The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  Not all surfers are robust young males; plenty of females and graying diehards surf, some of them well. Still, it’s not really a sport that the entire family—unless the family is a marine version of the Flying Wallendas—can enjoy. Hence the insular codes and cryptic slang of surfers, and the relegation of all nonsurfers to alien status—“inlanders,” “chalk people.” Much of the tribe’s language isn’t even language. If you listen closely to surfers in the water, you are likely to hear little intelligible speech. Mainly, you’ll hear a strange, primitive chorus of whoops, war cries, karate shouts. The first time Caroline and I looked at waves together was months after we met, and she was appalled to hear me start jabbering in a language that she didn’t know I knew. “It wasn’t just the vocabulary, all those words I had never heard you use—gnarly and suck-out and funkdog,” she said, once she had recovered. “It was the sounds—the grunts and roars and horrible snarls.”

  Grunts and roars and horrible snarls filled the air in Mark’s apartment. Slides from the past couple of winters at Ocean Beach were being shown, and most of the surfers featured in the slides were on hand, so the audience was agitated. “That can’t be you, Edwin. You hide under the bed when it gets that big!” Mark convened these gatherings quasi-annually, provided most of the slides, and emceed. “This was the best day last winter,” he said, projecting a shot of huge, immaculate Sloat that elicited a deep general groan. “But I don’t have any more pictures of it. I paddled out after taking this one, and stayed out all day.” Mark’s voice actually had the nasal, waterlogged quality it got after a long session. And, in fact, he had already told me that he’d come in from the surf—its steady thunder from across the Great Highway, the coast road where Mark lives, was supplying the bass line for this evening’s entertainment—only an hour before. “The moon rose just as it got really dark,” he said. “I went back to Sloat, and surfed there for another hour. All those kooks were gone. It was just Peewee and me. It was great.” I found this scene hard to picture. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe Mark—his hair was still wet. I just couldn’t imagine how anyone could surf by moonlight in waves as big and powerful as the ones that had been breaking at Sloat at dusk. “Sure,” Mark said. “Peewee and I do it once every winter.”

  Peewee was there at Mark’s that night. Most of the surfers I knew by name in San Francisco were. Because the surf in and around the city is so formidable, few people learn to surf there—perhaps half of the city’s surfers come from elsewhere. These migrants, who tend to be middle class, remain distinct in some ways from the homegrown surfers, who tend to be working class, but the fifteen or twenty men at Mark’s that evening came from both groups. Ages ranged from the late teens to the midforties. With only three years’ seniority, I was probably the most recent arrival in San Francisco. Peewee, who was about the same age as Mark and I—early thirties—and who worked as a carpenter, was a lifelong local. Mark, who grew up in Los Angeles, was still regarded by some natives as a newcomer, but in fact he had been around for more than ten years—he had gone to medical school at the University of California at San Francisco—and during that time had probably logged more hours in the water at Ocean Beach than any three other people combined. He had also become a central figure in local surf society. At least, no one else, from what I had seen, ever put together evenings such as this—and Mark did it with almost no visible effort.

  “San Francisco is what I imagine surfing in Southern California was like in the fifties,” Mark once told me. “Great waves, not too many people, lots of eccentrics, and everybody pretty much knowing everybody else.” After the surf craze of the 1960s, Southern California surfing became a mob scene, with a cast of hundreds of thousands. An Ocean Beach denizen known as Sloat Bill had recently moved back to San Francisco after a stint in San Diego, declaring, “Surfing down there was like driving on the freeway. Totally anonymous.” Sloat Bill, who qualified in my book as an eccentric, was a commodities trader from Texas via Harvard. He got his nickname when, following one of his divorces, he moved into his car and lived for a month in the Sloat parking lot, vowing not to leave until he had mastered the harsh art of surfing Sloat. There was room for argument about whether he had achieved that aim, but certainly he had made more money, after tapping market quotations into a computer plugged into his car’s cigarette lighter, than any of the rest of us ever did while sitting in the Sloat parking lot. Sloat Bill wasn’t at Mark’s that night, but Mark showed several slides of him anyway—taking gruesome spills. A slide of me surfing Ocean Beach the previous winter drew a couple of hoots but no insults—I hadn’t been around long enough for that. Mark said he had two new sequences he wanted to show, and then he would turn the projector over to others.

  The first sequence illustrated a recent expedition to a remote point break near Cape Mendocino, far up in Northern California. Mark and another San Francisco surfer, a gardener named Rob, had traveled the last ten miles to the surf on dune bikes, racing at low tide along what looked like an extraordinarily rugged wilderness coast. They had camped on the beach for three days. The surf looked very cold and scary, and nobody watching the slides volunteered for a return trip that Mark was planning. On the way home, he said, they had been forced to travel at night, because that was the only time the tide got low enough. There had been a lot of rain while they were camping, so the streams crossing the beach had become major obstacles, especially in the dark. Rob had inadvertently sailed off the bank of one stream and crashed, bending the forks on his bike and soaking the sparkplugs. The tide had started rising while they were trying to get the bike going again. Bob Wise, who owns and operates the only surf shop in San Francisco, had heard enough. He had changed his mind, he said. “Doc, please take me with you next time.”

  The second sequence showed another North Coast exploit: Mark pioneering a fearsome surf spot known as Saunders Reef, in Mendocino County. Local surfers had been watching Saunders break for years, but no one had ever tried to surf it until, earlier that winter, Mark persuaded two big-wave riders from the area to paddle out with him. The wave broke at least half a mile from shore, on a shallow rock reef, and featured what was plainly a horrendous drop, along with some troublesome kelp. Mark’s slides, taken by an accomplice with a telephoto lens from a mountainside, showed him cautiously riding deep-green walls two or three times his height. The trickiest part, he said, had actually come not in the water but in a nearby town that evening. People at the local hangout had been alarmed to hear that he’d surfed Saunders, and suspicious, he said, until they learned that he had done it in the company of two locals.

  It was surprising to hear Mark mention local sensitivities. They were a real issue—I once saw a clipping from a Mendocino newspaper in which a local columnist described Mark as “a legendary super surfer from the Bay Area,” adding, perhaps sarcastically, “I’m sorry I didn’t stick around for his autograph”—but I usually thought of Mark as impervious to such matters. Of course, it was also a little tricky showing these slides to this audience; it required a delicate touch, even a measure of self-deprecation. Mark might disregard the finer points of the surfing social contract among strangers in the water, but Ocean Beach was home; here the strong drink of his personality needed sweetening. Earlier in the evening, when Mark, who suffers from asthma, complained that he was having trouble breathing, as he often does in February, an Ocean Beach homeboy known as Beeper Dave had muttered, “Now you know how us mortals feel.”

  A parade of photographers with their slide carousels followed Mark. There were water shots, some of them good, taken at a couple of the gentler San Francisco breaks. There were many blurry shots of giant Ocean Beach. Each time an especially frightening wave appeared on the wall, the youngest member of the audience, a teenager named Aaron Plank, snarled, “That’s disgusting.” Aaron, who was easily the most talented young surfer in San Francisco, was not yet a big-wave rider. Some old-timers showed slides from the seventies, featuring surfers I’d never heard of. “Gone to Kauai,” I was told.
“Gone to Western Australia, last we heard.”

  Finally, Peewee was prevailed upon to show a handful of slides from a recent trip to Hawaii. Taken at Sunset Beach, one of the best big-wave spots in the world, Peewee’s pictures, which were of poor quality, showed some friends windsurfing on a small, blown-out day. “Unbelievable,” somebody muttered. “Windsurfing.” Peewee, who was probably the best pure surfer San Francisco had ever produced—and one of the few people from the city who were actually capable of surfing big Sunset Beach—said little. But he seemed amused by the crowd’s disappointment.

  As the slide party ended, I stuck around to help Mark clean up—and, watching the crowd drift off down the stairs, I suddenly recalled something that Kim Bodkin, the wife of a local big-wave surfer named Tim Bodkin, had said to me a few days before. I was clearly a charter member, she had said mock-innocently, of what she called “the Doc squad.” The remark had mortified me. It meant that I was seen as one of Mark’s acolytes. He did have acolytes—guys who wandered into his psychic gravitational field and found themselves orbiting around his fixed, surf-centered ideas about how to live. And it was true that since the day I moved to San Francisco, Mark had made himself my surf coach, health director, and general adviser, urging me on what he called “the surfer’s path.” And I had largely followed his lead—“played Doc’s games,” as Edwin Salem, another protégé, put it—letting his exuberance carry me along, letting him be the engine that powered my surfing life. But the fact was that I felt deeply ambivalent about surfing. I had been doing it for more than twenty years, yet I had long been reluctant to think of it as part of my real life as an adult. On balance, I seemed to spend as much energy these days resisting Mark’s exhortations as I did actually surfing. So it was dispiriting to hear that I came off as an eager follower. Mark was like the guru character in every Hollywood attempt at a surfing movie—the Kahuna. The last thing I wanted was a walk-on part as one of the slack-jawed chorus.

  Really, it shouldn’t have mattered. Surfing wasn’t supposed to be about one’s standing in a company—about caste. In fact, I had spent years slogging through tropical backwaters in search of empty surf, looking for the purest possible encounter with the remotest possible waves. Still, some dogged essence of common vanity, of grubby society, had followed me everywhere. It was a paradox at the heart of my surfing: a desire to be alone with waves fused to an equal desire to be watched, to perform. The old Hawaiians, who institutionalized the spiritual side of surfing, had no illusions about its locker room aspects: they loved to gamble on organized competitions. Of course, they were not, from all accounts, prey to self-conscious conflicts about their place in the world, or to a Western-style dichotomy between Society and Nature.

  They didn’t have to cope with photography, either. The passion of virtually all surfers for photographs of themselves in the act of surfing approaches fetishism. To say that waves and the rides they provide are inherently fleeting events, and that surfers naturally therefore want mementos, barely begins to explain the mania for photographs. For a start, pictures are rarely about what a ride felt like; they are about what a ride looked like to others. Mark understood the surf-photo mania. He not only put on these slide shows, and had pictures of himself surfing tacked up all over the walls of his apartment; he also delighted in presenting friends with pictures of themselves surfing. I’d seen these photographs hanging in the homes of their subjects, framed like religious icons. I have one here—of me—as I write. Mark likes to say that surfing “is essentially a religious practice.” What I’ve always had trouble deciding is just who or what is being worshipped.

  On the wall by my desk in New York a photograph hangs: me half crouched inside a slate-gray barrel off Noriega Street, Ocean Beach. Mark gave Caroline the photograph; she had it framed for my birthday. It’s a great shot, but it frustrates me to look at it, because the photographer fired an instant too soon. Just after the moment recorded by the camera, I disappeared into the wave. That’s the shot I covet: the wave alone, with the knowledge that I am in there, drawing a high line behind the thick, pouring, silver-beaded curtain. That invisible passage, not this moment of anticipation, was the heart of the ride. But pictures are not about what a ride felt like; they are about what it looked like to others. This picture shows a dark sea; my memory of that wave is drenched with silver light. That’s because I was looking south while I navigated its depths, and as I slipped through its brilliant almond eye back into the world.

  1992

  LAST OF THE METROZOIDS

  ADAM GOPNIK

  In the spring of 2003, the American art historian Kirk Varnedoe accepted the title of head coach of a football team called the Giant Metrozoids, which practiced then every week in Central Park. It was a busy time for him. He had just become a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, after thirteen years as the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and he was preparing the Mellon lectures for the National Gallery of Art in Washington—a series of six lectures on abstract art that he was supposed to deliver that spring. He was also dying, with a metastasis in his lung of a colon cancer that had been discovered in 1996, and, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York, he was running through all the possible varieties of chemotherapy, none of which did much good, at least not for very long.

  The Giant Metrozoids were not, on the face of it, much of a challenge for him. They began with a group of eight-year-olds in my son Luke’s second-grade class. Football had replaced Yu-Gi-Oh cards and the sinister water yo-yo (poisonous) as a preoccupation and a craze. The boys had become wrapped up in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ march to victory in the Super Bowl that winter, and they had made up their minds to be football players. They wanted a team—“a real team that practices and has T-shirts and knows plays and everything”—that could play flag football, against an as yet unknown opponent, and I set about trying to organize it. (The name was a compromise: some of the boys had wanted to be called the Giants, while cool opinion had landed on the Freakazoids; Metrozoids was arrived at by some diplomatic back-formation with Metropolitan.)

  Once I had the T-shirts, white and blue, we needed a coach, and Kirk, Luke’s godfather, was the only choice; during one of his chemotherapy sessions, I suggested, a little tentatively, that he might try it. He had been a defensive-backfield coach at Williams College for a year after graduation, before he went to Stanford to do art history, and I knew that he had thought of taking up coaching as a full-time profession, only to decide, as he said once, “If you’re going to spend your life coaching football, you have to be smart enough to do it well and dumb enough to think it matters.” But he said yes, eagerly. He gave me instructions on what he would need, and made a date with the boys.

  On the first Friday afternoon, I took the red cones he had asked for and arranged them carefully on our chosen field, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street. I looked over my shoulder at the pseudo-Renaissance mansion that houses NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, right across the street. We had met there, twenty-three years earlier, his first year at the Institute of Fine Arts, and mine, too. He had arrived from Stanford and Paris and Columbia, a young scholar, just thirty-four, who had made his reputation by cleaning up one of the messier stalls in the art-historical stable, the question of the authentic Rodin drawings. Then he had helped revive some unfairly forgotten reputations, particularly that of the misunderstood “academic” Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte.

  But, as with Lawrence Taylor’s first season with the Giants, though we knew he was supposed to be good, nobody was this good. He would come into the lecture room, in turtleneck and sports jacket, professor-wear, and, staring at his shoes, and without any preliminaries, wait for the lights to dim, demand, “First slide, please,” and, pacing back and forth, look up at the image, no text in his hand but a list of slides. “Last time, we left off looking at Cézanne in the eighties, when the conversation between his code, registered in the delibera
tely crippled, dot-dot-dash, telegraphic repetition of brushstrokes, and his construction, built up in the blocky, stage-set recessional spaces, set out like flats on a theatre,” he would begin, improvising, spitballing, seeing meaning in everything. A Judd box was as alive for him as a Rodin bronze, and his natural mode was to talk in terms of tension rather than harmony. What was weird about the pictures was exactly what there was to prize about them, and, his style implied, all the nettled and querulous critics who tried to homogenize the pictures into a single story undervalued them, because, in a sense, they undervalued life, which was never going to be harmonized, either.

  It was football that made us friends. In that first fall, he had me typed as a clever guy, and his attitude was that in the professions of the mind clever guys finish nowhere at all. Then, that spring, we organized a touch-football game at the institute, and although I am the most flat-footed, least gifted touch-football player in the whole history of the world, I somehow managed to play in it. A bunch of us persuaded our young professor to come out and join in one Sunday. The game was meant to be a gentle, co-ed touch game. But Kirk altered it by his presence. He was slamming so many bodies and dominating so much that a wary, alarmed circle of caution formed around him.

  Finally, I insisted to John Wilson, the Texan Renaissance scholar in the huddle, that if he faked a short pass, and everybody made a lot of noise—“I got it!” “There it is!,” and so on—Kirk would react instantly and run toward the sound, and I could sneak behind him for the touchdown.