The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (14 page)

“I don’t really have a drinking problem,” I say. “I’m just going for the spiritual part.”

Grodin looks at me like I’ve lost my mind, then heads for the refrigerator.

The meeting takes place in a cinder-block church house just down the road from Grodin’s. It’s an odd mixture of working-class residents and wealthy Hamptons vacationers, including one Zsa Zsa Gabor type who goes on an indulgent, weepy rant about how she caught her little lapdog eating its own shit—
doo doo
, she calls it—and how this ruined her entire day.

After things wrap up and we all hold hands for the Serenity Prayer, Andy introduces me to his friends Collette and Nadia, good-looking city women who are out for the weekend, staying in a Montauk beach rental for sober folks.

Nadia and I walk outside together, stand around talking in the dirt parking lot.

We hit it off—that is, until she asks is how long I’ve been sober.

“I’m not really an alcoholic” is the best I can manage. Nadia looks puzzled, but fortunately Andy walks up and invites her to our beach barbecue. She and Collette follow us to the grocery store, where we pick up three pounds of fresh clams for the grill, plus a couple six packs of soda.

Nadia and I converge on the checkout line.

“Hi! How
are
you?” she says, playfully, as if we hadn’t just seen each other in the frozen seafood section.

“Well,” I sigh, “I
was
doing great, until my dog ate its own shit and totally ruined my day.”

Nadia grasps my forearm, doubles over with laughter.

It’s dark by the time we meet Grodin and Anka out on the beach, a bonfire illuminating their faces. Nadia pulls up a chair beside me, hangs out while I strum the ukulele.

“You know, you’d be a lot better on that thing if you could figure out more than three chords,” Andy says.

“Ah, don’t listen to him,” Nadia says. While everyone else hovers over the grill, she asks me again about my sobriety.

“So if you’re not an alcoholic, then why come to AA?”

“I don’t usually. I’m in another twelve-step program, though, so I just came for the support.”

“So you’re in NA, right? You don’t have to be embarrassed about it.”

But I’m not in NA, and I
am
embarrassed. How do you tell someone you’re hooked on a destructive relationship pattern? And I’m not and probably never will be comfortable with the term “love addiction.” I’m tempted to tell her I’m in Al-Anon, which is partly true since I’ve been to a few of their meetings, too. But I want to be honest—honesty being the bedrock of recovery—so I go ahead and tell her about the men’s meetings.

“Wow,” she says. “That’s not at all what I expected. Considering you were with Andy, I thought you must’ve been a total junkie. But I was confused because you don’t look like the average heroin addict.”

She goes on to ask me about the group, about my issues. I explain it the best I can—that I have a really, really hard time getting over ex-girlfriends.

“That just seems like human nature,” she says. “Everyone has trouble getting over relationships.”

Without going too deep, I try to explain how it’s different for me—that I have a codependent pattern of losing myself in relationships that has basically ruined my life, over and over. But I can tell she’s not fully convinced. It’s a reaction that I’ll find increasingly common and troubling—to struggle with an affliction that people don’t even believe in. Even my own therapist, a kind of old-school Freudian, seems to think that I really just need to get laid. And oddly enough, after I tell Nadia all this, she seems even more interested in me.

“What about you?” I ask, hoping to change the subject. “How long have you been sober?”

“Not long,” she says. “About ten months.” She tells me about her life; I’m surprised to learn she grew up in Alaska. She assures me that she didn’t have the typical Alaskan upbringing—“There sure as hell weren’t any family camping trips,” she says. There was no camping at all, not until she got sent away to a wilderness program for wayward youth.

“Suffice it to say I was a
bad girl
,” she tells me. “Although not compared to some of the others. Once I had to share a canoe with this guy who ended up in prison for murder. As if being thrown together with people like that was going to help me.”

She explains how, after finishing high school, she escaped to L.A., and then New York—as far from Alaska as possible. And how she’s getting healthy now for the first time, and feeling pretty good about things. She definitely
looks
healthy. She has the flawless, pale skin of someone who grew up in a northern place, away from the sun. Pretty blue eyes and a stunning figure. But in the light of the bonfire, I think I detect something a little off in her gaze—a wound that hasn’t quite healed, a deep need that’s yet to be satisfied.

We all feast on clams and shish kebabs and a big loaf of crusty French bread. Then Collette and Nadia invite Andy and me back to Montauk, to meet up with the rest of their sober crew. As we clean up, Grodin douses the bonfire with seawater, then pulls me aside and says, “Okay,
now
I understand why you went to an AA meeting.” But it’s after midnight and I’m worn out, ready for bed. Asa is also taking the train out the next morning, and I’m looking forward to an early surf session.

It’s painful watching Nadia walk away, looking over her shoulder at me—her eyebrow raised in one final, seductive invitation. Maybe I’m just squandering a chance for a good time, a harmless little post-Karissa rebound? Attiq has warned me about getting involved with program people, at least in the beginning. And with only ten months’ sobriety, Nadia seems hungry in a way I imagine might swallow us both up—making her even more of a dizzying temptation. Although this is probably just a projection, because history proves that
I’m
the dangerous party in these situations. Attiq has also suggested I refrain from any relationships, even just a harmless fling, at least for a solid few months. He said this will cause me to suffer, but that more than anything I need to sit with this suffering, that it’s precisely what I’ve been running from for so many years. At any other point in my life, I would’ve chased after Nadia, guided by my dick and my slobbering ego, losing myself for something that might last one night or ten years, just a couple people crashing into each other by accident, ripping our tenuous mends.

Even after Grodin and Anka pack up, I linger by the smoldering ashes, alone with the waves as they churn themselves into foam.

I
meet Asa at the train station the next morning, and then we head straight for Ditch Plains. I tell him about Nadia during the drive.

“Sounds like you made the right choice,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Definitely. You stayed true to yourself and your recovery.”

“It brought up so much shit for me. I wanted her so bad, and then when I let it go, I started thinking about Karissa. I woke up feeling completely obsessed.”

“I hear you, man,” Asa says, “and I think you just need to sit with the feelings.” This is a mantra I hear repeated over and over in the program, in one form or another, including my favorite,
don’t just do something, sit there
.

We’re two of the first people in the water, and floating around with Asa in glittering sunlight, I start to feel better. We surf all day, taking breaks for food and water, or to nap on the beach. It’s my ideal day, when I feel fully present in a place and in my own body—enough that my mind shuts off for a while. Someone else in recovery once told me that the ego is like a dog on a leash, that to get anywhere we have to train it—teach it not to bark or shit on the neighbors’ lawn or hump a stranger’s leg. For me, surfing’s like letting the dog run wild on the beach all day, chucking a stick for it to fetch out in the break, again and again, until it wears itself out. I once heard that it’s impossible to experience anxiety during the act of intercourse—directly before and after, sure, but not during the actual deed. I have a similar theory about surfing: it’s impossible to feel depressed during the actual riding of a wave.

Along with feelings, my problem’s also with language, the way I’m plagued by certain words, words that are like the
whale lines
that Melville says all men live entangled in, words that trigger the feelings in the first place:
should’ve, would’ve, Karissa, never, failure, regret, future
. The way the water out beyond the break at Montauk reflects symphonic patterns of sunlight—now like static snow on a TV screen, now like diamond buckshot up from below, now like a conflagration of tiny lightning birds, now concentrating into a single shimmering portal, yet all of these descriptions so completely failing the signified—helps me move past language’s breakwater, to drift out farther, beyond words toward the ineffable, toward silence. Toward something like serenity as Asa and I skim across the wind-woven surface of the Atlantic.

N
ext to Duke Kahanamoku, Tom Blake was the most important figure in the history of early twentieth-century surfing. A native Wisconsinite who grew up skiing, he moved in the 1920s to Oahu, where he befriended the Duke and was eventually inducted into native-only groups like the Hui Nalu (translation: United in Surfing). Blake spent time at the famous Bishop Museum, where he helped restore ancient Hawaiian surfboards in their collection. Blake then transformed surf technology by incorporating these ancient board designs into a modern hollow-core construction. At the time, Duke was riding ten-foot boards that weighed about seventy pounds. Blake’s new boards were more streamlined, with a hollow core and a pintail, and though they were two feet longer than the Duke’s board, they weighed only forty-four pounds. Known as cigar boards, they revolutionized not only surfboard design but the art of surfing itself. Blake himself used a hollow-core board during a twenty-six-mile race from Catalina to the California mainland, which he completed in five hours, fifty-three minutes, shattering previous records. Blake also built sixteen-foot hollow-core boards, called
okohola
, that were more exclusively designed for surfing waves. Duke followed in his footsteps, building a sixteen-foot redwood board, allowing him to do some of the best surfing of his life: “In one instance, at zero break, he caught a twenty-five-foot wave and rode across the face of it, through first break, clear into Queen’s surf at a speed of about thirty miles an hour.”

Along with his contributions to surfboard design, Blake helped promote the laid-back surfing life with his book
Hawaiian Surfriders, 1935
. His love for the easy life by the sea, which he contrasts with the social obligations and superficialities of city life—as well as his description of a kind of Universalist, multicultural existence in Hawaii—all have echoes of Melville:

In
Hawaiian Surfriders
, Blake also relates a number of ancient Hawaiian surf legends he encountered during research at the Bishop Museum. In one, a ruling chief named Aikanaka stole the wife of his younger brother, Kawelo. Betrayed and despondent, Kawelo spent his days plotting revenge against his brother. But his quest for vengeance was interrupted when a large swell arrived at the local break. According to the story, “a great desire came over Kawelo.”

Instead of seeking revenge, he went surfing.

D
espite my ancestors’ Midwestern roots—five or six generations in Missouri, Illinois, and Colorado—I’m not the first ocean-obsessed member of my family. On my mother’s side, my uncle John Lawrence spent the better part of his late twenties and early thirties living and cruising on a sailboat—much like Herman Melville, who spent his young adulthood bouncing from whaling vessels to merchant marine ships to tropical islands. “This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship,” Melville wrote in the first chapter of
Moby-Dick
. In my uncle’s case, going to sea may also have been a matter of life or death, but unlike me and Ishmael during our New York years, he didn’t ship out to quell his own self-destructive thoughts or his urge to go about the streets “
knocking people’s hats off
.”

In John Lawrence’s case, the threats came from the outside.