Some Like It Cold

by William Povletich

  All her life, Mitch had been the good daughter, and so the qualities her parents objected to in Lee were exactly what drew Mitch to him—he was a dark and dangerous surfer from the south side, refusing to adhere to the conventions and convictions of the conservative north side. When he introduced her to his surfing lifestyle, she was overwhelmed with excitement; it was one of the first times she had ever put her toes into Lake Michigan.

  For Lee, spending time with Mitch at the lakefront couldn’t have made him any happier, especially since it brought together his two favorite things in life. When the weather was hospitable, he’d bring his board along, and Mitch would sit on the shore and watch him surf. Afterward, they’d stroll along the sand and talk for hours. When Mitch couldn’t join him, Lee would wrangle Larry and a couple of friends and surf whenever possible. They were becoming such skilled surfers that one former Lake Shore Surf Club member decided it was time to invite his former understudies to the Sheboygan surf party of the year.

  Along with several other Great Lakes Surf Club alumni, the Williams brothers were invited to Randy Grimmer’s house for his annual New Year’s Eve party in 1970. Arriving at the house, which was perched at the top of a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan, they finally got to see what they’d been hearing about for years—the furnished basement decorated like a surfing museum. Surfing-themed posters, record albums, and photographs covered much of the wood-paneled walls. Surfboards, Tiki dolls, and Hawaiian memorabilia filled nearly every corner and nook. The boys felt like they’d been transported to a tropical island as far away as possible from wintry Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

  Grabbing beers, they sauntered through the writhing mass of bodies dancing between the furniture to the surf music blaring on the stereo. The place was packed. With its low ceiling and lack of ventilation, it soon became a sweatbox, and beer offered the only relief from the heat. As the bodies pressed against each other, tighter and tighter, the boys continued downing beer after beer. After guzzling a tremendous amount of liquid courage, they decided to approach several of the former Lake Shore Surf Club members who were reliving their glory years amongst themselves. As Lee and Larry approached Randy Grimmer, Bill Kuitert, Rocky Groh, and Andy Sommersberger, they realized there wasn’t enough alcohol in the house that night to numb their nerves. Even though everyone was a few years older, the childhood anxiety of approaching someone you idolized had yet to subside.

  “You guys are really cutting it up out there,” Randy greeted the boys as they approached, helping to break the initial tension.

  “Thanks. The waves have been cooperating of late,” Lee replied.

  “Who’da thought it would be you two still surfing after all these years,” Rocky said.

  “You’re more than invited to join us,” Larry offered.

  “I think our time has passed, boys,” Andy declared. “We might have started the whole Sheboygan surf scene, but we’re too old and too cold to keep pace with you guys.”

  The fact that Lee and Larry weren’t being referred to as gremmies was the closest Andy had ever come to paying them a compliment. It was just the beginning of their three-hour conversation that delved into everything from their shared memories on the beach and cherished friendships long since dissolved to regrets about goals each of the Lake Shore Surf Club surfers were unable to attain.

  “Enjoy the ride while you can,” Bill advised. “Life on the other side of eighteen doesn’t get any funner.”

  “The sooner you figure that out, the sooner you’ll find happiness,” Andy added with a toasting of his glass. As his fellow compatriots raised their glasses in unison, Lee and Larry followed.

  “To your happiness, boys!” Andy proclaimed. “If it eludes you tonight in the bottom of your glass, you’re still young enough to find it out there in the real world.”

  Larry with Lee before his senior prom

  As Lee and Larry reached the bottom of their frosted beer mugs, they couldn’t help but notice through Randy’s picture window the Lake Michigan waves crashing down below.

  After Mitch graduated from high school and left for college in September of 1971, she returned to Sheboygan on weekends to tutor Lee as his graduation approached. Since he was far from being a stellar student, she labored over his essays with elaborate corrections and comments while he tried to distract her with comical attempts at seduction. But she was serious and sensible enough to withstand them, at least in public. She had already earned a reputation as a driven young woman headed toward a brilliant academic career.

  As their high school romance evolved into an adult relationship, Larry found his snarky comments about Mitch falling on deaf ears as everyone began accepting her as family. The only thing keeping them from getting engaged was Lee’s continuing reluctance to commit—a hesitancy that led to several full-blown arguments during his senior year of high school.

  Following a long night of drinking at the local bars, Larry jumped into the backseat of his brother’s car, in need of a ride home. As the car pulled out of the lot and into traffic, Larry was surprised to hear Lee and Mitch in the front seat launch into an alcohol-induced argument. Mitch chastised Lee, saying she was tired of his sarcastic responses to her inquiries about getting married. For Mitch, Lee’s lack of commitment was no laughing matter.

  As the argument intensified back and forth, so did their weaving across lanes of traffic. Hoping it would all end soon, Larry shut his eyes and shoved his thumbs in his ears. If only he could manage to keep his booze-soaked brain from spinning in a million directions for the last few miles. He was so desperate to get home safely, he actually considered going to church the next morning to offer thanks if he survived the ride.

  After fifteen minutes of trying to drown out the fight in the front seat, Larry noticed the car was no longer in motion. Opening his eyes, he saw that they were waiting for a train to pass. He took the opportunity to say, “I’m out of here” and bail out of the car, landing on the gravel shoulder.

  Jumping to his feet and racing past the long line of cars waiting for the train to pass, Larry realized he didn’t know where, exactly, he was. Doubling back toward Lee and Mitch, he passed their car and headed toward the passing train. “What the hell is he doing?” Mitch said, interrupting the fight with Lee.

  As the train sped by, Larry grabbed onto one of the railcar’s ladders, fleeing the scene into the darkness of night.

  “What did we just see?” a stunned Lee asked Mitch.

  “Your brother just hopped a train,” she said with a sigh.

  Knowing they were on Sheboygan’s north side with the train heading south, Lee turned to Mitch. “I’ve got to go find my brother. We can continue this conversation tomorrow.”

  Disgusted, Mitch turned away from Lee, not speaking to him once during the remainder of her drive home. Following the silent trek to her house, Lee spent the drive back to his house trying to figure out where Larry could have ended up. Pulling up to the house, he saw that all the lights were off, meaning Larry had yet to make it home. Lee settled himself on his parents’ front lawn to wait. If Larry were alive, he’d have to walk across the yard before crawling into bed.

  Across town on the clattering train, Larry held tightly to the rusty metal ladder, but he could feel his grip loosening. Disoriented by the wicked combination of alcohol and adrenaline, he decided to jump off before he fell. Thinking he saw a familiar landmark, he leapt, slamming onto the ground and rolling into somersaults that, when he finally stopped, left him a discombobulated, dirty mess.

  Instead of feeling relief that he hadn’t rolled under the train wheels, he stood up to see that he still didn’t know where he was in his own hometown. He looked around hoping to recognize something—a store, a street sign, a neighborhood—but it all looked strange. Then he did what most incoherent men do when unsure of their whereabouts—he started walking in a direction that seemed right.

  After fifteen minutes of aimlessly wandering through the residential streets of Sheboygan, Larry saw a taxi that
had just dropped off somebody in the neighborhood. He ran for it and jumped into the backseat. The taxi driver waited in silence for the drunken kid to tell him where to go. Larry said nothing, savoring the relief of having a way home.

  “Where to, buddy?” the driver asked.

  Larry was about to give his home address—1415 South Ninth Street—when he realized his wallet was gone. It was sitting either on the bar or in the backseat of Lee’s car. But he desperately needed to get home.

  “Got an address?” the driver snapped.

  Larry nodded. With as much ease as he could muster, he said, “1514 South Tenth Street.”

  The cab shot off down the street. When it pulled up to the address Larry provided, which was one block from his parents’ house, he jumped out with the promise of returning with the fare. Going around to the back of the house and cutting through the alley, Larry ran home, leaving the driver to wait, conceivably forever, for the fare.

  When Larry reached the house, his bizarre journey grew even weirder. He found a trail of empty beer cans along the sidewalk leading to where Lee had pushed a reel lawn mower across the front yard just a little earlier. With several freshly cut rows behind him, Lee had been at it for a while.

  “Picked a fine time to cut the grass,” Larry said.

  Lee looked up. Filled with both relief and annoyance at his brother, Lee just shrugged. “Every man needs vices when they’re stressed. Mine are beer and lawn care.”

  Larry smiled. “Looks like you’re mowing down the beers as fast as the grass.” He felt guilty for worrying his brother with a stupid stunt like hopping a train. “Sorry for—”

  Lee raised his hand to stop him. “I screwed up with Mitch. She dumped me ’cause I won’t marry her.”

  Larry wasn’t sure what to say. Though the news shouldn’t have been surprising, he was shocked that Mitch had finally had enough.

  “Whenever she tries to get serious,” Lee continued, popping a fresh beer, “I can’t help but make some asinine comment. Tonight she basically said crap or get off the pot.” He managed a lopsided smile. “I guess I screwed up for good this time.” He knew he wanted Mitch more than anything in the world, but making a lifelong commitment was beyond him. And he couldn’t push through his own stubbornness to apologize for the mess he had made.

  “Hey, everything happens for a reason,” Larry philosophized. “You just gotta ride this wave out and see where you wash up. If you force things, it’ll just keep dumping on you like a gnarly thunder-crusher.”

  For the next few hours, the two brothers sat on the grassy embankment, trying to comprehend how their lives had begun taking them in directions they no longer seemed able to control.

  “All I ever wanted was to find a decent job, start a family, and grow old with someone special,” Lee said, wiping a reluctant tear from his eye. “But not today! Not now! Is that too much to ask?”

  “Take your own advice, and follow the path you feel most destined for,” Larry replied. “Me, I want to make a difference in the world. Do something that’ll immortalize me in the surfing community. Maybe like visiting all those great coasts they surfed in The Endless Summer.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Lee said with a smirk. “We’re stuck here, and you know it. So how, exactly, are you going to make a difference? By trying to convince people until you’re blue in the face that Sheboygan is the Malibu of the Midwest?”

  Larry stood up to head inside. “You’re just pissed off at yourself,” he said. “Why don’t you quit complaining and do something about it?” He headed up the steps and into the house, closing the door behind him. Lee watched him go, feeling completely alone in the world. No one understood the conflicting emotions he felt, wanting Mitch but wanting her to wait, to let him live a little bit before settling down. Was that really so hard to understand and really so much to ask?

  During the final months of his senior year, Lee tried to hide the pain of losing Mitch by flirting with cute girls who hoped to be her replacement. He also made a handful of attempts to win back Mitch, but not once did he address the core issue of their breakup. He just couldn’t make himself vulnerable enough to tell her his most intimate feelings, leaving her to wonder what their relationship could have been.

  His natural response to make the pain go away as quickly as possible was to spend as much time at the beach as possible. Lee could compartmentalize his feelings when focused atop his board and riding the next Lake Michigan wave. “I can deal with that mess later,” he would tell himself. But as the holidays approached, the emotional weight that was burdening him began to fester into his daily demeanor.

  By New Year’s Eve, Larry sensed his brother was growing increasingly depressed and frustrated. So as a distraction, he and Kevin took Lee with them when an encroaching storm system was creating some ideal surfing waves on Sheboygan’s northfacing beaches near the cove. Grabbing their wetsuits and boards out of the garage, Lee, Larry, and Kevin headed straight for the sand. Navigating across the bluff’s frozen mudslides, the boys risked their lives before they even made it to the lake. The path was treacherous even for someone who knew his way to the water; for three over-anxious guys groping almost blindly in the encroaching dusk, it seemed a sure bet for disaster.

  Somehow, they made it down to the beach.

  The soft glow from the nearby streetlights cast shadows on the cresting brown waves. Though thick from the churning sand, the waves seemed surfable as they rolled toward shore. Filled with all the false confidence adrenaline can provide, the three boys cried out in solidarity as they ran toward the water, “Who needs a girlfriend when you’ve got these waves?”

  Seconds later, all three were clobbered by a thundering wall of water—and another and another. With their feet pulled out from under them, they were jack-hammered into the lake bottom. Left to suck mouthfuls of water while being twisted by wave after wave, they had no idea if they were being shoved toward shore or spun into open waters.

  After another wave slammed Lee’s face into a sandbar, he realized the beach had to be near. Thrusting his hands against the lake bottom, he rose to his feet and saw the beach was only ten yards away.

  Making it to shore, still filled with enough adrenaline to ignore their brush with death, the Williams brothers and Kevin retrieved their boards. As their ice-water-soaked wetsuits clung to their bodies, they paddled out past the breakers to calmer waters, nearly one hundred yards offshore. Perched on their boards while silhouetted against the rolling waters, all three could feel the unspoken tension. There was no contingency plan if things went terribly awry. On a December afternoon in Sheboygan, no one would be in earshot with them surfing so far from the shoreline.

  The boys got into position as a promising set of waves approached. They anticipated who would claim the first available wave, knowing the surfer closest to the curl received the right of first refusal. The set soon washed out, leaving them to straddle their boards and admire their reflections in the rolling waves.

  “Looks like we could be waiting five or ten minutes for the next set,” Lee said as he looked out at the darkening horizon behind them. But not a moment later, his eyes widened at the sight of big gray waves rising in the distance. “Malibu wave!” he yelled. “Malibu wave! Party wave!”

  The oncoming set of three or four oversized waves, which were bigger than the rest of the set that were often referred to as the “three sisters” by sailors, meant all three boys could cut up the waves together. For the next fifteen minutes, the rolling waves continued and they took turns riding solo or in tandem. Still gasping for air after another exciting set, Larry was the first to sit up on his board. “This is so surreal,” he said while paddling back into position. “We’re probably the only people surfing on any of the Great Lakes right at this very moment.”

  With Kevin and Lee getting ready for the next set, Larry couldn’t contain his enthusiasm. “This is what life’s all about,” he said. “Following your passion. Living your dream!”

  “Speak f
or yourself,” Lee responded, suddenly turning serious. “I’m not living my dream. The party is over.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kevin asked.

  “It’s time we grew up,” Lee snapped. He talked about owning a home, getting married, and starting a family. His abrupt change in mood caught Larry and Kevin off guard.

  “Whoa, you’re starting to sound way too much like an adult,” Larry said.

  “I can’t spend the rest of my life delivering newspapers, bussing tables, or working part-time at the supermarket. It’s time I start earning my keep.”

  Larry didn’t think it was just the pressure of becoming an adult that would cause Lee to speak in such a foreign tongue. “Mom and Dad will let us live at home rent free for as long as we want,” Larry said. “Who could ask for anything more at this point in our lives? We’ve got surfing and we’ve got each other.”

  “Sounds pretty good to me,” Kevin chimed in.

  “Not to me,” Lee said, slapping the cold water with the flat of his hand. Floating on the lake, he suddenly realized what he wanted to do. Even in the increasing darkness of the setting sun, he could see Larry and Kevin staring at him, shivering, still startled by the change in mood, which just a few minutes before had been so full of fun. Still straddling his board, Lee sat upright and looked at his twin brother. Then he said, “I’m going to win Mitch back.”

  Third Wave

  Chapter Six

  Lee wasted no time in making good on his promise to “win Mitch back.” Leaving Larry and Kevin at the beach, Lee went home to get some dry clothes and raced across town, knowing each moment wasted catching his breath was one less he’d spend with her for the rest of their lives. He tracked her to a corner bar, but when he stepped inside he saw her with another guy. He stood in the doorway, his insecurities overwhelming him. Could he have walked into a more nightmarish scenario? Lowering his head in defeat, he turned to walk outside, pausing in the doorway while muttering, “I don’t care. I don’t care. I really don’t care!”