The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (13 page)

Then he reads from a Rumi piece, tells us that if we’re not comfortable with its use of the word
God
, we can substitute
higher power:
“Loving God is / the only pleasure. Other delights turn bitter. What hurts / the soul? To live / without tasting the water of its own essence. People / focus on death and this / material earth. They have doubts about soul water. / Those doubts can be / reduced! Use night to wake your clarity. Darkness / and the living water are / lovers.”

The last line—
Let jealousy end
—feels like it was written for me.

He puts the book aside, says a few more words.

“Most of my life I clung to women, hoping they could fix me. It makes me sad to think of it, how imprisoned I was—how I turned other people into my higher power, because I didn’t have my own. But once I went through withdrawal and worked this program, I rediscovered it, recovered my own Self. That’s the miracle of these rooms. And it’s the reason I’m in a good, equitable relationship with a woman who is now my fiancée.”

After we hold hands for the closing prayer, a crowd gathers around him, two or three guys thick, like a guru with his acolytes. Asa wants me to ride the subway back to Brooklyn, but I tell him to go on without me, that there’s someone I need to see.

After half an hour, I finally get to speak with Attiq. Up close, he has heavy brown lids, not the kind that make some New Yorkers look pretentious, but that make him look wise and kind and maybe a bit fragile.

I tell him how much I related to what he said, how I’m right in the throes of it with Karissa. Though I can tell he’s worn out from speaking and all the attention, he listens patiently to my whole litany of woes.

A large Kenyan man, a former crack addict, interrupts us briefly so he can bend down and give Attiq a bear hug.

Attiq turns his attention back to me, places his hand on my arm. “Listen, you might not comprehend this yet, but what Karissa has done for you—letting you go, helping you see your own destructive patterns—is a gift. As far as what you do with it, that’s for you to decide.”

A
fter connecting with Attiq, I keep going back to Wednesday-night meetings, where I find myself feeling increasingly at home. The more I put myself out there and talk to people, the more I realize we have in common. And the more I discover that what we have is a kind of underground, twelve-step surf club. Along with Asa and me, at least half a dozen other guys are into surfing, in the same obsessive way I am. There’s a lot of talk about how easy it is to swap one addiction for another; in our case, surfing seems like a healthy substitute.

There’s Mick, a former Californian whom I end up seeing at Rockaway almost every time I go. He has a waterproof housing for his homemade pinhole camera; he shoots black-and-white photos of Asa and me surrounded by darkness, standing on water in small round apertures of light. And Benny, a guy with whom I develop a really tight bond. Originally from a small village in Northern Ireland, Benny survived a long period of heavy drinking and drugging. He got sober in the nineties but, like the rest of us, still struggles with relationships. A private contractor, he remodels apartments most of the year, but always spends a month or two in the tropics, surfing in remote parts of Ecuador or Brazil.

Asa and I start referring to our surf sessions as
water meetings
. While waiting for waves, we sit on our boards and talk about what’s going on with us, listening, offering support. Sometimes Mick and Benny are there, or any number of friends in one form of recovery or another, all of us out in the ocean together, trying to heal. In this way I’m able to do what I never thought myself capable of doing: actually surviving outside a romantic relationship, and doing it in perhaps the most difficult city in the world in which to be single.

It’s what, in program language, we call
withdrawal
—it’s like giving up drugs, but in our case it means resisting the urge to rebound back into yet another relationship.

And my own painful, imperfect withdrawal—during which the ocean becomes my surrogate girlfriend—lasts not just for weeks or months, but, with the exception of a few slips, for well over two years.

A
s of the 1990s, there wasn’t a single skatepark in New York City. By the time I move there in the early 2000s, several good parks spring up, thanks in part to Andy Kessler. He showed up at hundreds of parks department meetings; he raised enough hell that in the late nineties the city finally agreed to set aside a large space in Riverside Park, on 108th Street, very near the same spot that he and his Zoo York crew used to skate back in the seventies. Two decades later, Kessler led the work crew that built a small vert ramp, street course, and a miniramp in Riverside Park; this was how he earned his nickname:
the Godfather of 108
.

Around the time I meet Andy in late 2003, a high-end sunglasses retailer hires him to build a small wooden bowl inside their Soho storefront. Known as the Blind Bowl, it’s capsule-shaped and only four feet deep, but one side shoots straight up the wall, giving it over six feet of pure vertical, like an asymmetrical bathtub.

I skate the Blind Bowl a few times with Grodin and Andy; one night the legendary pro skater Mark Gonzales shows up and blows my mind. He doesn’t do any tricks per se, just rocks these stylish frontside turns all the way up the vert wall. Rumor has it that when Gonzales first moved to New York back in the nineties, he signed up for ballet lessons. And after thirty-plus years of skating—similar to Andy Kessler—there is something simultaneously raw and balletic about the way he handles a skateboard.

A few weeks later, during a party at the Blind Bowl, Kessler trips up on the vert wall and takes a disastrous nine-foot slam, landing straight on his knee. The impact shatters his kneecap and jams his femur bone so violently upward that it cracks his pelvis nearly in half. He’s laid up in the hospital for several weeks, and with no health insurance he racks up a $51,000 medical bill. After a few months’ recovery, he gets back on his feet and along with some friends puts together a benefit art show/skate jam at the Blind Bowl. Artists like Julian Schnabel, Wes Humpton, and many others donate work, enough to raise $20,000. It’s rare for guys to skate well into their forties, and after that kind of slam most would hang up their Vans, but Andy gets right back on the horse. He actually
skates
at his own benefit show—in the same bowl that nearly crippled him—even though he’s just graduated from crutches to cane.

So while the accident doesn’t keep him off a skateboard, it’s a turning point for Kessler. As a form of rehab for his hip, he spends more time in water, and especially the ocean, where, at age forty-five, he gets seriously into surfing. He falls in love with Montauk around the same time I do. We’ve skated together many times, but it’s while hanging out on the beach and in the clean water at Ditch Plains that I really get to know him.

His first full summer in Montauk is 2005, when he lives for three months aboard an ancient little sailboat belonging to his friend Casual Chuck. The exterior isn’t much to speak of—it doesn’t even have a mast—but Chuck refinished the interior cabin with reclaimed hardwood flooring. Andy keeps all his belongings down in the hold, his clothes folded and stacked, his skateboard decks and a surfboard leaning against the wall next to a hammock, old hardcover editions of the Narcotics Anonymous and AA “big books” propped up by his pillow, the way a monk keeps a copy of the Bible at his bedside. There’s something monastic and pure about the way he lives aboard this small vessel, recovering from his injury, waking at dawn to meditate and pray before surfing.

I visit him out on the docks one Saturday evening in July. After showing me around down in the cabin, he gives me a pocket-sized package containing something called a Mighty Kite. As we climb back up on deck, he tells me he buys them by the case in Chinatown.

“I freaking love these things,” he says, launching a diamond-shaped Mighty Kite off the edge off the boat. Midnight blue with pink paper tails, it’s about the size of a playing card. “I brought a case with me on a surf trip to the Dominican Republic last winter. Paid a bunch of local kids to help me sell them to tourists. Made about two hundred bucks; doubled my investment.” He lets out some slack on his Mighty Kite. Just a few feet above his head, it shivers in the wind, occasionally diving down toward the bay before darting up again into a series of playful McTwists.

“I guess I wouldn’t have pegged you for a salesman,” I say.

Andy cracks up. “Oh yeah, I have a long history in sales.
Drug
sales, that is.”

I knew he’d been a junkie, but I’d never heard anything about him dealing drugs. It’s hard to reconcile with the Andy I know, the guy who helps out so many people, who builds skateparks and encourages kids to skate and live healthy lives.

“You wouldn’t have recognized me,” Andy says. “I was out there on the streets delivering that shit every day. Selling it, or just pretending to sell it and straight up stealing people’s money. There are probably some junkies over on the East Side still waiting for me to deliver drugs.” He breaks into a cackle. “I bet they’re out there right now, fucking standing around on the block, just
waiting
.”

As the sun pearls below the horizon, he reels in his Mighty Kite and walks me back to my truck, past rows of fishing skiffs and sailboats.

“This seems like the way to go,” I say. “I don’t think I can ever afford a house out here at Montauk. But a boat’s like the perfect little surf shack.”

“Seriously, man. I love every minute I spend out here.”

We pass a sailboat with a For Sale sign. It’s moderately sized, but they’re asking over three hundred grand.

“Okay, so maybe I won’t be able to afford that either.”

“Hey, you really never know. When you make room for a dream like that in your head, that’s when things start to happen.”

Kessler and I meet up the next day out at Ditch Plains; I follow his lead when he suggests we walk south a ways to a spot called Poles. We paddle out together and I get a couple good waves, bigger than what I’m used to at Rockaway. A teenager heckles me because I ride one with my knee cocked in, like I’m on a much larger wave, but I’m too stoked to care.

I watch Andy catch a good left-hander and cruise frontside with his characteristic laid-back style, until another guy on a longboard drops right in on him, bashes into his board, leaving a sand dollar–sized hole in his rail. I follow him back to the shore, where we assess the damage and decide it requires some patch work to keep water from seeping in and ruining the core. It’s a special board, given to Andy by his friend Joel Tudor, a pro surfer and shaper who sometimes lays over in Montauk for the summer between stints in California and Hawaii.

“Fucking guy,” I say. “He dropped right in on you.”

“Whatever. He meant no harm; these things happen.”

We walk on the sand back toward the parking lot, checking out girls in bikinis along the way, the sun on our backs.

“Looks like you’re getting around pretty good these days,” I say, noticing that his limp has subsided.

“I’m feeling a lot better. My doctor’s amazed at my recovery. He didn’t know if I’d ever walk again. Surfing has definitely helped. Plus the way everyone showed up for me after the accident,” he says. “I felt a real healing, you know, coming from all those people.”

“That’s the thing about you, Andy. You help out a lot of people. That all comes back around.”

“Yeah, I guess I help some people every now and again … when I’m not busy
heckling
them,” he says, then breaks into another cackle.

It turns out that Casual Chuck’s the caretaker for the artist Julian Schnabel, who owns an estate just above Ditch Plains. Chuck lives in a cottage on Schnabel’s property; I drive Andy up there to fetch some sun-cure resin to fix the ding. Back at Ditch Plains, we buy tacos at the Ditch Witch—a food and coffee cart that sets up shop in the summer time, and that always has a mile-long line. Andy and I grab a picnic table, where we hang out and talk, taking our time while the patch job dries.

The moment finally feels right to tell him about the twelve-step program.

“That’s great, man. Congratulations. What, are you in the beverage program?”

I explain that no, for me it’s about relationship and codependence issues.

“I know what you mean. My ex-wife and I had some serious codependency shit going on for years. My opinion is that humans can turn just about anything into an addiction. Good for you for taking care of yourself.”

“How long have you been in NA?” I ask.

“Eleven years as of January. What can I say? That program saved my life.”

I tell him I’m reading a book called
The Spirituality of Imperfection
, how it claims that the twelve-step program is one of the most significant spiritual movements of the century, that the original founders of AA had consulted with Carl Jung—a man who believed that some alcoholics were so far beyond traditional medical help that only a spiritual awakening could save them.

“Look at me—I’m living proof,” Andy says. “If it wasn’t for NA, I’d probably be dead. As far as spirituality goes, I think it’s the best thing going.”

Later that afternoon, Kessler asks if he can catch a ride back to Amagansett for a Saturday-night AA meeting. He invites me to come along. “An addict’s an addict,” he says, “and a meeting’s a meeting.”

On the way, we stop by Grodin’s house, where I’m spending the weekend. We shoot a few games of pool with him while he chides Andy about his deep suntan.

“Jesus, Kessler, you think you got enough sun today? Your face looks like a stewed tomato.”

After Grodin slaughters us both at pool, he invites us to barbecue with him down at the beach later that night. I’m embarrassed to tell Grodin that I’ll meet up with him later, that first I’m going to an AA meeting with Andy.

“You’re going to meetings now too? I’ve never even seen you drunk.”