How I Get By in the Third World...

Turn to Gin

So this is what it’s come to
Life abroad in limbo,
My hairline and patience wearing thin
Soon it will be evening
Twilight, shade of grieving
No leaving, I turn to gin




I’ve got no one else to blame
Wanderlust fueled the flame
Scorching sun toughens my skin
Stranded, lost and shipwrecked
A Gilligan of the intellect
I reflect and turn to gin

Gin, I fear
Cold and clear
If you’ve a better idea
I’m all ears

City buildings wreathed in wire
Barbed and loaded guns for hire
Car alarms wail above the din
Gray exhaust perfumes the air
Bookstores are a sad affair
With consummate flair, I turn to gin

Exile and the bourgeoisie
Agony and the ecstasy
Fail to embrace the culture is a sin
But I’d consider turning gay
Just to see a Kushner play
Dismayed, I turn to gin

Easily bored and feeling weak
My lamentation’s not unique
Eschew the booze, bear the blues, and grin
I’m not cut out for martyrdom,
And after all’s said and done
She comes, my faithful gin

Gin, King Lear
Cold and clear
If you’ve a better idea
I’m all ears

Goddamn finally finished writing this,
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
September 26, 2011

All I Wanted To Say About It

Song written after a good friend in Syria, a citizen there, refused to speak to me again because I kindly suggested that at least in the US you can protest without fear of violent repression. Well, honey, take this:

All I Really Wanted to Say About It

Wind whipped the wire while photographer got ready to shoot
Waiting for a sign when the desert spit the dust on his boot
He’ll soon be wiping blood off his heel, so I guess the point is moot
Hail the Day of Denial, Big Daddy’s got a new shiny suit.

Slogans of devotion in the mouths of everyone you meet
Flags are a-flying and the banners unfurled across the street
But the dragon’s blowing fire, so get out if you can’t stand the heat
Servants shuffle knives while the master shuffles his feet

Dear lady in a haze, confusing what is real and what is not
The guilty only find the words to speak when they fear getting caught
Will the sons and the daughters freely speak without fear of being shot?
I’m just tossing seeds to the weeds in an old vacant lot

Water in the cistern gleaming cold like a diamond pool
Water for the women of the wheat and the riders of the mule
But the rusted pipe’s corrupt and the king’s nobody’s fool
Flowers for the iron tower, the valley’s dry as a jewel

Packing up my bags, western sky’s calling my name
I thought I might apologize, but it wouldn’t be the same
Contrived explanations, empty wind when the dead are to blame
Here’s a shot of me in New York City, I’m the one just outside the frame.
Here’s a shot of me in New York City, I’m the one just outside the frame.



Written 5:30, April 23, 2011

Instead of Living, Just Record It

In the future, nothing will be experienced, but only recorded. Documented on video for later viewing on smaller and smaller screens, your child in glorious pageantry dancing her sugar plum fairy across a pre-school stage will be a digital reproduction of an evening you won’t remember because you were there only to hold up your iPhone to capture a moment in her fleeting childhood. Why did you want to capture your daughter’s performance? Do you even know? Perhaps it was important to her, and therefore to you, because she had been practicing for weeks, telling you excitedly about her part, showing you her twirl, sharing anew the tale of the Nutcracker and the Rat. She wanted to know that you and Daddy would be there. You assured her you would, and, indeed, smiling to yourselves that evening on the drive over, proud parents, you both showed up (though your cell phones were on silent and you had no intention of not answering any vibration). When the lights dimmed and the magic began, tiny cameras held aloft (with all other parents), you videoed this evening’s performance because it was an important event—but evidently not important enough to pay attention to the performance itself while it was unfolding before your eyes. You missed it.
Or rather, you captured the performance, either partially or whole depending on your arm’s level of endurance holding up the device, so you could—well why, exactly? View it in the future in its greatly reduced capacity for reasons not strong enough then to sway you to experience it in the present?
Perhaps you wanted to forward it to me, because surely I get as much delight watching your daughter perform as you did recording it. Perhaps you wanted to upload it to Facebook, and monitor your wall awaiting the “likes” and effusive comments. We agree: she is just too cute. My, how she’s grown.
Perhaps years to come when she’s a snarling teenager averting her gaze and mumbling listless responses to your humblest morning greetings, you’ll sift through your saved files to watch in her more innocent and loving times what you didn’t watch the first time around. And under the clutter this is the driving reason, isn’t it: to remember. To scoop from its ceaseless flow a cupful of time’s rushing river. This is your daughter when she was young and beautiful and didn’t resent you. It was your daughter back then, too, when she was a sugar plum fairy, and that magical evening would never come again, though so many days and evenings were still to come, and many of these you recorded as well—blessed technology!—but the river kept rushing, didn’t it? Where did the time go? After receiving from your daughter a somewhat halfhearted goodbye hug—she fell limp too soon, you thought—and waving as the taxi took her to the airport for her flight to Prague to live with an indie filmmaker, who will end up not marrying her, you return to your digital recordings. There she is (no, there she was). You did it: you captured that wonderful evening long ago. She loved you so. Look at her smile. Don’t you wish you would have been there to see it?
Ask an ambitious mountaineer why he (or she) desires to ascend Mount Everest, the mountaineer may cleverly remember to answer “Because it’s there” and we nod and grin admiringly, sharing the aptness of this stock response. But that’s not the reason to ascend Everest, is it? You could brush aside the mountaineer’s unintended evasion and lay scrutiny: no really, why? Next response might come “Because I want to” or “Because I’ve always dreamed of doing it” which are variations on the original evasion. You persist. If at this point the mountaineer isn’t annoyed at your dogged pursuit, you may get a shrug. He may not know the reason. Or he may. But because the mountain exists isn’t a reason to climb it. The chair I’m sitting on right now also exists, but I doubt the mountaineer wants to climb it. Giraffes exist. After his descent from Everest, will he scale them?
If we can record it, we should record it. By recording it, we don’t have to bother experiencing it. Recording it is certainly much less work. We don’t have to attend to what we’re seeing or hearing, just whether we’re getting the footage we want and whether the device has enough power. We are relieved of the dreaded responsibility of living in the present, and more importantly, thinking about the meaning of the experience. Thank goodness. We can use our minds more constructively: putting the recorded footage on Facebook, for instance.
Look, your daughter has sugar-plummed her way offstage. You may stop recording now, and continue watching the delightful play. You have missed seeing your daughter, but she’ll return soon. Here she comes again: stop experiencing and start recording, quick. Well done: you have succeeded in missing another moment in your daughter’s life.
I had a friend who, when asked by strangers if he would be so kind to snap a photo of them standing in front of (insert attraction: waterfall, statue of stern king on horseback, sunset, whatever), would kindly refuse. I’m sure they didn’t expect that. What an asshole, they murmured as he walked away. Or perhaps they asked, why not? Being a kind person as I know him to be, he probably answered them truthfully. I know what he would have said. They may or may not have understood the gravity of his answer.
Make sure you take photos. You will often hear this as you bid goodbye to friends and family before embarking on any adventure or vacation. They want to see what you’ll see. You may meet some really fun people. Let’s say you do. You have such a great time with them, you make sure to document the four of you together to commemorate the amazing time you had. One of you approaches a stranger to ask him to take a photo of the four of you (careful whom you ask). Click. You’re all captured smiling gleefully. Back home, showing the photo to friends, you try to convince them how absolutely cool and amazing these people were. It should be apparent from the photograph. It’s not. But we all nod heartily and say “Wow, sounds like you had a great time” which isn’t entirely insincere.
I was in a bar once with a friend. We’d had a few drinks. A woman arrived with a hand-held video recorder and began filming the young woman behind the bar who busied herself wiping down the counters. I waited for the bartender to do something, or say something…well, significant, or out of the ordinary, or flatly just worth recording. She didn’t. Excuse me, I slurred to the video recorder, why are you filming her? Unwavering in her concentration, the woman replied, “Because she’s my friend.” I persisted, probably a little more impatiently than a few drinks before—okay, she’s your friend, but why are you filming her? “Because I want her to be famous,” her tone a bit annoyed I didn’t grasp the obvious. Well, of course I persisted again (I suppose I should have just asked if she knew any giraffes). As my friend pulled me off the bar stool toward daylight, the woman finally looked away from the device. “God, what’s wrong with you!”
Well, there isn’t just one thing wrong with me. But in this I’m simply trying to understand why people find it necessary to video-record the everyday. I walked along a North Carolina beach yesterday afternoon and passed a father with iPhone recording his two daughters splashing in frothy waves. They were too small and too young to evince any talent; they’d bend their squishy little legs and gather up water and let it drop, that’s pretty much it. When I returned direction twenty minutes later, young father was still their posed to record daughters repeating their fun. I suppose I shouldn’t be prejudicial: perhaps he wasn’t filming them, but watching porn.
The Venus de Milo, or Aphrodite of Melos, graces the Louvre in Paris, solemn, demurring her gaze, a sensual masterpiece of ideal Hellenistic beauty. Famous, it is mobbed by visitors because they’ve read or heard it’s famous, and here they are, a family, finally in Paris after a long and expensive flight from Ohio. They’ve read the guide, planned their few hours, and behold! In the marble flesh! They stand back and take a photo. This time they don’t have to ask: a stranger offers to take a photo of the whole family in front of it. Duly documented, it is forgotten, and the family searches out the next famous work of art in the guide. They’ve got photographic evidence that they indeed saw this famous statue. Thank goodness, because they can’t really afford numerous trips to Paris on what their salaries.
When they get home, they can prove to their friends.
Gather round the laptop. Look here. Click. Enlarge the jpeg. Ohhh, we say reverentially. You narrate: yes, that’s the famous Venus. Wow, we say, you really saw it. Click. Hey, that’s you guys next to the Victory of Something. That proves beyond doubt that you saw this famous statue! I guess you liked it so much you also bought a large cardboard glossy reproduction of it. Fifteen dollars? Whoever took that photo is a real professional. No, I know you’re not a professional photographer, you’re an accountant. So why did you take the photo when you also bought this expertly glossy reproduction? You just wanted to. I see. Rest assured, I don’t doubt you actually visited the museum and saw first-hand this famous statue; no reason to lie about a thing like that. Although here on your bookshelf is an art book you grabbed from the bargain rack at Barnes & Noble before your trip. Doesn’t look like it’s been opened. But here’s the photo of the Venus. Another real professional job. But hey, you now have your own photo of the famous statue. But tell me, the Venus is famous for its sensual expression of a Hellenistic ideal of beauty, so what did you notice about it specifically? Oh. But I thought you said you saw it, and this photo of you and the kids proves you were there. You just took the photo, is all. So you spent thousands of dollars and flew all the way to Paris and visited the Louvre which houses this famous statue which, let’s face it, you probably won’t visit again, and you were right there in the presence of this masterpiece of ancient sculpture, and you didn’t even look at the statue except to take the photo, the same photo you already own within this heavy art book you bought on the bargain rack at Barnes & Noble? The real work of art you simply ignored?
Well, at least you have your own picture.

Deep Springs, Silent Peaks

Just a glimpse of a documentary on Nietzsche, and I am swept into a whirlwind of regret, dust and pebbles clogging eyes and nostrils, those organs I once used to see mist feathered peaks and breathe crisp alpine granite rain-softened cool still hidden waters. What have I not been engaged in? Passing photo stills in the documentary of a German scholar coveting his oak and icy windows and warm pages of books, and I find myself reaching, longingly, into the computer screen. Nietzsche's last human gesture before falling into the abyss of madness was to throw his arms around a workhorse who had fallen under his terrible burden. I witness those horses in Syria. Would anyone weep for them, fallen? Oh Nietzsche, you last decent man. You embraced the animal while descending as a god--and what god doesn't retire finally into madness? When have I last admired the silent soar, watchful and fiercely intent, of an eagle? I cannot continue to give away if fresh flows are not coming in. I must trace a path to new springs.

My, my

Such a storm of offending and offensive comments unleashed after my Thrill Gone post (no names offered of course--ah the boldness in anonymity). As a courtesy, I deleted it--and the comments. But the post? Just a whimsical and lively relating of a smattering of my experiences there. But what many obviously missed was: being my blog, these were MY experiences. Not anyone else's. And of course I don't speak for anyone else. Unless the offended would be content if I just kept to the party line? Or pretend my experiences didn't exist? That's probably better: denial. Sorry to disappoint. When I think of my time in Syria now, I can only conjure up good memories. But to my detractors: I think you have other worries far more significant than a blogger posting. Far, far more significant.

Rocking at the Guggenheim

Art unfamiliar to us we often dismiss, not so much out of ignorance but because it confounds the limits of what we’ve come to understand as defining Art. And what defines Art for us is the sum of our previous experiences with Art, beginning with straightforward realist representational landscapes because they often look “just like” the world as we’ve seen it straightforwardly whizzing by the car window. We also approach Art as passive consumers, not active critical questioners, unless we’re in a classroom being asked to work for an understanding—meaning a grade. Perhaps we’ve been lucky enough to engage in the Art History class, and learned something beyond uncomplicated landscape painting. Our limits of what define Art expand, then, but only so far.
We often come to Art at a museum holding “famous” works of Art with the same affable expectations we have for other tourist attractions or the beach: please delight me. The beach is easiest, for our participation takes the least thinking. We don’t have to do anything but go to sleep in the sun. Tourist attractions—statues, buildings, waterfalls—expect a little more attention paid, but we can still drift through taking snapshots, then check the places off your list of Things to See (why we have to see them is never asked). Art overlaps with tourist attractions, in that contained in a particular museum are famous works by artists whose names we know, so we pay money to see them so we can say we saw them. This approach requires the least effort: come to the work, take a minute or less discerning what it is, read the title and artist, nod in recognition. That works up through the Impressionists, maybe a Picasso when his figures were recognizable. Woe to anyone stumbling through the thicket of 20th century postwar contemporary Art. When representation fell away—or was hacked, shoved, or dreamed away—so did the attention span of the average museum tourist. Free audio guides have helped, surely, but when we hear curators airily suggesting that the artist is “questioning the traditional line between life and art” or “commenting on the meaning of movement and space in our post-industrial age” we tend to reel, letting the conceptual language whirl around like confetti, then move on to the next crazy installment involving melting ice and video of the artist consuming string.
The end of representation marked the end of the Old World, and that world was all we knew. Modern Art in the 20th century began questioning everything—the role of the artist, the tools used, the placement of the artistic work, the space it inhabits, the medium through which it communicates, whether it needs to communicate anything at all, whether it can communicate anything, the historical, social, political, psychological, and economic forces involved in the work and the creative process and where the work ends up, the role of the observer, the space between the observer and the work observed, whether that “space” is meaningful in any way, and if so, who decides? I could go on. In the same way we can’t know how a bridge is built by just looking at it, to appreciate Art we need to put the effort in: what is the artist trying to do, or say? What is s/he reacting against, breaking away from, reviving, honoring? What is the socio-political and/or historical context we can place the work, and does that have any bearing on our understanding? What has come before, what came after? Methods, colors, figures, space, light, shadow, movement, brushstroke. The first step in approaching Art is simply to shift the emphasis of this question: “How is this Art?” to “How is this Art?” and trusting not that what we are beholding in this side alley gallery a “great” work of Art, but simply an expression of the artist. Yes, all Art is quite useless, as Oscar Wilde famously quipped.

At the Guggenheim, an exhibition of the works from the 1960s to the present of South Korean born Lee Ufan snailed upwards in Gehry’s building, called "Marking Infinity". From the Guggenheim's website: charting his creation of a visual, conceptual, and theoretical terrain that has radically expanded the possibilities for painting and sculpture since the 1960s. Lee is acclaimed for an innovative body of work that revolves around the notion of encounter—seeing the bare existence of what is actually before us and focusing on "the world as it is."
Ufan’s works were initially unfamiliar to me; moreover, as instillations using common, working-industrial materials simply arranged in space didn’t appear as having the artist’s creative intentions upon them. One instillation from 1968 had stainless steel thin narrow strips strewn across one another but interwoven to make a soft grid like a magnified section of a wicker chair. Eleven strips by ten make up the threading design. Just beyond each side of this square weave on the floor lay piles of more stainless steel strips, unadorned, still, as though awaiting their chance to join the weaving. The piece seems both unfinished and fresh, inviting the viewer weaving. In this, Ufan achieves an “encounter” between work and audience looking upon the work. The stainless steel strips are manufactured for their sharp, strong, pliable, industrial usefulness. Here they give way to be threaded into a softer, woven texture that in itself could be useful, as woven textures like wicker chairs are. The Art is the invitation between unfinished design and the strips alongside awaiting their participation—as we stand alongside acknowledging the invitation to “finish” the work began. Relatum, which names many of the works in his exhibit, is a philosophical term denoting things or events between which a relation exists. So artwork is not “an” object as such but a network of relationships, shifting aesthetic experience to the art of encounter. Rather than objects representing and so standing apart, Art for Ufan is a process of mediation between self – other, nature – industry, being – nothing, presence – infinity.

Relatum – a Response from 2008 is a “pure distillation of materials,” an oval stone two feet high by two wide leaning toward at a distance of a few feet a large thick dark square slab of steel: an encounter of organic nature and processed industry. The two remain at a distance, but incline to one another, which is the invitation by the artist through his Art to contemplate their relationship, Their distance in space, framed as it is in contemplative proximity, symbolizes distance in time and in shared natures. Organic stone becomes over time (and place) processed or created into steel. Looking on from our distance as viewer, the oval stone appears ordinary, even dull beige in color; indeed it shares in its dull sheen the color of the steel slab, the latter only darker and richer in power. The steel slab lies in its finished but unused industrial state—yet it also is unfinished as it awaits industrial use: what good is a flat slab of steel? If we turn to the stone, we see its potential for the arts of sculpture, and to the artist’s eye it awaits its representational form. But slicing through our initial judgment, examining the stone qua stone, we can more readily appreciate the time compressed it contains, its mysterious ancient composite structure. What powers forged this heavy weighted thing? Beige soon gives way to intricate patterns and sparkling facets, pores and stains and moss dried to a burned green paste. An earth hovers there in space, minerals and spices packed within like planets and stars within a galaxy. If Art is intentional, Ufan arranged the rising angled oval stone to face toward the flat steel slab lying before it, but its slender end coming to meet the stone bends upward gently like a wave heralding the stony prow of a ship. One side of steel slab facing the stone is gouged slightly along its edge, trimmed half an inch in precise shaping to the presence and force of the stone, as though by inundation over time and proximity the stone has worn away the edge. This encounter, a gradual wearing away of the seemingly solid and timeless and enduring steel, is ironic in that the stone’s own minerals were worn and broken down and transferred across time and distance to form the steel slab itself.

Dialogue Series – Dialogue 2008: A large canvas is laid down flat. The artist bends over a pristine creamy white canvas, then makes a limited number of discreet strokes with a broad flat brush loaded with gray paint, a color vague and ephemeral. Gestures are minimal, his mind focused, and the resulting image is sort of a solid gray flat cup-shape, basically square but tapering slightly at the bottom. Through the process, the shape depicted is at once minimal and perfectly executed, yet because the image is not centered on the canvas; all the more does its painted shape call to its own presence. Although gray, there is a darkening on one side of the shape, grayness expressing its own depth and hollowness. The image is simple and precisely conveyed, as though the artist executed with absolute concentration a lithe gesture this moment in time and presence in space.

Relatum – Silence, 2008: a tall steel structure rises from the floor yet leans for support on the wall behind it. Steel, flat rectangle twelve feet high. Away from it stands a rock two feet high, found and placed there from nature, yet seeming at its head to incline toward the height of its blank, industrial formed distant brother. The wall holds the steel’s shadow, dark and solid at its host but only a nightly wisp of material in itself. The light, however, upon the rock casts a number of soft, inter- and overlapping shadows of its own. Shadows both cast by the light and the soft intermingling, as though ripples easing toward the steel. The steel’s industrial use intends its geometric, stable, forceful rectangle shape, yet removed from its industrial context, lending instead its presence to this aesthetic, “useless” encounter with its organic original self—again, the rock quarried to give the steel slab its mineral body and blood, indeed its very existence.
Funny story: the artist, who was then shuttling between Japan and France, was doing an exhibition in Paris. For some installments, he went searching for a particular kind of rocks he had in mind. Walked the city parks, and couldn’t find any. He became discouraged, then came upon piles of just these needed rocks. He used a wheelbarrow to haul rocks to the exhibition space. That afternoon he discovered outside the police, who wanted to speak to him. He needed to return the rocks immediately, as they were part of a Japanese garden. Ufan pleaded, and, as they were French, the police agreed that he could return them after the show. Ironic that he found in Paris the rocks he needed, in a garden whose cultural design he was ignorant of, but so close to his home.

Drifting Back to the Ocean

As far back as I can remember, and long into my early 20s, my family and I would spend three weeks of summer in Newport Beach, about an hour below Los Angeles, with my grandparents who lived right on the ocean. Since the early 1950s my grandparents had lived there; we have a photograph, unbelievable in its sparseness, taken from a Cessna of the Pacific coastline supporting only a few scattered houses, modestly built, a small road behind, iceplant-studded sand dunes rolling to a narrow railroad track, and an empty Pacific Coast highway in the background. My father would rouse us at three in the morning, we’d pack and pile into the Buick, and drive the eight hours from Sacramento down old highway 99 to arrive as my grandmother was clearing the lunch dishes. Newport Beach is one of the wealthiest enclaves in Southern California, but I didn’t know it then, too young to practice the arts of envy and disdain used to fashion my ego in college; indeed, the affluence that lined the beachfront and spread thinner and thinner further inland seemed sun-bleached and ephemeral, suburban and charmless. The ocean was real because it whispered and shouted and roared and pulsed and heaved and drenched the briny wind, hurled towering waves that cracked and curled and charged frothy and white like galaxies. And there were bikinis with tanned young women inside. I know now why I can’t leave the ocean, why I return to its razor horizon in imagination and dream and whenever I can get the time. The ocean drew me in like the vast reaches of the universe, silent, infinite, containing all the heavens and me—and I still wonder how and why. And the long summer days and nights beside her established finally that I was not and would never be one of the cool teens, and there was no getting around that.
Early memories on the seashore were of creation and discovery. Refortifying moist, ever melting sandcastle bulwarks against charging waves, finally watching with a mix of amusement and disappointment as a fierce swell overleaps and floods our poor residences, shanties mostly, to refortify again, a task hopeless and endless and therefore ready for renewal. Or we dug tremendous moats around as a first defense. But the seriousness of play was in the building, the creative act. Discovery became both motive and end. Worlds in tidepools, delicate and perfect communities replenished moment to moment with tidal splash; the froosh and hiss and hump of waves heaving under the black rock jetty; the racket and crowds of gulls surrounding my attempts to feed them dry bread.
Alternatively, we’d just dig holes, scooping out handful after soft, wet handful, piling up landfill, digging seemingly for the sake of the hole itself (Zen without the awareness). At the water’s edge we’d dig up meager sandcrabs that squirmed, scurried and burrowed in our palms, wriggled free with the dripping sand to reburrow until another generation wandered to the wave’s retreat. We buried each other in the sand, feeling soft warmth and pressure. These symbolic associations with the grave, digging holes, burial, I’m sure are coincidental, yet unsettling nevertheless.
Reflecting on why we are here—standing at the ocean’s edge as a metaphor for anchored down on a planet hurling through cold black space—occupied my thoughts only later in life, probably when I began having a somewhat regularly fulfilled sex life. Prior to that, I fumbled from one infatuation to another, hoping to be if not loved, then noticed. Handsome enough I suppose I was, as early photographs of my father in uniform offer favorable precedent, and photographs of my mother in her 20s show her to be quite beautiful, so the chemistry was there. I remember my father introducing his two very young sons to a Catholic priest at a local parish in Anaheim. The priest, Midwestern-seeming and balding, shook our hands heartily and bellowed, “Well, what two handsome young men!” He said it for my father’s approval, but I considered this a generous compliment. Coming from a priest, I reasoned, there must be some truth to it. But if pretty girls were not lavishing attention on me as they certainly did in my fantasies, endorsements from priests were worthless. Being conventionally handsome simply meant you don’t stand out in a crowd as a disfigured freak. It also means plain.
Southern California’s beaches have a well-deserved rarefied air of the shapely and beautiful. The supple, tanned skin of teenage girls, warmed from a day in the sun, glowed, radiated a honeyed aura as they lounged and laughed on their towels. They were my first experience with the ethereal nature of beauty, what rises from the world, passes through the world, yet remains indefinable. How to approach them, talk to them, for godsakes make friends with them (forget anything even remotely sexual; you may as well have asked me to fathom Space-Time), was daunting and mysterious. Yet for all that of course I was deliriously attracted to them. Advice from all sides would be as reasonable and empty as a truism: “You just go up to them and say hello,” as though the power of the priest’s conviction and my unexceptional but respectable enough ancestry should puff my chest and sparkle my delivery. Reader, you know what I’m talking about. I only honed my humble talent and acquired the wisdom when I couldn’t use and didn’t need them anymore. The way it goes, I guess.
I was content enough, at times, simply to look at these sunning maidens. But who actually met them, chatted them up, even (so I imagined) touched them? The surfers. Southern California surfers at that. Behold them, sitting on their boards, rising and falling with the swells, flashes of sunlight flickering on the water around them like paparazzi, waiting patiently as gods with their eyes resting on the shimmering horizon for the coming set. You couldn’t get up early enough to catch the ocean without them (I tried once). You lost sight of them as night finally flooded the waves, leaving only the muffled sound of heavy crashing. They were serious in their passion, but reserved. They spoke little, and not very often. They drifted in and drifted out like the tides they monitored. They were self-contained, necessary and sufficient, and that was their victory. I used to love to bodysurf and boogieboard—still do—but when I joined a pack of surfers they always regarded my presence with cordial yet guarded territorial suspicion, as noblemen must when an affable peasant strolls through the palace courtyard. Besides their inevitable bronze color they had the physique which these sunny maidens admired: shoulders and chests pumped with years of powering their boards under, in, over, and through waves, and a tanned physique, not the reptilian sheen of bodybuilders. Once more, their brawn didn’t look as if they worked at building muscle (more to their credit, you see, modest saints). They didn’t know what combs are used for, and their hair was always perfect. Reader, have you ever seen an unattractive surfer? Neither have I.
We couldn’t afford surfboards, and it wasn’t worth buying one just to use a few weeks in summer. I was also a little afraid of learning, faced with the failure that accompanies new endeavors. So I bodysurfed. Then my parents purchased boogieboards and swimfins for my brother and me, and my great love for the ocean began in earnest. In the ocean, within its cold, mineral, dark emerald fold, I felt borne up by forces greater than myself. Swimming, I was allowed buoyant play. I was also given moments of aesthetic joy: floating nearly alone in blue twilight waiting for waves, the orange sunset skimming the water to my right, moonlight whitening the water to my left; floating nearly alone during a light gray rain, the ocean turning jade green and soft as glass. In the ocean I encountered the wild. From my grandparent’s balcony one New Year’s morning I spied to the south a pod of porpoise trawling just beyond the wave break. I hustled on my wetsuit, grabbed my fins, and charged into the water. I swam hard, looking up to catch their distance, dug in and swam, then paused way out to find eight or ten large shiny dark gray beautiful porpoise gliding by on either side of me. As they rose and glided, their black eyes regarded me, and I trembled.
But after the night closed the swimming and tanning, there wasn’t much else to do after dinner, which was early and then lengthened with bottles of wine and conversation, which we wanted no part of. So my brother and I would launch our skateboards, rolling down the cement strand fronting beachhouse rentals crunched side by side all the way to the Balboa Pier a few miles south. Destination was the Balboa arcade, where hundreds of sun drenched youths gathered and wandered, see and were seen, flirt or fail, and hoof the long skate home. Those Newport summer nights at the arcade was the ever-recurring home to connect, and we’d remain ever vigilant to maintain cool as bevy after bevy of California girls drifted by (it occurs to me that my brother, three years younger, always did pretty well with women, and perhaps he may have had better success then without me tagging along, but whatever). I remember a few summers going where every single dude wore Izod shirts sporting the little green alligator. You swear you looked the coolest with yours, unique. One night we skateboarded down the promenade, met up with three other skaters, befriended a few more, more joined, until we reached the pier, a sunburned horde skidding to a stop. One of the guys, probably the oldest, took stock. “Okay,” he said, looking down the row of us sitting on a cement wall rounding the parking lot, “let’s see, we have to get pussy for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen guys. I mean sixteen,” pointing to himself. We all forged on, our number whittling down as night dragged on. We scattered. Walked up and down and around. Attempted at eye contact with the lovelies. But Southern California girls just sailed by like nymphs, or sirens who, far from drawing you to the rocks, pay you no attention at all.
At one point my brother and I veered away, heading home, then paused, entertained by a water balloon fight. Up on a rental’s second floor balcony were three teenage girls still in bikinis. Besides a few balloons, they’d employed a hose to jet water over the strand and onto the sand, and plastic buckets. Down below on the beach were four guys, three well built and good-looking, shirtless, and one who was a little pudgy around the waist, but probably came in handy because he had a car and could drive the others around. The boys dashed between rentals to refill balloons to the size of small pigs. The girls whipped the hose around to fire in every direction. Civilian passersby would either duck and rush through, or give wide berth outside of the hose’s range. I noticed the pudgy kid duck with a full balloon behind a large trash can at the edge of the cement, peering around for his chance. But suddenly the strategy changed: evidently one of the boys found a door unlocked, and all three rushed up the stairs and ambushed the girls, pelting them on the balcony as they screamed. One of the boys grabbed the hose, cut the supply, and their battle was won. Gallant in victory, the boys found towels to wipe down the maidens, who accepted graciously. I don’t know if the boys knew the girls before, but they were in, and the night was still young. As they all stood on the balcony, the forgotten pudgy fourth one, outside and unpaired, emerged, hiding his filled balloon behind his back. This was his moment. Attention was on him. He wanted the game. But as he took another step, the others high on the balcony in unison waved him off, shouted discouragements—the game was, after all, finished—and at that point I saw him gently but firmly begin squeezing his balloon, tighter and tighter, until it burst and soaked into his shorts. The others didn’t know it, though. So with the attention riveted on him, he made a faltering show of throwing the flabby balloon. The balcony gasped, but the torn piece just floated, then dropped. The others immediately turned to drying off and getting along. The pudgy one remained alone, for he wasn’t invited up. Casting for sympathy, he turned to my brother and me, witnesses. But we turned away and rode off into the night, tired ankles angling us home to sleep with the soft ocean crowarsh and the wind feathering the salt-rusted window screen.