A French couple walked past me, but didn’t glance over.  They were assessing the condition of the waves and it seemed safe to assume that either one or both of them were surfing in the preliminaries that weekend.  I didn’t have my signs or postcards out and wasn’t even going to pretend to be looking for tips.  No.  I just sat there and plucked a little tune about a man who returns to a city where the houses are the same but the faces have changed.  Did it matter that people couldn’t hear me or understand what I was trying to communicate?  Not one bit.  I just sat and played for the ocean and the sky.

Eventually, a face floated into focus, however, that recognized me and was coming towards me, smiling, all teeth, the top lip gone, shredded years ago, after colliding into the barnacles on a piling, possibly the one right below the bench I sat on.  I knew Jiminy from the Gathering.  His accident had made national news in 2016.  His friends had tramped a giant peace sign in the sand and filled his van with flowers, remembering him as a true innocent.  Even in his present dislocation, he seems able to maintain a permanent stoke.

I asked him how surf contests are judged, so I could follow along and make some sense out of the next nine days.  He explained that every surfer gets judged on their best two waves.  The top score on a wave is ten so the highest score possible is twenty.   The heats at the beginning are four surfers and the top two advance.  As they get closer to the finals, it’s just two surfers going head-to-head in a heat.  On the last day, only one remains.

A few minutes after Jiminy had stumbled off I spotted Lydia, also from the Gathering, in her black track suit, her fingernails clenched into her palms, her smile a determined grimace.  The rumor about her is that her son and some friends had decided to make a midnight swim around the pier a few years ago and, with his head down, he’d kept going when they reached the end of it, never to be seen again.  She’d been keeping her nightly vigil, tersely walking the graveyard shift, looking for clues.  Another morning had arrived and still no answers.

These days, it may seem like I know a lot of people in Huntington Beach, but the truth is almost everyone I know is a ghost.  I can only speculate why that might be, but am sure it has something to do with the seizure I experienced after arriving back from Vietnam during the height of the pandemic.  One moment I was talking on the phone with my sister, the next I was in the back of an ambulance.

Since then, things haven’t been the same.  My family set up a camper in my mother’s backyard that I’ve been staying in, but it would be hard to claim I’ve had much of a life.  All I do is surf, somehow never getting any better, ride a bike against the wind all day long, and go to the Gathering every morning at Tower 7.

After getting out of the hospital, I stayed in the camper for a long time, afraid that the neighbors would see me, afraid someone would accuse me of being a COVID super-spreader, since I’d been all over Indochina at the time the pandemic broke out.  The days were sixteen hours long and the crows would start cawing at five-thirty.  My nerves were shot.  Eventually, I started sneaking out the back gate at the first light of dawn and going for long walks, usually as far as the river jetty at Newport and back.

Although the beaches were largely deserted, as most of the country was under lockdown orders, there was one group I kept seeing at the base of Tower 7.  They would sit in a circle and seemed to be taking turns telling stories.  A few of them were getting a lot of laughs.  I was dying to know who they were and what they were up to, but was too disoriented and shy to approach them.

One morning, however, I reached the pier at the same time they were disbanding.  I hastened forward and was able to catch a few of them crossing the bike path.  They seemed to recognize me and were surprised I’d never met them.  How could I not have heard about the Gathering?  They’d been meeting for a few months now.  Did I think I was the only one of my kind?  Of course not.  I was right where I belonged.  They invited me to join them the next morning.

This morning I was going to be late.  The Open didn’t kick off until 7:35, and I wanted to be there to watch the first surfer catch the first wave of the contest.  Sitting on the bench, vacantly strumming, I was suddenly approached by an old man in a Hawaiian shirt, some kind of ukulele enthusiast wondering if I knew anything about the ukulele group that used to meet on the plaza every summer.  Funny he should ask.

The ukulele I was holding had once belonged to my father.  The summer after his stroke I’d gone with him to a ukulele class at the Senior Center.  The teacher, Big Island Bill, had recommended a ukulele shop on Gothard called Island Bizarre that we’d gone to check out.  My father bought me a ukulele and we began attending a Hawaiian music night together.  That was the same group that regularly met on the pier until the pandemic forced them to take a two-year hiatus.

Right before my father passed away, he’d given me his ukulele.  It had never really served him well, as his fingers were too thick to fit easily on the fretboard.  There’d been a magical connection when I’d picked it up, however, and in a short while it had become my main instrument.  The old man liked that story.

While we’d been talking, the southside of the pier had cleared out, leaving just four contestants in colored jerseys.  The announcer came over the PA, welcoming the world to beautiful Huntington Beach and first day of the Van’s US Open. 

Then it was 5..4..3..2..1.. and the contest was on.