Slake: Los Angeles, A City and Its Stories, No. 3: War & Peace

By Laurie Ochoa and Joe Donnelly

In this newest installment of Slake: Los Angeles, A City and Its Stories, editors Laurie Ochoa and Joe Donnelly gather War Stories -- personal and political, cultural and social, sometimes bloodless, sometimes violent -- centered on Los Angeles and beyond as told by some of the nation's finest writers and artists. Slake: Los Angeles is devoted to the endangered art of deeply reported narrative journalism and the kind of polished essay, memoir, fiction, poetry and portrait writing that is disappearing in a world of instant takes and unfiltered opinion. Designed with an artist's eye and published in a full-color, perfect-bound format, Slake: Los Angeles sets a new template for the next generation of print journalism -- collectible, not disposable; destined for the bedside table instead of the recycling bin. Seductive in its looks and content, Slake marks a return to storytelling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Slake Media
• Release date: Mar 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9780984563555

Book preview

He stood at the curbside, one small duffle and two new surfboards bubble-wrapped in their own bags. The planes looked huge behind the terminal—shiny, smooth, and glowing under the floodlights as the fog drifted in from El Segundo. It still didn’t seem like he was going anywhere. An hour earlier, he’d been with a couple of friends, joking about how crazy it was to go surfing in the middle of a war. Now here he was, slightly buzzing, watching the Lakers game at a bar in the international terminal. He ordered another beer and then another, paying for each round with a fresh twenty so he could collect small bills before he boarded the plane.

    Across the expanse of the terminal, he saw the departure board flashing destinations in the middle of the hall. There were three flights that night bound for San Salvador. Three flights a day to a war zone. It must be like that every day, he thought, every war. While you sat watching TV, flights were booked full of people and crying babies headed to a war in droves.

A sip of Heineken and the Miss World Pageant, live from Las Vegas, came on. It always started like this, he thought; it always started like nothing was going to start at all.

He was going surfing because he wanted to, he told himself, because it mattered. Because the waves in El Salvador are some of the best in the world and he wanted to get out of his life in L.A., get away from his lousy delivery job and his long drives to the beach, away from the crowds in the surf and the news and the radio and from everything he knew. He wanted to get away from the daily trips to the hospital where he’d watched his younger brother fade away, tired and yellow. He wanted to get away from the feeling of helplessness and the months of fickle hope. Away from his parents’ grief, the weight of sadness and scattered ashes.

He had been surfing since he was a kid. It was what he did best and what was familiar. And now he needed to be alone with great waves and the right boards, pushing himself. When he thought about it like that, it seemed the best thing to do. But now, sitting alone with the Heineken warming in his palm and a ticket to a war zone, it also seemed foolish and unimportant and he was afraid.

A flash popped out of the corner of his eye. Four Japanese men were posing for pictures in front of the departure board, smiling and clean.

Two weeks earlier he had knocked on the door of the boss’s hot, carpeted office during an afternoon coffee break and asked for two weeks off. The boss looked up.

You already had a vacation this year.

Not vacation, he explained, thinking of the two new boards he’d had made for the occasion. A 6’0 three-!n for most days, and a 6’4 for when the surf gets big. Just time o. No pay."

No pay? The boss raised his eyebrows and looked at him for a moment. He wasn’t sure if the boss knew about his brother, but he didn’t want to explain. Sure, okay. Put it on the calendar, the boss said and went back to the papers on his desk.

It was that easy. He bought his ticket that same afternoon at the TACA office on Wilshire and Normandie. Caca, they had called it after the first trip.

He had been to El Salvador five years ago, before his brother got sick. It had been great then, a month of adventure—the two of them surfing all morning, trading waves with no one else around. Afternoons swinging in hammocks reading tattered paperbacks, muscles sore, skin sunburned, hair dry and salty. The war was little more than a ghost story at their campfire, a distant sound in the night. They were used to feeling safe, especially together.

He got up from the bar and wobbled down an escalator that had stopped running. In the restroom, he swayed and pissed in a toilet stall, and as he stood there it occurred to him that everyone else in the bathroom had black hair. It crept over him then, that feeling of sliding into Latin America, and the nervousness came as his memories of other trips drew closer. The dirt-floored bars and mosquitoes, the taxis with holes in the mufflers, the sweat and heat. And guns. Machine guns hung over shoulders, and the sounds of them in the night. That’s what he remembered now.

He took out his wallet and put it into his old, worn money belt and strapped it on low under his Levi’s. It felt familiar. He squeezed out a few more beer dribbles while thinking of black hair. He caught a glimpse of his blond hair in the mirror and he knew then he was going away.

On the departure board, the announcements began to read longer as the last of the European flights left, and when they read Mexico, Guatemala, Salvador, and other Central American locations, he knew that meant Nicaragua.

11:03. The Qantas flight left for Sydney, and from then on all the announcements were made in Spanish first. There was still too much time to kill, and he walked slowly down the corridors of the terminal, bored. Everywhere there were babies and card-board-box suitcases tied with string; there were big, black mustaches, boom-box radios, and cowboy hats, and he was sinking into it all, getting there before he had even left. Snakeskin boots and huge belt buckles, infants in pinafore smocks, and women in dresses with slips showing. He was drunk.

Shit, he thought, and closed his eyes.

•

He woke with the bump and the shudder of the landing gear in Mexico City. Out the window, the sky was light purple in the dawn and the waning moon hung dead center above a gray building. It looked like LAX, like they hadn’t gone anywhere. He watched the ground crew in the growing light as passengers bustled in the aisle. He dozed again until the plane’s takeoff woke him for an unexpected view of miles and miles of cement-gray houses and dirt streets and crumbling walls, getting smaller as they rose but spreading out bigger and disappearing at the edges in a brown haze along the mountains.

He slept and woke and had powdery eggs and orange juice and his head hurt. Outside it was just a sea of white clouds. When they started descending he tried to keep his eyes open, waiting for the swing over the ocean and a glimpse of the town and the point and the waves. Looking over the mountains with tiny villages between the green of the trees, he couldn’t imagine there was a war down there. Torture and death squads and bombs seemed more like TV. Below just looked like mountains. And heat.

And then the ocean and the beach and the pier. He strained to see if the waves were good but couldn’t tell before they disappeared from view, and he waited to feel the bump of landing.

Three thudding stamps in his passport and he was standing against a pillar waiting for his boards. Above his head was a poster of a girl in a dress, on crutches. She had only one leg. Another victim of FLMN bombs, it read in Spanish. As he looked down, a family walked by and there was a girl in the same dress but with both legs and he had to look up at the poster again to make sure.

"¿Que hora es?" he asked as he climbed in the taxi’s front seat.

The leatherette was hot and he began to sweat. Driving along, there was nothing and it was brown; the green of the jungle he remembered was gone and it was all open and flat and dead. He thought there must have been a fire but the taxi driver said it was just the dry season. There were clusters of dirt-and-stick shacks along the road close to the asphalt. There were people and cattle now and then walking along in the sun, but the taxi driver never slowed down. Everything was poorer and worse than he remembered. The town seemed smaller, too, and the streets were crowded.

How have things been here? he asked the driver.

"Tranquilo."

He got a room in the cement motel across from the beach and the woman at the desk remembered him and asked where his brother was.

He’s not coming this time, he said.

What a pity, she said.

The heat grabbed him, hugging him heavy and wet, and he knew it wouldn’t let go until he was gone.

The trade winds were blowing already in the late afternoon and the surf was choppy and weak, so he walked through the town looking for a cold drink. Everything was the same as before, but different: the short, narrow streets of cobblestone and low, adobe houses with worn, shuttered doors opened to cool, hammock-crossed interiors and tiled floors lost in deep shadows. Old, toothless women lounging in fraying beach chairs, mongrel dogs slinking away under cars, ribs showing. Babies sitting in paint-chip-flecked dirt, dusty trucks with flat tires in dirt lots, and young girls in plastic sandals walking with Tupperware bowls on their heads.

In the main street before the church plaza, people were drawing huge pictures on the pavement in white chalk and others were filling in the colors between the lines with rice and tree bark. At a corner in front of a pupuseria he watched them finish a drawing of Jesus with a sawdust face and toilet paper rolls for hair and seashells for eyebrows. Good Friday.

In the afternoon, he walked out along the point and watched the wind blow the waves sloppily over the reef. He decided to go for a surf anyway, to get in the water and out of the sweat and get a feel for the new board before the real waves came. The board rode well, loose and solid, light under his feet, and he surfed until the sun was too much and his lips stung from the salt.

He walked back into the town after a shower. The moon came up late, almost full, low and red beyond the pier. He watched trucks running over the designs on the pavement, rice and flowers and sawdust scattering to the gutters. Red-and-blue political posters for the ARENA party were plastered on doors and walls and light poles, its logo painted on the side-walk and benches and fences. In his sparse room at the motel he tried to read but there was a distant, echoing boom and then the light flickered and went out, and he knew it was the guerillas bombing the power lines.

•

"¿Cuando? ¿Cuando? ¿Cuando?"

He woke under the single sheet. It was almost dawn.

"¿Cuando? ¿Cuando? ¿Cuando?" squawked the parrots from their cages in the restaurant across the street.

Standing at the window, he could see the sun just topping the ridge of volcanoes in the east. The sound of the unseen surf cracked sharp in the air.

"¿Cuando? ¿Cuando? ¿Cuando?"

Fifteen minutes later, he was up at the point, balanced on a rock, barefoot—his flip-flops buried under stones—timing the incoming waves to scramble out a few yards over the rocks before the next one hid them from view. He could smell the zinc oxide smeared on his cheeks and his T-shirt was tight across his stomach, knotted behind his back. The waves were bigger and the water was smooth and orange in the sun and he was alone.

He surfed for hours while the sun got higher and hotter, until his lips cracked and his face burned. The set waves were head high and long and fast and sucking off the shallow rocks so that he had to watch his outside rail as he pumped his way across the wall, the speed building for the turns, the water smooth and fast.

When he finally came in, he was so hungry that his legs were weak and he walked slowly along the point to the motel and stood in the cool flow of the shower in the cement room. At the restaurant across the way, he sat at an outdoor table and watched families play on the sand and in the waves. The waiter recognized him from before.

"¿Café? the waiter asked, surprised. ¿No cerveza? and brought him a plastic cup of hot water and a jar of Nescafé. ¿Y tu hermano?"

"Él no viene este vez," he said, and they talked about the town and how the restaurant was doing.

Not many surfers come through here anymore, said the waiter. Sometimes an American and his girlfriend from the capital.

After that there was a fried fish with its eyes charred black. A mariachi band played over the blare of the jukebox. Children laughed and begged for food with upturned palms until the waiters shooed them away. Dogs hid beneath chairs. The sun got hotter and hotter and the waves looked fun in the glare.

•

The days melted along, hot and humid, the streets filthy with trash and sleeping drunks sprawled in the dirt; oyster shells and bottle caps glinted in the sun, flies and filthy dogs, scraps of paper blowing off dry, cracked posters on whitewashed walls. Sometimes it was fine and he was just there, tired, but then suddenly it became too familiar and he couldn’t stop remembering, and as he walked and picked his way along broken sidewalks and around stinking trash piles he felt as if he were being pressed under a thumb, and there was a panic inside his chest and he wanted to escape. Soldiers lounged behind sandbags at every street corner, rifles swaying. Dogs hid from the sun in deep shadows and the heat was heavy until he was back in the shade of the cement room, lying before the fan with eyes closed, breathing.

Slowly the surf got bigger, building a foot or two a day, rolling in from some unseen storm beyond the white-blue of the horizon. It was eight feet on the sets and still building and he could hear the crack and roar beyond the slats of the louvered glass windows of the motel, where waves rolled and barreled along the point in the dark.

On the fourth day, the surf was ten feet in the early dawn as he balanced barefoot on the rocks. Then the pressure was gone and he knew why he had come. The waves rose slowly in the distance like hills. He would feel them lifting from behind as he paddled hard, and then the slide, and the drop, and him jumping to his feet cleanly and the board falling out beneath him, the speed building up in his knees at the bottom and leaning into the turn, the board coming around solid and fast and the wall of water before him, huge and moving toward the town and the fishing boats bobbing far away beside the pier. He surfed from first light until the trade winds rose before noon, until his stomach ached and his arms were weak and rubbery. There was always the afternoon in the shade of a restaurant, sore shoulders and his skin tight and hot from the sun. Coke bottles that fit perfectly into his palm.

And every morning he was on the rocks again at dawn, the takeoffs coming later, the drops getting deeper, the turns harder, pushing his surfing, always alone.

On the sixth day, as he picked his way cautiously over the rocks, he could see another surfer was already in the water. He was a journalist down from the capital, the American. Floating in the water between waves, the journalist talked about being caught in a shootout between the army and the guerillas in a village in the mountains, and how a photographer near him had stood to take pictures and been shot in the stomach. The journalist caught the next wave, and when he paddled back he explained how he had tried to get the photographer to a hospital but had been forced off the road by mortar shelling. They’d hidden in the wreckage of a house where the photographer had lain there bleeding and died.

They talked about surfing and other things, and traded waves and everything was all right. The journalist caught a good wave and was far down the beach. He looked down the coast, past the journalist walking on the shore, past the pier and the town, to the distant volcanoes, and thought about getting shot in the stomach.

•

At dawn, the town was calm and quiet and still cool before the sun. The waves continued to rise and he spent his mornings in the water and afternoons at lunch: fish and rice, or a bowl of seafood soup with tortillas and goat’s milk cheese before a nap in front of the fan in the motel. After Easter, the crowds had gone back to the capital and the town settled down, but the heat lingered, not caring that the holiday had ended.

During those quiet afternoons he walked the streets and tried to reconcile things, the town as he remembered it from years before and the way he saw it now. He thought about his brother and everything seemed worse than before: dirtier, smellier, more broken, rotting, rusting, destroyed—older, roasting itself in the heat. He couldn’t imagine it going on like it was, just squeaking by, just holding together.

He wandered in the cemetery between the hotel and the point, stepping in the shade between hundreds of crumbling cement crosses and graves the size of shoe boxes. Or in the town plaza, where every surface was plastered with posters—green, white, red, and blue, fi ghting for space on the walls, torn and shredded like the town. Or he walked across the beach toward the pier, where stinking open sewers trickled black across the sand. Or around soccer games and sand fi ghts between school kids. Pillars collapsing, tiles broken, bent and rusting rebar protruding from every corner and cement wall, and palm-frond roofs tumbling in on families of ten.

•

On the seventh day, the sets moved in from deep water and exploded off the outside reef. He went quickly from rock to rock in the gray dawn, glancing up to watch the waves as he went, and almost stepped on the headless body of a chicken covered with flies. It startled and nauseated him and he couldn’t get it out of his head as he paddled out to the surf, the water warm.

The journalist showed up later and they egged each other on, taking risks and paying for their mistakes, getting dragged underwater over the rocks, cutting their feet, water up their noses. The surf was enormous and smooth, with power and speed that wound up like a spring in his legs. Paddling hard and forcing himself over the edge of the biggest waves, the wall of water long and fast and moving ahead, driving for speed and the whole thing throwing out blue and wide with the town at the end against the base of the hills, dry and yellow, everything racing and nothing else mattering.

By the eighth day, the peak of the swell was over and the surf began to drop, slowly, almost begrudgingly. The lull between sets got longer and it seemed the sun would boil the water as they waited. But then, suddenly, the horizon would darken and catch them off guard. By the tenth day, there was almost nothing left