All Our Waves Are Water

by Jaimal Yogis

  I still didn’t know where it was going—if I would be a journalist forever, with Siri forever, or living in San Francisco forever. But that night I had a dream that helped me stop grasping at certainty.

  In the dream I was dying and a group of doctors were slowly taking my body apart like a car in a chop shop. First the hair, then the skin, then the eyes. Each time they removed a layer, the world I relied on was melting away. All those memories I stood on like crutches: first kiss, first horror film, first loss, first win. They were each torn away along with the layers of biology. But as the doctors dug deeper, cutting out the intestines, the stomach, the liver, I wasn’t afraid. I felt another body beneath this body. It was a body that was woven of mind or wind or water or dreams and couldn’t be cut or sliced or killed. I knew this with confidence. Excited about the news, I sat up on the operating table to tell the doctors. But as I did, my excitement woke me. I was sweating—the wounds on my back still stinging.

  18

  Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

  —Lao Tzu

  I do not understand the mystery of grace—only

  that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.

  —Anne Lamott

  In a famous teaching known as the sutta of the arrow, the Buddha tells his students that, if they hadn’t noticed, even with all this mindfulness and compassion work, life is still rocky.

  “Monks,” the Buddha says, “an uninstructed run-of-the-mill person feels feelings of pleasure, feelings of pain, feelings of neither-pleasure-nor-pain. A well-instructed disciple of the noble ones also feels feelings of pleasure, feelings of pain, feelings of neither-pleasure-nor-pain. So what difference, what distinction, what distinguishing factor is there between the well-instructed disciple of the noble ones and the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person?”

  Buddhist suttas were not originally written down. They were passed on through recitation. But removing some of the repetition that’s there for memorization, the Buddha basically tells the monks that the “run-of-the-mill person,” when shot with an arrow, “sorrows, grieves, and laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical and mental . . . the pains of two arrows.” The person trained in mindfulness, however, when shot with an arrow, feels only the physical pain and “does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. So he feels one pain: physical, but not mental.”

  With our home team, the Giants, winning three World Series in recent years, this teaching always makes me think of catcher Buster Posey. When Buster gets whacked in the thigh by yet another ninety-five-miles-an-hour slider, he leaps up, cringes, walks it off, then crouches back down for another pitch. It hurts. Of course it hurts. Life hurts. But what Buster doesn’t add is a big story on top of the pain. That would just hurt more. There’s a game to be played.

  After Jimmy flew off to Africa, Siri came to meet me in Bali for the last few weeks of the trip. Before leaving, we had been in the low tide of our relationship cycle, a cycle that usually took a downturn when I started questioning the relationship and Siri got insecure. Then I felt bad, told Siri I was ready to commit, and she proceeded to want out. I then got jealous and tried to convince her to stay. We’d broken up three or four times now, a cycle that was beginning to feel like a depressing Groundhog Day.

  We were never sure if this breakup cycle was because we both had fears of marriage from our divorced parents or because of something more fundamental. But the fact was this: We had a lot of fun together when we lived in the present. When we thought about the future, the fun got twisted. But instead of letting uncertainty be a single arrow, Siri and I found ourselves complaining about uncertainty a lot, which made uncertainty into lots of arrows.

  Maybe it was the Hindu ceremonies where priests in shiny outfits tossed flower petals and holy water on our foreheads. Maybe it was climbing a volcano on Lombok at sunrise or moped rides through mountain rice fields. But in Bali it felt as though Siri and I finally stopped firing arrows at uncertainty. We let uncertainty be its usual uncomfortable self. Then we kept living, two people who happened to like spending time together now.

  I presumed this was Bali’s magic. But as we immersed ourselves back into San Francisco—working and seeing friends and paying bills and cooking—we were able to keep the good vibes. At least for a while. There was a grace period from uncertainty target practice. And in this period, I also saw that, before Bali, I’d been throwing subtle arrows at the facts of life. I’d been moaning that my student loans took all my money instead of just paying them. I’d been moaning about how much work it took to write a decent article instead of just working hard to write a decent article. I’d been moaning about the onshore winds at Ocean Beach instead of just feeling the wind. I’d been moaning about all the political things that are easy to blame your problems on instead of doing something to ameliorate our flawed democracy.

  These arrows had seemed like natural venting, a necessary pressure release. But as I looked at my arrow-shooting habits, I realized that those second arrows never helped. At best, they just were annoying to the people who had to listen. At worst, they made the wounds sting more.

  So I tried to completely stop shooting second arrows, and failed. (Complaining is a highly addictive behavior.) But I think I reduced the moaning and whining by about 10 percent. And 10 percent fewer arrows is 10 percent fewer arrows. It can do a lot of good.

  For example, now that we’d hit a new stride, Siri and I decided we would try to find an affordable one- or two-bedroom apartment together in the most expensive city on earth, on an art teacher’s and a writer’s salaries. I was pessimistic about our chances, but I caught myself about to complain and thought, Wait and see. Siri, after all, had a way with housing. She had found little lofts or artist’s studios by simply knocking on doors of places she loved. This had led to both surprising opportunities and a few frightening experiences. But for Siri, it slanted positive.

  So, following Siri’s lead, in under a month, we fell in love with a place that was affordable—affordable being a relative term. It was a studio that received perfect morning light and had its own private bathroom and kitchen. That’s right, its own private bathroom and kitchen.

  Siri won the landlord over at the open house, and we were sure we’d get it. But no call ever came, and we eventually badgered the poor landlord enough to discover the truth. A young web engineer had offered two years’ rent. In cash.

  Similar misses occurred over the next month. Refraining from moaning, I went to the next logical option: quitting. “I think we should throw in the towel,” I told Siri one night.

  I’d left my little in-law for the Bali trip and was now crashing on my sister’s couch. Siri was living in a tiny bedroom in Oakland.

  “We can’t,” Siri said. “This is just the city. You keep trying.”

  I rolled my eyes. Recently Siri had started approaching strangers on the street to ask for housing. Part of me was impressed. The other part of me thought I was dating an insane person.

  “Well, let’s do a shelter dance then,” I said, trying to stay positive and withholding a second arrow I really wanted to shoot.

  “A shelter dance?”

  “You know, like a rain dance but for shelter from the rain.”

  We were taking swing dancing classes at the time—an attempt to find some common passions since Siri didn’t surf and I didn’t paint. A shelter dance seemed like an opportunity to dance with purpose. Perhaps to pray.

  Siri liked this idea. We drew up some pictures of idyllic apartments. Nothing fancy. Just a couple windows, a roof, a stove, a shower. We taped them to the wall. Then we tossed some ragtime on and began to butterfly, dishrag, and loop-de-loop around my sister’s dining room, picturing ourselves settled, happy, cooking.

  Sweaty, we then walked down to the beach and burned our sketches in a bonfire. But nothing happened. Nothing but life rolling on, which was OK. Not moaning so much was s
howing good results in other areas. I’d even landed an opportunity to write a feature about Ocean Beach surfing, something that seemed too good to be true on its own. I never thought the story would tie in to shelter or arrows. But here is how we encountered a single-arrow warrior—the Queen of Ocean Beach—and in the process found an apartment we never could have dreamed up.

  There was a new surf shop–art gallery out on San Francisco’s foggy western fringe called Mollusk. The Mollusk crew was a cult of scruffy artists who spent most of their days longboarding and drinking boutique coffee on the shop’s front stoop. But they also made beautiful retro surf gear and clothing that deified the wave riders of the days past—especially their nonmaterialist ways. Then the crew charged rich folks a lot of money to buy these products.

  The Mollusk surfers’ obsession with looking as if they didn’t care how they looked could feel a little precious. But because many of them had grown up in LA and felt comfortable with the theater of life, they could joke about that hypocrisy, which made them more tolerable than your average hipsters. I pitched the Mollusk crew as a puff piece, and to profile them, I had to interview some of their idols.

  “Carol,” whispered Jay, a twenty-four-year-old who lived in Mollusk’s attic and spent his days building Scandinavian-inspired wooden campers on hatchbacks.

  “Who’s that?” I asked, wondering why we were whispering.

  Jay looked down, shyly twisting his torn wool sweater about his fingers.

  “Well, she’s actually the Queen.”

  “The Queen?”

  “The Queen.”

  “Like, literally?”

  “Yeah. Of Ocean Beach.”

  The Queen’s palace was just around the corner from Mollusk, a three-story peach Victorian with blue sea horses carved into the beach-facing facade. A life-size Saint Francis mural gleamed on the south-facing wall. Dolphin carvings flanked the third-story dormer window, and a bright wooden sun rose out of the rafters.

  I walked up the abalone-embossed steps and knocked.

  “Hello? Anyone home?”

  Nobody answered, and I was about to leave when I heard a scream. “NO YOU DON’T, YOU LITTLE SHIT! NO YOU DON’T!” The raspy voice was clearly that of an elderly woman. She sounded panicked, and the front door was ajar. I walked inside.

  “Hello?” I shouted, tiptoeing through a living room that was so thick with objects it was hard to find passage. A tarnished tuba lay against a dusty stand-up bass, which lay next to an orange fishing buoy propped on top of a bag of chicken feed.

  I climbed over a three-foot pile of yellowing New York Times into the kitchen where raw vegetables lay everywhere. Antler-like pieces of driftwood and strands of garlic dangled from the ceiling. I hit my head on one. Then I heard another scream.

  “DON’T JUST STAND THERE! GRAB HIM!”

  Out of the back window, in the overgrown bougainvillea, I saw the Queen. She was dressed in nothing but batik cloth wrapped around her waist—leathery breasts exposed to the sun, wild red hair encrusted with salt. Her skin was wrinkled and browned like an elephant seal’s, but her body was lean and muscular, and she stood like a free safety ready to tackle. Behind her, a fluffy white chicken cowered.

  I assumed the Queen was shouting at someone down in the garden, but then she looked directly at me through the window and screamed, “THE DOG! GRAB THE DOG, YOU MORON!” I ran down the squeaky wooden stairs and saw the mutt. He was growling and barking at the chicken as dogs do.

  “BACK HOME!” the Queen shouted at the dog. “Murderer!”

  I grabbed the dog by the collar.

  “Where should I take him?” I asked.

  “How should I know!” the Queen said.

  “OK . . . I guess I’ll . . .”

  The Queen pointed toward the gate.

  “Anywhere but here!” she shouted.

  She looked me up and down as if I was dressed strangely.

  “Are you looking for somewhere to stay or something?” she asked.

  “No, actually, I’m here . . . I mean, I was hoping to interview you.”

  “Well, does this look like a good time?”

  “No, but maybe, you know, another . . .”

  “No! I can’t do the interview with the dog here. Get her out of here and we can talk. What’s your name anyway?”

  “Jaimal.”

  “How do you take your tea?”

  That was how I met the Queen, who, I later learned, had lost a few chickens to neighborhood dogs. Over the course of many splendid weeks of interviews with the Queen and her longtime friends, I learned why people left firewood on her doorstep like offerings and how she earned her royal title.

  Carol Schuldt was born in San Francisco in 1933. Her stepfather was a longshoreman, and her mother stayed home, but “in those days,” the Queen told me on that first day in her garden, “parents just said, ‘get out of here and be back by dinner.’”

  Carol didn’t mind this because, “I always had a gang, a big rowdy gang, and we’d go around building caves in the park and having acorn wars, surfing and singing and building fires and getting into trouble.”

  In her teens, Carol was a wild partier, a terrible student, who ran with some of the beats in North Beach. “Ferlinghetti, the artists and intellectuals, the homosexuals. I was a city girl,” the Queen said with a wink. “I played piano at the hungry i all night.”

  But urban as she was, what Carol truly loved was playing in the cold Pacific. For money, she worked stints on fishing boats and hauled sea logs, but she spent all her free days riding waves with big-wave surfers like Jack O’Neill and Fred Van Dyke who lived around Ocean Beach at the time.

  “Your generation doesn’t understand, Jaimal,” the Queen told me. We were now nibbling raw radishes she’d just yanked up. “You have your gizmos, your technology. You surf and get back in the car. You turn on the heater. You go work in a box not speaking to anyone. You don’t stay on the beach. You don’t have the fire.”

  Even after O’Neill, a friend of Carol’s, invented the wetsuit in 1952, Carol and her gang bodysurfed Ocean Beach in nothing but trunks or a bikini, a practice the Queen was still maintaining at seventy-five years old (only she usually surfed naked now).

  “Life was about feeling then,” she said, “not about avoiding pain, not about hiding behind headphones and screens. We were free, Jaimal, and it was wild and not phony at all.”

  San Francisco seawater hovers around fifty degrees. So Carol’s gang gathered driftwood, built a bonfire, then jogged up and down the foggy beach before plunging in.

  “We’d stay out until we were blue and then come in by the fire and do it all over again,” she said.

  “How did you get excited to be cold every day?” I asked.

  “It’s just cold!” Carol laughed. “What’s the matter with that?”

  This was back when the palatial indoor Sutro Baths were still standing next to the Cliff House restaurant, when Playland—the beach boardwalk with Laughing Sal and bumper cars—ran along the north end of Ocean Beach where the Safeway is now.

  In those days, Timothy Leary was down at the beach keeping the youth stoned. Carol and her friend Tamby, whom she eventually married, led the opposing tribe of healthy surfers, bringing in as many young people as they could. They believed nature was the doorway to truth and managed to buy a small house near the water, often letting friends who couldn’t make rent stay with them for free. They also gave shelter to recovering addicts.

  “They personally saved me,” Rudy Funk, a longtime San Francisco surfer later told me. “They saved I don’t know how many people.”

  But harder drugs were coming to the beach in the late ’60s into ’70s, and the Sutro Baths burned down in 1966. In 1972, Playland, which was slowly becoming dominated by gangs and heroin, was torn down and replaced with condos.

  In Tam and Carol’s eyes, these were local reflections of society becoming less in tune with nature each year; the more distant people became, the more drugs and distracti
ons they wanted. Surfers became more aggressive and territorial. A lot of Carol’s best friends moved to Hawaii or more rural areas. On top of the cultural shift, Carol and Tam’s three-year-old son, Peter, was hit by a car on the Great Highway.

  Doctors said that Pete would die or be a vegetable—no hope. But Carol didn’t buy it. She ripped Pete off life support at San Francisco General and drove him to Ocean Beach. In tears, she rolled him in the wet sand and cold surf. She believed the sea’s power would give him life.

  For his first ten years, Pete lived but couldn’t walk or talk. Slowly, slowly, however, as Pete was rolled in the tides each morning, and read stories to, and brought to parties, and talked to constantly, he began, for one reason or another, to heal. Broken sentences emerged. Walking, running. By age forty-one, when I met him, Pete’s speech was slightly delayed. One eye wandered. His gait was crooked, but he loved to travel and even competed in swimming and running.

  Broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, and handsome, Pete often had a girlfriend and did odd jobs around the neighborhood to keep busy. Many called him the neighborhood Buddha for his peaceful, warm demeanor.

  Carol and Tam later divorced, Tam moving to a quiet area of Marin. Carol stopped surfing Ocean Beach and began riding her rusted beach cruiser to a beach she called “the pretty place,” a secret spot she made me swear not to mention because “it’s the last one, Jaimal, the last place where I can connect to the universal mind.”

  “The ecstasy was over,” Tam later told me from his forest cabin, “but through all the madness, what amazes me is that Carol stuck to her values and her lifestyle. She’s been through so much, but she never gave up on her ways or wanting to help people, even the people who simply can’t be helped. That’s why she’s the Queen.”

  I included the Queen in the larger piece about Mollusk and Ocean Beach. Then I moved on to writing about some city controversy or the best fish tacos. But the Queen’s voice stuck with me. When I was tempted to moan, along with Sonam, I now heard Carol cackling, “Jaimal, it’s just cold! What’s the matter with that?”