A few weeks later, during a party at the Blind Bowl, Kessler trips up on the vert wall and takes a disastrous nine-foot slam, landing straight on his knee. The impact shatters his kneecap and jams his femur bone so violently upward that it cracks his pelvis nearly in half. He’s laid up in the hospital for several weeks, and with no health insurance he racks up a $51,000 medical bill. After a few months’ recovery, he gets back on his feet and along with some friends puts together a benefit art show/skate jam at the Blind Bowl. Artists like Julian Schnabel, Wes Humpton, and many others donate work, enough to raise $20,000. It’s rare for guys to skate well into their forties, and after that kind of slam most would hang up their Vans, but Andy gets right back on the horse. He actually skates at his own benefit show—in the same bowl that nearly crippled him—even though he’s just graduated from crutches to cane.
So while the accident doesn’t keep him off a skateboard, it’s a turning point for Kessler. As a form of rehab for his hip, he spends more time in water, and especially the ocean, where, at age forty-five, he gets seriously into surfing. He falls in love with Montauk around the same time I do. We’ve skated together many times, but it’s while hanging out on the beach and in the clean water at Ditch Plains that I really get to know him.
His first full summer in Montauk is 2005, when he lives for three months aboard an ancient little sailboat belonging to his friend Casual Chuck. The exterior isn’t much to speak of—it doesn’t even have a mast—but Chuck refinished the interior cabin with reclaimed hardwood flooring. Andy keeps all his belongings down in the hold, his clothes folded and stacked, his skateboard decks and a surfboard leaning against the wall next to a hammock, old hardcover editions of the Narcotics Anonymous and AA “big books” propped up by his pillow, the way a monk keeps a copy of the Bible at his bedside. There’s something monastic and pure about the way he lives aboard this small vessel, recovering from his injury, waking at dawn to meditate and pray before surfing.
I visit him out on the docks one Saturday evening in July. After showing me around down in the cabin, he gives me a pocket-sized package containing something called a Mighty Kite. As we climb back up on deck, he tells me he buys them by the case in Chinatown.
“I freaking love these things,” he says, launching a diamond-shaped Mighty Kite off the edge off the boat. Midnight blue with pink paper tails, it’s about the size of a playing card. “I brought a case with me on a surf trip to the Dominican Republic last winter. Paid a bunch of local kids to help me sell them to tourists. Made about two hundred bucks; doubled my investment.” He lets out some slack on his Mighty Kite. Just a few feet above his head, it shivers in the wind, occasionally diving down toward the bay before darting up again into a series of playful McTwists.
“I guess I wouldn’t have pegged you for a salesman,” I say.
Andy cracks up. “Oh yeah, I have a long history in sales. Drug sales, that is.”
I knew he’d been a junkie, but I’d never heard anything about him dealing drugs. It’s hard to reconcile with the Andy I know, the guy who helps out so many people, who builds skateparks and encourages kids to skate and live healthy lives.
“You wouldn’t have recognized me,” Andy says. “I was out there on the streets delivering that shit every day. Selling it, or just pretending to sell it and straight up stealing people’s money. There are probably some junkies over on the East Side still waiting for me to deliver drugs.” He breaks into a cackle. “I bet they’re out there right now, fucking standing around on the block, just waiting.”
As the sun pearls below the horizon, he reels in his Mighty Kite and walks me back to my truck, past rows of fishing skiffs and sailboats.
“This seems like the way to go,” I say. “I don’t think I can ever afford a house out here at Montauk. But a boat’s like the perfect little surf shack.”
“Seriously, man. I love every minute I spend out here.”
We pass a sailboat with a For Sale sign. It’s moderately sized, but they’re asking over three hundred grand.
“Okay, so maybe I won’t be able to afford that either.”
“Hey, you really never know. When you make room for a dream like that in your head, that’s when things start to happen.”
Kessler and I meet up the next day out at Ditch Plains; I follow his lead when he suggests we walk south a ways to a spot called Poles. We paddle out together and I get a couple good waves, bigger than what I’m used to at Rockaway. A teenager heckles me because I ride one with my knee cocked in, like I’m on a much larger wave, but I’m too stoked to care.
I watch Andy catch a good left-hander and cruise frontside with his characteristic laid-back style, until another guy on a longboard drops right in on him, bashes into his board, leaving a sand dollar–sized hole in his rail. I follow him back to the shore, where we assess the damage and decide it requires some patch work to keep water from seeping in and ruining the core. It’s a special board, given to Andy by his friend Joel Tudor, a pro surfer and shaper who sometimes lays over in Montauk for the summer between stints in California and Hawaii.
“Fucking guy,” I say. “He dropped right in on you.”
“Whatever. He meant no harm; these things happen.”
We walk on the sand back toward the parking lot, checking out girls in bikinis along the way, the sun on our backs.
“Looks like you’re getting around pretty good these days,” I say, noticing that his limp has subsided.
“I’m feeling a lot better. My doctor’s amazed at my recovery. He didn’t know if I’d ever walk again. Surfing has definitely helped. Plus the way everyone showed up for me after the accident,” he says. “I felt a real healing, you know, coming from all those people.”
“That’s the thing about you, Andy. You help out a lot of people. That all comes back around.”
“Yeah, I guess I help some people every now and again … when I’m not busy heckling them,” he says, then breaks into another cackle.
It turns out that Casual Chuck’s the caretaker for the artist Julian Schnabel, who owns an estate just above Ditch Plains. Chuck lives in a cottage on Schnabel’s property; I drive Andy up there to fetch some sun-cure resin to fix the ding. Back at Ditch Plains, we buy tacos at the Ditch Witch—a food and coffee cart that sets up shop in the summer time, and that always has a mile-long line. Andy and I grab a picnic table, where we hang out and talk, taking our time while the patch job dries.
The moment finally feels right to tell him about the twelve-step program.
“That’s great, man. Congratulations. What, are you in the beverage program?”
I explain that no, for me it’s about relationship and codependence issues.
“I know what you mean. My ex-wife and I had some serious codependency shit going on for years. My opinion is that humans can turn just about anything into an addiction. Good for you for taking care of yourself.”
“How long have you been in NA?” I ask.
“Eleven years as of January. What can I say? That program saved my life.”
I tell him I’m reading a book called The Spirituality of Imperfection, how it claims that the twelve-step program is one of the most significant spiritual movements of the century, that the original founders of AA had consulted with Carl Jung—a man who believed that some alcoholics were so far beyond traditional medical help that only a spiritual awakening could save them.
“Look at me—I’m living proof,” Andy says. “If it wasn’t for NA, I’d probably be dead. As far as spirituality goes, I think it’s the best thing going.”
Later that afternoon, Kessler asks if he can catch a ride back to Amagansett for a Saturday-night AA meeting. He invites me to come along. “An addict’s an addict,” he says, “and a meeting’s a meeting.”
On the way, we stop by Grodin’s house, where I’m spending the weekend. We shoot a few games of pool with him while he chides Andy about his deep suntan.
“Jesus, Kessler, you think you got enough sun today? Your fac
e looks like a stewed tomato.”
After Grodin slaughters us both at pool, he invites us to barbecue with him down at the beach later that night. I’m embarrassed to tell Grodin that I’ll meet up with him later, that first I’m going to an AA meeting with Andy.
“You’re going to meetings now too? I’ve never even seen you drunk.”
“I don’t really have a drinking problem,” I say. “I’m just going for the spiritual part.”
Grodin looks at me like I’ve lost my mind, then heads for the refrigerator.
The meeting takes place in a cinder-block church house just down the road from Grodin’s. It’s an odd mixture of working-class residents and wealthy Hamptons vacationers, including one Zsa Zsa Gabor type who goes on an indulgent, weepy rant about how she caught her little lapdog eating its own shit—doo doo, she calls it—and how this ruined her entire day.
After things wrap up and we all hold hands for the Serenity Prayer, Andy introduces me to his friends Collette and Nadia, good-looking city women who are out for the weekend, staying in a Montauk beach rental for sober folks.
Nadia and I walk outside together, stand around talking in the dirt parking lot.
We hit it off—that is, until she asks is how long I’ve been sober.
“I’m not really an alcoholic” is the best I can manage. Nadia looks puzzled, but fortunately Andy walks up and invites her to our beach barbecue. She and Collette follow us to the grocery store, where we pick up three pounds of fresh clams for the grill, plus a couple six packs of soda.
Nadia and I converge on the checkout line.
“Hi! How are you?” she says, playfully, as if we hadn’t just seen each other in the frozen seafood section.
“Well,” I sigh, “I was doing great, until my dog ate its own shit and totally ruined my day.”
Nadia grasps my forearm, doubles over with laughter.
It’s dark by the time we meet Grodin and Anka out on the beach, a bonfire illuminating their faces. Nadia pulls up a chair beside me, hangs out while I strum the ukulele.
“You know, you’d be a lot better on that thing if you could figure out more than three chords,” Andy says.
“Ah, don’t listen to him,” Nadia says. While everyone else hovers over the grill, she asks me again about my sobriety.
“So if you’re not an alcoholic, then why come to AA?”
“I don’t usually. I’m in another twelve-step program, though, so I just came for the support.”
“So you’re in NA, right? You don’t have to be embarrassed about it.”
But I’m not in NA, and I am embarrassed. How do you tell someone you’re hooked on a destructive relationship pattern? And I’m not and probably never will be comfortable with the term “love addiction.” I’m tempted to tell her I’m in Al-Anon, which is partly true since I’ve been to a few of their meetings, too. But I want to be honest—honesty being the bedrock of recovery—so I go ahead and tell her about the men’s meetings.
“Wow,” she says. “That’s not at all what I expected. Considering you were with Andy, I thought you must’ve been a total junkie. But I was confused because you don’t look like the average heroin addict.”
She goes on to ask me about the group, about my issues. I explain it the best I can—that I have a really, really hard time getting over ex-girlfriends.
“That just seems like human nature,” she says. “Everyone has trouble getting over relationships.”
Without going too deep, I try to explain how it’s different for me—that I have a codependent pattern of losing myself in relationships that has basically ruined my life, over and over. But I can tell she’s not fully convinced. It’s a reaction that I’ll find increasingly common and troubling—to struggle with an affliction that people don’t even believe in. Even my own therapist, a kind of old-school Freudian, seems to think that I really just need to get laid. And oddly enough, after I tell Nadia all this, she seems even more interested in me.
“What about you?” I ask, hoping to change the subject. “How long have you been sober?”
“Not long,” she says. “About ten months.” She tells me about her life; I’m surprised to learn she grew up in Alaska. She assures me that she didn’t have the typical Alaskan upbringing—“There sure as hell weren’t any family camping trips,” she says. There was no camping at all, not until she got sent away to a wilderness program for wayward youth.
“Suffice it to say I was a bad girl,” she tells me. “Although not compared to some of the others. Once I had to share a canoe with this guy who ended up in prison for murder. As if being thrown together with people like that was going to help me.”
She explains how, after finishing high school, she escaped to L.A., and then New York—as far from Alaska as possible. And how she’s getting healthy now for the first time, and feeling pretty good about things. She definitely looks healthy. She has the flawless, pale skin of someone who grew up in a northern place, away from the sun. Pretty blue eyes and a stunning figure. But in the light of the bonfire, I think I detect something a little off in her gaze—a wound that hasn’t quite healed, a deep need that’s yet to be satisfied.
We all feast on clams and shish kebabs and a big loaf of crusty French bread. Then Collette and Nadia invite Andy and me back to Montauk, to meet up with the rest of their sober crew. As we clean up, Grodin douses the bonfire with seawater, then pulls me aside and says, “Okay, now I understand why you went to an AA meeting.” But it’s after midnight and I’m worn out, ready for bed. Asa is also taking the train out the next morning, and I’m looking forward to an early surf session.
It’s painful watching Nadia walk away, looking over her shoulder at me—her eyebrow raised in one final, seductive invitation. Maybe I’m just squandering a chance for a good time, a harmless little post-Karissa rebound? Attiq has warned me about getting involved with program people, at least in the beginning. And with only ten months’ sobriety, Nadia seems hungry in a way I imagine might swallow us both up—making her even more of a dizzying temptation. Although this is probably just a projection, because history proves that I’m the dangerous party in these situations. Attiq has also suggested I refrain from any relationships, even just a harmless fling, at least for a solid few months. He said this will cause me to suffer, but that more than anything I need to sit with this suffering, that it’s precisely what I’ve been running from for so many years. At any other point in my life, I would’ve chased after Nadia, guided by my dick and my slobbering ego, losing myself for something that might last one night or ten years, just a couple people crashing into each other by accident, ripping our tenuous mends.
Even after Grodin and Anka pack up, I linger by the smoldering ashes, alone with the waves as they churn themselves into foam.
DIAMOND BUCKSHOT
I meet Asa at the train station the next morning, and then we head straight for Ditch Plains. I tell him about Nadia during the drive.
“Sounds like you made the right choice,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“Definitely. You stayed true to yourself and your recovery.”
“It brought up so much shit for me. I wanted her so bad, and then when I let it go, I started thinking about Karissa. I woke up feeling completely obsessed.”
“I hear you, man,” Asa says, “and I think you just need to sit with the feelings.” This is a mantra I hear repeated over and over in the program, in one form or another, including my favorite, don’t just do something, sit there.
We’re two of the first people in the water, and floating around with Asa in glittering sunlight, I start to feel better. We surf all day, taking breaks for food and water, or to nap on the beach. It’s my ideal day, when I feel fully present in a place and in my own body—enough that my mind shuts off for a while. Someone else in recovery once told me that the ego is like a dog on a leash, that to get anywhere we have to train it—teach it not to bark or shit on the neighbors’ lawn or hump a stranger’s leg. For me, surfing’s l
ike letting the dog run wild on the beach all day, chucking a stick for it to fetch out in the break, again and again, until it wears itself out. I once heard that it’s impossible to experience anxiety during the act of intercourse—directly before and after, sure, but not during the actual deed. I have a similar theory about surfing: it’s impossible to feel depressed during the actual riding of a wave.
Along with feelings, my problem’s also with language, the way I’m plagued by certain words, words that are like the whale lines that Melville says all men live entangled in, words that trigger the feelings in the first place: should’ve, would’ve, Karissa, never, failure, regret, future. The way the water out beyond the break at Montauk reflects symphonic patterns of sunlight—now like static snow on a TV screen, now like diamond buckshot up from below, now like a conflagration of tiny lightning birds, now concentrating into a single shimmering portal, yet all of these descriptions so completely failing the signified—helps me move past language’s breakwater, to drift out farther, beyond words toward the ineffable, toward silence. Toward something like serenity as Asa and I skim across the wind-woven surface of the Atlantic.
A GREAT DESIRE
Next to Duke Kahanamoku, Tom Blake was the most important figure in the history of early twentieth-century surfing. A native Wisconsinite who grew up skiing, he moved in the 1920s to Oahu, where he befriended the Duke and was eventually inducted into native-only groups like the Hui Nalu (translation: United in Surfing). Blake spent time at the famous Bishop Museum, where he helped restore ancient Hawaiian surfboards in their collection. Blake then transformed surf technology by incorporating these ancient board designs into a modern hollow-core construction. At the time, Duke was riding ten-foot boards that weighed about seventy pounds. Blake’s new boards were more streamlined, with a hollow core and a pintail, and though they were two feet longer than the Duke’s board, they weighed only forty-four pounds. Known as cigar boards, they revolutionized not only surfboard design but the art of surfing itself. Blake himself used a hollow-core board during a twenty-six-mile race from Catalina to the California mainland, which he completed in five hours, fifty-three minutes, shattering previous records. Blake also built sixteen-foot hollow-core boards, called okohola, that were more exclusively designed for surfing waves. Duke followed in his footsteps, building a sixteen-foot redwood board, allowing him to do some of the best surfing of his life: “In one instance, at zero break, he caught a twenty-five-foot wave and rode across the face of it, through first break, clear into Queen’s surf at a speed of about thirty miles an hour.”
The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld Page 10