The Gentlemen's Hour

170

The Battle of Rockpile becomes a legend among the surfing community of San Diego.

By that afternoon, the story gets told at The Sundowner and every other bar, burger place, taco joint, and hangout on the coast.

The Dawn Patrol

v.

The Rockpile Crew.

It was a beat-down.

An ass-kicking.

A balls-to-the-walls, all-out, no-mercy epic.

The tale gets told how the PB Dawn Patrol slashed through the Rockpile like a tsunami wave through a pier. How Boone freaking Daniels, Dave the Love and War God, Johnny Absolutely Banzai, High Rolling Tide, and Hang Tough Twelve threw down, fists and feet, until the beach looked like a Tijuana bullfight—blood in the sand, baby. Even the chick got into it, man—punching, kicking, clawing—while that crazy ancient dude went around keying cars and smashing in windshields and headlights.

Alarmed artists on the bluffs (concerned citizens they) dialed 911, but the kookiest thing happened—the cops rolled up, all right, but then they parked on the bluffs and never got out of their cruisers until it was time to buzz the EMTs to carry out the wounded.

Of which there were many, because DtLG went dervish, like that was the dude who once punched a shark, yeah, so he just went off on the Rockpile, and JB was all judo and shit so that Brazilian crap just couldn’t cut it, and Tide, he grabbed three of those Pilers and banged their melons together like, well, okay, coconuts, and the squirrely little soul surfer rasta dude totally foffed Energizer bunny, man, he just took the hits and kept on coming.

And would you like to have been there (and, much later, many would claim that they were), the beach denizens asked each other, when Mike Boyd launched himself into a Superman Punch to take out BD, and Boone stepped back, cocked his right knee, and cracked that surfing-strengthened-to-steel leg straight into Boyd’s junk? They say you could hear that bang from the bluffs, like a board crashing into the rocks. Like . . .

whump!

The beach-bongo telegram system spreads the story, and by sundown it’s made it all the way to Oz, where Sunny Day looks at her text message and smiles.

The Battle of Rockpile.

The “Fivers,” as they get glossed, expelled from the beach.

Which was rechristened “K2’s.”

Paradise Found.

Epic.

Macking.

Crunchy.