The Gold Coast

17

Tashi Nakamura gets to Jim’s writing class just before starting time. Tashi’s interest in writing is minimal, but Jim’s classes depend on enrollment for survival, and this semester it looked like there might not be enough students to keep the class going. So Tashi decided to sign up. It was a typical Tashi act; he has a streak of generosity that few know about, because of his shyness and poverty.

Jim arrives ten minutes late, just as his students are packing up to leave. Instantly Tashi can see that Jim is upset about something; he’s flushed, his mouth is a tight line, he slams his daypack down on his desktop and glares at it. Stands there pulling himself together.

After a while he takes a deep breath, begins the night’s lecture in a monotone. His explanations of comma use, shaky at the best of times, are now almost incoherent. In the middle of them he stops, veers off into one of his historical jags. “So the Irvine Ranch, which began as the county’s only force for conservation, ended up by selling out to a corporation that leased all its land to developers, who made it into a replica of the northern half of the county, ignoring all the lessons they should have learned and grading the hills with a complete disregard for the land. In fact our fine college is part of that heritage. And this development came at the time when the ballistic defense was being put into orbit, so the arms industry expanded into this new land and increased a hold on the county that was already completely dominant!”

Jim’s other students blink at him, completely unimpressed. In fact they’re looking rather mutinous. Most have taken the class to get by the minimal writing test necessary to graduate Trabuco, and they are impatient with Jim’s digressions. Learning to write is hard enough as it is. One of the more aggressive men breaks into Jim’s monologue to complain. “Listen here, Mr. McPherson, I still don’t have the slightest idea when to use ‘that’ or ‘which,’ or which one goes with commas or how to use the commas.” Really disgusted about it, too.

Jim, flustered and still really upset about something, Tash can’t guess what, tries to return to the dropped explanation. He makes a hash of it. The students are looking openly rebellious. Rules of punctuation are not Jim’s forté anyway; he’s more an inspirational teacher than a technical one. But it’s a student body looking for rules and regulations, and they are getting angry at him as he flounders.

“The example you used with me,” Tash says in an ominously silent pause, “is definition versus added information. You use ‘that’ to help define, like in, ‘On the day that it rained.’ And there’s never a comma there. ‘Which’ is for additional information—’Last Friday, which was rainy, turned out well.’ And there you use commas to bracket the interjected phrase.” Several students are nodding, and a relieved Jim is quickly writing examples on the blackboard, screech! Wow, got to watch that chalk, Jimbo. He’s definitely not all there tonight. What’s the problem? “That’s how you put it when I asked you last week,” Tash adds, and begins scribbling the examples in his own notebook.

Then when class is over, Jim packs up swiftly and is out the door and gone before Tash even has time to stand. Too upset to talk about it? Now that is unusual.

Tash shakes his head as he leaves the concrete bunkers above the Arroyo Trabuco condos. Too bad. Well, maybe he’ll find out about it later, after Jim’s had a chance to calm down. Meanwhile he can’t worry about it; he’s got to get ready to go surfing.

Yes, it is just after ten P.M., and Tashi Nakamura is going to go home and eat and do a little carbrain repair, and then drive down to Newport Beach and go surfing. This is his latest innovation; after all, the waves are jammed with hordes of surfers by day, and so—think about it—if you want to avoid them, there’s no choice but to surf at night.

All his friends laughed themselves silly at this idea. It had the trademark Tashi characteristics, following a solution out to a logical but crazy end; Tashi, Jim said, just didn’t believe in reductio ad absurdum. And they laughed themselves sick. Ahhh, hahahaha.

But did they ever try it? No, people tend to judge new ideas without actually testing them, and so they remain on track all their lives, a part of the great machine. That’s fine with Tash, because among other things, it means he can have the nighttime waves all to himself.

The trick is to do it when there is a full moon, like tonight. So at 3:30 A.M. Tash parks in Newport Beach, walks down the dark, quiet street, surfboard under his arm. Curious how unanimously diurnal people are. Between the fashionable beachfront condos, with their walls of dark glass facing the sea. Onto the broad expanse of sand, milky in the moonlight, lifeguard stands looming on the bright surface like ritual statuary.

Stone groins extend into the water every four blocks; they’re there to help keep the trucked-in sand on the beach. Just off their sea ends waves break, faint white in the darkness. That’s another trick to night surfing: find a regular point break with a clear orienting marker. Each groin starts a left break when there’s a south swell, as there is tonight; and they’re easy to see. Perfect.

Tashi waxes his board, steps down to the water. He arrived in his wetsuit, so sweat reduces by a fraction the room for seawater. Still, wading in and strapping the board’s leash onto his ankle, the soup surges up his legs and gives him the familiar shock. Cold! Lovely salt stimulation. He shoves the board into a broken wave, jumps chest first onto it and paddles out, puffing walruslike at the rush of chill water down the wetsuit’s neck. Pull of the backwash, the rise into a wave almost breaking, slap of water into his face, the clean cold salt taste of it; he takes in a big mouthful of ocean, sloshes it around in his mouth till the taste fills him. Swallows some to get it down his throat. He’s back in Mother Ocean, the original medium, the evolutionary home of the ancient ancestor species that he now feels cheering wildly, down there in his brainstem. Yeah!

Outside the break, paddling with smooth lazy strokes. Pretty much directly out from the 44th Street groin, his favorite. Newport Beach now seems a long strip of white sand backed by hundreds of toy blocks. As usual there’s no wind, and the water is perfectly glassy, like dawn glass only better. A liquid heavier than water.

Seeing the waves. It is a bit of a problem, naturally. But the moon’s millions of squiggled reflections rise and fall on the swells outside, making a pattern. And close up the black wall of a wave is hard to miss. It’s a good sharp left tonight, lips pitching out and dropping over with clean reports as they hit.

Tashi digs the board in, paddles to match the speed of a point about to break, pushes up and stands in one fluid thoughtless motion. Now he’s propelled along without further effort, it’s merely a matter of balancing his weight in a way that will keep him moving ahead of the break. There’s a kind of religious rapture in feeling this movement: as the universe is an interlocking network of wave motions, hitting the stride of this particular wave seems to click him into the universal rhythm. Nothing but gravitational effects, slinging him along. Tuning fork buzzing, after a tap of God’s fingernail.

A wall in the wave that Tash doesn’t see knocks him over, however, and it’s underwater night soup time, an eerie experience of cold wet zero-gee tumbling, up to the roiling moonwhite surface, where a million bubbles are hissing out their lives and popping a fine salt rain into the air just above the water. Tug on leash, grab board, get on, paddle hard to get over the next wave before it breaks. Success, barely. Back over to the point off the groin. Try another one.

It’s a pas de deux with Mother Ocean at her most girlish and playful. Quickly Tashi gets into a rhythm, the interval between crests is known to his body more than his eyes, and sometimes he takes off on a wave without even looking at it. He wonders if the blind could surf, concludes it would be possible.

Well. Of course waves are variable; like snowflakes, there are no two the same. And in the dark they bring a lot of surprises, sudden wall-offs, unexpected bowls, backwash ripples and so forth, which catch Tash off guard and knock him down. No big deal, it’s interesting, a challenge. But the neat thing is that about the time he is getting tired of the unexpected variable dumping him, the stars in the east dim, and the sky grows blue. The water is quick to soak up the sky’s color, as always. Tash finds himself skimming over a velvet blue like the sky in Jim’s orange crate posters, a pure, intense, glossy, rich, blue blue. Wow. And he can see a lot more of the wave’s surface. It’s so glassy that he looks at one smooth wall about to crunch him and decides he must need a haircut: wild-haired guy grinning back at him like an Oriental Neptune, surfing inside the wave like the dolphins do. Who knows, maybe it was Neptune.

The best part of the day. A renewable miracle: always so astonishing, this power of the ocean to resist humans. Here he lives in one of the most densely populated places in the world, and all he has to do is swim a hundred yards offshore and he’s in a pure wilderness, the city nothing but a peculiar backdrop. Wildlife refuge, and him the wildlife.

Not only that, but the tide is going out and the waves are getting hollower and hollower, little four-foot tubes tossed into existence for the five seconds necessary to stall back into them, so that he can clip along in a spinning blue cylinder that provides swirling floor walls and roof, with a waterfall fringe at the open end, leading back out into the world. Might as well be in a different dimension when you’re in the tube, it is such a wonderful feeling. Tubed, man! How tubular!

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.

Sandy notices Erica’s stare and Tashi’s discomfort under it, and says, “Last week I made a connection with my supplier at Monsanto San Gabriel, and I was tracking back home with about three gallons of MDMA on the passenger seat, when I ran into a Highway Patrol spot-check point—”

“Jesus, Sandy!” Erica purses her mouth.

“I know. It was one of those mechanical checks, to make sure all my track points were functional, which they were. But meanwhile one of the Chippies walks over to me and looks in, right at the container. He says, ‘What’s that?’”

“Sandy!” Erica cries, scolding him for getting into such a situation.

“Well, what could I do? I told him it was olive oil.”

“You’re kidding!”

“No, I said I worked for a Greek restaurant in Laguna and that this was a whole lot of olive oil. And there was so much of it there, he couldn’t imagine that it would be anything illegal! So he just nodded and let me go.”

“Sandy, sometimes I can’t believe you.”

Tash agrees. “You should be more careful. What if he had asked to taste it?”

After Sandy and Erica have left to get back to work, Tash operates on a circuit board and shakes his head, recalling Sandy’s tale. Sandy’s dealing is getting a little crazier all the time. For a while there he was talking about making a bundle, investing it, and retiring. He might have, too; but then his father’s liver failed after a lifetime of abuse, and since then Sandy has been paying for regeneration treatments in Dallas, Mexico City, Toronto, Miami Beach.… Radically expensive stuff, and Sandy’s been pushing hard for almost a year now, about to untrack under the stresses of his schedule. Only his closest friends know why; everyone else assumes it’s just Sandy’s manic personality, magnified by the effects of his products. Well, that might be part of it, actually. A tough situation.

Tash sighs. Sandy, Jim. Abe too. Everyone in the machine. Even if you aren’t you are.