Chapter 2 Surfing

Surfing chose me and Ryan from the earliest days of recollection. For my own part, I bought into all of it from the first words of a Beach Boy’s song playing on my father’s radio as he sanded a door smooth in our garage in Melbourne Beach. Before I could even toddle with skill, before I understood that what was making me cry was a soiled diaper, I was in. Surfing is what set me free and gave me an identity.
Surfing was also where I met my fellow countrymen; my brothers and sisters in this sweet land of liberty. Because it’s not the foxhole, where you really bond. No sir, you learn more about a buddy out in the line-up than you’ll know about any other human being, anywhere else on earth, period.
Surfers, especially those who have paddled out together since childhood, know each other; really know each other. That knowledge comes seeping like some chemical form of ESP, through the back-bent silences in the morning fog, and explosions of liquid mayhem that follow. Will my buddy attack a wave or work with it? Does he risk a late drop-in or paddle for the shoulder? Is his soul passive or aggressive? Does he force his will on the ocean, or does he accept her gifts as they come? From the way he handles disappointment and wipe-outs; to the courage he expresses in wave selection; how much hope and optimism his soul carries in reserve through those doldrums of waiting, everything about my buddy is all spelled out in the way he surfs.
And Ryan? He was a warrior. He never backed down from a peak, no matter how sick or un-makeable. He was also the most eloquent person I’ve ever known with his feet and body stance. It was a language he spoke, from the arch of his spine, to the balls of his feet, without ever opening his mouth. Tubes and closeouts that others thought impossible, Ryan would somehow cheat these of their mystery, in that relaxed, bony-elegant way of his. The horrendous explosion of water would follow and you’d find Ryan’s head popping up from the shoulder; having slipped out the back door before the whole shithouse came tumbling down.
I can see him descending the face of a crashing wave; a big smile on his face, a smile that too seldom came, and because of its rarity, it warmed you like sunshine; an expression of fleeting joy from a brow that knew mostly knots of deep thought and pain.
True, Ryan could be extremely impatient. He wasn’t capable of fully appreciating the peace of the ocean’s lulls unless I was around to do my comedy bits for him. He liked the Ted Kennedy bit I used to do; “er-uh, I was er-uh, in the er cah….” My dad was originally from Boston so the Kennedy thing was a cinch for me, since dad did it around the house. I think that may have been the first time I saw Ryan smile in a long, long while, after I arbitrarily selected Teddy’s voice for airing out in the line-up. No reason. Ryan was the only one who got it.
Ryan used to love those early Devo videos that made no sense, too. You remember that one, don’t you, where “Ken and Barbie” have claymation combat, and Mark Mothersbaugh dresses up in a rubber chicken suit of some sort, hunches over with his arms all bent, and sort of pecks with his beak? We used to fold our arms together and stalk around like that random, Feliniesque chicken man singing the words to “Love Without Anger” especially the weird Mothersbaughian asides “Are you kidding me? You must be kidding me!” That shit was hilarious. What did it mean? Who cared?
To surfers, it doesn’t have to mean anything, the more ridiculous and bizarre the better. People would beg us to tell them what the hell we were singing, what we were doing and Ryan would just smile, very non-committal. They weren’t inside the joke, and until they caught the Devo video themselves they would remain on the outside. He loved that.
But in his broodier moments, Ryan Cogswell could also be a pain-in-the-ass; a real, humorless perfectionist. There were days and weeks when he didn’t surf at all because it wasn’t just right. I’d fold my arms like the chicken-man, peck at his front window with my nose.
“C’mon, Rye…It’s breakin’ man!”
“You’re lying, Timmy, it ain’t breakin’ fer shit and you know it…”
Ryan was also a hopeless addict; a real danger junky. He wasn’t a poser who talked the big talk; when it was big he was out in it. He was the kind of kid cops had to drag from the water when the order to evacuate was given. His brand of crack was hurricane swell hitting an offshore breeze, stacking up on a high tide so it pounded the sandbar with a grenade’s fury, real neck-sprainers, concussion grinders; because those were the ones that offered those slim rays of escape his nimble mind enjoyed. During some of those monster storms, he gambled with his life the way a Vegas chronic throws his last chips on the blackjack table, again and again and never lost; and there, I can see him now.
Stuff that made me scream and howl on the bottom turns just to ejaculate the leg-shaking madness; stuff that terrified me to the bone, he’d stay out in until his arms fell off, or he nearly drowned in it. Charging down those faces with his hair on fire, slip-sliding away from death, with a careful adjustment of his back, or a quick trim with those splayed pads of meat as he gripped the board beneath him in vice-like ferocity, causing his toes to turn white; punching out for the sky or turning shoreward only at the last second; carving lines of terror and freedom through telescoping segments of eternity; lines that you remembered after you had seen them, every droplet of spray, every strand of hair flung from his head; sticking the landing impossibly, and turning to smile.
Yeah, there he is, he’s saying…
“Did you see that, Tim? Did you see what I just did? Don’t ask me how I got away with it, dude, because I don’t know either.”
So, when I got the call from Thea Cogswell stating in that flinty accent that her son, my lifelong friend and surfing buddy was dead, I just went numb. This time, there had been no miraculous escape, no punch-out at the last second.
Ryan had been precisely that sort of cocksure, thirteen-year-old boy who formed the model in my mind. He was the reason I became such a good judge of character in burgeoning teenage manhood, a yardstick by which I measured all my male students as either similar or lacking. The courage, the refusal to lose, or back down an inch; the way he questioned everything in this world and the next; he had set the bar high. Truly he had. I’ve often wondered if he set it too high, even for my own son to emulate.
“Tim? Did you hear me, Timmy? Ryan’s dead. The funeral is this Saturday. Tim?”
I guess on some level we had all been expecting Ryan’s death, given the valiant war he waged against his demons; a war he had been fighting since we were thirteen years old. It was a war most of us had long forgotten, dismissed as confused and stoned memories, nothing more than childish dreams. Just stuff that had been written about long ago, and now is relegated to the domain of conspiracy websites, and whispers on the beach, part of the mythology that clung tenaciously to southern Brevard County. And I had naively supposed that once Ryan had made it past the age of thirty-nine, things were going to be alright; that he would forget the battle too just like the rest of us had.
Obviously, I had been mistaken.
“Can you make it Tim? I know he would want you there…”
The call arrived just after I pulled into the driveway. I could hear the phone through the kitchen window as I ran into the house thinking about what a bad day I had at the academy; two expulsions due to drugs, the pressure from which was hammering my temples like the gongs of hell. The house had been dark and our striped boxer, Blazer, was in the garage whining for someone to please let him out so he could do his business. And I angrily assumed the call would be from one of the parents of the boys we had expelled, or perhaps even their grandparents begging for a second chance, which can be awkward and infuriating. Yet it does happen.
I yanked the phone off the wall ready to hear the damnation or tears as they were part of my job description. Learning that Ryan was no-longer hit me like an assassin’s bullet: it came from out of nowhere. From the second of impact it left me wide-eyed, thoughtless, without the ability to formulate words, even in my mind.
“Tim? Are you there..?”
“I am, Mrs. Cogswell. I will be there. I’ll make the calls,” I said, recovering slightly as the room spun, trying to recall the very last thing he said to me, and realizing I wouldn’t be able to for at least a week.
I took a breath, opened the door to the garage while cradling the phone in my hand, and Blazer nearly flew out into the yard.
“Now the funeral service will be held at Immaculate Conception,” she was saying, and meanwhile I am thinking, “Whose funeral? Oh yeah! Ryan’s funeral, because Ryan is DEAD!”
It just didn’t seem real. But there she was, shielding herself in the minutia of arrangements and handling business; the flowers, the chapel, the day, the casket, the plot.
Oh, a plot and headstone were no way for a surfer to face eternity. There were boyhood oaths to consider. And by the way, how the hell had he known he would be first? A silent, sunrise paddle out, a wisp of wet blonde hair brushed from his face and the words came out of nowhere: “Dude, promise me, man, no shitty coffin. I want to be buried at sea!”
It wouldn’t do any good to ask Thea to cremate Ryan so his buddies could paddle out and cast his ashes into the offshore breeze, scattering them over the shoulders of a nice incoming swell. Thea wouldn’t go for something so pagan, so native in style. The widely-accepted course would have to be honored, so her friends at the yacht club wouldn’t wince and roll their eyes at something weird being done with the body of her son. Conformity would have to be observed always. She was big into that, conformity, as if it could balance all that weirdness in her life.
Yes, arrangements. I had to be there to help her as well. To go through “all this stuff,” she said; stuff that was in his room; stuff that no one would understand but me. All this weirdness, she was saying.
And ‘his room’? Had he split with his wife and moved back in with his mother? Had it gotten that bad?
I was no one to talk. Sheila and I had been fighting lately due to my schedule. The school kept me there nearly fifteen hours every day as well as a few hours every weekend. And in frustration, she had taken the kids, Barbara and Paul, to be with their grandmother, Rosie, in Philadelphia for a week as well as getting a break from me, which was fine.
So my gorgeous red brick home on half a pine-covered acre in Florence, South Carolina, was empty for the first time in history, as I stood in the kitchen pondering the death of my buddy. I felt hollow inside, surrounded by all the finery Sheila had arranged to make us all feel homey and safe over the last fifteen years, as the transient nature of life sprang to mind. And this was something Sheila and I had been arguing about; the fact that life was disappearing before my eyes; the development of my own children was passing me by like a summer shower, and I continued wandering around oblivious to it all, for the benefit of a rich-kid academy, and my career as its academic principal.
“That place will still be standing, Tim. If you take a week off, it’s not going to damned fall apart,” she had said.
That had been two weeks ago. She had wanted to go to the Outer Banks again, and recharge the batteries of our marriage at our customary summer rental. It was an excellent idea that I had completely blown off. Well, now I had all the space I needed, and, in that we were only in week one of the academy’s eight-week summer program, I would not be missed.
Like me, Ryan was a victim of this career-addiction syndrome but in the worst way: his own two children Charity, Kyle, and his wife, Debra, would now move on without him, although they essentially had been doing so for the last few months, according to Thea. Ryan had been getting worse than I imagined. But I hadn’t known he had gotten worse than I could have imagined, which was what Thea was alerting me to now.
Thea Cogswell had more to say in that brittle tone of hers.
“I know you and Ryan were best friends, Tim. More like brothers and I know there are a lot of questions you have and we don’t have much information to give out right now…”
Hard to predict that some of the most important bonds you can make in life will be forged at twelve and thirteen-years of age.
While a suicide three years ago, or even two, might not have been out of the question for him, I had spoken with Rye recently and he said he really had been doing better. In fact, he had been planning a Costa Rican surf trip for old-time’s sake and asked me to come along. I had been just as non-committal to him as I had been to Sheila’s request for some alone time at our usual summer beach house.
Thinking fast now, I pulled up a familiar website while Thea was still on the line.
The news article on the internet wasn’t much help when it came to information about his death other than the location: on the strand behind a nightclub he and I frequented while at Florida Tech: the gunshot wound to the brain, apparently suicide. And what in hell was he doing back there?
Well, at least, finally there was peace inside that head of his. Finally the scat and the static stopped, finally he was at rest. Now he couldn’t disappoint his mother with anymore weirdness. Because it just doesn’t get any weirder than suicide, does it Thea?
“It’s just so awful, Timmy. He loved you all so much…” amazingly, the most emotional thing I have ever heard this woman say to another human being. That I was the recipient of that warmth, well, I almost fell out.
“I understand Mrs. Cogswell…”
“Since his father died, he’s had no one to really talk to about what he was going through. Some of the troubling feelings he gets from doing his job, Tim…”
“ I understand Mrs. Cogswell and I will be there…”
The police were still investigating, she said. But now since he was working on some top-secret stuff for the Navy with his employer, it turns out that federal investigators of some stripe have to get involved.
How many security clearances had he gotten over the years? It was then, all those mysterious phone calls from all those humorless, faceless people conducting the polygraphs, and holding sway over his clearances, came to mind.
They were ever-so polite as they posed their interrogatives: what were his personal habits? Foreign contacts? Any feelings of anger toward his country or government? Any unexplained wealth to speak of?
Ryan’s bout with manic depression – the one thing I knew about him that I always lied about: the fact that sometimes he just went a little haywire - had been an increasingly uphill battle. He was caving inward emotionally, turning morose, and even confrontational as the years wore on.
He had been prescribed medication for his condition but he had mentioned that the meds left him feeling cloudy, and as a computer engineer for military contractor Camerdyne Systems Inc., he had to be on top of his game all the time.
So, I guess the complaints to his wife and his mother was a way of saying ‘hey, I’m fine without them. I’ll let you know if I decide to go back to them but, to put us all on the same page, I am not using them for the moment.’
Ryan was always way ahead of everyone in the brain department. Like the front runner in a marathon, that distance he put on the rest of us left him in a very lonely place.
I only began to understand how intelligent he was that summer in 1981. For it was Ryan who gave me a glimpse into the working of his fantastic mind, and made me question the very nature of reality.
I guess I’m not expecting any of the guys to remember events of that summer exactly the way I do, and maybe they won’t remember them at all, if their lives are any indication. Even now, I’m not sure I’ll be able to face those guys again and recall it all the way it actually happened – out loud that is.
Once you do that, well, people look at you verrrry differently from then on. We got a taste of that right away, and no one more so than Ryan, who understood what was happening instinctively, almost as though he had lived it all before and wanted to get it right this time.
After I hung up with Thea, I started making the calls to my old Surf Road crew. I thought about what a charmed life it should have been, and was, really, but for that one summer, thirty years ago.
Our restless world had been the yards and homes within those neatly laid-out streets between Ocean Avenue, A1A and Pine Street, and the beaches as far south as the inlet. All those sweaty, muggy nights running those quiet lanes, climbing fences, hanging out on the beach, playing kick-the-can, camping out in the middle of the baseball field under the stars. A year prior, AC/DC released “Black in Black” which was still, at that time, our favorite album, although the reggae and alternative scenes were getting under our skin as well. And that year there had been decent waves off and on all summer long. A rare summer on Florida’s east coast.
Nearly every home up and down those streets had at least one dinged and faded slab of foam and fiber-glass tucked into a rack on the wall, stuffed into a corner, or lying down by a fence in the backyard, just waiting to be used. Pintails, swallow-tails, tri-fins, twin-fins, to your dad’s beat up single-fin long-board, we all surfed anything we could get our hands on. That summer we surfed and skateboarded our brains out. If you didn’t find us in the water, you found us on the street covered in sand, sweat and grit from a thousand things we did to stay in motion, scraping around the blazing asphalt on Proline skateboards.
When I had finished making all the calls, emails and IMs, I took a glass of red wine on my back porch and stared out at the stars while Blazer sat beside me, whining and growling at raccoons every so often. The mist from the low country moved in sometime after midnight and with that vaguely marine smell in my nostrils and the shimmering hiss from the cicadas in the woods, I thought about a day in the summer of 1981, the first time Ryan told me about the nightly visitations.