Californios 2

By Jeff McElroy

In this collection, Jeff McElroy continues where he left off with his debut, IPPY Gold Medal-winning Californios, exploring the waves, mountains, and deserts of California and beyond with a cast of characters reminiscent of Steinbeck’s seekers, Abbey’s apostles, and Dylan’s dirtbag disciples. From the Sierra headwaters to where the sagebrush arroyos meet the Pacific, the trail has always led West. Follow this ragtag band of Californios as they struggle to transcend the dams and concrete sprawl of modernity so they might keep afloat long enough to inhale at least one last golden sunset.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff McElroy
• Release date: Dec 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310088568

Jeff McElroy

Author Jeff McElroy received his MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. He won First Place in the Writer's Digest Short Story Contest for "Brown Pride." His stories "The Tipsy Fox" and "Song of the Earth" were selected to represent the Antioch MFA Program at the 2008 and 2009 AWP Awards. "Goofyfoot" was adapted to film, screening at the Ventura, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, San Diego and Newport Beach Film Festivals, and winning the Audience Award for Best Dramatic Short at the Valley Film Festival in Hollywood. Jeff is a regular contributor to Wetsand.com, one of the largest surfing websites in the world. "Californios" is the first published collection of his short stories.

Book preview

Californios 2

In this collection, Jeff McElroy continues where he left off with his debut, IPPY Gold Medal-winning Californios, exploring the waves, mountains, and deserts of California and beyond with a cast of characters reminiscent of Steinbeck’s seekers, Abbey’s apostles, and Dylan’s dirtbag disciples. From the Sierra headwaters to where the sagebrush arroyos meet the Pacific, the trail has always led West. Follow this ragtag band of Californios as they struggle to transcend the dams and concrete sprawl of modernity so they might keep afloat long enough to inhale at least one last golden sunset.

Californios 2: A Collection of Stories

Pierpont Press

Copyright 2015 Jeff McElroy

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever including Internet usage, without written permission of the author.

Cover Design by Jesse James Dickenson

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eBook formatting by Maureen Cutajar

www.gopublished.com

Californios 2

a collection of stories

Jeff McElroy

Author’s Note

Why Californios? The term originates in Spanish California, where Spanish/Mexican vaqueros roamed the wilderness among and between the vast ranchos, honing their expert horse skills and perfecting the art of the Santa Maria BBQ. They let the cattle graze freely and kept the country country. Of course, the real Californios were the native tribes: Chumash, Mojaves, Paiutes, Esalen, and many more. But this sacred land has since become part of the United States. As the seekers of gold, the seekers of oil, the seekers of gods, the seekers of beauty, and the seekers of progress pooled and puddled here, we’ve all become Californios. And on any given sunset, whether it be in the alpineglow of the Sierras, the peach stillness of the Mojave Desert, or the manzanita cliffs of the coast, the surfers, the climbers, the joggers, the families, the tourists, the winos, the weird, and the wonderful still pause to ponder the West so they might gather the dust of their lives into some intangible stone of meaning to take with them into the night.

Contents

Silhouettes

Jetties

Nobody’s Waves

Going Home

Proving Grounds

New Break

Hueneme

No Story

The Odd Sea

Puffy Vests

Notch Hetchy

Roadtrip

Wavelengths

I am haunted by waters.

—Norman Maclean,

A River Runs Through It

Silhouettes

In the dream, he is surfing towards me. It’s one of those infinite winter days in California when the sun is warm but the water is cold and the waves steam in from the northwest and wrap around the pointbreaks. The days when you lose count of days and waves and your eyes glow red from Santa Anas and salt and you burn off the burritos as if they were coal in your fire of stoke. He is surfing towards me from the north, way up at the top of the point, and he is silhouetted by the setting sun.

Only a silhouette, and yet, I know it is my friend.

Because we know our friends by more than name. We know them by more than voice or hair or smile. We can know them in ways as subtle as the letters they trace in the sky. Or, for surfers, by the way they dance on a wave. I can think back on the dudes I grew up with in the water, remember their stories, their joys and hardships. I can see their faceless forms on the wave: There is Ryan The Lurker (he’s 6’4, skinny as hell, and somehow manages to lurk the barrels with his back bent, long arms and longer fingers poised like Nosferatu). There is Bryan The Businessman (big, ripped, spine straight, slaying waves as if they were his business competitors), Martin The Windmill (he rotates his back arm to generate more speed on the wave), and Frazier The Waiter" (sits like a Roman bust alongside his jetty, beard like Dionysus, patiently waiting for set waves).

These are my friends, and I love them all for the people they have and will become. We all started out in the same soup, at the same breaks, with the same stinkbug silhouettes. And like bugs, we molted, discarded old styles, grew thicker skins. For a while, we tried to mimic the pros in magazines and videos, but we were all destined for our own styles, our own silhouettes.

In the dream, my friend is surfing towards me on that infinite winter afternoon, which is strange, because he died two years ago in Afghanistan. In the dream, he drags a hand through the bottom turn, tightens into a quick barrel, then shoots down the line in his archer’s pose. The archer, the discus thrower, the surfer—such is the substance of statues. The timeless poses make us immortal. And though there are a billion versions of heaven, I like this one the best: My buddy forever pumping down the line on a sepia winter California afternoon, sending spray over the backs, then paddling back out to do it all over again.

Jetties

He remembers the bloated, pale body of the dead swimmer in the jetty, surges of sea animating his limbs like a stringless puppet. Crabs waltzed sideways. One crawled over his open eye. The dead boy’s bespectacled mother scrambled over the rocks, toenails bleeding, one large breast flopped over her one-piece. Jimmy! She screamed. The fishermen in their rubber boots reached into the birdshit reek of the rocks and tugged at the boy’s arms. He remembers the firefighters sprinting on the jetty, one carrying a bright orange box. They did CPR right there on a flat rock, sharp with barnacles. When they zapped, he thought the boy was coming back because his chest heaved. Then blood spilled over his lips. He was gone. Jimmy.

He remembers this now as he sits on his surfboard a few yards past the jetty. He’d used the rip running along the jetty to paddle out faster, the same rip that caught that boy fifteen years ago. He’d been a boy himself, nine-years-old. The jetty was the first place where he felt eternity and oblivion, something about it like a finger pointing towards rapture of beer-brown waves and sepia sunsets, tattered sails of ghost ships on a sad horizon. The lowing of the buoy like some metronome trying to tame the wild slosh sloosh, the errant knocks and thuds in the fractious rocks the drumbeats of some defected marching band of the damned. And always the mute fishermen with faces hidden in hooded sweatshirts regarding nothing, seeming neither bored nor alive, either catatonic as gargoyles or working quickly with knives and hooks whilst squatting over bloody paint buckets.

The aromas cemented in his psyche all he would ever be able to know of the sea, for the jetty is the keeper of the sea’s secrets and memories, and olfactory memory is the only memory worth remembering. Down in the purple dark rocks with crabs and plump stars, he inhaled diesel and tarred rope, live bait and dead fish, kelpy decay, slipstream cigarette smoke and dried bum urine. It smelled like pirate.

Even now he imagines Jimmy’s ghost misting betwixt the rocks, condemned to these piled stones by manacles of death, moaning pitch-perfect with the dismal buoy. Each dawn the promise of a jettison west, each noon the Sisyphean waltz on the rocks, pacing, pacing, then the heartbreak of sunset when couples migrate seaward with wine and sweaters to hold each other as if touch might stave off the inevitability of rejoining the cosmos, naked and decayed, the nitrogen cycle. Then the darkness of night, when the jetty sleeps, but not Jimmy.

A wave rears like a spooked horse, and he spins to rope it. He rides the wave past the jetty, sliding past a million eyes of crabs and the dead. And in that ride he forgets about Jimmy, thinks only of the wave, and, in that act, affirms life. He rides the wave past consciousness to that primal realm of being that has kept the human race hopeful despite death. It’s why the farmer plows, the weaver weaves, and the surfer surfs. To life.

Nobody’s Waves

We’re running out of land, I said.

Highway 1 rose and fell over buttery contours of buttery fields, August sun baking the chaparral into golden hay and shimmering the pacific Pacific. Kellie’s chipped-paint toenails rode on the dashboard and reminded me of a little girl’s cute, grubby paws. But beyond that, she was all woman. Miles of tan legs barely disappeared into Daisy Dukes, and her acres of blonde curls clothed her bosom more than the bandana blouse she wore. We’d grabbed coffee in Carpinteria, ate BBQ in Cambria, and I’d already explained to her why zebras grazed alongside cows below Hearst Castle.

William Randolph Hearst was a fat-cat newspaper man, owned all the newspapers back in the day, I’d said. He basically controlled the media which is crazy because he could create headlines to sway public opinion, say, towards war. Orson Welles made a movie based on him called Citizen Kane.

She’d interrupted me with a bow-tie smile shot out from beneath big ol’ Boogie Nights sunglasses. Shut me right up and made me feel like a dirty, boring grandpa. She had been listening, would’ve listened to me ramble for a thousand miles about yellow journalism, the Rough Riders, and the Spanish-American War. But that smile, so fertile, so hot. It said, I’d go anywhere with you and listen to you forever, because I love you. But it also said, through no intention of hers, Shut the fuck up, we’re approaching Big Sur.

And when we ran out of land, Highway 1 floated on the same foggy updrafts lofting the fanned-out hawks. We clung to the continent by pine roots. The world became emerald sea and opal sky on the outward bends of road, then damp evergreen forest on the inward turns. Beautiful, I said. She nodded, contemplative. She’d told me a few weeks before she’d only been up to Big Sur once; ten years ago with her dad, the year before he OD’d. The summer between 8th and 9th grade. She didn’t remember much, just lots of cliffs and ocean and trees. Dad was a big surfer from Oxnard, back when wetsuits were thick, shiny rubber and boards were short but fat with three stringers and one fin. She grew up building sandcastles or swinging on rusty swings while Dad surfed Oil Piers or The Point.

We passed Esalen. I told her the Esalen were the native people of this area, living lives more vertical than horizontal, fishing the sea and foraging the forests above. Now the Esalen Institute was a quasi-Buddhist, hippie, New Age, Yoga, Meditation retreat for yippies, mystics, hipsters, housewives, and corporate retreats. Four hundred dollars to pitch a sleeping bag for the weekend, why not? Over in the passenger seat, that bow-tie smile. She fed me a fig and kissed my neck.

Around a corner, and the waves turned on like a switch. Overhead beachbreak thumping away, trying to turn an isthmus into a sea-stack. I had my board and wetsuit in the back. But this is the story of Big Sur: no access. It’s either privately owned, NAVY owned, or such a steep cliff you’d need climbing gear to rappel to the break. So we stopped to piss in Gorda. A beer for me, a glass of wine for her, and a little boy tried to sell us an American flag on a stick for two bucks while his dad slept something off in a junk-stuffed sedan. Northward. Scenic Lookout Point signs were emblems of wasted tax-payer dollars; the whole damn thing