Surf God of Malibu Ch. 03

Dear Readers: Herein concludes my reminiscence. But trust me, it's really impossible to read this 3rd chapter without the context of the first two. --JamesonX

I may have awoken that second morning with the sweet sense of no longer being entirely alone in the world, but I awoke with plenty of anxiety, too. As I looked over at the sleeping face of Jacob: his olive skin and rough morning beard, his tangle of black curls on the pillow, I tried to think hard—not always my strong suit. Was there some kind of a future here? Did any of this make any goddam sense at all?

Sure, we'd had a great moment. In fact, three great moments—and again the individual scenes tumbled into my brain like Old Master paintings—rich and dark and fleshy—each magnificent peak surging again in my loins. Sure, I'd fulfilled that longtime fantasy. I'd fucked a man. I'd stroked his balls. Bent him over. And it was good. But now what? Jacob here wanted tomove inwith me. He was, like, talking about staking his goddamlifeon me. He'd put up pictures and brought in his shit. Surely, he was nuts. And surely, the whole situation was headed for big trouble, or worse. Would I ever, ever, ever tellanyoneI knew that I had had sex with a man? That I now had aboyfriend?Like...tell Vince and the guys down at the surf school? My little brother Pete in Phoenix, who practically worshipped me? My Mother...well she already hated me, but still, it seemed impossible. Good thing my father was dead, as they say, or it would kill him.

And there seemed to be no way that Jacob, however much he wanted to be "the new Jacob," and probably (unlike me), really was gay, wouldactually give uphis wife and his fancy life in Bel Air, when the shit hit the fan. Didn't he say he worked for hiswife's father'sfucking law firm? How could thatever play out in the real world, except in disaster?

"You are the Surf God," I told myself as I stared at the ceiling, using the words that always made me happy. "You are free as the wind and the waves. You are the troubler of women's dreams and master of lesser men." I took a deep breath, but the words did not make me feel the way they always had. They seemed somehow...absurdly youthful. Though I was only 27, I had the sudden and profound sense of being too old for those words.

I would make him breakfast. That's what I would do. I would let him know that I was not the demanding brute who took and took both in bed and out of bed and never gave anything in return. Yesterday he'd made me breakfast and then he'd let me lean him over the kitchen table and fuck him in the ass. Today, I'd make him breakfast, and...well, then we would part. Like gentlemen. Like grownups. One last kiss, perhaps.

Carefully, carefully, I crept out of bed, and went into the "kitchen" part of the one-room shack. In the refrigerator, I was surprised to find a full haul of food: milk, eggs, cheese, meat, those little long green onions. On the counter was a loaf of that unsliced bread you get at actual bakeries. The shack had never had it so good. Gamely, I turned on the burner and pulled a pan out as quietly as I could. I'd never actually cooked anything for another person, but shit, how hard was it to scramble some eggs? You just broke 'em in the pan and then fished out the shells, right? Then I could slice some cheese on top while it was cooking—cheese was always a good thing. I opened a tiny box of what looked like fancy cheese, but it had some kind of weird white fungus growing all over it—so I threw it out. Waste of money there.

Just when the eggs were done, and I was trying hard to scrape them off the pan and get out the last of the shell, an alarm went off, and Jacob shot out of bed, naked as a jay bird.

"Shit, shit, shit," he shouted. " I thought I set this thing for seven. I'm going to be late."

"Morning, Jacob. I'm making breakfast."

"That is so sweet, lover. But it's eight, I have a client meeting at nine, and it's easily 40 minutes from here."

That word lover entered the room like an uninvited guest—the kind that makes you awkward and unsure of yourself. Really not okay to use that word.

"Jacob—" I glowered.

"Look, I'll call you," he said with a smile, and ran into the shower. I just stood there with a spatula in my hand, looking very unlike a surf god.

Soon he was out of the shower, drying himself off, and I just watched as, still naked, he threw a suitcase on the bed and pulled out a fancy-ass slate-gray suit and a little brush to get the lint off of it. He turned his back on me as he unpacked, no doubt to give me a view of his hairy balls wagging between his legs. I watched him pull on his little jockey shorts and button his monogrammed white lawyer shirt and conservative fucking lawyer tie, and then pull on the suit and sparkling shoes. All in all, an effective strategy on his part.

"How do I look?"

"Not at all like someone who just fucked a surf instructor in a beach shack." The words sound joking, but I said them kind of slow and serious, and he understood what I was trying to say.

Our eyes met, and he tried to laugh it off. "I guess not. But life is like that. Unpredictable."

"Jacob, you know that there's a lot of crazy—"

"I'll call you, okay?" he said with a desperate smile. "But if you don't take my call, and I find my shit out on the beach when I get back this evening, it's still okay. It really is. I said I was taking that gamble."

"I'm not that kind of a jerk. Another kind, maybe, but not that kind. I was going to make you breakfast."

"So you were," he said and met my eyes again.

At that, I walked over and kissed him hard, on the mouth, grabbing his junk through his fancy suit, but not putting my tongue in—I was trying to be good. "None of this makes any goddam sense," I said when I released him. "But you go to work and we'll both think about it." I hung onto his junk for a second before I let go. What was I doing? I didn't know. Letting the dice roll across the table, I guess.

He just gave me a long look and grabbed his laptop and shot out the door, leaving it open. I watched him struggle up through the sand to his silver fucking Boxster, which had surprisingly not been stolen overnight.

When I want to think, I always clean my boards—leaving 'em out in the sun to warm up, and then carefully scraping off all the old wax. It's good for the soul. Later, I'd do some solo surfing. Then, late afternoon, I'd walk into town for some beer—did I mention that I didn't own a car or even have a license in those days?

By the time Jacob came back that evening, it would all be clear. And I would be ever so proud of myself for my mature and philosophic attitude about the whole thing. In fact, by noon, I had a beautiful scenario worked out, in which he would move back out on the best of terms, but keep on with the surfing lessons once a month as a way to meet for some secret man sex. We'd be, like, lifelong friends having secret rendezvous. He'd tell me about his life and complain about his wife in Bel Air, and I would still be the hetero Sex God, growing leathery but handsome with age. Just a little bi, on the side, for fun. And I'd tell him tales of the beach and we'd get drunk together afterwards.

You know, every month. Secretly.

Around one o'clock, a little emerald green Civic pulled over on the highway, and I watched a small redhead walk down the path between the rocks, and purposefully across the sand to my beach shack. When she got close, she shaded her eyes to read my wonderful, hand-painted "Surf God" sign over the door. Then she shaded her eyes to look at me, shirtless and magnificent, sitting on an overturned bucket and scraping a longboard.

"Are you Peter?" she asked.

"Can't deny it."

"I might be interested in surf lessons. I hear you give surf lessons?"

"Beginner. Intermediate. Advanced. Andveryadvanced," I smiled pointedly.

"How lovely," she smiled. "How much do you charge?"

"Sixty dollars an hour," I said, raising the price just a might on account of her nice shoes. "My boards, your wetsuit."

"Got it." She said. "Do you surf right here?" And she took an interested stare out at the waves.

"Right here," I said.

"And look at this wonderful little shack! It's like, right out of a movie." And she pulled out a tiny camera and took a quick shot. "I just have to look inside!"

And before I could get up, she'd walked in the open front door and was shooting pictures all over the place.

"Hey," I said, "Please don't do that." But by the time I got inside, she ran out past me, back onto the beach, and stood about 30 feet away, in the direction of the highway, where people could see us if they cared to look.

"I have a deal for you, Peter."

"What is this about, lady?" Though I was already getting a sinking feeling that I knew what it was about.

"On your table in there, I just left an envelope with ten one-hundred dollar bills. A thousand dollars earnest money, just to show I'm serious."

"What? Serious about what?"

"Here's my proposition. You lay off my husband and I'll deliver another nine thousand. I don't know what he's paying you, but that's got to be a good deal, even for a handsome son of a bitch like you."

"Holy shit, lady. I don't knowwhatyou are talking about."

"Yes you do. I saw his suitcase in there, and some of his clothes thrown all over your goddam bed. The bed where he...he probably... I've always known this might happen. I've seen those magazines he hides. It was all I could do not to laugh when he talked about 'surf lessons' a few months ago. I've had him watched, and--"

"You must be Alison. And you're wrong about Jacob."

"Oh my god, he told you my name! What is wrong with him? You don't tell a whore your real name and your wife's name! He's really lost it."

That made me really, really pissed, but now that I was so mature, I controlled myself. "I think you better leave now. And take your money. You're not understanding this at all. He simply needed a little time away, and I offered my place."

At that, she backed up another 10 feet, and shouted: "Think about the deal, Peter. My word is good on the money." She trembled: "Look, since he told you his name and all that, I'll make it fifteen grand. I have your number from the surf school. I'll call you for your answer. I'm not threatening you, you understand. I don't want to insult you, either. I get it. Everyone has to earn a living, and this is a flat-out deal, okay? Don't ruin our lives, please!"

And with that, she turned and ran back up the beach, and up the little path, and into her Civic, and threw it into gear. And though a Civic isn't real good at roaring off, she did her best to roar off down the road.

I just stood there for a while, an idiot staring up at the road. Feeling like utter shit.

Sure enough, the envelope on the table contained a grand and a little note, in case she didn't get a chance to talk to me, offering the deal.

I left the envelope on the table, and went out for a long session on the waves. It was a good low tide, with a big, well-formed curl, and I let the sea calm my spirit. It seemed obvious that the right thing to do was both turn down the money, and send Jacob back home. There would be no secret monthly "surf lessons," now that Alison knew. The Surf God would again be the Surf God, and that was that.

When six o'clock rolled around, I saw the silver Boxster pull up along the highway, and I saw Jacob lurch down toward the shack. He would find the envelope there, and save me the trouble of telling the tale. Maybe he would just leave. I mean, what more was there to say?

A good long time passed, but at last Jacob emerged from the shack. I was surprised to see he was wearing a wetsuit, and he grabbed a board. I let a couple of perfectly good swells pass me by as I waited for him to paddle out.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey," he replied. "Looks good out here."

"It is. I must have had twenty good rides this afternoon."

"When the tide comes in, it'll probably flatten out, though."

"Yeah, somehow the tide always comes in," I said. "Shit if it don't." He turned his board to face the sunset, and I turned with him, ready for that grownup parting I'd imagined. Instead, he said this:

"When I don't go home tonight, Alison will tell her daddy. By tomorrow this time, I won't have a job. In fact, I can probably kiss the whole entertainment industry goodbye, because her daddy will put out some kind of shit on me. He's smart, he'll figure out something really wicked. Something way worse than cheating on his daughter with a guy."

"But youaregoing home, right?"

"No fucking way."

I was astonished. "What the fuck, Jacob? You're really prepared to go that far? Divorce? Unemployment?"

"I said that all along."

Now the sunset wasn't beautiful...it was panic-inducing.

"Look, Jacob. I need to be fucking honest here. You're a nice guy. Shitty surfer, but a nice guy. We had some good times the last couple of days, I won't deny that. I enjoyed everything. But...sexisn'teverything in life. You can't..." At that, I saw a stricken look cross his face, and I amended it. "Okay, it was more than sex. It was, like, spiritual or something. But still. We don't hardly know each other beyond the sex. And I'm not ready to...not prepared to...you just can't count on me like that. You can't fuck up your life for...your goddam surf instructor. It's ridiculous."

"Of course not, Peter. But you don't understand. I am not asking for any kind of commitment whatsoever.Exceptmaybe for more surfing lessons," he grinned. "I'll probably have the time, now. And it's so beautiful out here. This is not your fault and not your responsibility—though you are the catalyst."

"What's 'catalyst'? I'm not a goddam surfprofessor, just the surfgod, remember?"

"Oh, fuck," he laughed. "It's like the thing that causes everything else to happen."

"Okay."

"Anyway, Peter, I would not have had the courage to do this without the wonder of the last couple of days with you. Nevertheless, if you send me back to shore right now and you never speak to me again, I will still not go home tonight, because I have stepped through the door, and I am on the other side already."

"Shit, Jacob," was all I could say, never being that great with words, and getting worse by the minute.

He turned then and fixed me with a powerful look, and made a much longer speech, one that I will never forget. It's a really long speech to record in an erotic tale, but what the hell. It was a speech made as we sat up on our boards and steadied ourselves to watch the sunset, so it had a little extra poignancy.

"And let me say something about sex," continued Jacob, the lawyer, "since you're so worried that I'm obsessed with the topic. Sex may not bethemost important thing in the world, but it is rightlyamongthe most important. When you go surfing, you leave the civilized country of rules and expectations and limits and enter what I might call the 'unknown country' of the ocean. The ocean's poetry and its wonder lie in a danger and a wildness which you cannot fully understand or control. Out here, life doesn't just feel boundless and infinite, itisboundless and infinite.

"Let me tell you that great poets and great musicians and great artists experience much the same thing when they create. They go into a wilderness of dangerous and uncontrollable beauty – a place greater than themselves, and they give themselves up to it. They experience the unknown country as a fearsome place. Great athletes, I suppose, feel much the same way—and enter into the uncontrolled arena of a race or a competition. But a man or a woman must practice for years to become a truly good surfer, or a lifetime to become a truly great artist. And their career may be very brief. But God gave every man and woman a way to visit the unknown country almost every day of their adult lives, if they so choose. Truly, for most of us, the only way we will ever get to that wild place is through the terrifying intimacy and dangerous beauty of sex with another human being.

"People talk about feeling like they are dying during sex. Or flying. Or merging with the universe. Shakespeare called death "the undiscovered country," and that phrase has always held a strange beauty, at least for me. I do not seek death, but I do seek to sometimes disappear into the lesser, never completely known country of sex. Shakespeare or Debussy or a great athlete may have experienced greater poetry than us, but this is the greatest poetry most of us willeverfeel. Why do people dress up in crazy leather outfits and do kinky things during sex? Is it because they want to be better at making babies? Or because they are desperate to visit the infinite unknowable and know no other way to get there? Why do people spend hours and hours looking at pictures of naked others or reading erotic literature? Even scary erotic literature? Only so they can get as close as possible to that unknown country when they have no lover to hold their hand and take them there in the bedroom."

"Shitfire," I said.

"Sexisdangerous. Get used to that. It's probably better to 'sublimate it' and write poetry or music instead, but in its true and raw form it is dangerous. But so is being alive. Peter, over the last two days, you held my hand and took me to the unknown country. What happens after that is up to me, but I will be ever grateful to you. You say you and I don't really know each other beyond the sex, but in truth I know you far better than anyone I've ever known—including Alison. I may not know who you are in the civilized country, but I know who you are in the unknown country. I know who you are out here. Without your help, I never would have gotten here. I would have lived my life in the box constructed for me by Alison and her father – no, that's not fair, I constructed the box myself, out of my fears and conventions and stupidity. If Alison only...if she could have...but no, that was impossible. No woman could have... For most men, yes, but not for me. Let me just say that if, at this very moment, a giant wave came and crushed me out here on the ocean, I would die happy. Why?Because I am out on the fucking ocean."

"Shitfire squared," I said.

What did I feel? I felt again strangely older. As if I suddenly lived in a world of meaning and consequence, where before I had been just a clown. For maybe the first time in my life, it mattered what I did next. Certainly, for the first time, I wanted what I did next to matter.

"There's a good set coming," I said. "We might just catch a curl before it gets too dark."

"I never get the jump right, up onto my feet."

"The secret to the jump is to really commit," I said. "To not fuckingcareif you make it or not, but completely believe that you are going to make it. Once you really feel that, you'll do it right every time—even if you fall into the drink. Even that's doing it right. The secret is to know that even falling is doing it right."

We turned our boards then, and waited, and we caught a good swell, and for a couple seconds we rode side by side—until of course, Jacob fell. You don't get good at surfing just through somebody's advice, even if it's damn good advice.

When we left the ocean, it was getting dark and chilly. In my memory, that night burned with a thousand stars, though of course that's impossible, it being so close to L.A. Probably the night burned with a thousand shore lights and a hundred crazy beams of headlights up on the highway.

Three figures were coming down the beach with boards, and even in the growing dark I could tell it was Vince and Al and Randy from the school. Vince's perpetual six pack of beer hung from his free hand, or what was left of a six pack.