When I Float

Sometimes when I lay on my board, usually early in the morning, I let swell after swell pass under me, lifting, lowering. I watch the two or three other people out there paddle to catch their waves, to write their twisting, turning names on the the face of each. They paddle back my way in a few minutes, exhilarated. They may have found something unlike anything else on that ride. Something like the speed of thought. Something like the spark between heartbeats.

At the pulse rate of quiet, I let swell after swell pass under me. Drifts of kelp splotch the surface like hair. A jellyfish has brushed up against me more than once in these moments. I never get stung.

What I’m thinking about is the bar of sand or shelf of rock deep beneath me, and the gentle sand sharks meandering just a few inches over it, in and around waving grass. I’m thinking about the slope of the ocean floor steepening as it nears dry land, and the growing turbulence under a forming break, and how the force, the fraction of the moon’s force in a wave, comes to meet the end of the inclining sea floor and is both defeated and completed at the shore.

Then I begin to wonder if this entire motion lives inside me too. The intricate call of one muscle to the other. The urge to spill out of myself. The answer I give back to the moon.

Joyce Hoffman

Kiki Lamonica was barely a teenager and living in the middle of the country those three years Joyce Hoffman won the U.S. Surfing Championships. Joyce Hoffman was a teenager herself, though a little older.

Hoffman was the first woman in the world to surf Pipeline in Hawaii. She won every major championship she competed in, and she now has a place in every major surfing hall of fame. In a SURFING ILLUSTRATED interview, she said, “I hope to help give surfing the image it deserves. Exactly how I can accomplish this I don’t know, but being named a Woman of the Year (LOS ANGELES TIMES, 1965) and getting good grades in school—all of these things help.”

She is, of course, my hero.

Who would have ever guessed a green-eyed licensed psychologist in a small town in Minnesota, a woman whose office is so bright from glare at certain times of day she needs to put on sunglasses, would find her way one three-day trip out west in the life of a surfriding honor student who had become a mom, who had become a grandmom, whose daughter had had a daughter she called Jade, who had grown after a short time to need a babysitter named April Street?

One day, there were the three-and-a-half of us, walking that stretch of beach just north of Shorecliffs. In ripples of sand, we shuffled along, putting the mind, the long stretchy muscles of the body, and the circle of women we all were, back together.

Chloe Rook

Chloe Rook moved here from Minneapolis in 1980 and set up a palm and Tarot parlor next to Cuchessi’s Bikes near the pier. On warm days, she leaves the door open, which allows a beaded curtain to sway a little between the bright sidewalk and the darkness inside. People walking by will smell the #10 Hare Rama incense sticks she burns continually near the window. The fragrance is what she would call “efficacious.” She believes it repels evil. She also believes it helps her write deeper poems. I know all this because we are an old woman and a young woman and best of friends.

The day I cut my arm open on mussel shells stuck to a piling, she cleaned my wound. She called a friend of mine to arrange a drive to the doctor. She looked at my open hand as we waited, and she told me two of the many things I loved, oranges and bare feet, and made me think things I would never think about myself. Like how, in a field, I was the absence of the field. Like how, if I wanted, I could eat men like air. All this at our first meeting. All because I caught a wave too close to the pier.

She may just be getting up those mornings I am fresh out of the water and starting the long walk up Del Mar with my board. I’ll see her in the apartment window just above her parlor, one hand waving while the other holds a small cup of tea like a tiny yellow chick. She’s had me up for muffins before, maybe some fruit, but I’m usually ready for something more substantial. Chloe has an older woman’s sort of diet. Most mornings I keep walking.

She gave me the recipe for the first tabouli salad I ever made or ate. I try now and then to get her to walk with me on the beach, to get out in the sunshine and fresh air: For someone who works right next to the ocean, she has the palest complexion I know. She asks me why I never bring a boy by for her to meet, or talk about college, or let her do a Tarot spread for me. We push and pull at each other in these ways.

Frankly, I think some of my friends might be frightened by her. She can seem like a 50-year-old Goth until she talks, but then when she talks she can scare you by what she knows about life. Frankly, I don’t know about college. As for a reading, maybe someday, but for now I want the cards to stay put in their deck, face-down in Chloe’s parlor and in my mind, there on the short round table in front of the half-round couch.

Inspired by Ms. Professor Girl, Some Things I Do Not Like

Water building up under my kneecap.

Indoor plants whose leaves are so dusty, they ruin whatever pleasure you might have gotten from them. Violets have to be the worst.

At the front of the theater concessions line, when the popcorn boy asks you if you want the next size up for only 50 more cents, and then the cola girl asks you if, for only 25 more cents, you want a medium instead of the small you ordered. They have been trained to ask you this, no less than they were drilled in washing their hands after using the rest room or removing a butter-substitute from maroon polyester. When their training lapses, or if they choose after months on the job to allow it to lapse, on that day when they think no one is listening and they allow your simple order to remain that way, their youthful manager—a former popcorn girl or boy, a ticket-taker, the young man or woman who now gets up on a ladder after the last show begins to change titles on the outdoor marquee—will threaten them with reprisals.

Remember that bumper sticker, “Mean People Suck”? Well, I agree.

The thought of veal.

People who take credit for the wonderful and sometimes accidental successes of others.

Until the national Do Not Call List, phone solicitations. Before the registry was available, a man I know would listen politely until the moment came when he could say he was not interested. He gave himself 15 seconds to do this: It became a sort of competition with himself, to remain polite while aggressively waiting for his opening. He discovered after hundreds of calls that he became hyper-aware of the rhythms of speech and breath, and this allowed him to treat most conversations on or off the phone from then on like intricate ballets. If a caller did not thank and wish him goodbye after his first refusal, the man would say calmly, “You know I’m naked, don’t you?” This might cause a slight pause as the caller wondered if he or she had heard right. It might end the call. If the caller persisted, however, my friend would add, “Shall I tell you where I’m touching myself?” and then “Shall I tell you where I’m touching myself?” in a continuing verbal loop. This usually took care of things.

Favorite Things

Not, as you might expect, anything Beach Boys. My desert island tune is Van Morrison’s “Queen of the Slipstream.”

The right break at Trestles, not all the far from my home.

When in the mountains, kokanee salmon, cooked in foil over coals with lemon and butter. When nearer to the ocean, albacore, cooked in foil over coals with lemon and butter.

Oranges. Strong coffee. Weak tea.

Self-adhesive postage stamps.

Carnations, in bunches.

The smell of salt behind my lover’s ear.

Terrific gas mileage.

Bare feet, when possible. When possible, bare naked under a light shirt and shorts.

Someone, anyone, playing a guitar at the beach after nightfall. And the bonfire. No singing.

The scar left on my mother’s nose after they removed the carcinoma. The knobs on my knees and on the tops of my feet after years of kneeling on my board.

The vague music you hear underwater when a wave holds you down, and all the air leaves you, and everything begins to go black.

Marks

When I was a kid, two Japanese monks dressed in long robes appeared on a TV variety show. One held a samurai sword, the other an armful of different-sized fruit. One monk lay down on his back and balanced a watermelon on his stomach. The other raised the sword high over his head and brought it down in a flash until the two halves of watermelon fell to the floor. The monk on his back was clearly untouched by the blade.

The two men switched roles. One monk placed the curve of a banana on the curve of his head. The other swung a wide, horizontal arc so that, after the blade penetrated the fruit, one third fell to the right shoulder of the monk, one third fell to the left, and the middle third balanced on the flat, upturned side of the sword. Not a strand of hair had moved. The monks dealt in their turn with an orange, a kiwi, and finally two blueberries poised in the cleft of one man’s chin.

After I moved out of the house, my first roommate hated that I would slice an onion without a cutting board under it. I asked her to show me any marks I had made on the countertop, but she never could find them. Many years later, a man I loved claimed all I needed to do was to run my hands over his stomach before he could feel tiny slices being made of his liver. He sometimes woke up choking in the middle of the night after dreaming I had kissed him, turning his tongue to filets.

As Lao-Tzu might say, the vegetable cuts as deep as the knife. The potato skin lets the blade in, but it reaches around the knife too, almost as if a grief lived in the steel, some hard sharp thing only a milky juice could soothe. You or I might watch this and not know anything is happening. We’d look for marks but find nothing.

SURFER Girl

When I turned 12, my mom bought me a two-year subscription to SURFER magazine. She tied the first issue with a little colored string and included a note: You know I never want you to try this, don’t you?

She worked as a secretary in the x-ray department of our local hospital. She saw the victims of car wrecks, bloodied and comatose, wheeled over from Emergency. She saw people my age who’d fallen off a roof or a bike, dangling one arm or limping, trying not to cry as they gave her their vital information. She also dealt first with shivering surfers, barefoot and dressed only in their shorts, and, if they were there to see her, usually bleeding from a gash to the head. Maybe they surfed too close to the tide pools at low tide, and when they wiped out they took a header into rocks. Or maybe they took a routine spill on a big wave and, as it crashed over them, pressing the air out of their lungs, their boards pearled beside them, driven straight down by the force of all that water, then just as powerfully propelled back into the air by the force of their board’s buoyancy. Just as the surfer came up for air, the tip of the board came down on his head. He’d be lucky if he wasn’t knocked out.

My mom knew I was saving money for a board, but I told her when I was ten that I was saving money for a car, so I don’t think she worried I was going to do either of the two too soon. Still, I was old enough to go to the beach by myself, and I hung out there a lot with my friends, a big pack of us that would meet at the Del Mar pier at 10:00 in the morning on summer days and not come home until 5:00, so maybe she thought I needed to hear some of the worse stories from work about surfers with head injuries. Their x-rays looked like continents, she said once, with whole groups of states floating off toward China.

I shared those stories with my friends, even as we watched Sam, whose parents bought him a board, ride the little two-footers in front of us. On a huge blanket laid over the sand, we all lay in a spoke pattern, our heads meeting toward the middle, and between us we’d have what seemed like three pounds of fries from Cropley’s and enough catsup to drown everyone. Scott Blair, the actor, had recently fractured his skull. He was about 40 then and had the lead role in The Journey Home. We were all surprised to find out he lived near us and wondered if we would notice his injury the next time we saw him on TV. Someone else had actually died from his surfing injury, my mom told me. He drove himself all the way to hospital in a state of shock, only to fall deeper into shock right there in the waiting room of South Coast General. Nothing to do to revive him.

It didn’t take much for me to get mom’s hints, and while she never asked me if I had tried surfing, I never did for the longest time, out of respect for her. I spent two years soaking in photographs from Surfer of tight, six-foot curls in Baja, and I had recurring dreams of the elevator drop down a wave wall at some remote break on Oahu’s north shore. I had dreams about getting sucked in and blown out of the Pipeline. I imagined myself sleeping on the sand in South Africa, of ripping around sharks in Indonesia or Australia. My bedroom walls were covered with these scenes.

It’s hard to say what happened to my family in those two years my magazine subscription ran out. Maybe I’ll talk about it some other time. Suffice it to say, the most important things in my life happened one August 27th, the day I turned 14:

That was the day our mom left us for good.

That was the day I surfed for the first time.

That was the day I met Kiki Lamonica.

Why I Knew It Was Time To Stop, Even Though We Had Barely Started

Because even then I knew a boy would tell his friends everything that happened.

And to give that first boy credit, because he knew the chemicals in his body made it impossible to resist telling every friend he knew what happened. If he stopped, surely he realized he would have me to himself all that longer, a possible reason I find sweet even now.

Because we were both young, and we knew it, and there was no arguing—not even, as I said, any discussion necessary.

We were good kids.

The First Time

The first time a boy touched me, it was after midnight on the beach below T Street. He’d parked his little truck, and we’d walked a half mile south from the pier where Del Mar ends. I was fourteen. We talked about a band I liked, one he wasn’t so crazy about. The ocean and everything else was black, all except for the white thumb-curves of foam that almost wet us as they reached up the sand. I still had my bikini on under my clothes. I wore my bikini under everything then.

It wasn’t touching like the hand on your ass in junior high when the corridor is so full, and everyone’s jostling, and you’d never have time to grab the hand before it left you, and you’d never know who did it if you had to wait to turn around. Then we were sitting down on the sand and he talked about the grandfather who once took him fishing up at Mammoth Lakes. It was the best summer trip of his life, he said. He caught five brownies, as he called them, and he got to know his grandfather better, the one who was sick then and probably wouldn’t make it to the next month.

It was darker than ever, even with a handful of street lights, just their tops, visible on the bluffs above us. Even with the white curves coming our way from Asia or the south Pacific. He’d been holding my hand since we got out of the car. A rough hand, like all the hands of boys who could change their own spark plugs or make the butcher block cutting board in wood shop for their mother’s birthday. I knew something was going to happen shortly after we sat down on the beach below T Street. Cropley’s had closed hours ago. No one really came here at night unless they were walking from the pier to the steps at Riviera. I just didn’t know what was going to happen, or how we were going to get from A to B.

He kissed me. A couple of long, slow kisses—delicate, really, like our lips were so close but not really in contact, floating just close enough to each other to create a little force field, which is what we really kissed. Then without saying anything, we leaned back together until we lay together on the sand. Then his hand was over one of my breasts. His whole hand covered it. Then we kissed a little harder, and I could feel his penis under his shorts against my thigh.

He reached under my shirt and put his hand back on the same breast, moving his cupped palm just a little in the tightest circles you could imagine. This had enough force behind it after a while to push my bikini top up and off my breast, so that he was touching me then, slowly and softly now, and running the tip of his fifth finger across my nipple. When we stopped kissing for a few moments, he kept his finger there, part of a hand that could cover a whole part of me. We kissed some more.

Neither of us needed to talk about not going any further. Pretty soon it was clear it was time to go, and we sat up to the position we had been 20 minutes or two hours before—we couldn’t tell—and he looked away politely as I adjusted the bikini top under my shirt and pressed out some wrinkles. We both stood up then. Standing several feet apart and leaning over, we tried to shake the sand out of our hair.

Why My Blog Is named What It Is, And Why I Will Always Love the Grass More than the Three Stone Steps Leading to My Job

I grew up three miles from the ocean on Calle Abril—April Street—half-surrounded by tract homes and half-surrounded by graded, unimproved lots cuts into the side of the hill. My friends and I saved large cardboard boxes, little houses new refrigerators had arrived in, and flattened them, and rode them standing up down the slopes between lots, 30-foot waves with no curl, sometimes planted with iceplant, sometimes simply packed with dirt. We learned a balance there, sliding to the next lot, that would save our lives those rare weeks every other year a chubasco would flare up in Mexico and send 20-foot sets our way. At T Street, Cropley’s snack stand ran out of everything those days all the surfers from 50 miles around showed up to ride waves churned up by the storm, and all the watchers from 100 miles around called in sick and got into their cars and drove there, only to sit all day on the grass above the bluff, happy and vaguely hungry, watching all but the gremmies take their rides on liquid breath first exhaled half a world to the south of us.

Snow Is Coming My Way, The Wind Chills Will Be -25, But I'm Not Worrying

because, after all,
only yesterday the dogs
only barked once each