L.A. Man

by Joe Donnelly

  “When he wanted us to start surfing, he gave us this equipment that was like 1965 equipment,” says Chris. “I remember the first contest we ever went to. Keith made the finals, and he was on a single fin and all the other kids were on these little thrusters. I remember Keith was waiting for the semifinals and was almost crying because all the kids were making fun of his big, single-fin board.”

  “He didn’t know what he was doing,” says Dan.

  I suggest that it was so old-school it was new-school.

  “Yeah, but it was so long ago, it wasn’t cool at all,” says Keith. The brothers laugh at the memory. But Keith made the finals and finished second.

  “I made all these enemies,” says Keith. “They were like, ‘I can’t believe you beat us on that piece of shit.’”

  “When we were kids, we only had one wetsuit,” recalls Dan. “So, two of us would be in trunks and the other one would get the wetsuit. I remember the first suit I got was a short john, and I remember I was out there in the winter thinking how warm it was.”

  “The first day he got his wetsuit, he slept in it,” adds Keith.

  During the summer months, after their father put them through a couple weeks of working on the ranch and on construction sites, he would drop them off at the beach. “We’d have a tepee set up, and my dad would come once a day and drop food off and we’d stay there the whole summer. I was probably in eighth grade,” says Chris. “People would come and take pictures. We thought they were taking picture of the waves. We’d always be like, ‘It’s shitty out there; why are they taking pictures?’ And they’d be taking pictures of these kids staying in a tepee on the beach.”

  “It was really unconventional growing up,” he adds.

  The boys were so out of the culture of the competitive-surfing world—a cutthroat culture that would make Little League dads blush—that there’d be competitions right around the point from their tepee, and they wouldn’t even know about it.

  Still, they managed to do well enough with their hand-me-down gear that the surfing Malloy brothers started to get talked about around Ventura. Soon they caught the eye of local board-shaping legend and surf guru Al Merrick, whose Channel Islands Surfboards was the industry standard at the time. Merrick was among the first to recognize the talents of such revolutionary modern surfers as local boy Tom Curren and, later, Kelly Slater. Merrick anointed the Malloys all at once, together.

  “Al Merrick was the first person who ever had faith in us as far as sponsoring us, and at that time he had the best surfing team in the world,” Chris says. “We were these kids from Ojai, and he saw that same hunger to surf in all of us.”

  For the Malloy brothers, family became a brand, not a word. “It made sense, and it was easier going that way than not. It was rare that anybody would say, ‘We want Keith or we want Dan or we want Chris,’” says Keith. “It was always like, ‘Hey, we want to talk to you guys about working together.’”

  “I think the sponsors knew how tight we were,” Chris adds. “It would seem inorganic to do it any other way.”

  The Malloys’ careers skyrocketed throughout the nineties. Chris’s fearless big-wave charging began earning him invitations to the Eddie Aikau big-wave contests. Keith was one of the most photographed and filmed surfers of the nineties. Dan was poised for perhaps the most glory of the three after winning the Ocean Pacific Pro Junior in 1996 and placing second in the 2000 U.S. Open. A couple of years ago, his peers selected him in Surfer magazine’s poll as one of the ten best surfers in the world.

  Then, in 2002, Dan quit the competitive circuit, having decided, like his brothers, that the circus was in the way of the surfing.

  The feeling that something was getting away from them had been building in all three Malloys even as their dreams were being realized beyond their wildest expectations.

  “Even since the time we signed those first contracts, the face of surfing has changed so much. At first, it’s ‘Hey, I can pay my rent and get to do what I love.’ It goes from having enough money to pay rent and barbecue to having your face on billboards and MTV and people in the Midwest wearing the stuff you’re hawking, and you realize maybe you’ve gotten into more than you thought you were,” says Chris. “After a while, about five years, it’s become apparent you’re a trained seal. It’s wear the trunks, wear the shirts, smile. Don’t say too much when you’re interviewed and everything will be fine. You’re helping surfing grow exponentially; surfing is growing like mad, but you’re helping create a bunch of loose cannons because of people who think surfing is fashionable or they are drawn to these idols that they see in surfing magazines and you step back and you start to feel like you’ve betrayed something that’s dear to you.”

  The first step in finding their way back was sort of a joint internal affirmation. “We wanted to surf for the reasons we started to surf; over the last four or five years, that’s how we’ve felt. We didn’t want to compete. We weren’t going out there trying to create attention with these hideously bright colors that they were using in surfing for so long,” says Keith. “It wasn’t something we talked about or anything, we just moved in the same direction together. We do spend so much time together, it just rubs off. We feed off each other.”

  Once they had reclaimed surfing for themselves by dropping out of the competitive grind, they slowly started a process that would be dedicated to reclaiming it for those who had gone before and those who would come after.

  This is where the Moonshine Conspiracy comes in. It’s a loose affiliation of like-minded surfers, musicians, artists, and filmmakers, but it’s really a code name for Chris Malloy, his brothers, former pro surfer and now-famous musician Jack Johnson, cousins Emmett and Coley, wife Carla, other family members, and anyone else they can inspire. Lately that’s come to include even full-time surfer and part-time rock icon Eddie Vedder, who contributed a ukulele song to A Brokedown Melody.

  They released their first film, Thicker Than Water, in 1999. It was a definitive step away from the prevailing mode, which was to make corporate-funded, quick-cut, heavy-action, and heavier-music affairs that were little more than adverts for the surfers and their sponsors. Aside from featuring the biggest waves ever ridden in Tahiti and debuting Jack Johnson’s music for most people, it is one of the few surf films ever to be shot entirely on sixteen mm film. The same year, the Conspiracy released Thomas Campbell’s incongruously longboard-centric The Seedling, also shot on sixteen mm. Then came September Sessions and Shelter.

  The films were so out of context with the mainstream that they were subversive. They didn’t identify riders or locations, had little of the standard (and annoying) voice-overs, and were infused with subtle messages and inside jokes. The idea was for viewers to be inspired to figure things out for themselves: who it is surfing, what they’re doing, what the references are. They depicted the Malloys and their friends as a band of adventurers, using the water in a variety of ways, living off the land, and gathering around the campfire to play music and tell stories of their predecessors. The films were independently made and distributed out of the Conspiracy’s headquarters in that renovated Victorian in Ventura. They were as much art projects as surf films, throwbacks to a bygone era that showed surfers living out an older definition of what it means to be a surfer.

  “I feel like where we come from, our heritage, is better than anything I do,” says Dan. “I have a whole lifetime of learning about the ocean, about what that lifestyle is. We’re trying to learn what it means to be a waterman.” That sentiment has resonated, and each film has become a cult classic in the surfing community.

  The recently completed A Brokedown Melody is the most fully realized of them all—a perfect balance of state-of-the-art surfing and high aesthetics. Shot in saturated, deep hues of blue, violet, and amber—which serve to close the distance between the viewer and the action—the film seamlessly moves from moments of aching beauty to seat-grabbing adrenali
ne. But it’s never over-the-top, always neatly calibrated to the overriding message, which is that to be a surfer is to understand one’s responsibility to both surfing’s past and its future.

  Among the film’s many poignant moments is a jam session with Tom Curren and Kelly Slater. Curren is like the Steve McQueen of surfing, an almost mythical searcher and the heaviest influence on the Malloys’ and Slater’s generation of neo-romantic surfers, which includes other stars like Rob Machado. The sequence intercuts between them out in the surf in Indonesia, which includes some of Curren’s best moments on a board in ten years, and on the sand, where they try to out-insinuate each other.

  “You kind of have to be a surfer to get the humor in this,” says Chris. But you don’t have to be a surfer to get the meaning of these two icons surfing together.

  Later in the film, Slater, Machado, and others are joined in the surf by local kids who are flat going for it on broken boards. You can feel the kids spurring on the elders and the elders inspiring the kids. The segment is a hosanna to the ability of surfing to induce joy and exorcise cynicism. If your skin doesn’t get goosy watching this, you may be dead.

  “Without being preachy or trying to tell people what to do, I wanted to, in a fun way, or in a simple way, just remind people a little bit about where we come from and what is there for everybody as surfers, and that this carrot that people are trying to chase now, and the Hollywood depiction of surfing and the glory that comes with it, that there’s something more than that,” says Chris. “But in a fun way.”

  It’s not a new thing, someone reclaiming something that has a pure heart from the maw of commodity and commerce. It happens in music, it happens in art, and it happens in surfing. But it’s a good thing, nonetheless.

  “What you see on film and in magazines represents about one percent of the surfing population. What the Malloys represent is the rest of surfing: the way the rest of people experience surfing—going on trips, camping with friends, playing music, and enjoying a beautiful setting. That’s the feeling you get when you watch their movies,” says Machado. “I definitely want to be a part of it.”

  ◆◆◆

  Before I knew all this stuff about the Malloys, before I knew about their work with Surf Aid, or teaching autistic children to surf, or that they had taken a big pay cut to leave surfing giant Hurley to develop an environmentally sensitive ocean division with unfashionable Patagonia, or that they had turned down big bucks to do a Sunkist commercial because they don’t think soda is good for kids—before any of that, I knew there was something different about these guys.

  I had seen them in Step Into Liquid, Dana Brown’s mega–surf flick from last year, in a segment that took place in Northern Ireland. They were teaching kids on both sides of the schism there to surf and maybe find some common ground in the bargain. That was cool and one of the movie’s touching moments, but also impressive was how the brothers turned the burly surf on the northwest coast of Ireland into a playground. People from the village came down to gawk as if they were watching aliens land. But the brothers came across as humble and grounded. There was something different about them, and I wanted to know what it was.

  I thought I found my answer more than a year later when I finally watched photographer and artist Alix Lambert’s Box of Birds documentary, which aired on PBS and which followed the Malloys from a surf trip in New Zealand to their family’s ranch in Ojai. Her film introduced me to Mary Malloy, the youngest of the Malloy siblings, the one who doesn’t surf.

  By the time I get around to asking about Mary, the brothers and I are sitting at an authentic Mexican cafeteria, one of the few remaining traces of old Ventura, a place that’s in the middle of a franchise takeover they say has caught the town all but unawares.

  “I heard the Gap and all these places are just circling, looking to try and kick out the antique stores, the old ladies who have had antique stores here for fifty years, and putting in the Gap,” says Chris. “There’s a real tug of war in this town right now.”

  The brothers say Ventura was the kind of place where cowboys, Hell’s Angels, and farm hands all mixed comfortably. As if to punctuate the statement, a roar of motorcycles announces a couple of guys on Harleys cruising down the street. Chris says they’re probably weekend warriors, not the real thing, because he doesn’t recognize them. The windshield on the front of one of the bikes would seem to confirm that. To illustrate the changes taking place, Dan tells me about last Halloween. “Some kids came up to trick or treat, and my dad opened the door and they were like, ‘No way! He’s a worker for Halloween.’” They all laugh.

  I ask if their dad would have been happy if they’d all stayed on the ranch. “Yes,” they answer in unison.

  “I was thinking about that the other day, how when I go out to work with my dad, he has to show me what to do,” says Dan. “He calls us city boys and says we have hands like girls because they aren’t all fucked up like his are.”

  I wonder if there is any tension.

  “I was just going to say, he has a tremendous amount of respect for what we do now,” Keith says. “He enjoys the big-wave surfing stuff. Although we don’t have the working hands he does, we have plenty of battle scars.”

  They hear it from their mom, mostly, about how proud their dad is of them. “We come from a family that if you sit there and talk about it, it degrades the whole thing,” says Chris. “He admires people whose actions speak for it. He’d rather show us his approval over the course of six months in a subtle way than say, ‘Gee, son, I’m so happy with you and I love you so much.’”

  The brothers, though, will be the first to say that they aren’t the real heroes in the family. The lessons of courage, resilience, and generosity were taught to them by their sister, Mary, who was born with cerebral palsy, a bad heart, and no hearing or sight. She’s fought harder for her moments of joy than they ever will, and they all know it. Mary is twenty years old, and that’s twenty-one more than anyone said she’d be. When the Malloy kids were growing up, the fire station was between the school and their house. “So for, like, ten years, every time I’d hear a fire engine, it’d be awful,” says Keith.

  There’s a scene in Box of Birds where Chris is lying next to Mary, who even now is not much bigger than a toddler, and he’s remarking that the doctors told them she isn’t sentient—that she doesn’t know what’s going on. Just as Chris says it, she reaches up and lovingly rubs his face. And then she does it again, a wide smile on her face. It’s more beautiful than any wave the boys have ever ridden.

  “Her being there gave us a perspective that I think a lot of people don’t get, you know? I think that just shaped us to be just a little bit unique in what is important to us just because we got that perspective from having our little sister, Mary, who has all these problems,” says Keith.

  “With her, the biggest lesson was no matter who you think you’ve become, no matter what a magazine has written about how good you are or what you’ve done, coming home to her and our family always made you realize that you were that same kid that you started out as, and that life’s not perfect. In fact, it’s way off center,” Chris says. “And the other thing is…”

  “She’s probably happier than all of us put together,” Dan cuts in, laughing.

  “You’d come home from school and there’d be an ambulance or something, and it was a really strange way to grow up,” Chris continues. “Here we had this wonderful place we lived and these great parents and we had each other, but it just gave you an appreciation for every day and what was in front of you, and to be optimistic, too. It gave you confidence. You’re told that things are going to be so wrong; she’s not going to make it past two weeks old, they said at first…it gave us optimism.”

  Chris can see where this is going, though, and doesn’t want me getting all soft on them. He has a warning for people who think they’re some kind of saints just because they’ve taken advantage o
f some of their time and privilege.

  “I just want to call bullshit on it,” he says, almost pleading. “We get wasted, and we get in bar fights and do stupid shit.”

  “If I read the stories about us, I’d be like, ‘Jeez, dude, what are you trying to prove?’” adds Dan.

  In the end, they say, they’re not out to save the world, or even surfing, for that matter. Their goals are much more modest. “My new goal is no more goals. That’s what I told my wife,” Chris laughs. But then he gets a little serious again and says, “All those guys who came before us, they’ve passed on a really precious thing, and we want to take off all the bullshit and leave it just how we found it. We don’t want to be seen as anything other than that.” Well, there’s one other thing, Chris sheepishly admits: if they ever write the story of this odd place called Ventura and the characters who lived and surfed here, maybe, just maybe, there will be a page in the book on them.

  Who’s That Girl?

  Lauren Weedman’s Search for Home

  Originally published in LA Weekly, April 25, 2007.

  Author’s note: I saw Weedman’s one-woman show, Bust, and came away from the performance feeling as buzzed at forty-three as I’d felt after seeing The Who when I was seventeen. I went into work the next day and all-but demanded we put the relatively unknown Weedman on the cover of the LA Weekly. Laurie Ochoa heard me out and said that would be fine so long as I did the story. I was embarrassingly nervous at the prospect of meeting Weedman, and when we got together for lunch, I overcompensated by eating too much and trying too hard. She indulged me nonetheless.

  Did you eat my napkin?” asks Lauren Weedman when I return from dousing myself with cold water in the bathroom.

  No, but it’s a fair question seeing as how I have eaten all of our bread, plus the calamari-in-marinara-sauce appetizer, my chicken ravioli, some of the better bits of her scraggly chicken marsala, coughed up two gumball-sized pieces of garlic, and nearly passed out.