by John Decure
When you learn to do for yourself to survive, your mind can play tricks on you, fooling you into believing that you’re doing a damn fine job when in truth you’re skirting the essentials. Starving. People say I look like my father. When my mother left I groped for a reason, and for a long time all I could come up with was that maybe she’d grown tired of me, that I reminded her too much of her dead surfer husband. Years later I learned that this was not the case, but by then I’d learned to avoid the intimacy, if not the touch, of a giving woman. I was determined, I suppose, not to be left behind again, by anybody.
Sometimes I think I reach out a tad too forcefully as a way of overcompensating for my own self-imposed isolation. Perhaps I’m trying to silence a little voice in my head that whispers to me when I’m alone in my car on Pacific Coast Highway at night, nothing on the radio, or paddling out at first light, ducking through a pitching wall of golden green. Not worthy.
This all feels vaguely like bad guesswork, built on amateurish research and influenced by half-baked reflection. But I do try to keep the noise level in my head turned down in the event that an important transmission might come through. I don’t waste my time or my money pursuing consumerism, that greatest of modern-day mind-fucks, nor do I read self-help books or write bad poetry. I’ve never seen a shrink, although I did date a leggy therapist a few years ago whom I dropped flat when she told me that my collection of vintage big-wave surfboards shaped by my father was actually a troubling manifestation of phallic insecurity. Of course, I did feel obliged to point out to her that the ten-six balsa model with the offset redwood stringers could easily fetch six figures today at a surf memorabilia auction, but hey, why be a dick about phallic insecurity? But I also can’t claim that I am inching closer to any breakthroughs. In the meantime, Carmen is dead right whenever she sighs silently, flicks a loose strand of fine black hair off her shoulder, and points out entirely without irony that my good deeds rarely go unpunished.
We headed southbound in the early twilight, toward Christianitos. Rudy was fairly loopy again, heading into Mitch Miller territory, apparently with nary a worry about the wife, her glowering boyfriend, and Silver the not-quite-lawyer, all of whom were fervently devoted to making him destitute. Dale motioned for me to light him another smoke, which I did. He nodded to me in thanks, puffing with the satisfaction of a man reclaiming his life again.
“I’m feeling good,” he admitted, as if he’d forgotten how until now.
I heard the words “I’m happy for you” issuing forth from my lips, but I knew I didn’t really mean it, and I wondered if I was just using this man to work out something so personal that he really didn’t figure in at all. But Dale hardly noticed my comment.
“Gotta hand it to you. You really know how to do an intake interview. Thanks.”
The words “My pleasure” issued forth.
I gazed at the view out my side window, hoping that I hadn’t already overextended myself—or Dale, for that matter. Thinking about that faded green sign outside my office window, meditating on the message it spoke, and—oh, what the hell—making the meditation into a prayer for a little direction. Silently watching the day fade into night, ten million tiny lights popping on, one by one, showing the way to go home.
Five
Main Street in Christianitos is a bit of a throwback, a solitary strip of commercial buzz slicing through the center of town like a racing stripe down the hood of a ’57 Chevy. For outsiders, I suppose, the wide sidewalks, antique lampposts, and quirky local shops on Main hold a certain charm that’s absent from the antiseptic multilevel shopping malls in the area. Throw in the expansive ocean view—free of charge—just beyond the main drag at the foot of the pier, and you’ve got the closest thing in this area to a tourist attraction. But weekend window-shopping goes only so far, and foot traffic fades whenever the creeping marine layer smothers the coast like a damp wool blanket, which is often. To make it on Main year-round, you need local support.
Driving down Main is like perusing a spice rack: there’s one of everything. A lone hardware store. A fish restaurant—the ever popular Captain’s Galley. There’s one used-book store, a bank, a Laundromat, a liquor store, the Bay Surf Shop, an art house movie theater, the Food Barn market. Then again, Clancy’s and the Marmaduke are both windowless dive bars, so I guess they break the Main Street Rule of One. Shit-faced inebriation holds a special position in this town.
“Drop me at Beach Motors,” I told Dale. It’s the only auto repair shop in Christianitos.
“Your car ready?”
“I doubt it. It’s a Jeep wagon, older model. Don’t know what the damage is yet. Either way, tomorrow we should report our situation with Rudy to the Glendale police.” I got out of the old Buick and leaned in the passenger window.
Dale did his best to appear nonchalant, his left arm slung over the steering wheel like a self-conscious teenager on a first date. “Sounds like a plan.”
“Call me in the A.M.,” I said.
“Make a new plan, Stan,” Rudy muttered from the backseat.
I shook Rudy’s hand through the open window. “Dale’s gonna look after you, buddy. Take it easy.”
Rudy winked at me. “Just drop off the key, Lee.” A regular Paul Simon.
I scanned the half dozen or so cars parked behind the high chainlink fence in the Beach Motors yard, but I couldn’t locate my ride. Damn, that meant it was still in the garage and wasn’t ready.
Dale blew some carbon out of the idling Buick’s pipes. “How you getting around tomorrow?”
“Maybe with you again.” I wrote my home phone number on the back of a business card and handed it across to Dale. His hand shook slightly when he took it, and in the same instant, he caught the look on my face.
“Can do.” He offered me the hand, as if he wanted to solidify a deal that until now had felt sketchy, and we shook. “Hey, thanks for the vote of confidence … you know, for today.”
My face felt hot. I wanted to tell the man, Sure, not a problem, but the words wouldn’t form. Inside, I was knotted up over what I’d done. Volunteering as his probation monitor was one thing, but bailing him out of an illegal employment situation was something much more. Throw an incompetent millionaire into the mix and the whole thing could foul in a hurry. What if Dale Bleeker was no longer the principled DA man I’d built him up to be way back when? Maybe he’d deserved to get canned. And what if he knew that those law center people were using his license illegally and he was only too happy to collect a monthly check for doing nothing? What guarantee did I have that he could resist fleecing his hapless new client?
No guarantee.
“Don’t mention it,” I said to Dale, sans enthusiasm.
“Sorry, already did. And I mean it.” He shot me a thumbs-up sign, and with the gesture I caught another glimpse of the smooth operator I’d remembered gliding to and from the podium in that paneled courtroom years ago. I stepped back from the Buick, mumbling a prayer of sorts. Lord, watch over these two; God knows I mean, you know—they need you now. The car pulled away and into traffic, rattling down Main toward the ocean, a torn piece of vinyl top on the roof curling back in the breeze like a hooking wave.
I was halfway across the asphalt lot fronting the garage when Mickey Conlin, an old surfing cohort and my longtime mechanic, stepped out of the shadows to greet me, a greasy rag in one hand, a silver hunk of carburetor in the other. A crazy tumbleweed of brown hair half covered his eyes, and when he smiled his missing front tooth made him look like a hockey player, a beefy defenseman who lives to hear the sound of body parts crunching against the boards.
“Where’s my machine?” I said. His frame was naturally well muscled, but he was thicker in the middle now, probably pushing into my weight range at well over two hundred.
He hefted the hunk of shining carburetor. “Where’s your checkbook?”
I’ve known Mick as something of a tough guy since the first time he pushed me down on the playground in the first grade and demand
ed my lunch money. I’d surprised him and the circle of kids jeering the action by popping him a good one on the lip, a first for him. On that day my display of moxie did little more than guarantee me a beating at the hands of a bigger, stronger boy, and I accepted it tearfully but without major complaint. But the flogging intrigued Mick. The next day at school I found him trying to pry a shiny quarter from my fingers yet again, and instead of running, I got in three or four good shots before the other kids even had a chance to make the bloodthirsty cry of “Fight!” I took another beating, but afterward, Mick’s nose was in worse shape than my face, and when we both returned from a week’s vacation courtesy of the principal’s strictly enforced demerit policy, he didn’t come looking for any shiny quarters of mine again.
What Mickey Conlin could not have known was that I had already learned something about dealing with the threat of violence, specifically that it is all about fear. Not denying your fear or attempting to be fearless, which is sheer stupidity, but knowing it is there, inside you, screaming at you until you can’t think and robbing your mind of its powers of assessment and strategy. I learned these lessons at home against a much larger opponent with whom I never fought, but the fear was there just the same, in the back of my throat, where your breath will snag at the halfway point between the mouth and lungs, right where the gasp originates.
Years later, when I took up wave riding in earnest, I found that by chance Mick had been bitten by the surf bug at precisely the same moment. We were the youngest pair of grommets on the beach, backs to the wall against the older boys, who tormented us with the standard hazing rituals. Our heads had been stuffed upside down into trash cans, Indian burns twisted deep into our skin, bodies masking-taped like human splints to the pair of flagpoles anchored in a small flower bed just behind lifeguard headquarters. We’d carted the pier crew’s boards, wetsuits, and soggy towels to and from the parking lot like a couple of wobbly pack mules, loitered outside Pier Liquor in the hot summer sun, hopping about on burning bare feet, panhandling change from tourists, then finding someone with an ID who could score us a twelver of brew to smuggle back onto the sand.
“What’s with the shit-eater, J.?”
I didn’t know I’d been smiling. “Nothing. Just … you always remind me of our early days of servitude down at the pier.”
“Quite the bottom-feeders, weren’t we?” he said, the gap in his teeth flashing.
Mick and I bore those petty indignities together, biding our time and subsisting on humble pie. We stuck around because we loved the ocean, and, I think, because we both had no place better to go. I was an only child and had already lost my father before I started the second grade. In spite of the steady company of a loving mother, my home life was stiflingly lonely. For me, going surfing was like escaping to another place, an exciting new place full of challenge and fear and beauty and tanned girls in the sand and colorful characters in the lineup and endless rounds of surf checks brimming with ongoing passionate discussion and reflection upon the vagaries of wind and swell and tide. It was keg parties and pot and late-night junk food, waiting in line all night for concert tickets that always seemed to put us in the nosebleed section anyway. It was somebody’s long-suffering girlfriend buying a ticket to the movies, then cracking the emergency exit so ten more of us could slip in and partake, the alarm buzzing and ushers running down the aisles with flashlights blazing as we laughed and stepped on feet and stumbled through the darkness and into some seats. It was lying in cool night sand that felt like a rumpled sheet, and staring at the stars while tossing off marginally accurate tidbits about Polaris, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia in hopes of impressing my date, the moment shattered by a nearby friend’s not-so-subtle suggestion that we all run down to the sea, lose the clothes, and really get raw. It was head-splitting, hungover dawn patrols and long fruitless drives to distant windy shorelines, and the pure joy of the occasional perfect day.
And it felt like belonging.
To Mick, surfing was liberation from a home life far worse than mine. Johnnie Conlin, Mickey’s dad, was a handsome, gifted grease monkey who’d never put his engineering degree to use like he probably should have. You could just see the guy simmering under the surface. Johnnie also had a thing for Wild Turkey in the morning, liked to flirt with married female customers, and was quick with a socket wrench for any outraged husbands who found their way down to the shop to call him out. Sometimes, when his frustrations were running high and he hadn’t been in a good fight in a while, Johnnie would come after Mickey for an unmade bed or a toilet seat left up or some other bullshit, anything to pick a fight. Though Mick never shrank from violence and was good with his fists, he lived by a personal code that kept him from ever swinging on his dad—a code I could understand, although my father never worked me like Johnny did Mick—and this left him essentially unprotected. Mick’s mother, a shaky housewife who wore a nightgown all day and was rarely seen out of doors, was no help. It was said that Doris Conlin was a fine schoolteacher before she married Johnnie, a taskmaster who knew how to apply the firm hand to bring about order in her classroom. But Johnnie was a far greater challenge than some kid who’d forgotten his textbook, and slowly, brutally, he stole her confidence. Now she was just as much a victim as Mick, an undiagnosed schizophrenic who lived with a constant, needling fear of when Johnnie would go off next.
Home was an ugly deal all the way around for Mick. One time I was over there, goofing on a guitar and teaching Mick a few chords in the garage, when Johnnie came home and instantly got after his wife over that evening’s dinner menu. “Meat loaf a-gaaiinn!” he kept shouting. A door slammed and furniture started to clatter. Mick’s mom was crying and screaming through it, and the next thing you knew, a whole set of dishes was flying out of the kitchen like bats from a cave.
For both Mick and me that first summer, surfing was our ticket to a new life, and if subjecting ourselves to an endless series of juvenile pranks was the price of admission, we were more than willing to pay up.
“We were groms,” I said.
“Lowest life-forms on the beach,” he said, reciting the standard refrain. “But they were some pretty fun times.”
Which was true. Until one packed-out day at the pier, when the game got a lot more serious. A dry offshore wind had whooshed out of the inland flats during the night, carrying with it a whiff of sage and the exhaust fumes from ten thousand tailpipes roaring along Pacific Coast Highway. Full-moon weather, the cosmic stuff that supposedly spikes murder rates. The left off the Northside pilings was forming up thick and finely tapered, and each swell was hotly contested. As the morning session progressed, a muscled, cocky-looking surfer from out of town began to lose his cool and started hogging waves, shoulder-hopping local riders and generally acting badly. A challenge was imminent. Rod Weesun, an older pier guy who’d come back from Vietnam with blank pits for eyes and a generally unhinged manner, paddled in, snatched my beach towel from under me, and ordered Mick and me to deal with the interloper.
It was an invitation to a beating, and I said as much to Mick while Weesun hissed about what a pussy I was. I didn’t care—although I was already a big kid at thirteen, it was not my way to throw my weight around, and I was not inclined to start trouble. But with the abuse Mick took from Johnnie on a regular basis, he was probably a lot more sick and tired of grommethood than I was at the time, and he didn’t hesitate to throw the first punch when he caught the guy coming up to the showers. The other surfer looked twice his size when he squared off red-faced on Mick, and Weesun and the pier boys cackled as Mick absorbed a series of clean shots to the face and head. But he knew what I knew about fear, found his focus amid the tumult, and somehow hung in until the guy’s arms tired, then paid it all back and more. A few minutes later, the lifeguards were loading the cocky guy feet first into the back of their Jeep down on the sand and Mickey Conlin was copping his first assault and battery arrest in the parking lot. After that the crew took to calling him Mick the Brick for the way he doled out
punishment with those meaty guns of his. He was in the group, and despite my nonexistent backup that day, my status mysteriously rose along with his. We were grommets no more.
As we got older, Mick became an enforcer at the pier, using his reputation to maintain order in the lineup, though he rarely came to actual blows with the perceived offenders. But that was a lot of years ago. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him in the water.
“What’s the story on the Jeep?” I said.
Mick’s rap on my car was ominous. Too many of his words started with “re,” which, coming from a mechanic, is not a good thing. “I’ll have to repack those bearings,” he said, “replace the drum, save you some money if I can find a reconditioned one. You want, I could redo the whole front end while I’m at it.”
I rubbed my eyes, staring at the list he’d written on pink carbon paper. “Right, while I get really reamed with the bill.”
He grinned. “Yeah, well, when your rectum recovers, you might recall my reputation for remarkably reasonable rates.” Then he paused. “What, no rebuke?”
I shook my head. “I want a receipt I can read,” I managed.
Mickey rubbed the blackened rag into his palm. “Seriously, though, have you thought about giving it a decent burial?” He peered into a remote corner of the yard, where an old pickup caked in dirt sat on blocks, a motorcycle sans engine leaning against it. “Got a little room over there for it.”
“You’re quite the businessman, Conlin. I get a new car, I won’t need your services.”
“It’s all right, I’ve got too much work anyway. It’s just me and Turd, the great Norse dipshit.”
I peered into the garage and made out the outline of my Jeep mounted five feet in the air. Tord the Norseman was hunched below the undercarriage, studying something. “Tord’s good,” I said. He’d done nice work on my most recent major tune-up.