Chapter 3 Lights on the Beach

June, 1981 Melbourne Beach Florida. - We had eaten the Twinkies after our morning surf session and guzzled four cans of warm grape soda.
By 1:30 in the afternoon the thick blanket of moisture and heat from the mainland had built up columns of white. High level winds had clipped off the tops of these anvil clouds sending plumes, stretching like fingers over the Indian River toward the barrier island. The daily storm yawned, stretched out its mighty arms preparing to do its thing. But, we still had a couple of hours before those billows reached us and unleashed their offerings. The air was warm, laden with the essence of the sea blowing in from the east in pleasant ten mile-per-hour gusts. Gone were the clean lines of the morning session. Now all we had was windblown chop.
Still, Ryan’s little brother, Sean, bobbed in the surf on his Boogie Board enjoying himself thoroughly; his little bristly blonde head nearly blazed like a light bulb.
We sat in the cool shade beneath the crumbling wooden walkway at Spessard Holland Beach Park. I rummaged my nylon backpack, pulled out my dog-eared copy of Surfer magazine and opened it to an article I thought he might enjoy.
“Says here Shawn Thompson is going to quit the tour,” I said. “People tell me I look like a young Shawn Thompson. I wonder if I can take his place.”
“So what. They say I look like Rabbit Bartholemew,” Ryan said, as he sullenly picked a scab on his toe that was partially healing yet still swarming with tiny black fleas. He rolled little scab bits and flicked them into the sand
Ryan had cut his foot when his leash got wrapped around it and was hauled hard by the force of a wave.
“Sure,” I said. I should believe it, because he did look like Rabbit, only fifteen years younger, and with pimples and no beard. He had those electric blue eyes that missed nothing. But I knew he was lying. No one ever told him he looked like Rabbit, just like no one told me I looked like Shawn Thompson, I only wished they did. Girls loved Shawn Thompson, all over the world.
“You’re full of it man,” I said.
“Whatever,” said Ryan. “I surf like him, anyway. You surf like Gumby.”
“Why does your mom hate my guts?” I asked out of the blue.
“She don’t hate you, man. She’s from Maine. They’re like that. They come off like they hate everybody,” he said, but I didn’t believe him again. She did hate me.
“Sure,” I said.
“Whatever,” said Ryan.
“Dude, have you heard the new Police album? Man, it is soooo hot!”
“Which one?” he asked.
“Zenyatta Mondatta. My sister just got it,” I said.
“It’s not new. They have another one coming out next month. Ghost in the Machine,” he said. “I just read it in Rolling Stone.”
“Huh,” I said.
“Yeah….huh,” he answered.
“What’s up, man?” I asked picking up on his contrary mood.
“I seen that thing again last night,” he said.
“The lights?”
“Yeah, just off shore,” he said.
“Was the old Indian out there watching too?” I asked.
“I could see someone down here on the beach. There was plenty of moonlight so, you could see a shade of somebody, but you couldn’t tell exactly who it was,” he said.
“What were the lights doing?” I asked.
“Tweaking, out there in the water. I could swear they were looking for something,” he said.
“Wow. Maybe it’s a Russian sub or something. Maybe they’re spying on us,” I added.
“I don’t think so, Tim,” he said.
“Why not?”
“They were moving too fast, really booking it,” he said. “Subs can’t move like that.”
I let it drop. Ryan had an incredible imagination. He could tell these stories that would absolutely scare the crap out of me. But when he spoke about the intense blue lights in the water, he grew serious, almost sad. I didn’t know what to make of it because he would do that sometimes also when he was joking and his mood would brighten to let you know he had you, as in “Psych! Got ya!” But sometimes when he did that, he was also lying: to deflate the tension he had created with his wild stories.
“I had a dream about a robot kid, last night, too; after the lights,” he said out of nowhere.
“What?”
“Yeah, little robot dude. He had springs for hinges on his knees and a big ole cartoon head. Except his eyes were sort of like lasers. It was really scary. He was poking his head through my window just looking at me. The weird thing was, he could sort of slip the head through the glass like it wasn’t even there. Then his goofy cartoon head filled up like a balloon. It got bigger and bigger until it was like filling the whole room or something.
“There was this weird light coming from the yard. So in the dream I shot up in bed and the cartoon dude booked it. I went outside and he booked even further out of there. His little hingy legs making this sound,” he said.
I shook my head.
“Man, we have got to stop smoking that shake from Neiderman. That stuff is messing you up, man.”
“It was just a dream,” he said.
“Yeah but these lights, and the Indian, now the hingey-leg dude with a balloon head?”
“What, you don’t believe me about the Indian?”
“I’m not saying that, Rye. You know what I mean. Maybe if we quit for a while all that stuff will go away,” I ventured.
“Yeah, whatever,” he said.
“Alright then, why don’t you tell your old man about all this blue lights stuff? He works for NASA or the Air Force or whatever, doesn’t he?”
“My old man, don’t know shit from shinola. He knows how to do one thing and one thing only. He sits at a screen up there and watches the radar during the launch and that’s it. He don’t know shit about shit else,” he said bitterly.
I knew how he felt about his father, Douglas, a retired Air Force major who worked up at the Cape on the launches for one of the contractors. The man was totally uncommunicative. His mind was always elsewhere. His wife, Thea, picked at her husband and her sons like an angry jay bird spiking worms, and ole’ Doug’s lack of gumption to fight her back made her contained rage all the more apparent. The air crackled with bad tension and electricity whenever we were around them. Thea was a control freak. That much had been plain enough, even to my thirteen-year-old mind. Although, back then I couldn’t come up with a term as politically-correct, I merely thought of her as bitchy but I never said as much to Ryan, I just kept asking him why she hated me so much. He kept right on denying she bore me any ill will.
When you went into their home, you didn’t feel welcome, although Thea made a show of how much she was doing for you while you were there. If you sat down to eat a sandwich she hovered over you with a wet cloth to catch the crumbs before they hit the table. She smiled this bristly grin that just said to me; “if I could get away with it, I would certainly kill you.”
I couldn’t take more than five minutes of that woman without wanting to scream. And I couldn’t imagine how Ryan put up with it his entire young adult life. All she cared about were her poodles and her damn porcelain knick-knacks, that, in a crueler version of hell, were also poodles. At the time I thought suffering through life with actual living poodles around all the time would be bad enough; she had to have expensive ceramic poodles everywhere, also. So when you weren’t enduring their prissy little yaps, you were looking at their smug little ceramic faces that stared at you from four different hutches, that somehow I was always bumping into. I wanted to run through that house with a damned baseball bat smashing those dogs and their effigies until I was spent.
I don’t know who started it, but those dogs were mean as hell, and they hated me just as much as I hated them. They nipped at me on my first sleep-over there. Mrs. Cogswell blamed me for getting near them, and no one said a damned thing. The males of the house just rolled their eyes as if to say ‘Yep, you can’t go near them, that’s the rule.’ They were venomous, prissy little jackass dogs, and that woman stored up all her affection on this earth, that she rightfully should have been giving to her husband and sons, and lavished it on those useless damned poodles: “Cutty” and “Sark.”
We sat there for a while finishing our grape soda and watching his little brother as the warm sea air bathed our faces and the hiss from the crashing waves left us to our thoughts. I cleared the image of poodle murder from my mind.
It wasn’t long before we weren’t alone. Talk and Smokey Lank came scraping up the parking-lot on their Pro-lines with their surfboards in hand. They slid down the hole beneath the dune walkover.
“Gonna be a huge swell coming in,” Talk Monster said.
Smokey didn’t say anything immediately. He merely wiped long strands of black hair from his face.
“What’s up, Smoke?” Ryan said.
“How do you know there’s going to be a swell?” I asked the Talking Monstrosity.
“We’ve been listening to the weather radio. There’s a low pressure out there. Some of the off-shore buoys are starting to show it.”
We knew all about the NOAA weather radio. My dad, Mike Stanton, a former navy chief now a postman, explained all this stuff to us one night. He got sick of listening to us argue about what NOAA weather radio was saying, what it all meant. The weatherman would come on and read a prepared statement through the scratchy sound of static. He’d talk about wave period, chop, wave height, storm advisories, and we’d get most of the information wrong. Dad said wave heights around one-hundred fifty miles off shore, were significantly larger than those in shore. But if there was no background swell beneath all the surface chop, the period would be short, as in, less than three seconds between crest to crest. But when that period was longer than six seconds and the height was still significant, say greater than four feet, well then, you had swell coming in. Talk Monster frequently got it way wrong and had to be corrected often.
We listened to Talk blather on about the incoming swell until he had spewed all he knew for the moment, and the quiet of the wind and hiss of the waves thankfully returned.
I think back with pity on Tom, even though he became an Orland broadcaster and a success at that, he has spent most of his life like a windsock. If he has it in him: anything, any bit of information at all, no matter how errant it is, he has to immediately expel it in order to maintain some sort of balance in the universe, I suppose. Peculiar to the breed of jabber-talkies, they either don’t realize they are doing this, or they just don’t give a damn how annoying it can be.
“Hey, I saw Corrine Hardesty walking with Tom Garner, Rye. What’s with that?” Smokey said out of nowhere.
Smoke knew where the cracks and weak spots were. If he said something it often had a reason for coming out of his mouth, a strategic piece in an on-going game of verbal chess, usually with Ryan with whom Smoke always competed.
“Nothing man. She can do whatever the hell she wants. That girl is just a tease. She won’t even let me get to second base with her,” Ryan said.
“Now we know what’s wrong with him these days,” Smokey said. He always did have a way of cutting through the bullshit.
“Naw…Ryan’s pissed about something else, ain’t you Rye,” I said with a smile.
Ryan gave me a look that was pure malice; as if to say don’t tell them shit, Tim, because in ten seconds it’s all over the neighborhood.

June 30, 2011 Florence South Carolina,– I woke to the sound of the cell phone, checked my watch and noticed the time: 2:32 a.m.
“Hello?”
No one there apart from the tinny echo of electronic static, as if someone was on the other end of the long-distance call holding the phone to their ear about to say something but had thought better of it. I checked caller I.D. and it read “Unknown Name, Unknown Number.”
I placed the phone back in the cradle, went inside the dark house after letting Blazer out into the back yard.
Entering an empty bedroom, I put on my old U2 CD in the dark. The lines Bono was singing at the moment seemed curiously apropos.

“I’m hanging out to dry with my old clothes
Finger’s still red from the prick of an old rose
But a heart that hurts is a heart that still beats
Can you feel the drummer slowing?
One step closer to knowing, to knowing…”

I clicked on the light, and wrote for a little while in the journal, setting the story down, and then I tried again to recapture the impossible memory that’s been nagging at me for years; the night that Myles Neiderman died and we had been blamed for it, but all I got was a jumble of images, some of them horrific.
As usual I was rewarded with blazing pain in my temples that I knew only alcohol would salve. I wandered into the kitchen and removed the bottle of rum from the hutch over the microwave. It had been a long time since I needed to do this.
I crushed the Benadryl tablets with the bottom of the rocks glass and swept the powder into the glass with my hand, poured a double shot and swigged it all down hard, then wandered back into the bedroom turned on cable and waited, hoping there would be no nightmares this time.
What came was a re-run dream of a later memory: that day Ryan and I had stayed after school in the tenth grade and Ryan had attempted to draw a picture of the scatological images that had come into his head.
The doctors told his mother the images were a result of a condition called manic depression. They suspected several creative geniuses had this syndrome. From artists to musicians and engineers, manic depression was hallmarked by the feeling that one had been imbued with special powers.
Oh, Ryan had his special, special powers that day. They were going off like fireworks. He drew the schemata for an engine that he claimed, used a sort of quantum froth or abundant energy from empty space as a propulsion system. The memory of the schemata flashed into his head during a chemistry class at Mel High.
From a cold-start, near sleep, Ryan stood up and spontaneously detonated on our teacher, Mr.Weiss, blurting out that the polar arrangement of the water molecule, far from merely causing your radiator to crack during a winter freeze, was actually a huge energy resource that was being suppressed by our government.
In an instant he was up at the board drawing something, running the class. It was no joke either, although the students thought it was. He was really flying there in some kind of zone; as if he were somehow channeling a dead astrophysics professor.
Ryan claimed that there was a way to keep it fluid at extremely high pressure. You could super-cool it until the patterns of adjacent water molecules could be arranged to maximize something he called “Zero Point Energy” which could be directed and channeled.
“Mr Cogswell, sit down, sir,” said Mr. Weiss taking the dry-erase marker from his hand. But Ryan wasn’t finished.
“There is enough free energy in a soda can to boil all the water in the oceans, or power a conventional rocket across the galaxy and back at light speed,” he announced.
“Sit down Mr. Cogswell before I call the dean!” barked Mr. Weiss.
In a daze Ryan went on to say he had seen an engine that operated perfectly using this very design.
Kids who usually slept through Weiss’s class woke up for once and looked at each other in astonishment. What the hell was that weird surfer Ryan Cogswell saying now?
After school I sat with him in detention in Weiss’s classroom as he tried to go over it with me again. With tears in his eyes he couldn’t clearly picture the engine anymore. He got a first-rate nosebleed, as well. I had to skip soccer practice and drive him home. On the way over the bridge, he told me he had gained this knowledge from what happened to us back in ’81 and he knew how the damned thing worked exactly, if only he could clear his mind and remember it.
That afternoon his nosebleed stopped and we paddled out into four to six foot semi-chop that had some nice drops and shoulder hops. It was kind of challenging also in that every once in a while on the inside, the section would just wall up and fall over on you. You never knew when it was going to happen.
It was still warm so we didn’t need wetsuits. I had recently purchased a board shaped by Dennis Pang, that had been designed for Mark Foo but Foo rejected it. It was too thin for his tastes and not sturdy enough to be a true Pacific big-wave gun.
It was a trophy Jeff Crawford glassed over and brought back with him from Hawaii. But he couldn’t sell it. It didn’t look like your typical tri-fin, it was some sort of hybrid between the Atlantic and Pacific big-wave styles the people couldn’t understand so it stood there in Crawford’s store on A1A for the longest time. I bought the board off of him for $150.
Ryan and I began calling the thing “The Wave Needle.” As skinny as I still was, though, it worked just fine. You could catch stuff outside with it like a long-board and on the inside it carved and turned with high performance. It was also a superb tube-riding machine. Even after I grew too heavy for the thing I kept it as a collector’s piece, especially after Mark Foo died at Mavericks.
That particular day, surfing with Ryan after his episode in chemistry class, I got slapped down on a decent inside chunk, rolled over the falls and bounced off the bottom. I came up smiling in the white water and paddled out to where Ryan was.
We sat for a moment on the boards and he said to me; “You know Tim, I still have trouble piecing together what went on that night. I still can’t remember it all. I also have all this stuff coming to my mind, now, man. It’s like a fire-hose. I can’t keep it all straight. I think I’m really losing it, bro. I’ll be lucky if I’m not dead within a year,” he said, and with that whirled around into a wave and was gone.
Of course he didn’t die within a year, he just kept fighting it, whatever it was.
I watched the falling crest from behind as he slashed and tore the face off of it. Every now and again you’d see his board pop out with Ryan on it gnashing another tear in the back of that wave with spray flying. He’d dip out of sight, go screaming along the face to where you could only see the blonde top sliding by.
He did one final floater and landed on his feet in the shallows, unhitched his leash and started walking home without a backward glance.
That episode reminded me of the weird phone calls I got from Ryan just prior to September 11, 2001. He didn’t seem to have anything specific to discuss with me, he just complained of a sense of ill-ease. He finally confided after prodding; “something is about to happen, man. I just … I just don’t know what the hell it is.”
After the WTC came down, I didn’t hear from him for another year. He wouldn’t return calls.