The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (23 page)

F
orecast for Long Beach: East swell, 2–3 foot waves at 10 seconds. Winds from the south at 7 mph. Water temp 59, air temp 67. Surf: knee to waist high and fair conditions
.

In May of 2005, Asa and I check out the Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. Back in the late nineties I’d seen the biopic
Basquiat;
in one scene another painter tells Basquiat that his audience hasn’t even been born yet. Looking at three entire museum floors filled with his paintings, I get the sense of how prescient his work was back in the 1980s, how much it influenced the street art scene that’s so much in vogue in 2005, with other self-taught artists like Mark Gonzales, Swoon, and Banksy as direct descendants of Basquiat. Basquiat was just as much a DJ as an artist; he sampled and repeated words, phrases, and motifs to create something entirely new and visionary. My favorite pieces were executed on found materials—wooden fence planks, cabinets, dressers, and doors, all nailed together like scrappy altars to Grandmaster Flash, Malcolm X, Miles Davis, and Joe Louis. And as a writer, I dig the textuality of his work, the way many of his paintings read like jumbled essays or inspired, furious poems.

A few months earlier, at a Chelsea gallery show called “In Word Alone,” I’d seen another of his pieces in which he’d simply copied the table of contents of
Moby-Dick
across nine sheets of white paper—the titles of all 135 chapters written in black crayon. The center page on the bottom row reads “threadbare in coat, heart, body, brain,” followed by one of Basquiat’s © symbols. There’s also a trademark sign after the phrase “Call me Ishmael.” I like this idea, that Basquiat was taking a classic work and reclaiming the copyright, making it his own. He was poking fun at Melville as a member of the mostly white literary canon, but also acknowledging his kinship—they were both highly political, anticolonialist, anti-imperialist artists. Both experienced poverty in their young adulthood; many of Basquiat’s paintings are haunted with spike-headed ghosts of slavery and destitution, or grimacing figures crowned with Byzantine halos. There’s a pervading darkness in Basquiat’s work, coupled with a grasping toward the sacred—a kind of street-smart chiaroscuro that’s reminiscent of Melville’s own nightshade vision of America.

You don’t really get a true sense of Basquiat’s paintings until you’re surrounded by them, and then both the darkness and the halo shine seep into your bloodstream, exciting and provoking you the way some jazz and hip-hop does—and for me these alternating currents hum with the noise and chaos and electric allure of New York City life. Maybe it’s for that reason, paired with the fact that it’s sunny out as we leave the museum, that Asa and I make the spontaneous decision to escape to the coast. It’s just like I imagined the first time I witnessed a surfer emerge from a West Village subway station: in New York it’s possible to see great works of art and go surfing, all in the same afternoon.

We pack up my truck and drive to Asa’s favorite surf spot at Long Beach. The water’s still wetsuit temperature, but the swells are small and clean and fun, and we’re the only ones out, trading wave after wave.

“You think you’ll ever move back to the West Coast?” I ask Asa between sets.

“Hard to say. I like New York; I like how real people are here. And where else can you take the subway to the beach? I think this is one of the best-kept secrets in the surf world. The waves are better in California, but the breaks are packed.”

“That’s part of the reason I never surfed much in San Diego,” I say. “And it’s why I still think about moving to Oregon all the time.” I’m always bringing up Oregon with Asa, telling him how much I’d like to relocate, reminiscing about our old times there.

“I lived in Portland for three years; I had a great time. But I can’t really see myself there now. That’s the thing: I try to be present with whatever place I’m in,” he says, then catches a nice left-hand peeler, working every section of it, cross-stepping up to the nose—making it all look so natural and effortless.

Forecast for North Shore Oahu: North swell 12 feet at 15 seconds. Winds from the south at 12 mph. Water temp 72, air temp 85. Surf: solid overhead and hollow; excellent conditions
.

Early in the film
Basquiat
, the eponymous young artist has a kind of ecstatic visual hallucination in which he envisions a giant surfer superimposed above a New York City skyline, trimming backside down the face of a sun-shimmering, double-overhead wave. At the time, Basquiat is living in a cardboard box, writing “Samo” graffiti and selling street art for a couple dollars a pop. But the surfing vision indicates awareness of his imminent ascent—it’s a fairly obvious but nonetheless bitchin’ metaphor for his real-life slash across an overblown swell of 1980s art-world fame and fortune. According to the film’s creator, Julian Schnabel, the Manhattan skyline surfer was “a barometer of his [Basquiat’s] emotional state—in the beginning, optimistic, sparkling, exuberant. As things get more problematic, the sea becomes more ominous.” In the end they get severely problematic: the skyline surfer takes a harrowing wipeout just as Basquiat begins his own terminal plunge into heroin addiction.

Basquiat the man wasn’t necessarily a surfing devotee, but he visited Hawaii a handful of times, and like so many mainlanders he fantasized about moving to Oahu or Maui. Just before his fatal overdose in 1988, he chose the remote, idyllic town of Hana on Maui as a clean, quiet spot to kick heroin. Rumor has it that while in Hana he slept in a fruit stand and spent his days painting on a friend’s kitchen cabinets.
¹
It’s unlikely that Basquiat ever actually rode a surfboard, especially while going through the DTs. In fact, there wouldn’t be any surfing in
Basquiat
if it wasn’t for Schnabel, himself a painter and lifelong surfer.
²
The story goes that a fledgling filmmaker came to interview Schnabel about his friendship with Basquiat, in hope of making a feature film about the deceased artist. Sensing that the filmmaker was a tourist who’d turn the nuanced story into one big art-world cliché, Schnabel snaked the cinematic wave and directed the picture himself, effectively launching a second career in film. More than a few critics complained that
Basquiat
the movie has a little too much Schnabel in it, that the story was remade in the artist’s own notoriously outsized image (Schnabel was once quoted as saying, “I’m the closest thing to Picasso that you’ll see in this fucking life.”) But any of Schnabel’s artistic indulgences
³
are mostly made up for by his painterly sense of scene and by understated performances from one of the best casts ever: Gary Oldman,
⁴
David Bowie,
⁵
Jeffrey Wright, Dennis Hopper, Willem Dafoe, Parker Posey, Christopher Walken, Benecio del Toro,
⁶
and the luminous Claire Forlani.

Critics also griped that the New York City skyline surfing imagery was at once lowbrow and heavy-handed. To his credit, Schnabel made the film on a relatively tiny budget, using the surfing footage in lieu of shooting on location in Hawaii to capture some of Basquiat’s important final days.
⁷
And though I first saw the film circa 1997, it was the surfing imagery more than any other aspect that stayed with me over the years—in fact, I’d had my own versions of Basquiat’s surfing vision when I stepped off a few of my first subway rides into the churning center of a city that was now home. Mostly in spite of myself I imagined the surfer up there above Union Square; the idea of it gave me a sparkling sense of exhilaration and, for lack of a better word—stoke. For anyone who grew up in the West or the Midwest or anywhere small and pastoral, or even a city like San Diego, your first few days as an actual New York City resident feel a lot like the awkward, euphoric self-consciousness you get the first time you ride a wave:
I’m in New York City! I’m doing this! I’m totally doing it!
In the beginning I was able to focus on that ride, on the excitement of living in the big city with its infinite cultural amenities and beautiful women and subway-accessible coastline, and kept the memory of the skyline surfer and Basquiat’s inevitable wipe out deep down in my subconscious. But it doesn’t take long to realize how hard and heavy a city like New York can come crashing down on you. And so it’s strange and oddly synchronistic when, a few years later, during a weekend surf trip to Montauk—and just before pretty much the biggest symbolic bail of my own lifetime—I wind up at Julian Schnabel’s beach house in Montauk.

Forecast for Montauk: Northeast swell 5–7 feet at 13 seconds. Winds from the south at 10 mph. Water temp 64, air temp 66. Surf: clean, head-high waves from the north with offshore winds; good to excellent conditions
.

On a Friday afternoon in early September 2006, just a month after my thirty-third birthday, I receive an important phone call. It’s from a nonprofit literary organization in Portland, Oregon, a place called the Independent Publishing Resource Center, and after several rounds of phone interviews, they offer me the executive director position. I tell them I need the weekend to think it over, but I’m already celebrating on the inside—Portland’s my dream city, where my stepbrother and my best friend live with their families—a place I always hoped I’d end up. I’ll be taking a serious pay cut, but it’s a rare non corporate job in the field of writing and publishing, and the cost of living in Portland is a fraction of what it is in New York. I’d taken the call on my cell phone in Paley Park; after hanging up I consider going back in and quitting my publishing job on the spot—forgoing the whole two-weeks-notice thing and instead taking those two weeks to surf out at Montauk before heading back west. I fire off a text to Dawn—
Holy shit, I think I’m moving to Portland
—then call my dad and tell him the good news.

I curb my
Generation X
meets
Endless Summer
quitting fantasy, but later that evening I do drive out to Montauk to spend the weekend at Grodin’s. A crisp fall night, a few dim stars, light traffic on the Long Island Expressway. I listen to the Rolling Stones, hammering out euphoric air-drum solos and fantasizing about my upcoming cross-country road trip.

The house is dark when I arrive—it’s past eleven and everyone’s out at the bars or already asleep. I spread my sleeping bag on the couch and switch off the lamp. As I lie there in the dark and contemplate the move, powerful waves of anxiety start roiling around in my stomach. Small at first, but soon they’re jacking up way overhead, scaring the hell out of me, threatening to swell into another tidal wave of generalized anxiety, the kind that nearly drowned me the first time I tried to leave my job. What the hell am I getting myself into? I’m in a precarious emotional state just a few months after the robbery; getting out of bed every morning is a challenge, and here I am faced with moving three thousand miles across the country, finding a place to live, surfing in a new ocean—completely reinventing my life in a notoriously rainy city. I finally have an escape route out of the Pit, but it’s cluttered with so many uncertainties. My biggest fear is that I’ll move to Portland and have some sort of meltdown, the kind requiring ambulances and those weird foamy hospital slippers and heavy rounds of pharmaceuticals. This is the beginning of a crippling cycle of regret and indecision, and my celebratory mood is quickly erased and reprogrammed with a kind of relentless binary code, my mind infected by an endless, almost computational shifting between zero and one, New York and Portland.

After a shaky night of sleep I wake to dark skies, intermittent rain, rolling thunderstorms. There’s an objective correlative–style storm brewing off the coast, very conveniently accentuating this new wave of anxiety and gloom. I text Dawn and Kessler; we agree to meet at a diner in Montauk, just up the street from the Memory Motel—the namesake of the Rolling Stones song about Annie Leibovitz.

The place is packed with weekenders, windows all fogged up, obscuring the view—not that there’s anything to see but clouds and rain.

“So what’s up with Portland?” Dawn asks, sipping her coffee.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I told them I’d take the weekend to think it over.”

“That’s a big decision for a weekend.”

“Tell me about it.” I think about my room in Brooklyn, all my stuff, the three thousand miles of red states between here and Portland. As much as I’m sick of New York, I also feel oddly insulated by it, protected and enabled in my isolation and anonymity, where none of my friends back home can see how hard I’m struggling.

Dawn brought along friends from the city, tall blond women in their late twenties with successful careers in the fashion world. Their names are Sarah and Tia; they both work for some big-deal fashion photographer and are in Montauk to celebrate her birthday.

“How long have you been in New York?” one of them asks.

“Three years, almost to the day.”

“Have you accomplished what you wanted here?”

I shrug, take a sip of coffee.

Outside, water pours off the eaves, the rain gutters failing.

And I’m embarrassed to say it. Three years in the city, only one accomplishment: learning to surf. The best thing that’s happened to me. The worst way to get ahead in New York.

After breakfast we drive out to a secret spot on the beach cliffs south of the Montauk lighthouse. Pulling up our hoods, we follow Kessler through an opening in the dense bramble and into a cavernous, dripping path toward the sea.

“If you move to Portland,” Dawn says, following just behind me, “I’ll probably come out and join you in a couple years. You can settle down there, buy a house. And they have actual trees there. A shitload of them.”

We emerge from the brush onto a knoll covered in thick, wet grass overlooking the Atlantic. The rain has tapered off, the sky quilted with a hundred hues of charcoal and gray. Some seriously formidable waves are rolling in a hundred feet below, creasing in off the horizon, then rearing up sharply to reveal cobalt faces—swelling with silver—before collapsing into white, exploding around rocky crags, fizzing and clambering toward shore. Dawn and I look out into the vastness, comment on the
fucking amazingness
of it. We put our arms around each other, pose for photographs, hold on even after the cameras are put back in purses. It’s already starting to feel like a going-away party.