“Shit!”
He zooms about the tiny apartment haphazardly getting ready, throwing on board shorts and a torn Quicksilver t-shirt he’s pretty sure is Rob’s from when he went on vacation with Lori to Australia before he and James even met. He shoves deodorant under his arms and splashes water on his face, grimacing at the stubble on his cheeks and knowing there’s jack shit he can do about it now.
James sends up a quick prayer of thanks to whatever god is up there watching him flail around from above that he thought to pack his gear bag the night before, with some semblance of prepared responsibility. He inexplicably throws a banana and an entire loaf of bread into the already full bag, then slings it across his shoulders and onto his back.
The sound of the crowd already cheering from down on the beach rushes to his ears as he flings open the crooked apartment door. He jams on a scratched pair of Ray Bans and shoves his feet into flip flops before tucking his surfboard under one arm. He drops his skateboard down in front of him with the other as he jogs down the driveway and out to Hermosa Avenue.
James tries to calm his hammering heart and lets himself smile at the feeling of the warm wind whipping through his hair as he bobs and weaves down the windy slope of road that will get him down to the sand. Palm trees, patio coffee shops, and ramshackle surf bars zoom past him as his body leans and sways with the movement of the skateboard, hurtling over blinding pavement and hot asphalt. Sweat starts to tingle down the back of his neck and under his arms, and James curses under his breath when he realizes the only damn thing he forgot to bring from his entire apartment was sunscreen.
The beach, when he gets there, is a zoo. A giant hand painted sign boasting the “International Surf Competition 1976—Hermosa Beach, California” hangs fluttering in the breeze between two palm trees, while across the sand, a churning throng of people battle against the sun with hats, sunglasses, umbrellas, and tiny bathing suits. They’re straining their necks to watch the first surf heat already out in the water and trying to listen to the commentary going on over a large, crackling loud speaker set up in the back of a pickup truck next to a purring generator.
James leaps off his skateboard at a run and swoops it up under his other arm, knowing full well he looks ridiculous with a board under each arm, crooked sunglasses, and a frazzled sweat already pouring down his forehead so early in the day. He weaves through the crowd as best he can, making his way towards the white competitors’ tent off to the side and hoping against all hope that they’ll still let him surf.
“Well looks like fucking Sleeping Beauty decided to actually show up! And in my own goddamn shirt!” he hears a voice call from the tent’s shade. James breathes a sigh of relief, then feels that damn irritating flutter in the pit of his stomach when he spots Rob jogging out to meet him, already ready for competition in his wetsuit bottoms with a small damp towel draped around his neck. His brown curls hang down long over his shoulders, still half-wet from when he must have taken a warm-up dip in the waves.
James shoves the tail of his surfboard down into the sand and drops his gear next to Rob’s before running his hands over his sweaty face. “Damn alarm clock battery died,” he sighs between his fingers.
“More like up too late last night doing something far more interesting than resting before a competition, you fucking juicer,” Rob says as he jams a sandy fist into the top of James’ head and messes up his hair.
“Aw, fuck off!” James laughs as he shoves Rob away from him. He tries hard to make sure the smile reaches his eyes as he smooths his hair back down into its usual swoop. It’s times like these he jarringly remembers that Rob has absolutely no idea that he’s his one and only friend in the world.
He walks beside Rob up to the check-in table and almost whoops for joy when he sees that it’s Lori behind the little fold-up table. She greets them with a flip of her long brown ponytail and a deep eye roll.
“Well thank God you decided to show up. I almost had to put this one in a corner; he was whining so much about why you weren’t here yet to play in the sandbox with him,” she says, pointing her thumb towards Rob and pretending to resist as he wraps her in a hug from the side and tries to press a sloppy kiss to her cheek. James chuckles down at the sand, unsure as to whether his laughter is real or forced.
“Look, Lor,” he says, once Rob’s pulled away, “Any way you can do me a solid and pretend I was here an hour ago in that paperwork of yours?”
She smirks and wipes the sand off her chest from Rob’s arms. James can see Rob staring almost open-mouthed at her little red bikini out of the corner of his eye as Lori stands and leans across the table towards him.
“Already told them you were here,” she whispers into his ear, subtly passing him his heat number.
“Far out, Lor. I owe you one.” He kisses her cheek and takes the heat number in his hands before following Rob back over to their boards.
“I’ve still gotta wax. My heat’s two groups away,” Rob says as he bends down over his backpack and rifles through for the bar of wax. James forces himself to look away from the long curve of his spine.
“Yeah, I’ll join you.”
They receive a fair amount of attention as they make their way through the sea of competitors stretched out on beach towels and lounging in the sand. Rob’s been a staple of this beach for his entire life, and, as much as he doesn’t feel like it deep down, James has made somewhat of a name for himself on the SoCal scene over the past two years of local competitions.
“Shit, man, beach is crawling with groms and kooks today. Can barely pick out the competition,” Rob says as he lifts his board above his head to avoid a group of onlookers spread out in the sand.
“Don’t see you complaining about the chicks, though,” James quips with a sly grin, and Rob looks back to flip him the bird.
“Gonna go pro today, dude, I can feel it!” someone calls out to him from the crowd. James rubs his hand over the back of his neck and barely jumbles out a thankful reply, already starting to feel the crushing pressure bearing down upon his shoulders. He hears a similar sentiment four or five more times as he and Rob make their way past groups of young high schoolers smuggling Budweisers onto the beach in brown paper bags, sprawled next to some of the most distinguished names in Hermosa, most with a platinum blonde beach chick hanging off their arms, passing a cigarette back and forth with lazy fingers.
Rob smirks back at him as he continues to stutter over his replies to the well-wishers, and James is inordinately grateful when someone starts blasting Earth Wind and Fire on a nearby boombox loud enough that anything more than a smile and nod becomes impossible. He feels like he’s been dropped onto a goddamn Hollywood film set, with a costume thrown on his body and a fake surfboard shoved under his arm and a director yelling, “Hey there, sonny, just walk down the beach and pretend you’re one of the boys!”
He feels one hundred years old, and he struggles not to limp in the sand. The last week’s worth of shifts sweating down at the docks sit like icy lead in every muscle of his body, leaving him frustrated and already out of breath as they trudge through the deep, hot sand.
Rob leads them out to a more secluded spot, up just high enough on a bluff that they can see the whole event stretched out before them like a colorful mirage. James marvels again at the sheer volume of it all. It seems to him like this whole surf scene suddenly appeared overnight. One day he was catching his last wave on a completely empty stretch of beach before boarding a Navy vessel, and the next day he was stepping off that same boat and waking up in the back of a station wagon to see an entire beach plastered with people wanting to watch a real, organized surfing competition. It had seemed absolutely insane to him then, and it still feels surreal even now.
“We are lucky sons of bitches, aren’t we?” Rob says, reading his thoughts.
James hums in agreement as he gets out his wax. They don’t say anything more.
He settles his knees deep in the sand and feels the burn in his tight hamstrings, th
en grimaces at the thought of stretching them out later before his heat. Gradually, he loses himself in the hypnotic ritual of waxing his board, listening to the steady waves call out to him as they pound against the sand in time with Rob’s deep, focused breathing beside him. James pretends that his already anxious, racing heart doesn’t speed up even more when he sees Rob eventually sit back on his heels to tie up his hair into a bun.
“You don’t believe them, do you?” Rob asks in a quiet voice, once he’s finished.
James startles out of his zen and looks up from his board with a frown. “Believe who?”
Rob pockets his wax and leans back in the sand on his elbows. “Anybody. When they tell you that you can really go pro with this, that you can make it up to the Championship Tour and make a living.”
James shrugs, avoiding Rob’s gaze. “Guess I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than hope, you know? Works better that way.”
He flinches when Rob’s hand is suddenly right in front of his eyes, slowly dragging the Ray Ban’s down off James’ face before leaning over to look him in the eye. James’ breath catches in his throat as those deep brown eyes latch on to his.
“You know what? Fucking win this, Jimmy,” Rob whispers, holding his gaze. “For all that shit you’ve seen that you keep bottled up in there. Go out there and fucking blow this thing out of the water.”
James’ throat closes up, and he quickly looks away, embarrassed, as he blinks the moisture out of his eyes.
Rob’s never said anything like that before, never acknowledged out loud the secret past that James keeps hidden from him, from everyone. Rob’s seen the scar, of course. And the tightness James gets in his shoulder when his body hasn’t fully woken up yet. He’s seen the way James jumps if a car suddenly honks back up on the road. He’s seen it all hundreds of times in the pre-dawn light as they perch side by side on their boards and quietly wait for the next set.
James remembers the first day he decided to go without his wetsuit top in front of him. It was one month after they’d met, and it was terrifying. The whole night before he’d been sick to his stomach just thinking about it. Lying in the back of the station wagon listening to the crickets and the waves, convincing himself to just suck it up and do it like a man, then talking himself back down from making the biggest mistake of his life and pushing away the only true friend he’d made since Billy Madden. He didn’t know then how Rob felt about it all—about the war and the politics and the soldiers coming home to tree trunks without yellow ribbons and brains that thought cars backfiring were machine guns in the middle of Sunset Boulevard.
The next morning, he’d risen before the sun like normal and brushed his teeth from bottled water over the gutter on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway. The seagulls cawed down to him, mocking his uncertainty. He made his way on shaky legs down to the shore with his board tucked under his arm and a bulky sweatshirt thrown over his thinning frame. And he’d watched as Rob jogged down to him from where he parked his beat-up Chevy with a smile on his face in the cool grey sand, and taken his hand and thumped him on the back like usual. And then James had forced himself not to vomit as he pulled the sweatshirt up over his head and left himself bare chested in the slowly warming virgin air, waiting to hear the gasp he knew would come from Rob’s lips.
Except it hadn’t come. Instead, Rob had simply pulled off his own sweatshirt, cursed and shivered at the cold, and then run forward into the fresh waves to start the day, calling back over his shoulder for James to get his shit together and join him before he had a birthday waiting for him to come.
James sees now that it probably wasn’t really as much of a surprise as he’d thought it would be. Thousands of boys his age were being shipped off to Vietnam every month, and almost just as many thousands came limping back one year, two years later. If they made it back at all. It didn’t matter if anyone disagreed with why they were over there in the first place. The soldiers still got shipped back all the same.
Even now, sitting up on a perfect sunny stretch of sand and looking down at the grand spectacle of the International Surf Competition, thousands of miles away from the little stretch of beach in Da Nang, James knows there has to be at least a solid handful of secret soldiers hiding amongst the surfers and spectators in the vast crowd. They all hide in plain sight. Laughing over beers down at the surfer bar or smiling around the bonfire after a day out on the waves. And then they wait for the crowd of friends to pack up and leave, they wait until they’re truly alone, and then they let the haunted darkness seep back into their eyes.
They see each other in the crowd. James looks at them, and they look back at James, and they know. They know. There’s a nod sometimes, or even just a blink. James received two just now following Rob through the crowd with his board under one arm and his wax in his pocket. The haunted darkness isn’t welcome on this sunny California beach, brimming over with cheers and smiles as young, unmarked men rip their way across the waves and spray. As pretty little girls cheer them on while sipping on Pepsi and the kids studying over at UCLA make plans to grab fish tacos before studying in the back of someone’s station wagon by the shore.
And now Rob’s gone and told him to fucking win it all anyways. To stick it to the haunted darkness and take the prize money and make a living doing the only thing in the world that keeps him from walking out into the sea and ending it all.
And he can’t think of a single way to thank him.
James swallows hard and blinks out of his thoughts. Rob’s still watching him calmly, patiently, sitting back on his heels in the hot sand, knowing he should be getting ready to paddle out and surf.
“Okay,” James finally chokes out, and Rob just smiles once and winks before nodding back to the crowd.
“Time to get back and stretch so you don’t break a hip, old man,” he says. “And also, the stubble on your face looks like shit.”
And James laughs, breathless. Nods once, hard, and slips his sunglasses back down over his wet eyes.
It’s time.
4
“Right on! And with a wild first wave score of 8.1, our own local boy Jimmy Campbell clears his first qualifiers heat with three waves all over 7.5. I think we all know that he’s gunning for those last couple thousand points today to push him up into the coveted pro circuit. We’ll see if he can pull it off in the second round of heats, coming up next just after lunch. And speaking of lunch, dudes, why don’t you head on over to Dave’s down on the pier for a bitchin’ burger and fries…”
James sweeps his first heat. Annihilates it, in fact. The other three surfers didn’t even stand a chance.
He’s walking calmly back up towards the competitors’ tent, listening to the chorus of applause and shaking the salty water from his hair, when he’s barraged by a swarm of other surfers congratulating him. He laughs and tastes the salt on the inside of his lips.
“Alright, alright, ladies, form a line,” he gets out.
The other surfers laugh along and slap him on the back, reaching out to touch his board like it’s some kind of trophy. James looks around and realizes he barely knows not even half these guys—some of them not even just by name or face. A mixture of elation and dread fills his gut. He’s known now. He’s becoming one of them. No longer just a local guy who some of the ex-surfers down at the Alcove Bar talk about as a little guy to keep your eye on as they nurse along a fourth beer and groan over the good ol’ days.
He needs to live up to something now, to prove that he’s worthy of surfers from all over the entire goddamn world patting him on the back and unknowingly clapping their palms over the ropy scar on the back of his shoulder. He needs to hold his head high and act chill and pretend he’s used to having his five minutes of fame on the hot sand.
He also needs to get the hell away from them all. Needs to find a quiet corner to unzip the top half of his wetsuit and throw on a t-shirt before anyone sees that he’s a worn-out Vietnam sailor who’s nine years older than the rest of them, not some hot new
kid climbing up the ranks of the Hermosa Beach waves like surfing’s just the greatest fun game in the world.
Rob breaks through the crowd and grabs James gently around the neck, rubbing his fist into his hair to mess it up again. He leans down and whispers, “You did it, old man,” in James’ ear before telling the other surfers to fuck off back to their girls and leave the poor guy alone to relax. James shoots him a grateful smile. The side of his neck feels cold when Rob takes his arm away.
James watches Rob jog back to his circle of friends in the sand, the warmth in the pit of his gut slowly fading with each step Rob takes away from him, then he keeps his head low and slinks through the crowds up towards the bluff by the pier so he can change in the shade of a palm tree trunk. He leaves the top half of his wetsuit hanging down around his waist beneath his t-shirt, shivering once at the scratch of the cotton over the layer of wet sand still plastered to his chest. On a whim, he aimlessly wanders over to the packed boardwalk once he’s done. His feet just lead him there, towards the thronging chaos; he has no idea why.
Dave’s burger shack has a line snaking down almost the whole length of the pier. James dodges skateboarders and families, fishermen and groups of bikini-clad girls as he makes his way barefoot down the rough wooden planks, seeking out a bathroom or a lemonade or whichever comes first.
A woman about his age with waist-length straight brown hair and a bikini top with cut-off jeans roller skates past him out of the crowd. She shoots him a knowing look and a wink, popping her lips around her pink bubblegum. She skates by too quickly for James to fully respond. For a fleeting moment, James imagines if Rob looked at him that way, all sultry desire and radiating flirtatious confidence, and now he needs to find a cold drink to get rid of the warm flush on his sunburned cheeks. A Beach Boys song from back before James even got drafted blares from a little ice cream stand he passes in search of a soda, and James feels a sudden pang of nostalgia in the pit of his chest for the times he would hop in Billy Madden’s dad’s Buick and race down along Pacific Coast Highway with an ice chest of beers in the trunk and nowhere to be but the sunset sand.
The Sea Ain't Mine Alone Page 2