The Gentleman's Hour

by Don Winslow

  “For a moment,” Cheerful says, “I thought you had learned some fiscal responsibility.”

  “Nah.”

  Boone steps into the shower just long enough to rinse the salt water off his skin, then gets out and dries off. He doesn’t bother to wrap the towel around himself as he steps back into the office to look for a clean shirt—okay, a reasonably undirty shirt—and a pair of jeans.

  Petra Hall is standing there.

  Of course she is, Boone thinks.

  “Hello, Boone,” she says. “Nice to see you.”

  She looks gorgeous, in a cool linen suit, her black hair cut in a retro pageboy, her violet eyes shining.

  “Hi, Pete,” Boone says. “Nice to be seen.”

  Smooth, he thinks as he retreats into the bathroom.

  Idiot.

  8

  “Business or pleasure?” he asks when he comes back in, Petra having handed him a shirt and jeans.

  She gave him his clothes a tad reluctantly because (a) it’s fun to see him embarrassed; and (b) it’s not exactly painful to see him in the buff, Boone Daniels being, well, buff. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, with the lean, long muscles that come from a lifetime of paddling a surfboard and swimming.

  “And why can’t business be a pleasure?” she asks in that upper-class British accent that Boone finds alternately aggravating and attractive. Petra Hall is a junior partner at the law firm of Burke, Spitz, and Culver, one of Boone’s steadier clients. She got her good looks and petite frame from her American mother, her accent and attitude from her British dad.

  “Because it usually isn’t,” Boone answers, feeling for some reason that he wants to argue with her.

  “Then you really should find a new line of work,” she says, “one that you can enjoy. In the meantime . . .”

  She hands him the slim file that was tucked under her arm. Boone nudges a copy of Surfer magazine off the cluttered desk to make a little room, sets the file down, and opens it. A deep red flush comes over his cheeks as he shuts the file, glares at her, and says, “No.”

  “What does that mean?” Petra asks.

  “It means no,” Boone says. He’s quiet for a second and then says, “I can’t believe Alan is taking this case.”

  Petra says, “Everyone has the right to a defense.”

  Boone points down at the file. “Not him.”

  “Everyone.”

  “Not him.”

  Boone glares at her again, then slides his feet into a well-worn pair of Reef sandals and walks out.

  Petra and Cheerful listen to him pound down the stairs.

  “Actually,” she says, “that didn’t go as badly as I anticipated.”

  Petra had known before she asked that the Corey Blasingame case was deeply hurtful to Boone, that it put into doubt everything he believed in, everything he’d built his life upon.

  9

  Kelly Kuhio was a freaking legend.

  No—K2 was a freaking legend.

  Build a surfing pantheon? KK’s in it. Carve a Mount Surfers’ Rushmore? You’re going to be blasting Kelly’s face into that rock. Just make a list of the all-time good guys who’ve ever ridden a board? Kelly Kuhio is in your Top Ten.

  Nobody who ever met Kelly Kuhio did anything but like and respect him, he was that kind of dude. Soft-spoken, understated, ultimate cool, Kelly had a way of making people want to be better than they were, and a lot of guys on the Gentlemen’s Hour could tell stories about how they went out and did just that.

  Kelly was the epitome of a bygone era.

  The time of the Gentleman Surfer.

  As a kid, Boone literally sat at his feet, because K2 was a good friend of Boone’s mom and dad, both of them well-known surfers both in San Diego and K2’s native Kauai. So K2—“Uncle K” to Boone—would come to the house and talk story, and Boone just kept his piehole shut and his ears open.

  Stories? Are you kidding me? Out of the mouth of Kelly Kuhio? Just look at the man’s life. Born in Honolulu, K2 was the Hawaiian state surfing champion at age thirteen. That’s thirteen, Jack, an age when most gremmies are only champs at . . . well, it ain’t surfing.

  And Kelly wasn’t some dumb, mutant muscle freak, either. Actually he was slight of build and smart, went to Punahou School on a scholarship and was 4.0. After school he went up to the North Shore, because that’s where the waves were, and it was K2 who figured out how to shape a board that could survive the wicked hollow tubes up there. K2 became known as “Mister Pipeline,” winning the Masters so often they practically put his name on it.

  Then he got bored with that and started traveling.

  Dig, it was K2 who first explored Indonesia, K2 who found that great left-hand point break that eventually became G-Land. Should have been K-Land, except Kelly was too modest to hang his tag on it. But now all the boys who make the pilgrimage to Indo on the Unreconstructed Hippie Surf Safari are following in the footsteps of K2, whether they know it or not.

  When Laird and Kalama and the rest of the Strapped Crew started to figure out the big-wave, tow-in thing, they went to K2 to advise them how to shape their boards. Kelly enthusiastically helped them but didn’t go out in the sixty-footers himself. In his forties then, he knew that was a young man’s game and K2 was too cool to try to desperately hang on to his youth. He had nothing to prove.

  When Kelly freaking Kuhio decided to move to California it was a big deal. He came at the behest of the surf clothing companies to promote their products, and then he stayed. Did a few small parts in films, made public appearances, was basically just being K2. He liked SoCal, he dug the San Diego vibe, he just hung out.

  The boys couldn’t believe it. They’d be on the beach and there was K2 out there, cutting his elegant lines, making it look so easy, so casual. And he’d invite you out there to surf with him—“Come on out, brother, the water is fine, plenty of room for everyone”—and give you little tips if you were open to them. (He shifted Sunny’s stance by three inches, and it made all the difference.) K2 was all about the aloha, the community, the peace.

  K2 was a Buddhist since his early days hanging out with the Japanese community in Honolulu. A serious, two-meditation-sessions-a-day, lotus-position Buddhist, but he never shoved it at you. K2 never shoved anything at anybody, you just looked at him and learned, and it was K2 who pointed Sunny toward Buddhism and probably never knew it. She just admired his energy, his presence, and wanted it for herself.

  Other things K2 did?

  Coached surfing at a local high school.

  Sit back and ponder that a little bit. You’re a high school baseball player, and Hank Aaron shows up one day and is going to stay and teach you how to swing the stick? You play a little b-ball and Michael Jordan volunteers to spend his afternoons and weekends perfecting your jumper? Are you kidding me?!

  K2, Mister Pipeline, the Zen Master himself, out there showing kids how to surf and how to do it right, how to carry themselves, how to behave, how to treat other people. K2, Mister Pipeline, the Zen Master, telling them to stay in school, spurn drugs and gangs. If you’re a kid and you’re hanging with K2, it’s cool to stay clean and straight, cool to stay off the corner, maximum cool to hang with that man, eat PB&J, and learn ukulele chords.

  Get it—K2 had Samoan gangbangers out there on Saturday mornings with trash bags, cleaning up the beaches around O’side and laughing the whole time. K2, more silver than black in his full head of hair by then, had black kids from Golden Hill in the water on body boards, talking about saving their money to get the real thing. There was a downturn in gang violence, most of it having to do with sheer demographics, but the local police laid a piece of it right on K2’s doorstep.

  K2 showed up at the charity events and the walkathons, always found some piece of memorabilia to donate to school auctions, never said no if he could find a way to say yes.

  He became a fixture at the PB Gentlemen’s Hour, standing around the beach talking story, more often out in the water catching rides, his style still
elegant if less hard-charging. Boone would see him around from time to time, at Jeff’s or The Sundowner, or just on the beach or some surf event. K2 would always ask after his parents, they’d exchange a few words. Every now and again they surfed together.

  Boone admired him, looked up to him, learned from him.

  He wasn’t alone in that. For good reason, San Diego loved that man.

  He was a hero.

  Maybe a saint.

  Then Corey Blasingame killed him.

  10

  It happened outside The Sundowner.

  Which makes what happened all the worse, because the restaurant-bar-hangout is an icon of the San Diego surf scene. Faded photos of great local surfers riding their waves decorate its walls; famous surfboards that have provided some of those rides hang from its ceilings.

  It goes beyond memorabilia, though. The Sundowner stands for the brotherhood—and, increasingly, the sisterhood—of surfing. A hangout like The Sundowner stands for the surf ethic—peace, friendship, tolerance, individuality—an overall philosophy that people sharing a common passion are, indeed, a community. In short, everything that Kelly Kuhio taught by example.

  In Pacific Beach, that community gathers in The Sundowner. To share a meal, a drink, some stories, some laughs. From time to time, a few tourists might come in and get overrefreshed, or some chucklehead from east of the 5 might walk in looking for trouble—which is where unofficial bouncers such as Boone, Dave, or Tide might be asked to intervene—but surfers never cause problems in The Sundowner. Sure, a surfer might have a few too many beers and get silly-stupid and have to be carried out by his buddies, a guy might yack on the floor (see Mai Tai Tuesdays), a boy might try to surf a table and end up in the e room for a few stitches, but violence just doesn’t happen.

  Well, didn’t used to.

  The ugly, painful truth is that violence has been seeping into the surf community for some time, really since the mid-eighties, when the drug-blissed hippie surfer era gave way to something a little edgier. Over the years, grass gave way to coke, and coke gave way to crack, crack to speed, speed to meth. And meth is a violent fucking drug.

  The other thing was overpopulation—too many people wanting a place in the wave and not enough wave to accommodate them; too many cars looking for a place to park and not enough spaces.

  A new word crept into surf jargon.

  Localism.

  Easy to understand—surfers who lived near a certain break and surfed it their whole lives wanted to defend their turf against newcomers who threatened to crowd them out of a piece of water they considered their home—but it was an ugly thing.

  Locies started to put up warning signs: “If you don’t live here, don’t surf here.” Then they began to vandalize strangers’ cars—soap the bodies, slash the tires, shatter the windshields. Then it got directly physical, with the locies actually beating up the newcomers—in the parking places, on the beach, even in the water.

  Which, to surfers such as Boone, was sacrilege.

  You didn’t fight in the water. You didn’t threaten, throw punches, beat people up. You surfed. If a guy jumped your wave, you set him straight, but you didn’t foul a sacred place with violence.

  “Fighting in the lineup,” Dave opined one Dawn Patrol, “would be like stealing in church.”

  “You go to church?” Hang Twelve asked.

  “No,” Dave answered.

  “Have you ever been to church?” High Tide asked. He actually has—since he left his gangbanging days behind, Tide goes to church every Sunday.

  “No,” Dave answered. “But I knew this nun once—”

  “I don’t think I want to hear this,” Tide said.

  “Well, she wasn’t still a nun when I knew her—”

  “That I believe,” Boone said. “So what about her?”

  “She used to talk about it.”

  “She used to talk about stealing in church?” Johnny Banzai asked. “Christ, no wonder she was an ex-nun.”

  “I’m just saying,” Dave persisted, “that fighting while surfing is . . . is . . .”

  “‘Sacrilegious’ is the word you’re searching for,” Johnny said.

  “You know,” Dave answered, “you really play into a lot of Asian stereotypes. Better vocabulary, better in school, higher SAT scores . . .”

  “I do have a better vocabulary,” Johnny said, “I was better in school, and I did have higher SAT scores.”

  “Than Dave?” Tide asked. “You didn’t have to be Asian, you just had to show up.”

  “I had other priorities,” Dave said.

  Codified in the List Of Things That Are Good, an inventory constantly under discussion and revision during the Dawn Patrol, and which conversely necessitated the List Of Things That Are Bad, which, as currently constituted, went:

  1. No surf

  2. Small surf

  3. Crowded surf

  4. Living east of the 5

  5. Going east of the 5

  6. Wet-suit rash

  7. Sewage spills

  8. Board racks on BMWs

  9. Tourists on rented boards

  10. Localism

  Items 9 and 10 were controversial.

  Everyone admitted to having mixed feelings about tourists on rented boards, especially the Styrofoam longboards. On the one hand, they were truly a pain in the ass, messing up the water with their inept wipeouts, ignorance, and lack of surf courtesy. On the other hand, they were an endless source of amusement, entertainment, and employment, seeing as how it was Hang’s job to rent them said boards, and Dave’s to jerk them out of the water when they attempted to drown themselves.

  But it was item 10, localism, that sparked serious debate and discussion.

  “I get localism,” Tide said. “I mean, we don’t like it when strangers intrude on the Dawn Patrol.”

  “We don’t like it,” Johnny agreed, “but we don’t beat them up. We’re broly.”

  “You can’t own the ocean,” Boone insisted, “or any part of it.”

  But he had to admit that even in his lifetime he had witnessed the gradual crowding out of his beloved surf breaks, as the sport gained in popularity and became cultural currency. It seemed like everyone was a surfer these days, and the water was crowded. The weekends were freaking ridiculous, and Boone was tempted sometimes to take Saturdays and Sundays off, there were so many (mostly bad) surfers hitting the waves.

  It didn’t matter, though; it was just something you had to tolerate. You couldn’t stake out a piece of water like it was land you’d bought. The great thing about the ocean was that it wasn’t for sale, you couldn’t buy it, own it, fence it off—hard as the new luxury hotels that were appearing on the waterside like skin lesions tried to block off paths to the beaches and keep them “private.” The ocean, in Boone’s opinion, was the last stand of pure democracy. Anyone—regardless of race, color, creed, economic status, or the lack thereof—could partake of it.

  So he found localism understandable but ultimately wrong.

  A bad thing.

  A malignantly bad thing, because more and more often, over the past few years, Boone, Dave, Tide, and Johnny all found themselves playing peacemaker, intervening in disputes out on the water that threatened to break into fights. What had been a rare event became commonplace: preventing some locies from hammering an interloper.

  There was that time right at PB. It wasn’t the Dawn Patrol, it was a Saturday afternoon so the water was crowded with locals and newcomers. It was tense out on the line, too many surfers trying to get in the same waves, and then one of the locals just went off. This newbie had cut him off on his line, forcing him to bail, and he sloshed through the whitewater and went after the guy. Worse, his buddies came in behind him.

  It would have been serious, a bad beat-down, except Dave was on the tower and Johnny was in the shallows playing with his kids. Johnny got there first and got between the aggro locies and the dumb newbie and tried to talk some sense. But the locies weren’t having it,
and it looked like it was on when Dave came up, and then Boone and Tide, and the Dawn Patrol combo plate got things settled down.

  But Boone and the other sheriffs from the Dawn Patrol weren’t at every break, and the ugly face of localism started to scowl at a lot of places. You started to see bumper stickers proclaiming “This Is Protected Territory,” and the owners of those cars—too often fueled by meth and beer—felt entitled to enforce the edict. Certain breaks up and down the California coast became virtual “no go” zones—even the surf reports warned “foreigners” to stay clear of those breaks.