Surferboy

THE DROP

THE little shop smelled of fruity surf wax and factory-fresh rubber and neoprene. It was so jammed with surfboards and wetsuits and dacron-polyester surfwear that you could barely walk through the place without brushing up against something. Flipping through a surf magazine with his thonged feet on the glass counter was a guy wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of yellow nylon trunks with scalloped slits in the sides. He had bleached-blond hair and bleached-blond eyebrows and a bleached-blond mustache and the hair on his legs stood out from his baked brown skin like a stubborn culture of white fuzz. We knew him. Or at least his name. We'd browsed through here a couple times before and heard him being called "Flea."

"Hiyadoon," he said.

"Good," said Jim. "We need a couple boards."

"New ones?"

"Used."

"Got plenny of those," said the Flea, kicking his feet down and scaling his magazine beneath the counter. "Whujya have in mind?"

"Something progressive," said Jim.

"Progressive?" said the Flea. "Progressive compared to what?"

Jim and I exchanged looks. I kept my mouth shut. Before entering the shop he'd told me to be cool and let him do the talking - you couldn't let these Malibu locals know you were a beginner or else they'd rip you off major.

"Uh, like, you know," said Jim uneasily. "Something . state-of-the-art."

The Flea gave him an unblinking deadpan.

"Yeah man, I like get your idea and all, but couldya be a little more specific? I mean, ya wunna amp or ya lookin' for trim or what?"

Jim mulled that one over. If he knew the difference between amp and trim then he was a better man than me.

"Amp," he ventured.

"Ampage," quoth the Flea, who slapped his thongs over to a stand of boards and pulled out a lilac-colored specimen with a white deck emblazoned with a rainbow comber, the surf shop's logo. "Here's a primo six-six. Twinfin swallowtail with fluted wings and good laminar flow for quick water release." He tilted the board Jim's way. "So ya might wunna look at that."

Jim took it but didn't seem too pleased. He'd heard that for your first board you needed something over seven feet - good laminar flow notwithstanding.

"You got something a little longer?"

"I thought ya wanted to amp."

"I do."

"So like give me a little help, dude, what exactly you lookin' for?"

"Something over seven feet."

"All you care about is length?" said the Flea. "I mean wutchya gonna do, surf the thing or turn it into a coffee table? There's like other stuff involved. What's the board ya got now?"

I glanced over at Jim in his T-shirt with the words SURF INSTRUCTOR WAIKIKI BEACH splashed across the chest. He didn't have a board. Jim Kalahani, full-blooded Hawaiian, but not a full-fledged surfer yet.

"It was blue," I said with quick inspiration.

"It's not blue anymore?" demanded the Flea.

"No, it's still blue," I said, "but he sold it a while back."

"Right," said Jim.

The Flea looked at us as if we'd just stated our firm belief that Hang Ten was some ancient Chinese philosopher.

"And I'm looking for trim," I announced.

"Trim," muttered the Flea.

He scanned the rack and drew out a longer, slightly thinner board with the same rainbow logo. He rattled off its specs - "Seven-three, rounded pin, solid glass job, no stress marks" - then gripped the board with both hands and made a show of drilling his thumbs into its underside. Nothing happened.

"Ya see?"

"Looks good."

"So there's that," he said handing me the board.

I cast my unschooled eye over it. I knew next to nothing about surfboards, and what information I did have was confused. I was aware for instance that the fin steered the board but I had somehow got it fixed in my mind that its raked-back form functioned as a shark decoy - that a shark coming across it would think it was another shark and split. (Why a shark would be swimming on its back, I hadn't got around to asking myself.)

"How much is it?"

"Hunnert bucks," said the Flea.

"Sold," I said.

"And one-ten for the swallow," he said, indicating Jim's board.

"All right," said Jim.

We reached for our wallets.

"And I guess you'll be needing a leash," said the Flea to Jim, "since ya prolly sold it with your board."

Jim bought one; I didn't since of course my "old board" would have already had a leash.

"How about wax?" suggested the Flea. "Water's gettin' warmer, gonna need some summer wax."

We bought a few bars.

"And wetsuits? Vests are real good for summer," said the Flea. "Prevent chest rash and whatnot. Got a couple here that're real light and limber . "

We purchased two Body Glove zip-fronts, then escaped before he could offer us a week of start-up surfing lessons.

We strapped our boards to the racks on Jim's car and took off down Pacific Coast Highway. The sky was metallic blue, a dazzling sunlight edged everything in gold, and the inrushing air tickled our nostrils with the salt tang of the ocean. It felt good to be driving beachside with our own set of wheels and boards on top. Up until then Jim and I had always hitched rides to the beach with his father who worked as bartender at a Malibu seaview restaurant called the Tonga Lei. Summer mornings we'd leave behind the muggy swelter of the San Fernando Valley with Mr. Kalahani at the wheel and ride down Las Virgenes Road through the olive-brown hills that doubled for Korea in the television series M*A*S*H, and Jim always kept the radio tuned to KMET which featured a surf report at 9:00 a.m. that started at the Mexican border and made its way up the coast. This is the Ocean Breeze Surf Shop in San Diego came the drawling deviated-septum surfer voice. Today we got a low-pressure system making for some hotdoggy three-to-five-foot surf with occasional larger sets. A slight grit taking the bloom off that morning glass but still very workable and can only get better with the low . Welcome to the space world of cosmic surfing, earthlings, this is Tamarack Mack's in Carlsbad. Got some solar cruelty in the offing and it's hottin' up in the water too, some grinding overhead barrels that might be hazardous to the health of the Surgeon General but they're just what the surf doc ordered . Roger that, Carlsbad, this is Paradise Surfboards in Newport Beach and we got some Orange County juice pumpin' in - a clean swell outta the southwest that's just startin' to blaze. I give it six on the fun-o-meter - six foot and hollow! Awhooo! .

Arriving at the Tonga Lei, Mr. Kalahani would start by polishing glasses while Jim and I caught the bus on PCH and rode it north to Zuma Beach, bellyboards braced between our knees. Jim had once rented a surfboard for the day at Waikiki and I'd picked up rudimentary bodysurfing on family outings to Santa Monica Beach, but it was Zuma where we got our first real lessons in wave-riding. Here we learned how to judge the swells, time a takeoff, and keep cool on wipeouts as we got tossed around like gnats in a highspeed blender. After swallowing our limit of saltwater we'd emerge from the surf and pick our way through all the dead jellyfish and kids digging for sandcrabs and then flop onto our towels before switching to our backs and staying propped on our elbows while watching the beads of water dry on our chests and breathing an air spiked with the fragrance of suntan oil as tinny transistors sounded from neighboring blankets and loudmouth mothers warned their children not to go in the water if they'd eaten the potato salad in the past half-hour.

After a while we'd return to the Tonga Lei. Arriving there with bellyboards under our arms and sand still caking our ankles, we'd pass between carved tiki gods into a chill dark lobby and grope our way through to the lounge, its thatch ceiling hung with exotic lamps and its walls decorated with South Sea artifacts. Propped on the bamboo-trimmed bar were middle-aged men in cardigan sweaters rolled to mid-forearm and scooping salted peanuts out of iridescent abalone shells and sipping vivid drinks with parasols and plastic monkeys hanging from the rims. Stationed...