The Gentlemen's Hour

10

It happened outside The Sundowner.

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

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

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

Well, didn’t used to.

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

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

A new word crept into surf jargon.

Localism.

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

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

Which, to surfers such as Boone, was sacrilege.

You didn’t fight in the water. You didn’t threaten, throw punches, beat people up.

You surfed.

If a guy jumped your wave, you set him straight, but you didn’t foul a sacred place with violence.

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

“You go to church?” Hang Twelve asked.

“No,” Dave answered.

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

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

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

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

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

“She used to talk about it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I had other priorities,” Dave said.

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

1. No surf

2. Small surf

3. Crowded surf

4. Living east of the 5

5. Going east of the 5

6. Wet-suit rash

7. Sewage spills

8. Board racks on BMWs

9. Tourists on rented boards

10. Localism

Items 9 and 10 were controversial.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So he found localism understandable but ultimately wrong.

A bad thing.

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

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

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

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

What evolved were virtual gangs claiming ocean turf.

It was ridiculous, Boone thought. Stupid. Everything that surfing isn’t. Yeah, but it was.

A scar on the body oceanic, even if Boone didn’t want to look at it.

But he never expected to see it in The Sundowner.

The Sundowner is old school. Go in there, you’ll find guys from the Dawn Patrol, from the Gentlemen’s Hour, surfers from the pro tour, out-of-towners on a pilgrimage to a surf mecca. Everyone is welcome at The Sundowner.

Maybe Boone should have seen it coming. The signs were all there, literally, because he started to see them in the windows of other joints in Pacific Beach, reading “No Caps. No Gang Colors.”

Gang colors?!

Freaking gang colors on Garnet Avenue?

Yeah, and it was a problem. The past few years, gangs started to come to PB. Gangs from Barrio Logan and City Heights, but also local gangs, surf gangs— surf freaking gangs —claimed clubs and whole blocks as their partying turf and defended them against other gangs. More and more bars began to hire full-time professional bouncers and security, and the streets of laid-back, surf-happy PB got sketchy at night.

But that couldn’t happen at The Sundowner.

Yeah, except it did.