Californios: a surf noir collection

By Jeff McElroy

“Jeff McElroy’s perfectly pitched prose sings like the surf that rolls and breaks over the beaches in most of these stories. The surfers, beach bums, migrant farm workers, and burned-out corporate drones that populate Californios are descendants of Kerouac and pilgrims in search of the perfect wave. We follow them along the ragged edge of the continent to places far from the glitter of Hollywood and deep inside the frailties of the human soul. In this impressive debut, McElroy takes us on a ride as sweet and smooth as words can carry us.”
Steve Heller - Author of The Automotive History of Lucky Kellerman, (Chelsea Green/Doubleday) and Chair, MFA in Creative Writing, Antioch University

"Jeff McElroy mines a rich, untapped vein of Californiana in this unique collection--sounds, smells, and textures of a California intimately, intensely known by all of its surfers and farmers, truck-drivers and migrant workers. This is a genuine, significant contribution to the literature of our coast and our culture."
Daniel Duane – Author of Caught Inside: A Surfer's Year on the California Coast (North Point Press)

“Every once in awhile someone comes along who recognizes that the tableau into which they have been dropped is unique. What Jeff has done, is to weave a creative tapestry that communicates his world with an honesty and innocence which informs and inspires the reader to take a sip of Californian culture. What is remarkable about that experience, is that in so doing, each reader will take away a view which will broaden their own explorations.”
David Pu'u – Internationally renown surf photographer, and contributor to Surfer Magazine, Surfing Magazine, The Surfer's Journal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff McElroy
• Release date: Nov 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301612017

Jeff McElroy

Author Jeff McElroy received his MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. He won First Place in the Writer's Digest Short Story Contest for "Brown Pride." His stories "The Tipsy Fox" and "Song of the Earth" were selected to represent the Antioch MFA Program at the 2008 and 2009 AWP Awards. "Goofyfoot" was adapted to film, screening at the Ventura, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, San Diego and Newport Beach Film Festivals, and winning the Audience Award for Best Dramatic Short at the Valley Film Festival in Hollywood. Jeff is a regular contributor to Wetsand.com, one of the largest surfing websites in the world. "Californios" is the first published collection of his short stories.

Book preview

Californios

a surf noir collection

by Jeff McElroy

Californios: A Surf Noir Collection

Published by Jeff McElroy at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Jeff McElroy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever including Internet usage, without written permission of the author.

Cover design by Jesse James Dickenson.

License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

The Old Dude

Highway 118

California Queen

Goofyfoot

Sit by my Fire

Hobo Jungle

Brown Pride

The Tipsy Fox

The Two Wise Men

A Conversation in San Jose

Get Wet

Pool Man

Song of the Earth

Watch Out for Sharks

Ojos de Oro

Timing Sets

Humqaq

The West is the Best

—Jim Morrison, The End

The Old Dude

The old surfer sat on a salt-bleached fold-out chair. The canvas seat sagged under him so his ass hung only an inch above the brown grass and flattened the weeds growing along the boardwalk. His grizzled face lurked deep in the hood of an old Baja sweater, the kind made of horse-blanket fabric that only smooths after decades of wear, decades of salt and sun and wind and sweat. His Ray-Bans reflected a bloody sunset, the islands like jagged wounds in the sky. The winter swell rolled in from the north, wrapping around the Point in predictable lines. The grommets and the hodads, the beginners and the pros, paddled for position, looking for the last wave that would bring them to shore with satisfaction.

His mutt, Woodstock, snoozed at the old dude’s barnacled feet. Once a chaser of seagulls and tails, now he knew the Zen of doing nothing; finding the shade on hot days, staying warm in the cold. Food came from the man in the chair, the man he’d seen and smelled every day for twelve years. Even on crowded days, when the hundred surfers in the water looked from shore like indistinguishable, bobbing seals, Woodstock knew which seal was his man. He whined and whimpered when the old dude rode a long one into the cove toward the pier.

The old dude sat so low in his chair that his tanned knees were at the same altitude as his head—five feet above sea level. The last drops of saltwater dripped from his full beard and soaked into the Mexican sweater. A Budweiser tallboy wrapped in a brown paper bag sat between his legs, nestled in the brittle canvas. A Harley rumbled into the parking lot behind him and fired off a few staccato reports causing a mess of seagulls to litter the sky, then pull together like iron filings at the magnetic dumpster. The old dude hadn’t moved for an hour.

His younger girlfriend slid out from the camper shell behind him, swung her tan legs off the tailgate, and lit a cigarette. She was 43, looked 25 from down the beach, but 50 up close with a smoker’s squint and brittle, bottle-blonde hair. She also wore a Baja sweater, teal faded to white. She spent the day stoned making jewelry in the camper shell and talking to her neighbors. She was the boardwalk darling, ogled by surfers, bikers, and veterans. But the flirting never got too serious because everyone knew she was with the old dude and that was that.

I fucking hit that shit like this! A blond surf rat arced his arms in front of him, palms out, to show his shaved-headed friend just how vertically he’d hit the lip of his last wave. They walked up the Point, wetsuits pulled halfway down, boards slung underarm. They nodded at the old dude as they passed between him and the sunset. His hood moved slowly.

Shit, I fuckin’… Their voices joined the sea static.

A Puerto Rican family pedaled toward the pier on a rented four-wheel bike. They were all big, white smiles and laughter. A little boy sat in a basket in front with chubby thighs splayed out like a horned hood ornament. His eyes met the old dude’s Ray Ban glint, saw his gray beard and burnt nose. Then he was gone.

His girlfriend finished her cigarette and stubbed it on the bumper, flecks of tobacco sifting to the bald pavement of the boardwalk parking lot. She leaned her head to the side and caught her long hair in both hands. She stroked it pensively and flattened it against her sweater. Then she hopped off the tailgate, fetched her baggy sweatpants from the truck, and pulled them over her pink bikini bottoms.

The Harley pirate was smoking whilst leaning against his bike. He made no secret of watching the girl’s ass as it had jiggled when she’d jumped off the tailgate, savoring every detail of her child-bearing hips before they disappeared under the sweats. She’d felt the gaze and didn’t care. The pirate was putting out his cigarette and trying to make something significant in his mind about the sunset before heading back inland.

The old dude lifted his beer into his hood and drank. He returned the tallboy to its groove. Woodstock rolled onto his side and one ear flopped open exposing a pink nautilus.

A large set rolled in and all the surfers paddled toward the horizon. The patient longboarders owned the first two waves of the set and rode them poetically, three to a wave, dipping and arcing. Then the shortboarders locked into the leftovers, pumping, snapping, cutting back. A few of them ended their rides with great flourish, launching into the air, busting their fins free, crashing into the whitewater. The sea static became a rumble, the round stones knocking a clattering fugue, the boardwalk itself vibrating. A German composition, a virtuous finale, a galloping ode, and then—calm.

A fertile whiff of ganja ghosted down the boardwalk, source unknown. The mutt growled low as a black&white sharked into the parking lot. The old dude closed his legs over the tallboy and burped. Everyone looked purposefully toward the sea, but the eyes on the backs of their heads were 20/20. The cop slowed his roll, a bicep, aviators. Two meth mouths scattered like fleas on rusty bicycles. Then the cop pulled out of the parking lot, and limbs relaxed. Someone bumped Come Together from a serious sub-woofer, and the ganja ghost haunted again.

The off-shore oil rigs flickered on the darkening horizon like floating Christmas trees. Boards thumped and scraped as surfers packed them into and on top of trucks and cars. Up and down along the boardwalk, the surfers balanced on one leg, towels wrapped around their hips, as they stretched out of their wetsuits. The old dude finished his beer and stood, soulfully shaking the last droplets into the weeds. He tossed the can into the camper shell and walked across the boardwalk to his longboard. Woodstock didn’t move his head, but the whites of his eyes grew larger as they followed the old dude. A little dog dashed along the sand and the Woodstock growled, still without moving his head.

The old dude’s barnacled fingers closed around the rails of the board and he lifted it over his head. The board was a pastiche of old resin and yellowed fiberglass cloth, sanded and smoothed in places, rough and worn in others. The board, like his woman, had appeared from the sea many years ago. The board, like the woman, had been stolen, lost, and broken, but always ended up finding its way back to the old dude. Because the old dude never went searching for anything more than waves, and he’d found long ago that the best way to find waves was to set up shop in one place and chill the fuck out. As the Duke once said, Wave come.

He eased the board into the back of the truck and lowered the camper shell door until it rested against the board. Then he pulled a shredded bungee cord from the door to the tailgate and gave it a pluck. At the squeak of the opening driver’s seat door, Woodstock jumped up and trotted to the truck. Only a few years earlier, he’d been able to leap inside, but now he placed his front paws on the floorboard and waited for the old dude to give his quivering hindquarters a lift. With the mutt onboard, the old dude walked back to the boardwalk to find the girl. He saw her a few cars south, laughing wildly with the gutterpunks who’d ambled into town the week before. Gutterpunks, Sunshine Kids, California Travelers, whatever you called them, you could be sure that they had bad schwag, bad teeth, and no money. Young as hell, too. Baby faces hardened by drugs and dust.

The girl had a fondness for the Sunshine Kids that the old dude attributed to the loss of her own son, Carson, many years ago. She’d raised him the best she knew how, but he started getting high early, and one day, when he was fifteen, he just took off. The police put him down as a missing teen. The first year, she still had the hope that Carson would show up at the front door and she’d hug him and yell at him and tell him not to do that to his mother’s heart again. By the second year, she started dropping weight, and she was already skinny to begin with. As the years stretched towards a decade, she tried all means of escape, from drugs and alcohol to suicide. But her suicide attempts were never the real deal and she knew this because, even as she swallowed dangerous amounts of pills, she was still hoping Carson might push through the doors.

As he watched her goof with the ratty kids down the boardwalk, he recalled the first time he’d seen her on this same beach with little Carson. Goddamn she’d been a looker, tiny fucking yellow string bikini, blonde hair sun-kissed white, and an ass that wouldn’t quit. She’d lie in the sand under the palm trees all day while Carson ran around on the rocks chasing crabs and digging holes. The old dude would drive down from the construction site every afternoon and back his work truck into a parking spot, always noticing her in his rear-view. Every dude on the boardwalk gave her a shot: surf lessons offered, teasing, hooting. Hell, a few dudes even tried the roundabout approach by befriending Carson first in order to get to her. But she just smiled and smoked and read her romance novels with corny covers.

Because she’d seen it all in Nevada running with a Hell’s Angel. He knocked her up in a motel room in Carson City and rumbled down the highway, gone. Another Hell’s Angel felt sorry for her and took her pregnant belly west to Ventura on the back of his motorcycle. He stuck around and promised her all kinds of shit. When Carson was born and she handed him to the Hell’s Angel, a distant look fell on his mustachioed face like a shadow. He was gone the next day.

From behind her heart-shaped shades on the simmering sand, she’d sized up her suitors. She went on a few dates with money. A few with looks. But her wisdom was too strong; she saw in men’s eyes the seed of evasiveness, from a simple distant glance or nervous blink. It never made her angry; she was beyond all that. She played the ones with money just enough to keep her and Carson fed, clothed, and sheltered. Got a few vacations out of it, too. Cabo, Costa Rica, Kauai. But she’d had her eye on the old dude (who wasn’t so old back then) from the get-go.

Because he had an ease, both on land and in the water. Especially in the water. She’d watch him over the yellowed pages of her novel as he sat up on his board, further out than anyone else. He never glanced back at shore. His long brown hair sometimes began to dry between rides. Once, when she was stoned, he reminded her of one of those Easter Island statues, stoically staring west. A full minute before a lump appeared on the horizon, he was already knee-paddling outside, long arms like gull wings dipping into the water. The wave always appeared, came to meet him like an old friend. He’d sling his board around and paddle gracefully until the wave scooped him and his feet crept out from beneath him.

He never forced anything. Never took more than the wave offered. If the face opened, he dipped and climbed. When the wave dwindled, he cut back to the source and banked off the foam. The other surfers had their own ideas about how a wave should be ridden, and sometimes their styles were beautiful to behold. But they could also appear awkward, unpleasing to the eye, jerking movements, hunched posture, stinkbug stance—unbalance. Because, somewhere in the beginning of their surfing lives, they’d formed the notion that waves were to be appropriated the same way trees are felled to make houses and oil is slurped to drive cars. Waves were out there to be stamped, conquered, tamed. Not so the old dude. His spirit animal was the dolphin, an organism in its rightful place, gliding within the given milieu. He balanced and moved from areas of high pressure to low, and, in doing so, was always one with the wave and wave with him.

He caught her the way he caught waves; with patient intensity. It was one of those primo summer days along the Point, when warm currents off Mexico brought bathtub water temps and the chariot pulled slower than ever, crisping sand and flesh alike in its shallow arc west. Aztec sun god spirit coursed through everyone’s warm breasts up and down the coast. The air and water were pregnant with the solar energy, a quiet shimmering, and the islands seemed close. At the siesta hour, when the respiration of the high-tide sea whooshed over cobblestones, the old dude sat alone in the water, bobbing on his log. The girl, recently lulled to sleep by the scattered calls of seagulls and distant ranchera music from a Mexican party inland, dreamed a dream she’d never forget and would never tell anyone, not even the old dude.

In her dream, a great bird of fire rose from behind the Channel Islands. It rose to its own fiery wing beats, larger than the island. Its heart was the sun, transparent, yet solid, burning in flux. The bird turned its head to profile and opened its beak with no sound. The sea darkened with a billion tomols (Chumash canoes), browned bodies paddling hard towards the horizon, towards the electric hologram of the bird. As they pulled away from the coast, she realized she was being left behind. Little Carson continued building strange sandcastles, very intricate with seaglass windows and shell ornaments. She knew they were in danger and that the land was crumbling behind them. But she couldn’t move from her towel. When