10

Hitched

It was inevitable we’d get married. Not “inevitable” as in “unavoidable” or “predictable,” but it was clear early on there was a course we were meant to chart. We were like a force of nature. From the moment Danielle picked me up at the airport in her friend’s limo, really, I knew we’d be together always, always, always.

Took her parents a while to come around. Her father and I were cool, but Danielle’s mom wasn’t too happy with me after I was taken from her house in handcuffs; don’t think she was too happy with me before that, actually, but the handcuffs didn’t help. She was cool with me eventually, though. I suppose she would have liked it if I had a better job, or better prospects, or a better education—hell, even just a piece of a shred of a tiny little fragment of an education would have helped. My future mother-in-law, Sharon, was a strong woman, but she could tell Danielle and I were a team, so she gave us her blessing. She even agreed to pay for our wedding.

My father was a little disappointed that Danielle wasn’t Jewish. Oh, my parents loved Danielle, and they loved the Brawners, but Doc would have liked it if I had kept the faith on this one score at least. After all, he’d done his part to repopulate the tribe, with eight Mexican-Jewish sons, but it was probably his secret wish that each of us would have eight Jewish sons as well, and here I was, first to the altar, with a shiksa bride—just like him! He came around, though. Guess he figured he had eight more kids to marry off and that one of them would fall for a card-carrying Jew and produce a proper Jewish grandchild. (He’s still waiting!)

Danielle wanted a traditional Catholic wedding, which was okay by me, but I did go to the trouble of seeking out a rabbi to perform at least a part of the ceremony—just to balance the scales. I thought we could do it up like one of those cartoon shorts they used to show at the movie theaters, before the main feature. We could say a couple prayers, maybe stomp on a glass, and then move on to the big show. Danielle was totally up for it, so we made some phone calls, started asking around. There were a bunch of rent-a-rabbis in Southern California, natch, but you’d be surprised how few of them wanted to share the stage at a Catholic wedding, especially in this off-to-the-side way; they all wanted to run the show.

Also, money was an issue. Danielle’s mom, Sharon, was footing the bill, but I’d already been in and out of her doghouse too many times to ask her to pay for a rabbi, so Danielle and I were on our own for this part. And so we looked long and hard for a rabbi who’d take the gig on our terms. Finally found a guy in San Diego who agreed to meet with us for lunch at a deli, to discuss our plans. It was understood that Danielle and I would be paying for lunch—anyway, it was understood by the rabbi, who showed up and ate like a pig. He ordered a ton of food, plus a container of chopped liver to go. This last is what’s known as chutzpah, a term Danielle would forever after associate with this gluttonous rabbi, who finally told us his fee for the ceremony was twenty-five hundred dollars. It seemed a little high, especially since the priest who was actually marrying us was only charging a couple hundred bucks, so we thanked the rabbi for his time and for doing his part to give Jews a bad name and sent him and his chopped liver on their way.

That was it for me on the rabbi front. Figured I’d given it my best shot.

Danielle and her mom found a beautiful church for the ceremony—St. Edward’s, overlooking the ocean in Dana Point—and then I realized our wedding date conflicted with a contest I meant to enter off the San Clemente Pier. I was back and forth on whether or not I should compete. Wouldn’t go so far as to say I was torn, but I was starting to fray. Why? Well, I was in the middle of a great run and I needed the points for my standing on the national circuit. Also, I always looked to compete in events around town, to make the most of my home field advantage, so I checked in with the tournament organizers to see if I could pinpoint the exact time of my heat and maybe find a way to towel off and still make it to the church on time.

Danielle wasn’t too happy about this, and she said as much. I’m paraphrasing here, but I believe what she said was, “If you’re even a minute late, I will fucking kill you.” Or words to that effect. In truth, she only gave me a little bit of hell, probably because a part of her thought it was way cool, to be marrying this rad surfer dude who had to catch a couple meaningful waves before tying the knot. Probably, I should have had the sense to let them go and let the day just be about my beautiful bride and our beautiful wedding and our beautiful future together, but nobody ever accused me of having a whole lot of sense.

I had it all worked out—in my head, at least—and the night before the wedding we gathered at St. Edward’s for a rehearsal, and while Danielle and her bridesmaids were figuring where to stand I was huddled with my groomsmen, going over last-minute plans for getting from the beach to the church the next morning. We ran through all these different scenarios, to make sure we had everything covered. The wedding was called for ten o’clock; my heat was set to go off at six thirty; wasn’t a whole lot that could go wrong, really. A couple of the guys were also planning to surf, including my brothers Jonathan and Adam, but there were enough non-surfers in the group to cheer us on, help ferry us back and forth, and make sure we had everything we needed.

At one point during the rehearsal, I caught sight of my dad, standing around in a pair of worn-out shoes I recognized from when I still lived in the camper; the soles were coming apart from the tops, and he’d put caulking around the seams to hold the whole mess together. I took him aside and told him he couldn’t wear those shoes to my wedding rehearsal, and then I slipped out of my own shoes and handed them to him.

I said, “Wear these.”

It seemed way more appropriate for the rad surfer dude groom to be barefoot than for the father of the rad surfer dude groom to be walking around in a pair of shabby kicks that wouldn’t have even made the cut at the Salvation Army.

Oh, and speaking of shoes, I’d gone out and bought all my groomsmen a pair of creepers to wear at the wedding. Remember creepers? They were a big punk-rockabilly craze in the late 1980s, so I bought a bunch from a British company called Nana for the wedding party. Mine were black with a leopard print—totally smokin’. My idea was we’d all line up for our groomsmen photo and look so spectacularly handsome in our custom creepers we’d have to hire extra security just to keep the ladies out of the shot.

*   *   *

The wedding was shaping up to be a big, big deal. It was certainly a big deal in the Paskowitz family; we could fill a room and call it a party all on our own. Plus, we’d invited all these legends of surfing—friends of ours, friends of Doc, friends of my father-in-law. Tubesteak and the rest of the Tracys would be there, of course. Gary Propper, Hobie Alter, J Riddle, David Nuuhiwa, the Patterson brothers, Raymond and Ronald … just a sick, sick lineup of all-time great surfers. I was the first among my siblings to get hitched, so most of my aunts and uncles and cousins were there, on both sides, plus Danielle’s large family … in all, over two hundred people, which made it like a highlight of the San Clemente–area social calendar. Folks were coming in from as far away as New York and Hawaii, so we were all pretty psyched.

Scott Ruedy was my best man, and my brothers were groomsmen, along with Danielle’s brother, Damian. Don’t think all the Paskowitz boys came to the pier on the morning of the wedding, but Abraham was definitely there, and Jonathan and Adam were competing, so they were there, too. The guys who weren’t surfing were all dressed for the wedding in their monkey suits, looking snappy and out of place for six o’clock in the morning on the beach. My buddy Matt Archbold, one of the greatest shortboarders in the world, was there and for some reason he was dressed out in an embroidered Mexican poncho. Other guys were wearing smoking jackets, or fancy Hawaiian shirts, or whatever their wives or girlfriends had told them was appropriate. We must have made an odd picture, in our various styles of formal dress, still in our various stages of early morning sleep, descending on this scene for my preliminary heat, but to our thinking it was all part of the celebration. It all tied in.

Understand, I wasn’t just surfing to go through the motions, or selfishly avoiding my husbandly responsibilities; this wasn’t some last act of rebellion or a swan song to my misspent youth. No way. The competition was important. It was a big-time, Hobie-sponsored event—a sanctioned leg on the national tour, which was just getting started. But at the same time it wasn’t just about needing the points to add to my yearlong total and securing my spot in the standings; I was also in it to win it. There was serious prize money involved—twelve hundred dollars as I recall, which I’d recently learned would have almost bought me half a rabbi. And I’d be going up against a strong, competitive field. I’d been in a zone for a good long while, and my goal was to keep a good thing going.

The waves were on the small side, but this was more of a problem for the other surfers than it was for me. I knew this sweet spot on the north side of the pier, where you’re almost hugging the barnacles, that would put me in a prime position to catch the best of the swell as it came in. I was on my pink board, on the inside, ready to ride my way into the finals. And that’s just how it happened. I caught my few waves and when the horn blew the guys came down to the shorebreak to meet me. A couple of them—already drunk, probably; or, possibly, still drunk from the night before—threw me on their shoulders and walked me out of the water, while I was still wearing my wet suit. Someone brought champagne, so we started passing the bottle around. I didn’t even stop at the scorer’s table to see if I’d made it through, because I knew I’d nailed it. Wasn’t that I was cocky or superconfident, just that I knew no one was catching the same waves as me.

At this point, it was a little after eight o’clock; the wedding was in less than two hours. We were only a couple miles from the church, but we had to swing by Abraham’s place so I could shower and change into my tuxedo. The other guys all disappeared into their own rides, while I hopped into Abraham’s run-down BMW. It was such a crap set of wheels, we couldn’t help but laugh. When we were younger, fresh out of the camper and scraping to buy our first used cars, we took a kind of youthful pride in what we were driving—throwaway American muscle cars, mostly, but we took such good and loving care of these vehicles. (My ’65 Impala is a perfect example.) But at some point, with Abraham, he flipped a switch, to where it was more about the brand than the ride itself. He’d always wanted a BMW, and this piece-of-shit was what he could afford; part of me worried if the thing could even get us to the church.

Happily, the car did its job. It was me who nearly didn’t make it there. First we had to have a couple beers. After all, this was my wedding day, right? There was a lot to toast … and, it turned out, Abraham had laid in a cooler’s worth of Pacifico. I showered between beers, jumped into my tuxedo, got started on my tie. My hair was still wet as I dressed, so my collar was soaked through, but I was making good time—that is, until I drained one Pacifico and popped another cold one. And another. Somehow, the time got away from us. Don’t know what it was or how it happened, but all of a sudden it was almost ten o’clock—“go” time. Guess I was so distracted by all this different crap I had to wear, all these component parts to my tuxedo, making sure I didn’t forget anything … I just messed up. Spent a bunch of minutes in there looking for Danielle’s ring.

Ah, the ring … a head-turning, no-karat, no-grade, no-clarity stunner I picked up at Target for $180. The setting had four micro-tiny stones that had a beautiful dark color to them, which was about what I could afford, but Danielle didn’t care. She only cared that I could haul ass to the church in time to put the damn thing on her finger.

Meanwhile, over at the church, people were starting to freak, wondering where we were. Scott Ruedy had gone back directly from the beach, along with Danielle’s brother, Damian, and the rest of my brothers, and they reported that I’d finished with my preliminary heat and was on my way, so the woman who was coordinating everything decided we were on schedule. The rest of the bridal party was all there, so they started up the music, the procession … everything. Folks were walking down the aisle, and soon it was the bride’s turn to walk down the aisle, and they just kept on going. It was like a runaway train. The wedding was underway, with or without the groom.

This all came to me later; all I knew at the time was we were running late. Not too, too late, but late enough. Apparently, Danielle was starting her walk down the aisle, looking mighty pissed. Mad as she was, though, she didn’t have a single doubt about my intentions. She knew I didn’t have cold feet; she knew I wasn’t bailing. She just knew I’d fucked up, was all.

As I raced into the church, I glanced down and saw my father’s shabby, caulked-together shoes, same pair from the night before. They were kind of tucked beneath the bushes by the entrance—tucked neatly, the way you’d rest a pair of slippers at the edge of your bed—and I had to laugh. Also, I had to wonder: Did he wear them back to the church this morning and suddenly remember they were all wrong? Was he barefoot? Did he leave them here last night? It looked like that scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy’s house has fallen on the Wicked Witch of the East and all you can see are her ruby-red slippers, only here it was like St. Edward’s had fallen on poor Doc as he arrived to watch the first of his Jewish sons get married … in a Catholic ceremony.

Don’t know why, but it struck me as just about the funniest thing.

Soon as I walked in the front door of the church, I was hurried down the aisle. Danielle was halfway down by that point, figuring out that I was not yet in position. I watched the video afterwards, and she looked so stunning, so pissed, so bewildered; her beautiful doe eyes were frantically scanning the room, trying to figure out what was happening, and in the moment I remember trying to avoid eye contact with her, because I knew she’d rip into me. I shot right past her on my way down the aisle and I tried to flash a look of apology, but she gave me the cold shoulder as I passed.

Other than the mess I made by running late, the wedding went off without a hitch. Before it was over, Danielle was all smiles and it was all good between us. And the reception, up the bluff at the Chart House, was kick-ass. Lots of good food, good music, good beer. One of the highlights of the reception was doing whiskey shots with Doc, pulled from a hundred-year-old bottle he’d been saving for a special occasion. He never drank, other than a cup of wine on the Sabbath, but some patient had given him the bottle years ago as payment for a visit or a consult back in Hawaii, and this seemed like a good time to pop it open.

I was a little hungover for the finals the next morning. Danielle, the new Mrs. Paskowitz, came down to the beach, and by this point she was fine with my wedding day screwup; by this time it had already become a story we’d tell over and over … someday, to our grandchildren. Guess she realized this was about what she could expect, marrying a professional surf bum, and that I’d just been holding up my end of the deal.

Jonathan ended up out-surfing me in the finals. I took second. And, as always, I was happy for him; I’d kicked butt in the preliminaries and he’d kicked butt in the finals, and that’s how it shook out. I left the beach thinking, Good for him. And, Good for me. And, Good for all of us.

And it was.

*   *   *

It’s not like Danielle and I sat down and planned our lives together. Wasn’t our style. We both wanted kids—sooner rather than later, I guess—but Israelah snuck up on us. I’ll never forget the look of stunned joy on Danielle’s face when she told me she was pregnant, but I imagine it was a lot like the look of stunned joy on my face as it sunk in.

Most people, seeing how we were living and with a kid on the way, would think we might have been stressed about money, but that never entered into my thinking. Might have kept Danielle awake a time or two, but not me. The way I grew up left me thinking kids didn’t change a thing, in terms of your bottom line. What did it cost to have a kid, really? Just a package of diapers, every couple days. That’s it. Ten bucks a day. To me, that was within our means, so I took a no worries approach.

Besides, I was at the height of my career, surfing out of my mind. I knew it wouldn’t last forever, success at that level, so we couldn’t count on it going forward, but I also knew I’d be crazy not to make the most of it. There was one stretch in there when I won eleven major championships in less than two years, including three in a row—at Trestles, at the Rabbit Kekai in Boca Barranca, Costa Rica, and at the Coke event in Australia I wrote about earlier. Wasn’t a lot of prize money to be had on the circuit, but the endorsement money was rich enough to fool me into thinking I was making a living. For a couple years, I pulled in thirty thousand dollars or so, between winnings and sponsorship fees. One year, I even topped fifty thousand. That was the year I did a series of ads for Nike, with Bo Jackson, Andre Agassi, and Michael Jordan, so I was getting a ton of attention. When I threw it all together with the decent money I was still making up in Newport Beach cleaning boats, it was enough to keep us in surfboards and diapers.

Danielle had her gig at Surfer magazine, too, and it came with benefits, so we had the pregnancy and pediatrician covered. In most respects, we were better off than my folks had been when they started spitting out kids—even with my father’s medical degree.

We had a funky setup on a ranch owned by Danielle’s parents, high up in the hills of San Juan Capistrano. Wasn’t much of a ranch, really. Back then, it was more like a big open field, pretty damn far from civilization. It was way, way up off the main road, and you had to take a twisty, unpaved access road to get to it. It was so rustic we didn’t even have electricity when we started living there, had to operate everything off a hand-crank generator. We had the idea that we’d be like pioneers, which worked out great because Danielle was becoming more and more interested in horses, so there was plenty of room for her to ride and roam.

Turned out to be too much of a hassle, though. We’d come back to the property a bit later on, but at that stage of our lives it was too much, or not enough. It was one thing, getting up and down that hill under normal circumstances, but with a baby the twenty minutes it took each way left us feeling pretty isolated, like we needed to be a little closer to civilization, and a steady supply of hot water.

This was never more obvious than the moment Danielle’s water broke. Racing down that hill to Mission Hospital took forever; on those hairpin turns it felt like I was about to drive us straight off the bluffs. Probably, that was the first we talked about having to find another place to live. But first things first, we had a baby to deliver, and by the time we got to the hospital there were a whole bunch of Paskowitzes and Brawners who’d arrived ahead of us. This was the first legit grandchild on both sides, so everyone dropped what they were doing to get in on it. (“Legit” because, technically, Jonathan’s son was the first of his generation on the Paskowitz side, but Jonathan never really copped to being the boy’s father.) At one point, there were about fifty friends and family members gathered at the hospital, waiting on this kid’s arrival, so it was a grand welcome … until the nurse had to chase everyone out.

Don’t remember too much about the actual delivery except that Danielle was pushing and pushing. For six hours, she pushed. I wasn’t much use to Danielle, I don’t think, but she hung in there. We didn’t want to know the sex of the baby beforehand, but I knew it’d be a boy. Deep down, I knew. We were Paskowitzes, after all. And it wasn’t just me. Danielle seemed resigned to it, too, which explains the absolute bombshell rush of surprise that washed over each of us when the baby finally came. I’d thought about this moment about a million times, and it never occurred to me we’d have a girl.

Not once.

I was so happy for Danielle. She really, really wanted a little girl, and I think she’d been terrified to say as much during the pregnancy; mostly, I just don’t think it occurred to her it would work out that way. But it did. Thrillingly, amazingly, wonderfully … it did. I was blown away with how pumped I was for Danielle. It’s like I’d given her this miraculous gift, only I’d get to share in that gift, too. Every day, I’d get to share in it.

I was totally stoked myself. I’d never really given much thought to having a girl or a boy. In my family, growing up, there was all this great weight and significance attached to the idea of having a son, but I never bought into any of that. Really, it was a lot of crap. To me, the weight and significance came with having a beautiful, healthy child. That’s all. A girl or a boy, it didn’t matter—and I think it only mattered to Danielle in an icing-on-the-cake sort of way. But to me, little Israelah was the whole damn bakery.

I must say, I was a great dad. And a full partner in parenting. Don’t mean to blow smoke up my own butt, but I was very involved, very present. It helped that Israelah arrived in November, as the pro circuit slowed for the winter, so I was around a whole lot, but I was really into taking care of her and taking part. Danielle was breast-feeding, so there was a lot I couldn’t do, but she pumped enough for a nighttime bottle and I always took the middle-of-the-night shift. All night long, I’d just stare and stare at this beautiful little girl—my beautiful little girl. The bottle would be long gone, and Israelah would be fast asleep, but I’d just sit with her in my lap, for hours and hours.

After six weeks, Danielle went back to work. We needed the money, but even more than that, Danielle had it in her head she’d be a working mom. That was the idea, the ideal, so we moved into a small, two-bedroom apartment right above Danielle’s folks and I started spending most of my time running around with the baby. Danielle and I drove a Ford Escort in those days, and I’d be back and forth to all these different surf shops and warehouses around town, and it was always a trick to try to puzzle a bunch of surfboards into that tiny car. The only way to do it, really, was to slide them directly over Israelah’s infant seat, so I’d pull up someplace and a buddy would help me unload my boards and all of a sudden I’d hear, “Hey, there’s a baby under here!”

First couple times, I pretended to be surprised.

Most days, we’d swing by the magazine for lunch, so Danielle could breast-feed Israeleh, and I remember stepping outside myself during these moments and wondering what I’d done to deserve such as this. I couldn’t remember when I’d ever been happier.

Soon, we started calling the baby Elah, and the name seemed to fit. She was such a perfect, perfect baby. Never made a peep, other than to let us know she wouldn’t have minded a little something to eat, or maybe a diaper change. We even hauled her to Australia, for another tournament the year after my Coke Classic win, and I remember sitting down on the plane next to a couple of big old burly Aussies who didn’t look too happy at the prospect of spending the next fourteen, fifteen hours next to a crying baby, but she was amazing. Didn’t cry once, the whole way.

By the time we got back home to California, we realized Danielle was pregnant again, so the loose plan was to keep doing what we were doing. By our math, Elah would be a big sister at about sixteen months, and she hadn’t given us any trouble, so we thought things would continue to be fine and easy and wonderful. We thought all our babies would pretty much take care of themselves.

(Yeah, right.)

Danielle worked straight through her second pregnancy, while I did most of the hands-on heavy lifting with Elah during the day, whenever I was in town; when I wasn’t, Danielle’s folks would pitch in, so they were a big help. For a while, we lived in the apartment at the back of their house; for another while, we lived just down the street; always, they were nearby and happy to pitch in.

I made sure to be home for the weeks surrounding our due date, of course, and when Danielle finally went into labor I talked her into a little detour. I remembered that she’d been at it for hours with Elah, so I assumed we were in for another long haul and suggested we stop at the beach. We’d already parked Elah with her grandparents, so I pointed the car towards San O and figured I’d catch a couple waves before Danielle’s contractions got bigger and closer together.

Full disclosure: I only half-expected Danielle to join me in thinking this was a good idea, but I thought it was worth a shot. And do you know what? She was completely down with it. We both thought the sound of the surf and the smell of the sea would clear her mind for the ordeal ahead, so while she walked I grabbed my board and paddled out. I left Danielle by the shack on the beach, pacing back and forth, told her I’d keep checking in with her. It helped that she had a killer whistle—one of those loud, piercing trills that come in handy when you’re calling farm animals or expectant surf bum fathers who might have drifted from their posts. I was out there a half hour or so when I noticed Danielle waving me in—a little frantically, if you must know—and by the time I got to her she was doubled up in pain.

And she was pissed. All of a sudden, I was a selfish fucking idiot, for wanting to surf while Danielle was in full-blown labor—and I guess she had a point. (Forget that she’d been into it; it was my fault for bringing it up.) So I got her in the backseat of the car and started hauling ass to Mission Hospital. Earned ourselves a police escort on the way, and once we got to the emergency room and they wheeled her inside, Isaiah made an appearance just a short while later. Elah had taken her sweet time, but her brother arrived in less than twenty minutes.

Here again, we hadn’t found out about the gender, so when the doctor held the baby out and I peeked between his legs I was probably the happiest father in all of California. To see that little tally-whacker … man, I don’t think I’d ever been that excited. Felt like my head was about to burst. My heart, too.

Isaiah was an absolutely beautiful baby. He was big and thick, with almond eyes and a full head of hair. Looked a lot like me in my baby pictures, only a little on the chubby side, which should have tipped us off to the kind of giant he’d become. He didn’t have the same easy disposition as his big sister, didn’t sleep as long or as soundly, but he was easy enough; it’s just that they were on completely different schedules, so it wasn’t long before Danielle and I were completely exhausted.

This time around, Danielle was in no rush to get back to work, which was just as well because Isaiah was born about a month ahead of the tournament season, so as soon as the first rush of fascination over the new baby wore off I was back at it. In between tournaments, I was hustling up to Newport Beach, to work with John on his boats, because Danielle and I knew money was going to be tight.

Elah was psyched to have a baby brother. She called him Prince, which she got from watching Bambi over and over. And it wasn’t just a name with her; she treated Isaiah’s arrival like he was the new prince of our little forest. She had the cutest baby-talk voice—high and gentle and sweet. She’d wake up in the morning and stand herself up in her crib and the first words out of her mouth were always, “Where’s Prince?”

It was an amazing time in our lives. Our kids were healthy and happy. I was still ripping on the tour, still squeezing as much money as possible out of a sport that was never really about money, still feeling completely on top of my game. And Danielle was happy to be at home with our beautiful babies.

Life was good.

*   *   *

Might as well finish up with the last of our childbirth stories, long as I’m on it, before doubling back and telling the rest.

Eli, our third, was a classic surprise. He was what a less enlightened parent would call a mistake, but “surprise” sounds a whole lot better—and, really, it’s way more accurate. Gets to the heart of how he arrived, what his arrival meant to our little family. Yeah, “mistake” works, too, but I’ve made a ton of mistakes in my life that didn’t work out like this. Like this was a godsend—another blessing to round out the set. But before Eli came along and surprised us, we certainly weren’t thinking of having another kid. Elah and Isaiah were about all we could handle. In fact, Isaiah all by himself was about all we could handle, because at about a year he started exhibiting symptoms of autism. We didn’t know what it was just yet, only that his behavior was off. Way off. This, too, was a surprise, because up until this time he’d been developmentally on point. Crawled when he was supposed to. Said his first “maa maa, daa daa”–type words when he was supposed to. Made good and appropriate eye contact and seemed as plugged in and engaged as any other toddler—certainly, as plugged in and engaged as his sister had been. He even started walking before his first birthday, which everybody said was a big deal.

With Isaiah, the changes were subtle at first—the kind only a mother would notice. The kind a clueless, head-in-the-clouds father would choose to miss. Danielle was around way more than I was during this period, but even more than that, she was attuned to this type of thing. As a parent, she was superattentive and supervigilant about the health and welfare of our children. Me, I was more about hanging out and having fun with them, so for a couple years I was in complete denial about Isaiah. I didn’t see what Danielle was seeing—because, hey, when it came to my kids, they were just right, pretty damn perfect, straight out of a fairy tale. Whenever Danielle would get all anxious about some Isaiah behavior or other, I’d remind her that I had been a quiet kid; I’d tell her how there was so much noise and nonsense in our camper household, I became shy and reserved, and that maybe that’s what was going on here. Whatever her concerns, I’d explain them away, or tell her she was all wrong.

After a while, it got harder to explain away Isaiah’s behavior. He started flapping his arms and doing this screeching-yelling thing he still does, tends to spook people out when they hear it for the first time. All of these little tics and mannerisms and idiosyncrasies started to turn up, but slowly, subtly, softly. They’d get bigger and louder and more pronounced over time, and as they did we’d see less and less of Isaiah. He was in there, somewhere, we felt sure, but however connected and plugged in he’d been as a toddler, however “normal” and by-the-book, it began to slip away, to where even I had to admit that something was terribly, terribly wrong.

We started taking Isaiah to a bunch of doctors. We did MRIs, and EEGs, and all these different tests. One doctor thought Isaiah might have some sort of brain tumor, and we were actually hoping this was the case because it would be something we could fix, so we didn’t know how to feel when all those scans checked out clean. Every doctor said something different … until they all started saying the same thing: autism. We heard it like some dreaded diagnosis, because we didn’t know what it meant. We didn’t know where it came from, or how to handle it, so right away Danielle started doing all this research, trying to learn as much as she could, quick as she could. I went the other way. I shut down. I checked out. I simply refused to accept that there could be something so wrong with my son, my perfect little boy, so I brushed it aside. Danielle was terrified; I was more thrown. Wasn’t what I was expecting, not at all, so I took my time processing it, ran from confused to pissed, mystified to sad, and all the way back to confused. Told myself whatever I needed to tell myself to get through my days. And, worst of all, I doubled down on my tournament schedule and started looking for reasons to travel to all these remote beaches, all over the world.

Basically, I shut my eyes and covered my ears and went surfing. Left it to Danielle to hold things together at home. Not exactly the most mature or loving or responsible approach, but all I could do was wish myself away, away, away.

More on my chickenshit response to Isaiah’s diagnosis a bit later on; for now, I want to get back to Eli. Poor Danielle had nightmares the whole time she was pregnant with Eli. And she wasn’t just worried this next kid would be autistic. Everything was on the table: she thought the baby would be deformed or unhealthy in some other way; in one recurring dream, the baby was born with a cleft palate, so she let her mind run. Whatever headline or TV movie-of-the-week she came across, describing some tragedy or other, that’s what she’d worry about; it was really tough on her, and I was no help.

The week before Eli was born, I did something stupid that only added to Danielle’s anxiety: I gave Isaiah a haircut. This alone wasn’t so bad, I’d given him haircuts before, but this time I gave him a Mohawk—I think because he’d pointed to a picture in a magazine and I thought he’d like it. Big mistake. Plus, it was a shitty, homemade, uneven Mohawk. My little guy looked ridiculous, so I gave myself a bad Mohawk to match, and it would have been no big deal except Danielle was all hormonal and she was already worried about the baby, already beside herself about Isaiah, and now every time she looked at her two men we struck her like a still frame out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, like we belonged in some mental institution. She actually cried a couple times, looking at us, so I felt like I’d really screwed up.

The other stupid thing I did was stop for a burger on the way to the hospital when Danielle went into labor with Eli. It was early in the morning, but we passed a Carl’s Jr. and I realized I hadn’t eaten, so I pulled into the drive-thru. Danielle was ripshit. And then, when I started wolfing down my burger as I drove, she started to retch from the smell. Clearly, it was a bonehead, piggish move.

Eli popped out in no time at all, just like his brother—and this last development kept the worry alive in Danielle. He was superhealthy, bigger than the other two, and there was nothing wrong with him, he was just a perfect, perfect baby, but all through his first year or two Danielle was completely on top of Eli, hovering over every little milestone. She measured everything against how old Elah had been, and what the books said, and what Isaiah had been doing at that same age.

And she measured my behavior against what it had been for Elah and Isaiah, back when I was fully engaged and present, when things were easy, when life was good, when the specter of autism didn’t hang over our house like a dark cloud. And as I set these thoughts to paper, now, I’m realizing that Eli got screwed. In a lot of ways, big and small, the kid caught a raw deal. He didn’t do anything but show up and smile, and all around him there was this shit storm of worry and weirdness. Ended up, Eli got gypped. Absolutely, he got gypped. Danielle and I were so focused on Isaiah, on everything it meant to have a young child with autism, that Eli never got the attention he deserved—Elah, too, but at least in her case she got a year or so of our full attention before Isaiah was born. Before I turned tail and hid out on the tour.

Even now that he’s a teenager, Eli is always taking a backseat to his brother’s needs. And in some ways, he probably always will. There’s no avoiding it, but it kills me just the same. It kills me because Eli’s such a tough, resilient kid. Smart. Funny. A little wise beyond his years. He’s like an old soul, because he sees everything that goes on in our semi-functional family and he weighs in with a kind of uncanny wisdom. He knows all, he sees all … but he doesn’t get to be a garden-variety kid. Sometimes, I watch him go about his business and it feels to me like he’s some intelligent alien being, sent to live among us nut job Paskowitzes to set us straight.

And here’s another thing: Eli doesn’t surf. It’s not that he doesn’t surf at all, just that he doesn’t care to surf. Don’t get me wrong, he knows how to surf. He’s actually got the stuff to be a strong surfer, if he wanted. But he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t live to surf, the way his dad, his grandfather, his uncles lived to surf. The way his sister lived to surf, for a time. I’m not such a complete ass that I attach any great significance to this, but I’d be less than honest if I said it didn’t break my heart, at least a little. It does. It’s like a sweet sadness that follows me around, whenever I stop to think about it, because I used to dream about having a little boy who’d follow me into the water. Same way my father had all his little boys following him into the water. Same way a lot of my surfing buddies are now watching their own kids become strong, competitive, champion surfers. It’s a selfish take, I know. And it pains me to admit it. But there it is.

These selfish dreams didn’t die with Eli, of course. When Isaiah was born, back before he was diagnosed, back before any of us had the first idea what we were facing, I held those same hopes and dreams for him. I’d wanted my firstborn son to know the joy and thrill of surfing, but that was not meant to be, so I guess I probably attached even more importance to this idea when Eli turned up.

But Eli had something else in mind, and I’ve learned to embrace his hopes and dreams and set my own aside. Lately, he’s shown some serious chops as a musician—perhaps drawing on the other sides of his gene pool. He’s got my mother’s tremendous ear for music, and on Danielle’s side he’s got my father-in-law’s sense of rhythm and timing. Eli’s actually a gifted and accomplished drummer, just like his grandfather and his uncle Damian, so I’m grateful that he’s got his own blend of silent fuel to drive his days. Doesn’t have to be my thing. Just has to be his thing, right? Took me a while to realize that, but I got to it eventually.