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Contests, Barrels—and a New Sister

THE LITTLE SURFER BOY

By Clay Marzo, Age 8

 

Once upon a time there was a little boy who surfed. He was very good, too. He was only 8 years old, and he could do snappy cutbacks, floaters and pull into a barrel. He was just learning how to do airs. He lived on Oahu right next to Pipeline and Sunset. He surfed there all the time.

 

Sometimes there are contests there, and he usually does good. He goes to Sunset Elementary right by Pipeline. His favorite trick is a throw-tail off the lip of the wave. Saturday he went surfing at Pipeline and it was big, really big. He was kind of scared but he went out. It was like 8 feet back and a 10-foot face. He was getting pounded, but then he got out to the peak. A huge set came in, and it broke right on the front of his board.

 

Then his board broke. He got thrashed around in the water onto the reef and cut his leg. He was bleeding like heck. He got up and he caught a wave in, and went to his house and his parents took him straight to the hospital. The doctor took him in. Then the doctor took a look and said you need stitches. So he gave him a shot first, then sewed in the stitches. Then after 2 hours he was done.

 

He said he couldn’t surf for two weeks. He was bummed. He had 15 stitches.

 

Then they went home and watched surf videos. At night it hurt him so bad. In the morning he woke up and his stitches felt a lot better. So then a week passed. He went back to the hospital and got his stitches taken out. So then he went to his friends’ house and went out at small Pipeline and had a blast.

 

THE END

 

The Marzo family showed up at Launiupoku Beach Park one Saturday morning in 1994 to surf, picnic, visit with Puamana neighbors and other friends, and watch Cheyne compete in another contest. Like the other beach parks lining Maui’s shoreline, Launiupoku offered simple charms—a couple of picnic areas, a shady canopy of ironwood trees, and a nice, rolling wave often frequented by long-boarders.

After Jill and Gino unpacked the car, Cheyne and Clay grabbed their boards (Clay’s was a loaner from Cheyne) and headed toward a tent canopy. It was a big day for the five-year-old Clay. No longer would he just sit on the beach and watch Cheyne. When Gino signed on the dotted line of the entry form, Clay was entered in the Hobie Hawaii Keiki Surf Jam too. The surf was a perfectly small and tame one to three feet for a competition featuring boys and girls. It was common to see two, three, or even four members of the same family compete in the Keiki Surf Jam, so Clay’s entry just let the others know that another eager kid was entering the contest arena.

Amid a weekend contest scene as popular as Little League and soccer on the mainland, Clay paddled out for his first competitive heat. Given his current stature, history would suggest that Clay blew everyone out of the water. A revisionist would state that like a two-year-old Tiger Woods smacking golf balls on The Mike Douglas Show in the late 1970s, Clay was an unstoppable force just waiting to grow.

Reality painted a different picture: Clay finished sixth in his first heat. Nevertheless, this local menehune heat began to bring out what would become one of the most talented, tightly knit groups of surfers to ever hit the world scene together. The boy just ahead of Clay, Matty Schweitzer, became one of the world’s premier stand-up paddleboarders; his father, Matt, was one of the world’s top professional windsurfers in the 1980s, while his grandfather, Hoyle, invented the sailboard. Matty’s grandmother, Carolyn Jackson, entered Clay’s life years later as his behavioral therapist. Matty and Clay competed many times against each other in amateur events, and they still get together occasionally to ride longboards at Launiupoku.

After the contest, Jill and Gino decided Clay was ready for his own equipment, so they bought him a surfboard. He surfed more and more frequently at the Pools in front of the house, Lahaina Harbor, and Shark Pit, just up the coast from Puamana. Clay displayed more dexterity and solid backside technique (his back facing the breaking wave) at the Pools, a fast, short, and hollow right-handed break. He was also able to surf frontside (facing the wave) on the lefts, where he started trying out what would become one of his signature moves—the aerial, when body and board blast above all contact with the wave and then drop back into it. (The aerial was originally a skateboard maneuver innovated and perfected by some hard-charging 1970s teens outside LA known as the Dogtown crew. Some were inspired by Cheyne’s biological father, Tony Magnusson.) Gino took note as Clay’s dexterity and skill began to catch up to his fearlessness, and he started taking him to other spots where he and Cheyne always surfed. They included Breakwall (outside the Kam III school window) and a secret spot called Shitty’s.

Surfing was an all-in-the-Marzo-family sport and lifestyle, so much so that Jill designed their Christmas card in 1996 around it. On the card, she and Gino are hugging each other with one arm, while she and Clay hold a longboard and Cheyne proudly poses with his surfboard. “We look like a very happy ocean family,” Clay says.

Ironically, Clay’s biggest first splash in sports came not from surfing but from baseball. “I played for the Athletics and hit a grand slam the first time I ever batted,” Clay recalls. “I wanted to be a good baseball player like Dad, who almost got drafted by a major league team.”

True: Gino was an all-conference pitcher and infielder at Citrus Community College in Southern California. During his second and final year at Citrus, a number of scouts watched the hard-throwing six-foot-one right-hander. His father had been a tough, driven man who grew up near the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Ebbets Field and moved with his wife to Pasadena shortly before the Dodgers headed west—and shortly before Gino was born, in 1957. Gino’s dad had lived, breathed, and dreamed baseball and horse racing, for which his new environs suited him perfectly. (The racetrack at Santa Anita Park was just down the road.) Gino tried to live his father’s dream of becoming a professional baseball player, but when the scouts started saying his fastball was shy of big-league velocity, Gino took a hard look at the odds, thought of surfing, packed away the glove, and moved to the coast.

Clay wanted to please Gino, who, like his own father, was a tough customer when it came to dishing out compliments. It was part of the Italian way—the “old country” way. How better to get “atta boys” than by playing Dad’s favorite sport? Within two seasons, however, Clay ran into a brick wall that neither he nor Jill and Gino had anticipated: local racism. Though he’d lived in Hawaii since he was nine months old, Clay was a haole, a white boy, not a local. While one would have expected Hawaiian children on the playground to pick and poke at him (which they did, often), who would have thought the parents would get involved? And to top it all off, his baseball coach?

“Clay liked to pitch, and hit, and he was pretty good at both. Not one of the very best, but good enough to make it a happy time for him and Gino,” Jill recalls. “But when he was nine, they started putting him on the bench and starting local kids who weren’t nearly as good. At first, we just thought they wanted to be sure everyone played, but then they stopped playing Clay too. Gino said it first, and I didn’t want to admit it, but yes, Clay was benched because he was white.”

Years later, Gino and Jill would realize the invisible added cruelty of the benching: though most kids with Asperger’s or autism are notoriously poor at activities involving keen hand-eye coordination, such as ball sports, Clay was a good youth baseball player and a very good soccer player with range and speed. However, because of the incident with the baseball coach, he grew wary and never again competed in a traditional team sport.

“When I was getting diagnosed,” Clay recalls, “the doctors couldn’t believe I was so good at something like surfing, or that I played baseball and soccer and I was a swimming champion. But I love sports. I always will.”

 

Surfing strengthened its hold on Clay’s desires and focus. He entered every local competition that included age group divisions. Sometimes he even bodyboarded so that he could ride waves with only a few others in the normally crowded lineup. Soon enough, results started piling up, often against competitors two, three, or even four years older—a big deal in any youth sport. When he was seven, Clay won the eleven-and-under bodyboard title in the Puamana Kids’ Day competition and was a winner in other surfing and skateboarding events as well. He placed fourth in the ages-seven-and-eight surfing division in the Second Annual Honolua Surf Company Keiki Surf Contest, after taking second in the eight-and-under bodyboard division. The winners of those competitions, Dusty Payne and Granger Larsen, became two of his best friends and fellow competitors. They were part of the talented Maui crew that, years later, would dominate the world amateur scene and develop excellent professional careers.

“I liked contests,” Clay recalls. “They were fun. I didn’t win at first, but I got to surf with only a few guys out. That’s how I like it—with no one or hardly anyone out.”

“He was already ripping,” Gino says. “He didn’t surf smart; he still doesn’t surf smart in contests, in my opinion. He would catch the most waves, because he couldn’t wait to get outside; he’d just turn around when a wave came, because it was there and no one was on it. In those local events, catching the most waves usually means winning. He always wanted to catch waves, and not wait for another one to come along.”

Gino and Jill both noticed that Clay lacked a killer instinct. By the time he was eight or nine, his day-to-day skill level had risen on a par with those his age and even older, like Dusty Payne. However, he often surfed hard simply for the camaraderie of sharing waves with his friends, while those same friends locked their eyes on the prize—a difference of perspective that reared its ugly side later in Clay’s amateur career. The dichotomy played out along parental lines as well: Gino would exhort Clay to go for the win (though, by all accounts, he never adopted the win-at-all-costs mentality of his own father or a couple of the other Maui surf parents), while Jill contented herself with watching Clay compete and the knowledge that he loved what he was doing.

“Clay was never deadly serious about winning,” Jill says. “He just wanted to surf. He just wanted to skate. He just wanted to swim. He was a natural. I don’t remember him being about winning. I would sit apart from his dad during contests because his dad always wanted him to win. Someone would come to me and say how well Clay surfed, and I’d be like, ‘That’s good.’ I was pretty humble about it. I just said, ‘Have fun, and if you make the finals, great.’

“But he liked the trophies. So he liked winning in that way. If the award was something he could physically see and touch, he liked to win it. It wasn’t like Cheyne. If Cheyne lost, he was a mess. Clay never took it so personally. I remember how Clay looked up to [world-class surfer] Bruce Irons. One time Bruce lost a heat he should have won in Oahu, when Bruce was the guy, and instead of being upset about it, he went and jumped off rocks and had a great time. I always compared Clay to that—that’s how Clay took losing.”

Whenever Clay made it to the finals, which happened in every local event, he’d look to the left and right in the four- to six-man heats and see his core group of friends: Dusty, Granger and Wesley Larsen, Matty Schweitzer, and later Casey Brown and Kai Barger. They began surfing together and pushing each other, both in contests and after school, forging a bond of shared excellence that held tight until they turned pro. “We were doing bigger, wilder stuff because we always had waves to play with,” Clay told Rolling Stone magazine. “It’s the Maui way: trying to top each other and look like we weren’t even trying.”

“Now that we’re pro surfers, some competing on the World Tour and others like me sticking to soul surfing, I don’t see the other guys much anymore,” Clay laments. “Sometimes I’ll see Granger or Wesley while driving around. And Dusty sometimes when he’s home; he’s my neighbor. But we’re not really good friends anymore.”

 

When Clay wasn’t competing, he was dreaming about the next contest, the next heat, the next time he could paddle out. Most of his daydreams took place in the classroom. Fortunately for him and the other surf-stoked third graders at Kam III, their teacher, Patricia Akiyama, gave them journals in which to record their thoughts, stories, assignments, and personal dreams. The new assignment couldn’t have come at a more opportune time for Clay, who had turned a corner in second grade and now held a sense of achievement inside the ­classroom. Jill noted in Clay’s scrapbook as the 1997–1998 school year was to begin:

 

Clay is now eight years old and is a very serious and sensitive lil’ guy. He loves to surf and he rips! He is doing good in school, he has a hard time focusing, but he’s getting better. He has so much energy. He still thinks the world of his big brother. He makes the most awesome, detailed paper airplanes around. He loves Jack Pope, his very best friend. He will only wear certain clothes to school; he really cares what he looks like. I’m trying to teach him, it’s what’s inside that counts. He is so strong.

 

The journal became an extension of Clay’s world. He relished it with a ravenous appetite that any creative artist or writer can appreciate. “Almost every day, we wrote about what we did in our lives, the people we hung out with, what we wanted to be, and things like that,” Clay recalls. “I also wrote stories. Years later, you look back and it helps you to remember. I drew waves on the pages . . . all the time. Writing stories and drawing barrels—best fun I ever had in school.

“It’s weird how we find things we do really well when we’re kids, but then we leave them behind as we get older. I don’t care anymore about paper airplanes, baseball card collections, or wearing only some kinds of clothes . . . and writing. Sometimes I wish I’d continued to write more. I really liked to write, because it was a way for me to communicate without having to talk to someone. Working on this book is helping me to remember all the fun I had writing. It’s really cool.”

When reading through Clay’s journal, what is most striking at first is the sheer volume of the journal and the passion of both the writing and the drawings. While much of the focus is on surfing and the beach lifestyle, he branches off into areas that paint a picture of a lively, active eight-year-old with plenty of friends and a well-developed sense of adventure. Not to mention empathy: his early writings show a considerable ability to sense how others feel, while also articulating how they made him feel. Not many eight-year-olds can verbalize the impact of another person on their feelings beyond “happy,” “mad,” or “sad.” His writing demonstrates what a brilliant idea it was for Patricia Akiyama to hand out those journals and give her class a yearlong assignment that would awaken a latent creative force in Clay that he would later transfer to the way he rode waves.

In telling the larger story of his third-grade year, nearly every page of his journal is anchored by a surf or ocean environment drawing of some sort (noted in parentheses):

 

Sept. 8, 1997

This weekend I was in a surf contest. I made it to the finals and got 1st place.

 

Sept. 9, 1997

What would you do if you had 1 million dollars? I will give it to my mom and I think will go to the store, and get my mom and dad a house and a piece of paper for our plans.

When I think of yellow I see . . . a sun and a flower and a yellow house and a yellow fish and a banana and a yellow crown, clouds, sun, undersea view of octopus, fish, shark, turtle.

 

Sept. 29, 1997

If I were an astronaut I would want to float. I would like to take a trip to visit the Mir [space station]. I would like to visit because it would make me feel good. I would see some planets. I would like to study the planets.

 

Oct. 7

I don’t like when people put me down because it makes me feel bad.

 

Nov. 4

Once mom and I walked down to the beach to go snorkeling at Puamana. We swam quite awhile. We saw a few fish. All of a sudden I spotted a big turtle. And then I went down and touched it and I came up with it and then it swam away and then we lived happily ever after.

 

Nov. 17

Yesterday I went to the beach with my Dad and we went surfing and my friends were there with me because he’s a surfing kid like me and he is going to like me and live happily ever after. (Illustrated with a picture of Clay emerging from the barrel of a wave)

 

Nov. 18

My brother went to a surf contest and then he got first place in the surf contest and he was tired on the ride home but he had a fun time and my mom is sick and I hope she feels better and my brother has a big trophy. (Illustrated with a picture of a plane flying, with Cheyne in the window)

 

Dec. 8

On my weekend, I played with my train. We put guys on the tracks and they got smashed by the train around the Christmas tree. It’s really fun.

The waves died. That’s too bad but I went boogie-boarding with my friends. It was okay and I played with my friend in the hammock at night. It was fun. My brother was in the hospital. I hope he is OK. He missed a lot of school but he went today. But he’s okay. We went to see a movie (Amistad). There’s supposed to be a swell coming. I hope my brother and my mom keep on talking about the kids smoking at school. But my brother doesn’t like to smoke because he only thinks it is for bum people. But I’m not going to smoke when I grow up.

 

During Christmas vacation, Clay’s life changed again: the family added one more face. “My mom was getting ready to have a baby,” he recalls. “We went to pick up my grandma, who flew in from San Diego.” His journal takes it from there:

 

We did a few errands first and then we went to the airport and it took pretty long until Grandma got here and she is the best cook and she made pancakes for us it was good and on our way back we stopped by the doctor’s office for Mom and heard the baby and they now say it’s a girl and then me and Grandma waited in the waiting room. I showed her a paper airplane she thought it flew good and I did too and then in the morning we played some Nintendo.

 

“I looked through a window, and I saw a little baby girl lying in a blanket—Gina Marie Marzo,” Clay recalls. “My baby sister was so cute, and I liked it when she smiled at me. I held her, and sometimes she spit up. It was sick, but her eyes were so pretty and cute.

“We still have a family home video shot right after Gina was born. ‘She looks just like a frog!’ I say in it. I was totally into her. I had my friends over, and we danced with her and I held her all the time and yelled at her, ‘Gina! Gina!’”

While Gina doesn’t remember those particular moments, she does recall the love Clay directed toward her—and how much she craved her brother’s attention. Much of her nostalgia, she admits, is due to the relationship as it stands today—far removed, emotionally and otherwise, from those deeply loving first years of her life.

“When I watch home videos, I see that Clay was obsessed with me. He loved me,” says Gina, a beautiful girl in her late teens with considerable talent as a poet and writer. “He loved the whole aspect of having a little sister. He always was really interested in me, interested in what girls do. He used to love to watch me eat, random stuff like that. He loves eating. When I think about it, it’s really funny.

“When we lived in Launiupoko, our dog, Kalani, had a leash. I remember one time we were sitting next to each other, talking, and Kalani was out there. Clay wrapped it around my ankles, and Kalani came. I got super rope burns, and Clay thought it was the funniest thing. We used to bounce on the trampoline together, and fall backwards, because the wind was so strong. We’d just crack up and laugh.”

Her smile fades, replaced by a deep, lingering sadness. “I wish we would have stayed close.”

 

The other new girl in Clay’s third-grade life was a schoolgirl, Asha, his first girlfriend. At least that’s how he saw it:

 

All About Asha

Asha is so pretty and cool. I love her and I like her as a girlfriend. So cute. xoxoxoxox

 

January 22

One day I went surfing with my older brother at Shark Pit. I got a big barrel first the wave was about to break and I grabbed my rail and ducked and I was in the barrel and I was happy! (At the bottom of this entry Patricia Akiyama wrote: “Maybe one day I will see you on TV as a professional surfer.”)

 

Feb. 5

There’s this boy whose name is Kaniala. He’s my best friend. Sometimes we get into fights and then we say I’m not your friend anymore. But then I say are we still friends Kaniala? He says yah it’s OK. Me and Kaniala like the Spice Girls and we like to skateboard.

We love surfing and we like basketball. Me and Kaniala have a big crush on the one girl. Her name is Asha. She is beautiful. (At the bottom, Clay rendered his best drawing to date: he and Kaniala perfectly slotted deep in the barrel, Mrs. Akiyama yelling “Help!” because she’s caught inside the wave, about to be pounded into the reef, and an awestruck Asha onshore, saying, “Ahhhh.”)

 

As expected in any school kid romance, things turned south with Asha. “She was so stupid because she said that I was a loser,” Clay recalls, the stinger of that moment still stuck inside. “That hurt my feelings. It meant she’s a loser, not me. So I drew a picture of her wiping out in a barrel.”

He deftly placed Asha deep in the impact zone, in a place every committed surfer has visited at least once before suffering a nasty wipeout. He could never have said in words how hurt and vindictive he felt; he had neither the vocabulary for those feelings nor the ability to use it. Instead, he let his colored pencils do the talking.

Through it all, Clay’s stories grew longer, becoming more detailed and laced with emotion. His concentrated mind and wounded heart were walking into a truth so many great, tormented writers have expressed in their best works: the truth of raw emotional turmoil.

 

Feb. 11

Surfing Rules

My favorite thing to do is surf because it’s so cool. Skateboarding is fun, but the funnest thing to do is to get barreled on a surfboard because it just feels good inside and then you have a good life. Mrs. Akiyama always says I would take 20-footers . . . (In the anchoring drawing, he brought out the central females in his life: Mrs. Akiyama getting barreled, Asha wiping out, Jill emerging from the barrel, and baby Gina watching.)

 

Feb. 27

I was on a broadcast this morning it was fun but when you come back to the classroom I’m afraid that the people in my class are going to make fun of me. (Patricia Akiyama wrote, “Don’t be afraid. I think they wish that they could be on morning broadcast.”)

 

March 10

20 years from now I’m still going to surf.

 

March 19

If I could learn about one thing I would learn all about surfing because I love surfing because surfing’s my favorite sport and I would like to learn how girls think. And that’s all I have to write about. (“You probably know more about surfing than I do. As for girls, they change their minds all of the time!” Mrs. Akiyama wrote. “Watch the news; it tells you what’s happening. Great picture!”)

 

In the spring, Clay found himself on the school’s performing arts stage in front of a live audience. He appeared in The Colors, not as an extra (though that was his original role, as a dressed-up crayon), but as the stand-in for the lead, suddenly pressed into duty when the star actor became ill. For Jill and Gino, his performance was a ­revelation of yet another facet of the unique and mysterious personality of their son—his ability to instantly recall facial expressions and words and play them back if he didn’t understand their deeper meaning, intent, or implication.

“It was a singing and dancing performance in front of live audiences,” Jill says. “Clay was never an extrovert, but he took honor in being this red crayon. He also learned the lead actor’s lines, and when the kid wasn’t there one day, he asked to be the lead. It was amazing; he was incredible at it, right down to the musical tone. He didn’t really have his own stage expression, but he mimicked what the original lead was doing in practice. So when the kid wasn’t there, he was the only one who could step in.”

“When I look back at these journals, it helps me figure out how I was growing into the person I am now,” Clay says. “I can see times of my life I can’t remember, or don’t have to remember, because I wrote them on paper. With me, it’s like, I do something, and then I’m over it.”

Clay had become an above-average third-grade story writer by year’s end. Writing stories was the only activity requiring patience that he thoroughly enjoyed. Normally, he could never sit still because his mind kept drifting a hundred yards west, to the breaking waves of Lahaina Harbor or Breakwall.

Clay’s story “The Little Surfer Boy” was the most prophetic and self-revealing piece he wrote in elementary school; while framed as fiction, it was a true story. Clay would never be able to write fiction, nor would he ever be one to exaggerate or spin yarns. Lies and untruths are as foreign to Aspies as desert heat to a penguin.

By the end of the school year, Akiyama had emerged as the unsung heroine of the Marzo household. Any teacher who could hold Clay’s interest for an entire school year became a treasured friend. “I liked everything about her. She was one of the best teachers I had in school,” Clay says. “I did much better when I liked the teachers and they were nice to me.”

“She really loved him, put him in front of the class to be ‘the teacher,’” Jill says. “Socially, it was a little weird with the other kids, but she put him there, and she was creative,” she adds. “He responded to it really well. Any teacher that reached out to him, worked with him, was kind to him, he would respond to with some of his best work. But any teacher that was old-school, it was like fire and water. Extra hard on him.”

The old-schoolers loomed in Clay’s immediate future.