Open Thread: Comment live as Donald Trump’s
number two (to be named later) Pence takes on Joe Biden’s inspired
pick, the exciting Kamala Harris, in the one and only
Vice-Presidential debate!
By Chas Smith
A battle royale!
But we must now turn our full attention back to
politics. The lessers amongst us believe that the dance of
the gods doesn’t belong in surfing but we know better. We know that
surfing is the only place to discuss important political matters
with a reasonable tone.
And how excited are you?
This is the one, and only, Vice Presidential debate pitting
Donald J. Trump’s Pence against Kamala Harris.
I’m going to be honest here. Pence is so dull that I forgot his
first name and refuse to search for it now as I am a surf
journalist worth is salt, not bending to easy Google tricks.
Kamala Harris, on the other hand, is a rising star in her party
but failed, miserably, when she herself tried to run for
President.
Life according to surfing’s only bonafide
rock-n-roller Michael Tomson: “To hell with the consequences!”
By Chas Smith
Godspeed, Michael Tomson.
Surfing icon Michael Tomson was put into an
induced coma over a week ago after suffering a seizure at home. He
has not come out of it and, yesterday, was taken off
life-support.
Damn it all.
We hurried our memorials up because I
wanted Michael to read them. I pictured him lounging in a hospital
bed, morphine dripping, scrolling through the stories, the
comments, with that Cheshire cat grin spreading across his
face.
He had the best Cheshire cat grin.
I wanted him to feel his impact, his influence. Chuckle at the
snarky asides, hot takes. Absorb the bookends of a life fabulously
lived. To see the path he hacked through surfing’s manicured
garden.
But we were too late.
Great historian
Matt Warshaw wrote that Michael Tomson will be
remembered in three parts: Fearlessly charging Pipeline, Gotcha and
cocaine but I disagree.
He was, is, surfing’s only bonafide rock-n-roller and I called
his great friend, one-time Gotcha designer, Jim Zapala to hope that
Michael might have been able to read his headstone.
“No, man, I wish. He never came out of the coma. The doctors
thought he would die last night but he’s still holding on, stubborn
bastard. But it’s over. I knew this moment would come, he hasn’t
been in the best physical shape for a while, but now that it’s
actually here it…
…it’s hard. I was digging around, yesterday, for one of the
first Gotcha logos I came up with. It had some cheesy 80s font but
also had Michael charging Pipeline in the ‘O’ and the phrase ‘To
hell with the consequences’ below. That was him…
…that was him.”
To hell with the consequences.
Michael Tomson will be remembered singularly for never, not
ever, pulling a punch.
Stories of his generosity, his not-yet-fully appreciated
writing, his fashion anarchy, his ability to Pipeline will
certainly flow and I have no doubt, when the dust settles, he will
be carved into surfing’s Mount Rushmore between Duke Kahanamoku and
a pack of Laird Hamilton’s SuperFood Coffee Creamer but, until
then, pour one out for an icon.
He was what we hope to be. What we are generally not.
All-fucking-in.
Godspeed, Michael Tomson.
Godspeed.
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Award-winning filmmaker Stephen Gaghan
tapped to write, direct cinematic version of William Finnegan’s
Barbarian Days!
By Chas Smith
"A beautiful addiction, a demanding course of
study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life."
But where are you on the book-to-film debate? A
purist who believes the written word should never be polluted by
celluloid? An illiterate who foregoes ink and paper, waiting for
the pichures to moov? Somewhere in between?
Me?
I love when books get turned into film so much. I love when good
books get turned into bad films, when bad books get turned into
good films and especially, especially when an iconic writer is
interpreted by an iconic director.
Which is why I was very excited to read yesterday that William
Finnegan’s Pulitzer Prize winning Barbarian Days shall be
written and directed by Syriana’s own Stephan Gaghan.
Oscar-winning Traffic scribe Stephen Gaghan will write and
direct Barbarian Days for Amazon Studios, based on William
Finnegan’s bestselling memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. The
book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016.
Gaghan will produce alongside Ted Hope, who will produce
under his multi-picture deal with the studio. Finnegan will also be
executive producer.
Barbarian Days tells the story of Finnegan’s lifelong love
affair with surfing. He describes it as an obsession, a beautiful
addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous
pastime, a way of life. The tale starts when the author was an
8-year old kid who caught the surf bug.
Exciting but who do you think should play young Finnegan? What
about slightly older Finnegan?
Swinging 70s G-Land Finnegan?
I think maybe James Franco.
Is he still cancelled?
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Incredible drone footage: All beaches
around Ballina closed after former world #1 Matt Wilkinson bumped
by large bull shark or great white, “If it got any closer it
would’ve been sucking my toes!”
By Derek Rielly
"The shark had kind of come at me from in front and
then went around the back and had a little go at my legs…"
At around three this afternoon, the former world number
one Matt Wilkinson felt, but didn’t see, a wild splash near his
feet while paddling at Sharpes Beach, a lonely stretch of
water between Ballina and Lennox.
A clubby drone operator, who filmed the encounter, told Wilko
via the little chopper’s speaker that there was a dangerous shark
in the area.
“The shark had kind of come at me from in front
and then went around the back and had a little go at my legs, then
last minute decided that my feet stunk or something and turned
away,” Wilko told ABC North
Coast. “It was probably about eight-foot long, it
looked like it was a few feet longer than me…I’m feeling pretty
lucky. We get to see sharks a little bit out in the surf but
that was definitely my closest encounter and I hope it doesn’t get
any closer than that.”
Comparing his encounter with Mick Fanning’s famous episode in
2015, the newly wed thirty two
year old said,“His one was a little bit more wild than
mine, but I guess I got to feel that weird, heart-sinking but lucky
feeling when I saw that footage. But I’m still here in one
piece and I’ll live to surf another day.”
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Long Read: Michael Tomson from Cocaine and
Surfing, a Sordid History of Surfing’s Greatest Love Affair: “I can
hear a whistling in his nose where a septum once was…”
By Chas Smith
MT was always unapologetic. He always seemed like
if people cared about his lifestyle, then that was their problem,
not his.
It really is a wonder that cocaine transitioned from the
disco dance floor to the go-go eighties without losing any
steam.
Gaining steam, even.
Becoming a necessary component of yuppie life alongside skinny
piano ties and giant mobile phones. It somehow didn’t retain any
disco taint—the wacky hair and glittery pantsuits, the Earth, Wind
& Fire—even though it was so closely associated with the era.
Maybe it was because Ollie North had flooded the market, making
it cheaper and more accessible than ever and further farm crises in
South America kept coca as the most lucrative crop. Maybe because
yuppies needed to wake up earlier to make all that fast money and
go to bed later, after 11:00 p.m. reservations at
Dorsia.
Maybe because cocaine paired with rayon even better than it did
with polyester. Whatever the case, by the mid-1980s the cocaine
market was absolutely saturated.
It was a time of greed, Gordon Gecko, and Gotcha — Michael
Tomson’s surf fashion label that turned the industry into an actual
force.
Michael was born in Durban, South Africa, to European parents,
and had surfed professionally during the 1970s, most notably in
Hawaii, where he was part of a brash pack that changed the approach
to the world’s most famous wave. He was fearless at the Banzai
Pipeline. Aggressive, raw, and powerful in his approach. Up to that
time, Pipe was considered a goofyfoot’s domain since they rode
facing the wave. Michael, and a small crew of Australians and his
cousin Shaun, showed that it could be ridden just as gorgeously
backside as frontside.
Professional surfing couldn’t hold all of Michael’s attention,
though, and toward the late 1970s he became a full-fledged surf
journalist as well as a par-time competitor, starting his own
magazine in Durban and becoming an assistant editor at
Surfing in America. The same Surfing where I was once
a retained writer and editor-at-living-large. The same
Surfing that is now dead.
Michael knew, always knew, that surfing wasn’t for everyone and
couldn’t be marketed to the masses—at least not as a sport. He
wrote, “Potential surf fans in Ohio and Michigan want a
blood-busting winner, one they can understand because they can see
the bastard who gets from A to B first.” He also knew, however,
that professionalism in an of itself was death. That to reform
surfing in the shape of Ohio and Michigan was the end.
* * *
And I wonder why Michael Tomson moved to San Clemente as
I drive past Salt Creek, past Dana Point, past Capistrano
Beach. Past Audi A4, Audi A8, Audi Q3, and even the odd
Audi Allroad. He was Laguna Beach. He defined the city as much as
the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. More than the Pageant of the
Masters, Laguna’s sad art festival where people dress as classical
works of art and stand around like dimwits while even bigger
dimwits “ooh” and “aah” at the misbegotten majesty.
He told me the story once before. “I was living in San Clemente.
I remember Bob McKnight, from Quiksilver, was pissed off at me
because I was starting Gotcha. Anyway, San Clemente seemed too far
south, so I said to my friend, ‘Let’s just drive north a bit and
see what there is.’ Driving through Laguna, I looked up and
thought, ‘This place looks cool.’ So we pull over. That afternoon
we found a house and that’s where we actually formed Gotcha. That’s
how it happened. Over time, Laguna became THE surf town. Really.
And it is. It’s the center of the industry.”
That was in 1979, and Gotcha set off like a rocket. I remember
seeing it in the surf shops where I loitered as a petrified
Oregonian youth. The fluorescent colors, the cuts, the boldness,
the half-fish /half-man Gotcha logo. It was all so cool, so
impossibly cool, and I knew I didn’t belong so I would buy cheap
knockoff brands like Pirate Surf and past-their-prime Op and Maui &
Sons instead. My cousins down in California wore Gotcha and sassed
their parents.
I remember seeing the Gotcha ads in the few surf magazines I
would buy: Full double-pagers featuring some kook on the first page
in black and white. A bald old man holding a brown paper sack. A
skinny kid with a tucked-in T-shirt and an egg-shaped head. Two
very fat kids wearing tank tops. The words IF YOU DON’T SURF, DON’T
START printed beneath their sad frames. The second page featuring
some amazing Gotcha team rider, always fit, always tan, always
totally ripping. And the words IF YOU SURF, NEVER STOP.
My mom thought the ads were mean-spirited. She thought the surf
magazines were morally bankrupt in general, with their
objectification of women and glorification of a viscerally shallow
pursuit, but it was Gotcha’s sneering “get lost” that got her the
worst. She would get angry at me for pinning them on my bedroom
walls, and she was right. They were mean-spirited but that is what
made Gotcha the dream. It was exclusive, and you weren’t invited,
and I wasn’t invited, but son of a bitch I wanted to be as I
lounged in my tiny Coos Bay bedroom. I wanted to be more than
anything in the entire world and even thought about sassing my mom
and telling her to get lost. That was what surfing always should
have been. A repudiation of big-tent growth, of professionalism, of
conservatism. A celebration of the tiny few.
* * *
I wind up into the hills of San Clemente, past Molly
Bloom’s Irish Bar where Surfing Magazine was put into the
ground,past a telephone banner praising the local
surfing Gudauskas brothers, past professional surfer super-prodigy
turned vague disappointment Kolohe Andino’s last-century
mid-modern, around the bend, and park in front of the address
Michael had given me. The house is nice but nondescript.
Like everything else in Orange County. I ring the doorbell and
wonder if he had to move because of cocaine.
During Gotcha’s run, Michael Tomson was a notorious party
monster, with cocaine being his belle. After Gotcha’s run, when he
became president of the Surf Industry Manufacturing Association, he
was a notorious party monster, with cocaine being his dame. Five
years ago, he was a notorious party monster, getting busted by the
cops with $2,000 of blow in his pocket. His sweetie.
Just last year, he was a notorious party monster, getting busted
by the cops in his Laguna home with so much cocaine that they
slapped him with an “intent to distribute” charge. The Los
Angeles Times put it thusly: “Former professional surfer and
cofounder of the Gotcha surfwear company was arrested on suspicion
of felony drug trafficking, Laguna Beach police said.
On June 18 officers conducted a probation check of Michael
Elliot Tomson’s house on Mar Vista Avenue and found ‘items
consistent with selling narcotics and 52 grams of cocaine,’ Sgt.
Tim Kleiser wrote in an email.”
His gal. His one and only. And that is a four-decade run. A
40-year dance. Never turning his head. Never taking another out on
the floor. David Bowie left cocaine behind in the mid-1980s,
saying, “I have an addictive personality, and it took hold of my
life. I’m ambivalent about it now. It was an extraordinary thing to
have to go through. I wouldn’t want to go through it again, but I’m
sort of glad I did.” Keith Richards had many partners but left
cocaine behind over a decade ago when, according to his biography,
he fell from a tree while foraging for coconuts after a few bumps
and split his head open. Even at the height of his romance, though,
he seems too in control to be truly in love, writing, “I was very
meticulous about how much I took. I’d never put more in to get a
little higher. It’s the greed involved that never really affected
me. People think once they’ve got this high, if they take some more
they’re going to get a little higher. There’s no such thing.
Especially with cocaine.”
And that may be sensible but it ain’t passion. It ain’t out of
control. It ain’t burn the stage down. It ain’t Shakespearean.
Michael Tomson is Shakespearean.
He was always unapologetic. He always seemed like if people
cared about his lifestyle, then that was their problem, not his.
The surf industry, for its part, has always been embarrassed by
Tomson, ready to brush him and Gotcha both under the nearest
carpet. The surf media somewhere between uninterested and
paternalistic. Legendary Australian surf journalist Phil Jarratt,
after Tomson’s latest arrest, wrote “I loved to watch Michael surf,
but our friendship was built on our shared love of good writing,
magazine design concepts and, it has to be said, the devil’s
dandruff. This was the seventies and coke was unavoidable, but some
people constructed better avoidance plans than we did. There were
plenty of all-nighters, washing the stuff down with whiskey and
wine, arguing with increasingly scary intensity the relative merits
of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. I look back on those times
with more pleasure than regret, but we all knew it was a phase we
were going through. Or most of us did. In the eighties, I dropped
back into mainstream journalism and he went into business, and I
didn’t see much of Michael for a few years. When we reconnected,
Gotcha had made him a millionaire but already he’d put much of the
profits up his nose. His coke bingeing was an open secret in the
surf industry and he was already on the police watch list. Pulled
over for speeding one night on the 405, he threw a vial of coke
under the wheels of the thundering freeway traffic before the cops
frisked him. They looked him up and down, thinking, only a matter
of time.”
Again, the restraint, the let’s-all-grow-up-and-be-adults, is
not the stuff of legend. It is the stuff of half measures. Of not
falling head over heels. Of hedging. What if Romeo had kept
Rosaline on the hook in case Juliet didn’t work out? What if he was
sensible? Maybe he would have lived, sure, but what kind of life?
Not a glorious romantic one, for damn sure.
* * *
The door flies open and my Romeo is standing there, hair
still perfectly frosted and reaching toward the sky, black sweats,
black T-shirt. Michael Tomson at 62 is still an imposing
figure and his South African bark reaches through the still-warm
night and embraces me. “Chas! Welcome. Can you believe this shit? I
live in San Clemente now. Come in.”
I follow him through the entryway, down a small flight of stairs
to the living room. It is not decorated like his old Laguna house
which featured memories of a life well-lived. Gorgeous surf shots
of Michael laid back in a gaping Pipeline tube. Coffee table books
about Gotcha. This house, instead, is clean but normal. An
overstuffed couch. A coffee table with no books.
I take the couch, he falls into an overstuffed chair and says,
“I keep thinking of you. You were telling me before about a pirate
boat somewhere. What were you doing there?” The last time I had
been with Michael was right before going to Djibouti. I’m surprised
he still remembers and tell him about the ketch, Red Sea, Saudi
Arabia, terrorism, anti-terrorism legislation, a raging civil war,
and a four-foot pirate named Mosquito. I tell him the goal was to
actually live bigger than life for a moment, to cast off what I
felt were shackles and do something romantic.
He takes it in for a minute and rubs his chin. Staring a hole
through me before leaning forward and asking, “Why don’t you write
fiction?”
I laugh.
“I can’t. My crusted brain can’t conceive of characters richer
or better than ones who exist in real life, like Eddie Rothman.
Frankly, I don’t think anyone could. He is impossible to
conjure.”
He leans forward and points a tanned finger at me.
“Characters. You’ve got to have characters. Elmore Leonard kind
of characters. Whenever I’m reading these things, one of his books,
and I’ve read them all twice, some three times, I think, ‘This guy
creates characters that do something…”’
—and he barks the word do—
“The what-for is in the characters. The story is in the
characters. And they are so fucking hip…”
—and he barks the word fucking—
“…so fucking good it is actually unbelievable. I’ll put a
Leonard book down when I’m done with it and think, what was that
about? But it was just entertaining. Did you read Leonard’s
Djibouti when you were in Djibouti?”
I tell him that I read it as soon as I got home and it was truly
amazing. Djibouti is a difficult-to-navigate hell pit. A pirate
town but not necessarily in a sexy way. A mad geopolitical ragout
where Russia, Germany, the United States, Japan, and France each
have large military forces running live weapons drills and carrying
out top-secret missions within spitting distance of each other.
After hours, those who can get day passes mingle in the decrepit,
portico’d town center drinking Heineken in shabby joints, where
Ethiopian girls shimmy and pimps offer their services for a night,
glaring at each other while melting in oven-like heat. And somehow,
even though he had never been, Elmore captured its essence, writing
better than I ever could, writing, “The place is the gateway to
Islam. Or the back door to the West, the dividing line
between
God and Allah.”
Oh, that’s just so damned good, and I tell Michael how delicious
Leonard’s description of Djibouti was. He grins a mischievous grin
and nods while saying, “It’s all about the characters. He has this
dialogue, man. His dialogue was so fucking taut, so fucking—”
“I can’t do dialogue. I can’t create characters…” I cut in. “You
exist and you are better than I could create.”
He stops, sits back, and chuckles, “Oh, I’m your guy then.”
And I don’t explain, I don’t mumble some preface. I just ask,
“So where the fuck did we go wrong?”
He doesn’t need an explanation. He doesn’t need a preface. He
doesn’t even need clarification as to who “we” are.
He knows.
Surfing.
“I’ll tell you. We fucking drank our own Kool-Aid. That’s what
it came down to. Look, it starts with just little surf shops.
Little shops selling boards, T-shirts and trunks. Then Gotcha comes
along and we’re selling sportswear. Surf fashion. That is the key
thing. Surf as a fashion statement. I get nominated for best West
Coast men’s designer TWICE, in ’85 and ’87. Milan, Tokyo, New York,
Paris. Runways are having surf looks. Surfing has become the
thing. It goes from this coastal beach thing in California,
Hawaii, Florida, to suddenly Seventh Avenue. You know what I mean?
It explodes. Right behind that comes PacSun. Before PacSun the surf
industry was small. PacSun brought five hundred doors. Later on
Zumiez, but PacSun brought five hundred doors right away. They
exploded the footprint. Then, thereafter, it was almost like action
sports followed that. It went from surfing to boardsports. We kind
of tried with snowboarding stuff, but nobody has ever cracked the
skate world. In history. They are a group of people that refuse to
be targeted. And they are the perfect underlying fucking customer.
So boardsports became Fuel TV and all that. Do you remember that?
All that fucking shit. And then suddenly, in combination with
fashion going away from surf, from boardsports, to the Internet,
the whole thing fucking imploded. The big shakedown happened,
starting in 2008.”
PacSun, or Pacific Sunwear of California, began as a small 1980s
surf shop in Newport Beach but soon saw the potential of the
exploding interest in surf culture and moved into malls across
America. Bringing the dream, almost overnight, directly to the
Midwest, Northeast, Southeast, and Southwest. Places without surf
but with a hunger for the Look. And this was the beginning of the
surf industry apocalypse. The slide to oblivion. The Mick Fanning
beer-bottle sandals. The brands’ coffers swelled, but all of a
sudden there was a new consumer and this consumer didn’t surf.
Thankfully Gotcha died years before this happened, burning up in
a big ball of neon fire, growing too big, going too wild, and
finally selling to Perry Ellis in the mid-1990s. It changed hands a
few times after that but has never come back, with Tomson saying,
“My baby turned into a fucking whore.”
But the baby was a mean-spirited little bitch before she was a
fucking whore. The baby made my mom question the morality of surf
culture and whipped kids into a frenzy. The surf shops couldn’t
keep Gotcha in stock and not just because they were selling it.
Surf rats with no money would brazenly steal it off the racks. The
less brave would steal the fish-man hangtag. It was rebellious,
punk, the in-crowd that ruthlessly made fun of the out crowd.
I ask Michael why he exacerbated potential
customers.
Why did he tell people who didn’t surf not to start?
He smashes a tanned fist into his hand while and begins to
growl, starting to find a kinetic rhythm. “That really was at the
heart of the matter because surf was so crowded. Longboards had
happened. Before that, there were no longboards, man. Longboards
were historical but they weren’t a lifestyle. And in the early ’90s
they became a lifestyle. Actually the late ’80s. Everyone was
riding a fucking longboard. At Lowers! You know what I mean? I
couldn’t even surf Lowers anymore. Idiots were dropping in, you
know. So that longboard thing happened and brought in all these
fucking new customers. Boys, girls, kids, old people, and suddenly
the nucleus of surf was being polluted. That’s where ‘if you don’t
surf, don’t start’ came from. And it resonated, you know. People
dug it.”
Lowers, or Lower Trestles, in San Clemente, is California’s most
recognized high-performance wave. The way it pitches and runs is
perfect for airs, for progression, and that is exactly what surfing
is. Progression. Or at least what it should be. It wasn’t for
people looking for a chill time. It wasn’t for sportsmen. It wasn’t
for historical buffs. It wasn’t for mellow-soul types. It wasn’t
for people who wanted to feel the glide, flow, energy, rhythm of
the universe. Surfing belonged to the radical few and Michael was
determined to drive a wedge between the in and the out with his
brand. The surfers who rode for Gotcha carried this devil-may-care
ethos. The advertisements pushed it. And the parties celebrated
it.
* * *
Brand managers, team managers, executive vice
presidents, surf journalists, and professional surfers still
whisper about Gotcha’s parties even though the last one happened
20-odd years ago. Some whisper in tones of hushed
reverence. Some with underlying notes of negative moralizing. But
all whisper. And so I tell Michael, “Gotcha’s parties are
legendary. I still hear people talking about them. People who
weren’t even there. I was never there, but I dream. And people
always talk about the sheer amount of cocaine.”
He sits back in his chair and groans. It is, at once, the sound
of appreciation for a vast monument but also the exhausting
toll.
I continue.
“Nobody throws parties like that anymore. I mean, every surf
party has cocaine, maybe even as much as ever, but it is always so
hidden. So wrapped up. And the parties don’t feel unhinged. They
feel tired. Why?”
“I don’t know,” he says, leaning back into his boring chair,
looking deflated for the first time. “Nobody else cares about
cocaine. Music, fashion, they don’t give a fuck. In surf, it’s a
fucking big no-no—even though more people here do coke than in any
other industry. I can tell you right now, there aren’t too many
people in positions of power that don’t do it.”
“But why?” I ask, wanting more. Wanting to find the thing, the
promise, to bring down the mountain back to the surf industry.
Wanting to figure out where the disconnect is. Wanting to break the
whole thing open.
Michael leans forward again, breaths deeply, and I can hear a
whistling in his nose where a septum once was.
“You are absolutely right. Those fucking parties. Well, at
first, they were fashion shows that became parties. We used to do
things,” he starts before correcting himself. “Well, I used
to do things, like hire James Brown impersonators, and have naked
chicks—fully naked—walking down the aisles and dancing. Not a
stitch of clothing on and spray-painted in neon colors. It was
fucking unreal. It was outrageous!”
And he shouts the word outrageous, letting it bounce off
the mostly empty walls of his new San Clemente home.
“What I’m saying here is, at that point in time there wasn’t any
history to follow so we were just doing it. I made fucking pants
that were short. It was, show me something fucking new or get the
fuck out of the office. You know what I mean? And the parties were
the same. Everything was new. Everything was big. Everything was
fresh. It felt like surfing for the first time.”
Suddenly I’m curious about why he quit surfing on the pro tour.
It would have been a dream, I’d imagine, in those early days.
Traveling the world without a care, experiencing new places, new
waves, competing, smashing opponents, and suddenly I wonder if
maybe he is not a competitive person? Surf-wise,
anyway.
So I ask.
He pauses, really pondering his internal makeup.
“That’s a good question. I was and I wasn’t. In my mind, I could
never only focus on surf. You know what I mean? I was eclectic.
There is a certain monotony to winning in a sport. You have to be
dedicated and alone in that. You can’t let anything distract you.
It’s kind of a weird space. I always just had other interests. I’m
competitive at wanting to be the best at something, yeah. But I’m
not so competitive at a one-on-one deal. At Pipe, I was
competitive. For sure. No question, I was competitive there.”
Surfing, real surfing, and any conversation about real surfing,
always inevitably comes back to Pipeline on Oahu’s North Shore. It
is the wave that both defines and creates the brightest stars. No
surf legend has ever walked without placing a marker on Pipeline. I
ask Michael if he still surfs Pipe and he almost jumps out of his
chair, screaming, “Never! Wouldn’t even CONSIDER it. It is
terrifying, man! There comes a point in time when it doesn’t matter
how hard you’ve trained, how fit you are, how many hours you’ve put
in, how good your equipment is. Fuck all. You’re still not going to
make that drop and it’s because of reflex. At some point you no
longer have the reflex. And reflex out there is everything. Once
you start questioning your motives, your tactics, your reason for
being out there—it’s over.”
Which again makes me wonder about the parallels with surfing and
cocaine. Which in turn makes me wonder about the parallels with
business and cocaine. Is there a time to quit? Were David Bowie and
Keith Richards right? I ask Michael if he feels he could start
another brand today, one that would bring the violent fun back to
surfing, that would crush the conservative monster—or if it would
be like paddling out at Pipeline without his young-man
reflexes.
“I couldn’t do it and I’ll tell you why. It’s not necessarily
from not having the talent. It’s the technology. The whole way you
market products today. I used to know how things were going to go;
I could envisage the future. Clearly. That was in the late ’70s up
through most of the ’80s. I could not do that today. The Internet,
the way consumers use digital. I didn’t grow up digital. It’s a
fucking big difference, man. I can hire people to do that, but it
isn’t me. And I go through the motions and all this. I do all the
fucking things I’m supposed to do but I don’t intuit the way I used
to, and that’s the difference right there.”
He gets up, slowly, and says, “Let’s go drink some wine.”
I follow him to the kitchen and watch him move. There are hints
of the way he used to surf Pipeline. You still see the confidence,
the arrogance. But you also see the stiffness. The lifestyle has
clearly taken a physical toll. The cocaine. The Matterhorns of
cocaine.
He pours me an almost-too-good-to-be-true glass of Sancerre then
pours himself one. Crisp, clean. Bracing acidity. Flinty smoke
flavors. We both lean on the kitchen island looking at each other.
I take a sip, savor, and ask, “Is cocaine a creative drug for
you?”
He takes a sip and thinks for a minute.
“You know something, I couldn’t articulate that. I never say to
myself, ‘I’m going to drink to do this or do the drug to do that.’
It’s just a lifestyle. I turn on all the inputs and look at
different stuff and I start musing and wondering about things.
Points of reference, whether they be magazines or online or books
or just a way of saying something. I am a huge collector of stuff.
An importer, that’s what I am. That was the edge Gotcha had over
everyone. I came from a European background and I was all over the
world, all the time, importing stuff. Not products. Ideas. While
everyone else was here designing in this little enclave of Orange
County, I was out in the fucking world.”
I want to hear more.
“I was a furious shopper. I would go down the street in Tokyo,
in Paris, in London. I’d walk in, give the guy a credit card, and
say hang on to it. Then I’d come back and collect my purchases. I
would buy 10K of clothing in a day. The shit I have here right now.
Two storage facilities. So much Comme des Garcons, Yohji Yamamoto.
So much stuff it is frightening. I was out with players, man.
Johnny Rotten is like my brother. I made his clothes and could tell
you some fucking stories that’d make your hair stand on end.”
“Tell me…” I say, voyeuristically.
He sighs then laughs.
“I can’t say these things. Not about other people. But the drug
stories, man. I was doing some really strange things, let’s just
put it that way. I once flew out to a meeting in Europe and left
the shit at home. So I just went back to the airport, flew home,
got it, and flew back. I never told anyone, so nobody knew.
Thirty-six hours in the air.”
Not wanting to expose others to his demons is something Michael
has mentioned to me before. There is a sort of chivalry to his
dance with cocaine. He was generous with it but didn’t want his own
slide deeper, deeper, deeper to derail the general good time.
Gotcha’s aesthetic, in fact, mirrored the tension between a good
time and an off-the-cliff disaster. It was always teetering on the
edge.
I ask, “Did it always feel like the whole thing was going to
explode in a fiery ball? That everyone was just barely holding
on?”
He leans back against a boring marble countertop and says, “It
did. There was this one time, I had some guys working for me who
decided they were going to have a party in a giant hotel suite. So
off we go. Before we even got there I realized it going sideways.
Every surf industry executive was there. They were all there. And
my guys had these hookers come out and one is giving a guy a
blowjob in the middle of the room, in the middle of 50 surf
industry people, and while it’s happening her hair comes off in his
hand. It’s a wig and she is completely bald. That kind of stuff
doesn’t happen anymore. If something does happen, it is so locked
up. Everything is so punitive, so confined, so restrictive. Back
then it was all fun. Society wasn’t all the way it was. Now it is
so fucking conservative.”
I nod too vigorously and reach for the bottle of Sancerre,
filling my glass too full and spilling a bit but not caring because
it is a small thing compared to pulling a hooker’s wig off in the
middle of an industry cocaine bash.
“So fucking conservative,” I say. “But, why? The whole thing is
circling the drain. Companies going bankrupt, mass layoffs, sales
numbers through the floor. You’d think everyone would just give up,
would do what they feel instead of doing what they think they
should. There is more cocaine today, I think, or at least as much,
but you never hear fun stories. It’s only chatty, grindy, sweaty.
It’s never unhinged. Why not unhinge? It is the fucking apocalypse,
after all.”
Michael shakes his head slowly and pours his more Sancerre for
himself.
He does not spill.
“Exactly. But the thing is, you know, the Internet is so fucking
cruel. I suffer from internet justice. I was beaten to a pulp on
the fucking Internet for half a gram. It’s another reason I moved
to San Clemente. Because everywhere I go in Laguna I’m so known,
too known. I’m under a microscope there. It’s a fucking joke. In
San Clemente, nobody knows me from fucking Adam. I’ve seen three
cops since I’ve been here. In Laguna, they’d sit outside my house
waiting for me to do something.
But why?
“People just want to step on you. They get off on it somehow. I
don’t know why.”
I change course.
“Why drugs? Why not stinginess or greed or sloth or pride or
envy or any one of a hundred thousand different sins? Why
cocaine?”
Michael looks defeated for the first time. Utterly worn
out.
“I don’t fucking know.”
“Are you running from it anymore?” I ask.
“Well, not anymore,” he says, slumping forward, away from the
boring marble counter, back to the nondescript island. “I don’t
give a shit. What happened happened. So what. Sue me. I’ve already
paid my price. It’s cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars. And
the people, yeah, they weigh in. ‘It’s time for Michael to clean
up.’ Yeah, yeah, yeah. Until they call me up and say, ‘Hey, do you
have some?’ It’s like, don’t try and make me into any kind of
anti-role model. Leave the model out. I’m just rolling. How did I
inherit that fucking responsibility? You know why? I become the
cathartic cleanse for them because they can say, ‘Look how bad
Michael Tomson is.’ You know what I’m saying?”
The cathartic cleanse. Look how bad Michael Tomson is. I
know exactly what he is saying and suddenly feel drained. Horribly
miserable.
We chat a little more about books, about William Finnegan’s
Pulitzer Prize-winning surf book Barbarian Days, which he
calls “fucking great” but also says, “I read it closely twice for
lack of authenticity and there are only two places. One is when he
is writing and he is my age, 62 or 63, and he writes about pulling
into a double barrel in New York and I just put the book down and
said, ‘FUCK YOU! In your fucking dreams, Bill. Double barrel.
Really.’
We chat a little more about how he is flying out to his house on
the North Shore tomorrow. About the book he will someday write.
I can’t concentrate on any of it. I feel like I’m getting sick.
Like I’m sliding down the throat of a vicious, puking drunk, and it
is not because of the Sancerre. Fifteen minutes later, I wish him
bon voyage, tell him to hug Eddie for me, and limp into San
Clemente’s starry night feeling the worst. I came up to Michael
Tomson’s house imagining I was a great prophet. I wanted the
stories, big and bold. I wanted the cocaine-fueled nights, a rock
that could smash the chains of conservatism that now strangles the
very life out of surfing. I wanted to bring these to the people
below and stand, still glowing a brilliant cocaine white from being
in Michael Tomson’s presence, on a stage made of broken surfboards
and bellow, “Come, my children, and listen to a way for us to truly
live again! I have been to San Clemente’s mountaintop! I have the
truth!”
But it absolutely smashed me hearing him talk about the weight
of people’s judgment, of their hypocrisy, of the sacrificial lamb
he becomes for their personal sense of morality. Even worse, I was
doing the same exact thing except flipped. I need Michael to be a
party monster because I don’t have the constitution to be one
myself. I come from good Christian parents who refused to drink
Australian beer and were internally hurt by mean-spiritedness in
surf magazine advertisements. I am an antisocial, generally quiet,
introverted thing who is happiest in bed by 10:00 p.m. after three
or maybe four vodka sodas and an episode of Big Little Lies,
snuggled up next to my wife and daughter. I drag her to church each
and every Sunday morning (even though her only real rule is
snitches get stitches). I am not and never will be a party
monster.
Oh, I know I’m not good. My ex-wfe gave a recent interview in
promotion of an album she was trying to Kickstart where I was
described thusly: “He’d spent the past two years of their happy
marriage fucking his barely legal-age student, then he sold the
house they’d bought as newlyweds and kept the money, then he didn’t
even wait until their divorce was final to remarry and have a
baby.” And I’ve done enough cocaine to know that the feeling is
exactly like surfing. A brain firing crescendo that almost
instantly dissipates and leaves no memory.
I’m not good but I’m also not brave enough to do what society
deems is really bad. I’m not bold enough to be Michael Tomson, so I
need him to be Michael Tomson for me and to hell with the
price—physical, financial, emotional, mental—that he has to
pay.