Hound of the Sea

by Garrett McNamara

  One time, after we stole some walkie-talkies from a sporting goods store, either Alan or I came up with the idea of nestling one beneath the tomatoes in the little produce section at our neighborhood health food store. We hid, and when a shopper picked up a tomato to check for ripeness one of us would say, “Don’t squeeze me!”

  I always thought that of all of us Kevin would be the one to wind up in prison, but he grew up to become a pretty successful small business owner.

  Our dad was the alpha dog of our little section of Berkeley, and Alan and Bill’s mom was, without a doubt, the prettiest mom. I decided she should meet my dad so I invited her to come to the restaurant and try our dad’s good vegetarian lasagna. I didn’t think she would show up, but she did. Dad knew how to work what he called the McNamara charm. That same night I was in the kitchen at the restaurant doing the dishes, another job for which we could earn a quarter, I saw Nancy sitting on my dad’s lap, whispering something in his ear. He was smiling. I had a pretty good idea what that meant.

  Dad and Nancy moved in together. Then suddenly—or it seemed sudden to us, since my brother and I never really thought about marriage, or whether our parents were still married or divorced, or whether it mattered, since they both had so many other girlfriends, boyfriends, old ladies, main squeezes, and fellow travelers over the years—the most amazing thing happened: Dad married Nancy, and now Alan and Bill were our stepbrothers, and Nancy gave birth to another boy, Michael. This was the best thing that had ever happened to us.

  UNCOOPERATIVE AND UNRULY

  I WISH I COULD remember where our mom was all this time, but she came and went so often I lost track. This time when she reappeared we didn’t raise an eyebrow. She moved into a little house two blocks away from us on Emerson Street and got a job cooking part-time at an Irish pub. We spent half the time at her house and half with Dad and Nancy and our brothers. She was unhappy with our dad’s relationship with Nancy. She disapproved of their drug use. Secretly, I didn’t like it much either. They had started fighting. However fierce their attraction was, they were bad for each other. For here’s the thing about the McNamara men—we follow the lead of our women. If our ladies have the capacity to bring out our best selves, we are all for it. And if they hook into something chaotic and destructive in us, we’re willing to go down that road too. Of course, I only learned this much later.

  Anyway, we paid no attention to our mom’s displeasure.

  Alan was eleven and I was still ten. Bill was nine and Liam eight. One day we climbed up on the roof of Greg Serber’s garage. From the back side of the garage there was a view into the backyard of Benet’s house. He was a big, gap-toothed Jamaican we called Rastaman, for his waist-length dreadlocks. In the middle of his tiny yard there was a canopy bed like something you’d see in a girl’s room, with white ruffles around the bottom and more ruffles around the canopy and gauzy white curtains. On the bed, in the middle of the afternoon, was Benet pumping away atop some girl; they were moaning and groaning.

  One of us lifted himself up on his elbows to get a better view. Benet must have seen the movement out of the corner of his eye, because he stopped midstroke, pulled himself out of the girl and onto his feet, and shouted in his Jamaican accent, “You boys!”

  We flattened ourselves on the roof. We were so busted. I remember feeling the gravel cutting into my cheeks. I wondered what our dad would do. Once, when we got caught stealing and the mini-mart called him, he came and got us but didn’t say a word. Maybe this would be like that.

  But I needn’t have worried, because Benet said, “You boys, you want to see this? Then come on down and take a look. But make it quick.”

  We threw ourselves off the roof and into the sand barbecue pit, then rushed to the Serbers’ back fence, scrambled over, and walked cautiously toward the foot of the canopy bed.

  Who should be inside but Nabia, our dad’s old girlfriend. She had her hippie skirt hitched to her waist. She smiled and said, “Do you want to have a look?” and then spread her legs.

  Probably our jaws dropped.

  I crept closer and . . . pointed.

  Alan and Bill and Liam will never let me forget it.

  Our world was rocked by this event. And between cutting school and stealing weed from the university rooftops and playing baseball and riding our bikes and skateboards, our lives were busy and full and just about perfect.

  Then one day our mom said that we were moving to Florida. She had suddenly decided she didn’t like the way our dad was raising us. She told us that living with him had made us uncooperative and unruly. We shook our heads solemnly, having no idea what she was talking about. It seemed that at our last baseball game, she’d heard two moms sitting behind her in the bleachers gossiping. When Liam was at bat, one of the moms said, “Oh that poor boy. His mother just ran off, and their father doesn’t take care of them—there’s a brother, too—and they just run wild.”

  Alan and Bill were frantic—how dare this lady they didn’t even know come and break up the brothers!—but Liam and I had been down that road enough times to have a wait-and-see attitude. Greg Serber threw us a big party, and gave us each a brown lunch sack full of candy—Marathon bars and Now & Laters. Our mom had found a guy who was driving to Florida, maybe through the want ads. He showed up the next day and we loaded up the van. Alan and Bill stood on the curb. Maybe they cried a little. Nancy gave us both a big hug.

  We drove off. The next day our mom decided she didn’t trust him. When he stopped for gas, we grabbed our suitcases and ran. We went back to Berkeley and everything went back to normal.

  She stayed in Berkeley. She worked various jobs. She went on and off welfare. We spent half the week at her house and half with our dad. There was something wrong with our brother Michael. They said he had a thing called yellow jaundice, and Nancy wouldn’t let us hold him or touch him. She started losing her temper at us and not just at our dad.

  Our mom started dating a musician named Darryl. We only met him after they were married. He was a little black guy with a monster Afro and a love of fine clothes; Liam and I called him Mickey Mouse behind his back. Darryl was a nightclub singer and, according to our mom, interested in moving all of us to Hawaiʻi. And also, not coincidentally, paying for all of our airline tickets.

  What I knew about Hawaiʻi I knew from watching Wide World of Sports at my friend Jesse Cortez’s house. I looked up to Jesse. He had the perfect family, or so it seemed to me, and was a good skater. We would skate up in Codornices Park, then climb up to a spot where blackberries grew. We would bring them home to his mom and she would bake a blackberry pie. One time while we were waiting for the pie to cool, because the pie always had to cool, you could never cut right into it, there was a surfing contest called Pipeline Masters, held on the North Shore of O’ahu, and we sat and watched guys get barreled in these monstrous glistening waves, these moving mountains of turquoise water, fringe of white water decorating the top, and I’d never seen anything like it. Just watching it took my breath away, and I don’t think Jesse and I ever did eat any pie that day.

  Still, I was not interested in Hawaiʻi. Liam was not interested. We were urban California kids. We had our brothers Alan, Bill, and baby Michael; and our neighborhood friends; our roofs we liked to jump off of; our bikes and boards; our ramps and routes; our little jobs at Jackson Liquor and our dad’s restaurant; our baseball teams. And now I’d also discovered hockey and soccer and there was not a moment in the day when we weren’t running, riding, climbing, or kicking, and I didn’t know what was in Hawaiʻi other than grass shacks and girls in hula skirts and a lot of water, and when I thought of water I thought of the ocean, the memory of the big silvery rooster-fish with its ugly gaping mouth and evil black-spined fin. Our mom told us about surfing. She said we could try it once we were there, but the promise of that wasn’t enough to change our minds.

  I said I didn’t want to go, wouldn’t go. She couldn’t make us, we said. We’d finally found a place we liked, a place we
felt we belonged. Our dad wasn’t for it. Nor were our friends or even some of the parents who found our antics amusing.

  But she was still making plans. Now that she had someone to pay for the move I knew we would go. Greg Serber threw us another goodbye party and gave us each another bag of candy.

  Our mom, giddy with the idea of starting a new life with a new family, got out her sewing machine. The last time she got the sewing bug it was white robes made from bedsheets, so I made myself scarce.

  The morning of the day we left Berkeley, Liam and I found our new traveling clothes laid out on our beds. Matching orange bell-bottoms and big-collared white shirts, to be worn beneath matching orange velvet vests. It may have been 1978, but wearing this outfit felt almost as traumatizing as the white robes, especially since Mom and Darryl were dressed the same way.

  Off we went to the airport. People stared at us as if we were famous, the Partridge Family traveling with some lesser-known member of the Jackson 5. Winging their way to Honolulu.

  OUR SECOND or third summer in Hawaiʻi we went back to Berkeley for a visit. Our dad must have come up with the money for the airfare, but when we got there he didn’t look like a man who could spring for a good meal, much less two round-trip tickets from Honolulu. He had sold the restaurant and grown a bushy beard and spent his days listening to mariachi music on a transistor radio he held close to his ear. He and Nancy were barely speaking. Alan and Bill said the high point of their lives was squabbling over who would get to clean their mom’s marijuana, which they did using an album cover and the long side of the Zig-Zag rolling papers wrapper.

  We brothers fell right back into our old routine as if no time had passed. We were all a little bit taller, and Liam’s and my hair was lighter from living in the tropical sun. Our little brother Michael had recovered from his yellow jaundice with no ill effects. He was happy to allow us to coerce him to stand at the window of the apartment and yell down to the women passing by that he wanted to bone them.

  A year after that one of our uncles, who was an insurance bigwig in New York, paid to fly Liam and me east for a family reunion. We spent two days with Alan and Bill, throwing crab apples at passing cars and putting Liam’s hand in warm water while he was asleep to see if he would wet his pants (he did). Then we flew home to Hawaiʻi where we stayed for many years without going anywhere. Alan and Bill and Michael, our brothers, fell out of our lives.

  CEMENT CITY

  WE MOVED INTO A first-floor apartment in Cement City, so-called armpit of the North Shore. This side of O’ahu is country. The south shore is town. Was in 1978, still is. Dole pineapple plantation and vast sugarcane fields on one side of Kamehameha Highway, postcard-perfect yellow-sand beaches on the other. Homes were little wooden ramshackle bungalows surrounded by plumeria and mango trees, probably with a few chickens pecking around. Maybe a little white picket fence. But Cement City was a clutch of decrepit stucco apartments considered low income, low rent. Military and plantation workers and their families lived there. It could have been a neighborhood in Florida or California.

  Our apartment looked out onto the parking-lot Dumpsters. Liam and I shared a room. Mom and Darryl got to arguing before the boxes were unpacked. The walls were thin so we could hear them going at it in the living room. Mom wanted to keep moving, on to Kaua’i where, she’d told us, one of those times she’d taken off, she’d lived in a cave in Ka-lalau near the Nā-pali coast. She hollered that Kaua’i is paradise; Darryl hollered back, so is this. Darryl needed to be able to work. He needed to be close to town, as the locals called Honolulu, an hour’s drive across the island, where he might find work as a singer. Darryl paid for our tickets and paid for our apartment and paid for our blue-box macaroni and cheese, our frozen peas and creamed corn and Frosted Flakes. So we stayed in Cement City.

  MOM DIDN’T know she was sealing the fate of Liam and me when she dropped us in the red-hot center of world-class surfing. She may have mentioned it when she was trying to convince us to leave Berkeley, but we were basically clueless city boys. It was the Dogtown era so we thought of ourselves as Dogtown skaters, Northern California style. Even after having watched Pipeline Masters at my friend’s house in Berkeley, I didn’t put two and two together: I was now a short bike ride away from the greatest waves on earth, which also drew the greatest surfers. Forty premium breaks, most of them iconic. Hale-’iwa, Laniākea, Wai-mea, Log Cabins, Off the Wall, Pipeline, Pūpū-kea, Rocky Point, Sunset Beach, Velzyland. Every kind of epic wave pounds the North Shore in the winter, the product of swells that originate off the coasts of Russia, Japan, and Alaska and freight-train over the wild, open Pacific. Flawless barrels. Solid twenty-five-foot marching walls of water. Clean, but complex and tricky, depending on the direction of the wind and swell.

  Every surfer on earth ready to go for it wound up here sooner or later, cashing in their savings or selling their cars to show up for the action every winter.

  At first it was no different from Cazadero or Berkeley in California, or British Honduras, just someplace my mom had perched for the time being. There were long sidewalks in Cement City, but we’d left our skateboards in California. I wasn’t even immediately taken with the ocean. I wish I could report I was a natural waterman, that I paddled out and the ghost of Duke Kahanamoku cast a spell on me, conveyed to me from beyond the grave that I’d found my place, my driving passion, the thing I was born to do. But I can’t.

  It was our first day in Hawaiʻi. We dropped our stuff in our bedroom in the apartment and Mom and Darryl took us to Wai-mea Bay to swim. The sand was coarse, not the soft, sugary stuff I’d heard about. It was sweltering and humid, no trade winds rustling the palm fronds. Thunderheads scudded across the horizon, some atypical storm out there somewhere responsible for waves that looked huge to me. Overhead, maybe six feet. Maybe smaller. Liam and I swam in the shore break. The waves weren’t breaking, really, but instead powerful swells surged in and out. We sat on the hard sand, our backs to the ocean, pretending to be race car drivers, waiting for the water to lift us up and drop us farther up the shore, so fast. For hours the swells pounded us, flinging us up the steep beach, then sucking us back out. This was so much fun!

  After a while, seasick from all the pounding, I spewed a fountain of Doritos and bananas. It had been my lunch, and now it was chum.

  My freak-outs never fazed me much. Throwing up my first day in the water had no effect on my desire to try surfing. Our mom knew that two boys could not hope to make a life in Hawaiʻi without surfing. She managed to scrounge up a board for us. She may have paid ten bucks for it at a garage sale, but a few days after we settled into the apartment, she showed up with a beat-up 12′ board that must have weighed fifty pounds. It took both of us to carry it to the beach.

  The next day we went on a recon mission around the neighborhood, just like we had done in Berkeley. Our apartment was on Apuhihi Street, which ended two blocks away at Waialua Beach Road, Highway 82. The highway ran along the cane fields, far as the eye could see. But on the other side there was a row of little houses, and we spied a kid about our age standing in the driveway of one of them. Butchy Boy Wong. He invited us to come in. Inside, hanging on the walls, was his father’s collection of hand-painted kneeboards with airbrushed seascapes, a kaleidoscope of blues and greens and white. He asked us if we wanted to take the boards out, and was sure his dad would let us.

  We carried the boards to a beach break in front of Hammerheads, near Waialua. It was mostly dry reef, but Butchy knew a little spot where we could catch a wave. It was bright and sunny, no thunderheads on the horizon. The light breeze was offshore and there were tiny white-water waves, one to two feet maybe, mushy and weak, but we happily paddled out, each on our own kneeboard. We windmilled our arms to turn ourselves back toward the beach and within a minute or two I felt the energy of the ocean beneath me, raising me up, and I paddled as fast as I could and once the wave had me, without thinking, I popped to my feet. It felt similar to skating, but mind-blowing because the
wave was doing all the work; instead of wheels, water pushed me forward making a little shhhhhhhh sound. I rode that wave all the way in, until I could just step off onto the sand, and from that moment on I was consumed, obsessed. It was love. I was stoked. The lifelong magic spell had been cast. In that ten-second ride I’d found perfect joy, and the sanctuary I’d craved, without even knowing it.

  Summer passed. I turned twelve. Darryl was gone most of the time. Said he was in a nightclub act in town with Don Ho’s daughter. Then one day he was gone for good, leaving our mom for some other woman, and she fell into a depression. Our apartment had a swimming pool, and she would lie out beside it all day long in her bikini, shiny with tanning oil, smoking cigarettes and crying. Eventually, the money ran out and we went on welfare. Poverty-stricken in paradise. We started using powdered milk on our Frosted Flakes. We got one pair of shoes a year—not as bad as it sounds, actually, since island kids all wore slippers, rubber flip-flops—or else we just went barefoot.

  One day a few weeks before school started, on a day of waist-high swells at Hale-’iwa, we sat in the lineup with a bunch of kids with good boards. I’m not sure how at age twelve I could tell they were so much superior, but I could. The shape, the colors, the stringer—the thin line of wood that runs down the middle to help the board hold its shape—the fin or fins underneath—all different from the McNamara brothers’ crappy, dinged-up longboard that they had to share. Also, they were much shorter and quicker, and made so you could carve across the face of the wave.

  The only way I could figure out how to get a short board was to make my own. Once I watched one of our neighbors fix his own board, and bummed some cloth and resin from him. That night I dragged my board from the porch into my bedroom and sawed out the middle third, glued it back together, wrapped some cloth around the seams, and sealed it with the resin.