Thrill-Bent (10 page)

There’s not much traffic, and I turn off my lights and get out of the car. I sit on the hood, buckling the metal slightly as I negotiate my ass right up next to the windshield. The whine of traffic is threaded with intermittent high-pitched whining from the factories east of town. I can’t hear the ’dan screaming from where I am, but in my imagination I morph the machine whir into a communal thrill-scream, a scream that seems squeezed right out of my memory’s clutches. I’m sitting here on the hood of a rental car, surrounded by unfamiliar “modern” architecture and road signs that don’t lead me anywhere. I’m minding my own business, smoking a filterless cigarette and periodically picking tobacco from my lower lip. I’m contained in my skin; I’m hermetically sealed; I’m not seeping out anywhere.

Dear Chantelle,
I think as I inhale,
Have you read the scene in Hamlet where Ophelia goes mad? If not, pick it up. Flip to page 79 in the Penguin pocket edition. Now, close your eyes and try to discern what the rest of the play is about. Lift the veils and skirts and floating weeds and hair. Yes, there is water. Yes, there are tears. And yes, that water eddies around the metrical moods of a man.

A two-seater has pulled off the road about a hundred yards behind me, casting its headlights on my back like it’s interrogating me from behind. I twist around to see what’s going on, but with the lights in my eyes, all I can discern is the tiny pistachio shape of the stopped vehicle. It’s just sitting there, engine rumbling. A few cars pass without slowing. No one emerges, and I’m starting to get the creeps. Through the dust-filtered light, I start to make out something strange. The little car—a Fiat?—is swaying and jumping slightly, as though a skirmish of some sort is taking place inside its miniscule cab-space. I hear a persistent thwack, a one-two-three-THUD that sounds like a weighty body part is connecting with one of the car’s metal contours. The thud rocks the car each time it happens, followed by a quick double-bounce, a fast-paced two-step. The rhythm is mesmerizing in its regularity, and for a minute I wonder if someone inside the car is getting weirdly fucked—or getting the shit kicked out of them. Or maybe it’s the epileptic mole-teen from the Sidesplitter line; maybe he’s been driving around looking for me, wanting to impart some urgent apoplectic message. But why are those jiggling headlights trained querulously on me? I slide off of my perch and back around to the driver’s side door, reaching in through the open window to grab the car keys. I slip the jagged trunk key in between the index and middle fingers of my right hand until it sticks out slightly when I make a fist, which is the dumb thing I always do when faced with potential danger, having once heard that this doubles the damage of your punch. Mainly it’s become a sort of talisman that makes me feel safer in the dark. I spin around, but the car is now completely still. In the streaming light, I see a figure moving toward me, walking slowly but purposefully. A man, I think, not a large man, and I can’t see his face because I’m visually impaired by the angle of the headlights. He’s approaching me steadily. And now, there’s the dance. The arm swings up, to the side and then overhead, punching the air in a victorious pang. Then he shuffles to the side, beating on his own body like a skin drum, letting his fists strike in quick jabs from his groin all the way up to his chest. The whole sequence takes about two seconds from start to finish and is swallowed up gracefully into the same slow, purposeful walk from before.

How perfect, I think. Here I am, fifteen hundred miles from California, trying to quietly meditate on the concept of “thrill,” and who shows up but the master himself? It may have been ten years, but I can recognize his performance in a heartbeat. As he gets closer, the outline of his wavy hair bites a shadow into the cloud of light. Sparks seem to fly from the black curls. I want to wrap my body around his until we both disappear. I want to throw a fortified hook that will send him flying into Oklahoma.

“Dad,” I say. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“O
h Jesus.”

When the rippling swells started to undulate beneath the glassy surface of the water, breaking up the quiet reflections of clouds and spangly spires of sunlight, the Condor began his litany.

“Oh shit! Oh Jesus!” he barked. “Oh pussy-cock Jesus-shit!” He jabbed at the air and jerked up and down in the deep water, gurgling and sputtering like a breastfeeding baby. His hands flew up in a slaphappy frenzy, pushing frothy waves at me in tiny, fierce sets and sending up spumes of spit. The tight black curls on his head got dunked and came up shining, then disappeared again. A couple of stoned-looking teenage boys peered over at us, drop-jawed, from their calm neighboring vista ten or fifteen yards south, then quickly looked away when I stared back at them, imitating their open-mouthed gapes. I treaded water and fantasized that the series of terse yanks taking hold of my father were being administered by a shark who had grabbed his leg underwater and was shaking its vicious, enormous snout, ripping through tendons and bone, tugging mercilessly at his tough flesh. It was fun to imagine such a scenario, and by squinting with the sun in my eyes I could invent a pink fountain of watery blood gushing up from beneath my dad into the welcoming womb of the Pacific. I could almost feel the rubbery gray cartilage of the shark’s fin tickling the arches of my dogpaddling feet.

“Outside!” someone yelled, meaning they had spotted a set of surfable waves forming in the deeper water, and I was thrown from my reverie by the Pavlovian urge to start swimming as fast as I could toward the horizon. My father, too, transitioned from his violent drowning dance into a graceful westward crawl. All I could hear was my own wet breathing—an explosive “Bah!” as I expelled all at once, and then the quick whoosh of intake before my face plunged under again—and I was aware of being sucked into the wider part of the world. And it wasn’t just me, everything was being pulled out toward oblivion; the whole ocean backed off the delicate hem of shoreline and rushed out to meet the monster breakers gathering in the belly of the sea. The smooth horizon line that beckoned us was growing wavy and bloated as the seconds ticked by, pregnant with multiple giant swells. I quickly looked over at my dad, who was slightly ahead in the glare-sprinkled sheet of blue. We both stopped swimming and he nodded at me and said gravely, “Don’t forget to turn your head like I told you!”

The magnetic pull stopped and there was an eerie, silent beat while the water reversed its course, a rising mass lifting our small bodies up in to the crook of the nascent wave. The hill of water elongated above our heads, becoming a liquid wall, a three-story tower with a rumbling white crest forming on its roof. It was leaning to the north, I saw, and so I began swimming north as if I had any control, as if I could navigate where this mellifluous beast decided to take me.

My chronic problem with bodysurfing, and the snag in my ability to follow my father’s repeated instructions, was atypical. Unlike most of my sixth-grade friends, I was not afraid of deep water or big waves. I was a strong swimmer. I didn’t panic or chicken out when the swell began to mature into a monstrous bully of a wave. I thrived on the sensation of dangling like a tissue-paper boat on the edge of a maelstrom, and I got off on the knowledge that my little point of view was soon to be revolutionized. My problem—my fatal flaw—was that I couldn’t resist the urge to drop straight down from the crest of the wave to the floor of the ocean. “Going over the falls,” we called it. The fall was fast and weightless, as thrilling as jumping out of an airplane must be. I’d fall through the plush airshaft of wave while my stomach jumped up to my throat, and then I’d land in the cruel agitation of the battered ocean floor. I had discovered that it wouldn’t kill me, though I had suffered some wide swathes of sand-burn across my shoulders and legs, rashy stripes of red riddled with salt and pepper flecks. If I remembered to take a long gulp of air just before I went down, I could let the violent washing machine of wave somersault me for almost a full minute before I came up gasping. It was like dying and being resurrected, like knowing how to defy gravity. It was terrifyingly fun.

“What are you doing?” my father shouted, as I swam furiously along the peak of the towering swell. I could barely hear him with the wind and saltwater rushing around my ears. “South! South!” he yelled. “Head south, you’re going the wrong way!” I ducked up out of the wave and swiped the shock of wet hair from my eyes. He backed out of the wave, too, and we treaded water silently as we watched the huge wall of water break just beneath us. Its crash was thunderous and surprisingly close, like a jetliner landing. Then it was silent again, a quiet made particularly ominous by the knowledge that this calm—with its low hiss and smooth-as-velvet skin—wouldn’t last fifteen seconds. An even bigger wave was gathering momentum just a few yards away, already pulling us toward it like a magnet.

“Didn’t you see which way that was breaking?” my dad asked, shaking his head and sending tiny droplets flying from his curly crown. “I keep telling you, you gotta look for the lean! Determine the lean of the wave, honey!” He looked at me sternly, his dark eyes narrow under thick eyebrows that glistened and swooped as though he had applied great gobs of Vaseline to them. And then, just like that, his look of disgust changed into a crafty smile. He dove deep, took hold of my ankles, and launched me up out of the water. I screamed with laughter, the entire surface of my body caught for one cartwheeling second in the bright web of sky. I was surprised that he had chosen to resort to one of my favorite games so early in the botched lesson, and wondered if it meant he had given up on me completely, if this would be the last, desperate attempt to make a real bodysurfer out of me. I resolved to read the next wave more carefully.

With only a moment to catch my breath before the impending onslaught, I mentally reviewed the procedure. As soon as the wave began to break, at the first sign of froth on the uppermost lip—a rare and lovely foretelling of abundance, like a lone white camellia on a garden wall—I was supposed to “determine the lean,” to figure out in which direction the white crest would lengthen, where the tube of wave would travel. This was always much trickier than it sounded, the ocean being a messy, violent bath of opposing forces and capricious impulses. Often a wave would break both toward the north and toward the south, the two tubes eventually meeting in the middle in a splashy crush of errant spume. Other times a wave broke like a perfectly described blueprint of design and symmetry, carrying my father’s body from one end of the beach to the other, so that when he finally flipped out of his long ride, he had to swim back a half a mile to return to me.

I had failed so many times to determine the correct lean that I now choked at the mere prospect of doing so. The recent sound of my father’s annoyed “South! South!” still echoed in my ears, confusing my internal compass. While I wanted very much to impress him, to show him that I was a smart and graceful girl who could handle the simple task of maritime navigation, and while I longed to hear him call out, “Good job, honey, I knew you could do it!” from some faraway watery perch, I also, more than anything, wished fervently to be elsewhere. If I could twitch my nose like Samantha on
Bewitched
and be magically and immediately restored to dry land somewhere, I would have jumped at the chance so as not to have to bear this next multiple-choice question: north or south, only two options—one completely right and the other completely, pathetically, wrong.

But while I was contemplating the nature of personal shame, I was approached by a hulking mass of time and space whose intentions were completely unreadable to me, and I experienced the familiar exhilaration as my body was lifted and sucked back into the jaw of the wave. I breathed hard through my nose, making a rasping sound like a screen door opening and closing. I looked left and right, searching for some sign, some symbolic image that would be my guide in the matter of the lean. To the north, burnt umber cliffs scalloped the shoreline as far as I could see, nosing over the water like a gathering of rubberneckers at an accident. To the south, I noticed one of the stoner guys who’d been treading water next to us, his white-blond hair smoothed like a corn husk over his face and neck, swimming toward me. I wondered where his friend had gone, then realized he must have caught that last wave in to shore. Whitey’s hiccuping crawl was strangely beautiful: as one of his tan, acne-scarred shoulders bobbed up out of the water when he swung his elbow up to stroke, the other dipped slightly under. He was moving fast, looking like a virtuosic team in a three-legged race. I had to trust that white-blond hair. Instinctively, I followed his lead.

My dad stayed perfectly still, floating without apparent loyalty. His eyes drifted lazily toward the shore and back, but I knew his body was tense beneath the water, he was waiting to see which way I moved. I started swimming north alongside the lurching boy, who was speedily approaching my back. As my arms rotated out of the water, I heard bits and pieces of my dad’s rapid-fire expletives pierce the budding wave: “Shit!” Stroke, breathe, “Fuck!” Stroke, breathe, “Jesus’s cum-filled asshole!!” I smiled to myself, knowing that Whitey, who was just behind me, must be hearing a similar version of this obscene serenade. And then, with one final deep pull of my cupped hand, I was up and over, tucked tight inside the massive, silent curl. Left arm thrown out in front, my head emerged from the tube.

I could see everything from here: the shallows that seemed to be miles away, where little kids in bright bathing suits ran from the waves screaming into their fathers’ arms and mothers dangled their naked babies’ chubby feet into the lather; the wide beige beach that looked like a movie set lined with ranch-style houses, big clay porches lolling out like tongues from their fronts; striped umbrellas and tiny postage stamps of towels patterning the endless strip of sand like the border of an enormous tablecloth; the Del Mar racetrack (“Where the Surf Meets the Turf!”) with its big Spanish tower and statue of Don Diego just behind the snakelike Coast highway; and behind it all, the clean brilliant-blue blanket of sky, white pills of clouds clinging to its smooth, color-saturated surface. In a split second, I felt it again—the urge to duck my head and drop straight down. Like standing at the edge of a rooftop and feeling your whole self involuntarily lean toward the void. I knew I didn’t have to, I knew I’d caught the wave now, I was home free if I simply dropped my left shoulder slightly to follow the northerly lean of the break. I just had to stay where I was. I tried with all my will to resist the suicidal urge. But my brain wouldn’t send the correct message, or my shoulder wouldn’t receive it. My collarbone remained yoked parallel to the horizon, refusing to budge or flex. I took my right hand from its place plastered against my thigh, threw it across my chest, and manually yanked my left shoulder a few inches back and down. Immediately I dropped a few feet into the core of the wave; foamy suds ruffled up under my chin like Queen Elizabeth in her choking royal collar. What else? What other tidbits of my father’s advice was I forgetting? Oh yes, I was supposed to turn my head in the direction of my destination. I pressed my cheek to the wall of water, trying to look around the corner of the curl, to spy the mystery on the other side. From this vantage point, I could see how truly fast I was traveling. The scenery flew by at a giddy pace as though I’d been shot out of cannon. It was absurd: I was completely comfortable, laid out on a soft, cushy couch that happened to be moving at a speed of twenty miles an hour. I could hear the roar of the wave as it constantly crashed on the soles of my feet, and when I shifted my eyes briefly back, I glimpsed Whitey tagging along in my wake, relaxed and smiling, his eyes at half-mast as his big white teeth flashed in the sun. I looked ahead to the shore and saw his friend, an almost identical sun-bleached blond, knee-deep in the shallows waving his arms and yelling some muffled cheer or jeer that I couldn’t quite understand. “Dude!” was all I could catch.

When the wave finally deposited me at the far end of the beach, I was entangled in the gawky, tanned limbs of my stoned conspirator, and we were both breathing hard, snorting salt water out of our noses. We tried to exchange apologies, but we were laughing too hard to get the words out.

“Gnarly!” he said, finally, and his hand swung upward to connect with my palm in a high five—one of those gestures I’d been witnessing since birth, a loose-wristed slap practiced by boys to celebrate some indescribable victory or covert mutual understanding.

“Right on!” I said too exuberantly, noticing a slight pained shift in his expression.

I waded in the knee-deep water back in the other direction. It was hard to tell how far I’d been carried by the wave, but I felt too exhausted and giddy to swim. I didn’t recognize my father among the bathers nearby. I wondered how much he had seen. Did he see me stick with the wave, resisting the inclination to go over the falls? Did he see me entwined in the arms of the high-fiving teenager? I knew he was unlikely to have witnessed anything other than my feet disappearing into the slush, my body leaving a scar in the back of the wave in the shape of a flying V, but I reminded myself that the Condor had a tendency to observe things that couldn’t be seen, to hear noises that were utterly silent. Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, I’d wander around the house in early morning, my bare feet barely whispering on the carpeting, just to run my fingers along the comforting, nappy cobalt-blue upholstery of the living room sofa, and the cool, flat top of the polished wood coffee table. I was mouse-quiet, and yet I always incurred the waking wrath of the Condor, who would emerge, framed by the long master bedroom hallway—swarthy and mad, smelling like oil and vinegar, like recent sleep. How had he known I was there? What messenger roused him from his hyper-attentive dreams? One look at his condemning face sent me skittering back into the hard arms of bed and my spinning, kaleidoscopic thoughts.

But there was no sign of my pervasive father on the beach or in the water, and I tried to locate our towels on the vast belt of shoreline. I knew we’d been sitting near Jimmy Durante’s house, which I had noticed from the crest of the wave—a big white mansion, easy to spot, and Mr. Durante out on the porch in his wheelchair tucked under a huge dark umbrella, a daily summer scenario. The Durante house seemed far from where I was now, and I was amazed at having been hurled the length of a football field by just one monster wave. Squinting, I picked out our towels still lying flat and empty on the sand, my father’s leather huaraches splayed pigeon-toed at the foot of his Padres towel, my Josie and the Pussycats one candy-bright against the blond sand. There were figures in the deeper water near there, and I made my way south with long, slow-motion strides, jumping over the small ripples as they crashed at my calves. I had a straight shot down the beach—the little kids were hugging the shore, and the bigger ones with rubber rafts were out a little further. I liked the sucking sensation at my toes every time I stepped, and I developed a blurping, cockeyed rhythm as I marched in the wet sand.