By Chris Daly
ME: When he went missing, and his truck was found on a neighborhood street a couple of miles from where he lived, I imagined Neal at a party first as a guest, then as a corpse, then a spectacle. You didn’t want to be around me.
GINNY: If he was going to be late getting home, he always gave me a call.
ME: The simple run away theory didn’t work. This was a guy who escaped every day to the ocean, and at least once a month to Mexico or the Ranch or up to the mountains. I know that, like all couples of ten years or more, you’d had dramas, but not recently. My impression is that you were a couple that did not put a lot of pressure on each other.
GINNY: I was promoted to administrator at a small school district. We did not believe in putting a lot of pressure on each other. We got this small house less than a mile from the Pacific Ocean, we have a fair amount of friends (mostly his) from old high school circles. On Saturday he had missed the weekly basketball game, which never happened when he was in town.
ME: At thirty he started riding the coke train?
GINNY: I threw him out, and it took a year to work back together. Since then we’d been fine, though it could be hard to tell with Neil. A syringe had been found in his truck, but that could have belonged to Don, who was diabetic.
ME: Yes, well Neal and I came out of the counter-culture in a beach town north of Miami, head-trippers or dopers, the cops chased us without making the distinction, within a year or two numbers were strung out and the corpses were piling up. I was cross-examined once in the same day by the cops and the junkies. Why do you do it? Why don’t you do it? Around that time I started hearing stories about Neal, and one or two of them had a needle in it.
HOUSE GHOST: The humans, matching drink for drink, are riding out the long night on her couch. The kitchen side-door is open to let the dog in and out. At intervals the wind of eternity blows in, stuns them for a while, blows out again.
ME: I’m starting to like this place.
HOUSE GHOST: There’s a wind rag on a tall pole at one corner of the roof.
ME: It’s a little like camping, in the good sense.
GINNY: Neal always waited for me. When we hiked. He never rushed me up the path. He would always stop and wait till I was completely rested.”
ME: We were close brothers at an early age, played football with a rolled up sock in the bedroom. Gave the kid his first surfing lesson, next sound I heard was him going past farther, deeper, faster. Anyway, I was quitting around the time he started and we developed into mutually exclusive types (head vs. doper.) It happens in families, even ones who escape at the last minute to California where the kids are saved, one by waves, the other by books. Neal was old that first season here, but in the fall jumped in high school, became younger, and emerged as popular Neal the surfer. But there was something he carried around that his California friends didn’t.
GINNY: He was such a good sneak. I counsel individuals with this type of problem and I didn’t even know it was going on in my own house. Made me better at my job. When I threw him out and he went up to Morro Bay to dry out he was living two doors from the local dealer. And you know Neal, makes friends so easily. Then he wanted to move right back in but I knew he wasn’t ready. If I went out of town for a couple days, he would break in and live here till I got back. Never caught him, but he made no attempt to clean up his mess. He told me that one of the times he was there he had tried to get as fucked up as possible. But then he started getting better and he was clean for years as far as I knew. He used time. Then he had to do this. He could be so selfish. I know I’m going to see him again somewhere, and when I do he’s really going to get it. But that won’t be for forty years.
ME: On Friday night it rained like shit but on Saturday there was a storm window. I got an hour’s sleep and steered someone’s boat part of the way down the coast to Bolsa Chica, off the last bathroom going south. From half a mile out we could see two dozen people in a line on the beach. Three of them paddled out in the cold water beyond the surf line, threw something more or less in our direction, held up clasped hands.
GINNY: We spread the ashes as the sun came up, (Neal was Dawn Patrol), we bawled, threw flowers in the water.
ME: Neal and I had learned to chat civilly, briefly when he came to do the lawn, he was more likely to have bigger conversation with my business partner, knew his way around landscaping, otherwise a bit of a phony, but not a con man, you could say defensive around me, the true uninterested family nut. On the way to work one day I passed him sitting in his older windowless van in the rain by the Seal Beach pier. There was darkness around the shadowy figure, but he had made it, he had a style, and except in a general arc of life way, he was not tragic.
GINNY: Neal’s friends have surf-friendly jobs like landscape and lawn, or medical tech, or property management, their wives and girlfriends are a good group, three and a half rooms full of people at the wake.
ME: Of course there was an underside to the guy who was “always in the water” and “used time” but that was beyond this conversational world. When Neal was first missing I would get pissed talking on the phone with many of them, including you,
Ginny. Tim had been told that Dylan had talked to Don, and bad Mike had heard about a party. Neal had fooled nobody, but that was beside the point.
GINNY: I did so many things that I would not have done without him.
THE DOG: I spent the night in or near the food room. On the TV was a home surf movie of the friends down in Baja, Neal was the best at finding waves. On their last day it came up a little and the elements finally took over for the last and best fifteen minutes. Jazz played over the sound of the wind and the whoosh whoosh, everybody out and going at it.
SUNNY: I was staying with Ginny and was, according to Neal’s brother, among this particular crowd, his only natural friend. We had spent the day cleaning out and turning Neal’s sleep and junk den into a work-out room. There was a weight bench, a couple photos, a book by John Muir. The only thing carried over was a large navigational chart in front of which we found ourselves hanging out. Three-fourths of it was water, the coastline was shown from just above Santa Barbara to just below the border. The land was unmarked, no cities, no streets.
ME: A thing of beauty.
SUNNY: And the serenity of the blue was not affected by all the number coordinates, by more islands than you might remember, by names from two or three civilizations, by amo dumps and other surprises.
ME: So after Neal walked along the path hidden by the bushes and small trees lining the fence encircling an isolated suburban oil-pumper, and laid back on the ninety degree slope between the upper path and a short dry gulley below, just across from a marching line of yuppie condos, and put a syringe of too much coke in his arm, loosened the belt and opened his blue eyes as his heart seized up (it was so cold and the place so ingeniously out of the way right in the middle of everything that the body was well-preserved for a week – the coroner remarked that case #88-12633 was in incredible shape), in a field next to a cop car Ginny in a black cape from a Fellini film, I went back along the fence and down into the field and was headed back to the water.
2.
7/10
Nice clean little late afternoon surf, north side of the practically reconstructed HB pier, on Neil’s old eight-foot “modern longboard”, shaped by Robert August. Blackie, Robert’s father, long time Seal Beach resident who opened his doors to generations, dropped in at a good place to do so, Old Man’s beach at San Onofre.
7/12
At Bolsa Chica dolphins swim by just beyond the surfline, not the scrubbed up SeaWorld kind, more like LA bum-dolphins, nicked and tattoo’d, spare some change?
7/16
1985 Haleiwa was on TV as I was leaving the office, 8-foot island waves, was asked if I could handle it. If, I said, the conditions were right.
The conditions (and terms): I get to pick the year of my life, there’s a reasonable paddle out, I’m in love (to give me the nerve) with the wrong person, the water’s warm, and with me in the line up are the same liberated wahines in the same sports bikinis.
7/24
I paddled out directly center outside Old Man’s, getting my best ride right off, then my second best, third best, etc., just fate of the Sunday surfer.
7/30
This a.m. down to HB contest for a few early heats – small peaks south of the pier. A Brazilian hit it half a notch harder than the next best I saw in an hour and a half, and energized the overcast late morning.
8/20
Sitting with my back to everyone at Happy Hour I’m beginning from ten years away to recognize what fifty looks like, if you’re lucky you can be a David Nuuhiwa, saw him down in San Miguel nose riding, making it around the corner once, stepping out of the largest RV there in the dirt parking lot, beyond fashion in a brightly stitched Indian / Mexican / Hawaiian pullover, long silver hair, advanced spiritual bearing required. Half way to one hundred you need a kind of leaning tower of Pisa equilibrium, belly over there, shoulders which still work off-setting.
9/29
Between late Friday afternoon when I got to San Miguel and early Sunday afternoon when I left, I had a west coast weekend vastation. It’s the Swedenborg term, Henry James’ father used it for what happened to him one day in his study; one minute he was sitting there and the next everything had changed.
10/7
A lumpy area, then a black wall behind it, and behind that the top of another black wall.
11/15
I drove up to Rincon though I knew there wouldn’t be a wave. On the way back I stopped at Ventura harbor where locals yelled at me before I was out of my car. In Hollywood-by-the-Sea, coincidental hometown name, and where Neil had lived when he was in the Coast Guard, (and ran laps on the deck of his iced-in ship), there was nobody around and I had an old fashioned panic attack. It was part of the surf cycle of panic and withdrawal. The ocean was as flat as a depressed person’s view of the future, the sand was a moveable Sahara, adolescent boredom loomed in the alleys and access roads, arresting officers were around the next corner. I stopped rolling thirty miles later when I passed the closed parking shack and pulled into Mickey Dora’s parking space at Malibu, that area of accelerated ambition that comes through even in the local undercrust hanging by the place where you go through the historic wall. Sitting out in the water the rocks
are visible a few feet down, and somewhere in the middle of the crowd of veterans and stink-bug artists I fit in, helped through the traffic problems possibly by my cabbie training. I was standing in my towel feeling good about finding at least a tiny southern window when in the last light of day I got a glimpse of someone across the way changing out of her wetsuit and I had a hard-on all the way back to Long Beach.
After San Miguel
I began to wind it down.
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Chris Daly resides on the West Coast, USA, and has been in the writing life for some decades and has published in various magazines and journals. Stories recently have been in Stone Coast Review, Main Street Rag, Fleas on the Dog, Wrath Bearin iron Review, Cowboy Jamboree, Arrowheart, Magazine 1, Superpresent, Pure Slush and Dumbo. Contact Chris Daly via email