11

Storm Clouds

A bunch of kids surrounded me out of nowhere and told me how great I was and wanted to touch my board and that I was their favorite surfer and could I give them my autograph? That really surprised me. It was kind of a trip. I’m like, “Dude, I’m just like you. We all surf.” But they saw me as this star.

 

I know people think it’s pretty cool, and I like to help when I can, like with the autistic kids in Surfers Healing camps, but it’s hard when you don’t know any of them. They’re all faces you haven’t seen before. That makes me nervous. So does surfing in contests where I don’t know anybody, which is totally different than when I was a kid and I had all my friends there all the time. You just don’t know who has hate in them and who doesn’t.

 

What made Clay so “different” from others? His biggest sponsor, Quiksilver, wanted to find out—and the sooner the better.

School administrators, friends, and even family members had asked the same question since Clay was six. Trying one test after another, they’d come up with an alphabet soup of diagnoses—ADD, ADHD, OCD, SAD, GAD—that proved to be nothing more than guesstimates. When you’re dealing with the life of a kid trying to cope with a world that completely confuses him, the damage of a missed diagnosis cannot be underestimated. His life was filled with them. Neither Clay nor his parents wanted to endure another battery of tests, especially when his surfing career was taking off.

However, Quiksilver paid the largest salary of any of his sponsors, a six-figure annual investment. They sent him on surf trips as one of their two most photographed and sought-after surfers (Slater being the other), so they decided to dictate how their relationship with Clay would proceed.

With good reason. After Clay signed his first big contract, the billion-dollar clothing manufacturer set up a dinner meeting in Australia with international officers, directors, and managers. Clay knew a few of the management-level staff members, so it seemed like a somewhat comfortable situation, though even the smoothest socialite might have found it a bit daunting to join the company brass for an introductory dinner halfway around the world.

When dinner was served, everything changed. A cloud settled over Clay’s brain, abject fear and trepidation replacing his initial curiosity, and he curled into his fortress-thick wall. He ate quickly, eyes constantly looking at his plate and never meeting another person’s. When asked questions, he responded with single-word answers. Or no answers at all. Then, to the astonishment of everyone else in the room, Clay finished his meal, stood up, and walked to a corner of the restaurant. He broke out his ear buds and the iPod he’d won at Camp Hobgood, lay down on a bench, and listened to music.

“He was with people he liked, Strider and a bunch of other guys. He didn’t talk to anybody the whole time,” Tierney recalls. “When we finished dinner, he walked away. I’m thinking, What’s this kid doing? Like everybody else, I thought maybe he didn’t like dinner, was in a bad mood . . . I didn’t know what was going on.”

As it turned out, Clay thought the same thing. His mind morphed into a dangerous bombing range—the by-product of too much sudden, unfamiliar stimulation—dropping internal questions on him: Didn’t I surf well enough for them? Didn’t I get them enough photos and spreads and good footage in the videos? Why are they looking at me like this? Why do they want to know all these things about me? “I was wondering why all these people were looking at me the way they did, with faces like I was rude and there was something wrong with me,” he later said.

Everyone was shaken, Clay by the harrowing experience of having all eyes trained on him, and the Quiksilver officials over his behavior and the reasons why they signed him in the first place.

The next morning Clay showed up for a quick surf and saw Tierney in the water. He paddled over, smiling slightly. “Hey, Jamie, how’s it going?”

Pure surprise registered across Tierney’s face. After the trouble­some dinner, Tierney couldn’t believe Clay was acting as if it never happened. “I could see there was something a little different, not just a matter of being rude, but he had an issue in social situations,” he notes.

Wasilewski had seen Clay’s apprehension in other Quiksilver meetings and wasn’t as surprised as the others. “I noticed right away that he was a different person. We used to look at each other while at a table of people in a work atmosphere, and I could see the discomfort not only with him but with people higher up in the company. They’d look at me like, What’s wrong with this kid? At the same time they’d be exchanging these looks with me, Clay and I would also be having nonverbal communication. He would tell me things silently, and I would respond to him with body language or facial cues, then we’d talk about it later,” he says.

While Clay brushed past the Quiksilver pow-wow, one of the company’s top executives did not. One executive expressed a strong objection to Clay’s behavior and openly questioned the company’s decision to sign him. He pulled Wasilewski aside, after which Clay realized two things: some people at Quiksilver didn’t like him, and Wasilewski was a true friend.

“There was obvious concern from guys that didn’t understand him, guys high up,” Wasilewski recalls. “The one executive told me, ‘I don’t want to deal with him.’

“I said, ‘Look, the guy’s different. He’s got something else going on.’

“‘Well, it looks to me like he’s an asshole, stoned, or whatever. I just don’t see why he’s around.’ He wanted to get rid of Clay.”

Years later, Wasilewski shakes his head as he talks about it, the memory both fresh and unpleasant. “At that point, I just looked at this guy and said, ‘You don’t want to help this kid? He obviously needs help. You don’t want to take the time to look into something we can do for him?’

“‘Then tell me, Strider, what is it? Tell me what’s going on.’

“For him, it was a numbers thing, a time thing—and he had no time for Clay. He needed a name, a label, something to call whatever was going on with Clay . . . or else.”

Clay had two very strong allies at Quiksilver—CEO Bob Mc­Knight, who co-founded the company, and Tierney. As Tierney continued to observe Clay’s mannerisms and awkwardness in social situations, along with his superhuman focus on one specific activity—surfing—his psychology schooling and acquired knowledge kicked in.

“After a few days, I said to Strider, ‘Have you ever heard of this thing called Asperger’s syndrome?’” Tierney says. “I asked a few other people at Quiksilver, and no one had ever heard of it. My mom’s a psychologist, and works with kids with learning disabilities, including autism and Asperger’s, and I’ve taken some classes. I’m definitely an amateur, but I do know some things, and this kid seemed to me to have characteristics of Asperger’s. I knew he didn’t have a learning disability per se, because kids with learning disabilities aren’t capable of vividly remembering every wave they rode for the last five or six sessions . . . or, in Clay’s case, the best waves he’s ridden at every place he’s ever surfed. He’s incredibly smart.

“Once they took a look at that, they said, ‘Wow, this sounds a lot like Clay.’ And once I described Clay to my mom, she said, ‘Yeah, take a look at Asperger’s.’”

 

Clay’s career moved forward with a growing frequency of mind-boggling events, both good and bad. In January 2008, he entered the O’Neill Sebastian Inlet Pro, a World Qualifying Series tournament. The event, held an hour south of Cape Canaveral at one of Florida’s premier surf spots and contest venues, was organized and produced by Mitch Varnes, Clay’s manager. It was the first of many planned WQS competitions for Clay, per the strategy he and Varnes had developed to qualify for the World Tour. Within the O’Neill Sebastian Inlet Pro was a second, independent contest, the Red Bull Tow-At. In that event, the surfer who launched into the biggest aerials and blasted the most radical maneuvers would win a Sea-Doo personal watercraft vehicle. A freestyle surfing competition . . . a vehicle as the top prize . . .

Suddenly, Clay’s laissez-faire attitude about the WQS event vanished. “I already had my car from winning the NSSA Nationals, and I really wanted the Sea-Doo,” he recalls.

He just missed, finishing second to Josh Kerr, another phenomenal talent. “In the main contest, he was eliminated in his first or second heat, which really disappointed me,” Varnes says. “In the tow-at, he knew there was a Sea-Doo on the beach, with keys in the ignition. With Clay, a money prize never mattered. But a vehicle, like a car or Sea-Doo? It’s a tangible prize; he can see it on the beach. We handed the keys to Josh on the spot, and Sea-Doo shipped it to him. Clay really wanted that Sea-Doo shipped to Maui.”

While the tow-at event marked the highlight of Clay’s trip to Florida, a seemingly complimentary and flattering incident on the beach rattled the eighteen-year-old star—when he was asked to sign autographs, he froze. When they heard about Clay’s reaction—a situation that would repeat almost everywhere he went—his parents shook their heads but were not surprised. “He wasn’t that much part of the group,” Gino says. “I don’t think he felt as comfortable. He likes the one-on-one. That went for contests and hanging on the beach too.”

When asked to look back on the day, Varnes thinks about it for a moment. “Florida might have been a defining moment. I’ve done signings with him at the US Open of Surfing and in New York City and New Jersey, and it’s the same thing. He’s always been totally withdrawn when he’s swamped with these kids, but it goes with the territory. If you’re a pro athlete or Olympian in any sport, of course people want to be near you and talk to you and touch you and get your autograph. Sure, that could be a defining moment, but he’s had many similar moments at other large venues.

“When I saw this happening, what I considered something new, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I’d already spoken with Jill many times about his other difficulties, so I knew he had some troubles with school, a hard time studying, things like that. I thought it was a learning disorder more than anything. It didn’t bother me as much, because he was being paid a lot of money to travel around and surf, and not a single sponsor complained about it. They did want him to surf contests, but they didn’t make it a priority, as long as he was traveling, surfing, and being prominent in the media.”

 

That autumn Clay joined a dozen other riders on a Quiksilver promotional boat trip to Fiji. As the boat steamed to an outlying island, Clay moved around constantly, rubbing his hands, talking much more than usual. He visualized himself unloading on the waves with the purest fury and might, dropping in from seemingly impossible positions to uncork reverse throw-tails, tube rides, and deep cutbacks and re-entries. Approaching the situation for which he lived, the experience that made his life on land more tolerable, he couldn’t have been more thrilled.

Suddenly, a massive tropical disturbance rushed out of nowhere and smacked them with furious winds and high seas. “We got hit by some thirty-foot seas,” Wasilewski recalls. “We headed right into it. We were taking on water, and huge diesel drums were flying all over the deck. It was not a good situation. The Indian captain asked me, ‘Do we keep going? Do we turn around?’

“‘What are we looking at?’ I asked.

“‘About a fifty-fifty chance.’

“‘Of making it through the storm?’

“‘Of living.’”

Wasilewski, no stranger to close calls as a big-wave surfer, found himself staring at his own mortality face-to-face—as well as that of the others. While the crew huddled in the galley and underneath chairs, rocking back and forth and praying fervently, Wasilewski put the matter to a group vote: Do we ride out the storm? Or try to head back?

The surfers decided to ride out the storm, but pure fear registered in the eyes of everyone on board. He felt the same fear.

One passenger, however, exhibited a calmness bordering on the absurd: Clay. While the boat continued to bounce up and down, with rain squalls and wave tops washing across the deck, Clay asked Strider, “You’re not going to let me die, are you?” He was as mellow as if he’d just emerged from a daylong meditation.

“No, Clay, you’ll be fine,” Wasilewski told him.

Clay grabbed his surfboards to protect them, just as concerned about his equipment as he was about his own physical safety. “Good. I don’t want to die today,” he said.

“All these guys were going crazy, hiding and making their peace with God, but Clay got really quiet, with no emotion in his face, no raised voice, just, ‘Good,’” Wasilewski recalls. “If I’d ever had any question that this kid was different from the rest of us, it was answered right there.”

Clay walked away. A couple of minutes later, Wasilewski staggered past, struggling to keep his balance on the rocky boat. “What’s happening now? We’re gonna die, aren’t we?” Clay asked, his anxiety finally rising.

“No, Clay, we’re not going to die. I won’t let you die.”

“I’m not gonna die?”

“No.”

“I just sat and looked down at the deck and let everyone else freak out,” Clay later said.

Wasilewski returned his focus to the task at hand: escaping the storm. “We made the turn, a very technical thing with a 140-foot boat, and rode right up the face of these waves,” he recalls. “The lip pushed the bow, and we rode straight down, the swells breaking on the helm of the boat. The boat’s like forty feet out of the water, waves breaking on it—all of this during the middle of the night. And Clay never once screamed, yelled, or panicked. Just about everyone else on the boat did.”

During the aborted trip, Clay mentioned to Wasilewski that doctors in Southern California “X-rayed my brain.” The MRI confirmed for Wasilewski that Quiksilver’s mandate to the Marzos to continue testing Clay had been followed.

A week later, Wasilewski would call Jill. “I don’t know what’s going on, but Clay’s different. He said something about you guys X-raying his brain. Did you?”

“We did a brain scan, yes.”

Even though Quiksilver pressed for the tests, Jill had tried to keep the information from them, because she was afraid they would drop Clay from the team—a costly, six-figure hit on his present and future. Her own high anxiety was redlining. “I constantly worried about that,” Jill says. “What else did Clay know how to do but surf? How else would he make money?”

Now Quiksilver knew. “Have you found out anything from those brain scans?” Wasilewski asked.

Jill’s stomach beelined toward her throat. Is this it? “No, no, we’re still working on it. Why?”

“Because on this trip, all these guys are panicking in the storm we hit, and I have never seen anyone in that critical of a situation who acted that calmly.”

Wasilewski paused for a moment, then laid down the heavy lumber: “Jill, we need to know what to call what is going on with Clay. We need some sort of diagnosis, or explanation. They [Quiksilver directors] want a label. They’re all over me about it. They want an answer as to what’s going on. We may never get that answer, but let’s try to find out what it is.”

After they hung up, Jill sat silently for an hour, perplexed. How did Clay manage to act so calmly in such a life-threatening situation? Was it because he was on the ocean, where he felt comfortable, even in the middle of a ferocious storm? Why would his calm demeanor during a storm concern Quiksilver as much as the more legitimate concerns they’d already voiced?

“At first, I thought this was weird, because he panics about things like throwing up,” she says. “But as I watch Clay more and more and see how totally unafraid [he is with] things he feels comfortable in—like oceans, hiking, being around nature—I realize that if there was an emergency, I’d want Clay next to me. His reaction is almost a primal thing—handle it now, panic later. I’ve never seen him panic when it’s related to the ocean.”

That was when a realization came to her: she and Quiksilver weren’t on a collision course at all—they were on the same page. She’d wanted answers for a dozen years, and now Quiksilver was forcing her hand. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing.

She and Clay flew to Newport Beach to visit the Amen Clinic. The research and therapeutic center works with kids and teens living at all levels of the spectrum, from nonfunctional autism to Asperger’s syndrome, as well as with other learning and social disorders. Jill, already exhausted and frustrated from trying to understand how her son ticked, had to deal with Clay getting surly. He spent the trip either in silence or asking her, “Why more tests? I’m over it!”

Gino and Cheyne took a much dimmer view of the matter. “When I decided to take Clay for the brain scan, Gino didn’t understand why I was going,” Jill says. “He didn’t understand, or want to understand, much about Clay’s situation at all. He thought it was a cop-out. So I didn’t tell anyone, and we went. I was still trying to figure out ways I could help him.”

Jill knew that Gino would either accept the situation in his own time or continue to deny it, but she had experienced enough recently to press forward, not to mention Quiksilver’s veiled threats to drop Clay. One of the more famous incidents pertained to a TV commercial shoot for Quiksilver, featuring Clay talking on camera about the virtues of the new board shorts he was wearing. While the camera rolled, Clay looked down and described what he saw, absent the filters and censors that normally wired people utilize. “They should be a little longer. Maybe with better material too,” he said. “And I don’t like the color.”

Then he remembered he was on camera. “Why, do you want me to like them?”

Quiksilver didn’t air the commercial, but later inserted it into Just Add Water to illustrate the direct line Aspies take when asked for their opinion. That clip eventually went viral on YouTube. “How could I say something good if I didn’t like them?” Clay recalls. “I just made a couple of suggestions.”

Some among the Quiksilver brass clamored anew to release Clay from his contract. However, McKnight, one of the most likable and caring executives in the surfing industry (not to mention one of its finest businessmen), saw matters another way.

When Jill heard about the shoot, her anxiety increased. “I was seeing more and more signs that worried and concerned me, and I was trying to keep his career going and balancing out . . . I was feeling like, ‘Who’s going to sponsor him if he can’t even shake someone’s hand or talk to them . . . or even care?’ I knew I had to do something—not only for my son but for me. I could see the innocence in him, he knew vegetables were good for him, so when he’d eat them, he’d say, ‘These are for my brain, Mom,’ or, ‘I’m going to take the blue-green algae and I’m thinking better now.’”

She shook her head as tears formed in her eyes. “That’s not normal.”

The Amen Clinic nearly became a disaster when Clay walked in the door and sat in the waiting room. “All of these little autistic kids five or six years old were running around the waiting room before going into these tubes, and I’m sitting there, like, What the fuck? I didn’t want to do this,” he recalls, his voice rising. Years later, the memories of his testing experiences still mass together whenever provoked, leaving him visibly distressed and ready to stop talking for the rest of the day.

Finally, a nurse led Clay to “the tube.” He entered the hyperbaric chamber for an MRI, a harrowing, claustrophobic struggle for most people. The effect on Clay was the diametric opposite: he relaxed completely, comforted by the absence of noise and strange faces. He listened to music and occasionally waved to Jill, who waited with tears streaming down her face. He reacted the same way to all ten MRI exams, feeling just as comfortable on his last pass as on his first.

“I was thinking, This is so sad,” Jill recalls, “but he was fine with it. It made me realize, whatever is different about the way his brain is wired, this is a real thing. It didn’t faze him.”

Jill and Clay remained at the Amen Clinic for two days of MRIs and additional tests. When doctors returned to discuss the results, they couldn’t offer anything conclusive. What else is new? Jill thought. They mentioned the so-called Ring of Fire, in which an excessive number of brain neurons from the frontal lobe fire at once to create sensory overload. They talked about OCD and a variety of anxiety and stress disorders, but there was not a single mention of autism or Asperger’s. “They just told me what kinds of supplements to use with him, what kind of learner he might be—he might not ever be able to learn like most people. I didn’t get any real answers,” Jill says.

Clay adds, whimsically, “Why did I have to leave Maui and give up all this surfing time to be there?”

The results, or lack thereof, did not sit well at Quiksilver. They ramped up the pressure on Wasilewski and the Marzos to deliver quantifiable medical results and a diagnosis, or they would drop Clay. Part of their concern was that they’d started to move forward on the Just Add Water documentary. Having just enjoyed success with a film featuring Dane Reynolds (First Chapter), Quiksilver had decided that another freestyle surfing movie about a popular team rider would find a ready audience. “Clay was the next guy up,” Tierney says.

Then, following Wasilewski’s suggestion, which Tierney wholeheartedly embraced, they changed the conceptual direction to delve into the reasons behind Clay’s eccentricities, socially awkward ways, and entombing quietness.

“I got really upset with Quiksilver’s attitude,” Wasilewski says. “If they would’ve let Clay go, I would’ve left too. I couldn’t believe they didn’t want to help someone in that situation. For some things, there just isn’t an easy answer, and that’s true with Clay. But they wanted one.

“That’s when Bob McKnight got into the conversation. He said, ‘I love this. Let’s do something for him. Let’s find out what’s going on.’ That’s when I turned the planned movie around and pitched it as a documentary.”

Wasilewski and Tierney had their movie angle, but Quiksilver still wanted a diagnosis before investing another ounce of time, energy, or money. They floated the idea of Varnes and company representatives flying to Maui to sit down with the Marzos. “They recommended to me, then the Marzos, that Clay fly to California for more medical evaluations,” Varnes recalls. “Jamie was fairly sure Clay had Asperger’s, which, like everyone else, I knew nothing about. But there was something about how he said it that made me think, ‘I wonder if . . .’”

In Maui, Varnes and Wasilewski had a pleasant and conversant evening with Gino, Jill, and Clay. They discussed the next step: one more series of tests, this time with Dr. Chitra Bhakta, an autism expert in Orange County, California, known to Quiksilver.

That was when Jill reached the end of her rope. “She freaked out,” Clay recalls. “Quiksilver knew that I was different, and she was afraid I would lose my sponsorship. I was eighteen and had nothing in my life that I cared about or did really well except surfing. I still don’t.”

While Wasilewski and Jill knew the status of Clay’s relationship with Quiksilver, they never told him. Why add more anxiety and stress to a situation already packed with tension? “I never got into the conversation with Clay because of how sensitive he was,” Wasilewski explains. “He was at that place where he was already borderline overwhelmed, an eighteen-year-old trying to keep up with a crazy year where he was now a major star. Anyone would be overwhelmed. I wasn’t going to add this.”

The next day Wasilewski invited Jill and Clay to lunch. He got right to the point. “Have you heard of Asperger’s syndrome?” he asked.

After a lifetime of never knowing about the disorder, they’d just heard it mentioned twice in a ten-minute span. Call it synchronicity. On the way to lunch, Jill’s mother, Joanna Darrow, had called and brought up the same question, based on research she’d been doing on her home computer to help her grandson. “It was very ironic these two people mentioned the word ‘Asperger’s’ to me in the same day,” Jill says.

However, after a dozen years of riding the diagnostic seesaw, her staying power had vanished. “I’d become anti-label,” she says. “I decided that Clay’s Clay, he’s his own person, and we’re going to do the best with what we’ve got. I didn’t want any more testing. He’s been tested for ADD, ADHD, and OCD, different anxiety disorders, tested for special ed three times, then the Amen Clinic, which was really embarrassing and humiliating, sitting him in a place with all those little kids. Really? I was tired of testing. I felt like I was making him feel dumb for needing to be tested so much.”

Those were not the words Wasilewski wanted to hear. “Can you get him tested one more time?” he asked.

Shortly afterward, Clay and Jill flew to Oahu so Clay could sign a multi-year contract with Super Brand Surfboards. The Super Brand staff buffed out their visitors with spacious rooms and all the food Clay could eat, which is to say, enough for two or three people. He has a ravenous appetite, especially after surfing. “They made me feel really special and told me a bunch of times how much they loved my surfing and the kids loved my surfing and how they could see more kids riding Super Brand Surfboards and they would pay me well . . . and they did,” Clay says.

Jill knew her next words to Clay would be make-or-break, not only pertaining to his Quiksilver relationship but possibly for their own relationship as well. When Clay has listened to a perspective or directive enough, he often tunes out the directive—and the person. That daunting fear ate at her psyche.

To console and comfort herself, and Clay, she started massaging his back. Clay thrives on sports massages; he still keeps weekly massage therapy appointments when he’s on Maui. While it later surprised many to learn that Clay enjoyed massage (normally, physical touch from another is anathema to those on the autism spectrum), it had been an acquired taste for him: Jill was a longtime massage therapist.

As she worked out the knots in his shoulder muscles, she took the leap. “Clay, I have to ask you something, and I want you to really hear me,” she said. “They want to do one more round of testing to figure out . . . why you surf so good. What is it about you that makes you surf so good? How are you so amazing at surfing?”

Clay rolled away and looked up at her with a face as cold as an ice cap. I don’t even want to hear it.

“I promise it will be the last time. I promise you we will never test you for anything again,” she said.

“The last time?”

“Yes.”

“Ever?”

“Yes.”

He stared directly into her eyes. “Okay.”