Ah, but good times are like tubes, here briefly and then gone forever. There’s enough light now for anyone to surf; and within half an hour or so, just about anyone is surfing.
Little clumps of bright wetsuits up and down off each groin.
Scattered surfers between the clumps, hoping for anomalous waves.
Spectrum bands, magenta, green, orange, yellow, violet, pink:
Solids and stripes: wetsuits and boards.
Rising and falling.
The concept of play is either bourgeois or primitive, but does that matter?
Looks like a child’s plastic bead necklace, thrown on the water.
The glassy blue water, the waves.
The real problem is that most of the occupants of these colorful wetsuits are assholes. They average about thirteen years old, and ruder little tykes couldn’t be imagined. Densepacking at the takeoff point is intense, and the young surfnazis have dealt with the problem by forming gangs and taking off in groups. If two gangs take off on one wave, it’s war. People are pushed off, fights are started. They think this is funny, surfing at its finest.
Tash just continues to do his thing, ignoring the crowd. Aside from a lot of violent threats he is rarely bothered. The truth is, the surfnazis think he is a kind of killer kung-fu character, Bruce Lee crossed with Jerry Lopez, and they leave him alone. But this time one of the more hostile kids deliberately drops in ahead of Tash, shouting “Get the fuck off, Grandpa!” and trying to drive him back into the break. Tash makes his normal bottom turn, comes up and is surprised when he knocks the kid off the wave.
As Tash paddles back out his harasser steams over toward him shrieking abuse and calling on his buddies to help beat up this intruder. Tash just sits up on his board and stares the kid down. Calling him names won’t do any good; these poor masochistic sleepwalkers like to be called nazis, in fact it’s a compliment among them: “Hey, fucker,” one will say to another after a good ride. “That’s real nazi.”
So Tash just looks at the kid. The rest of the gang hangs back. Tash allows himself a little theatrics, says to the enraged surfer in a tiny horror-video whisper, “Don’t cut me off again, my child.…”
That not only infuriates the young nazi, it gives him the creeps. Tash paddles back out to the point, chuckling.
But here he is chuckling over terror tactics, when just an hour ago he was involuntarily grinning at the sweet dark face of nature itself, as it rushed up to embrace him. Now it’s mallsprawl on the water, surfing another video game. Tash rides a few more waves, and no one actively bothers him, but the mood is gone.
So he paddles out of the new machine, walks up the beach. Sits down to dry off, warm up.
Watches sand grains roll down the side of a hole his toe is making.
The sun gets higher, people begin to populate the beach. By the time he picks his way across the expanse of sand it is dotted with hundreds of figures on towels.
Let’s spend a day at the beach!
Talk. Smell of oil, try this coconut!
Here I’ll put it on you. Coconut is popular this month.
Thirty tunes clash in the baked shimmery air.
Lifeguard stands are open. Green flags on top.
Lifeguards in red trunks, burnt noses, aren’t they cute?
Pastel colors of the old beachfront condos. Neon rainbow overlay.
You don’t know how to make a book.
A seabreeze flutters the flags.
White sand, colored towels. See it!
Girls with lustrous dark skin, lying on their backs.
Bright patches of the cache-sexe:
Colors repeat the wetsuit array.
Your head aches when you think about it!
Oiled legs, arms, breasts,
Backbone lifting to a round bottom.
Skin poked out by shoulderblades.
Silky blond hairs, swirled in oil on inner thigh.
The erotic beach. Beautiful
animals.
Tash observes the sunbathers with the sort of godlike detachment that a morning of surfing can bring. What is the cosmos for, after all? If the highest response to the universe is an ecstatic melding with it, then surfing is the best way to spend your time. Nothing else puts you in such a vibrant contact with the rhythm and balance of the cosmic pulse. No wonder the godlike detachment afterward. And seen from that vantage, lying flaked on the beach looks lame indeed. Minds turned off, or tuned to trivia (their selves). Surfing calls for so much more grace, commitment, attention.
Or it can, anyway. Tash recalls the surfnazis. It depends on what you make of it. Maybe there are people out there in the prone zone turning the activity into a deep sunworshiping contemplation?… No. They lie there chattering. Divorced from it all. No land, seasons, fellow animals, work, religion, art, community, home, world.… Hmm, quite a list. No wonder the erotic beach, the alliance merry-go-round. All they have left.
Oh well. Nothing to be done. Time to go home.
Tashi’s home is a tent, set on the roof of one of the big condotowers in the Newport Town Center. The roof used to be a patio, but was closed when a resident fell over the too low railing to her death. Soon afterward Tashi saved the building manager from a bad mugging in Westminster Mall, and over drinks the manager told Tash about the roof, and later allowed him to move up there, with the understanding that Tash would never allow anyone to fall over the side. Tashi sewed a big tent, with three large rooms in it, and that has been his home ever since. In the concrete block that holds the elevator there is a small bathroom that still functions, and all in all it couldn’t be nicer.
Tashi’s friends tend to giggle about the arrangement, but Tash doesn’t mind. His home is part of his larger theory, which goes like so: The less you are plugged into the machine, the less it controls you. Money is the great plug, of course; need money, need job. Since most jobs are part of the machine, it follows that you should lead a life with no need for money. No easy task, of course, but one can approximate, do what is possible. The roof is a fine solution to the major money problem, and it even helps with the other major need: he has vegetables growing in long boxes, most of them set in rows next to the railing, to provide a margin of safety. Neat. And he’s out in the weather; has a view of the ocean, a great blue plain to the southwest; and above him, the ever-changing skyscapes. Yes, it’s a fine home.
He washes down his wetsuit, showers. As he’s finishing up in the bathroom the elevator door opens. Sandy and Tash’s ally Erica Palme emerge. “In here!” he calls as they pass the bathroom headed for the tent. They look in. “We’ve brought some lunch along,” Erica says.
“Good.”
Sandy starts laughing, “Ah, hahahaha— Tashi! What are you doing?”
“Well—” He’s about to brush his teeth, actually. It’s obvious. “I’m brushing my teeth.”
“But why are you tearing up the toothpaste tube?”
“Well, it’s about out. I was just getting the last of it.”
“You’re tearing open a toothpaste tube to get out the last of the toothpaste?”
“Sure. Look how much was left in there.”
Sandy looks. “Uh-huh. Yeah, that’s right. You should be able to brush several teeth with that.”
“Hmph! Oll sh’ oo!” Tashi brushes triumphantly. Sandy cracks up while Erica drags him off to the tent.
Once inside they go to work on the bags from Jack-in-the-Box. Tashi finishes well ahead of the others, starts to work on a broken carbrain. He buys the little computers from car yards, fixes them and sells them to underground repair shops. Another part of OC’s black economy. Income from this alone is almost enough to pay the bills, although it’s only one of many activities that Tashi pursues, in a deliberately diffuse way.
Erica watches this work with a sour expression that makes Tash a little uncomfortable. A vice-president in the administration of Hewes Mall, she never seemed to mind Tashi’s semi-indigence before; but lately that appears to be changing. Tashi doesn’t know why.