8

Danielle

I’m afraid I didn’t make a good first impression on my wife, Danielle. In fact, it’s a wonder she ever wanted to see me again. First time we met, I saw her across the room at a party, and she struck me straight off as just about the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen: animal, vegetable, mineral … whatever, she had ’em all beat. She was absolutely breathtaking. Tall, blond, with great tits and a sweet, sweet smile.

I didn’t think I had a chance with her, but I knew I had to find a way to talk to her, to at least give it a shot. Don’t think I would have ever forgiven myself if I didn’t make some sort of move, but the “breathtaking” part was turning out to be a problem. Why? Because I ended up taking her breath away, too—only not in a good way. In my stupid defense, I’d been working on my car all day—a ’65 Impala—so there was grease in my hair, on my clothes, under my fingernails. I looked like shit, felt like shit. Wasn’t really in the mood to go to this party in the first place, but it was a party for this girl who used to go out with my brother Jonathan, who happened to be pregnant with his baby, although she hadn’t really acknowledged that it was his at the time. Everybody knew, in a kind of, sort of way, but it was one of those things that weren’t really discussed.

Anyway, when I got there, I was greasy and tired and wanting to be someplace else. I went to the party basically to support Jonathan, even though it wasn’t clear to any of us at that point what his involvement would be with this baby, or if it was even his. Don’t mean to go all soap opera on you or lay on too much information, but I want to set the scene. Plus, I’d had a few beers, and eaten a bunch of junk food, and my stomach started acting up in a big-time way. It got so bad I had to take a major, major dump—in a tiny little apartment, with no ventilation—but I was so not into being there I just didn’t care. I didn’t really know anybody at the party, wasn’t looking to meet anybody, so I dropped a big-time load and stunk up the place like you wouldn’t believe, and then to make matters worse as I was coming out of the bathroom there was Danielle, waiting with her knockout friend Terri, next in line.

I was so thoroughly and totally embarrassed I could have shit, all over again. It was bad enough just seeing Danielle as I came out the door, but then to have these two gorgeous creatures slip inside together to inhale my shame … well, it was like someone had taken my thorough and total embarrassment and put it on a billboard.

It was probably one of the ten lowest moments of my life, to that point—the ultimate party foul in every sense of the word—and to hear Danielle tell it later it was just as bad as I thought. Apparently, she and Terri closed the door behind them and Terri turned to Danielle and said, “Hey, that guy was cute.” Or something similarly flattering and positive and hopeful. To which Danielle could only scrunch up her face in disgust and say, “What a pig! Are you serious? How could anybody do this? This place smells awful!” Or something similarly mortifying and negative and doubtful.

I knew who she was, of course. By reputation. She was Danielle Brawner, and in addition to being gorgeous, she was California surfing royalty. Her father, Danny Brawner, had been a drummer for the Sandals, a surf rock band that had made a big splash in the 1960s with the sound track to Endless Summer. Even today, you can hear the Sandals’ distinctive instrumental surf tunes on classic rock radio stations. And Danny had since gone on to become a legendary glosser, making boards with Dale Velzy and managing production at Hobie since we were kids. It was Danny Brawner who’d designed the Gerry Lopez Lightning Bolt board I got for my bar mitzvah. He’d known my father, for years and years. They used to surf together at Tourmaline, at San O, at Malibu. They ran with the same crowd—so I’m guessing Danny gave Doc a deal on my board.

I knew Danielle’s brother Damian, too. Damian was the drummer in a popular club band that always played around San Clemente, and everyone thought it was cool that his father had been the drummer in this famous surf rock band. I knew Damian had a sister, but I had no idea she looked like … this.

I left the party soon as I could, making my apologies to Jonathan’s ex, but I couldn’t shake thinking about Danielle. I got home and wished like hell things had gone differently, so I drank a couple more beers and started feeling sorry for myself. I had a girlfriend at the time, a pretty little Irish-Mexican girl I’d been seeing for a while, so it’s not like I was out looking to meet anyone. I suppose I could have called my girlfriend and invited her over to take my mind off what I’d missed, but instead I asked my pal Scott Ruedy to call Danielle for me. Scott and I were living together in a tiny little apartment in San Clemente. Apart from friends whose couches I’d crashed on and my buddy Bob Bueno, whose kindness I’d abused, Scott was the first guy I’d lived with who wasn’t a brother. We’ve been friends for over thirty years; we would be best man at each other’s weddings; that night I recruited him to call a girl for me, because I was too chickenshit to call her myself. That way, I figured if Danielle shot me down, she wouldn’t be shooting me down directly.

It was lame, I know, but I’d dug myself such a deep, deep hole I didn’t see any other way out.

Scott didn’t mind being my wingman. And guess what? Danielle was happy to hear from me, even in this lame-ass, once-removed way, so I got on the phone and we ended up having a nice long conversation. Really, it was such a great conversation, I hung up and called the Irish-Mexican girl and broke it off with her. I didn’t want to string her along or to have Danielle thinking I was some sort of two-timing asshole, so I cleared the decks and made myself available.

Whatever happened now, I was all in.

And what happened was this: Danielle and I set off on a whirlwind two-week romance. It was incredible. She was smart and funny and sarcastic, just like me. (The sarcastic part, I mean—never really thought of myself as smart or funny.) More than that, she had a big, generous heart and she was smoking hot, which basically made her the girl of my wildest dreams. The reason it was only a two-week romance was because she was leaving for Europe on a long-planned trip with one of her girlfriends. It sounded like an amazing adventure, and a part of me was excited for her, but another part thought it sucked that just as we were getting going she was going away. We’d been thrown together in this chaotic way and now there was a clock on our relationship—or whatever the hell we wanted to call it. Plus, she was planning to see an old boyfriend in France, so that was kind of weighing on me, too.

I was still surfing on the professional circuit, but in a half-assed way. It had been a couple years since I’d made the finals in that San Miguel competition, and I’d had other small successes, here and there. Nothing major. Nothing sustained. Enough to land some low-end sponsorship deals with a local apparel company and a local surfboard company, enough to maybe even call myself a professional surfer and not be laughed off the beach, but hardly enough to keep me in beer and utilities. I was still working with John at the marina, making good money. By outward appearances it might have seemed like I had it going on, but it felt like I was treading water. Wouldn’t say I was washed up, but I was certainly stuck, languishing, and before Danielle showed up I’d been wondering if I really wanted to give myself over to surfing. It can be a tough slog, a real grind, traveling to all these out-of-town tournaments, not making any real money, having to keep fit and focused. Before meeting Danielle, I was leaning in the direction of packing it in and finding some other way to fill my days. I didn’t think I had it in me to live like my father, to eat healthy, to live, sleep, and breathe surfing, to do whatever it took to make it on the professional circuit. But then, after hanging with Danielle those two weeks, I started leaning in a whole other way. I’d never been with a woman like her. She was incredible, really—and it wasn’t just that she was drop-dead gorgeous. She was decent and wonderful. She was twice the woman I deserved, at least, and I found myself wanting to double down and step up my game, just so I could measure up. She made me want to be better.

Also, she made me want to be in a serious relationship. With her. Only with her.

When our two weeks were up, I drove Danielle to LAX from San Clemente. We didn’t leave ourselves a ton of time, although in those days you could breeze into the gate just a couple minutes early and still make your flight. That’s about how it shook out that day. I had to ride the emergency lane the whole way there, but nobody pulled us over, and there was no time for a long, emotional good-bye, which I guess was just as well. I had my too-cool-for-the-room pro surfer exterior to maintain, but deep down I was a wreck. Deep down I was quivering. It felt like the love of my life was slipping away. Danielle had burst into my world like a comet, and taken me on this wild, wonderful ride, and now she was off to blaze some other path, on some other continent … maybe even take up with that old boyfriend.

I wanted to cry.

*   *   *

I moped around for a couple days after Danielle left, not quite sure how to jump-start my life. But then an opportunity came for me to leave town, too, in the form of a one-way ticket to Israel. My dad’s old pal Topsi Kanzapolski had a couple kids in the surfboard business, Amor and Nir. They sent the airline ticket for Abraham, actually, but he wasn’t up for the trip, so we switched it up. Their idea was I’d help them with their designs. My idea was to just get away, maybe wait out Danielle’s European tour with a change of scenery.

I stopped for a day or two in New York on the way over. In recent years, the city had become a kind of hang for the Paskowitz clan. My grandparents had been there awhile, and now my brother Adam was living there, working in a motorcycle shop; also, my sister, Navah, had just left the camper and decided to give New York a try. This meant it was just down to Joshua living under my parents’ roof, and their roof at this point was down to a Chevy Nova—so the times they were certainly a-changing in our family. (Just to be clear, the Nova was like a base of operations, a place to keep their stuff; they also had a couple tents, so it’s not like poor Joshua had to sleep in the glove compartment.)

I had thirty bucks in my pocket and a backpack with a pair of board shorts and a couple days’ worth of clothes. I was still bumming about Danielle, missing her like crazy. I borrowed twenty bucks from my sister, which she didn’t really have, to get myself a killer leather jacket at Adam’s bike shop, using his employee discount—basically because I thought it’d cheer me up to have a killer leather jacket.

It did and it didn’t.

When I boarded the plane for Tel Aviv, I was down to some loose change, but somehow I made it from the airport to Amor’s flat. Amazingly, I found that I still knew my way around. It’d been about ten years since I was last in Tel Aviv, but I had a sense of where I was, where I was going. Amor had a really nice setup across from a marina. You could see the beach from his window, and it was filled with surfers. I remembered the stories my father used to tell, about bringing those first boards through customs in the 1950s and teaching guys like Topsi to ride. I thought about our two trips to Israel as a family, and the growing popularity of the sport, especially on weekends when the surf was up and the crowds were out. And now here I was, about to start work with Topsi’s kids at a surfboard factory, across from a break where hundreds of kids lay on their bellies waiting to drop in and ride. Surfing had become a big, big part of Israeli culture. In some areas, among young soldiers especially, it was such an all-consuming passion you could look on and think you were back in California.

The only thing missing, really, was a world-class break. The surfing wasn’t bad, but it was a lot like surfing in Florida, where the shores are buffeted by islands and you’re unable to get a clean swell. The Mediterranean can behave like a giant lake, with low pressures and an occasional wind that will drive the swells into little waves. Sometimes, when it’s especially windy, it can whip around and blow up the face of these small waves and make them taller, instead of blowing on their backs and crushing them.

On a good day, the surfing was fine. Better than good enough, really. The water was crystal clear and warm and completely different from what I was used to back home, so there was something exotic about it, too. I really dug it, the whole scene. I dug the language, the culture, the vibe. Wound up working there for a couple months, although “working” is probably too strong a word to describe what I was actually doing at first. Basically, I was hanging out and letting these guys bounce their ideas off of me about their boards, their designs; sometimes, I’d bounce my ideas right back. We commuted to the factory on Amor’s Harley, which had a bitchin’ sidecar, so we tooled around the streets of Tel Aviv like an Israeli Batman and Robin, making the beaches safe for Middle Eastern surfers.

On Friday nights, we’d have Shabbat dinner with Amor’s parents, Topsi and Naomi; they cooked these amazing meals, and we talked deep into the night about what was going on in Israel, among the young people especially. The Kanzapolskis’ English was perfect, but they sprinkled in a little Hebrew if they thought they needed just the right word to get a point across. Soon, whatever Hebrew I’d retained in my fog of little-kid memory started to come back to me and I could hold up my end pretty well.

I didn’t make any money, but I got a place to stay. And food and beer. At the time, early 1980s, beer wasn’t a big thing in Tel Aviv, so I was a bit of a trendsetter on this one. Most of the folks I was hanging with seemed to think beer was filling, that it would make them fat. They’d rather smoke hash—that was their way of unwinding after a day on the beach or a day at the surfboard factory. Personally, I’d never been into weed back home. It always made me feel drowsy, dopey, paranoid. Beer was much more my thing. But hash was a whole other high, and I came to really enjoy it, so that became a part of our days, too. Surfing, food, beer, hash … the ideal recipe to chase me from my funk about missing Danielle.

It’s not like we weren’t in touch. Over the next three or four months, she wrote me letters. (Remember letters?) Told me what was going on with her adventures. She got pickpocketed in France, had all her money stolen, so that set her back. The much-dreaded reunion with the old boyfriend—much dreaded by me !—came and went without incident, so that gave me a lift.

After a while, my friend Dovoleh found a way to rig one of his neighbor’s lines so Danielle and I could talk on the phone and we’d have these long, loopy conversations that stretched on for hours. Each one was like that first conversation we had back home, the night of that shitty party. Just the sound of her voice was enough to get me thinking I should drop everything I was doing in Israel and find my way back to wherever she was. She returned home to California ahead of me, but we kept up with our late night phone sessions, and after a while I couldn’t take being away from her. Trouble was, I had no money for a flight home. So Amor’s girlfriend hooked me up with a couple modeling gigs, and I started doing some coloring work down at the surfboard factory, which earned me a few shekels. I’d apply watercolors to the blank boards after they’d been shaped; then we’d wait for them to dry and laminate over the fiberglass, giving the boards a hip, distinctive look. Nobody was doing that over there at the time, and it threw a little money my way and soon I’d managed to scrape together enough for a return ticket.

Danielle came to meet me at the airport in a limo, which I thought was way cool. It belonged to a buddy of hers who lived up the street, and the guy wasn’t doing anything that afternoon, so she convinced him to go for a ride. (First time I ever had sex in a limo! Historians, take note!)

Seeing her again was like coming up for air.

I’d given up the apartment I was sharing with Scott, so I needed a place to stay, and Danielle convinced her folks to let me crash in her brother Damian’s room. They weren’t too keen about it, I don’t think, but Danielle could be very persuasive, I was learning. Don’t think Damian minded one way or another; we got along well enough, and it’s not like I was actually bunking with him the whole night; I’d sneak into Danielle’s room when her parents went to sleep, and sneak back in the morning.

I’d loaned out my car, too—to my brother Abraham, which ended up being a big mistake. Oh, man, I loved that ’65 Impala. It was my first car. Bought it for $650 off this old dude, who made me drive around with him in it for a half day before agreeing to sell it to me, like he wanted to check me out and see if I’d be a worthy owner. It had sixty thousand miles on it. The chrome was in perfect shape. Hadn’t really wanted to lend it to Abraham, but he had no other way to get around and promised he’d take good care of it, and I couldn’t see letting it sit for a couple months when I was in Israel.

It took Abraham a couple days to get the car back to me after I got back to town, but once I got my car back I was able to feel a measure of independence. Kind of tough to feel like you’re on your own and moving in the right direction when you’re living with your girlfriend’s brother in his boyhood bedroom. So the car helped, definitely. I could come and go as I pleased, and do as I pleased … until we were all woken up one morning a couple days later by the bleat of the telephone and a loud knock on the door. It was way early, still dark, and all of a sudden the house was filled with all this noise and activity. I’d already ducked back into Damian’s room, and he and I were both startled awake by two cops, who came busting into his room with their guns drawn, barking out questions.

One of the cops turned to me and said, “Are you Israel Paskowitz?”

I nodded.

Then he slapped a pair of handcuffs on me and started pushing me out the door of Damian’s room. It was a crazy, chaotic scene. Danielle’s parents were half-asleep, standing in the hallway outside Damian’s room, but her mom, Sharon, was alert enough and pissed enough to go off on me. Sharon turned to Danielle and screamed, “See, I fuckin’ told you he was no good. Goddamn surfer!”

Danielle’s dad was laughing. Danny was a cool guy. Took a lot to set him off. Plus, we got along pretty well. I think he knew one of the cops, because Danny was a volunteer fire captain and he worked with all these law enforcement types. He thought the whole thing was pretty funny. He even asked the cops to hang back for a beat so he could go get his camera. Said he wanted to take pictures, because this was something we’d all want to remember—Doc Paskowitz’s kid, being led from Danny’s house in handcuffs.

Damian was freaking out—mostly because of the drawn gun, I think, but also because he’d nodded off with a jarful of coins on his bed. He’d come back from a gig, was counting out his tips, and was a little bit hammered, so I’d taken the time to stick a bunch of pennies on his skin while he was passed out—you know, just to goof on him. Danielle had said I should make myself at home, and this was the kind of thing my brothers and I would do to each other all the time. An hour or so later, as Damian stumbled out of bed, with all these coins stuck to his body, I didn’t think I’d done such a good or thorough job, because they started dropping to the floor—one by one, at first, and then in clumps. Poor Damian couldn’t figure what the hell was going on. He was half-asleep, half-baked, fully confused.

The whole scene was a little too confusing to process. Sharon was yelling at Danielle, and Danielle was yelling back at Sharon, telling her to shut up and leave me the fuck alone, and Danny was off to the side, trying not to laugh.

Wasn’t exactly the picture of domestic bliss, I’ll say that.

I managed to grab my passport and jump into a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, before the cops threw me barefoot into the back of their car and drove me to the station. The whole time thinking, Great, Izzy. Welcome the fuck home.

At this point, I still had no idea why these guys were arresting me, but it came clear that Abraham had run up all these parking tickets and moving violations while I was in Israel. The car was registered to me, but whenever Abraham got pulled over they’d run the plates and he’d say he was me and that he’d misplaced his license, so now there were all these outstanding warrants for my arrest. After a while, they came looking for me.

Ended up spending the rest of the morning in a jail cell, before I was dragged in front of a judge. There were a bunch of other cases ahead of me, all similar traffic violation stories, and it seemed this judge was giving about a week of jail time for each warrant. I did the math and figured he could put me away for a month or more, because there were four or five outstanding warrants—but luckily I was able to produce my passport, to show that I was out of the country at the time of each violation. I said I’d left my car behind and that a lot of people had access to it, but when the judge pressed me to give up some names I pretended like I couldn’t really say for sure, like the list of people who might have had a key was just too long for me to be any more specific.

I didn’t want to give up Abraham on this, even though he’d been so quick to give me up every time he was pulled over.

Danielle was hugely pissed, though, because the whole scene created a mess of tension between her and her parents—between us and her parents. She was pissed at me for not turning Abraham in, and at Abraham for putting me in this spot, and at her mother for being so quick to write me off, and at her father for not taking it all that seriously.

I couldn’t be mad at my brother just for being stupid and selfish and irresponsible. It wasn’t Abraham’s fault that his stupidity and selfishness and irresponsibility ended up getting me arrested; it’s just how it shook out—and it all shook out to the good, because my passport put me in the clear.

And because it forced Danielle and me to push our relationship to the next level and move in together. We couldn’t stay on in her parents’ house after something like this. I’d overstayed my welcome, and we rode that swell into our first apartment, knowing that whatever happened next, whatever adventures lay in wait, we would face them together.