Don Winslow: The winter of Frankie Machine

But Frank loves the early hours. They’re his favorite time of the day.

This is his quiet time, the only part of his busy day that’s actually tranquil, and he loves to watch the sun come up over the hills east of the city and see the sky over the ocean turn pink as the water changes from black to gray.

But that won’t be for a little while.

It’s still black out now.

He turns to a local AM station to get the weather report.

Rain and more rain.

A big front moving in from the North Pacific.

He pays half attention as the announcer gives the local news. It’s the usual-four more houses in Oceanside have slid down a slope in the mud, the city auditors can’t decide if the city is on the verge of bankruptcy or not, and housing prices have risen again.

Then there’s the city council scandal-the FBI’s Operation G-Sting has resulted in the indictment of four councilmen for taking bribes from strip-club owners to repeal the city ordinance prohibiting “touching” in the clubs. A couple of vice cops have been paid off for looking the other way.

Yeah, it’s news and it’s not news, Frank thinks. Because San Diego is a port town for the navy, the sex trade has always been a big part of the economy. Bribing a councilman so that a sailor can get a lap dance is practically a civic duty.

But if the FBI wants to waste its time on strippers, it’s nothing to Frank.

He hasn’t been in a strip club in-what, twenty years?

Frank switches back to the classical station, opens the linen napkin on his lap, and eats his egg sandwich while he drives down to Ocean Beach. He likes that little bite of the onion in the bagel against the taste of the egg and the bitterness of the coffee.

It was Herbie Goldstein, may he rest, who had turned him on to the onion bagel, back in the days when Vegas was still Vegas and not Disney World with crap tables. And back when Herbie, all 375 pounds of him, was an unlikely player and unlikelier ladies’ man. They’d been up all night, hitting the shows and clubs with a couple of gorgeous girls, when Herbie had somehow pulled into his orbit. They decided to go out to breakfast, where Herbie talked a reluctant Frank into trying an onion bagel.

“Come on, you guinea,” Herbie had said, “stretch your horizons.”

That was a good thing Herbie had done for him, because Frank enjoys his onion bagels, but only when he can buy them fresh-made at that little kosher deli up in Hillcrest. Anyway, the onion bagel-egg sandwich is a highlight of his morning routine.

“Normal people sitdown to eat breakfast,” Donna told him.

“Iam sitting down,” Frank replied. “Sitting down driving.”

What is it Jill calls it? The kids these days think they invented doing more than one thing at a time (they should have tried raising kids in the old days, before the disposable diapers, the washer-dryers, and the microwaves), so they came up with a fancy name for it. Yeah, “multi-tasking.” I’m like the young people, Frank thinks. I’m multi-tasking.

Ocean Beach Pier is the biggest pier in California.

A big capitalT of concrete and steel jutting out into the Pacific Ocean, its central stem running for over sixteen hundred feet before its crosspiece branches out to the north and south an almost equal distance. If you decide to walk the entire pier, you’re looking at a jaunt of about a mile and a half.

Frank’s bait shop, O.B. Bait and Tackle, sits about two-thirds of the way up the stem on the north side, just far enough from the Ocean Beach Pier Cafe so that the smell from the bait shop doesn’t bother the diners and the dining tourists don’t bother Frank’s regular fishermen.

Actually, a lot of his customers also hit the OBP Cafe on a regular basis for its eggsmachaca and lobster omelette. So does Frank, for that matter, a good lobster omelette (okay, any lobster omelette) being a difficult thing to come by. So if there’s one right next door, you tend to take advantage of it.

But not at 4:15 in the morning, even though the OBP Cafe is open 24/7. Frank just polishes off his sandwich, parks his van, and walks out to his shop. He could drive out there-he has a pass-but unless he has some equipment or something to bring in, he likes to walk. The ocean at this time of the day is spectacular, especially in winter. The water is a cold slate gray, heavy this morning with the ominous swell of an approaching storm. It’s like a pregnant woman this time of year, Frank thinks-full, temperamental, impatient. The waves are already slapping against the concrete support pillars, making little explosions of white water burst into the air below the pier.

Frank likes to think about the long journey that the waves make, starting near Japan and then rolling all the way across thousands of miles of the North Pacific just to break against the pier.

The surfers will be out in force. Not the spongers, the wannabes, or the kooks-they will and should stay onshore and watch. But the real guys, the gunners, will be out for these swells. Big waves, thunder-crushers, that will crash all along the old spots and breaks, which read like a litany in a surfers’ church service: Boil, Rockslide, Lescums, Out Ta Sites, Bird Shit, Osprey, Pesky’s. Both sides of the OB Pier-south side, north side-then up along the coast-Gage, Avalanche, and Stubs.

Frank gets a kick just reciting the names in his head.

He knows them all-they’re sacred places in his life. And those are just the breaks around OB-go farther up the San Diego coast and the litany continues, from north to south: Big Rock, Windansea, Rockpile, Hospital Point, Boomer Beach, Black’s Beach, Seaside Reef, Suckouts, Swami’s, D Street, Tamarack, and Carlsbad.

These names have magic for a local surfer. They’re more than just names-each place holds memories. Frank grew up at these spots, back in the golden sixties, when the San Diego coast was paradise, uncrowded, undeveloped, when there weren’t a lot of surfers and you knew practically every guy who went out.

Thosewere the endless summers.

Each day seemed to last forever, Frank thinks as he watches a wave roll in and smack the pier. You’d get up before dawn, just like now, and work hard all day on the old man’s tuna boat. But you’d get back by the middle of the afternoon; then it was off to meet your buddies at the beach. You’d surf until dark, laughing and talking shit out there in the lineup, goofing on one another, showing off for the bunnies watching you from the beach. Those were the longboard days, plenty of time and plenty of space. Days of “hanging ten” and “ho-dadding” and those fat Dick Dale guitar riffs and Beach Boys songs, and they were singing aboutyou, they were singing aboutyour life, your sweet summer days on the beach.

You’d always stop and watch the sunset together. You and your buddies and the girls had that ritual, a common acknowledgment of-what, wonder? A few quiet, respectful moments watching the sun sink over the horizon, the water glowing orange, pink, and red, and you’d think to yourself howlucky you were. Even as a kid, you knew you were just damn lucky to be in that place at that time, and you were just wise enough to know that you’d better enjoy it.

Then the last sliver of red sun would slide over the edge, and you’d all gather firewood and build a bonfire and cook fish or hot dogs or hamburgers or whatever you could scare up, and you’d eat and sit around the fire and someone would pull out a guitar and sing “Sloop John B” or “Barbara Ann” or some old folk song, and later, if you were lucky, you’d slip away from the firelight with a blanket and one of the girls and you’d make out, and the girl smelled of salt water and suntan lotion, and maybe she’d let you slide your hand under her bikini top, and there was nothing like that feeling. And you might lie with her all night on that blanket, and then wake up and hustle down to the docks just in time to catch the boat and get to work and then do the whole thing all over again.