Our glorious disaster!
On June 12 the book Cocaine + Surfing: A Love Story! Goes on
sale. It is my mission to
get it onto The New York Times bestsellers list only to have the
words “cocaine + surfing: love story” there in print right when the
non-endemic masses are excited about the Olympics, wave pools, etc.
In order to get it there I need you to preorder a copy. Might you
do that for me? Could you find it in your heart? What if I publish
the book’s prologue three weeks before it comes out?
Here you go!
Click here for
America. Click here for
Australia.
It is cold outside, and gray. Heavy-sweater
weather. Maybe even thin down-filled jacket paired with stocking
cap weather and it smells like cow. Like manure, wet feed and sour
milk which only makes sense since we are in Lemoore, California the
official “Home of Cows, More Cows, and Chas Smith’s Damned
Ex-Wife.”
Just kidding. My damned ex-wife is from neighboring Visalia, but
all of inland central California is basically the same thing and a
place I swore I’d never return. Then Kelly Slater went and created
the perfect wave here.
Yes, the world’s most celebrated surfer decided, as he neared
retirement, to shake a tanned fist at God and man-make a
legitimately perfect wave using some patented plow in what used to
be a water ski lake in what used to be my damned ex-wife’s general
neighborhood some hundred miles away from the ocean, all cow stinky
and gray.
A wave that barrels properly. That drives down the length of the
green lake and barrels perfectly every single time. Nothing like
this has ever been done. Previous wave pools create a surf that
dribbles along in an embarrassing, weak, low-energy kind of way.
Kelly’s fires the imagination. Even surfers who travel the world
riding the ocean’s best waves are clamoring for an invite.
“Surf Ranch” is what they are calling it and it is the jewel in
the World Surf League’s crown. Surfing as a “sport” has always been
hampered by nature. By God. Sometimes waves show up. Sometimes they
don’t. And how is a sporting event supposed to be held in such
randomness? The football field doesn’t change and neither does the
basketball court, so the World Surf League purchased the Surf Ranch
property and its patented plow technology from Kelly Slater in
order to equalize the arena. To make surfing a proper sport. And so
the new World Surf League CEO invited me and twelve crusty surf
journalists and surf photographers up to surf it and witness the
future.
She is trying to understand what we are, God bless her, trying
to figure out what makes our hearts’ beat. The last CEO, Mr. Paul
Speaker, came from the National Football League and was a dipshit
and refused each of my impassioned pleas for an interview, so I
made fun of him every day in the surf media until he got fired. The
new CEO, Ms. Sophie Goldschmidt, came from the Women’s National
Basketball Association and seems to be taking an honest shot at
knowing what this is all about, and so here I am in the cold and
gray and stink listening to her give us all a warm
introduction.
“I’m so glad you could all be with us here today,” she says in a
proper British accent. “Everyone is going to have so much fun, I
trust, and this safety briefing will ensure just that. We are very
proud of what we’ve built.” She is tall, pretty, with eyes that
look too innocent for all of this and a smile that looks too pure
and I don’t know if I will be able to muster the internal strength
to make fun of her every day. “Before we begin, though, I think it
is only right to recognize that today is the day Andy Irons passed
away.”
The room is silent.
“I never had the privilege of meeting him, though I know many of
you knew him very well, and as I learn about surfing’s history it
is clear what an impact he had.” Eleven of the twelve crusty surf
journalists and surf photographers keep their eyes down. I look
sideways at my best Australian pal/biz partner who looks like he is
in a bad spot, having had four or maybe six too many whiskey sodas
the previous night. She clears her throat after what feels too
long, “And now allow me to introduce you to our head of water
safety…”
The head of water safety is a handsome man who tells us not to
screw around, but I’m thinking about Andy Irons and not the
dislocated shoulder I’m going to get in two hours by screwing
around.
Andy Irons.
The three-time champ from Hawaii died November 2, 2010, alone in
a Dallas hotel room from what the county’s medical office concluded
was cardiac arrest due to a severe blockage of a heart artery and
acute mixed drug ingestion including Xanax, methadone, and
metabolites of cocaine. He was thirty-two years old.
The causes of his death surprised no one in this cloistered
world. Every crusty surf journalist and surf photographer in this
room had either gone big with him or caught him in full pin-pricked
pupil, incessant prattle mode. He was a giant character but also
not an outlier and while his death was an utter tragedy it was not
necessarily a shock.
Drugs and surfing, especially cocaine, felt synonymous with
professional surfing those eight-odd years ago. It still does. It’s
always snowing in Orange County, or so they say, and I look at
Sophie. She is listening intently to the head of water safety at a
perfect man-made wave, trying to turn this professional surfing
into a proper sport while also respecting its past, God bless her,
but as long as I’m around that ain’t happening. Surfing, at its
core, is an unruly, fouled, smutty disaster. Its past littered with
felons, smugglers, addicts, narcissists and creeps. Its present
defined by crusty surf journalists and surf photographers. Its
future a certain disaster but it is our disaster.
Our glorious disaster.
