The Dazzling Blackness
I’M THINKING ABOUT BRAZILIAN PRESIDENT Getulio Vargas, who shot himself in the heart in 1954; I’m thinking about Pepe Lopes, who died in a hang gliding accident while trying to win a second world title in Japan in 1991; I’m thinking about Aryton Senna, the Formula One racer who died on lap seven of the San Marino Grand Prix in Italy in 1994. I am not thinking about death explicitly, but death hangs over all of this.
I’m bodysurfing the north end of Barra da Tijuca, a spot called Praia do Pepe, named after the aforementioned hang glider. The swell is out of the southwest; the waves are a whomping four foot, mostly lefts, with the occasional short burst of right. The water smells of sewage, with a distinctly Rio tang. My romantic self likes to think of it as bathing in the collective DNA of this city of six million. My more practical self fears Hep A. On my feet, Da Fins, recommended by bodysurfing guru Mark Cunningham. At the tip of my fingers, a hand plane, which I have learned to hold with my inside hand. This is why I love bodysurfing. This is why, on my recent trips to Rio, I end up bodysurfing more than board surfing: I’m still learning new things. At age 47 I may be declining as a surfer, but as a bodysurfer I’m unquestionably improving. The tadpole grows feet and hops across the terra firma. The surfer sheds board and swims off to eternity.
Along the beachfront are high-rises, one of which is a 15-story apart-hotel that is my home for the next month. It’s really my wife’s place. She is here on a three-month contract to co-direct Amor e Sexoa documentary TV series that explores love and sex. She arrived from New York, where we live, a week before me. “We’re staying here,” she said over Skype, and aimed her computer at the building. I recognised it immediately: Barra Beach Towers. I used to stay there in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, when I was a pro surfer. In fact, mostly everyone on tour stayed there. I had what now seem to be prescient moments.
In 1989, while sharing a room with fellow pro Bryce Ellis and playing heated games of Backgammon into the wee hours, I became haunted by the Rolling Stones It’s Only Rock ‘n’Roll, specifically the song ‘Time Waits For No One’. One night I couldn’t sleep. The melody was soothing, but the lyrics were galvanizing. I had the idea that I should get up and run sprints along the shoreline. We pros did a lot of this: raising heartbeats, inciting adrenalin, simulating make-or-break moments in the dying seconds of world title-deciding heats. But it is never a good idea to be alone on the beach in Rio at 3am. So instead I ran mental sprints.
In 1991, in that same hotel, possibly the same room, possibly even the same room where I now stay with Gisela, I cried in sync with Sinead O’Connor, who cries spectacularly in her video ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. I watched it on MTV, again in the wee hours, horribly jet-lagged. Melancholy consumed me. I was in a relationship that was dying, and in my efforts to revive it I vowed to paint a portrait of my girl, turquoise and gold, with drips like the tears falling down Sinead’s face. I would give it to her as a Christmas present. But we never made it to Christmas.
Bobbing on the bottle green sea, a plane roaring across the rainbow sherbet sky, a jet-skier 100 yards out fucking up my waves, I remember moments at the breakfast buffet with fellow pros Tom Carroll, Ross Clarke-Jones, Gary “Kong” Elkerton. I miss how simple life was with that bull’s eye focus of the pro tour. I do not miss having my self-esteem dictated by where I sat on the rankings.
An A-frame looms. I put The *biiing* of my floor, the doors open, I make my way down the tiled hallway, anticipating this late afternoon routine I know all so well: approach apartment #905, smell weed, hear GloboNews on the TV, knock on door, Gisela shouts in the warmest way, door opens, vibrant wife of mine stands there all sinewy, big smile, glassy eyes. We hug. I kiss the side of her dirty blond head. It’s a world, a life, though I fail to fully appreciate it at the time. I’m preoccupied with the memoir I’m trying to write, with a particularly North American brand of career advancement. I’m a cliche. I take it for granted, think it will always be there. I’m terribly wrong.
