy. Joke. Marine Corps cadence, from… Korea.”
The man shook his head. “Army.” Mr. Tony stepped back. “World War Two, Tony, the durn leathernecks stole it. It’s… fact.” The man laughed, took both of his bags from the counter before I could move them to the cart, and held them against his chest. He took two steps, purposefully bumped into me with a shoulder. Friendly bump. “Good man, Joe DeFreines.” He took two steps more steps, and said, without looking around. “Tony’s okay, too, for a fucking Gi-rine.”
“Jo-dy,” Mrs. Tony, at the middle register, said, loudly, sharply, almost like someone calling cattle. Pigs, more like it, emphasis on the second syllable. She was holding my Pee-Chee notebook out and toward me, six customer account cards on top of it. She slid it, several times, toward the credit shelf as I approached. “Lots of regulars on a Sunday,” she said, “putting it on their tabs.” I took the folder. “You might want to learn some of their names.”
“I’m… working on it, Ma’am.”
Mr. Tony stepped toward us. Mrs. Tony gave her husband a message, eyes-only. Back off. He did. I set the Pee-Chee on the counter, spread the tab cards on top of it. Mrs. Tony said, “Ask your mother,” and turned away.
I reshuffled the cards, rearranged them, alphabetically, and put them away as quickly as I could. “It’s a lot of money, Mr. Tony,” I said, tapping the edge of the folder on the slight guardrail at the edge of the counter. “Lost Arroyo Investments. Are you… familiar?”
Mr. Tony looked at the folder rather than at me. He exhaled, popping his lips, slightly. “It’s not dirty. I guarantee you that.” He turned toward his next customer, one aisle away. “You ready, Honey?” She wasn’t. Not quite. Without looking at me, he asked, “You afraid to ask your mom?” Turning toward me, he read my expression correctly.
“Almost four-twenty, Jody,” Doris said as she returned to the middle register. “Your break. Take it or lose it.”
I acted as if I hadn’t noticed that Doris had removed the scarf and curlers and had brushed out her hair. Doris looked as if she wanted a comment. I was bagging, concentrating. Produce, one bag; ice cream, white, insulated bag; several cans of soup, bottom of double bag; one loaf of bread from a local baker, on the top; quart bottle of milk, TV Guide, straight into the cart. I gestured my willingness to push the cart. The older woman at the counter shook her head. Another church goer, I guessed, another dark dress with white pearls.
“Headed that way anyway, Ma’am. Mrs. …?”
“Not Mrs. anything anymore.” I stepped behind the cart. “Jackie, just Jackie.”
“Just Jackie, did you notice Doris’s hair?” Just Jackie turned and said something to Doris I didn’t hear; something Doris, self-consciously primping, pushing up the curls on one side of her face, seemed to appreciate. Doris gave me a different look when Jackie stepped next to me and set her purse into the cart. Embarrassed but appreciative, perhaps.
The shades across the front windows were a third of the way down, the sun just at the bottom line, the light half glaring, half insufficiently muted. Jackie kept one hand on the side of the cart as she and I walked. I was one set of windows from the main doors, even with Tony’s register, when I saw Julia Cole enter.
It would be an over-romanticization if I said that, at just that moment, the sun, full force, dropped below the shade and Julia Cole was bathed in that light. Amber. That is how I saw it; pausing, stopping myself and the cart, and because I stopped, Jackie stopped.
“I can manage from here… Jody,” Just Jackie said, looking at Julia Cole, looking at me, looking at Mr. Tony at the first register, looking back at me. I blinked, looked at Jackie. She was smiling as if she knew something about sunlight and amber and magic.
Julia Cole, walking toward me, had her eyes on me. I was only slightly aware of Jackie pushing the cart toward her. Julia’s expression changed when she turned toward Jackie. Surprised, perhaps, at the woman’s expression. Still, Julia appeared to be no more than polite.
Julia Cole moved to her right, out of the glare. She stopped. She did not intend to walk any closer to me. If it was a dare, I wasn’t taking it. I was replaying the previous seconds.
Julia Cole was very close. She said something, not quite a whisper. I saw her lips move.
“Ju-lie!” It was Mr. Tony’s loudest voice. “Surf up or something?” Julia Cole turned toward the voice. “Jody can take off and go if he wants.”
“No. No, Mr. Tony, it’s not… that.”
With Mr. Tony and Julia Cole in my periphery, right and left, I saw the silhouette in the alcove at the main doors. Only a hand and arm came out of the shadow. The hand was pointed at me. It twisted and flattened. Fingers out, the hand was pulled back. A summons. Duncan Burgess at the corner of the entrance alcove, just in the light, standing next to Julia Cole’s big gray bag.
Julia Cole asked me a question. Before I could process, she repeated it. “Can you come outside? I mean, please.”
I looked at my watch. 4:23. Break time. Ten minutes. I didn’t look around. I did hear Mr. Tony’s voice, mid-range volume-wise. “And how’s Christina and her little one?”
“Margarita. She’s… fine, Mr. Tony. Christine’s…” Julia’s laugh was surprisingly sharp. “Well, you know Christine.”
“Most popular bag girl we ever had.” Julia must have waited for the punchline. “And the worst.” Mr. Tony’s and Julia Cole’s laughs were several octaves apart; but perfectly synced, timing wise.
Julia gave me a look I read as meaning I was to go see Duncan without her.
Reaching under my apron and into my shirt pocket for the pack of Marlboros and the Zippo lighter, I headed for the alcove. I struck the wheel on the lighter at the point where the windows stopped. It flared up. Duncan noticed. I lit up as if this was normal. Duncan picked up Julia Cole’s bag, backed through the right-hand glass door and held it in the open position, allowing me just enough room to pass. I exhaled at precisely that moment.
Dick move.
Duncan Burgess took a roll of photo paper out of the top of Julia Cole’s bag. He removed the rubber band, put it around his left wrist, unrolled and handed the stack to me. He watched me as I went through the first three pages.
“Contact prints,” he said. “Julie gets them… Palomar. College credits.” I nodded. Duncan looked at the cigarette in my right hand. He stuck out two fingers on his right hand. I allowed him to take the cigarette. I took the stack of photos. “Teacher likes her. Probably a pervert. Photographers. They all are. But… free developing.” Duncan took a drag, blew the smoke just to my left. “Julie takes… a lot of photos.”
Unlike the first three pages, 35-millimeter black and white images from sections of exposed negatives, the fourth, fifth, and sixth pages were almost full-page images of Chulo, in his rough and dirty evangelizing robe, and another man, taller, in a robe, barefoot, his left arm in a sling, leaning to his right on a single crutch. Jumper. The mid-section of the Jesus Saves Bus was behind Chulo and Jumper. The image of Jesus was between them.
I looked at the second three pages, shuffled the first three in behind them, and studied each of the larger images. “Chulo is smoking,” Duncan said, moving to my right side. I looked at my cigarette between the fingers of Duncan’s left hand. He took another drag. “Next photo…”
In the next photo, Jumper’s crutch was falling away as his right hand was knocking the cigarette out of Chulo’s mouth. “Julie said they’d been arguing. Like, quietly. Check out the third enlargement. See? She zoomed in. Jumper is pulling something from a pocket of his robe, handing it to Chulo.” Duncan put his index finger on the photo. “There. See?”
Duncan took my cigarette out of his mouth and offered to put it in mine. I declined, possibly backing away too quickly. Duncan blew smoke between me and the photo. Dick move. Payback.
“You can’t see it.” It was Julia Cole. She had come out the entrance door and was looking over Duncan’s shoulder and directly at me. I looked away from the photo and looked directly at her. “They weren’t arguing,” she said. “Not exactly. Chulo was… he was crying.” I blinked. Julia Cole blinked.
Chulo, in the last photo, was smiling. And crying. Jumper was smiling. I let go of the papers with my right hand, allowing them to roll up against my thumb.
“Actually, Julia Cole, I think they both were… crying.”
Julia Cole smiled. I lost focus on Duncan Burgess, directly in front of me, and everything else. “I do think so,” she said. “You’re… right.”
I would like to believe, and still do believe, that Julia and I froze for the same number of seconds. Her eyes were alive, studying mine, and mine, hers.
“Hey, Junior…” Duncan came back into focus. “You gonna help or not?”
“Not.”
I stepped back, handed the roll of photos to Julia. Duncan stuffed the cigarette butt in among many others in the waist-high concrete pipe ashtray at the side of the entrance door. I tapped my watch. “There’s nothing I can do, and… and my break’s over.”
Julia and Duncan exchanged looks. If Duncan looked angry or frustrated, Julia looked disappointed. She held the roll of photos upright, spun it in little circles, looking past it. At me. Disappointed, angry, resolved; then neutral, then a ‘Fuck you, then,’ Julia Cold look.
Duncan moved between Julia and me. He removed the rubber band from his wrist and double wrapped it around the roll of photos, giving Julia Cole a ‘told you so’ look. He turned toward me; moving his face closer, too close, to mine. I didn’t step back. I was trained not to. Duncan made a growling sound as he pushed past me and though the exit door.
Mr. Tony met Duncan ten steps in. Tony gave him the same side hug he had undoubtedly given Julia. “How’s your dad, Yo Yo?”
“No one calls me that, anymore, Mr. Tony, but… he’s, um, better.”
“You’re excited for prom and graduation and all that, I expect.”
“Can’t wait.” Disingenuous.
Mr. Tony slapped Duncan on the back. “Oh, come on, Duncan!”
Julia Cole stepped closer to me to allow a couple, tourists, possibly newlyweds, with matching sunburns, to keep holding hands as they entered the store. She looked past them and at Mr. Tony and Duncan and the couple. The door closed.
“So, Miss Cole, you’re… angry?”
“I had no… expectations. It was Duncan.”
“Oh? But… why does… Duncan… care so much?”
“He has his reasons.”
“You don’t ask.”
Julia Cole turned toward me. Her expression said, “I don’t need to” before she did.
I wanted to keep Julia Cole talking. I wanted her that close to me, close enough that the only thing in my field of vision was her. I was more aware than usual of my pauses, the lapses, the seconds I spent replaying previous seconds, trying to remember, trying to catalog exactly what she said, and how she looked, exactly, when she said it.
“I had one,” I said. “Yo-yo. Duncan.” Pause. “Sparkly.”
“We all did. Phase.” Short pause. “Sparkly? Yours?”
“Mine? Yeah. Sparkly.” Pause. “Walk… walk the dog.”
“Basic.” Pause. “Good trick. Easy.”
“Yes. The, um, trick… the one I liked… most, was…” I moved my hand up and down a few times, palm down, then flipped it over, pantomimed throwing the yo-yo over my fingers, then flipping my hand back over. “It’s like… switching stance.”
Julia Cole was staring. I was a fool. Ridiculous. She smiled. Politely. “It… is.” She held the smile longer than I could comfortably handle. She was studying me. I looked away, politely, allowing her time to drop the smile and continue the studying. “What do… you think?”
I pointed at the roll of photos. “Chulo smokes. I believe Jumper… maybe he doesn’t. Or… he quit.” I pulled out my father’s lighter. “Zippo. That’s… a guess.”
“Zippo?”
“Marine Corps logo. Maybe, if you enlarge it, the image, more…”
“I will.” Julia looked appreciative in the moment before she looked past me and into the store. I took the opportunity to look at her. When she seemed to sense this, I looked where she was looking.
Duncan and Mr. Tony had moved just beyond the first counter. Duncan pulled folded bills from an inside pocket of his windbreaker. “On account,” he said. Mr. Tony took the cash, pulled out several account cards from the rack, top left box, A-B. He shuffled through them, set one aside, took his pen out of his shirt pocket, wrote something on the card and showed the card to Duncan. He looked past Duncan at Julia Cole and me. I looked away. None of my business. She looked away and toward my car at the far end of the lot, then back at me.
That may have been that lapse, the pause that caused Julia Cole to speak. “I have… other photos. Negatives. I could… How late do you work?”
I refocused on Julia. “Today?”
She didn’t wait through the guaranteed pause. “We saw all the red lights, Swamis, from my, my mom’s house. Cops. Fire engines. We went down. It was… you don’t get it, do you, Junior? That… night. After…”
I didn’t get it. Julia Cole looked frustrated, even irritated.
“We saw it. Saw… it. It. Chulo. Portia. Gingerbread Fred was still there. Everything. It was… I just thought… maybe… you… might…”
I wasn’t keeping up. There was something in my mental image file, the view from Swamis and up the hill. It was a photo in an old Surfer magazine. In color. Maybe it was a cover photo. “From my mom’s house” she had said. It would have to be…
“What is… wrong with you?”
Julia Cole moved a hand over her mouth the second after she asked that question. All I could see was the back of her hand and her eyes. All I could hear were the words. “What is… wrong with you? What… is… wrong… with you?”
Three seconds, ten, I have no idea how long I was staring at Julia Cole. She was backing away and into the parking lot. I backed into the edge of the exit door. I took my eyes off Julia Cole, spun around, and pulled it open. Duncan and Mr. Tony both looked in my direction. In twenty-one steps I was even with the counter, with them. I stopped, pivoted, ninety degrees right. “Duncan Burgess, do you know Jesus?”
I pivoted back. I walked to Doris’s counter, everything slightly out of focus, unaware she was speaking. I grabbed a bundle of San Elijo Grocery paper bags, ripped off the paper ribbon that held them together, stuffed as many as I could into a shelf at Doris’s knee.
Doris put a hand, flat, on my chest. “So, Joey, I figured, I don’t have a man at home… currently; why not let my hair… down?”
I looked at Doris, tried to smile. I looked to my right. Duncan was gone. Mrs. Tony was at her husband’s register. Mr. Tony slid the account card and Duncan’s cash toward her. “Two-fifty-five on Burgess.” Mrs. Tony opened the register, took the bills from her husband, and began counting them. Mr. Tony looked at me. Mrs. Tony looked at him. Both looked at me before I could turn back toward Doris. What was wrong with me?
Doris looked at Mr. and Mrs. Tony. Her expression was hopeful. That’s what Julia’s expression was. Had been. Hopeful. Optimistic. Temporarily.
“What is wrong with me,” I whispered.
“Doris; you look… gorgeous.” Mr. Tony’s body language, the raising of his shoulders, suggested he was suddenly aware the compliment had been in his loud voice. He didn’t turn toward his wife for her reaction. He walked toward the front windows.
Mrs. Tony, walking toward Doris and me with the draw from the other register stuffed in one of the pockets of her faded green apron, stopped and looked at her cashier. She looked over at her husband, a shadow in the glare, as he used the pulley to lower the first of the window shades all the way down. Mrs. Tony touched her own hair, let out an only slightly exaggerated sigh, and pointed at me. “Julie. Beautiful girl, huh Jody.” I couldn’t respond. “The money; ask your mother. Huh?”
It was nearly sunset when I walked across the parking lot. 6:32. Daylight savings time had kicked in and the sun would set, officially, at 7:13. The tourists and inlanders and visitors and customers were all headed elsewhere. The wind was, if anything, slightly offshore. There was time to catch a few waves if I made a quick decision and went somewhere close.
Something was stuck, face up under the driver’s side window wiper. It was a flyer for an Australian surf movie. “Evolution.” There was one on the bulletin board on the wall between the entrance alcove and the window wall. Or there had been one. Friday, April 4, Hoover High School, seven pm. Saturday, April 5, San Dieguito High.
There was something under the flyer. More pages. Seven. Photo paper. Stiff. Slight curl. Slightly damp. I looked at the images as if they were flash cards, moving each to the back of the deck, going through them again and again. The photos were so dark that the artificial light of camera flash and flashlights and headlights burned out any details: Firefighters and cops, Dickson and Wendall; a woman in a robe holding back Portia. One photo showed the unmistakable anguish on Portia’s face. Another was of someone’s body, burned, against the wall. In another, the body was being covered with something more like a tarp than a sheet. In the last photo, Gingerbread Fred was on his knees, looking up. Up.
“Tear in the shroud, “I said.
I couldn’t look at any of these images for more than the time it took to move to the next photo. I couldn’t allow any of these images into my memory, a file too easily pulled. Too late. It was imprinted, permanently. I could describe each of the photos now in more detail than the actual photographs showed.
That was what Julia Cole had seen, witnessed, photographed. I tried to look again at each of the enlargements. It didn’t work. All I wanted to see, or imagine, were Julia’s expressions when she was trying to tell me about that night; how sincere, raw, honest she looked; how beautiful. All I wanted to do was collapse.
I didn’t. I went through my ring of keys, separated the one for the Falcon, I rolled up the pages. There was a note on the back of the flyer: “Portia said you are your father’s son, and you might help. I have more…” Out of room, the words went sideways. “…waiting… for you.”
I looked around the lot. Julia Cole wasn’t there. Of course, she wasn’t.
…
Vulcan Avenue runs parallel to Highway 101 and the railroad tracks, and in front of the San Elijo Grocery. There were several cross streets. I took one, went up two blocks, turned left. I looked at the houses, looked toward the water. I went up another block, headed south again. I stopped at the middle of three empty lots, the place where the best view would be. Optimal view. Surfer magazine view. Swamis Point.
Two houses farther south, on the uphill side of the street, a VW mini-bus, grey-green, white top, was parked in front of a house. “Julia’s mom’s house,” I said. Partially hidden by the VW and some shrubs, the back of the Jesus Saves bus was parked in the driveway. “Portia said you are your father’s son, and you might help.” I repeated the phrase. “Waiting… for you.” Me.
A light went on inside the house, behind the sheer curtains. I drove on. I pulled a u turn at the end of the block, coasted by again before I dropped back down to Vulcan and turned right. When I got to D street, I turned left. The Surfboards Hawaii shop was on my right. There were no cars on the block, either side. Several storefront businesses were on my left. David Cole C.P.A. was one of them. No lights. I got to 101 and turned right.
At Tamarack, parked on the bluff, lights to the south to lit the underside of the clouds. There were black lines on a dark ocean in front, breaking from a peak, gray soup to a gray beach. The rights looked better than the lefts. Still, I was replaying phrases. “You are your father’s son.” Portia. “What’s wrong with you?” Julia. “Waiting for you.” I reread the note that had been on the windshield by the light of my father’s flashlight. I straightened the photos, without looking at them, and placed them in a yellow notebook and slid that into a PeeChee.
I stayed on 101 until it curved away from the beach. Carlsbad Liquor was on my right, still open. Baadal Singh’s truck was parked nearby. “Gauloises bleus,” I said, out loud. “Picasso smokes these.” I considered stopping in, possibly buying a pack. I didn’t.
“Swamis” and all revisions are copyright protected, all rights reserved by the author, Erwin A. Dence, Jr, Thanks for respecting this, and for reading,
Each chapter of my novel corresponds to a single day. THIS is a big day. It isn’t exactly like I’m bogged down here, it is more that I continue to tighten up the plot and the character development. So, Joey is checking out Swamis pre-dawn on a Saturday, almost four days after Chulo was burned to death along the wall of the Self Realization Fellowship compound. He h as already had a connnection with Baadal Singh, a witness to the murder, and possibly a suspect. It’s still early, and with a south wind blowing, the lot is starting to fill up. It’s Swamis… locals and non-locals, and Joey has the optimum parking spot.
CHAPTER TWELVE- PART TWO- SATURDAY, MARCH 29, 1969
It was morning rather than dawn, The south wind still blowing. The Swamis parking lot was filling up. I was standing in the middle of the lot, in the middle of the lane between the middle row of spaces and the single row along the grass. I wasn’t sure how long I had been there, rerunning what I had heard and seen, trying to focus on, to memorize the most important images and words.
Too confusing. If Chulo had been a snitch, a narc, then…. Then what? An image of my father explaining why he was talking to a shady looking guy outside the Vista Foster Freeze broke into my mind. “We need sources,” he said, “Like dictionaries, encyclopedias. Assets.”
If Chulo had been a snitch, a narc, an asset, a source, he was Langdon’s. Had to be.
My fault. Of course, it was. I couldn’t help visualizing the Jesus Saves bus in my rearview mirror, front right tire in the ditch. Langdon had come onto the scene. He had found something.
Of course.
I looked past the latest car to arrive in the lot and toward the bluff. Julia Cole was behind the stack of surfboards stacked on the Mercedes, her telephoto lens between them and the roof. She was taking photos. Of me.
Maybe not. I turned toward the highway. Baadal Singh was gone. His truck was gone. I turned back toward Julia Cole. She waited a moment before pulling her camera back, but kept looking at me. Maybe not. A car was almost even with me, way too close. There were three boards on the rack, two on the driver’s side, one on the passenger side.
It was Rincon Ronny’s car, a late fifties Morris Minor, rather dinged up, the once dark blue paint faded rather unevenly. Rincon Ronny was driving, Monica in the front seat, not quite up against him. Duncan Burgess, in the back seat, flipped me off as the car passed. I nodded and walked toward the Falcon. Duncan turned his body enough to look through the car’s back window. When he saw I was watching him, he flipped me off again, bouncing his middle finger on the window until the Morris Minor parked in the last spot available on the bluff.
Duncan was definitely smiling. I probably was.
Petey Blodgett’s dawn patrol crew members, four boys and Julia Cole, were all gathered at the center of the bluff, in front of the Falcon, an empty Dodge Dart, and the Mercedes. Most of the kids were talking at the same time. The four boys were half-sitting on the hood of my car. Seeing me approaching, two kids slid fully onto my car’s hood. The other two moved to the front of the Dodge. One of them slid a bar of wax across the windshield, just once, before Julia Cole grabbed his wrist. He dropped the wax, then pushed it, hard, with his free hand, across and off the hood.
Julia Cole shook her head, lifted her heavy gray canvas bag from the Falcon’s hood, set it on the pavement, and turned to greet her three friends walking toward her from Ronny’s car.
The surfers from the Dodge Dart, obvious out of towners, had made the decision to go for waves the obvious locals had passed on. Other non-locals were in small groups along the bluff or hanging around their own cars in the middle rows. Second tier surfers, they couldn’t just join in with the locals, and they wouldn’t be invited to.
Nor would I. I unlocked the rear door, rolled down the window, and dropped the tailgate. I leaned into the back of the Falcon, moved my new surfboard to one side and crawled forward over towels and trunks to the back of the front seat. I stretched my body and my arm toward a stack of folders and notebooks on the dashboard. The two boys on the Falcon’s hood moved their faces closer to the windshield. Ronny, Monica, and Duncan looked past them and at me.
If any of them looked amused, I couldn’t tell. “casual” I whispered as I pulled up a red notebook, spiral bound, a pencil in the wires. I started to pull myself back, my left hand on the steering wheel, notebook in my right hand. I heard a click from outside the driver’s side window. Click.
Julia Cole pulled back and lowered the camera. She did look somewhat amused. “Casual,” she said. I mouthed the word. She blinked. I blinked. I would remember her quick smile, quickly dropped, another expression to add to my Julia Cole file.
As I back crawled out of the falcon, the surfers in all the little groups resumed talking. “Fucking south wind,” one of the current members of Petey’s dawn patrol group said, holding back a bit on the ‘fucking.’ Practicing. He was probably about my brother Freddy’s age. Eighth grader. “Fucking wrecking it,” he added, emphasis on the ‘ing’ part. Better. “Fucking!”
“Fucking,” I whispered, equal emphasis on both syllables.
…
Leaning over the tailgate, writing down notes from my discussion with Baadal Singh, trying not to have my thoughts interrupted by another image of Julia Cole, I became aware of comments coming from several speakers in several directions. “Chulo.” “And right here. Swamis.” “Which one was Chulo?” “Limpin’ Jesus.” “Oh, with the big cross thingy around his neck.” “Good surfer, though.” “Barbecued, I heard.” “Shut up!” “Guess he’ll get to know Jesus.” “God!” “What about his woman?” “Portia. What about her?” “Cops know who did it?”
There was a pause in the conversations. I didn’t look around immediately.
“You know Jumper Hayes was busted, few years ago, along with Chulo.” It was someone next to me, standing on the driver’s side of my car. It was Duncan. He was talking over rather than to me. I didn’t look up. He continued. “This asshole Deputy crippled Chulo. They sent him to some work camp in East County.”
“And Jumper Hayes, he ditched out.” This voice came from the passenger side of the Falcon. “They’re not going to bust the son of a big-time flower grower and landowner. Not around here.” It was Rincon Ronny. He was looking at me. He looked away when I looked back.
“No way,” some second-tier surfer said. “I heard Jumper ran off to Canada.”
“San Francisco,” another voice said. “Mexico,” yet another voice added, enough emphasis on the word to make almost anyone believe it was based on fact. “Mainland, not Baja.” More specific. More believable.
“Back off, fucker!” It was Duncan’s voice, directed at one or all the second-tier guys. “Mexico? Really? He was in fucking Vietnam, fucker.” Practiced. Proper emphasis. Impressive,
The “Mainland, not Baja” guy flashed a peace sign and mouthed, “Peace, Brother.”
Duncan flashed his own peace sign, flipped his hand around and lowered his pointer finger. “You don’t know shit. Brother.”
I twisted around and sat on the tailgate. I looked at Duncan, and then Ronny. Both moved together and in front of me. I stuck the pencil back in the spiral binding and closed the red notebook. I started counting the seconds, silently, as I looked at each of the surfers. Evidently my lips moved. Both Duncan and Ronny, after I got to ‘four,’ counted with me. When I got to ten, I said, “Yeah. Marines. Fucking… Vietnam.”
“He was here,” Duncan said, leaning down and toward me. “Jumper.”
Rincon Ronny grabbed the top frame for the back window and pulled himself up an into a kneeling position on the tailgate to my left. “Yeah. Here. Swamis. He and Chulo. Julie got some pictures.”
“Julia Cole?”
Duncan half spit out something like, “Jeez,” before he answered. “Yeah, Julie. Julia Cole.” He spoke loudly, clearly, slowly. Sarcastically. “Jumper. Here, Swamis; the day before. Tuesday.” Duncan sat down to my right. He looked past me, to Ronny. “Tuesday, right?”
“Think so,” Ronny said, pulling himself into a standing position on my tailgate “Yeah, Tuesday. He was talking with Chulo.”
“Tuesday would be the day of,” I said, stepping off the tailgate. “Maybe it was… Monday?”
“No, it was Tuesday,” Duncan said. “Day of.”
“He was all bandaged up,” Ronny said; “Didn’t look too good, I guess, according to Gingerbread Fred.” Ronny pulled Duncan up and next to him and added, obviously for my benefit; “Fred. He comes here, like, every evening. For the… sunsets.”
“Late afternoon, then? Monday.”
Duncan and Ronny both looked toward the water. Ronny spoke without looking around. “After you and your mom left.”
I may have chuckled. More likely I giggled. “What was Jumper… how’d he get… here?”
There was no response. I was thinking, looking between Ronny and Duncan. Staring. I did see them. I didn’t see Julia Cole until she was next to me, looking at me. Not unkindly.
It must have been ten seconds before Duncan, then Ronny, turned toward me. “I told you, Julie,” Duncan said, “Useless.” Ronny jumped down, Monica moved between him and Julia. Duncan jumped down and directly in front of me. “Freak,” he said, crossing his eyes.
“You mean retard, don’t you?” I smiled. Duncan moved back and sat on the tailgate.
Julia Cole stepped closer, put a hand on Duncan’s shoulder. “Pickup. Same one Jumper had… before.” I looked from Duncan to Julia. “I have… photos, but… why’d you ask… that?”
“Curious, Miss Cole. Or, really, no reason.”
Monica moved closer to me. “Portia told me Chulo was returning the flower van. Jumper was supposed to give him a ride back.”
“Never made it,” Julia said, “My dad said the van was over at… not Mrs. Tony’s, the market off of Vulcan. Door was open.” She put her right hand on Duncan’s shoulder. “We think…”
Duncan pushed Julia’s hand off his shoulder, pushed himself off the tailgate, moved forward, crowding Monica and Julia back. He turned toward me. “Fuck you, Junior. Yours and Jumper’s dads; old friends. You do know that; don’t you?”
I didn’t answer.
Duncan turned toward Ronny. “Junior and I… I’m a junior, too. We were born the same day, Balboa. Just before our fathers took off for Korea.”
Ronny stepped off the tailgate. “Duncan. Really?”
“Yeah, Ronny, I’m three hours older than… DeFreines.” Duncan looked from Ronny to me. “His dad came back a hero, mine came back… fucked up. Yeah. But we were all… poor.”
Duncan was looking at Ronny. I was looking at Duncan. “When Joe DeFreines got on with the County, he moved them all up to Frogbutt.” Duncan laughed. “Maybe he thought it was safer.” Duncan turned toward me. “Then some wife beater crashes into the patrol car. Joe fuckin’ shoots him. Meanwhile, Junior there, flying around in the car, gets all…”
I smiled at Duncan, then shared the same smile with Ronny, then Monica, then Julia Cole. Her expression, as blank as the other’s, revealed something close to sympathy.
“Was Jumper in… was he driving the Cadillac?”
“No,” Monica said, “Pickup.” We all looked at Monica. “Same one he always drove.”
“I have the photos,” Julia Cole said.
I visualized Jumper in this very parking lot, 1966. He was leaning on the hood of a Ford pickup from the late 1940s, black paint waxed and shining, exposed metal on the hood waxed and shining, a nine-six Hobie balanced, sideways, across the roof. Jumper was laughing, juggling three avocados, two other, older, surfers and two high school age girls, all entranced, watching him. He held one avocado out toward me as I walked past, catching one, allowing the third one to smash to the asphalt. More laughter.
“Thank you,” I said, and walked to the front of the Falcon. “Jumper wasn’t… here.”
The locals had left. I walked to the bluff. There were five surfer at the peak, one dropping into a choppy peak, another dropping in on him. I walked past the Falcon, took two steps into the traffic lane. Ronny and Duncan were at the Morris Minor, talking. In the other direction, toward the stairs, Julia Cole was standing next to Monica and in front of Petey’s Mercedes. Julia had her bag on the hood and was holding the body of her camera with both hands, the telephoto lens pointed down. She was looking at me. Neutral expression. Monica was looking at her, shaking her head.
I had edited out everything but Julia Cole.
Duncan and then Ronny came from behind me. Duncan, on my right, his left hand in front of my face, waved Julia over. She shook her head. Duncan, stepping around and in front of me, said, “Thousand-yard stare. I’m familiar.”
“I’m sorry.”
There was a chuckle from Ronny, cut short, I guessed, by a quick glance from Duncan. “You. Junior,” Duncan said, close to my ear, “I don’t get you.” I shook my shoulders. I thought the gesture would be taken as ‘nothing to get.’ “You asked about… Jumper, his truck.”
Ronny and Duncan both moved in front of me, blocking my view toward Petey’s Mercedes. I looked from one to the other. Ronny spoke first. “Julie doesn’t know. Monica, she isn’t involved.”
“You’re… protecting. You love Monica?”
Ronny spun around, instantly, yelling “Monica” as he did. “I love you… Monica!”
There were, just as instantly, loud reactions from the various parking lot groups and individuals. Mostly positive. Petey Blodgett raised a fist. Monica put a hand over her face. Julia Cole put a hand on her friend’s shoulder, smiled, kept her eyes on Ronny and Duncan and me.
I exhaled, looked at Duncan for a second. He half-smiled and shook his head. “You don’t know shit, do you?” I copied his smile, reached into my windbreaker pocket for my cigarettes. Duncan put his right hand over mine and pushed, slightly. “The truck? You were talking to that Simon guy. He was there, here, did he see…?”
Duncan pulled his hand back. I pulled my hand out of the pocket and closed my eyes. “Freak!” It was a whisper, but intense, coupled with a shove backward.
“Probably,” I said, catching my balance, opening my eyes. “So, please, kindly, don’t tell me shit I don’t want to know.” Now I did pull out my cigarettes, took one out, put it in my mouth. “Don’t tell me shit, don’t ask me… shit. Why would you?” I half-turned, put my hand on my father’s lighter in my pants pocket.
“We heard you’re… brainy.”
“Closer to freak, Rincon Ronny.” I kept my hand over the Sheriff’s Office logo as I lit up. “Wait.” I stepped forward, took the cigarette out of my mouth, waved it in a big loop, and closed my eyes. “I’m imagining two guys getting out of a pickup truck. They drag Chulo…out.”
Opening my eyes, I aimed the cigarette toward the entrance to the parking lot, watched Julia and Monica move to the far side of the Mercedes. I counted to five, out loud, turned, stepped back until both Ronny and Duncan were in my field of vision. “You know more than I do.” I did a pinching maneuver with my left hand, wiping my eyes. “I shouldn’t have told you that… even.”
“Look, Junior,” Ronny said, “cops have been coming around, talking about how maybe Chulo’s some sort of big deal drug… dealer, drug dealer. Like he deserved… you know.”
“Marijuana,” Duncan said. “Weed. You… familiar?”
“Not… intimately. Not… no, but that, um, diversion, yes, it seems like that is what cops would do. Langdon, maybe.”
“It wasn’t Chulo. He wasn’t… big time,” Ronny said.
“Langdon,” Duncan said. “You think, maybe…?”
I shook my head before I reran the question through my mind. “No. Wouldn’t… suit his… no.” I took another few seconds, shook my head another two times, back and forth. “Thank you both, but… what if I’m a… narc?”
Both Ronny and Duncan laughed. Ronny laughed harder, but not for as long.
“And… I’m not a cop.”
“Not yet.”
“Not ever.”
Ronny followed Duncan’s eyes. I turned around. Petey Blodgett was walking along the bluff. “Hey,” he said, quite loudly, directed to the dawn patrol boys, to Monica and Julia, to Duncan and Ronny and me, and to the second and third tier surfers: “Kids. If you are involved… if you’re into illegal drugs, you’re hangin’ with criminals, and, as a bonus, you are a criminal yourself. Now…”
“Another fucking preacher” the guy who had insisted Jumper had been in Mexico said, instantly silenced with an elbow to the ribs from another second tier surfer.
Petey Blodgett held his right hand up as far as he could, brought it down, licked his finger, raised it again. Everyone shut up and looked at the oldest person in the Swamis parking lot. “South wind,” he said, “not letting up.” He looked at Ronny and Duncan and me.
“Not yet,” Ronny said.
“Not ever,” Duncan said, chuckling after he said it.
Copyrighted material. All rights reserved by the author, Erwin A. Dence, Jr. AND, thanks for reading.
In my attempt to cut and whittle and refine my manuscript, “Swamis,” into something, one, readable, and two, sellable (could have said marketable), I am eliminating this portion. Changes: Virginia (Ginny) Cole is now Julia (Julia), Erwin as a character (put in because some readers might believe Joey (aka Jody) is me, is gone. Out. I should (will) add that Trish did go to junior high in Oceanside with Barbi Barron and was a temporary member of Barbi’s unofficial Oceanside girls’ surf club before Trisha’s dad got transferred to the East Coast. I did see Barbi frequently at the Oceanside jetties and the pier when I was working at Buddy’s Sign Shop in (let’s call it) O’side. I did have a night class, public speaking, with Cheer Critchlow, Palomar Junior (now Community) College. He did, and I reminded him of this, at a high school contest at Moonlight Beach in 1968, in which he was a judge, eliminate real people Scott Sutton and Jeff Officer and me in our first (and only) heats. I never met Margo, did hear and read about her.
With those notes, the story is sort of (kind of) true (if fiction is sliced from real life).
CHAPTER 14- WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1969
For reference, this was a week and a day before my father’s death, four weeks before Chulo’s.
Ginny Cole was, to my seventeen-year-old self, perfect. There is no way my memory, in the fifty-plus years since, could have further enhanced that image, that belief. Perfect.
Some of the girls I had gone all through school with were great, and I could easily supply a list of those I’d had crushes on, but, yes, I’d gone all through school with most of them. There were, always, new girls; daughters of Marines stationed at Camp Pendleton, temporary duty, three years and gone. They came from or went to Twenty-nine Palms, Camp LeJeune, Barstow; occasionally one would come from Hawaii, Philadelphia, even overseas.
Fallbrook is on the east side of the triangle that is Camp Pendleton- Fallbrook, Oceanside, San Clemente. From kindergarten on there were sons and daughters of Civil Service workers, pharmacists and ranchers and irrigation contractors and teachers and real estate agents and builders. There were those whose fathers lived, during the week, in apartments in the vast smoggy sinfulness of Los Angeles.
If we were isolated, purposefully, there were always newcomers with stories of different places. Exotic, mysterious, sophisticated, up to date.
Ginny Cole was, in my mind, miles away from dusty Fallbrook. Mysterious, exotic, distant; and she surfed. Ginny would know what it means that someone surfed, and she would know the allure, more fiction, even fantasy, than reality, of surfing itself. There’s what surfing is, and what surfing suggests, what being a surfer says about a person- the aura around the reality. Perfect.
Ginny Cole was like the best photos from surfing magazines, like memories of my best rides. I could bring her image into my mind at will, or without willing it; images from the few times I’d been on the beach or in a parking area or in the water with her. Not with her; around her, near her. It wasn’t like she knew me; another teenage surfer, awkward out of the water, not yet skilled enough to be noticed in the water; but working on it; hoping to be a surfer who, when I took off on a wave, people would watch.
Teenager fantasy, of course, in the same way, playing pickup football, my friends would self-narrate: “Roger Staubach drops back… and the crowd goes wild!” There were always witnesses in my mind when I would skateboard; carving bottom turns and cutbacks, pulling up and into the curl, crouching, hands out, locked in, eighteen miles, straight, from the nearest saltwater.
Competing. Improving.
It was more than that Ginny was a girl in the lineup. She could surf, ride a wave with graceful, dancer-like moves, always close to the power. She would always be noticed.
I cannot honestly swear that it wasn’t that I wanted a surfer girl girlfriend the way a girl might want a football quarterback, a lead guitarist in a garage band; the way a guy might want a cheerleader or that girl who’s always just so nice. And so pretty.
Ginny wasn’t phony nice or made up pretty. She was just-out-of-the-water pretty; she was real; she was perfect. I saw it. I assumed everyone did.
If I did see Ginny as perfect, I did think winning her over would be difficult, challenging. There would be other suitors. I knew I was ridiculous, naïve; definitely, but I was competitive. I didn’t know her, couldn’t see more than my romanticized image of her. I did hope that if she shared that obsession with and addiction to surfing, she might understand me.
Still, also, and always, I knew I was ridiculous.
…
Virginia Cole wasn’t the only girl surfer in the North County; there were a few others: Barbie Barron, Margo Godfrey. I frequently saw Barbie in the water and in the parking lot at Oceanside’s shorter jetty, or over by the pier. Southside.
I once saw Margo with Cheer Critchlow at Swamis on a still-winter afternoon; uncrowded, big and blownout. Pretty scary. Yet they were just casually walking out, chatting, wading out on the fingers of rock, pushing through to the outside peak. Scott and Jeff and Erwin and I, our portable crowd; four inland cowboys, shoulder-hopped, choosing only the smaller waves on the inside, watching any time either Cheer or Margo would take off.
Coolness, casualness, some sort of self-confidence, some sense of comfort in one’s own skin. Things I lacked, things I appreciated, qualities I believed Virginia Cole had. Yes, I do realize how this makes me sound; exactly like a seventeen-year-old on the cusp, the very cusp of… everything.
MORE NOTES: I am also tightening the timeline for the story. I have to. One thing all the over-writing has given me, besides so many back-stories for characters I have to eliminate or cut back on, is the knowledge that there is at least one main and worthwhile story in “Swamis.” I will keep cutting back and hacking and going down the line until… yeah, until.
ALSO: I have changed some other names, partially because I have written words the real people didn’t say, put them in situations that are totally and completely fictional. My best surfing friends Ray and Phillip- sorry, you’re now Gary and Roger (names from childhood neighbors), Wally Blodgett, who drove kids around for dawn patrol, is now Petey (kept the Blodgett part). Sid (whose name I borrowed from a real surfer who was in a Surfboards Hawaii ad in mid-sixties, can’t remember his last name) is, so far, still Sid. I will let you know who else changed as the manuscript changes.
ALSO: Pretty shitty spring for waves on the Strait AND pretty shitty weather for painting houses. YES, it would seem that would give me more time for writing and drawing. So, maybe it’s not THAT shitty.
Good luck to all the real people and real surfers. Remember, this stuff is copywrite protected.
My novel, “Swamis,” keeps growing, keeps reaching past ‘novel’ to ‘epic novel’ length. I keep editing it, deleting stuff, then, tightening and polishing and making sure all the little moves are clear; it just keeps rolling past the 120k word zone, that fictional border that keeps a fictional story at a readable length.
Yeah, and as much as it hurts me to cut chapters, with where I am, so close to an ending that keeps evading me in the rewriting and editing, I definitely need to cut a couple of thousand words. SO, I keep moving them to the backup, shadow story, labeled “Sideslipping” on my laptop. I have published some of these on realsurfers, and, if I can swing the computer moves, I will stick some ‘edits,’ don’t want to call them ‘deleted scenes,’ here. MAYBE ‘deleted scenes’ is acceptable.
John Witzig photo, Australia, sixties; but it sure looks like Swamis
The following is actually two big outtakes. Remember, though there is a lot of actual people and real events included in “Swamis,” this is fiction. I transplanted my best surfing friends Phillip and Ray into situations that never happened, stuck myself in there, too, mostly so readers don’t think I am Jody. I am not. And, yeah, it’s a lot of words to delete; still not enough:
SIDESLIPPING- OUTTAKES FROM “SWAMIS”
Here we go:
Someone I met much later, a former member of the La Jolla/Windansea group, ten years or so older than me; old enough to have dived for abalone and lobster; old enough to have ridden a new balsa wood board, said, of surfing in his era, “We just sort of plowed.”
When I switched from surf mats to boards, in 1965, diving for and selling abalone and ‘bugs’ (lobster) for cash was already over; being a ‘true waterman’ was no longer a priority. This only added to the mystique. There was a certain reverence, respect, held by surfers of the “Everybody goes surfing, surfing U.S.A.” era for the members of that post-war generation; beatnik/hotrod/rock n’ roll/pre-Gidget/rebellious/outsider/loner surfers plowing empty waves.
That is, for those (of us) who actually gave a shit.
Tamarack was obvious; one peak in front of the bathrooms on the bluff, a bit of a channel; a parking lot at beach level. Good place to learn; sit on the shoulder; wait, watch, study; move toward the peak; a bit closer with each session. Get yelled at; get threatened; learn.
Eventually, if you wanted to improve, you would have to challenge yourself to ride bigger waves, beachbreaks with no channel, tough paddle outs. You would have to learn to hold tightly to the board’s rails, your arms loose enough to move with the violence of a breaking wave. If you wanted to surf the best waves, the set waves, even at Tamarack, you would eventually have to challenge a better-than-you surfer for a wave.
Chapter Eight- Thursday, March 20, 1969
Phillip and Ray lead the discussion about the murder and the excitement. There was a bigger than usual crowd at the big concrete planter boxes, designed with seating all around, trees and bark inside them. The break was called ‘nutrition,’ between second and third periods, and there were two trailers set up where nutritious snacks like orange-sickles and twinkies could be purchased.
Mostly Ray was talking, with Phillip adding key points, and Erwin looking out for any nearby teachers. Mark and Dipshit Dave and three of the Billys were there. I was in my usual spot, standing in the planter, observing, listening. Some of the local toughs and the cooler non-surfers were, unusually, part of this day’s group; listening; more friends of friends of Ray and Phil.
Two of the Rich Kids came over from the Senior Area. Mike, who had been my best friend up until third grade, jumped up next to me on the planter. “Missed the excitement, huh Joey?”
“Guess so, Mikey.”
I had already heard the story. My mind was somewhere else.
“Um, hey; Joey; you know…” I knew what Mike wanted to say. “We’re still; you know, friends.” He tapped me on the chest, tapped his own. “It’s just… your dad. Sorry.”
I tapped Mike on his chest, three times, held up a flat palm between us, went back to being somewhere else.
…
In our freshman year, the most crowd-centric of several big concrete planters became the pre-school, break, and lunchtime hangout for the entire crew of Freshmen surfers (as far as we knew); Erwin and Phillip and me. With the administrative building behind it, the gymnasium/cafeteria downhill, most of the classrooms to the west, and a bit of shade provided by the trees, it was a good place for observing while still laying low, avoiding… avoiding the other students; the older students in particular; but also any awkward interactions with girls and rich kids and new kids who had gone to other Junior high schools, Pauma Valley (East, toward Palomar Mountain) and Camp Pendleton (West) and Bonsall (Southwest) and Rainbow and Temecula (Northeast).
Temecula. In my senior year, 1969, there were four or five kids from there; three were siblings; two Hanks sisters, one brother. These days, if people don’t know where Fallbrook is, they have heard of Temecula. Big city. “Yeah, sure, Temecula; out on The 15.”
Putting “The” in front of the name of highways came later, along with traffic helicopters and rush hour destination forecasts. Later.
I-15 was Highway 395 then, and Temecula was, often, twisted into Tim-meh-cu’-la; not for any good reason except, perhaps, it was more inland, farther East than Fallbrook, Fallbrook, a town that self-identified (with signage) as “The Friendly Village;” but was nicknamed, in a self-deprecating way, Frog-butt.
Again, the planter was a good place to observe the daily run of mostly manufactured dramas, crushes and romances and slights and breakups, from. High ground. The planter offered a good view of the slatted, backless wooden benches where the sociable girls, this clique and that one, sat (one or two sitting, two or three standing), in groupings established through some mysterious sort of class/status jockeying, some girls able to move from one group to another; some not.
The planter was adjacent to the Senior Area, a sort of skewed rectangle of grass and concrete with covered picnic tables. This chunk of real estate was off limits and jealously guarded, mostly by guys in red Warriors letterman jackets, against intruders; though any senior who made any effort to appear cool (particularly when talking with underclass girls) would feel obligated to say the exclusivity of the senior area was no big deal to him.
Girls. Yeah, the planter was a good place to observe girls, some I’d known since kindergarten. Changing. So quickly. Heartbeat by heartbeat. Girls. So mysterious.
It’s not that I didn’t try to understand how a (comparatively) poor girl with a great personality could be in with three rich girls, at least one of whom was totally bitchy (I mean ‘slightly difficult, quite mean, and unreasonably demanding,’ but I would have meant and said bitchy back then). I figured it was because they knew each other before we figured out whose parents had more money than whose (ours).
…
Phillip was new when we were freshmen. He had come from Orange County; but he had done some surfing and his older sister was going out with a guy who was definitely one of Fallbrook High’s four or five real surfers. Phillip and I shared a couple of classes. I’d known Erwin since kindergarten. He was a Seventh Day Adventist, which was, he explained, “Kind of like Christians following Jewish traditions.” “Oh, so that’s why you’re not supposed to surf on Saturdays?” “It’s the Sabbath. Holy. Sundown Friday until sundown Saturday.” “Too bad.” “Well; we have gone to, um, Doheny; somewhere we wouldn’t run into anyone from, you know, here.” “Oh?” “Yeah; hypocrisy and guilt. If surfing isn’t, you know, actually sinful…” “Oh, but you know it is.” “Sure is.”
Erwin was one of the only Adventists at our school, and he started board surfing right after junior high; about the same time I did; when his sister, Suellen, beguiled by “Gidget” movies and an episode of “Dr. Kildare,” probably (no doubt, actually); got herself a used surfboard and let her brother borrow it.
Sinful, yes; addictive, undoubtedly. I once, early September, just after school started, saw Erwin sitting on his sister’s board, toward the channel of the lineup. Sunday. Tamarack. It wasn’t big, really, maybe a little bigger than had been average over the summer.
“You’re in the channel, Erwin.” “So?” Closer to the peak meant closer to the crowd. We challenged each other, had to go. We both paddled, over and out; and sat, anxiously, outside of where the waves were breaking, watching other surfers, from the back, take all the waves. When a set wave showed up, we were (accidently) in position. We both; heads down, paddled for it; Erwin prone, me on my knees. We both caught the wave. I pearled, straight down, my board popping back up dangerously close to other surfers scrambling out. Erwin rode the wave. Probably quite ungracefully, but, if only between him and I, he had bragging rights.
Bragging rights, but only between Erwin and me. Being ignored for a mediocre ride was far better than being noticed, called-out as a kook, told by three surfers, only one of them older than I was, to go surf somewhere else, go practice my knee-paddling in the nearby Carlsbad Slough.
I never did. I persisted. I got better. I had significant surf bumps by the time I started riding boards that took knee-paddling out of the equation.
Sometimes I, or Phillip and I, would go (on a Sunday) with Erwin’s mom and his many siblings; sometimes Phillip (on a Saturday) or both of them (on a Sunday, after school, or on a holiday) would go with Freddy and me and my mom. Always to Tamarack. Lower parking lot. Freddy never surfed a board. Surf mat; the real kind, hard, nipple-ripping canvas. Sometimes Freddy and I would get dropped-off, try to fit into the crowd, ease close to someone else’s fire when our mom’s shopping took longer than the time we could manage to stay in the water.
…
Ray and some of the other guys our age didn’t start surfing until the summer before our sophomore year, so Phillip and Erwin and I were ahead of them, better than them. Many of our contemporaries at least tried it. Anyone newer to surfing than you were was a kook and/or gremmie. Surfing had its own dress code and, more importantly, a fairly strict behavioral standard. A code I thought, at the time. It was fine to get all jazzed up among other surfers, going to or from the beach, but not cool to kook out among non-surfers.
Even in the proper surf gear, Phillip and Ray, both blondes, looked more like what TV and movies said surfers should look like (unless you were foolish enough to believe Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon were anything even close to real- real surfers knew the extras, the background guys, Miki Dora especially, and Mickey Munoz, were the real surfers). Erwin and I, dark haired; even when dressed in the requisite surf garb of the time, weren’t immediately recognized as surfers, weren’t immediately given whatever prestige we thought surfers received.
Or we were, and the prestige wasn’t what we thought it might be.
By the time we were seniors, most of the other Fallbrook surfers our age had dropped off; surfing was less important than whatever they were doing; though they still looked like surfers and always asked when I’d gone last; always said we’d have to go, together, some time.
Some time. We still rarely hung out in the Senior Area. The planters.
We all seemed to have cars; hand-me-downs from parents or older siblings off somewhere new. We could go surfing alone. Phillip and Ray had girlfriends, on and off. Even Erwin had a girlfriend, Trish; not an Adventist. Separate lives. Separate adventures. Romances. Drama. Sometimes we’d still surf together; usually not.
The stories of those adventures connected us. Loosely, probably.
I studied, I surfed. But, at nutrition and at lunch, pretending not to notice the swirl of so many stories around me, this concrete planter box was my social scene.
I probably should start with the color version of the Ginny Cole illustration for “Swamis” before I get into anything remotely political. I am making progress on the novel; with at least one new character and so much concentration on how Jody’s father, Joseph DeFreines, Sr. died that I may have to severely cut back on the drama and adventure involved in the killings of Chulo and Gingerbread Fred.
Sequel? Not yet. Trish asked me if I wanted the drawing to be sort of mystical. Yeah, definitely; reflecting the time, 1969, and, more specifically, how a young person felt about the time, the place, life, love, surf, everything.
Fictional Ginny Cole on a mystical ride
I’m not actually through doing satirical political drawings. There is just too much material out there. For example, Ivanka Trump leading a public relations effort to encourage desperate and out of work folks to just ‘find something new.’ Yeah, like, um, with jobs at a premium and Republicans claiming the unemployed are just living it up on all the extra money; maybe what folks need is a new daddy. Works for her. Cake, yeah; let them eat cake; oh, and, because the owner of this outfit said nice things about her daddy; eat lots of Goya beans.
AND, I would like to do a drawing of Tucker Carlson, whose lawyers went to court recently to defend his right to tell lies; or, put in Fox-speak, Tuck-man is under no obligation to tell the truth. It’s not like he’s a real journalist. I would add, perhaps, a little sign that says, “Truth don’t matter; Ratings matter.” Yeah, it should be Truth ‘doesn’t’ matter; thanks for catching that.
If you haven’t checked out realsurfers in a while, I’m posting pages from the manuscript in a reverse order. There are some non-“Swamis” posts between this and the next parts, the plan being, that, when I get back to the beginning, one can read them in order, with, again, the interruptions. Much like real life, spurts and moments and interruptions. I have been continuing to re-re-re-edit the manuscript and have recently been moving chunks around in order to make it less confusing. This doesn’t mean that the fictitious writer of the fake memoir, Joseph Itsushi (Jody) DeFreines, Junior, doesn’t take a probably-annoying number of narrative side trips, despite my attempts to control him. OKAY, we just jump in about here and…
I moved closer to the screen. I was pretty sure I saw Ginny Cole in with a couple of the San Dieguito High School crowd, surfers, but the pan of the crowd passed too quickly. No rewind.
“Ginny,” I said. “Ginny Cole,” I whispered. Ginny.
No, I had my own rewind. Words. Images. Blink. Remember.
“And now, the weather…”
PART TWO
SATURDAY, MARCH 15, 1969- THE OPTIMUM VIEW
-Pre-dawn Swamis. South wind. Great parking spot. Checked out murder scene. All cleaned up. Carlsbad Liquor matches. Clue? Wally’s crew there. Ginny Cole. Rousted by Dickson and Wendall. Found pistol. Surfed 1-2 ft Swamis beachbreak w/Ray & Phil. Fallbrook house sold. Profit. Escrow.
The damaged section of the wall at the Self Realization Fellowship was back to white when I next went to Swamis, against my mother’s warnings, two days after Chulo’s murder. It was a Saturday. Weekend. Barely light. I got there early enough to park the dust bowl tan 1964 Falcon station wagon in the choicest spot; a little toward the stairs, but front row, and offering the optimum view of the lineup. It was the same car my Mom had used to drive us to swimming lessons and church and Doctor visits, and to the beach; surf mats and Styrofoam surfies and whining Freddy, maybe an annoying friend of his; the factory installed (optional upgrade) roof racks now pretty much rusted in place.
A predicted swell (this gleaned from other surfers and pressure charts in the Marine Weather section of the newspaper) hadn’t materialized and a south wind was blowing. Cars with surfboards were passing each other up and down 101. Surfers were hanging out in parking lots and on bluffs and beaches, talking surf, watching the few surfers bobbing in the side chop. Maybe it would clean up, maybe it would actually get bigger.
So, I would wait. Waiting is as important a part of surfing as trying to be in the water before the best conditions hit. My shift, at my new, weekend-only (at that time) didn’t start until ten-thirty; about the time the onshores typically get going. Different with south wind. Perfect. Maybe. I could wait. I had my notebook, college-ruled; I had the probably stolen (not by me) four and eight track tape player under the passenger’s side of the seat; and I could do some studying.
Read, recite, memorize. Study.
I really wanted to sneak over to the crime scene, the thick, high, stucco-finished walls, gold flower bulbs perched above them. There was (and is) a wrought-iron gate in the higher, arched entrance, also topped with the flower (though it could as easily be a flame, not dissimilar to the top of the statue of liberty). This is not the actual entrance to the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) compound, a place where people go seeking enlightenment, a realization of the true self.
THE OUTSIDE THE WALL GUY
I did walk over. Had to. I expected more. I expected some explanation. There was a man by the wall, wheel-barrowing soil from a pile near the highway to the wall. I had seen him before. I have already mentioned him. Dark skinned. East Indian I presumed. I also presumed him to be the outside-the-wall SRF gardener. He was dressed in a long-sleeved shirt, white, with faded blue workman’s pants, rubber boots, and heavy leather gloves. Most of his face (and I knew he had a beard) was covered in what appeared to be an overlarge (plain cloth) bandana, a standard bandana (they came in red and blue- still do) around his nose and mouth, and a tropical straw hat (quite different from the cowboy style Mexican farmers and landscape workers preferred). He dropped the new soil around newly transplanted, but full-sized plants.
There was no explanation, no evidence that something horrific had occurred. The new paint blended perfectly. The plants looked… it all looked the same as it always had; as it did even in the late 1950s. Exactly the same. Perfect.
If I blinked, I thought, it might be like taking a picture. I might remember details. I might remember better.
Blink.
NOW ANALYZE
“What do you see?” This is what my father would always ask me. I would know it was coming; any time he was around, anywhere. It’s the first thing I remember him saying to me. I always tried to be ready, tried to see everything, determine what it meant. I was never ready; never saw enough.
But, and maybe it’s a good thing, my father would point out the things I had missed; clues; someone’s expressions that were evasive, someone’s words that were lies, patterns and random things that weren’t random, things that meant something.
“Okay,” I would say, “I see it now.”
“Do you? Great; now analyze.”
“Analyze?”
“There’s what you see, and there’s what it means.”
“Analyze.”
CLUES
There were cigarette butts, quite a few of them, forming a half circle, a perimeter, cleaner areas where the structures that held the police tape had been set. No one had bothered to clean up outside the police line. I positioned myself dead center, optimum view, pulled the pack (box, not soft pack) from my windbreaker’s pocket, pack of matches inside, lit up a Marlboro.
“Power of suggestion,” I said to myself, throwing the now-empty pack of matches down with the line of butts. “Peer pressure.”
There was an opened pack of matches on the ground. Half the matches were gone, removed left to right. “Left-handed,” I thought. I picked the pack up, tried one of the matches. Nope, too soggy. Rather hip lettering on the cover, red on black, read, “Carlsbad Liquor.”
Clue?
Yes, I did think it might be a clue; one missed clue. Important. I knew the place. Carlsbad Liquor. Coming north to south, it was just before you would see the ocean. It was there before the 7-11, good place to get snacks. My friends said there were dirty magazines in a back room. One of the Billys (Bigger Billy), supposedly, snuck in; got run out, but not before he saw some, as he described, “sexy, almost disgusting stuff. Close ups.” Closeups? “Adults only,” he said with some sort of indiscernible accent. Hey, it was a liquor store. Adults only.
I put the pack inside the Marlboro box, that in the windbreaker’s inside chest pocket.
The groundskeeper dropped the wheelbarrow in the center of the already-cleaned, formerly roped-off area, threw a wood-handled, metal lawn rake onto the strip of lawn (maintained, I assumed, by the State of California), took out a stiff-bristled push broom, and started sweeping the asphalt along-but outside the crime scene.
He was close enough that I felt I had to say something. “How’s it going?”
He nodded before he spoke, looked at me, looked at the other cars in the lot, the surfers gathered at the edge of the bluff. He didn’t pull down his bandana. “Nasty business, this,” he said.
I probably made that sort of ‘smells bad’ expression, one that he, it seemed, returned. “I was informed that it would be permitted. Clean up. ‘Okey dokey,’ one of the detectives told me.” He pointed a gloved hand, vaguely, toward the compound. “Today.”
I probably stared. It was a bad habit I was, mostly, unaware of. His eyes were darkest brown, bloodshot, and there was something about his eyebrows. I was thinking; thinking about his accent; Indian, of course, but his English, not American-learned; British. Of course.
“I didn’t do the initial… work.” He pointed toward the wall. “Professionals. Contractors (emphasis on the ‘ors’ syllable).” He pulled the bandana down, awkwardly, because of the gloves, looked at me, said, “Sunburn. Even I… one must wear the hat.” He had a bit of trouble pulling the bandana back over his nose. “Sun.”
“You, um, work… (my hands mimicking the sweep of the walls) here? Swamis?”
“Voluntary, one would say; work, yes; compensated; not really; not in… dollars.” I nodded. He went back to sweeping. I stepped back, out of his way. He stopped, looked up. “You’re a surfer. Yes?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I mean, yes. Um, so, um… voluntary; like… like, um, like penance?”
He laughed. “Perhaps. No, they teach… we are taught that hard work is good. We strive to…” He leaned the broom against his body, made a gesture like an expanding circle. “Perfection. Realization.”
“Well; the grounds are… perfect. I’ve been inside. Every rock, the paths, the garden up on the very point… the, I guess, meditation garden. Good place to see… surf.”
“And, yes; meditation, surf vantage point; so many benefits of having a committed volunteer labor force.”
“So, um, are you, like, the only one who does this?” I made a gesture I thought indicated working on the outside of the compound. “I, um… (short, embarrassed laugh) thought you were… your hair and beard… I’ve seen you before. I thought you were, um, older.”
He laughed. “With all the people nowadays sporting longer hair, people doing what they want to…” He stopped. “Surfing. Swimming. People.” He paused again. “I do feel, sometimes… older.”
We both stood there a few moments longer. I had questions. He started sweeping. I nodded toward the bluff, he nodded in the same direction. I did a little bow, felt stupid instantly, but he returned it.
SINNERS LOVE COMPANY
When I approached the bluff, surfers I recognized as locals, all about my age, three guys and one girl, Ginny Cole (you always knew the names of the few girl surfers), were sitting on the guard rail, two other guys standing on the parking lot side of it, directly in front of my car, and, in fact, leaning against it.
Sure. Optimum view. This was their spot; the land equivalent of the apex of the peak in the water; they wouldn’t give it away to some tourist; they were less willing to give it to me.
Ginny and one of the guys, who had been watching me, evidently, turned back around after I gave a bit of a gesture that I meant to say, “Yeah, I looked at the crime scene; so what?”
Maybe I looked too long at Ginny Cole. Evidently. At least the guys on either side of her seemed to think I had. I had. Of course. I was forced, by the rules governing adolescent encounter, to give each of them (the guys) the “yes, I looked” look.
Then, as required, I looked away.
Ginny pulled her coat and an over-sized gray bag (I would say purse, but surfer girls were way too cool for that) off the hood of my car. Not in an apologetic way. Two of the guys continued to lean the just-past-comfortable distance between the railing and my car.
Fine. I probably would have been sitting on the hood if they weren’t there. Casually. Observing. Analyzing. If I were someone else, if I was observing someone else, I’d say posing. Posing. Posturing.
Each surfer had a small carton of orange juice or a quart of chocolate milk in his hand, maybe a cold piece of pizza. One might have had a large coffee from the 7-11 down toward Cardiff. One very well could have had a mason jar of juice, carrot always an ingredient, some color from sick green to sick orange; always willing to share. Not with me. Maybe once. Later. Months later. Only once because I turned the offer down. Green.
None of these surfers were smoking. These weren’t my high school friends, so anxious to learn how to smoke; starting out with, Parliaments, maybe, cigarettes for beginners, moving on to Marlboros or Winstons, arguing about which was better; urging me to be cool, to not be a pussy. Tobacco evangelists.
Sinners love company, I had thought, and I put off starting the very same habit my father had only participated in in secret, or at work, never around his children.
Still, we knew. Camel non-filters. My mother kept his last half pack in a dresser drawer with his badge and empty holster. Nothing else. Occasionally she would open the drawer. Leather and tobacco.
I squeezed the cherry out, tossed the butt through the opened driver’s side window and onto the floorboards, grabbed my fairly-full quart of chocolate milk and my half-gone package of donettes off the seat, went into a practiced lean, a slouch, against the backseat door, driver’s side.
Frosted, never chocolate.
Posturing.
DOWNRAIL SPEED MACHINES
It seems wrong to me, now; it’s obviously wrong; but, somehow, when I was a teenager, it seemed all surfers were somewhere around my age. Some younger kooks, some older surfers. Not many of those; or maybe I just didn’t focus on them; only the ones who were well known, who had been in “Surfer” magazine. If someone like that showed up, his name would spread quickly through a parking lot or lineup: L.J. Richards or Rusty Miller at Pipes, Mike Doyle at Stone Steps, Skip Frye at a contest at Tamarack; surfers you would, definitely, watch, keep track of, give way to in the lineup; just to see if they were all that good. Better. They were better.
How much better?
But these were days of evolution in surfing; shorter boards, more radical moves, backyard soul shapers, V bottoms and downrail speed machines; and the new heroes were younger; more like my age; s-turns and tube stalls and 180 cutbacks.
The first 180 cutback I ever saw, with an off-the-foam-to-bottom-turn, was at Swamis, from that landing two-thirds the way up the stairs; the one with the metal screen, ‘Old guys stop here’ carved into one of the rails. The stance, so solid, the moves, so controlled, so fluid, one to another, seamlessly, were performed by Billy Hamilton, on a longboard; smooth and stylish. He was older, maybe even ten years older. Still, older.
Chulo Lopez was, or, rather, had been in this group. Older. Aggressive, stylish, and dominating, back-foot heavy; always pivoting off his good (right) leg. Surfers who dominate a lineup, who get their choice of waves, are respected and hated, sometimes almost equally. If they take a wave you thought you should have been on… your opinion would swing more toward hate.
Chulo had once, on a glassy evening at Pipes, given me the signal to go on the first wave of a set. Two other surfers in position to go didn’t go. Wouldn’t. Chulo looked them off. No need to yell. Then he looked back at me, said the second of the two things he ever said to me. “Go!” I had to go. I did.
Real Surfers 