"We saw it all, death, drugs, violence…"

There are many reasons to fall in love with the WSL commentator Strider Wasilewski, still boyish at fifty and whom we can imagine falling gratefully asleep every night, tucked spoon-fashion into beloved wife, one hand babyishly grasping a breast as a child clutches a favourite toy for comfort when he enters the frightening realm of a dream. 

Shall we list the ways?

His now famous attack dog tits, a surf career that included a sponsorship by Quiksilver and a place in the Pipe hierarchy , as well as his rise from the skate ghetto of Dogtown, and now, in his harvest years, a man with the elasticity and balance of an adolescent.

And, today, the wild revelation that the only reason he ended up living in Santa Monica, then a hotbed of high-performance surf and skate stars, Jay Adams, Tony Alva etc, was a drug bust in London when he was only six. 

“In 1978 there was a knock on the door of our flat in the suburbs of London,” Strider told his 100k-plus followers on Instagram. “My pops had just left to go get Chinese food as we had company over… The knock was loud and inappropriate, it was “The Bobby’s!” (English Police). As the guests tried to stash the the illegal substances they kicked in the door and raided the house. I vaguely remember standing close by the front door when my dad got close enough to the house to realize what was going on! I was held by the shirt as he was detained out front on the street… He went down hard for almost 10 years! We left the next day on a plane to Los Angeles, stayed at our Uncle Jim’s and with our God Parents Edward & Sharon until we landed in this building picture above, The Sea Castle Apts.. Rent Controlled and on the beach, $300 a month for a 2 bedroom apt.! All we had was the beach, we saw it all, death, drugs, violence and WAVES. My brother @mescalito70 and I would wait on the shoreline for people to lose their boards and we would grab them. Ride them in the whitewash until they realized we had em. That’s how I started surfing.” 

 

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Strider is a rare commodity in the surf game, candour his great quality. Speaking to The Surfers Journal a while back, he described his wild life in Santa Monica and Venice. 

“I saw a guy get shot in front of my house. And they used to deal drugs in the alley behind us. There were drug addicts that lived on the beach and under the pier. It was the Dogtown era. I moved there in ’78. It was right when Tony Alva and Jay Adams were hitting their peaks—doing what you see in the movies. They were stars. They’d kick me out of the parties because I was too young. They didn’t want me to see what was going on. In that sense, they were looking out for me, which thinking about it now, was really cool of them. I can’t believe most of those guys made it through those days. When I started surfing, I couldn’t go to Venice. My little crew could go down there and skate, but we weren’t even allowed to walk out to the breakwater. The guys would throw rocks at us, beat us up, break our fins, and then tell us to go home. They didn’t care that we were little kids. Slowly, I became friends with a kid named Ricky Massie, who was my childhood rival as a surfer. Through him, I got a hall pass to go to Venice. His family members were Venice gangsters. Even though the rest of us were terrified to go down to the breakwater, Ricky was probably safer down there than he was in his neighborhood. We used to go to parties at his house that were so scary.”

Iconic.