Some lunatic poltergeist had a box of cold french-fries and was throwing them at the seagulls, which were dodging them like missiles.  He got to the bathrooms that I was sitting next to with my ukelele and threw the whole box on the roof.  Then he turned to me, wild-eyed at first, but gradually seduced by the tune I was plucking.  Eventually, he ended up right in front of me, weaving back and forth like a cobra.

Royal had asked me to meet him for breakfast.  I had a half hour to kill.  I watched the sun come up.  The waves were projected to be six to eight feet, but cleaner than the day before.   The surf photographers were staking out their spots and setting up their gear.  Among them I saw Fresno Joe, infiltrating, standing there as if he were a colleague, shirtless, in tar-stained board shorts.  He was giving his opinion on the best angles to shoot from.  Good God.  One time I saw him get up and start dancing along with some Japanese Taiko drummers who were putting on an exhibition on the Pier Plaza.  Their manager came dancing out to intercept him and it almost turned into a sumo match.

Royal is a big-spender.  Evidently, at one point he’d owned a few casinos up in Reno.  I met him outside of the Mako Bar and found he’d already ordered for the both of us.  That was fine with me, as long as he was paying.  Once a prospector, always a prospector.

Royal wanted to check out the Van’s Village after we were done eating, and we ran into Daisy locking up her bike.  Daisy is a casualty from the Summer of Love, but since it’s love she overdosed on it wasn’t such a bad thing.  She wears her hair in blonde braids and still kills in a bikini.  She came along with us and we walked down to the sand like a band of acid-drenched siblings.  I would’ve had a seizure years earlier if I’d known it was going to introduce me to so many new friends.  What we have in common can’t be denied.  We’re all screwed up in the exact same way. 

Royal offered to buy us T-shirts when we got down to the village, and I hesitated because I didn’t want him to ask for a favor later.  Then I realized I’m broke and don’t have a car.  It was probably OK.  There were about three hundred shirts to choose from and Daisy and I both picked out the same one.  Was that a coincidence?  It was hard to say. 

As we walked out of the merchandise hall with shopping bags over our arms we ran into Lance.  He was smiling but still radiating the inverse charisma of a dead jellyfish.  He wanted to know what we had in our bags.  Not what he’d had in his bag five years earlier.  That had gained him a lot of notoriety and lost him most of his freedom.

Betsy had somewhere to be, so Royal and I walked out to the end of the pier to watch the contest.  He started getting nostalgic about the good old days when the boys from the Gallows would meet up and paddle out before every Gathering.   There was a memory he’d come to cherish about some kook dropping in on him and a bunch of us, his band of brothers, paddling over to back him up.   If it had happened, I hadn’t been there.  He recalled another morning that had been like the invasion of Normandy, a band of ghost surfers coming out of the fog, storming the beach, taking no prisoners. 

If that’s the way he chose to remember it, that was fine by me.  The fact that the nose of my board had probably been planted squarely in the ocean bottom at the time made no difference.  I was just happy to be included.