Tom Hanks - Uncommon Type - Some Stories

“I’m going to have to make some calls about eight thirty. Business shit,” Frank said, flipping some biscuits onto a plate. “Won’t take too long. I’ll leave the water to you for an hour or so.”

“If you gotta do it, you gotta do it,” Kirk said. As always, he’d brought a book to the table and was already absorbed in it. His father reached over and slid it away from him.

“Architecture in the nineteen twenties?” Frank asked. “Why are you reading this?”

“For the racy parts,” Kirk said, soaking up Polish sausage grease and egg yolk with a biscuit. “The Jazz Age was a building boom until the Depression. Postwar engineering and materials changed every skyline in the world. I find it fascinating.”

“Those exterior-supporting structures made for wedding cake buildings. Everything got smaller the higher you went. You ever been to the upper floors of the Chrysler Building?”

“In New York City?”

“No, Dime Box, Texas.”

“Dad, you raised me, remember? When did you ever take me to New York City to see the upper floors of the Chrysler Building?”

Frank took two travel mugs down from the shelf. “The top of the Chrysler Building is a fekkin rabbit warren.”

The last of the coffee went into the mugs, which Frank placed on the dash of the truck while Kirk pulled his board—all six feet six of it—out of the storage shed. He tossed it into the camper, where Frank’s eleven-and-a-half-foot paddleboard—the Buick —took up most of the room.

Six summers before, the camper was brand-new, purchased for a momentous vacation—a two-thousand-mile loop up the coast to Canada, across the two-lanes of British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, all the way to Regina. The trek was a long-planned Ullen Family Retreat and came off as promised, for the first few hundred miles, anyway. Then Mom started sharing her opinions and insisting on behaviors. She wanted to establish her rules of the road and began giving orders. Thus rang the opening bell, beginning the first of what became many punishing rounds. The verbal jousts became serious disagreements, escalating into full-throated, mean-spirited arguments that had to be won by the mother of the family. Kris, as was her wont, turned her rebelliousness up a few notches. Dora’s righteousness devolved into deep-crevassed silence, punctuated with outbursts so fast, loud, and vitriolic as to be near-Shakespearean. Frank, at the wheel, sipping on his cold coffee or warming Coca-Cola, acted as referee, therapist, fact-checker, and cop, depending on the point made or offense taken. Kirk, as his defensive stance, pulled out book after book, reading like he was a chain-smoker with a carton of menthols. For him, the psychodrama faded into a background din not much different from the wheels of the camper humming across thousands of miles of asphalt.

They argued their way across Canada, continued as they came south through the vast American Prairie, the space so open, so endless it was said to have driven some of the original settlers insane. The Ullen family went certifiably daffy in Nebraska when Kris bought pot from some guy living out of his car at a KOA campground. Mom wanted to call a cop and turn in both the dealer and her own daughter. She went DEF CON ballistic when Dad allowed no such thing by simply packing them all up and driving away, fleeing the scene of the crime. The camper went frosty, like a bitter family Christmas in July; no one talking to anyone while Kirk finished all of William Manchester’s books on Winston Churchill. By the time they turned due west in Tucumcari, New Mexico, everyone wanted off the road, out of that truck, and away from each other. Kris threatened to hop a Greyhound bus the rest of the way home. But Dad insisted they do some camping in the desert, which they did under protest. Kris got high under the stars, Dora went on solo hikes until after dark, and Dad bedded down outside in the tent. Mom slept in the camper, guaranteeing she’d be alone, in peace at last, by locking the door. That was a problem, as it cut off access to the bathroom. Thus ended the last family vacation for the Ullens. The last family anything for the Ullens. The camper stayed bolted onto the King Cab pickup, serving as Frank’s mobile office–surf buggy, one that had not been cleaned or vacuumed in 21,000 miles.

In his youth, Frank Ullen had been a real, shaggy-haired surf bum. Then he grew up, got married, had kids, and started an electrical wiring business that took off. It was only in the past year that he had once again begun to leave the house before anyone else was awake, to make the point break at Mars Beach, a tight right-hander best in a rising three-to-four-foot tide. When Kirk was a kid and a part-time beach rat, father and son would park on the highway shoulder and carry their boards down the well-beaten path to Mars. To young Kirk, hefting his original sponge board, the beach seemed as rocky and far away as the bottom of Valles Marineris on the Red Planet. The Economic Boom Years had drastically altered the place—there were inland luxury apartment complexes built on what had been marshes; and five years ago the state had paved over a square of weeds and dirt, creating a real parking lot for three dollars a car. Mars was no longer free, but it was conveniently accessible; surfers headed left at the sand, regular beachgoers veered to the right, and county lifeguards kept the two apart.

“You haven’t seen this.” Frank was exiting the highway at Deukmejian State Recreation Area. Kirk glanced up from his book. What had been a field was now flattened and surveyed; the little flagged posts were already planted, with a sign advertising the site of a future Big-Box Mart. “Remember when the nearest business was a taco stand back at Canyon Avenue? It’s now a Chisholm Steakhouse.”

“I remember taking a shit in the bushes,” Kirk said.

“Don’t swear around your old man.”

Frank pulled into the lot, parking in an empty slot one row away from the path gate. “Well, whad’ya know,” he said, as always. “Welcome to Mars!”

A collection of shops had evolved on the other side of the highway under low-slung roofs made to look like Mexican adobes. There was a surf gear shop, a recent and ubiquitous Starbucks, a Subway sandwich place, a Circle W convenience store, and the office of a lone insurance agent named Saltonstall, who had set out his shingle there so he could surf when the phone wasn’t ringing. An AutoShoppe/FastLube & Tire franchise was under construction at the south end of the shopping center.

“A lube job while you surf,” Kirk noted. “That’s environmental consumer integration.”

“Here’s your handbasket. Enjoy hell,” Frank said.

The parking lot showed a collection of aged and rugged vehicles—Rancheros and station wagons loaded with tools, owned by construction workers who were grabbing waves before work. There were old vans and self-painted VW Buses owned by surfers sleeping overnight, despite posted ordinances that exclaimed NO CAMPING. When the county sheriffs periodically rousted the surf bums there were always lengthy legal discussions about the difference between “camping overnight” and “waiting for daylight.” Lawyers surfed Mars, too, as did orthodontists and airline pilots, their Audis and BMWs strapped with roof racks for the boards. Moms and wives would be in the water, good surfers and kind people. Fistfights had once been frequent, when the high surf attracted kooks from all over, but this was a weekday and not all the schools were out yet so Kirk knew the crowd would be easygoing and manageable. And the Martians, as they called themselves, had all gotten older, mellower. Except for a couple of asshole lawyers.

“Sweet break this morning, Kirky-bird,” Frank said, eyeing the water from the parking lot. He counted over a dozen surfers already in the water as large waves—the Swell—were shaping in regular intervals outside the lineup. He unlocked the door to the camper. They pulled both boards out, and Frank’s paddle, standing them up against the truck as they yanked on their summer wet suits with the short legs and built-in rash guards.