by Jake Parent
“They kind of stink,” Cristina said, removing the rose from her hair and holding it to her nose.
Casey sniffed the air.
“Oh, I thought that was you.”
She chuckled sarcastically and smacked him in the chest.
“Seriously though,” she said. “I think I’m going to throw up.”
He offered his arm and she took it, continuing to twirl the rose in her fingers as they strolled the short distance to the end of the pier.
There was a stench there, too. Leftover from the guts of fish caught earlier in the day. But it was faint in the salty breeze, and still better than the sharp body odor of the sea lions.
The only other people nearby were an elderly man and woman silently holding hands on a bench. A few moments later, the old couple got up and walked toward wherever their lives were going, leaving Cristina and Casey alone, staring into the dark endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean.
The sea teemed with the energy of a living being.
Casey leaned his hands onto the rail, while Cristina turned to stand against it, her back to the water. She grinned in distant thought, trying to remember a time when she’d been so at ease with a guy, whether on the first date or the twentieth.
It sounded almost cheesy, but just then it felt like nothing in the world could hurt her. And not just because, given his impressive physique, Casey could probably take on just about anyone physically. There was something more. Something deeper. Beneath his tough exterior – the tattoos, the muscles, the hard-to-read face – he seemed to possess an aura of tranquility that calmed the world around him as he passed through it.
After a long but not uncomfortable silence, she asked, “So what’s your story, Mr. Casey Peters?”
He didn’t respond right away, not even with the playful little smirk he’d had on his face most of the evening. He only stared into the distance, as if the answer to her question lay submerged somewhere in the water.
“I’m not sure you want know,” he said finally.
Cristina was no stranger to how much effort a person could put into pushing other people away.
“Yes,” she said, admiring the profile of his strong jaw in the moonlight. “I really do.”
He turned toward her.
There was the grin.
“Why do I feel like I know you?” he asked.
The question caught her off-guard, but she knew exactly what he meant.
“I don’t know. Past life maybe?”
“Maybe . . .”
“Seriously, though.” She put a hand on his dense forearm. “Tell me about yourself. I promise I won’t judge. Trust me, I’ve got enough of my own story to fill a book. Ten books, probably.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Tell me how you ended up with that tattoo on your stomach.”
He laughed. “The demon throwing fireballs out of his eyeballs? Wild, drunken night in Indonesia. Woke up the next morning and there it was.” He turned and gave her a sarcastic look.
“No, dumb ass,” she said. “The triangle.”
“Oh, that one. Well, the short version is that I did a lot of dope, and basically sabotaged a surfing career. Then I got clean about five years ago.”
For all his kidding, he actually seemed a bit stand-offish when he told her this. His words had a bite to them that made her wish she hadn’t asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a while, taking off his mesh hat and rubbing a hand across the stubble on his head. “I guess I’m still a little sensitive when it comes to talking about my past. Where I come from, people deal with what they need to deal with and they move on.”
She took him by the hand and led him to the bench that the old couple had been using. She sat, pulling at him to join her. He hesitated, looking almost afraid, but then allowed himself to be drawn down.
“Look,” she said, staring into his eyes and choosing her words carefully. “From what little I already know about you, I think we have a lot in common.”
She paused, debating whether she should say what she wanted to say.
She continued, “All the flirty bullshit aside . . . I’m not really a chick who’s interested in playing games. Even if we only become friends, and that really would be cool with me, I just want you to know that, with me, what you see is what you get. I’ve been through a lot in life too, so I try my hardest not to judge people.”
He snickered.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“That’s hella real.”
He looked a little overwhelmed. Maybe even intimidated.
Good, Cristina thought. He should be.
Suddenly, she had a gut-instinct she decided to follow. A theory that needed testing. She leaned toward him and kissed his lips. A deep, passionate embrace. But not lusty. There was no tongue. That wasn’t part of the experiment, at least not yet.
She pulled back and shared her results.
“Yep, I was right. Our lips fit together perfectly.”
For a moment, the face of this hard-cut man transformed into one that more resembled an awkward little boy with no idea of what to do. The look didn’t stay there for long. She thought he might go in for another kiss. But he surprised her by instead taking her hand into his, squeezing her fingers tight.
Then, in a calm, matter-of-fact tone, he began to tell his story.
22
Casey Peters was born in the mountains above Pleasure Point, in the back of an old van his mom was living in at the time.
It wasn’t that she wanted to give birth to her first and only child that way, but the van’s rear axle had cracked in half when her high-ass boyfriend drove over a boulder on the way to the hospital.
Luckily, her companion happened to be a nurse – the kind who liked to raid the morphine supply at work, which was probably why Mom liked him in the first place.
But this man was not Casey’s father. The man with that distinction had long since left for god-only-knows where. Casey had never met him, and would be damned pleased if the arrangement stayed that way.
Eventually his mom did get the baby to a hospital, where the doctor declared the little boy to be in perfect health, except for the fact he was suffering from opiate withdrawals.
His mother was a junky through and through. Casey never got the chance to know her. She ended up dying a few years after he was born, from a heroin overdose in the back of that same van.
After she died, the county wanted to put Casey into foster care. But they couldn’t find anyone to take him. So he ended up going to live with his mom’s sister.
It was his aunt who eventually told him the story of how he was born. And she did what she could to welcome him into her dirty, two-bedroom trailer in the backwoods. But she was married to an alcoholic who hit her on a regular basis. If Casey was around, he got beat, too.
Casey became quite adept at seeing the rage coming. When it started to boil up, he would camp out in the woods. Sometimes for days at a time. Creeping back in only when his uncle finally passed out.
The violence eventually became too much. Casey ran away at 13 and lived on the streets, mostly sleeping under bushes along the concrete levees around Pleasure Point. It was during this time he discovered two things that would change his life forever: punk rock and surfing.
Punk gave him a philosophy to live by. Surfing gave him a reason to live.
He found a political and social consciousness in California punk bands like Bad Religion and Pennywise, one that helped provide a framework for understanding the chaotic, unfair world he’d grown up in. He snuck into every show he could. And, while most of the homeless people around Pleasure Point panhandled for booze, Casey usually spent any cash he managed to get on CDs.
As for surfing, he was a natural from the very beginning, able to stand up on the first wave he ever attempted. But he never would have even tried if it hadn’t been for a Pleasure Point local-legend named Jerry “Hound Dog” Parker. Feeling sorry for the wide-eyed kid he saw stand
ing on the beach one day, Hound Dog let Casey try out one of his boards, and would continue letting the young man use it as he learned the ropes. And when Jerry found out Casey was homeless, he also let him crash on his couch.
Within months – working hard every day, sometimes from dawn until dusk – Casey became the talk of the local scene. Everyone wanted to see the new phenom who was giving even seasoned vets in the area a run for their money.
Before he knew it, brands like O’Neil and Quicksilver were scouting him.
Pretty soon they were paying for him to enter contests.
He officially dropped out of high school after his sophomore year to focus on surfing full-time. It wasn’t like he’d really been going anyway. Besides, school had never done much good for him. He seemed to learn a lot more about life by actually going out and living it.
At 16, he was featured on the cover of Surfer magazine. The following year, he was consistently winning major tournaments on the pro-circuit, bringing in big bucks, attracting attention from beautiful young women, and basking in all the glory a teenage boy could dream of.
In short, he was on top of the world.
Just after his 18th birthday, he fell surfing a 40-foot monster at Mavericks in Half Moon Bay. When the jet ski finally pulled him from the rumble and tumble, x-rays revealed fractures in both legs.
He recovered fine, but the process introduced him to the world of opioid pain pills.
Before getting hurt, Casey had practically been straight-edge. Like everyone else in the surfing world, he smoked a little weed here and there, drank a few beers, and sometimes more than a few. But riding waves was really the only high he’d ever needed.
Those painkillers, though. It was insane just how fast they crawled into the pores of his being and refused to let go.
And with the network of connections he’d built around California and the world, there seemed to always be an endless supply. Even when he felt an urge to stop, he could easily flush a whole bottle of pills in a morning rage, only to have a refill in his hands by noon.
Despite the pills, Casey continued to dominate surfing. The way he rode was so intense, so innovative, that by 20-years-old people were calling him “the Michael Jordan of the sport.” They said he’d completely changed surfing forever.
Heavy pressure for a young kid to handle.
With all the fame and glory came the parasites. The hangers-on. The gold-diggers. Some of them women, sure, but the men were just as bad, if not worse. It seemed like everyone wanted something, and nobody really gave a shit about who Casey was anymore, much less what was in his best interests. And nobody dared say a thing about his growing drug habit.
Without any family to fall back on, he became more and more absorbed in the surfer’s quest for an endless summer. He and his cohort of top-pros traveled the globe, in search of perfect waves and never-ending fun.
For a while that was enough. Especially the surfing. As long as he could get on a board, he felt like he had a purpose in the world, even when he found himself scratching his arms bloody after taking ten pills full of poison.
But one night things finally went over the edge.
Casey and his boys had a two-day layover in Amsterdam on their way to South Africa for one of the most important big wave competitions of the year.
The plan was to hang out in the city the first day, and then check out a punk festival that was happening the following afternoon. Casey had scored VIP passes from Fat Mike of NOFX, and was stoked for the chance to meet some of his other favorite performers.
He never made it.
The first night in town, he found himself in the red-light district, smoking lots of pot and taking bumps of cocaine that were as pure and white as Tahoe snow.
At some point, one of several ladies Casey was paying to be his friend brought out a small black bag that looked like a shaving kit.
It wasn’t.
By some dark instinct, Casey knew exactly what the bag contained, even before the long-haired blond with the big chest sensually dragged open the metal zipper like a practiced pro. Inside was a number of disposable syringes, a couple spoons, and a big bag of amber-white powder that would change his life forever.
He missed the tournament in South Africa. In fact, no one heard from him for more than a week. He just disappeared. And to this day, he still couldn’t remember much about where he’d been or what he’d done.
When he emerged from the fog long enough to catch his breath, he discovered he’d gotten a pair of roses tattooed on his neck. He also had an armful of track marks, and the feeling that his soul had been ripped from his body.
After that, surfing no longer mattered. Neither did music.
The only thing that had any meaning now, the only thing that gave him purpose, was a substance called heroin.
It didn’t take long for the rumor mill to start churning.
Within days, representatives from his biggest sponsors were calling. They acted casually concerned at first, but as he failed to show up at other tournaments, the calls quickly turned into demands for answers. And he didn’t have any. Not for his sponsors. Not for his agent. Not for his surfing buddies. And especially not for the kids who chased him around everywhere he went, begging for autographs.
There really wasn’t much to say. He didn’t answer to them. He answered to heroin. And it stole everything from him, more quickly than he could have ever imagined.
Unable to handle the pressure being put on him, Casey took a hiatus from the circuit and locked himself away in his expensive Pleasure Point bungalow. Ironically, the place was not all that far from where, just a few years earlier, he’d spent his nights sleeping outside, a death grip around a bundle of meager possessions, hoping that the sun came up before he got robbed.
He taped dark blankets over the windows, so he didn’t have to see the sunlight. The only people allowed over were his dealer and those few people who could keep up with his increasingly insatiable need to get high.
Anyone who gave him shit about the bruises on his arms, or about anything else, was promptly told to fuck off. Eventually, he covered himself in tattoos to hide it all away.
But no one could miss the emptiness in his eyes.
Not even himself.
It took less than a year to drain his sizable bank account. He then sold his surfboards, the BMW, his boat, and eventually even his trophies. He took pennies on the dollar for it all, but he didn’t care as long as the money came fast and in cash.
Next, he sold his house.
Flush again with funds, he figured he ought to try and make it last. He decided to start dealing and bought a big brick from a biker who was part of an organization called New Horizon. Not only did the guy have tons of dope to sell, but he also had a whole philosophy to go along with it. These were the end of days, he told Casey. And in order to get on the right side of the universal revolution – the one that would wipe out the bullshit materialism of modern times – a person had to open new doors in their mind.
At that point in his life, Casey really didn’t care about anything philosophical. Heroin was the only god he prayed to, and the only guiding force he needed. But the great thing was, this pseudo-religion was based on exactly that. Doing drugs wasn’t selfish, they said. It was a path to enlightenment.
Looking back, it was all batshit crazy. But, at the time, he was so disillusioned with the world around him, it seemed to make sense. In the same way punk had done, New Horizon offered a way to make some sense out of a world filled with chaos.
Casey went so far as to take up residence in one of the many abandoned buildings the organization had taken over in the rundown area of Pleasure Point people call Perkins Town. It became Casey’s job to help make sure the increasing number of new junkies in the area were getting their dope from the group.
Of course, the whole illusion imploded one day when the DEA raided a squat Casey was holed up in. They caught him with a gun and a half-kilo of pure heroin.
He thought
he was looking at 20 years.
The only thing that saved him was the fact that the feds screwed up something to do with the chain of evidence – a minor technicality Casey still didn’t fully understand – and a lot of the case got dropped. The only thing that stuck were state charges.
He still got five years, but only ended up doing 18 months.
It was in prison that he began going to 12-step meetings. He became close friends with the other men in the group. It was amazing how so many of their stories, while at times wildly different, were so similar to his own. Their support gave him courage. An internal fire he’d only ever felt on a surfboard.
He did his time without much incident.
While locked up, he worked with a sponsor to take on the ominous task of figuring out how to live life without heroin. It wasn’t easy, and he admittedly fought the process most of the way.
But, in the end, it worked.
He also got his G.E.D. inside, and an A.A. degree in business management.
Thankfully, Jerry “Hound Dog” Parker – who remained, through it all, one of Casey’s only real friends – had seen the writing on the wall before the shit really hit the fan. He’d managed to somehow snag $25,000 of Casey’s earnings, and had stashed it for the younger man to fall back on.
When Casey got out, he used that money to open Bula’s. He couldn’t afford rent for both the store and an apartment, so he set up a cot in the back. It wasn’t much, but it was a lot better than some of the places he’d stayed over the years.
The store was doing alright, too. He started off with just himself as the sole employee, but now there were three other people working there – the two girls Cristina had seen earlier, and a kid who stocked shelves and folded clothes part-time.
The store didn’t bring in anywhere near the money Casey pulled as a pro surfer. Not even close. It never would. But he was getting by, trying to live a frugal, simple life as he saved up. And it’s not like he’d taken some vow of poverty. He even recently splurged on a nice used Harley as a present to himself, in celebration of Bula’s third anniversary.
Nowadays, most of his free time was spent either surfing, going to shows, helping out with the Junior Lifeguards, or mentoring young addicts at the Pleasure Point Youth Center.