Crazy for the Storm

by Norman Ollestad

  I skidded down the dirt path winding around the succulents where I used to play hide-and-seek and onto the access road. I crossed a slab of concrete where the lifeguards parked their trucks and I realized it was our old garage, roofless and adrift in the sand.

  I stepped off this relic and approached the lifeguard station. To the south the beach curved toward Santa Monica, where tall buildings stood behind the salty haze. My eyes lowered, settling on Bob Barrow’s brick stairs climbing off the beach, the porch gone but the porch footings stabbing out of the sand, and up the dirt embankment to the access road. The stairs looked like a spine without a body. All along the beach columns of stairways lay like skeletons from another era against the ripped-apart embankment. I thought of the ghost towns my dad and I had passed through and it hurt to imagine what this one used to be like.

  I came to a standstill. The old days long gone percolated in dew across my eyes and it all dappled together like a pond reflection until Rolloff called my name.

  Norm, he said.

  I turned and blinked and the mist congealed into a clear picture.

  Hey man. Where’ve you been? he said.

  The bodies in the sand twisted around and a chorus greeted me. The ghost town came alive.

  I don’t know. Working, I said.

  I stepped forward and slapped fives and brandished a hang-loose sign to each legend while the various girls and guys augmenting the scene looked on.

  Shane told me I looked like I healed up pretty good, and I touched the indented scar on my chin. Trafton asked me if I was ready to surf again. I wondered how he knew I hadn’t surfed in months. I nodded yes out of reflex. When Rolloff offered his board for a go out I used the excuse of not having trunks.

  It seemed strange that I would come to the beach without trunks or a surfboard, so I explained that I worked across the street at the diner. Rolloff said it was good for lunch but everybody else said they liked George’s Market better.

  I took off my shoes, plopped on the sand and dug my toes in, listening to everybody talk surf. A swell was due in a couple days from south of Tahiti. Shane thought Catalina Island might block the waves, and I glanced southward as if assessing how the swells would hit Catalina, a smudge on the horizon. Within five minutes I was on the inside of the circle, chiming in at will, and I took off my shirt and felt the sting of the sun on my skin. An hour later I was running up the access road past Barrow’s dilapidated landing and I was excited about tomorrow for the first time in months.

  Our garage was at street level. I ran right up to the door, unlocked it and searched for my yellow-railed seven-foot-two surfboard that Dad had given me on my tenth birthday. I couldn’t find it. So I walked down the stairs toward the house, which rested on the hillside below the garage. I looked in the storage space under the garage. It wasn’t there. Sunny followed me around and whimpered and I knew she wanted to play so I took her into the canyon and threw the stick until she was panting hard.

  I was consumed by the notion of surfing again. I worried about whether I would still be able to hop right up and make the drop and generate speed down the line.

  When my mom returned from teaching summer school I skipped the hellos and asked where my board was.

  Gosh I think it’s in the garage somewhere, she said.

  I looked in there, I said.

  What about above. In the rafters?

  Oh yeah.

  I used the hood of my mom’s VW to ladder myself to a rafter beam. I pulled myself up and crawled around in the dust and heat that had accumulated in the attic. In the back on top of boxes I found my board.

  I hosed it off on the grass outside the front door and my mom asked me how it felt to see Topanga again.

  Weird, I said.

  She waited for me to say more and followed me to the kitchen. I grabbed a spatula to clean off the dirt-encrusted wax.

  She followed me back outside.

  Were all the guys there? she said.

  Yeah.

  Was it good to see them?

  Yeah, I said.

  I looked at her and her entire face opened up like she was feeling something pleasant touching her skin.

  I hope I can still surf, I said.

  It’s like riding a bike, she said.

  You used to surf, right?

  Oh yeah, she said. Your dad got me out there almost every day one summer.

  What happened? I said.

  She stuttered.

  Oh. You know. Winter came. It got cold. And the next summer you were born.

  But didn’t you want to keep surfing?

  To tell you the truth, not really. I did it for your dad. Once we divorced I lost interest. She flipped her hair back and looked out at the ocean. He gave me lots of attention when we were surfing, she said.

  Her longing for other forms of attention from my dad did not register. Instead the notion that Nick didn’t surf either and that my mom had abandoned surfing, maybe even because Nick didn’t do it, suddenly made surfing my one and only desire. It took me by the throat. Surfing would cut me free.

  After work I walked out along the dirt knoll and came around the top of the point. I crossed the mouth of the creek, shored up now for lack of rain, and it was spawning green moss. Then the crew saw me and somebody whistled. It made me smile and my cheeks crinkled, sensitive from yesterday’s sunburn.

  I asked for a bar of wax and Shane himself rose and climbed under the station and reached into the crossbeams under the top story and handed me a bar.

  My secret stash, he said.

  I waxed up my board and Shane said he remembered when my old man had bought the board for me.

  It’s a clean shape. Fast down the line, he said.

  I nodded. For Shane to give me some of his wax and then compliment my board was a kind of achievement and I noticed some of the crew watching and I was as sure as ever that it was a big deal.

  All the ceremonies were played out and there was no way to delay the inevitable anymore. Time to paddle. Rolloff picked up his board and said he’d come along.

  We hoisted our boards and walked to the point. The tide was high and the waves gathered against the rock shelf and finally broke in a bundle of energy, unreeling like a beam of light running down the line.

  It’s only waist-high, I told myself.

  Where’s the take-off spot? I said.

  He looked at me suspiciously. Right off the creek, he said.

  A moment later Rolloff wasn’t next to me anymore. He was leaning on his board stepping through the shallows.

  There’s a little channel through here, Norm.

  I trotted back and hustled to get right in his trail. The channel was mostly sand with an occasional rock. My fin hit a rock and Rolloff told me to flip my board over. When the water came over our knees he righted his board and jumped on and paddled. I did the same. My shoulders cracked as if breaking through a dry husk and I labored to propel myself forward. By the time I made it to the take-off zone I was beat.

  There was a lot of seaweed to wade through and I knew that would make it doubly hard to catch the waves. I sat up and looked toward the beach. The yellow submarine house used to be right there, I figured, eyeing the plot of dirty sand. I had watched the party from out here, over the backs of the swells. Dad had told me that one day I’d realize how great it was, how lucky I was, and be glad he made me learn to surf.

  A set, Norm, said Rolloff.

  I swung my board around, nearly tipping over, and followed Rolloff, hoping he’d steer me into the right spot for take-off. He spun his board like a turret and dropped forward and his arms stroked around twice, rising gracefully out of the water. An instant later he popped to his feet and glided below the wave, then his scarecrow arm posted above the lip.

  Just in time I became aware of the next wave and cranked my nose into the pitching face and sliced through. The cold water snapped my senses to the fore and I tingled. The air was crisp and my ears gurgled with saltwater. The seaweed stench seemed to d
rive me toward the next swell even though my shoulder muscles threatened to rip from the bone. I coughed and grunted and tore against the water, driven by those familiar sensations.

  There was a lot of wasted energy, lurching and jerking, before I somehow scratched into the wave. When I stood up my legs quivered and I had to steady my labored breathing. I used my entire weight to lean back and scoop the nose of the board out of the trough at the bottom. Then I tottered to one side just enough to steer the board off the bottom and down the line. I leveled into the face and the lip was curling in front of me. I gyrated, rocking from rail to rail, pumping my knees. I just started doing it. With each pump the board jetted. Suddenly I was screaming like a bottle rocket, hooked into some invisible flow. And like that, in the blink of an eye, I was dancing again above the earth in that old magnificent world.

  The wave closed out in front of the station and I kicked over the back. They all hooted from the beach. An older guy with a mustache and curly hair made me look twice. The second time I felt my eyes sting and my face seemed to crumble. Dropping my head, I shuffled my board around and paddled toward the point, coughing and gagging on the tears and mucus.

  I paused and drifted shy of the point. Rolloff kept glancing at me. I angled away from him.

  You okay, Norm? he called out.

  I raised my arm. This rocked me to the opposite side and I searched beneath the surface. The sparkling sediments rained down past the tiny bubbles leaking from the rocks below. The perfume in my nose and the gurgling in my ears. Home.

  If it wasn’t for your dad I might not be surfing right now, said Rolloff when I paddled back to the point. I for sure wouldn’t be as good.

  Good thing, huh? I said.

  He tipped his head up and down. Lovin’ it, he said.

  By summer’s end I had my own money and my own set of friends and was so out of the loop with my mom and Nick that I hadn’t realized Nick had moved out. Even though I stayed at Eleanor’s some nights, she never mentioned it. It wasn’t until my first day of junior high that I asked my mom where Nick was.

  He moved to the beach, she said.

  Good, I said.

  I told him he can come back when he stops drinking, she said.

  That’ll never happen, I thought, and I nodded.

  She tried to look strong. But I thought she would let him come back, after some excuse, and I refused to stand there and pretend otherwise, so I bolted.

  On my first day at Paul Revere Junior High one of the eighth-grade boys, a surfer named Rich, recognized me from Topanga Beach. Apparently he was out surfing one day that summer and had seen how all the legends watched out for me and how every once in a while they let me take a set wave. Rich befriended me because I was anointed in a club that I suddenly realized was spectacularly cool even beyond the oasis of Topanga Beach. By day two I was hanging with Rich and the popular crew. They had long hair and burned skin and always wore shorts and ragged shirts. I fit right in like a jigsaw piece, folding me back into the regular world again. You were right Dad, thanks for making me surf.

  A week later, I woke in the night and there was a strange glow out my bedroom window. I went upstairs and into my mom’s room and outside her glass door I saw tongues of fire.

  Wake up! I yelled.

  I was naked and when her eyes opened I turned away before she saw the three pubic hairs sprouting out. I ran downstairs and put on some boxers. My mom waited, urging me to forget about the boxers, she had a towel for me. Then we ran out of the house together. I reached into the storage area under the garage to retrieve my surfboard. She yelled at me from the stairs, but I wasn’t going to let it burn. Feeling the heat of the fire on my back, I hauled my board up the stairs, past the garage and onto the street. Mom knocked on a neighbor’s door and they called the fire department.

  Nick showed up a half hour later. The whole roof was burned and the drywall on the top floor was charred from the heat. The fire chief said that embers from a fire earlier that night about a mile north, carried by the Santa Ana winds, had probably landed on our roof. Because our roof was made of old shingles, he said, it caught fire easily.

  We had to move into a house about two miles away, across Sunset Boulevard, for six months. The first night there my mom mentioned puberty, and I realized she had seen me naked the night of the fire and I was embarrassed. Then she asked me if I felt different.

  No, I said, unwilling to admit that over the last few months I had often been surprised by jolts of aggression. Outbursts of anger that never quite made it out of my body. I’m going to bed, I said.

  During our first week at the new house Nick came around. It wasn’t clear whether or not he had quit drinking and I didn’t ask my mom. I steered clear of him and he steered clear of me.

  Around this time one of the girls from seventh grade invited the surfer crew to a party on a Saturday night. My weekend curfew was 10:00. I came home at 10:30 and my mom was upset, worried. She threatened to ground me. I shut my bedroom door on her and opened Surfer Magazine and thought about surfing and one of the girls from the party named Sharon who kept talking to me. My phone rang and I picked it up and it was Sharon. She asked me if I had fun at the party. It was great, was all I could come up with. Then she asked me if I was going to masturbate. I didn’t know what to say. I told her I had never done it. She scoffed and said I was lying. I swore to her that I never had. She sounded excited and invited me over on Sunday.

  Cool, I said.

  She told me her address and I found a pen and wrote it on my hand.

  Good night, she said in a sultry voice.

  I couldn’t sleep. Even though I knew about sex, had seen it all around me on Topanga Beach, I wasn’t sure if I should be masturbating or not, or really how to do it. How could I be so out of it?

  My date commenced with Sharon stealing her parents’ Mercedes and driving us to Westwood. She was only thirteen, so driving a Mercedes along Sunset Boulevard with the windows down and Madonna blaring made her the coolest chick in the world. Sharon gave me my first ever handjob on Makeout Mountain, providing a helpful model for how to masturbate in the future. By the time she parked in front of my house, scraping the hubcap against the sidewalk, it was forty minutes past my curfew.

  I ran up the brick stairs of our temporary house, a single-story stucco with plastic awnings. I tried to open my bedroom window but it was locked. I circled to the side of the house and climbed onto the back porch. The sliding-glass door to the porch was cracked. I slipped inside.

  I tiptoed to my bedroom door and was not halfway there when my mom opened her bedroom door.

  You’re busted, Norman.

  I’m getting some milk, I said.

  I don’t think so. Go to bed and we’ll deal with it in the morning.

  Over breakfast my mom informed me that I was grounded the following weekend.

  That’s bullshit, I said.

  Another word and it’s two weekends.

  We’ll see, I said.

  She glared at me and I scoffed and chomped on my cereal. I slurped it down in one gulp, dropped the bowl in the sink, grabbed my skateboard and left.

  Do you have your lunch? called my mom.

  I ignored her and skateboarded as fast as I could to catch the bus to Paul Revere Junior High.

  Nick was in the kitchen with my mom when I got home from school. He eyed me with a puckered face. I aimed for my room.

  Norman, said my mom.

  I stopped. What?

  You were forty-five minutes late last night, said Nick.

  The bus was late, I said.

  You lie without hesitation, said Nick. It’s become second nature, Jan.

  Mellow out, I said to him.

  He shook his head.

  You’re goin’ down a bad road, Norman, he said.

  Whatever, I said.

  Sharon’s mother called me today, said my mom.

  My insides dropped and went fluttering down my legs and I was hollow.

  I shot her a
so-what face.

  Did you or did you not take Sharon’s mother’s car? said Nick.

  I wasn’t driving, I said.

  She’s thirteen years old, said my mom.

  I told her not to do it.

  But you got in the car, said Nick.

  She was leavin’ no matter what.

  You’d jump off a bridge if she told you to? said Nick.

  I missed the bus. I was late.

  They noticed the car was gone at 7:30, said Nick. You got home at 10:45.

  I didn’t do anything. I just got a ride, I said. She was going anyways.

  The fucking denial, the lack of any shred of compunction, is really fucking sickening, said Nick.

  I shrugged. Whatever.

  His hand was around my neck in a flash and I was tripping backward. I grabbed his forearm and he lifted me off the ground and slammed me against the refrigerator. I slid to the ground and the floor knocked the wind out of me. His eyes were red with throbbing vessels and his face was purple and his fingernails dug into my neck. I had a clear shot at him—my arms free at my sides, his face unguarded. But my biceps turned to weeds. I was afraid to fight back.

  Let go. I’m choking, I said.

  Let go of him, Nick!

  You give me a go-fuck-yourself look again and I’m going to wipe it right off your face.

  Okay, I sputtered and nodded.

  He unclenched his fingers. I breathed again.

  He stood.

  A nice little family discussion, he said sarcastically, and he and my mom both laughed. It was clear that she had aligned herself with him again.

  Are you okay? said my mom.

  I ignored her and stood up and stared out the window.

  Your mother asked you a question, Norman, said Nick.

  Yeah I’m great, I said staring out the window.

  Okay. Well. You’re grounded for two weeks, said my mom. No going out. You have to come home right after school. Got it?

  What about surfing? I said.

  No surfing either.