The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

by Susan Orlean

  THE FIRST HEATS of the contest had right-handed waves, three or four feet high, silky but soft on the ends so that they collapsed into whitewash as they broke. You couldn’t make much of an impression riding something like that, and one after another the Hana girls came out of the water scowling. “I couldn’t get any kind of footing,” Theresa said to Matt. “I was, like, so on it, but I looked like some kind of kook sliding around.”

  “My last wave was a full-out closeout,” Lilia said. She looked exasperated. “Hey, someone bust me a towel.” She blotted her face. “I really blew it,” she groaned. “I’m lucky if I even got five waves.”

  The girls were on the beach below the judges’ stand, under Matt’s cabana, along with Matt’s boys’ team and a number of kids he didn’t sponsor but who liked hanging out with him more than with their own sponsors. The kids spun like atoms. They ran up and down the beach and stuffed sand in one another’s shorts and fought over pieces of last night’s chicken that Annie had packed for them in a cooler. During a break between heats, Gloria with the crazy hair strolled over and suddenly the incessant motion paused. This was like an imperial visitation. After all, Gloria was a seasoned-seeming nineteen-year-old who had just spent the year surfing the monstrous waves on Oahu’s North Shore, plus she did occasional work for Rodney Kilborn, the contest promoter, plus she had a sea turtle tattooed on her ankle, and most important, according to the Hana girls, she was an absolutely dauntless bodyboarder who would paddle out into wall-size waves, even farther out than a lot of guys would go.

  “Hey, haoles!” Gloria called out. She hopped into the shade of the cabana. That day, her famous hair was woven into a long red braid that hung over her left shoulder. Even with her hair tamed, Gloria was an amazing-looking person. She had a hardy build, melon-colored skin, and a wide, round face speckled with light brown freckles. Her voice was light and tinkly, and had that arched, rising-up, quizzical inflection that made everything she said sound like a jokey, good-natured question. “Hey, Theresa?” she said. “Hey, girl, you got it going on? You’ve got great wave strategy? Just keep it up, yeah? Oh, Elise? You should paddle out harder? Okay? You’re doing great, yeah? And Christie?” She looked around for a surfer girl named Christie Wickey, who got a ride in at four that morning from Hana. “Hey, Christie?” Gloria said when she spotted her. “You should go out further, yeah? That way you’ll be in better position for your wave, okay? You guys are the greatest, seriously? You rule, yeah? You totally rule, yeah?”

  At last the junior women’s division preliminary results were posted. Theresa, Elise, and two other girls on Matt’s team made the cut, as well as a girl whom Matt knew but didn’t coach. Lilia had not made it. As soon as she heard, she tucked her blond head in the crook of her elbow and cried. Matt sat with her and talked quietly for a while, and then one by one the other girls drifted up to her and murmured consoling things, but she was inconsolable. She hardly spoke for the rest of the afternoon until the open men’s division, which Matt had entered. When his heat was announced, she lifted her head and brushed her hand across her swollen eyes. “Hey, Matt!” she called as he headed for the water. “Rip it for the girls!”

  THAT NIGHT, a whole pack of them slept at Matt’s—Theresa, Lilia, Christie, Elise, Monica Cardoza from Lahaina, and sisters from Hana named Iris Moon and Lily Morningstar, who had arrived too late to surf in the junior women’s preliminaries. There hadn’t been enough entrants in the open women’s division to require preliminaries, so the competition was going to be held entirely on Sunday, and Iris would be able to enter. Lily wasn’t planning to surf at all, but as long as she was able to get a ride out of Hana she took it. This added up to too many girls at Matt’s for Cheyne’s liking, so he had fled to another boy’s house for the night. Lilia was still blue. She was quiet through dinner, and then as soon as she finished she slid into her sleeping bag and pulled it over her head. The other girls stayed up for hours, watching videos and slamming one another with pillows and talking about the contest. At some point someone asked where Lilia was. Theresa shot a glance at her sleeping bag and said quietly, “Did you guys see how upset she got today? I’m like, ‘Take it easy, Lilia!’ and she’s all ‘Leave me alone, bitch.’ So I’m like, ‘Whatever.’ ”

  They whispered for a while about how sensitive Lilia was, about how hard she took it if she didn’t win, about how she thought one of them had wrecked a bathing suit she’d loaned her, about how funny it was that she even cared since she had so many bathing suits and for that matter always had money for snacks, which most of them did not. When I said a Hana girl could have a pure surfing adolescence, I knew it was part daydream, because no matter how sweet the position of a beautiful, groovy Hawaiian teenager might be in the world of perceptions, the mean measures of the human world don’t ever go away. There would always be something else to want and be denied. More snack money, even.

  Lilia hadn’t been sleeping. Suddenly she bolted out of her sleeping bag and screamed, “Fuck you, I hate you stupid bitches!” and stormed toward the bathroom, slugging Theresa on the way.

  THE WAVES ON SUNDAY came from the left, and they were stiff and smallish, with crisp, curling lips. The men’s and boys’ heats were narrated over the PA system, but during the girls’ and women’s heats the announcer was silent, and the biggest racket was the cheering of Matt’s team. Lilia had toughened up since last night. Now she seemed grudgeless but remote. Her composure made her look more grown up than twelve. When I first got down to the beach she was staring out at the waves, chewing a hunk of dried papaya and sucking on a candy pacifier. A few of the girls were far off to the right of the break where the beach disappeared and lustrous black rocks stretched into the water. Christie told me later that they hated being bored more than anything in the world and between heats they were afraid they might be getting a little weary, so they decided to perk themselves up by playing on the rocks. It had worked. They charged back from the rocks shrieking and panting. “We got all dangerous,” she said. “We jumped off this huge rock into the water. We almost got killed, which was great.” Sometimes watching them I couldn’t believe that they could head out so offhandedly into the ocean—this ocean, which had rolls of white water coming in as fast as you could count them, and had a razor-blade reef hidden just below the surface, and was full of sharks. The girls, on the other hand, couldn’t believe I’d never surfed—never ridden a wave standing up or lying down, never cut back across the whitewash and sent up a lacy veil of spray, never felt a longboard slip out from under me and then felt myself pitched forward and under for that immaculate, quiet, black instant when all the weight in the world presses you down toward the ocean bottom until the moment passes and you get spat up on the beach. I explained I’d grown up in Ohio, where there is no surf, but that didn’t satisfy them; what I didn’t say was that I’m not sure that at fifteen I had the abandon or the indomitable sense of myself that you seem to need in order to look at this wild water and think, I will glide on top of those waves. Theresa made me promise I’d try to surf at least once someday. I promised, but this Sunday was not going to be that day. I wanted to sit on the sand and watch the end of the contest, to see the Hana girls take their divisions, including Lilia, who placed third in the open women’s division, and Theresa, who won the open women’s and the junior women’s division that day. Even if it was just a moment, it was a perfect one, and who wouldn’t choose it over never having the moment at all? When I left Maui that afternoon, my plane circled over Ho’okipa, and I wanted to believe I could still see them down there and always would see them down there, snapping back and forth across the waves.

  LIVING LARGE

  THE COOLEST PERSON IN NEW YORK AT THE moment is a man named Fred Brathwaite, who is known most of the time to most of his friends as Fab Five Freddy, Fab, Five, or just Freddy. Freddy has a lot of jobs. He has been, at one time or another, a graffiti artist, a rapper, an internationally exhibited painter, a video and TV commercial director, a screenwriter, a film scorer
, an actor, a lecturer, and a television personality. Currently, he is also known to millions of viewers as the host of MTV’s popular Saturday-night rap music show, Yo! MTV Raps. Freddy also knows a lot of people. He counts among his friends the late Andy Warhol, a music promoter who goes by the name Great Adventure, the painter Julian Schnabel, and the afternoon manager of a McDonald’s on 125th Street in Harlem. Freddy’s tastes range all over the place. In the course of any given day, he might express enthusiasm for Italian postmodern painters, a new rap song by Public Enemy, the oxtail soup served at a dumpy little Haitian restaurant on Tenth Avenue, the actor who played Grandpa Munster on The Munsters, Malcolm X, high-end stereo components, medieval armor, dogs, women, and nicely designed long-haul trucks. Hanging around with Freddy is a multimedia experience.

  Freddy has perfect grammar, but, in keeping with his nonstandard tastes, he prefers to use a finely discriminated array of nonstandard English expressions to characterize his regular outbreaks of good feeling. These include:

  Fly—implies exceptional stylishness or unusually high achievement. How Freddy described the food at a dinner he attended with representatives of the Ebel watch company at Le Cirque.

  Excellent—often refers to a successful business transaction. How Freddy said he felt when he found out he was being hired to play himself in an upcoming movie.

  Dope—expresses all-purpose positiveness, especially about something intense or challenging. How Freddy rated a new album by the Jamaican singer Shabba Ranks.

  Extra happy—refers to a big, expansive swell of feeling. How Freddy described his emotions upon hearing that his television show would be broadcast in the Soviet Union.

  Yo!—the ultimate, all-purpose exclamation, which, depending on inflection, can imply marvelousness or wonderment. How Freddy begins a discussion of what it’s like for him to consider that at this fairly early point in his life he is already the host of a hip internationally televised music show, has a deal with Warner Brothers to direct two movies, travels freely among a dozen different worlds, knows famous people, and is famous himself.

  PEOPLE RECOGNIZE FREDDY on the street all the time these days, but you get the feeling that even if he weren’t televised weekly he would still not be the sort of person to go unnoticed. On camera he can look wiry, but in person he is over six feet tall and more than solidly built. He is thirty-one years old, looks about thirty, and will occasionally assign himself a few years less than that in the telling. He has prominent, round cheekbones, a bow-shaped, wily smile, and a small, nearly forgettable mustache. His hands are large and long-fingered and mobile. He is very adept at the classic B-boy gestures of rap—stiff thumbs, forefingers, and pinkies moved in deliberate, threatening sweeps, ending with arms crossed high, shoulders hunched, and head tilted sassily—but his real body language is more subtle. He walks canted forward, as if he were about to lean over and whisper. His voice is slightly nasal and usually amusing. I can describe neither his eyes nor his hair, because he always wears a hat and sunglasses—indoors and out, night and day. He favors felt fedoras and Jean-Paul Gaultier shades. The rest of his outfits have an equally arresting quality—he always looks camera ready. One time I was with him, he was wearing a scarlet camp shirt with flap pockets, baggy black gabardine pants, red suede oxfords, and a taupe felt fedora. Another time, he was wearing a pumpkin-colored rayon shirt buttoned to the neck, no tie, a string of large amber beads, baggy rust-colored pants, green suede oxfords with thick black soles, and a black silk trench coat. All in all, his style is pretty sui generis.

  Summing up what he does for a living, Freddy said recently, “I’m the king of synthesis.” There is no such job listed with the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. Freddy nonetheless synthesizes full time. An ideal Fab Five Freddy project involves several media and several individuals who represent the high and low ends of artistic endeavor or social standing and whose association would be discordant if they were not harmonized by Freddy. His favorite version of such projects at the moment is the cross-pollination of black street culture with highbrow art. Some months ago, describing a trip he took to Italy, he told me, “I wanted to walk by Fellini’s house, because I really admire his filmmaking. So I took a huge ghetto blaster, put in a Run-D.M.C. tape, and walked up and down Fellini’s street, right in front of his house, blasting rap music. I liked the idea of combining the two experiences.”

  Freddy describing the rest of his stay in Italy: “Then I went to dinner at the home of the man who runs the Galleria la Medusa in Rome. We were getting together to talk about the graffiti scene, and all that. His house was filled with all these gorgeous Caravaggios and de Chiricos and Italian Futurist paintings. It was, like, yo.”

  ONE MORNING THIS SPRING, I caught a cab and headed over to pick Freddy up at his apartment. Freddy lives in a modern high-rise on the western edge of midtown Manhattan. Before that, he lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side. When he first achieved notoriety as a graffiti artist, he was living at home with his parents, in Bedford-Stuyvesant. His present apartment has sensational views in three directions, quite a few mirrors, a vacuum-sealed ambience, and, to my eye, a sort of Wall Street yuppie gleam, which makes it exactly not the place I would have expected Freddy to live in. As it happens, though, Freddy appreciates good views and slick buildings. He also has a lot of friends circulating in the neighborhood; one evening when he and I were coming back from a Yo! taping, we ran into a rapper named Queen Latifah and her manager, both friends of his, in the entranceway.

  The things Freddy does and the pace at which he does them make him seem to be all over the place all the time. This is true of many people in New York—and, in particular, of the kinds of people who populate Freddy’s various businesses—but Freddy takes being on the move, like everything else he does, to its highest form of expression. A typical day for him might include shooting an episode of Yo! on location in the Bronx, then editing one of his music videos at a production facility in midtown, then shopping in SoHo, then meeting people for dinner at the Odeon, then visiting friends at midnight in Bed-Stuy. One afternoon this winter, Freddy called me from Los Angeles. I was actually expecting him to be calling from Japan, where he and rap have lately become hot commodities, both separately and as they are teamed up on Yo! Freddy is usually more than happy to travel wherever he has become a hot commodity, and a few weeks earlier he had decided he ought to visit Japan while he was still in vogue, but apparently the trip had fallen through, and instead he had gone to California. In Los Angeles, he was staying at the Mondrian Hotel, a glossy place on Sunset Boulevard whose owners also happen to consider him a hot commodity: Several years ago, they let him live in the hotel for three months in exchange for some of his paintings. Toward the end of the conversation, I asked Freddy what he’d be doing for the next few days. He rattled off a list that included movie, television, advertising, and music projects that would entail traveling to three nations on three continents. When I said that he’d be hard to find, he said, “Oh, not really. I don’t know how to drive, so the whole time I’m in L.A., I’ll kind of be stuck in my hotel room.”

  This particular morning in New York, Freddy was first going to a meeting about an upcoming music video project, then shooting the episode of Yo! MTV Raps that would run the following Saturday night, then working on his Warner screenplay, and then having a meeting about another music video he might be directing. I was late, but Freddy didn’t seem to notice: When my cab pulled up, he was sitting in the lobby, absorbed in a magazine about expensive stereo equipment. The lobby was busy with people in smart business suits. Freddy was wearing a silky shirt with a pattern of brightly colored fruits and vegetables, zoot-suit-style brown twill pants, tan socks, his green suede oxfords, a satin baseball jacket with the slogan 45 KING on the back, a small leather map of Africa hanging from a rawhide thong around his neck, a newsboy cap of Irish tweed, and steel-rimmed Gaultier shades with little round lenses. He looked stylish. He appeared to be in a good mood. Upon seeing me, he holle
red “Yo!” and then laughed—a loud, articulated laugh that sounds like the air brakes on an eighteen-wheeler seizing. On our way out, he accosted his doorman, his concierge, and various people entering the building by cocking his head and calling out “Yo! My man!”

  “How’s it going, Freddy?” his doorman asked.

  “Living large, man,” Freddy answered, sauntering through the doorway. “Living very large.”

  As we crossed the courtyard, Freddy stopped to greet a neighbor who was walking twin black pugs. “Great dogs,” he said, leaning over to pet them. “I love that—matched dogs.”

  “Brother and sister,” the neighbor said. “They’re not exactly matched.”

  “I love the way they look,” Freddy went on, disregarding the correction. “That’s so dope! I should get a dog. It would look fly to walk down the street with twin dogs.”