by Mike Safe
Shannon’s nickname in that also time-honoured Australian male tradition of reinforcing friendship through belittlement, was ‘Carpark’ because that was where, it was joked, he did his best surfing. He could talk for hours about anything, all the while throwing in opinions and passing judgments whether wanted or not. This was especially so when it came to surfboards – how they were shaped, their curve and foil, their arc and subtleties, what made one better than another. All considered, he was actually a more than competent surfer when he finally made it into the water, but once a moniker was bestowed it was impossible to escape. Still, Carpark had been around long enough and was good humoured enough to accept it. After all, he didn’t have a choice.
Brown and Carpark, along with Harcourt, who for some reason had never attracted a moniker beyond the boringly obvious Johno, were part of a loose amalgamation of older guys similar to those who could be found at any town or suburb attached to a surf beach up and down the coast. These three and Cruz Jones, who was now walking across the sand from the surf, lived at the beach like most of the crew while ‘Weekend Warriors’, as they were known, made the drive from the surrounding suburbs, mainly on weekends. There was never-ending humour and practical joking, a lot of rubbish talked and tall tales that became even taller in their frequent retelling – ‘do you remember that giant day back in ninety-five?’ et cetera – and a degree of male competition. Every couple of months they would hold an informal contest and barbecue which, if the truth be known, was more about socialising than surfing. The winners would act humbly, or be put in their place, and the losers would treat it as a joke anyway. There were fathers and sons – Harcourt’s son Jack had been part of the competition circle until his musical interests intervened.
‘Hey, guys, looks almost good out there,’ said Harcourt, greeting Brown and Carpark.
‘Jeez, that’s more than can be said for you,’ said Carpark, not one to stand on niceties. ‘You look like crap.’
‘Yeah, well, we had a bit of a late one, but I’m up and functioning now,’ replied Harcourt. ‘Did you see that noseride Cruz got? All the way to the beach.’
‘Tide’s about right at the moment,’ said Brown. ‘If we’re going, now’s the time. It’s coming in and it’ll swallow this little swell in a couple of hours … hey, Cruz, you killed that one, bud!’ he called.
Cruz, who was washing off under a nearby promenade shower, simply waved in acknowledgement.
‘Yeah, he can do it all right, the bastard,’ said Carpark. ‘See that new board he’s got – a true noserider just like that old nine-four I used to have with the big concave under the nose and kick in the tail. You could stand on the front and just hang there for what seemed like a week. God, I loved that board. Was made for small, clean stuff like this.’
‘I remember that monster,’ said Harcourt. ‘Had that horrible purple and green spray job. What happened to it?’
‘I told you – got stolen up in Byron off the roof of my car. Some arsehole hippy backpacker no doubt. Have his balls for breakfast if I ever found him.’
‘Well, no chance of that happening now,’ said Brown. ‘Hey, Cruz, worth going out there, mate?’
‘Sure,’ came the reply.
Cruz remained supple and lean with an elegant style on a wave that made difficult look easy. He lacked Brown’s take off and die craziness, but, then again, so did just about everybody else. What he did have was an innate ability to be in the right place at the right time to catch the right wave. Beachside wisdom had it that he had inherited this gift and way of life from his father, Ralph Jones, a genuine local legend. A former chief lifeguard, Ralph was now somewhere around eighty and a relic from the wild old days when rescues were carried out by lone lifeguards swimming through treacherous seas, not taking an easy ride out on a jet ski or rubber ducky rescue boat.
A couple of years back, Ralph had been about to take an early morning swim, an essential part of what had been his daily ritual, when he suffered a stroke and dropped like a shot seagull to the sand. It had happened only a hundred metres or so from the lifeguard tower on the promenade and he was spotted immediately. Among the first to his side was Cruz, who was on duty that day. Ralph had survived but was now confined to a wheelchair and was rarely seen any more along the stretch of water that had been his life for longer than this generation of surfers had been alive.
‘How’s Ralph going?’ Harcourt asked as Cruz tucked his board under his arm before heading off. After Ralph’s collapse and subsequent life and death struggle, Harcourt had written a newspaper column about him and his hallowed place in Sydney’s surfside culture. The old lifeguard had been somewhat embarrassed and even a little indignant about such reverential treatment, which had hardly been Harcourt’s usual style, but Ralph’s family, his wife, Dot, of going-on fifty years and Cruz, the man of few words, had appreciated it.
‘Oh, he’s doing okay, Johno,’ said Cruz. ‘Pretty quiet Christmas and New Year actually, but I brought my kids over. We had a nice time. He just kinda watches the days go by. Doesn’t get out much.’
‘Well, say hello from us guys, okay?’
‘I’ll do that.’ Cruz glanced back out to sea as another neat set of waves spiralled towards the sand. He smiled. ‘Get out and score a few before they all go away. See yah.’ With that, he headed across the reserve and road towards the old family home, which was a ten-minute walk up the hill that overlooked the beach.
‘Well, let’s go!’ called Carpark, already heading off to get his board. ‘See you two out there ASAP.’ Harcourt and Brown also set off for home and their boards – Brown at a slow jog, Harcourt at little more than a walk.
Twenty minutes later the three of them were together again out beyond the surf break. Carpark had lugged down his longest and heaviest board, a nine-six old style log that had the width and length to catch the smallest ripple. During the not so gentle ribbing sessions up on the promenade, this plank was often derided as being the reincarnation of the Titanic. All Carpark needed to complete the image, so the comedians quipped, was a captain’s cap, a ship’s horn and a wheel to steer it. Still, it was doing the job as he ploughed through the crowded line-up and quickly caught a couple of nice waves. Harcourt had also got out his longest board, but it was only nine foot in the old language – a Californian-designed Robert August tanker, wide in the nose and square in the tail, offering plenty of paddling power and still manoeuvrable in the small conditions. Brown was riding something similar, but shorter, and picking up a few as well.
It was a simple but often hard learned fact that it could be more dangerous to surf in such seemingly benign conditions than in maxing double overhead waves. When any novice, who had little idea of what he was doing, could manage to paddle his way into a crowded line up like this, there was going to be trouble – arguments, collisions and maybe injuries to bodies and boards. Surfing had its own arcane code of etiquette, a sort of rules of the road that were only learnt through experience, and when those rules were ignored bad stuff happened.
As a bigger, chest-high set came in on the rising tide, Harcourt used his board’s extra paddle power to scramble his way inside a couple of younger shortboard guys who had migrated over to the peak that was now showing much better shape than the shorebreak where the kids had been. He scratched into the first of the waves, dropped to the bottom, turned the board hard to the right and cranked it back off the top of the toppling swell, setting up a long, fast section to carry him all the way to the beach. He was a goofy-footer – a surfer who rides with his right foot in front of his left – and so he had his back to the wave, almost looking over his shoulder at the swell as the board fired down its slickly breaking line.
Ahead of Harcourt a guy in his late teens, or maybe early twenties, kind of pasty looking, probably a backpacker, was floating helplessly on what was known as a ‘softie’, a cheap board for kids or learner surfers made out of composite plastics, not the hard fibreglass of most performance boards. He was just sitting there as Harcour
t’s rocketing board bore down on him. More by good luck than good management, Harcourt managed to swing a jagged turn at the last second to avoid a collision. In the half-second flying by, he saw a look of terror on the guy’s face.
Kicking out of the wave before it dumped on the shore, Harcourt felt a surge of anger fuelled by the adrenalin already coursing through his system. But his years of experience, and maturing moments, told him it was better to have a few stern words with the newcomer who was obviously a danger to himself and others. It was better to keep calm and be at least a bit conciliatory rather than lose his nut as he’d often seen others do.
But as he started to paddle back out towards him, here came Carpark on the Titanic, having snagged the last and biggest wave of the set. It was chest high on him – and Carpark was a sizable guy. His board rode fast and tight and it looked like the wave might even offer a quick tube ride, allowing him to duck down inside its fast curling break. But then too late, Carpark caught sight of the still-terrified novice who floundered to paddle the softie out of the way. Locked into the wave on the speeding board, Carpark made a last moment attempt to turn it back into the white-water, but the big projectile had taken aim like a guided missile.
There were a couple of muffled shouts and something like a dull thud – but most of the sound of the collision was lost in the all-encompassing white noise of the breaking wave. Carpark surfaced quickly and angrily. He hadn’t been using a leg-rope to attach himself to his board, something a lot of longboard riders preferred, particularly in smaller waves, and so the Titanic was now washing all the way to the sand on the broken wave. The pasty guy had been using a leg-rope, which beginners usually did, and now he was floundering on the end of it, his softie bobbing up and down a couple of metres away.
‘What the fuck are yah doing!’ yelled Carpark.
Oh, here was go, thought Harcourt as he paddled over to where their heads bobbed up and down in a patch of foamy water.
‘Sorry,’ spluttered the pasty-faced guy in what sounded to Harcourt like a northern English accent. ‘I tried to get out yer way, yer know.’ He had one of those flat pie plate faces that seemed to characterise young males from that part of the world.
‘Get outta the bloody water – and stay out until you have some idea of what the fuck you’re doing!’ thundered Carpark.
At least he’s not going to belt him, thought Harcourt as he reached them, although that would have been almost impossible as Carpark was up to his neck in water and keeping himself afloat, hardly a position from which to start throwing punches.
By now the guy had managed to pull himself back on to his softie and it was then that he noticed a long slice across its deck where the fin of Carpark’s speeding missile had cut deeply into it. ‘Look, at my board! Look what yer done!’ exclaimed the pasty-faced one.
‘Mate, be thankful it’s not your head with the hole in it,’ said Harcourt. ‘It would be better if you got out of the water now, believe me. Learn a few rules of the road with the other newbies before you come out here in a crowd like this.’
‘Yeah, fuck off!’ said Carpark. The guy looked downright frightened, not knowing Carpark’s bark was worse than his bite.
Between the sets of waves, the ocean had gone quiet and so had the line up as everyone, from the youngest grommet to the crustiest veteran, watched this little seaside drama play itself out. Those who had been around long enough knew that surfing’s bright and sunny image of caring and sharing didn’t exist on overcrowded city beaches where it was every man, woman and child for his or her self. You found your place in the pecking order and behaved accordingly. The pasty-faced guy was at the bottom of the food chain and in fact didn’t even make the register. It was best he leave. He seemed to have come to this realisation and without another word began to paddle, somewhat clumsily, towards the sand. Carpark even beat him to shore, swimming in to retrieve his board which had now washed up on the beach. From what Harcourt could see, if not quite hear, he fired a bit more advice at the pasty guy’s retreating back.
Later, as the three survivors of many such encounters walked up to the promenade to wash off under the shower – and after Carpark had calmed down – Harcourt sighed and remarked, ‘Just another day in our little surfside paradise.’
At least Carpark managed to laugh at that one.
TWO
Stevie Ray Vaughan’s electric blues guitar riffing Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Little Wing’ resonated through the interior of the Sand Bar as the long hours of the summer afternoon lazed by. It remained hot and still outside, but it was frigidly cool within these shadowy surroundings as the air-conditioning laboured overtime. Harcourt sat on a creaking stool at the well-worn bar that ran the length of the room. There was a small stage piled with sound gear and a bits and pieces drum kit at the far end, a dance floor in front of it and a scattering of utilitarian tables and chairs that had seen better days. By the wall opposite the bar stood a classic Wurlitzer 1015 jukebox, the pastel lights around its console aglow – and it even played vinyl 45-rpm singles, such as Vaughan’s take on the Hendrix classic.
The owner of the Sand Bar, Randy Wayne Roberts, still managed to find a steady supply of discs for his vintage juke. Most of them came from a source somewhere in Britain who he declined to divulge, not the United States, the home of the venerable Wurlitzer. It seemed the Brits appreciated such an icon of popular culture more than those who had built the massive lump of a thing back in the nineteen-forties. The discs were all old stuff, mainly blues, country, early rock, or various amalgams of the three, many having long since disappeared from any sort of regular sound or sight. There was barely a track on the box that had been recorded in the last twenty years – and most of it was earlier than that. It was probably the only juke in Australia – not that there were many anymore – to feature the mournful tones of Hank Williams singing ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’, recorded in nineteen forty-nine. And here it sat beachside in Australia’s biggest city, far from the plains of west Texas where Randy Wayne had been born and raised. But as he liked to explain to the often confused who wandered into his place and found themselves listening to some lonesome cowboy rather than the latest top forty diva, ‘We play both kind of music here – my-woman-just-up-and-left-me blues and my-dog-just-down-and-died country.’
For all his seemingly hillbilly sensibilities, Randy Wayne was anything but a yokel. He had an arts degree, majoring in English literature, from Austin University, the most liberal campus in Texas, and was a voracious reader, currently working his way through the early social commentary novels of English author Edmund Harrison, who these days turned out mega-selling frontline reportage epics when not featuring on the upper end of the international social scene with some pretty woman on his arm.
‘The guy’s a paradox,’ Randy Wayne told Harcourt during one of their Sand Bar chats. ‘He used to write gritty social realism but now he’s fixing to get his head shot off in world hot spots – when he’s not being an international playboy. Explain that to me.’
Harcourt couldn’t. But Harrison was with Tess’s company and had a major new book in the works. ‘I’ll get you a free copy when it comes out, that’s if I can. Hell, Randy Wayne, you’d read the goddam phone book if it told a better story.’
From their appearances, Harcourt – tall, thick in the shoulders with saltwater disarranged hair, wearing baggy shorts, an old Hobie Surfboards tee-shirt and dirty Converse sneakers – and Randy Wayne – short, wiry with slicked-back dark hair, dressed in a fitted snap-button shirt, vintage Levi’s and spit-polished Frye cowboy boots – looked to be worlds apart … A man of the sea meets a man of the plains.
But their relationship was almost intuitive. Randy Wayne, now pushing sixty, had first come to Australia more than twenty years ago as a guitar player and back-up singer on an eventful tour. Things had gotten off to a dubious start at the Tamworth country music festival with a group of ultra-nationalistic locals and a late night bar brawl that had led to a string of court appea
rances, fines, even threats of deportation, and a storm of press interest that had been all but missing up till then. Thanks to the resulting sensationalised reporting, especially by the tabloid TV shows, the national tour ended up doing sell-out business.
When it hit Sydney, Harcourt interviewed Randy Wayne as one of the arrested and subsequently fined stars. Harcourt knew of this guitar player’s hard-won place in the scheme of things. He’d written a dozen hits for hunky cowboy and cute cowgirl singers. Using his considerable business smarts, Randy Wayne had hammered out a deal that enabled him to hang on to his songs’ publishing rights, something most production-line songwriters of the time failed to do. All these years later, he still received tidy royalty cheques because of their ongoing airplay on golden oldies radio stations.
In his down-to-earth way, Randy Wayne had been genuinely heartened that someone in this far-off corner of the world, beyond the smattering of Tamworth regulars, knew of him, and he and Harcourt kept up an intermittent correspondence over the years. When his recording session work was taken over by a younger generation of guitarists, and after divorcing his one-time teenage sweetheart bride, he decided it was time to look for a new horizon. Eventually he thought about Australia and, on Harcourt’s urging, decided to give it a try.
Fifteen years later and Randy Wayne was cruising. The Sand Bar was thriving. Perhaps this was because it couldn’t help standing out like a Texan in a ten-gallon hat among the Australian seaside tackiness of cheap Thai restaurants, takeaway burger and pizza joints, backpacker crash pads and budget clothing and surfwear shops. He had also picked up a bit of recording work and dabbled in a couple of pick-up bands who played on a semi-regular basis at the Sand Bar and at other places around the neighbouring beaches that wanted something other than oh so cool DJs churning out mind-numbing beats.