Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  But my parents, who were even more clueless than I was, thought my work looked grand. Which felt great, in a rueful sort of way.

  • • •

  THE REMEDIATION of my cluelessness—my ground-level education in progressive South African politics—came largely from activists like Brian Dublin, Cecil Prinsloo, and others who eventually decided to trust me. My main interlocutor turned out to be a senior from another high school. Her name was Mandy Sanger. She was a friend of Cecil’s, and she had been one of the regional boycott leaders. She took special pleasure in puncturing what she considered self-serving liberal illusions. As the school year wound down, and I saw nothing—after the ragged and violent end of the great student boycott—but discouragement and retrenchment for what everybody called the Struggle, Mandy set me straight about lessons learned, commitments deepened, and national organizations strengthened. “This year was a big step forward, and not only for students,” she said. She was only eighteen, but she had the long view.

  There was no graduation ceremony, no end-of-year ritual. My students drifted away after their exams, wishing me happy holidays, hoping to see me next year. I wasn’t going to teach another year, though. I had saved enough to resume, on the super-cheap, my travels—but only after I finally finished, I decided, my poor old railroad novel. Before I buckled down to that, I planned to spend Christmas in Johannesburg with friends. My ancient car wasn’t up to the long drive, so I would hitchhike. To my surprise, Mandy asked to come along. It seemed that she had business, unstated, in Johannesburg. I didn’t see how I could say no. The trip took us several days. We dodged cops, slept out in the veld, squabbled, laughed, got burnt by the sun, chapped by the wind, and met a wild miscellany of South Africans. After Christmas, we hitchhiked to Durban, where Mandy had more student-activist business, again unstated. The phones, the mail were no good—the Special Branch, as it was called, tapped phones and opened mail. Resistance activists needed to meet face-to-face. After Durban, we hitchhiked down the coast. In the Transkei, we camped on the beach. I borrowed a surfboard and pushed Mandy into gentle waves. She cursed nonstop. But she was athletic, and she was soon popping to her feet unassisted.

  Mandy was interested in my plans—whether I would just keep traveling around forever. Not a chance, I said. I would soon head back to the United States. But I asked her advice. Did she think there was anything useful that I could write for American readers about the situation in South Africa? She had, I knew, a hardheaded, utilitarian view of what foreigners could do to help the Struggle, and I had taken on enough of that view myself that the idea of entertaining my compatriots with appalling tales of “apartheid” now felt inadequate, or worse. Obviously, my readers would do nothing. The cause would not be advanced. Maybe I would do better just to write about—hell, something I actually knew about. Surfing. We debated this question intermittently on our long looping hitchhike from Cape Town to Cape Town. Mandy complained that I had complicated her view of America, which she normally thought of as a capitalist ogre hell-bent on destroying progressive movements around the world, with my stories of the brakeman’s life on the railroad in California. Then, on a sun-drenched point in the Transkei, watching Xhosa fishermen pull in galjoen with bamboo poles, she encouraged me to return to the United States and figure out there what I could usefully write. I could probably write about subjects other than surfing. “And I say that as one surfer to another!”

  • • •

  I RETURNED TO MY NOVEL. It took me another eight months to finish. I realized that my interest in the kind of fiction I was writing was fading. South Africa had changed me, had turned me toward politics, journalism, questions of power. The only sour note during my parents’ visit to Cape Town had come when my father asked what I was writing, and then seemed impatient to hear that I was still basically an amateur. At the end of the school year, I found myself vowing to take no more day jobs. I would write for a living, period. I started writing essays, short features, for American magazines. I wrote nothing about South Africa—though I had a pile of overflowing notebooks. I yearned to go home—wherever exactly that might be. I clung to a line in one of Bryan’s letters. He had moved back to Missoula. There was a spot on the softball team for me, he wrote. A spot on the softball team.

  Sharon and I finally broke up, decisively. Her mother had died, and Sharon had taken a job in Zimbabwe, running a school for disabled ex-guerrillas. Zimbabwe’s long war of national liberation had recently ended, and “building socialism” had begun. The decisiveness of our breakup was all Sharon’s. I was more upset than I had any right to be. Our dissolution had been overdue.

  My brother Kevin showed up in Cape Town. I had encouraged him to come. Still, I had the paranoid idea that our parents had sent him to get me. If so, the timing was good. I was ready to leave at last. Maybe Kevin and I would go Cape to Cairo. My surf odyssey was over. I tried to ship my blue pintail to the United States—I was extremely fond of that board. But sending it cost money, and I needed every cent, so I sold it instead. My old station wagon was failing. We traded it for an equally old but somewhat sturdier Rover.

  Saying my good-byes around Cape Town, I called Mandy. Her mother answered and, when I asked to speak to Mandy, burst into tears. The Special Branch had detained her. Her mother did not know where she was being held. Mandy was still in prison when we left South Africa.

  Kevin and I drove north, camping, through Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe. We saw a lot of big game. Kevin seemed enthusiastic, engaged, and not like he was on an onerous errand, which was a relief. He seemed to know an awful lot about everything—African history, politics. When had that happened? He had studied history in college, earned a degree in art. He was working in film production. He could drink me under the table. We left the car in Zimbabwe with Sharon—a miserable scene for me, since she was already on to the next man: a young Ndebele ex-guerrilla, now an army officer.

  We continued slogging north, traveling the length of Lake Malawi on a crowded old ship, the MV Mtendere, calling in at forlorn villages, sleeping on the deck. Zambia, Tanzania, Zanzibar. We reached Masai country by local bus and camped on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater. Then, at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, I lost my passport to a pickpocket in a bus station, and we could not cross into Kenya. We backtracked to Dar Es Salaam. I was feeling pretty beat. I was ready, I announced, for the West. Now Kevin seemed relieved—he had a life to resume in California. We abandoned Cape to Cairo and took the cheapest flight north: Aeroflot to Copenhagen, via Moscow.

  I made my way alone through Western Europe. I was sleeping on the couches of friends, grateful for every creature comfort. In London I caught a plane to New York. The joy of each American thing. By then it was late autumn. My brother Michael was at New York University. I slept on the floor of his dorm room. Michael was studying French lit, playing cocktail-lounge piano with remarkable finesse. When had this happened? I hitchhiked to Missoula—a long, cold, magnificent trip. A truck dropped me on the interstate, and I staggered into town. For what it was worth, I was coming, as promised, from the east.

  Author, Noriega Street, Ocean Beach, San Francisco, 1985

  EIGHT

  AGAINST DERELICTION

  San Francisco, 1983–86

  The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation.

  —JOSEPH CONRAD, The Mirror of the Sea

  BY THE TIME I MOVED TO SAN FRANCISCO, I HAD BEEN SUCCESSFULLY confining surfing to the sidelines of my life for a couple of years at least. It was 1983, early fall. I’d spent the previous summer in a roach-infested basement in the East Village, banging out a screenplay, sleeping on the floor. My railroad novel was still bouncing between publishers. The few interested editors wanted me to unpack the technical language, the railroad jargon, for the general reader, but that was where the poetry was, I thought, the elusive genius of place and workplace that I hoped to capture. I passed. In truth, I didn’t want to di
ve back into the manuscript for any purpose. I was afraid of what I might find—infelicities, corniness, yet more juvenilia.

  I had been ricocheting around the country. Unable to afford rent, I stayed with Bryan in Montana, with my parents in Los Angeles, with Domenic in Malibu. My accounting, in Conrad’s sense, upon coming back to America had been neither triumphant nor disabling. There were Rip Van Winkle moments. I was unfamiliar with the telephone answering machine—now everybody had one. But I was really just glad to be back, and eager to work. Missoula had been splendid, everything exactly as I remembered it. Bryan was ensconced there, writing hard, back in the American swing. Not surfing. He seemed burnished, confident, older—the higher latitudes agreed with him. Nobody else could understand where I had been these last years. He and I could still talk all night. I went deer hunting in the mountains above the Blackfoot River on my twenty-ninth birthday. Still, I didn’t stay. Something told me I belonged in a city. Some hardheaded sprite of ambition, no doubt. I even considered L.A. But my old prejudices were too strong. I freelanced. Assignments trickled in, including that screenplay, which did pay the rent, even in New York. I still felt mentally flayed by my time in South Africa. But my reservations about American readers, about writing about politics—even writing about South Africa—passed.

  I had a glorious new girlfriend: Caroline. She was from Zimbabwe. We had met in Cape Town, where she was an art student. Now she was a graduate student at the San Francisco Art Institute. She had joined me in New York, on that basement floor—it was the first place we shared. Caroline worked as a hostess at a restaurant on lower Fifth Avenue. We did not leave Manhattan once that summer. Our block was popular with junkies, drug dealers, and prostitutes. It was hot and grimy and we often fought. We were both hardheaded and short-tempered. But when she went back to school, I followed her.

  • • •

  THE FACT THAT San Francisco gets some of the best waves in California was for many years a secret. Santa Cruz, seventy miles south, was already a crowded surfing center when I went to college there, but among the thousands of people who surfed Santa Cruz only a handful ever ventured up to San Francisco. I had surfed Ocean Beach, the main spot in the city, a few times while I was railroading out of Bayshore Yard, which was near Candlestick Park. So I knew. Still, I didn’t understand what I was getting into by moving there. I had a contract to write a book—about teaching in Cape Town. We rented a flat in an unfashionable, foggy, mostly Asian neighborhood called the Outer Richmond. The room I used as an office had flocked lime-green wallpaper. I could see the north end of Ocean Beach from my desk.

  From up there, on most days, Ocean Beach looked reasonable. Four miles long, perfectly straight, lots of swell, many promising sandbars. Prevailing winds were northwest, onshore, cold, the standard California afternoon sea breeze. But there were plenty of happy exceptions—mornings, fall, winter—when it was glassy or blowing offshore. The whole four miles was beachbreak, meaning it had no point of land or built obstruction—no reef or river mouth, no pier or jetty—to define it. The shape and whereabouts of the waves depended mainly on the configuration of the sandbars. That configuration changed constantly. All waves are too complex to diagram in detail, but beachbreaks are, among surf spots, an especially unpredictable species. And Ocean Beach, which receives an unusual amount of groundswell, mainly from the North Pacific—and is also raked by great tidal currents because San Francisco Bay, all four hundred square miles of it, fills and empties twice a day through the Golden Gate, just around the corner to the north—was as complicated a proposition as any surf spot I’ve seen. Had it been a book, it would have been something dauntingly difficult—continental philosophy, theoretical physics. Besides being complex, Ocean Beach got big. Not California big but Hawaii big. And it was cold-water, unmapped, and, once you got amongst it, frequently unreasonable.

  • • •

  I STARTED SURFING IT at the north end, a wind-protected, relatively gentle break known as Kelly’s Cove. Kelly’s had deep spots and some random wishwash outside but regularly produced thick green wedges that broke quickly across an inside bar. The waves were not things of beauty, but they had guts, and if you could decode some of their eccentricities, they offered occasional pitching backdoor barrels. Kelly’s was the most popular spot along the whole of Ocean Beach, but even it was never crowded. Heading south, the next stretch, known as VFW’s, was a broader field, with bigger waves and a wide array of bars. VFW’s was off the west end of Golden Gate Park. A graffiti-covered seawall stood above the beach.

  The next three miles of Ocean Beach abutted on the Sunset District, which was a seedier version of the Richmond—low-rise, sleepy, a sloping grid of streets built in a hurry on sand dunes as wartime worker housing. The seafront there was a rough embankment pierced by dank pedestrian tunnels and topped by a battered coast road known as the Great Highway. Except on rare warm days, the beach was mostly deserted. Winos sprawled in the few sun traps; the homeless sometimes camped there briefly, before the wind and cold drove them away. At high tide, Korean fishermen in rubber boots wrestled with surf-casting rigs. The surf, as you moved south, got generally bigger, more intimidating, with the outer bars farther from shore. Seen from the water, especially when the surf was big, the streets running inland became lineup markers—they told you where you were. In the Sunset, they were named in alphabetical order, from north to south: Irving, Judah, Kirkham, Lawton, Moraga, Noriega, Ortega, Pacheco, Quintara, Rivera, Santiago, Taraval, Ulloa, Vicente, Wawona, and then the oddball, Sloat. You didn’t say you surfed Ocean Beach—you surfed Judah or Taraval or Sloat. South of Sloat Boulevard was the city zoo, beyond which sandy bluffs began to rise and the urban oceanfront—Ocean Beach—ended.

  I found myself getting in the water most days that first fall. I was riding a secondhand 7'0" single-fin. It was a plain vanilla board, stiff but versatile, a good wave-catcher, stable and fast. I had an old custom-made wetsuit, now fraying and leaky, a relic from my prosperous brakeman days. I found a few sandbars that produced fine peaks, for a few days at least, on certain tides and swell angles, before the sand moved on. I was getting to know the board. It was well suited to the big open faces, knifing through the offshores, responsive at speed. But it was difficult to duck-dive—it was thick, and therefore hard to sink deep enough to escape incoming whitewater. Paddling out at Ocean Beach was nearly always an ordeal—yet another reason so few people surfed it—and my board’s extra volume did not make it easier. I tried to keep my go-outs short. I worked better after surfing, though. The icy water, the exertion, then thawing under a hot shower, left me physically quiet, able to sit without fidgeting at my desk. I slept better too. This was before the first big winter swells.

  • • •

  THERE WAS A SMALL CREW of local surfers. They were effectively invisible to the rest of the city. Indeed, native San Franciscans would tell you that there was no surfing in San Francisco. There was surf, of course, but the ocean, I was more than once informed, was too cold and stormy for surfing. In truth, it was usually too rough for learning to surf—the nearest beginner breaks were outside the city. And there was a contingent among the Ocean Beach regulars who had learned their chops elsewhere—in Hawaii, Australia, or Southern California—and had moved to the city as adults. These newcomers, who tended to be professional types, and who now included me, remained distinct in some ways from the homegrown surfers, most of whom grew up in the Sunset.

  But both groups bought their wax and wetsuits at Wise Surfboards, a bright, high-ceilinged place on Wawona, a few blocks from the beach. Flanked by a Mexican restaurant and a Christian day-care center, it was the only surf shop in town. There was a long row of shiny new boards along one wall and racks of wetsuits in the back. If you were looking for someone to surf with, Wise’s was the place to start.

  Bob Wise, the proprietor, was a tightly built, sardonic James Brown fan in his early forties. He ran, from behind the counter, a permanent bull session on th
e peculiarities of Ocean Beach, and of the guys who surfed it. It was a sort of surf-story jukebox, featuring a well-worn collection of tales: the time Edwin Salem found himself facing, in waist-deep water, a wave pushing before it the trunk of a redwood tree; the time the resin barrel blew up, burning off Peewee’s eyebrows. Business was usually slow, except when rich dope growers from up north came in loaded with cash and saying to their friends, “You want a board? Lemme buy it for you. You think Bobby might want a board? Let’s get him one too.”

  One afternoon when I walked in, Wise was midstory, regaling a couple of customers. “So Doc, who can see the surf from his window, calls me up and says, ‘Come on, let’s go out.’ So I keep asking him, ‘But how is it?’ And he goes, ‘It’s interesting.’ So I go over there and we go out and it’s just totally terrible. So Doc says, ‘What did you expect?’ Turns out that when Doc says it’s interesting, that means it’s worse than terrible.”