The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld

by Justin Hocking

  I sit down on the sand, chest and stomach muscles clenched, heart pumping arrhythmically.

  Teagan, who has also just started surfing, stretches into a borrowed wetsuit.

  “Come on,” she says, “we’ll go out together. We’ve totally got this.”

  Shoulder to shoulder with Teagan, things seem less perilous. With glassy conditions and just a slight offshore breeze, paddling out is easier than I thought, and to my surprise, so is catching waves.

  My first is a perfectly shaped, head-high wall of water—)))))))))))))))))))))))—the concave lip breaking from left to right, from Queens toward Brooklyn.

  I paddle into it at a slight angle. Just like Kyle Grodin showed me the weekend before. Arching my back and popping up to my feet, I cut frontside down the stained-glass face, my back knee cocked in slightly.

  Dropping right into the pocket—the power source—the wave folds into itself just behind me, while the silver-blue, sun-flecked lip keeps welling up in front of me, feathering white at the upper edge, the wind hollowing it out, holding it up like a crystal cavern wall—and I skim across it faster than I’ve ever surfed, my left fingers combing the surface, a long frothy wake tailing my board—until it curls and tumbles all over itself, rolls itself up like a long, bleached bale of hay, then collapses.

  It only lasts a few seconds, but still it’s a kind of peak flow experience, something I’ve experienced many times on a skateboard, where all sense of time drops away, inducing a sense of euphoria combined with intense focus. In this case, the experience is heightened by the ocean, by the fact that I’m in physical conversation with a reverberation of energy from a distant storm system.

  After cheering on Dawn as she rips a right-breaking peak, I catch a few more perfect lefts, riding the last one all the way back to shore, where Teagan’s already out of the water, waiting for us. Emerging from the brisk sea into warm, hazy sunlight, I feel like I’m being reborn into the world as a different person—I just surfed my first storm swell without failing or even falling once.

  Back on the beach, we peel off our wetsuits, spread a Mexican blanket across the sand, and lie down, Teagan’s tan, sun-warmed leg touching mine. I watch as she rubs some sunscreen between her hands, then finger-combs it through her thick brown hair.

  “Hair can get sunburned?” I ask.

  “Not so much burned as damaged. Here, you want me to give you a little condition?”

  She squeezes a tiny white pearl into her palm, rubs her hands together, then massages it into my hair and scalp. I haven’t been touched by another human for weeks. Combined with my lingering surf buzz, it feels phenomenal.

  “All right, angel-face,” she says, “you’re all set.”

  “So what’s the plan for tonight?” I ask.

  “Dawn’s got a hot date. Me, not so much. But I’m meeting up with her for drinks at midnight.”

  “You want to grab some dinner after the beach?”

  “Deal,” she says, leaning her shoulder into mine.

  Dawn stays out in the ocean for another half hour, while Teagan and I nap and flirt on the beach. It’s late afternoon by the time we make it back to Brooklyn. I shower and put on a T-shirt and jeans and cowboy boots. Before heading out I do a quick double take in the mirror, a little surprised at how surfing has transformed my upper body.

  Teagan and I meet up at Bonita, an upscale Mexican place just around the corner from my apartment.

  “Hi hi,” she says—it’s always double hi’s with Teagan—and returns my kiss on the cheek. We score a coveted sidewalk table, right on Bedford, and drink Pacificos with lime while waiting for our orders. We talk about her birds: she makes little stuffed pigeons, knits and sews them by hand, sells them from her website.

  She also tells me about a friend who showed up at her apartment the previous weekend ripped on cocaine. He basically hung around all night, tweaking out, eating her food, throwing her pigeons around, and trying but failing to sit through a movie.

  “Finally at about four in the morning he comes up with this brilliant idea that we should make out. But by that time I was way past bored and ready for bed. I was like really, dude, really?”

  “So what’d you do?”

  “I figured what the hell. We’re not a couple or anything. I mostly just did it to shut him up. So yeah, I let him French me for a minute, then pushed him out the door.”

  Her use of French as a verb kills me. And also the way she used actual Frenching so strategically. I consider my own strategy, wondering if I’ll plant a first kiss on her, but at the same time starting to doubt if I can even keep up with her.

  After dinner, Teagan wants me to hit the bars with her, then meet up with Dawn at midnight. But it’s already past eleven, and I have a strict rule about waking up early on Saturdays to write. Plus I had two whole Pacificos—about all my lightweight constitution can handle. The fact is, I’m just not that into drinking. In this way I’ve maybe set myself up for some major isolation—drinking is what New York women in their thirties do on the weekends. At least the ones I’ve met so far.

  Teagan and I say our good-byes and then I head home, still ecstatic about surfing but at the same time completely lonely. Teagan’s intelligent and beyond attractive, but we’re totally incompatible. It’s the same story with all the women I’ve dated in the city.

  Then it hits me—what feels like an epiphany: I want to be with Karissa. After my Ophelia ride I’m feeling better than ever. I’ve gotten over my subway fear, my ocean fear, and now that I’m stronger, more independent, I’m ready to leave New York on a high note. And I want to be with Karissa again, share this feeling with one person who will understand, and who won’t just want to go partying all night. Who will instead let me take her to bed early, so we can take our time folding into each other’s bodies, and then wake up early for a service at Unity.

  I picture the two of us standing hand in hand at a church altar in Portland, Oregon—where Karissa lives now, and where I’ve always wanted to live—in front of all our friends and family.

  She picks up when I call, sounds happy to hear from me.

  “I want to talk to you about something,” she says.

  My stomach goes all fluttery, hoping maybe she’s been thinking the same thing, that we can work it out and get back together, that this is all going according to the two-Pacifico plan I formulated five minutes ago.

  “You know that black party dress I told you about, the one I sewed by hand?” she says.

  Though I’ve never actually seen it, I can so vividly picture her in it, the way it must curve around her hips and chest, expose her smooth skin and tattoos.

  “I wore it the other night, when a bunch of my new friends and I went out and sang karaoke. And something clicked with me—I got up on stage and sang song after song. Everyone was cheering for me because they were glad to finally see me happy, you know? Then my new friend Alex got up and sang with me, and everyone was cheering for us even more. And then it dawned on me—I almost couldn’t believe it was happening—but it dawned on me that Alex and I are together now.”

  After a long silence, Karissa asks if I’m still there.

  I finally manage to speak. “I guess I don’t know why you’re telling me this.”

  “I’m telling you because I don’t think we should talk so much anymore. It’s not really fair to the person I’m dating.”

  Though I was the one who’d gone and left her for my ostensibly awesome new life in New York, the news hits me hard, sucker punches me right off my blissful little surfing peak.

  Feeling panicked and desperate, I tell her how I’ve dated some people too, but that I realize now how special what we had was, that no one else makes me feel like she does—trying not to, but still heaping on the clichés, because I so desperately need to get this out, to get her back. I tell her about surfing and my epiphany—that I want to move to Portland. That I’m ready to move to Portland, to be with her.

  Now the silence emanates from her end.
>
  When she finds her voice, it quavers on the edge of anger and hurt. “I thought you’d be happy for me. You were the one who left me, remember? But instead you dump all this shit on me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s how I feel. I’m just being honest.”

  “Well, as usual, your timing sucks. Because I’m with someone now. And this conversation is over.”

  I hardly sleep that night; instead I lie awake obsessing over her, over what might have been, doubting that I’ll ever find another soul connection like I had with Karissa, especially here in New York City. This marks the beginning of a long, treacherous tide of obsession and regret; it runs strong and deep, and I try to channel it, like my chronic dissatisfaction with my work, all back into the ocean, spending more and more solo time out at Rockaway, attempting to surf my mind and body into a state of numbness, to recapture those ephemeral few minutes of Ophelia bliss.

  THE REJECTION

  August 15, 2005

  Mr. Jerry Clark

  2580 S. Wilcox Lane

  Orlando, Florida 23756

  Dear Mr. Clark,

  Thank you for your recent submission of WET GODDESS. After having read it, I’m afraid this is going to be a pass for us. Although the manuscript is well written and has some nice details, I’m afraid that we do not see a large enough market for a story about an amorous relationship between a man and a porpoise.

  Thanks again for the look, and best of luck with your writing.

  Sincerely,

  The Editors

  _____Publishing

  DARKNESS AND THE LIVING WATER

  After my first Wednesday-night men’s meeting, I’m not sure I ever want to go back. I grew up partly with a single mother and multiple stepsisters, so I’m most comfortable around women. I’ve always had plenty of male friends, but aside from skateboarding road trips, given a choice between a group of women or a group of men, I’ll choose women any day. It just seems logical; who—besides members of the Promise Keepers or the Elks club—honestly wants to sit in a poorly lit room full of forty or fifty dudes? And this room in particular is full of so much testosterone, like the womanless Pequod—a ship ruined by unbridled masculine force.

  But after the phone call with Karissa, I realize that though our relationship was categorically different from Nicole’s and mine, in the end I’ve elicited the exact same baffling, crippling pattern. Through my anti-Midas alchemy, I’ve turned another available, lovely woman into an unavailable object of obsession and misery. I’m haunted by what she said at the airport that Thanksgiving—the only reason you ever love anyone is to make yourself feel better. No one had ever nailed me like that before. It was a fairly polite way of bringing me face to face with my own darkness—with the fact that, relationship-wise, I was kind of an imperialistic asshole. I’d bounced in and out of relationships my entire adult life, using them to narcotize myself and hurting people in the process. I know I need help—God, please help me—no matter how many lurid stories I have to endure.

  I know that Asa will be there, so I go back the following Wednesday. I tell myself that if nothing else, the two of us can talk about surfing.

  That evening, a small, quiet man with wire-rimmed glasses tells his story. His name is Attiq; he describes how growing up in a half-Iraqi, half-Iranian Jewish household, he always felt at war with himself. At the beginning of his share, he says he’ll spare us all the graphic details of his history with women.

  “Because the thing that really got me—brought me to my knees, over and over,” he says, “is love addiction.” He describes how he dated a woman for several years, but it fell apart, and then by some twist of fate they ended up working together in the same office. Worse yet, she started dating some six-foot-tall, athletic blond guy, prominently displaying pictures of him on her desk.

  “Even two years after we broke up, I’d wake up in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, imagining them sleeping together. And thinking about how the guy probably had a much bigger dick than me.” This last line is totally unexpected from someone with the looks and mannerisms of a Buddhist monk; it sends the group into hysterics. But not me. Instead of humor I feel a jolt of anxiety—what if Karissa’s new boyfriend has a bigger dick than me?

  He goes on to talk about how he got better—through prayer and meditation, constant contact with a power higher than himself—and, in his case, writing poetry and reading the work of Rumi.

  “For me, Rumi gleaned the essence of this program, but he did it back in the thirteenth century, in my homeland. So much of his poetry centers around an ecstatic connection to the lover. What he’s really talking about is entering a relationship with the divine, a part of which resides in our own hearts,” Attiq says, looking out across the room.

  Then he reads from a Rumi piece, tells us that if we’re not comfortable with its use of the word God, we can substitute higher power: “Loving God is / the only pleasure. Other delights turn bitter. What hurts / the soul? To live / without tasting the water of its own essence. People / focus on death and this / material earth. They have doubts about soul water. / Those doubts can be / reduced! Use night to wake your clarity. Darkness / and the living water are / lovers.”

  The last line—Let jealousy end—feels like it was written for me.

  He puts the book aside, says a few more words.

  “Most of my life I clung to women, hoping they could fix me. It makes me sad to think of it, how imprisoned I was—how I turned other people into my higher power, because I didn’t have my own. But once I went through withdrawal and worked this program, I rediscovered it, recovered my own Self. That’s the miracle of these rooms. And it’s the reason I’m in a good, equitable relationship with a woman who is now my fiancée.”

  After we hold hands for the closing prayer, a crowd gathers around him, two or three guys thick, like a guru with his acolytes. Asa wants me to ride the subway back to Brooklyn, but I tell him to go on without me, that there’s someone I need to see.

  After half an hour, I finally get to speak with Attiq. Up close, he has heavy brown lids, not the kind that make some New Yorkers look pretentious, but that make him look wise and kind and maybe a bit fragile.

  I tell him how much I related to what he said, how I’m right in the throes of it with Karissa. Though I can tell he’s worn out from speaking and all the attention, he listens patiently to my whole litany of woes.

  A large Kenyan man, a former crack addict, interrupts us briefly so he can bend down and give Attiq a bear hug.

  Attiq turns his attention back to me, places his hand on my arm. “Listen, you might not comprehend this yet, but what Karissa has done for you—letting you go, helping you see your own destructive patterns—is a gift. As far as what you do with it, that’s for you to decide.”

  WATER MEETINGS

  After connecting with Attiq, I keep going back to Wednesday-night meetings, where I find myself feeling increasingly at home. The more I put myself out there and talk to people, the more I realize we have in common. And the more I discover that what we have is a kind of underground, twelve-step surf club. Along with Asa and me, at least half a dozen other guys are into surfing, in the same obsessive way I am. There’s a lot of talk about how easy it is to swap one addiction for another; in our case, surfing seems like a healthy substitute.

  There’s Mick, a former Californian whom I end up seeing at Rockaway almost every time I go. He has a waterproof housing for his homemade pinhole camera; he shoots black-and-white photos of Asa and me surrounded by darkness, standing on water in small round apertures of light. And Benny, a guy with whom I develop a really tight bond. Originally from a small village in Northern Ireland, Benny survived a long period of heavy drinking and drugging. He got sober in the nineties but, like the rest of us, still struggles with relationships. A private contractor, he remodels apartments most of the year, but always spends a month or two in the tropics, surfing in remote parts of Ecuador or Brazil.

  Asa and I start referring t
o our surf sessions as water meetings. While waiting for waves, we sit on our boards and talk about what’s going on with us, listening, offering support. Sometimes Mick and Benny are there, or any number of friends in one form of recovery or another, all of us out in the ocean together, trying to heal. In this way I’m able to do what I never thought myself capable of doing: actually surviving outside a romantic relationship, and doing it in perhaps the most difficult city in the world in which to be single.

  It’s what, in program language, we call withdrawal—it’s like giving up drugs, but in our case it means resisting the urge to rebound back into yet another relationship.

  And my own painful, imperfect withdrawal—during which the ocean becomes my surrogate girlfriend—lasts not just for weeks or months, but, with the exception of a few slips, for well over two years.

  THE ACCIDENT

  As of the 1990s, there wasn’t a single skatepark in New York City. By the time I move there in the early 2000s, several good parks spring up, thanks in part to Andy Kessler. He showed up at hundreds of parks department meetings; he raised enough hell that in the late nineties the city finally agreed to set aside a large space in Riverside Park, on 108th Street, very near the same spot that he and his Zoo York crew used to skate back in the seventies. Two decades later, Kessler led the work crew that built a small vert ramp, street course, and a miniramp in Riverside Park; this was how he earned his nickname: the Godfather of 108.

  Around the time I meet Andy in late 2003, a high-end sunglasses retailer hires him to build a small wooden bowl inside their Soho storefront. Known as the Blind Bowl, it’s capsule-shaped and only four feet deep, but one side shoots straight up the wall, giving it over six feet of pure vertical, like an asymmetrical bathtub.

  I skate the Blind Bowl a few times with Grodin and Andy; one night the legendary pro skater Mark Gonzales shows up and blows my mind. He doesn’t do any tricks per se, just rocks these stylish frontside turns all the way up the vert wall. Rumor has it that when Gonzales first moved to New York back in the nineties, he signed up for ballet lessons. And after thirty-plus years of skating—similar to Andy Kessler—there is something simultaneously raw and balletic about the way he handles a skateboard.