Now is the time for apologies. He speaks of his stress, his burdens, his hangover. His demanding classes and demanding girlfriend and family obligations. What is expected of him, and how he cannot meet those unrealistic expectations, and how, ultimately, this moment of failure sums up all the shortcomings in his brief yet overburdened life.
He uses the word fuck a lot.
He wrings his hands and taps his feet and fiddles with his sunglasses. The ones that have been on his head the whole time.
He apologizes for his very existence. “It’s just been a fucked-up day, man. I mean, I don’t know you. But Annalise likes you. And she doesn’t like anyone. But I’ve met industry guys, right? And they’re asswipes. Not that you’re . . .”
Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace. “Here.” I hold up the baggie.
He stops midsentence, eyes wide. Then he smiles.
We pass the miles and the sebsi I bought from a wrinkled, old man outside Tangier. The smoke curls up around us, the tinted city flying past, morphing into a smaller city, then only pieces of city, then no city at all. With the push of a button, the driver dissapears. Now it is just the two of us in this cloudy, black-leather cosmos.
Make an island of yourself. Make yourself a refuge.
Though I do not subscribe to a set belief system, Buddha’s got some pretty rad pointers.
“The Hamptons.” Miller tokes, then leans back and laughs loudly. “I fucking hate the fucking Hamptons. Wait, where’d you get this stuff again?”
“Morocco.”
“This shit is sick. And you brought it back . . .”
“In a can of coffee beans.”
“That. Is. Fucking. Insane.”
“Best in the world. Roasted over charcoal fires, ground up with mortars. Very ritualistic art form, goes back generations.”
“The hash?”
“The coffee.”
“Fuck, dude. I meant the hash!”
“Yeah,” I say, laughing. “That’s pretty good, too. Got the herb from some bros outside Taghazout.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Surfing. Trying to figure it all out.”
“And did you?”
“Yes. No. Maybe.” I suck in, letting the elixir work its magic. “Snagged some killer waves, that’s for sure.”
We grin at each other. I pass the pipe.
“Like your nails, man,” I say.
“Fuck!” he says, reaching for a Duane Reade bag. “Totally forgot about that shit.”
“Very glam rock,” I say.
Wow, I was expecting—”
“A Hollywood Douche. I know.”
“I figured Annalise had her reasons. Wanted to impress her dad, prove she’s got contacts. She wants to run his new magazine. And since your mom’s, I dunno . . .”
“The most powerful woman in Hollywood? Or so says Variety.”
He looks uncomfortable. “Shit, this stuff makes it hard to control my mouth.”
“Tibetan monks can control their body temperature through mediation. Drop their fingers’ and toes’ by seventeen percent. They can lower their metabolism, too.”
“You’re a trip, man.”
“It’s true, Harvard did a study. They took them fifteen thousand feet up in the Himalayas in the freezing winter, monks wearing nothing but thin shawls. Little guys bedded down right there on the ledge and slept like babies, not even a shiver.”
“No fucking way.”
I take another toke. “Tummo mediation. I tried it myself a few years ago in the sequoia backcountry.”
“You wore, like, a robe?”
“Nah, my boxers.” Now we are laughing. “But I only lasted half an hour. I mean, it was snowing.”
Somewhere far away someone honks a horn. I pack another bowl.
Are your eyes still closed?”
“Yeah, man.”
“You still picturing the hollow tube?”
“Sure.”
“This time, let the air travel up into the crown of your head, then down to your navel. Ready? One. Two. Three.”
“You feel anything?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Do that chant thing again.”
“Humee hum too hee too wahe guru. So . . . are you warmer?”
“Could be. Hold up a sec. Wait . . . yeah. I think I am. For real. Seriously, dude . . . that is . . . weird as fuck.”
“I told you, my friend. Inner fire.”
There’s a buzzing and a bodiless head levitating in the cloud of smoke. “We hit weekend traffic,” says the driver. “Want me to crack a window, Mr. Crawford?”
“Call me M.C., you asshole,” he says, and the driver chuckles. The screen rises and the windows unroll and I am once again reminded how little we control, how the universe is a series of unexpected events and unseen forces.
I inhale deeply, then watch the smoke spiral upward.
“He drove me to elementary school,” says Miller with a wistful smile. “I’d eat the Oreos out of my lunchbox on the way. Never ratted me out.”
“That’s beautiful, man.”
“Yeah, I guess. I mean, he kept me company. Sucks to be an only child. You got sisters and brothers?”
“Three.”
“What are their names?”
“Dahnay, Ye-Jun, and Dulcina.”
“Say what?”
“They’re adopted. Dahnay’s thirteen, just starting seventh grade. I’m teaching him to surf and he shows real potential. Stands out, that’s for sure. Probably the blackest kid in Malibu. Who isn’t on a gardening crew.”
Miller starts to laugh, then looks uncomfortable. “It’s okay,” I tell him kindly. “I meant it to be funny.”
He laughs again, though I strongly suspect he’s forgotten what was funny in the first place.
“The girls are crazy for him, though, calling and texting all hours. This one sent him a topless picture. She’s eleven.”
“Are you kidding?” Miller says, suddenly alert again. “That is fucking insane. What did you do?”
“Called her mother and said, ‘I think your daughter might be dealing with some emotional issues.’ And she starts crying, babbling how the father left her for a Penthouse Pet and the girl probably saw her picture, was emulating what she knew, and on and on, about how she’d done everything humanly possible to keep him from leaving her, the new boobs and daily Pilates and fat transplants from her ass to her face, but he’d gone anyway and now she had an eleven-year-old porn-star-in-the-making and had never felt so lonely in her life.” I sigh. “And then she asked me to come over and fuck her.”
“And?”
“I went over and fucked her.”
He stares at me, wordless.
“But afterwards I made her promise to get a child psychologist.”
“That is the craziest shit I’ve ever heard. You see them much? Your siblings?”
“No.”
Miller is suddenly uneasy, shifting around on his seat. “Do you want to talk about—”
“No.” I smile. “I want to smoke this bowl.”
This traffic is bullshit,” says Miller. “Gonna be late. And I wanna meet this guy, Evergreen. Dude is a genius. I mean, his site is a game changer.” He sighs. “Not to mention, Annalise is gonna bust my balls. Hey, where’d you meet her?”
“Annalise? In the elevator. She just smiled and said, ‘You must be Phillip Atwater! I’ve heard loads about you.’ Never met her before in my life, but she seemed sweet.”
“Annalise? Fuck, I love the girl. But sweet isn’t the word. . . . I mean, she’s hot as shit. And, like, smart. Cares about real stuff. Not like those bitches who go crackass ’cause you don’t text every second. Talking about their fucking hair for five hours. Their purses. I got this one before all my friends, Miller! Isn’t that amazing? And I wanna say, ‘Don’t you get it? I don’t give a shit about you, or your fucking purse either.’”
His words are coming faster, his voice growing louder and more agitated.
“Annalise is different, right? She’s like, top-shelf. She’s Macallan thirty-year and these other girls are, I dunno, Bud on tap. I mean, sometimes you want that. At a bullshit club, maybe. DJ pounding, dance floor full of Jersey chicks in stripper heels. But do you want beer every single day of your freakin’ life? Do you want, like, a wine cellar full of kegs?” He pounds the seat with his fist, red spots blooming on each cheek. “You know what I’m saying, man?”
I have no idea, but I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with beer.
“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards,” I recite. “The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.”
“Lyrics?”
“To life, maybe. Siddhartha.”
He stares at me, face screwed up with concentration, jaw clenched. I breathe deeply, sending rays of calm in his direction. I’ve often been the one to nurse others through the torrid waves of bad-tripdom, once reviving a Finnish girl from a mushroom overdose at a Scandinavian rockabilly festival using this very method.
Under my gaze, his body relaxes, and for a second, I can almost feel his heart rate grow slower, steadying itself to an even tick.
“Are you for real?” he asks.
“Nothing is real.”
“How come I never met you? I’m at the Tower all the time.”
“I don’t go out much.”
I pass him the sebsi, and he inhales deeply, coughs, and then laughs. “With this shit, I wouldn’t either.”
“Moroccan hashish. Kif. They grow it in the Rif Mountains. Kif from the Rif.”
“Kif from the Rif.” He grins. “You’re better than Wikipedia, bro.”
He tells me he never talks this much, not about real stuff. He tells me I’m a good listener.
He has stopped apologizing.
He talks about his music, and it is like a switch flipped inside him, the wattage oozing from under his skin. I’ve been scouting the clubs, he tells me, got the drop on these guys. The real deal. Straight outta the Queensbridge projects.
I nod and listen and watch the smoke rise, the spirals unfurling between us.
None of this plasticized, slicked-over bullshit, poser mofos saying they got a message and never seen shit, spouting off how they’re down for the hood and served hard time for poppin’ some nigga, but they’re really straight outta Cornfuck, Iowa, pullin’ down shifts at the TGI Fridays . . .
I inhale, lean my head back, and allow my flesh to melt.
No pretty-boy wannabe Justin Timber-flake, not these guys. I mean, who the fuck is Drake, tell me that? Some teenage Canadian soap star, gets himself some bling and grill, and boom, he’s the voice of a generation?
He’s excited now, gesticulating and tapping out beats on the tinted window, and I’m thinking how something matters to him, how he wakes with a purpose. How that is a beautiful thing.
I’m talking the real raw shit here, man. These guys are like that, right? The hustlers, the pimps. Corner boys fighting the power. When it meant something.
I think of beautiful things. That girl I met at the hostel in Kauai, the one with the wild hair who never wore shoes, or was it Costa Rica? No, that was the French backpacker, but she didn’t wear shoes either.
I’m talking Run-DMC, slayin’ suckers who perpetrate . . .
It was Kauai, I remember now, that bonfire on the beach, the local boys sharing their herb. And there she was, parting the darkness like a curtain. Calling me pretty white boy . . .
Kool Herc. Bro. Changing the course of history with two turntables . . .
When she smiled, her teeth glowed white in the moonlight. I remember now. Rolling across the sand, her body slippery from the ocean, her skin shiny brown like a beetle shell. Her calling me haole and straddling me. I was so baked, but I remember . . .
“And that’s what I plan on telling him.” The voice, intense, pulling me back. Miller. Leaning toward me, his eyes focused. “He’s got the capital, I got the goods. I’m gonna say, ‘Evergreen, take a look at me. This is your future right here, man. You dig?’”
Miller stares at me.
“Yes,” I say. “You have a vision.”
We have nearly reached our destination.
“It’s all marketing,” he says confidently. “You know, you’re from Hollywood. Strategy. So Desy, she’s got star power, I’m talking pop potential, total bubblegum, dismissible shit. But the kind of shit that sells. And Evergreen’s got the pull. He’s got the capital. So get him on board, launch her . . . boom, we got a label!”
He looks at me expectantly, like he’s waiting for something important.
“And that’s the beginning of everything.”
A huge grin spreads across his face. “Exactly. Living life without fear. Just like Biggie said. Putting five carats in my baby girl’s ear.”
I’m glad he didn’t quote that part about the Twin Towers.
He looks at me with awed respect, like I hold all the answers. Unfortunately, he’s right.
I was just like you once, I think. Living in my happy little house with my happy little dreams and never seeing the bars on the windows.
Then I broke out, and for a few transcendent moments, everything was perfect.
Until that castrating, narcissistic Nazi mother of mine froze my bank account. Until she sent a PI to drag me kicking and screaming back to her dungeon.
Hope is a beautiful thing. Until you lose it, that is.
The day I planned on leaving was like any other Tuesday.
I woke at 4:45 a.m. knowing I was ready. I’d made the arrangements, written the letters. Then I opened the curtains, thinking, One thing left to do.
I smoked a bowl, pulled on my wet suit, grabbed my board, and headed for the patio. Dialed in the alarm code and quietly eased the sliding doors open. After all, the kids were still sleeping.
As for Mom, she was somewhere else, maybe a film festival or the house in Vail. Could be Spielberg’s ranch or the Star Island estate or the Hills hacienda she kept to be nearer the studio. She might have been alone or with someone she was fucking, like D-Girl Dacee or the cokehead pottery heiress or the new Vassar intern.
It could have been the wealth manager. Spiritual guide. Personal stylist or personal assistant or personal psychoanalyst.
Most likely, it was just Eduardo, her best friend and stylist. The one who pencils in a lip mole and has wanted to fuck me since my fourteenth birthday.
Bottom line, she wasn’t around. In that moment, it was just me and the ocean.
I stood on the porch and took in the morning.
The sky was eerie dark, but it didn’t matter. Not at 5:00 a.m. with big surf already. Perfect wind, the waves rising to greet me, as though they knew and had conspired for my epic send-off.
I headed down the sand toward my favorite spot, passing Jasper, who waxed his board with a blissed-out smile. Sometimes we shared a pre-swell bowl, and I listened to his Old Carp stories. He rhapsodised on about days before Billionaire’s Beach, when the real girl-midget Gidget caught air with Tubesteak. The days when you could claim this very sand with a beachwood stake, build a shack, and take up residence.
A time I could hardly imagine, before Malibu popo and rent-a-cops, before the Man was there to permit and zone you out of existence. In those days, this was Jasper’s kingdom, though he’s spent the last twenty living in a van off Venice. Still, he was here every morning like clockwork, parking by the PCH before daybreak. He’d climb through the paparazzi-clipped fence hole, scope the surf, and resume his lifelong quest: to carve the perfect wave, to catch the ultimate air and go flying.
Sometimes, I was jealous.
He nodded at me with a half smile, then went back to the waxing.
I kept moving.
A half mile farther, and Sean Penn sat in lotus, his longboard laid out beside him. He barely noticed me, lost in contemplation, perhaps ruminating on the nature of the universe or his next movie role or whether the southwest waves would offer suitable momentum.
I appreciated his disinterest.
A respectful bunch, the true devotees. The sunrise riders. You speak or you don’t, and to each his space and moment.
Of course, there were exceptions. The biweekly McConaughey cameos, where he’d pose shirtless, board in hand, for an entourage of snapping photogs. Since the day surfer guys went ballistic on his crowd of trailing paps, he’d chosen the freezing morning water over further lawsuits.
That day he was MIA, maybe put off by the unflattering lighting. Again, I was grateful.
I passed Sting’s house and Leonardo’s, Tom Hanks’s and Bill Murray’s. A few miles up the beach and I’d hit Dealmakers’ Rock, where moguls sealed fates on handshakes. Carbon Beach, where the truly powerful had migrated, the execs and moneymen in their multimillion, multilevel beach homes. Mom had threatened to move us for years. I won’t live with the Talent, she hissed, adding she refuses to be shown up by that asshole Geffen.
Lucky for me there was never time between awards season and adoptions. My brother and sisters are the best things she’d ever produced, that’s for sure, and she sure paid enough for them. Adoption is the right thing to do, that’s what she said. I mean, just look at the press it got Angelina.
Finally, I found my spot.
I waded through the beach break, then stopped for a moment and stood there. Let the water splash my ankles, the sand ooze between my toes. Let my eyes rest on the spot where water and land meet.
Light was just breaking.
Despite the cesspool of industry types, the Colony had its attributes. Hollywood cred is one thing, but no animator could 3-D an ocean this magnificent, no matte painter render a horizon so perfect.
I climbed atop my board and began the journey to meet it.
Weed, women, and water, that’s the surfer mantra. But the real ones know that’s only half of it.
Pure meditation. A solitary experience. Even with friends, you’re still by yourself, hours spent looking out toward the ocean, land growing farther and farther behind you, but you never turn back. Not ever.
You paddle. You wait. You hope the big one is coming.
And when it does, you ride to the beach. Or go crashing. Then you do it all over again, right back to the beginning.
This day, I wouldn’t make a choice.
I didn’t vibe on the word suicide. That was for movies and emo bands. Instead, I preferred mission of chance. Besides, suicide had only one ending.
This could go either way.
Today the waves will decide, I told myself. To embrace or suck me under.
Hair still wet and backpack loaded, I slipped the letter under Dahnay’s door. Ten pages, handwritten.
Either way, he would have found it. But this way is better.
For Ye-Nay a pencil drawing tucked in her Dora lunchbox, right next to the tuna fish sandwich wrapped in tinfoil, crusts removed, just how she likes it.
A scrawled little girl prancing her pony across a rainbow. I love you curling through the clouds above them.
Stupid, but she was only seven. Besides, she was totally crazy for horses.
Xoxoxo, Phillip.
Nothing for Dulcina. She couldn’t say my name yet, so she wouldn’t have known the difference.
Five minutes till the nannies come. Two for my exit.
One last thing, this time for my mother. A neon-yellow Post-it slapped to her MacBook monitor.
M—
Back when I’m ready. Don’t come looking.
Phillip
PS Ye recital on 15th. Be there. And make sure she has a costume.
A buzzing, and the driver’s head again, only now he is serious: “We’ll be there in ten, but I’ll stop at the Exxon first. Get you boys some coffee.”
Across from me, Miller gives a slow, languid smile. “So, first time in the Hamptons. You ready?”
“I’m sure I can handle it. After all, I’ve been to six continents.”
“That’s nothing. To these people, the Hamptons is the only continent that matters.”