Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

So ended his first day in Huntington Beach. It was dark by the time he got back to the Sea View apartments. And if the town had come to life with the rising of the sun, then the Sea View apartments had come to life with its setting. The place had been quiet as a morgue when he’d left; now there was apparently some sort of party going on. Many of the doors stood propped open above the stained linoleum floors. A kind of music he was not used to hearing, but what he took to be punk rock, spilled from the guts of the old building and swirled around him as he climbed the stairs. He went straight to his room and closed the door, collapsed on his bed. He had been on the bed for about five minutes, hovering at the edge of sleep, when someone knocked at his door.

He opened it to find two girls standing in the hallway. One was short and dark, with short black hair. The other was tall, athletic-looking. She had strawberry-blond hair that came to her shoulders. It was the dark-haired girl who did the talking. The blonde leaned against a wall and scratched her leg with her foot. They both looked drunk and happy, slightly stupid. They wanted to know if he had any papers. The music was louder now with the door open and he could hear other voices farther down the hall. They looked disappointed when he said no. The dark one sort of stuck her head in his room and looked around. She wanted to know if he was a jarhead or something. He said he wasn’t.

The girls giggled and went away. Ike closed the door behind them and walked into his bathroom. The moonlight was coming through the small rectangular window now, glancing off the porcelain and the silver slab of the mirror so he could still see a dark reflection of himself in the glass. But the reflection was hard to recognize. It seemed to change shape and expression as he watched it until he could not be sure that it was his own and then it came to him that the feeling he got from that dark glass was not unlike the feeling he’d gotten from the overpowering silence of the desert and he turned away from it quickly, heart thumping high and fast, and looked instead down into the yard where a lonesome oil well jerked itself off in the moonlight.

He wasted one more day staking out the Adams house on Ocean, still thinking that perhaps there were other people living there besides the old woman. There were not. The H turned out to stand for Hazel, and Hazel Adams lived alone. Her husband was dead and there was a son in Tulsa and a daughter in Chicago who never called. Ike learned all of this because he happened to be sitting around in front of the elementary school when Mrs. Adams crashed the three-wheel electric cart she drove. She was coming home from the market and rolled the machine trying to get it in the driveway. Ike saw it all and ran across the street to see if he could help. The old woman had escaped unscathed, however, and invited him in for a piece of banana bread. And that was how he learned about her family. Old Mrs. Adams, it seemed, was starved for affection. She spent her days thinking about her lost husband, her daughter who did not call, the son she never saw, baking banana bread for visitors who never came. She spoke of noise and pollution, of blue skies gone the color of coffee grounds, of elementary school children who smoked weed and fornicated beneath the shrubbery in her front yard. She warned Ike against the dangers of hitchhiking along the Coast Highway. A wealth of gruesome facts lay at her fingertips.

There were punk gangs, she said, high on angel dust and strange music waiting in the alleys to catch young girls, and boys like him, force them to carve swastikas into their own arms and legs, or set them on fire. Ike sat and listened. He watched as one more day slipped past him, melting with the sun beyond the dark wood of an antique dining table.

That evening, riding home on the bus, he was struck by a particularly depressing thought: He suddenly saw himself learning nothing. His savings would go for greasy food, a crummy room. His trip to Huntington Beach would turn out to be no more than some grotesque holiday, and in the end the desert would reclaim him. Had to be. He did not fit in here. Like it was not even close, and everything was moving much more slowly, and awkwardly, than he had imagined. This was not San Arco, not even King City.

He discovered a small cafe across the street from the pier, a strange sort of place frequented by both bikers and surfers. Inside, the two groups kept to separate ends of the building, glaring at one another over short white coffee mugs. The cafe made him nervous. He was very much aware of not belonging to either camp, but it was a good place to eavesdrop and the food was cheap. And it was in the cafe that he got his first break.

It was his fifth morning in the town and, as on the other mornings following his bus ride from H. Adams’s house, it had been hard to force himself out of bed, to fight a growing desire to give it up and split, to accept the fact that his coming had been a sham, that the kid in the Camaro had been right. But he had managed it. He had dragged his ass out of bed with the first light, then down to the Coast Highway and the cafe, looking for something, a word, a name, anything. And that was what he found, a name. He had just finished a breakfast of coffee and doughnuts and had gone to the head to take a leak, and that was where it happened, standing at the damn urinal, his dick in his hand, absently reading over the filth scratched into the walls, when two words suddenly jumped out at him. A name: Hound Adams, the letters scratched out of the metal partition that separated the urinal from the sink. There was nothing else, just the name.

Admittedly it was not a lot. But there was still a thin film of sweat on his forehead as he left the cafe and crossed the street. There was something about just seeing that name someplace besides the scrap of paper. It meant there really was a Hound Adams, somewhere. And with that discovery came a fresh idea. It hit him as he walked along the boardwalk, headed out to sea on the pier: What if he could surf? He wouldn’t have to do it well, just enough to hang out in the water. It made sense. He was too far away from things on the pier, and hanging out on the beach in street clothes didn’t work either. He had tried that, tried getting close to certain groups as they came out of the water, but he was too conspicuous, always collecting too many stares if he got too close. But if he could surf? If he was in the water with them, with a board to sit on, the whole shot? Shit yes. It was something to think about.

He thought about it all that morning, watching the small peaks take shape and break, and the more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea, until at last he admitted to himself that there was more to it than just getting closer to the action. There was something in the shape and movement of the waves, something in the polished green faces laced with silver while the moon hung still visible above the town. A person could lose himself there, he guessed, and imagined cool green caverns carved from the hollow of some liquid barrel. The thought seemed to add to the excitement he already felt, and he walked home quickly, with a new attention for the multitude of surf shops that lined the street, the new boards that seemed to him like sticks of colored candy shining behind sheets of plate glass.

He thought about it again that night. He remembered the time he had tried to ride the Knuckle. He remembered lying there in the sunlight, his blood forming a dark pool in the gravel while Gordon went for the pickup. He had not tried anything like it since, but there were no machines here, just the boards and the waves.