by Malcolm Knox
But you only got one scoring wave, and even if it was a 20 out of 20 you probably be knocked out the conness. Some argy-bargy about had you gone outside the conness area.
Then a bunch of locals stormed the judging tent and threatened to wrench the judges’ arms out their sockets if they didn’t send you through to the next round.
Didn’t matter what the scores were. You got the greatest wave in the history of the biggest surf break in California. Instant legend. DK.
Thirty thousand chanting:
DK! DK! DK! DK!
You done interviews. They asked if you thought you were the best surfer in the world. This was the year of Ali and Bobby Fischer. You said:
Yes I believe I am.
No crap. That was DK. They ate it up.
So you’ve just won the HB Pro with what’s being called the wave that was heard around the world. Where to from here?
Win next week at Trestles.
No bull. DK.
There were guys waiting for you on the beach with fence palings cos you’d been hassling so hard. By the end of the event they were carrying you out of the water on their shoulders. How did you turn it around?
You saw. People recognise greatness.
DK, DK, DK.
You DK was famous. People who you didn’t know waltz up on HB promenade and chatted like you’re their best mate. Full-on. You were a movie star. Americans knew how to treat their stars: blitzed you with their love.
A continent full of love but no Lisa.
•
In the hotel surfers want to play you: table tennis, chess, pool, Monopoly. They just want to beat you at something. But you got an authority to maintain.
They give you joints, trips, ludes, mushies, to dull your edge.
You beat them at table tennis.
Beat them at chess.
At pool.
Monopoly.
Somebody had to keep the world in order. Your belief system: a pyramid, with DK at the top. In all things.
All things.
At Trestles, a nice A-frame beach break, you disappeared in the sandhills and let them wonder were you in the country, in the state, in an altered state, on the moon . . . They talk about you and talk about you some more and lie awake all night wondering. Then their heats start and you aren’t there. They get confident. Till they look out the back when a bomb set come in, and they paddle out like crazy to scratch their way over the top of the wall of water, and on the inside, deep in the wave, in the barrel, the Scream in Blue clearing the water.
They were gone baby gone. They loved you or hated you, they didn’t want to surf against you. Either they were grovelling at your feet like you were the Second Coming or conspiring to get you kicked off the tour. They niggled the judges about technicalities: find something illegal you done. They wanted the scoring system changed back again to reward flouncy slow trimmers instead of the zigs and zags within the zigs and the zags. Michael Peterson said he’d never want to surf cynical like you surfed, and he pulled the plug. Weak. Cynical! You don’t even know what that means. Petersons and their big words.
Nobody could handle DK.
You won at Trestles but they got in the judges’ heads in the third Californian leg, at Churches. By now they had to keep some interest in the world title cos you were running away with the thing. Lot of coin changing hands. You saw it all from behind your aviators. The beginning of corruption. Sponsors. Beginning of the end.
But you finished the sixth event of the tour with four wins under your belt and six grand in earnings. You sent orders home for a velvet lounge suite bought for Mo. Apparently when the delivery men bring it to Sanga, she said it wasn’t hers. They assured her it was, care of Dennis Keith. She unblocked the doorway and let them in.
Took her a while to sit in it.
Didn’t approve of luxuries for herself, your Mo.
You been away from home six weeks. Before that, you been away three of five weeks for Bells and Margs. You were missing the Gold Coast so bad you were wasting away. Had diarrhoea. Had no friends on the tour. They loved you too much. They hated you too much. No room for friendship when you are a living legend. No risk to the winning edge.
No mates.
No Mo.
No Lisa.
Nineteen seventy-five still. More or less, you thought. You holed up in your hotel in your aviators and watched TV comedies, documentaries, news. No movies. You never liked movies. But comedies, yeah, and news. Surfing documentaries, for sure. Animals. Africa. Yeah.
All on your tod.
Going spare.
Thinking about the next stop.
The three legs, the Triple Crown:
Haleiwa, Sunset, Pipe.
Couldn’t stop thinking.
About Hawaii.
The three legs, the Triple Crown:
Haleiwa, Sunset, Pipe.
Couldn’t stop.
Going in the posters on the walls of your bedroom in Sanga.
You made a call home.
Mo has to go to hospital again, she does it more now, I dunno. She won’t tell me what she has to go in for and I won’t ask her in case I don’t like the answer. She says it’s only for a couple of nights
and but
but her spidery maroon veins her lovely face.
Her eyes looking away from me all the time so hard they feel like they’re boring straight through me.
Whatever’s wrong with her must be bad. But my Mo she’s not worried about herself. She’s worried about me fending for meself a couple of nights.
‘It’s sweet Mo. I got some muesli. I’ll go down to Bob’s for lunch. I can do it.’
She holds me hands. We’re sitting at the melamine table. My feet are in the air cos I can’t handle the diagonals. I want to go home. I want to sleep in Shangrila.
‘I’ll be right Mo. I’ll come visit you.’
But I won’t. I won’t have no-one to take me.
Half the fricken Gold Coast would give their right ball to drive Dennis Keith to the hospital to see his sick mother.
But I won’t. No-one will know about me and my Mo and what I need and what she needs.
BFO’s gone. Shot through.
I didn’t tell Mo about the conversation, me twigging who the BFO was. Or thought she was.
But no she
Mo hasn’t mentioned the BFO and neither will I.
I won’t either.
She gets the village minibus to the hospital. I see it through the metal security grille. My fingers white on the aluminium. Grabbing the rails.
Into the bedroom, under the covers, up with the radio.
It’s only two nights. Sweet.
Dennis, you only needed to open your mouth.
She didn’t have the heart to tell me.
What she knew.
Halfway through the first night I get up and go to the hallway closet. The one that falls open with the old junk. The one that holds all of Shangrila.
You get in there and find what you was looking for.
Get some blu-tak.
Go to work.
Darkness before dawn, time I used to get up to ride my chopper down The Other Side, the hour when cops raid, I sit on my bed.
Feet up. Not touching these bad diagonals:
My work is done.
He must of been Hawaiian. Rod spread a rumour round Kirra that your dad was Duke Kahanamoku—though the Duke would of been pretty long in the tooth by 1950, the year you were made. And probably not that type of man. A gentleman and a Duke. Royalty. Wouldn’t of done that.
But the point was, Rod said, a surfing god must of made you.
A Hawaiian.
It was in the way you shaped your spine for your
famous cutback. The way you chopped your right hand behind you to make the wave go as fast as your mind. The courage to take on the big monsters:
You had to have some Hawaiian in you. It stood to reason. You felt Hawaiian. You even liked their slack key music.
No idea who they were. Never heard of Hawaiians coming to Queensland in 1950. But there had to be. Brothers. Big-wave riders. Stood looking at five-foot Greenmount one day, shrugged their shoulders, too small for them, so went off looking for sport on land. Ladies would of loved them in Queensland. Take their pick.
Hawaiian big-wave gods.
One of them him.
You flew from America to Hawaii on your own. Feb ’75.
LAX:
You kept your eyes on the floor.
Nobody hassled you.
Nobody knew you.
World’s greatest surfer. World champion waiting for his crown: in a plane to Hawaii.
Hawaii.
The posters on your bedroom wall.
Hawaii:
Land of legends.
Hawaii.
Honolulu Airport:
Man mountains of customs officials smiling and waving you through . . .
Women in grass skirts and coconut bras singing and hula-ing . . .
A big half-pineapple full of juice and a straw shoved in your hand . . .
A necklace of frangipanis slung round your neck . . .
You’d died and went to heaven . . .
Aloha, DK.
Reporters grabbed you. Microphones.
Your press conference:
DK, they say you’re the best in the world now, tell us straight up, man, what do you think about that?
Well I am.
Laughter.
You’re brave, man, talking like that here.
You said tell you straight up.
Sweating pellets all the way in from the airport in the official car. Already paranoid about what you said. The coconut wireless be carrying your words round the islands.
Your heart playing tom-toms while the world tour’s official driver this beefy Hawaiian with a kombi took you to the North Shore.
North Shore: Sunset, Pipe, Laniakea, Haleiwa. The place called Waimea which only the headcases surfed.
Hawaii.
The Rock.
You checked in.
You turned on the TV.
You didn’t leave your room.
You could hear onshores mucking up the surf but you didn’t look.
Couldn’t.
You couldn’t handle Hawaii on your own.
While you was waiting in your hotel waiting for the onshores to drop and the surf to clean itself up, these things happened to Rod.
He took a call at home at the Queenslander.
He packed his bags.
He packed his mull.
He packed his harry.
He got Mo to drive him to Brisbane airport.
He kissed her goodbye.
He found out he couldn’t get through immigration cos he didn’t have a passport.
He called Mo.
He got her to drive him to the post office.
He went home for two days.
He got his passport.
He packed his bags.
He packed his mull.
He packed his harry.
He got Mo to drive him to Brisbane airport.
He kissed her goodbye.
He sparked up in the toilet in the airport.
He shot up in the toilet in the plane.
He had a few drinks.
He arrived at Honolulu airport and got took in by the police for suspected vagrancy and terrorism.
Sniffer dogs had sussed something out.
He got searched.
They found his full ding-repair kit: glass, resin, hardener, catalyst. Stink of acetone.
They analysed it. Thought he was making bombs but it was his ding-repair kit.
The smell of acetone was so strong, dogs found nothing else.
He got interrogated.
He said nothing.
Wouldn’t even confirm the name they read on his passport.
Sat in the lock-up at Honolulu airport for six hours.
Told them nothing. Wouldn’t even open his mouth.
They searched him again. Found nothing. He reeked of it: acetone, fibreglass, surfboards.
Kicked him out.
He got a taxi to Rocky Point. Fabled but inconsistent break: eight to twelve foot, occasional sets up to one foot. You knew this. You’d read about Rocky Point all your life.
He had no coin.
With his board and his bag, he done a runner.
Taxi driver was too fat to run after him.
Taxi driver shot at him.
He got away, slept in a cave at Rocky Point.
He’d forgot where you were staying.
Next morning, he took a shot and slept in, then thought bugger you, he’s going for a surf.
He got some four-foot runners at Rocky Point.
He thought, bugger you, he’s staying here.
He slept under the palm trees three nights.
He got four-foot, five-foot, six-foot runners at Rocky Point.
Just about on his own. Locals hooting him, buying him cocktails at night, bringing him ice cream. Coolest place on earth. Hardly anyone out. He could of stayed there forever. Heaven.
Hell.
Next day the surf jacked up to twelve foot and he went out again.
Crowded.
Heavy.
Rod didn’t know. He thought he was in heaven. Dropped into waves and got smashed on the reef. Cut himself up.
Paddled back out.
Got hassled. Got threatened. Got told to get the fuck out of the water.
Rod took them on but wasn’t good enough.
Got smashed.
Smashed.
Smashed again.
On the reef.
In his head.
Coconut wireless—
A group of them followed him in to the beach. Circled him. Said they were gunna smash him so hard the nailing he got from the reef’ll feel like a Thai massage.
Closed in on him.
Rod in a noose of Hawaiian meat.
What Rod did next:
Started gagging on his own tongue.
Frothing at the mouth.
Babbling strange languages.
Sucking back screams.
Spinning in circles.
Blood drained out of his head.
Fell over, donutted more circles.
Babbling.
Frothing.
Spinning.
They thought he was having an epileptic fit.
Was what he wanted them to think.
Then they figured he was having them on.
Some laughed.
Some called him an asshole. Ass-haole.
But they couldn’t beat crap out of him now. Not on the sand. He was too low down.
•
After that day he decided he come and find you over at Haleiwa. He been told you were in your resort hotel, waiting for him in your room.
Lost in Space was on.
Rod’s favourite.
You didn’t say nothing when he showed on your balcony. Cuts all over his face, chest, legs. Big deep black-red gashes.
You pushed the aviators up your nose (still there). You turned back to Lost in Space.
Rod: Warning! Warning! Danger! Danger!
He sit down beside you and got his works out.
He rolled you a doob. You said no
eh.
He took a shot. He smoked his mull. You tried not to watch him.
Lost in Space.
When he was real stoned and staggering round the room, he caught you by surprise: come up to you, grabbed your ears and pushed his face up into yours.
You thought:
Rod don’t choose this moment to turn queer on me—
But he wasn’t kissing you. He was rubbing his nose against yours. Your aviators jumping round all over the shop.
What the f—
Rod fell back on the bed, laughing to break the mouth.
Aloha, DK.
Eh?
Alo means face, ha means breath. Aloha is us sharing the essence of our breath, our life, DK.
Ya didn’t get any of my breath ya homo bastard.
He sighed and lay back: Aloha Den.
Put his arms behind his head on the pillow like he was settling in for the night.
Get off me bed Rodney.
But—
You watched more TV.
Conness was starting the next morning, and you had your bro.
Not alone no more. You were right to call him, buy his ticket.
The conness.
Hawaii.
You hadn’t been game to look at a wave till your bro got there.
You needed your bro. Rodney Keith Keith.
Not alone no more.
He offered you a doob for the fifteenth time in fifteen minutes.
You shook your head.
Whasup DK?
You shook your head.
Here!
You put a hand up to the side of your face like a blinker, keep him away.
C’mon D, it’s not a microphone!
You get up and went to the toilet.
You weren’t smoking. You were going turkey on him. This was Hawaii. You was going to pay due respects. You were bugging out. You couldn’t sleep. You were having nightmares. Your thoughts were inside out and upside down. You were choking down tears in the bathroom. Couldn’t look at yourself in the mirror.
Couldn’t look out your balcony door at the waves.
Hawaii.
No Smoking.
You didn’t have the hair to tell Rod. He wouldn’t of known what to make of it.
Of you.