Crazy for the Storm

CHAPTER 39

THE NEXT MORNING Nick’s face was swollen and his eyes were bloodshot, the way he looked after a big night of drinking. I was wheeled into a large room filled with reporters and cameras. My mom and I answered their questions. I told them that my dad taught me never give up. It was something Nick had said the night before and it sounded right so I said it.

After the interview we drove back to the Palisades, to the house my dad had bought on the edge of a canyon above the ocean. My hands were useless with the gauze and cast and my feet were still numb on the tips so I didn’t get to go outside and play.

Eleanor came over that night. She rested in bed with me. My mom and Nick were very quiet upstairs. My legs were cramping and the pain made me squirm around. I couldn’t sleep. I turned on the radio, which was tuned to a news channel. They were talking about the airplane crash. Two people were speculating about whether or not the plane could have been sabotaged by an incensed element within the FBI. They talked about J. Edgar Hoover’s vindictiveness and how he had a lot of loyal lieutenants still high up in the FBI.

Hogwash, said Eleanor, turning the dial to a different station. They’re always looking for conspiracies. People love bad pretends.

My legs were knotting up, so she rubbed them out for me. She had to massage my legs the entire night, talking me through the pain, reading to me, making me feel safe. I knew my mom was busy with Nick, discussing things, important things, I guessed. As long as I had Eleanor, my other mother, I had what I needed.

I slept most of the following day. My mom made me whatever kind of food I wanted and right after wolfing it down I’d fall back to sleep.

On my second night home I woke up around 9:00 p.m. I lay in bed for a while before I smelled the scent of weed coming from upstairs. I heard my mom and Nick laughing. It was loud. I called Eleanor from the phone beside my bed.

Please come over, I said.

When she showed up at the door my mom asked her what she was doing. Eleanor told her that I had called.

Eleanor. I can handle it, said my mom.

I came upstairs and insisted that Eleanor stay. Nick and my mom appeared paralyzed by my demand. I’m sure my bruised sutured face, broken hand and gauze-covered fingers had disarmed them.

A few days later Grandma and Grandpa Ollestad arrived from Puerto Vallarta. Grandma talked continually, as if deafening herself against something wailing inside her. Grandpa was stoic as usual and his eyes were soft and stirring. They shone with tears that never dripped down his cheeks.

Aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered at my dad’s cabin-house in Topanga Canyon. We all sat in the living room and they told stories about Dad. I went to my room and cried without all those sympathetic faces watching me.

Alone in my old room, I felt my chest begin to burn. The armor around me, the animal skin, was melting from the heat in my body. My tears seemed to come out of the hot space in my chest. The faster they spilled, the more out of control I felt.

You could easily turn into a weirdo. Watch out, I told myself. Don’t fall apart.

Allowing my body to unclamp was too dangerous. The skin knitted me together. Kept me whole.

One more bad thing happens and you might lose it, I thought.

Timothy, the kid on my block who always stared at his feet, haunted me. I thought about him dragging around like a beaten dog, hiding behind his comic books, tripping over his feet as he scuttled away from the neighborhood boys throwing balls at him.

I stood up from my old bed and sucked up my pain. I wiped my cheeks and walked back into the living room with a smile, just like my dad would have.

Hundreds of people showed up to my dad’s funeral at the Little Church of the Flowers. Many stood in the aisles and the crowd seeped out the doorways because the church only accommodated 250 people and there were no seats left. I cried every time somebody went to the podium and when Eleanor spoke she seemed far off in the distance. I kept blinking and the people around me appeared very close, then far away. I mentally shucked off these splintered images, reeling myself back to the steady world that I knew was right there.

They had to stop letting people talk because two hours had gone by and the church officials wanted to wind it down.

Uncle Joe, my dad’s half brother, whose hotel we stayed at in Lake Tahoe, threw a party after the funeral. All my relatives danced to a live Dixieland band and they all said they thought it was what my dad would have wanted. He always hooted in powder—good or bad—and fought through storms and riptides, I thought, and played guitar even when the vaqueros despised him, transforming that hostile night into something beautiful.

I danced at the party too and it seemed like I was on an escalator moving on a different plane at a different pace, like there was no gravity holding me. Cousins, aunts and uncles moved with their feet on the ground—they had gravity. I seemed separated from everyone by thick glass and it made all sounds a din of noise and I told myself not to get creepy like that Timothy kid.

I stopped playing hockey, stopped surfing, and mostly just hung out with the neighborhood kids and hoped I wouldn’t turn sullen and awkward. Instead I came down with a lot of sore throats and had to stay inside and alone several days a week. My body was not used to all that hanging around and my grief stayed crammed up inside me, with no outlet—except the sore throats.

That spring I got strep throat and a high fever, and it was Nick who nursed me back to health. He put his lips to my forehead to measure my temperature, and tenderly administered his Irish remedies, coming to my bed with a spoonful of warm water, plopping an aspirin in the water, and telling me how to drink it down while we watched it dissolve. As Nick prescribed, I let the aspirin bits catch in my throat. Amazingly it took most of the pain away. That evening he made a hot toddy—hot tea with shots of brandy, some lemon and honey. My mom saw him concocting the hot toddy in the kitchen and she deemed him Nurse Nick. When it was ready he brought a mug of it to my bedside. Then he rolled me up inside two comforters with only my head poking free like a sausage rolled up in a pancake. He carefully poured the hot toddy into my mouth and it burned my throat and stomach.

Nick told me that his mom used to nurse him and his brother and sisters back to health with hot toddies. She hated having to take care of us when we were sick, said Nick.

You mean she didn’t want to? I strained to say.

God no, he said. She’d scowl at us if we seemed like we were coming down with something.

The hot toddy made me sweat before I even finished it. Nick tucked me in, making a big show of it—tucking the comforter under my ribs and thighs and feet. I fell right to sleep. When I woke up the next morning the comforters were soaked, my temperature was gone and my throat was just a little scratchy.

Thanks Nurse Nick, I said to him.

It was a relief to feel closer to him, but it seemed dangerous too.

At the end of June, I graduated from grammar school and Grandma Ollestad had pneumonia so I couldn’t go to Mexico until later that summer. Nick said I had to get a job. Grandpa was in L.A., perhaps picking up special medicine for Grandma, and he informed me of a new diner across from Topanga Beach that he had stopped at while taking a cruise down the Coast Highway. So he drove me down there and I got a job as a food prepper, server and busboy. Grandpa left a few days later.

On a whim one day after work I crossed the Pacific Coast Highway and stood on the bluff above the converted lifeguard station. All the surf legends were hanging out on the sand in front of the station, and different-colored surfboards leaned against the bottom half of it, which was open on all four sides. The waves were small and I recognized Chris Rolloff, my old buddy who had surprised me in Mexico last summer. He was riding a sparkling green peeler, his front arm cocked at the elbow like a scarecrow. He was goofy-footed like me and I found myself going through the motions, pumping up and down to make the section. He rode the wave to the inside. In one motion he hopped off his board, snatched it up under his arm and danced from one slippery rock to the next all the way to the beach. Man he’s gotten good, I thought.

I skidded down the dirt path winding around the succulents where I used to play hide-and-seek and onto the access road. I crossed a slab of concrete where the lifeguards parked their trucks and I realized it was our old garage, roofless and adrift in the sand.

I stepped off this relic and approached the lifeguard station. To the south the beach curved toward Santa Monica, where tall buildings stood behind the salty haze. My eyes lowered, settling on Bob Barrow’s brick stairs climbing off the beach, the porch gone but the porch footings stabbing out of the sand, and up the dirt embankment to the access road. The stairs looked like a spine without a body. All along the beach columns of stairways lay like skeletons from another era against the ripped-apart embankment. I thought of the ghost towns my dad and I had passed through and it hurt to imagine what this one used to be like.

I came to a standstill. The old days long gone percolated in dew across my eyes and it all dappled together like a pond reflection until Rolloff called my name.

Norm, he said.

I turned and blinked and the mist congealed into a clear picture.

Hey man. Where’ve you been? he said.

The bodies in the sand twisted around and a chorus greeted me. The ghost town came alive.

I don’t know. Working, I said.

I stepped forward and slapped fives and brandished a hang-loose sign to each legend while the various girls and guys augmenting the scene looked on.

Shane told me I looked like I healed up pretty good, and I touched the indented scar on my chin. Trafton asked me if I was ready to surf again. I wondered how he knew I hadn’t surfed in months. I nodded yes out of reflex. When Rolloff offered his board for a go out I used the excuse of not having trunks.

It seemed strange that I would come to the beach without trunks or a surfboard, so I explained that I worked across the street at the diner. Rolloff said it was good for lunch but everybody else said they liked George’s Market better.

I took off my shoes, plopped on the sand and dug my toes in, listening to everybody talk surf. A swell was due in a couple days from south of Tahiti. Shane thought Catalina Island might block the waves, and I glanced southward as if assessing how the swells would hit Catalina, a smudge on the horizon. Within five minutes I was on the inside of the circle, chiming in at will, and I took off my shirt and felt the sting of the sun on my skin. An hour later I was running up the access road past Barrow’s dilapidated landing and I was excited about tomorrow for the first time in months.

Our garage was at street level. I ran right up to the door, unlocked it and searched for my yellow-railed seven-foot-two surfboard that Dad had given me on my tenth birthday. I couldn’t find it. So I walked down the stairs toward the house, which rested on the hillside below the garage. I looked in the storage space under the garage. It wasn’t there. Sunny followed me around and whimpered and I knew she wanted to play so I took her into the canyon and threw the stick until she was panting hard.

I was consumed by the notion of surfing again. I worried about whether I would still be able to hop right up and make the drop and generate speed down the line.

When my mom returned from teaching summer school I skipped the hellos and asked where my board was.

Gosh I think it’s in the garage somewhere, she said.

I looked in there, I said.

What about above. In the rafters?

Oh yeah.

I used the hood of my mom’s VW to ladder myself to a rafter beam. I pulled myself up and crawled around in the dust and heat that had accumulated in the attic. In the back on top of boxes I found my board.

I hosed it off on the grass outside the front door and my mom asked me how it felt to see Topanga again.

Weird, I said.

She waited for me to say more and followed me to the kitchen. I grabbed a spatula to clean off the dirt-encrusted wax.

She followed me back outside.

Were all the guys there? she said.

Yeah.

Was it good to see them?

Yeah, I said.

I looked at her and her entire face opened up like she was feeling something pleasant touching her skin.

I hope I can still surf, I said.

It’s like riding a bike, she said.

You used to surf, right?

Oh yeah, she said. Your dad got me out there almost every day one summer.

What happened? I said.

She stuttered.

Oh. You know. Winter came. It got cold. And the next summer you were born.

But didn’t you want to keep surfing?

To tell you the truth, not really. I did it for your dad. Once we divorced I lost interest. She flipped her hair back and looked out at the ocean. He gave me lots of attention when we were surfing, she said.

Her longing for other forms of attention from my dad did not register. Instead the notion that Nick didn’t surf either and that my mom had abandoned surfing, maybe even because Nick didn’t do it, suddenly made surfing my one and only desire. It took me by the throat. Surfing would cut me free.

After work I walked out along the dirt knoll and came around the top of the point. I crossed the mouth of the creek, shored up now for lack of rain, and it was spawning green moss. Then the crew saw me and somebody whistled. It made me smile and my cheeks crinkled, sensitive from yesterday’s sunburn.

I asked for a bar of wax and Shane himself rose and climbed under the station and reached into the crossbeams under the top story and handed me a bar.

My secret stash, he said.

I waxed up my board and Shane said he remembered when my old man had bought the board for me.

It’s a clean shape. Fast down the line, he said.

I nodded. For Shane to give me some of his wax and then compliment my board was a kind of achievement and I noticed some of the crew watching and I was as sure as ever that it was a big deal.

All the ceremonies were played out and there was no way to delay the inevitable anymore. Time to paddle. Rolloff picked up his board and said he’d come along.

We hoisted our boards and walked to the point. The tide was high and the waves gathered against the rock shelf and finally broke in a bundle of energy, unreeling like a beam of light running down the line.

It’s only waist-high, I told myself.

Where’s the take-off spot? I said.

He looked at me suspiciously. Right off the creek, he said.

A moment later Rolloff wasn’t next to me anymore. He was leaning on his board stepping through the shallows.

There’s a little channel through here, Norm.

I trotted back and hustled to get right in his trail. The channel was mostly sand with an occasional rock. My fin hit a rock and Rolloff told me to flip my board over. When the water came over our knees he righted his board and jumped on and paddled. I did the same. My shoulders cracked as if breaking through a dry husk and I labored to propel myself forward. By the time I made it to the take-off zone I was beat.

There was a lot of seaweed to wade through and I knew that would make it doubly hard to catch the waves. I sat up and looked toward the beach. The yellow submarine house used to be right there, I figured, eyeing the plot of dirty sand. I had watched the party from out here, over the backs of the swells. Dad had told me that one day I’d realize how great it was, how lucky I was, and be glad he made me learn to surf.

A set, Norm, said Rolloff.

I swung my board around, nearly tipping over, and followed Rolloff, hoping he’d steer me into the right spot for take-off. He spun his board like a turret and dropped forward and his arms stroked around twice, rising gracefully out of the water. An instant later he popped to his feet and glided below the wave, then his scarecrow arm posted above the lip.

Just in time I became aware of the next wave and cranked my nose into the pitching face and sliced through. The cold water snapped my senses to the fore and I tingled. The air was crisp and my ears gurgled with saltwater. The seaweed stench seemed to drive me toward the next swell even though my shoulder muscles threatened to rip from the bone. I coughed and grunted and tore against the water, driven by those familiar sensations.

There was a lot of wasted energy, lurching and jerking, before I somehow scratched into the wave. When I stood up my legs quivered and I had to steady my labored breathing. I used my entire weight to lean back and scoop the nose of the board out of the trough at the bottom. Then I tottered to one side just enough to steer the board off the bottom and down the line. I leveled into the face and the lip was curling in front of me. I gyrated, rocking from rail to rail, pumping my knees. I just started doing it. With each pump the board jetted. Suddenly I was screaming like a bottle rocket, hooked into some invisible flow. And like that, in the blink of an eye, I was dancing again above the earth in that old magnificent world.

The wave closed out in front of the station and I kicked over the back. They all hooted from the beach. An older guy with a mustache and curly hair made me look twice. The second time I felt my eyes sting and my face seemed to crumble. Dropping my head, I shuffled my board around and paddled toward the point, coughing and gagging on the tears and mucus.

I paused and drifted shy of the point. Rolloff kept glancing at me. I angled away from him.

You okay, Norm? he called out.

I raised my arm. This rocked me to the opposite side and I searched beneath the surface. The sparkling sediments rained down past the tiny bubbles leaking from the rocks below. The perfume in my nose and the gurgling in my ears. Home.

If it wasn’t for your dad I might not be surfing right now, said Rolloff when I paddled back to the point. I for sure wouldn’t be as good.

Good thing, huh? I said.

He tipped his head up and down. Lovin’ it, he said.

By summer’s end I had my own money and my own set of friends and was so out of the loop with my mom and Nick that I hadn’t realized Nick had moved out. Even though I stayed at Eleanor’s some nights, she never mentioned it. It wasn’t until my first day of junior high that I asked my mom where Nick was.

He moved to the beach, she said.

Good, I said.

I told him he can come back when he stops drinking, she said.

That’ll never happen, I thought, and I nodded.

She tried to look strong. But I thought she would let him come back, after some excuse, and I refused to stand there and pretend otherwise, so I bolted.

On my first day at Paul Revere Junior High one of the eighth-grade boys, a surfer named Rich, recognized me from Topanga Beach. Apparently he was out surfing one day that summer and had seen how all the legends watched out for me and how every once in a while they let me take a set wave. Rich befriended me because I was anointed in a club that I suddenly realized was spectacularly cool even beyond the oasis of Topanga Beach. By day two I was hanging with Rich and the popular crew. They had long hair and burned skin and always wore shorts and ragged shirts. I fit right in like a jigsaw piece, folding me back into the regular world again. You were right Dad, thanks for making me surf.

A week later, I woke in the night and there was a strange glow out my bedroom window. I went upstairs and into my mom’s room and outside her glass door I saw tongues of fire.

Wake up! I yelled.

I was naked and when her eyes opened I turned away before she saw the three pubic hairs sprouting out. I ran downstairs and put on some boxers. My mom waited, urging me to forget about the boxers, she had a towel for me. Then we ran out of the house together. I reached into the storage area under the garage to retrieve my surfboard. She yelled at me from the stairs, but I wasn’t going to let it burn. Feeling the heat of the fire on my back, I hauled my board up the stairs, past the garage and onto the street. Mom knocked on a neighbor’s door and they called the fire department.

Nick showed up a half hour later. The whole roof was burned and the drywall on the top floor was charred from the heat. The fire chief said that embers from a fire earlier that night about a mile north, carried by the Santa Ana winds, had probably landed on our roof. Because our roof was made of old shingles, he said, it caught fire easily.

We had to move into a house about two miles away, across Sunset Boulevard, for six months. The first night there my mom mentioned puberty, and I realized she had seen me naked the night of the fire and I was embarrassed. Then she asked me if I felt different.

No, I said, unwilling to admit that over the last few months I had often been surprised by jolts of aggression. Outbursts of anger that never quite made it out of my body. I’m going to bed, I said.

During our first week at the new house Nick came around. It wasn’t clear whether or not he had quit drinking and I didn’t ask my mom. I steered clear of him and he steered clear of me.

Around this time one of the girls from seventh grade invited the surfer crew to a party on a Saturday night. My weekend curfew was 10:00. I came home at 10:30 and my mom was upset, worried. She threatened to ground me. I shut my bedroom door on her and opened Surfer Magazine and thought about surfing and one of the girls from the party named Sharon who kept talking to me. My phone rang and I picked it up and it was Sharon. She asked me if I had fun at the party. It was great, was all I could come up with. Then she asked me if I was going to masturbate. I didn’t know what to say. I told her I had never done it. She scoffed and said I was lying. I swore to her that I never had. She sounded excited and invited me over on Sunday.

Cool, I said.

She told me her address and I found a pen and wrote it on my hand.

Good night, she said in a sultry voice.

I couldn’t sleep. Even though I knew about sex, had seen it all around me on Topanga Beach, I wasn’t sure if I should be masturbating or not, or really how to do it. How could I be so out of it?

My date commenced with Sharon stealing her parents’ Mercedes and driving us to Westwood. She was only thirteen, so driving a Mercedes along Sunset Boulevard with the windows down and Madonna blaring made her the coolest chick in the world. Sharon gave me my first ever handjob on Makeout Mountain, providing a helpful model for how to masturbate in the future. By the time she parked in front of my house, scraping the hubcap against the sidewalk, it was forty minutes past my curfew.

I ran up the brick stairs of our temporary house, a single-story stucco with plastic awnings. I tried to open my bedroom window but it was locked. I circled to the side of the house and climbed onto the back porch. The sliding-glass door to the porch was cracked. I slipped inside.

I tiptoed to my bedroom door and was not halfway there when my mom opened her bedroom door.

You’re busted, Norman.

I’m getting some milk, I said.

I don’t think so. Go to bed and we’ll deal with it in the morning.

Over breakfast my mom informed me that I was grounded the following weekend.

That’s bullshit, I said.

Another word and it’s two weekends.

We’ll see, I said.

She glared at me and I scoffed and chomped on my cereal. I slurped it down in one gulp, dropped the bowl in the sink, grabbed my skateboard and left.

Do you have your lunch? called my mom.

I ignored her and skateboarded as fast as I could to catch the bus to Paul Revere Junior High.

Nick was in the kitchen with my mom when I got home from school. He eyed me with a puckered face. I aimed for my room.

Norman, said my mom.

I stopped. What?

You were forty-five minutes late last night, said Nick.

The bus was late, I said.

You lie without hesitation, said Nick. It’s become second nature, Jan.

Mellow out, I said to him.

He shook his head.

You’re goin’ down a bad road, Norman, he said.

Whatever, I said.

Sharon’s mother called me today, said my mom.

My insides dropped and went fluttering down my legs and I was hollow.

I shot her a so-what face.

Did you or did you not take Sharon’s mother’s car? said Nick.

I wasn’t driving, I said.

She’s thirteen years old, said my mom.

I told her not to do it.

But you got in the car, said Nick.

She was leavin’ no matter what.

You’d jump off a bridge if she told you to? said Nick.

I missed the bus. I was late.

They noticed the car was gone at 7:30, said Nick. You got home at 10:45.

I didn’t do anything. I just got a ride, I said. She was going anyways.

The fucking denial, the lack of any shred of compunction, is really fucking sickening, said Nick.

I shrugged. Whatever.

His hand was around my neck in a flash and I was tripping backward. I grabbed his forearm and he lifted me off the ground and slammed me against the refrigerator. I slid to the ground and the floor knocked the wind out of me. His eyes were red with throbbing vessels and his face was purple and his fingernails dug into my neck. I had a clear shot at him—my arms free at my sides, his face unguarded. But my biceps turned to weeds. I was afraid to fight back.

Let go. I’m choking, I said.

Let go of him, Nick!

You give me a go-fuck-yourself look again and I’m going to wipe it right off your face.

Okay, I sputtered and nodded.

He unclenched his fingers. I breathed again.

He stood.

A nice little family discussion, he said sarcastically, and he and my mom both laughed. It was clear that she had aligned herself with him again.

Are you okay? said my mom.

I ignored her and stood up and stared out the window.

Your mother asked you a question, Norman, said Nick.

Yeah I’m great, I said staring out the window.

Okay. Well. You’re grounded for two weeks, said my mom. No going out. You have to come home right after school. Got it?

What about surfing? I said.

No surfing either.

I turned and glared at my mom.

Why would you think it would be okay to go surfing if you’re grounded? said Nick.

I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself. However, he was correct—if you’re grounded it doesn’t make sense to be able to go surfing.

This will help you finally learn about consequences, he said. That your actions have consequences. Welcome to the NFL.

It was a peculiar thing to say but I fully understood it. I even smirked.

I served out my sentence for tardiness and lying and the winter turned to spring and we moved back to the house on the edge of the canyon and it seemed like all I thought about was surfing and sex—though I was still a virgin. Then right before spring break Sharon left me for an eighth-grader. She called me aside one day, explaining that he was really just more her type. I walked away weak-legged and I thought I might cry as I stole into the bathroom. I did not love her and I couldn’t understand why it hurt so much. I locked myself in a stall so that nobody would see me like this.

I was kissing Sharon yesterday and today she’s gone. I wanted to touch her again, lose myself against her body. Our make-out sessions were suddenly blissful moments that I longed for. I had told her things that only Eleanor knew. My mind raced, searching for somebody to fill in for Sharon—Sharon under my body, breathing into my ear while I kissed her neck. Then she vanished, abandoned me, and I was free falling. My knees hit the bathroom floor and I spit into the toilet on the verge of vomiting.

I wiped my mouth. All the aggression that had been mounting over the previous couple months erupted. I turned and side-kicked the stall door. I kicked it and kicked it until the lock busted and dangled from the door. Moving to the sink, I felt looser. Not so jammed up anymore. I splashed water on my face and cooled down. As I made my way back to the hangout spot by the cafeteria I thought about beating up Nick.

On Friday night I skateboarded to a party with the surfer crew and they got into a fight with some jocks, reminding me that I used to be a jock. I wanted to hit somebody—it would feel good, doling out a little punishment and not just taking it all the time. Instead I watched from the sidelines.

It was a weekend and I had just come back from the beach when my mom told me that Grandma Ollestad had lung cancer. I touched my neck remembering my sore throats and I thought that maybe I could get throat cancer.

She didn’t smoke, did she? I said.

Never. That’s what’s so strange about it, she said. She’s going to Tijuana for a special treatment they don’t offer in the States. I thought we’d drive down and visit her next weekend.

Okay, I said.

I sat down on the couch and stared out the window. Grandma’s black lungs crawled with cancer-worms and I zoomed toward the ocean below as if tumbling down the hillside. When I looked at my mom again she appeared to be scattered around the living room as if I were in a house of mirrors. I closed my eyes and wondered what the hell was wrong with me.

The following Saturday we loaded Nick’s station wagon and I put my surfboard in last so it would not get dinged by the suitcases.

You’re not bringing your fucking surfboard, said Nick.

Why not? I said.

We’re going down there to spend time with your grandmother, not to surf. Take it out.

I’m not going to surf the whole time. Just after we’ve been there all day. Just in case it’s good.

No. Absolutely not.

Nick, said my mom. Let him bring the board. We’re not going to be in the hospital all day every day.

His grandmother is dying, Jan. This might be the last time he sees her. He can manage not to surf for two days.

He turned to me.

This is not about you, Norman. It’s about your grandmother. I know that’s hard for you to comprehend.

I get it, I said. I just want to have the board in case there’s some extra time. What’s wrong with that?

Because it’s not about that. You have to learn to think of other people sometimes without putting your selfish needs into the equation.

He grabbed the board and walked it to the side door of the garage, unlocked the door and went inside with it.

What an asshole, I said to my mom.

Just let it go, Norman, she said.

This will be good for you, Norman, Nick said with a grin as we drove away.

I wanted to slug him. It brought me back to those days on Topanga Beach when I wished I were bigger and stronger. I had always believed that I’d be able to whip him by the time I turned thirteen and now my thirteenth birthday was a month away and I wasn’t close.

Grandma’s silver curls were flat on one side and she had tubes in her arms and her eyes were sunken back in their sockets and colorless behind a glassy film. Eleanor was there with Lee and she cried when she saw me. An aunt or uncle offered me a seat and I collapsed into it. Grandpa sat on a rickety chair beside the hospital bed and watched Grandma. He was slouched and his face was haggard.

Somebody said, Little Norman’s here, and Grandma sat up. She found me and her eyebrows perked. Her pupils were so dilated that she looked blind. The rest of her face, apart from the eyebrows, was limp and expressionless. Then she shifted her attention across the room and spoke toward the empty corner. It was pure babble. Her arms rose and she gestured and babbled.

The morphine makes her hallucinate, explained Eleanor.

I watched her moan and talk to different imaginary things. Then she fell back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling, motionless. Grandpa put his hand on her arm and she stared at the ceiling with a clinched mouth and nobody spoke.

She’s kinda like Sandra was, I thought. Her body is there but her mind is gone.

When we left for the night I kissed and hugged Grandpa and he was all skin and bones. I waited with Eleanor outside the room while my mom and Nick said their good-byes. I asked her how Grandma could get lung cancer if she never smoked and was so healthy.

Grief, said Eleanor. If you push it down it can grow into something toxic like cancer. Your father was her masterpiece.

In our hotel room I thought about how it would have killed my dad if I had died and he had survived, just like it was killing Grandma. We were staying out by Rosarita Beach and I heard waves crashing in the distance and I wished I could escape out into them.

After a second day at the hospital it was time to say good-bye to Grandma. She had been lucid all morning and when I hugged her I felt her muscles and bones vised together and I knew she was in excruciating pain and that the moment I left they would shoot her up with morphine and she’d relax and hallucinate again. That was the last time I ever saw her.

On the drive home I decided there was no God and that we were all on our own here.

The following weekend I went to a party at a house in Brentwood with a big pool and a tennis court and its own movie theater. I kicked my skateboard onto the brick flower planter in the driveway and grinded my trucks along the edge, chipping off slivers of brick.

You totally thrashed their wall, said one of the guys I was rolling with.

I glanced back at the slivers on the ground.

Yep, I said, feeling that same sense of relief as when I broke the stall door.

The gang let out a nervous laugh. I led them around the back, through a gate and onto a lush green lawn with rolling mounds and flowers and roses along the edges. We marched around the corner and the entire party—maybe twenty-five kids—turned around to see us. Missy the hostess was lounging poolside with her set of rich girls on gigantic pink towels. She lifted her Ray-Bans and waved only her fingers, ambivalent about our presence.

Immediately I met each and every pair of male eyes staring at us. I wanted to punch someone again. Feel myself unload. It seduced me. I scowled at the boys, hoping for a scowl back. There were no takers and I strutted to the cooler and got a beer.

We sat on our skateboards, kicking aside the chairs and benches—a rebuke of civilization—and sipped our beers, commenting on the digs. Where a half-pipe skateboard ramp would go, or if we should drain the pool and skate it.

Missy stood up and straightened her bikini and waddled over.

You guys need to promise to be mellow, okay? said Missy.

Can we drain your pool? I said.

Norman. No way. I’ll call the rent-a-cops if you mess with the pool. I’m not kidding.

Where’re your parents? I said.

They’re out of town, but the housekeeper’s here, so…

So we can totally rage, I said.

That got a big laugh and some howls of enthusiasm.

One of the rich girls whom I had never seen before made a comment. I whipped around and confronted her.

What’d you say?

The girl was pretty. Hair perfect. Skin even and supple. She wore a ridiculous gold dress and swanky gold sandals and clutched a frilly handbag to her bosom. She spoke with an accent—English maybe—and tightened her mouth into a sphincter when I addressed her.

You’re rude and immature, she said with her nose literally in the air.

Fuck being mature, I said. That’s boring.

What’s wrong with you? she said.

I opened my mouth to respond and I saw all those kids staring at me. I stumbled on my words and it seemed like everyone could see how weird and sad I really was and it scared me.

I grabbed her arm, tugged her off the lounge chair and flung her into the pool.

She came up with her hair in her face and her dress billowed across the surface and her arms got caught in it and I thought I’d have to dive in and save her. Half the party was laughing.

Several girls and a boy went to her rescue and helped her out of the pool. Her eyes and nose were covered by wet limp hair and her mouth trembled. Her nipples were exposed through the wet gold material.

Missy and company took the girl inside and the party died. I was afraid to make eye contact with anyone so I opened another beer and skated onto the tennis court and did layback tail-slides on the smooth concrete. Thinking of that girl sobbing, her limp dress clinging to her like cellophane, triggered a strange emptying sensation in my face—it was eroding into a skull. My skin seemed to crawl off me, leaving the sinewy muscles and tendons of my entire body fully exposed. A grotesque, mutilated boy. I wondered what my dad would think of me now.

Missy appeared, trailing two rent-a-cops. It was time to leave. We gathered our boards and I flipped the cops off and we ran out the gate.

We rode the bus to Westwood and picked a fight with some Emerson Junior High kids. One of our crew got pinned in a telephone booth by three big Emerson guys. The rest of my crew was busy with their own battles. Again I found myself on the sidelines and I remembered a man at my dad’s funeral describing how a mob of Stanford football fans had jumped him at a game, and how my dad was the only guy that charged in there to help him. I charged headlong into the phone booth, ramming two big guys in the back with my skateboard. It broke them apart and somehow we scrambled away just as cop sirens were approaching.

The crew split up and I hid atop Makeout Mountain, then took the back streets to Sunset Boulevard and rode the bus home. I made it just before my curfew. Nick was up watching TV and asked me how I got the cut on my nose.

Fell skating, man, I said.

I went downstairs and looked in the mirror. I couldn’t remember getting hit in the nose. My eyes looked tired and the dark circles were like a sick boy’s and my body vibrated and I told myself that rich chick got what she deserved. Still, her quivering mouth and the way she stumbled toward the house in her wilted dress bothered me and I turned away from my reflection in the mirror.

When I awoke the next morning I was still on edge. I went to Topanga and paddled out, not saying hello to anyone. I dropped in on every surfer except the legends and Rolloff. I slugged a big kid named Benji in the face when he splashed water in my eyes after I snaked his wave. He grabbed my hair and dunked me under. Shane called the kid off. Benji let me up and I told him to go fuck himself and paddled to the point.

We got your back, Norman, said Shane. But you might want to tone it down, you know.

I nodded.

The aggression and anger seemed to enfold and redouble inside me and it made me jittery and I kept blowing the waves, digging a rail or overextending my turns. Benji made a point to laugh loudly each time. I reminded myself that he could not punch me even though I deserved it and I relished that injustice.

I turned thirteen and that summer I spent half my time in fistfights. I got my ass kicked fairly often, and the blows to my nose or jaw or ribs were strangely gratifying. Even in defeat I always made sure I got a couple licks in that the other guy wouldn’t soon forget. Sometimes getting whupped made me feel tougher than doing the whupping. I knew I could take anything and that made me feel like the winner in spite of my blackened eye or bloodied nose.

That fall I did poorly in school and Nick grounded me for a month.

One afternoon while I read surf magazines in my prison cell Nick came home early from work. I heard him banging around in the living room and then he called out my name. The blinds were drawn and there was a projector set up on the coffee table. Nick told me to sit down on the couch and watch the screen in front of the TV. He flipped a switch and the projector chugged and spit out a beam of light. On the screen appeared a Pop Warner football game. Nick had hired an editor to assemble a highlight reel of all my best plays—tackling big fullbacks that had darted through the defensive line into the backfield. Catching a pass over the middle as a monstrous linebacker engulfed me, the ball still in my arms when he pounded me into the grass. A quick shot of my dad eating peanuts in the stands with the sports section folded in a rectangle triggered a searing pain that burned a hole in my chest. I had to close my eyes until the ache went away.

When the reel tailed out Nick and I reminisced about me hiding fishing weights in my jockey cup during the weigh-in, about some of the dangerous neighborhoods that we played games in, and the various idiosyncrasies of the coaches and players.

You’ll have this film to look back on forever, he said.

And I compared how I was then to how I felt now. I was callused and irritable these days, brooding. Who was that sweet-natured kid on the screen? What happened to him? Like most things that made me uncomfortable, though, I shrugged it off.

Rolloff called to give me surf reports and I read surf magazines to try to quench my hunger. After school I was pretty bored just loafing around the house, so I decided to fix the dings in my surfboard—at least I’d get to touch it. I fished out the can of resin and catalyst from the storage space under the garage and saw a cardboard box labeled Little Norman in the back corner.

I dragged it out and opened it up. I unearthed newspaper clippings, then yearbooks, then my Murcher Kurcher stories, and finally old photographs of me playing hockey, surfing Mexico, ski racing, me and Dad skiing St. Anton together, and me, as a baby, riding on my dad’s back while he surfed. Mom told me she had come home from grocery shopping to discover me and Dad out in the surf. I went buzzeerk, she said. How could you be so careless with his little body? she screamed at my dad.

I dropped the photograph and tears pressed against the back of my eyes. I stooped and pushed the tears back. You’re not some wimp that can’t handle what happened, I told myself.

I called Sunny over and hugged her and rubbed her belly. She flopped onto her back and wiggled around in canine bliss.

I’m happy like you, I said.

Then I threw the stick as far as I could, and she went bounding down the canyon.

I put the photos back in the box, then the other stuff, and one of the newspaper clippings caught my eye: a Los Angeles Times black-and-white photograph of me sitting in a wheelchair with bandages all over my swollen face, a black eye and a bulkily wrapped right hand.

Already it seems like a dream, I thought. Like it happened to somebody else.

I sighed and something kicked up in my throat and scorched my rib cage and I had to sit down with my back against the house.

It’s cool, I told myself. You’re not messed up. You’re okay.

I was supposed to be tough because I made it down that mountain. The dark feelings swirling and clawing inside me were something that I would just have to get over. Dad got over his hurt feelings. Shook them off. Moved on. Bad stuff just had to be reframed. I knew how to do that. And I read the article below the photo as if to prove how okay I was.

We decided we had to move or freeze to death…. My eyes stuttered on this sentence. I tried to push the onslaught of images aside, but I couldn’t. I was back on the mountain, telling Sandra we had to go. She didn’t want to go. But I made her go. Then she slipped and I reached out too far, miscalculated, and she disappeared into the mist.

My head and heart clenched, fending off spurts of pain. I rubbed my back against the house and it cut into my skin and I kept rubbing and had to force myself to stop. Settle down man.

My throat got thick so I drank water from the kitchen sink. It washed right through me and seemed to settle like everything else down in my feet. I splashed water on my face but I was still groggy. I hiked down the stairs and my thighs ached. I crawled into bed and fell asleep.

I woke up with a fever. Sandra might have lived if I let her stay under that wing.

I picked up an empty glass next to my bed and threw it at the wall. It shattered across my desk.

I stared at my knuckles, where the scar tissue was raised as if the skin had permanently blistered.

I twisted off the bed. Stop thinking about it.

I swept the glass slivers off the desk into the wastebin. Some spilled into a partially open drawer. I opened the drawer wide to get to the glass. Staring up at me was the plastic Indian that Dad had bought me in Taos.

I remembered that I used to look at it and think that if my dad ever dies then I want to die too.

He got killed taking me skiing, I said to the Indian.

I shut the drawer and went outside. I stuffed the newspaper clippings back into the box, closed the flaps and wedged it back into the corner under the garage. I had the flu for a week.

News of a big winter swell came via several phone calls from the school crew and Rolloff. I was finally over my fever and the descriptions of perfect peaks and juicy bowls and radical turns fueled my passion all week and by Thursday evening I was in a coiled frenzy.

My mom made honey-baked chicken, wild rice, and salad—her specialty—and I waited in my room until it was served, not wanting to have an outburst. After dinner I cleaned the dishes and then walked into the living room and addressed my mom and Nick, who were watching the news.

Look, I said. You have to understand.

I opened my hands as if holding a beach ball.

Man, I just need to surf, I said. It’s like the thing that makes my heart pump, it’s essential to what I am, and if I can’t do it I can’t function. I just feel dead inside and it’s horrible.

Sunny was absorbing my every word and I pointed to her.

Imagine taking her stick away. No more retrieving. That would kill her. It’s totally against her nature. Surfing is my retrieving. I don’t need anything else. No friends or parties. I won’t even hang out at the beach. I just need to be in that water, man, or I’m going to shrivel up.

Nick was leaning back on the couch and he was totally engrossed.

Please, Nick, I said.

Jesus Christ what a speech, said Nick, to my surprise. How can I say no? You know Norman if you put 10 percent of that kind of effort and passion into school, or anything, you could do great things. Really thrive.

Oh man. Thanks Nick, I said. Can you give me a ride in the morning before school? There’s a pumping swell.

Well. I’m not working, he said. You know it’s supposed to rain. Right?

I don’t care, I said.

All right. I’ll wake you up at 5:30.

Killer. Thanks.

I woke on my own at 5:15. The rain thumped out an incessant staccato on the plastic awning. Last night I had loaded my board and wetsuit into Nick’s station wagon, so all I had left to do was throw down some cereal. Nick was making coffee in the kitchen.

You still want to go? he said.

Totally.

I was so excited that I couldn’t eat more than one spoonful.

Nick put on a parka and a yellow rain slicker over it and a wool cap. I wore trunks and a sweatshirt and flip-flops.

You’re going to get sick just wearing that, he said.

I’m going surfing anyway, I said.

He thought about it. You got a point, he said.

He blasted the station wagon’s heater and I was sweating by the time we parked on the bluff overlooking Topanga Beach. The rain splattered the windshield and the trail to the beach was a mudslide. I studied the ocean. The wind and the swells and the globs of rain blurred together and out of nowhere white ribbons sprang from the blur and moved down the point.

Should we get the hell out of here? said Nick.

It’s offshore, I said, watching the wind bend the fronds toward the ocean, which meant the wind was sweeping up the faces of the waves, smoothing them out.

I felt him looking at me. I glanced over. His face was buried in layers of wool and plastic, oval-framed like a nun in a frock. His stories of getting kicked out of several Catholic schools and getting punished by the nuns came to mind.

I reached back and brought my wetsuit into the front seat. I stripped down and tucked into the tight black rubber.

This seems like an awfully stupid idea, Norman, he said.

Why?

Why? It’s raining like a frickin’ hurricane and it’s freezing. You can’t see the waves. Plus there’s probably a motherfucker of a rip current out there.

I looked out the window again. Diaphanous coils of whitewash moved behind the rain and I imagined the offshore winds feathering back the crest of a wave and felt the exhilaration of the ride.

Looks fantastic, I said.

He did a double take and we both knew that’s exactly what my dad would have said. I realized then, like a shade zipping up on a giant window, that Nick respected my dad a lot, and that Nick probably wanted to be as good a dad as Big Norm. He seemed trapped in the car by the storm and for the first time in my entire life I felt sympathetic toward him.

I didn’t want him to see this in my face, so I ducked down and put my booties on. When I sat up Nick was watching the ocean. His eyes roved the scene as if it were something awesome and too dangerous to mess with. I followed his gaze outside. Behind the thrashing rain, at the bottom of the mudslide, a few duck-dives away, was a paradise for those willing to fight through the storm.

I opened the door and the rain pelted me in the face, heavier than I expected. I took a hold of my old seven-foot-two, the yellow rails looked like dirty water in the pale light, and I shut the door with my foot. I crouched at the top of the path, then skimmed down on my booties and ass.

I ran up the point and saw Shane on a wave. It was over his head, big and gaping, and I was scared yet so desperate for a ride that I charged right in. The creek was running fast and it whisked me into the waves. I dove under the whitewash and paddled and negotiated the logs and tumbleweeds and garbage trapped in the break line between the creek current and the ocean current. It dragged me southward as if I were a twig and by the time I was outside the break I was halfway down the cove, past Barrow’s brick stairs. They hung down the embankment, just a red smudge trail behind the streaks of rain.

I dug my arms deep into the water and my fingers were numb and wouldn’t stay together, making them porous oars. I used everything I had just to get to the point.

Shane and Rolloff and one other guy I didn’t know were out.

Hey, Little Norm, said Shane. The crew will be out soon, better get it now.

Totally, I panted.

It was hard to judge the surf because the offshore wind swirled the rain into patterns that looked like waves on the horizon. Rolloff stayed on his stomach, so I did too. We did not talk and just watched Shane. He paddled up the point against the current and we followed.

It caught us all by surprise and was eight feet tall. The wind held it up just in time for us to puncture the belly. The next wave was bigger and hidden by the first wave’s blowback, coming out of the sky like a big-winged bird eclipsing the light and making it ten shades darker. The leading edge of the lip hit the middle of my back and bounced me off my board and the follow-through drilled me down into blackness. I rolled and told myself to rag-doll. I hoped I wouldn’t hit a rock. When I came up my board was no longer on the end of my leash and I was in front of the lifeguard station, a hundred yards from the point.

I swam for the shore and the current dragged me south. The tide was high enough that I was able to flatten my body and ride a shore-pounder over the rocks.

I scanned the cove for my board. Then I saw Nick in his yellow rain slicker and umbrella up by the lifeguard station. My board was at his feet and he waved to me. I waved back.

I jogged into the wind and was panting by the time I reached him.

You had enough? he said.

My arms were noodles. My head was light and my dizziness made white gaps in his face. I shook my head and picked up my board. Without looking at him I jogged up the point. I tied what was left of my leash to the leash-plug and made three knots. I knew it would not hold if a big one hit me, so I would not be able to let go and dive deep because the leash would break and I’d have to swim in that current again, more tired than before.

I fought through the walls of whitewash and wished I had more food in my stomach. I ended up south of Barrow’s again. I took ten strokes, rested, and took ten more. The current was setting me back five strokes per rest. I decided to go slower but not stop. Twenty minutes later I made it to the point. Shane and Trafton were the only guys out.

Where’s Rolloff? I said.

Maybe that last set kinda worked him, said Shane.

I searched the inside and could not find him. All I saw was Nick’s yellow figure on the sand. Thinking about him saying You had enough? made me determined to ride these big waves. Somehow if I didn’t, Nick would be right about my character. I had given him this power and so I needed to reclaim it.

I paddled up the point, farther than Shane and Trafton. I knew they thought I was going too deep. I didn’t look back and kept my eyes on the miasma of wind and water blurring the horizon.

It came and I paddled for it. Trafton and Shane yelped to rouse my courage. I got under the peak and turned, pointing the crown of my head into the offshore wind. I squinted to see through the sweeps of rain. The lip of the wave in front of me was sheared by the wind. I was choking on its blowback so I closed my mouth.

The tail of my board kicked up and I was going straight down and I jumped to my feet. The wind got under my board and I leaned on my front foot and broke the pocket, only to nose-dive. I stamped hard on the tail and yawed the nose loose. I was only halfway down the face and the wave was already leaning over me. The wind got under my board because it was skewed a bit and the offshore wind scraping up the face nearly blew me over the lip. Just in time I worked the rail down under the crest and suddenly airdropped onto the face again. This threw me back and the nose jerked up like a motorbike doing a wheelie, so I swung my arms around to keep from pitching off the tail. I had lost speed and the wave face heaved and expanded, about to swallow me. Frantically I gyrated and pumped, arms winging up and down. I ducked to avoid the falling lip just as the rails bit and my board responded. A few more pumps and the board began skipping across the surface, bouncing hard, and I bent my knees to absorb the turbulence and steadied her in the pocket.

I started working the board up and down despite the risk of getting too high up the face and getting pitched. That got me hauling ass, the offshore wind like a jet stream under my board. The section was relentless and the lip nearly decapitated me again, inciting a moment of doubt. I fought it off though by pumping even harder, and the propulsion was like a bobsled getting hurled through a concave track. I felt the wave’s power root into me as if I grew out of the wave, and I locked into sync with her and suddenly she was easy to ride. Together we soared strong and free.

Rolloff was sitting on the sandbank and he ran down and slapped me five as I came ashore.

Insane ride, Norm, he said.

I hooted and he patted me on the back.

Come on. Let’s get some more, I said.

He grabbed his board and we jogged up the beach.

See that one? I said when we passed Nick.

Nick nodded and I knew that I had done something he could never do, that he was too afraid to do. And I understood that riding waves made me feel things he could never feel. I paddled back out, strong and brave and a part of something that lifted me above all the shit.

My fingers were too numb to open the car door and Nick had to reach across the seat and open it from the inside. He had towels down over the vinyl and told me to get in. I put my hands against the blasting heaters and Nick put the car in reverse.

You got guts, kid, he said as he backed the car up.

Thanks for letting me go, I said.

It would be a lot easier if you didn’t lie, Norman.

I know, I said. And it would be a lot easier if you didn’t drink.

His eyes slanted hard and one side of his mouth curved.

What can I say, he said. You’re right. When you’re right you’re right.

I watched the waves trail away from us below the highway.

Nick stopped drinking, going cold turkey, and soon afterward Grandma Ollestad died. Nick drove the three of us to her funeral. The service was in the same little church as my dad’s funeral, about an hour away from the Palisades. Everyone spoke about how kind and giving and full of vitality Grandma had been and they mentioned my dad sometimes and I winced at the thought of him watching me these days, so spiteful and so blind to the beauty all around. As if he were hovering overhead, I told him that I was getting better. Did you see me surfing the other day?

On the way home from the funeral I kept thinking about Grandpa. He stood with a very straight back and when everybody gathered outside the church he listened carefully to each consoling relative. He only spoke a couple of times and his words were concise and poetic—like music or colors that send you upward. I thought about how his eyes were the same blue starbursts as my dad’s and as mine and I thought about how my dad would be very saddened by Grandma’s death but not paralyzed by the grief, and I imagined him playing guitar for everyone outside the church.

We were driving down the freeway, Nick at the wheel, and I started to compare my dad’s fluidity to Nick’s jerky body language. Nick wrestled with each social interaction and at the funeral he sighed a lot and belted out hardened proclamations about death and life and so on. He grated against things, in a fever, compared to how I imagined my dad acting—an enchanter. Nick’s pinched red face and Dad’s wide smile juxtaposed in my mind.

As we came through the McClure tunnel onto the Coast Highway Nick spoke about being a good person, responsibility, hard work and honesty. He used words like colossal and catastrophic as if we were about to go off to war and this was our pep talk. Instead we arrived in the sleepy Palisades on a windless, cloudless Saturday afternoon.

I wandered down the stairs lost in my observations and comparisons and saw the ocean lined with swells stacked to the horizon. Grandpa, Eleanor and Lee were on their way over and I was afraid to ask if I could go surfing.

The next day I hung out with Grandpa over at Eleanor’s house and nobody talked much.

Then in the afternoon Grandpa said, I have to fix the roof, and got in his car and drove back to Vallarta.

The following weekend I was doing my chores around the house and I noticed the waves picking up. I waited another hour to make sure the swells were not an anomaly. When they kept getting bigger and bigger I decided to take the 3:30 bus down to Topanga Beach. Nick and my mom had gone out to run errands and before they had left Nick reminded me that Sunny had been chasing coyotes into the canyon, which was a trap, and that our new policy was to put her inside or on the upstairs porch in the afternoon before it got dark so she wouldn’t get lured into the coyotes’ ambush.

No problem, I had said.

I reminded myself to put her inside while I made a melted cheese sandwich and Rolloff called from the phone booth at Topanga and said, It’s goin’ off the Richter. I got so excited that I just grabbed my gear and ran to the bus stop, inundated with visions of my board stabbing the lip and cutbacks and me riding inside a tube.

When I stepped off the bus a four-wave set was reeling in. The legends were in the water and I watched them tear it up while I slipped into my suit. Rolloff was perched on the lower deck of the lifeguard station and he asked me where I had been and I told him about my grandma’s funeral. He nodded and changed the subject. As I zipped up I noticed Benji staring at me. He was sitting by the lone palm tree with a few of his buddies. I ignored his stare and Rolloff said that Benji was talking shit about how he was going to snake me.

Watch out, said Rolloff.

I shrugged and told myself that the only thing that mattered was to ride the waves and avoid the bullshit.

I’m just here to have fun, I said to Rolloff.

That’s cool, said Rolloff.

I concentrated on the waves and how they were breaking and where I would take off and I ignored Benji’s stinkeye. I strolled to the point and dropped onto my board, ducking under a little insider. A layer of sorrow wiped right off me and it seemed like I could see for a thousand miles. I sat with the legend pack on the point and they asked me where I had been. I told them.

You’ve had a rough go, said Shane.

I shrugged.

Norm, he said. Just hang in there. It’ll turn around.

I nodded.

I surfed for an hour and it was hard to get waves with all the heavy boyz out. Finally Shane went in and that opened up a bit more space. I was eager to snag a set wave and I could feel the frustration darting inside me. Something menacing was rising up and it seemed like everything I had hoped to let go of was surging back and that made me desperate to burn it up. Suddenly I really wanted to shred a wave in front of Benji and his crew.

I heard somebody calling my name from the bluff. I squinted and recognized Nick’s body language. He had one hand on his hip and the other waved me in.

Get your ass in here, Norman, he yelled.

I saw the crew on the beach turn from me to Nick then back to me.

Wanting to minimize the embarrassing drama I paddled right in.

Busted, said Benji with a smile when I passed him.

Most of the locals knew Nick from the old days and as I gathered my shorts, shirt and flip-flops they said things like He looks agro. Tell Nick to take a ’lude.

I meekly waved good-bye to the surf crew and hauled my gear up the dirt trail.

Nick had both hands on his hips when I reached the top.

Do you think we’re all here to clean up your fucking messes? he said.

No, I said.

He jabbed his finger into my breastbone.

You do not exist at the center of the universe, he said, punctuating some words by jabbing harder.

I know, I said.

No you don’t. You’re a fucking self-centered thankless little shit.

I shook my head.

No I’m not, I said.

Yes you are, Norman. Yes you are.

What did I do? I yelled at him.

You left Sunshine out.

Oh shit. Is she okay?

That’s beside the point. The point is she could be dead by now. Eaten alive by those fucking coyotes. You don’t give a shit about her or about anything but yourself.

That’s not true, I said.

Yes it is.

No it’s not. I just got so stoked that I forgot.

That’s a bullshit excuse, Norman.

He pressed his nose against my nose. The whites of his eyes were mucus yellow. I recognized that he wanted to hit me and punish me and make me squirm. In that moment I envisioned myself much older and I was screaming and hell-bent, fighting a bunch of angry faces, eager to punish them like Nick wanted to punish me. When I came out of this vision and saw him again I was merely fascinated by his rage. What else could Nick do but fight all those demons, I thought, and try to slay them before they sucked him into their darkness?

I slapped his finger off my chest and stepped back. He snickered at my retreat.

I never want to become you, I declared to myself.

Tears welled from a hot cavern in my chest and washed him out of sight. I moved away and followed my feet. When I looked up I was walking along the bluff away from the point toward the bus stop. I held my board tight to my ribs and I cried and watched the waves roll into the cove. I wanted to dive into those long bending swells. As I imagined my escape the rage and pain converged with the shimmering light blooming off the water. It all blended into one, like rivers entwining. This invisible current swept me up and it felt right to go with it.

I ran down the embankment and across the horseshoed sand in the cove. The beach was empty and smelled like seaweed. I dropped my board and streaked for the ocean. When I hit the water my skin stung as if cakes of dried mud were tearing off of me. Now there was nothing buffering me from the pain.

I miss you, Dad.

I felt my tears flooding into the water. I opened my eyes. It was murky down there. A big shit storm.

You vanished.

I dove deeper and skimmed the sandy bottom. Dark.

You left me all alone. All alone.

I needed air. Surfaced. The ocean under my chin rippled and swayed. I was not okay like I wanted to believe. I was sad. I was angry. And it made me feel ugly and lonely and cruel sometimes.

I came to shore and pounded the sand with my fists. I kicked and beat the sand for a long time. When I was worn out I rolled onto my side and stared at the ocean.

I was in pieces. Unable to gather myself back together. I stopped trying, and it wasn’t so bad to be in pieces. I was calm, easy, light. Then the pain cut deeper into me, all over me. But somehow it was all right to feel things so close to my bones. The pain did not crush me.

The ocean spread out and the swells undulated and the waves looked beautiful peeling down the point. Dad taught me to fly right there on those waves. They were there for me to ride for all time, like the powder, streaming through the center of my body. I stood up.

The sand filled out the high arches of my feet, balancing me. In the hiss of the surf whispered my dad, asking me to trust that heaving wave in Mexico, trust that the ominous wall would bend and wrap me in its peaceful womb, revealing everything essential, a dream world of pure happiness—beyond all the bullshit.

Off the point at Topanga Beach I stared into the eye of a distant wave. Somewhere in the oval opening I grasped what Dad had always tried to make me see. There is more to life than just surviving it. Inside each turbulence there is a calm—a sliver of light buried in the darkness.