The first morning that I attended the Gathering at Tower 7, I had no idea what to expect.  Some of the participants had asked me to join them so I did, although still unsure what our connection might be.  As soon as they’d gone around the circle, introducing themselves and identifying as ghosts, I understood right away.  Things had not been the same since the seizure three weeks earlier. 

Still, the more I sat and listened to the other ghosts share, the more I realized that my condition preempted the recent medical emergency, that in fact it was possibly the result of a trauma that had occurred years earlier.  Some of the ghosts had died physical deaths, while others, due to an extreme aversion to pain, had been too stunted, emotionally, or mentally, to ever lay claim to the lives they might have led, and had retreated to the shadows.

It made me think back to that night beneath the bridge at Moon Park, not long after my family had moved to Southern California, one of the many moves we’d made as a codependent clan of perpetual outsiders.  There was a dance at El Rancho High that night and everyone else was going, but I’d managed to score a twelve-pack of Mickey’s Big Mouths, and was slamming the empty bottles on the concrete riverbed beneath the freeway, shaking my fist at a blood-red moon, like a new super-villain taking an oath against all mankind.

At the beginning of the pandemic, when everyone had been locked down and the beaches were empty, all you saw were ghosts, like wild animals, cautiously reestablishing their boundaries once the cities emptied out.  I may have met three hundred ghosts that first year and felt a sense of unity I’d never experienced anywhere.  At the Gathering, most of the ghosts are trying to get back their humanity, believing that it is only humans that are capable of salvation.  I’d started out the same way, working through the steps and following the principles that they advocated.  For a while it felt like I was making real progress. 

Lately the distance has begun to set back in, however, and some days I’m no longer sure that I even want to be saved. 

Pulling up in front of Tower 7, I saw Rudy standing in the parking lot, his right leg shorn off at the knee.  Depending on where you meet him, he’ll tell you a different story about losing his leg.  He’d told me it was a shark attack, but I’ve also heard it may have been a motorcycle accident, sniper attack, or pro football injury that was to blame. 

Rudy said he’d seen Jason and Buddy paddling out at Tower 5 earlier, but that no longer hurt my feelings.  Our surf crew, the Gallows, because someone was always dropping in on someone else, had only hung together at Tower 7 for a few short glorious months.  Over time, Jason and Buddy had become more selective, going wherever the waves were best.  Doc and Oscar had migrated back inland.  Ezra was off in his van somewhere.  Sometimes I’d see the other guys around, here and there.

With my unreliable string of bikes, I’d never been as mobile as the rest of them, and stayed loyal to Tower 7 for a long time, bringing my board to every Gathering.  Eventually, when no one was showing up anymore, I began heading up to the Cliffs by myself.  There I stood less of a chance of being pitched over the falls every time I tried to get to my feet.

The meeting was about to wrap, so I perched on a wall and listened to the last ghosts tell their tales.  It was a much smaller crowd than it had been a few years ago.  A lot of ghosts had gotten antsy when the lockdown orders ended and the summer crowds began returning to the beach.  What remained was largely a skeleton crew of regulars. 

Roy and Betsy came over and sat down next to me once everyone began to disperse.  They asked about the ukulele, so I showed it off, recounting how I’d recently been to Hawaii, loading it up with mana energy on Oahu and the Big Island.  Then it had been up the entire Pacific Coast of Mexico, wading out knee deep in the surf, keeping time with the waves.  All that to prepare for my debut performance at the US Open.

Really?

Yes, it was true.  I’d be kicking off the proceedings every morning on the pier.

If it wasn’t for my father I may have never been to Hawaii or Huntington Beach, let alone the planet Earth.  He was the one who found the teaching job in Hawaii in the 1960s and the budget beach cottage in Huntington Beach twenty-five years ago, in what has now become a million-dollar neighborhood.  I just tagged along.  Although we had our differences, and his confrontational attitude and unstable ministry left me largely rootless by the time I was a teenager, I can’t deny I owe a lot to the man.

In addition to the ukulele, I also have one of his bikes, an Electra three speed that he only rode once.  The design, black numbers on a white frame, give it a cow-like appearance, and it was my main ride for years.  After returning from Vietnam, it had been destroyed by rust, however, the chain brittle and orange, and the brake calipers clamped down like vise grips on the tires.  The bike shops were taking months to do repairs and there were no affordable bikes anywhere.

Around this time, my mother spotted a bike locked to a street sign that was for sale.  The Blue Bike wasn’t worth what they were asking, but I was desperate for a ride and made do with it for a few months.  It went on to get a flat tire every other week, which didn’t seem possible, and led me to believe that it was cursed. 

It did buy me time to get father’s old bike into JAX for a tune-up, however, and after picking that up and mounting a surf rack on it, I dubbed it the Holstein Charger. It was a valiant ride, and we did about eight months of hardcore surf patrol together before the same problems began to set in.  Any bike with handbrakes doesn’t stand a chance at the beach.

Needing a backup, I came across a Huffy at Walmart, which finally had some bikes in stock.  It was a bike with no pretense, unlike the other bikes, with their knobby tires, fake shock absorbers and shiny reflectors.  I dubbed it the Mule, or Muley, and when the Holstein Charger reached the point where it could no longer be resuscitated, I yanked the surf rack off it and commissioned Muley for surf patrol.  Now Muley is failing, stuck in seventh gear, the front brake completely disengaged.  To get going on it I almost have to push it down a hill.

Thank God for my latest acquisition, the Cruiser.  My survival depends upon having a working bike.

After leaving Betsy and Roy, I made my daily run down to Balboa.  From the Huntington Pier to the Balboa Pier and back is roughly twenty miles.  If you leave early enough in the day, you may be able to escape the wind.  By afternoon, however, it is usually blowing so strongly in one direction, sometimes both, that the trip becomes a parody, a pantomime of someone trying to ride a bike through an electric fence.   Going the other way, to Bolsa Chica, or Blowsa Chica, can be twice as bad. 

There are days when the only thing worse than making the ride is not making the ride.  I would be eaten alive by my demons if I didn’t.  Either I find a way to beat them down or they are going to beat me down.  It’s as simple as that.  It may not be a permanent solution to anything, but in the wake of the pandemic, and the purgatory I wake up to every morning, riding a bike, even if it is straight into the wind, is usually the best thing I can do.

Hawaiians are generally credited with inventing surfing, or wave sliding, and it was a Hawaiian, George Freeth, who introduced it to Huntington Beach.  In 1914, he put on a demonstration of surf riding at the dedication of the new pier, which at the time was the longest pleasure pier in the States.  Another Hawaiian, Duke Kahanamoku, considered the father of modern surfing, inspired a few Huntington Beach lifeguards to make their own boards a few years later, which at the time were carved out of redwood and weighed over a hundred pounds.

The first West Coast Surfing Championship was held in 1959.  In the 1980s that evolved into the OP Pro, which then became the US Open, which for the last ten years has been sponsored by Van’s, the shoe company most closely associated with surfers, skaters, BMX riders, alternative rockers, and Southern California in general.  By chance, I graduated from El Rancho with one of the family members, but had just moved from North Dakota and knew no one but the other wrestlers on the wrestling team.

Over the years I’d always walked down to check out the contest if I was in town, but didn’t pay much attention to what was going on.   I’d just stand with the crowds on the pier and make a short ramble through the village, and that was that.  This year, however, I was determined to get to the heart of it, with my ukulele on my back, soaking up the energy and trying to participate, in whatever small way I could muster.

When I got back from Balboa, I saw that riders were warming up for the BMX Waffle Cup, so I locked up my bike and went to watch them practice.  I’d been told that there was a free barbecue at noon so went over to check that out, only to run into Jason and Buddy, coming down the steps from the VIP section. 

Jason was the only one from our surf crew, the Gallows, who could really surf.  The story was that he’d been a star in high school, and then later in the courtroom, and that there’d been an accident on PCH that left his Maserati totaled.  His involvement in helping the rest of us learn to surf can only be described as an act of charity.

From what I understood about Buddy, he’d been a running back for the Oklahoma Sooners, who on a crucial third and goal had had his head driven further back into his shoulders than the ball had advanced downfield.  He was crazy to surf, but the day I first met him looked like he’d never been on a board before.  I wasn’t any better. 

From the beginning, we competed in our own kook Olympics, perfecting such maneuvers as the stunt man left, stunt man right, the pearl jam, the hang zero, the Niagara plunge, and the Malachi crunch.  All in all, the Gallows was a sight to behold.  Dignity?  We had none to spare.  We’d paddle out under any conditions, to see who could get destroyed in the most brutal and ridiculous fashion, and then all laugh about it later.

Eventually, a few of us improved and started getting expectations.  I didn’t begrudge Buddy for sticking with Jason and going off in search of greener pastures.  He’d worked harder and was making more progress.  I was still flopping and floundering most of the time, chasing waves I couldn’t catch, then getting caught too far inside when the rest of the set came through.  I could never seem to find the sweet spot.  We were all still friends though.

On this particular day they had a surprise for me.  Jason had managed to finagle some VIP passes from a secret source, and though they’d already made their rounds, they had an extra wristband they gladly handed over.  One minute I was waiting in line for a hotdog, the next I was upstairs at the Waffle Cup, watching the BMX riders and eating fish and chicken tacos, right next to the mayor of Huntington Beach. 

Later, I went over to watch the surfing in another reserved section, where there were fruit plates, bowls of peanut M&Ms, and a cooler stocked with Red Bulls.

My idea had been to immerse myself in the US Open, and now, only four hours into it, I was sitting in the VIP sections with an all-access wristband.  That was incredible, for sure, but things had gotten way too good, way too fast.  I’d need to get a flat tire on my bike on the way home in order to restore balance to the universe.

It is believed that ghosts exist, and continue to haunt the physical world, because of a situation that they were unable to resolve as humans.  Perhaps, it was something that was done to them, or something they did to others, but it is this unfinished business that prevents them from ever resting in peace. 

The group of ghosts at the Gathering, consider themselves to be in recovery, and have a program and steps they follow in an attempt to make their amends and finally break free from the past.  When I discovered that there were other ghosts out there, and that I’d been one for most, if not all, of my life, everything made total sense.  I was willing to do anything to alleviate the all-consuming anxiety at that point, so I got a guide and began following his recommendations.

I didn’t have much experience living as a human, so that took some getting used to.  I began by making my bed every morning and eventually got to the point where I was paying weekly visits to the grocery store, even returning the shopping cart to the designated collection spot afterwards.  Mind you, this was happening during the pandemic, so what was normal wasn’t all that normal.  The next step would be to get a job, but I couldn’t risk exposing my mother to the virus so that would have to wait.

On some days it felt like I was making progress, but just as often I felt trapped and longed to have my old freedom back.  On the second morning of the contest, I was up at sunrise and went to 7-eleven for a coffee.  There were two poltergeists sitting out front, different from the morning before, one in a pirate hat, the other with feet so swollen it seemed unbelievable that he was able to slip a pair of flip-flops over them.  They were noisily arguing and didn’t look over when I passed.

Poltergeists are part of the same family, but unlike the ghosts at the Gathering, who all have been poltergeists at one point or another, are either unaware that they are ghosts or don’t care.  In Asia they are known as hungry ghosts and are often depicted as having enormous stomachs and only thin, needle-like throats, so they can never get enough.  They can be actively disruptive and even aggressive when they’re not getting what they need.  They shout, swear, scream, bang garbage cans, and frighten tourists, giving us all a bad reputation in the process.  They are not evil as much as driven mad by pain.

It was these worlds I now found myself trapped between, in a purgatory that seemed to have no end in sight.  I was neither fully human, nor was I the same unabashed hell-raiser I once reveled in being.  If I thought about the past I was consumed by regret.  If I started worrying about the future, I would be overcome by terror.  Everyone had advised me to stay in the moment.  It wasn’t easy, but at least I had the surf contest to distract me from my problems for another week.   After that, I’d just do what I had to do.

The sun was low in the east, just breaking through the clouds, and the sea was calm, with a small, clean swell from the south.  It was the second day of the Van’s US Open and the men in the Challenger Series would continue the round of 96 that had begun the day before, while the women would be starting their round of 64.  The south side of the pier was already crowded with photographers, but there were lots of benches open on the north side.  I sat down on one of them and watched two old Vietnamese men pass by, one of them swinging two hiking poles, as if he were cross-country skiing.

The day before I’d lucked my way into the VIP sections of the Van’s Village, but today I was back to being an invisible presence, playing my lonely ukulele songs on the pier, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of a record I’d made twenty-fears years earlier, Ghost on the Roam, that had bankrupted me and gone nowhere.

Ghost on the Roam had been a collection of the best songs from my nomadic 20s, and the title track was a song I’d written while living in Humboldt County, where the beauty of the redwoods was intoxicating, but I’d nearly been driven out of my mind by loneliness.  At the time I merely felt like a ghost on the roam, not realizing until years later, after a seizure I’d suffered during the height of the pandemic, that the reason I felt that way so strongly was because I actually was one.

Now that I understood that, I had no issue sitting outside, playing to the sky, playing to the sea, capturing the rhythm of the waves, watching the people pass by, all the different races and nationalities, many of them paying their first visit to California, taking their first steps on the pier.  Sometimes an adult would notice me and come over, like the old ukulele enthusiast who’d approached me the day before.   The children would almost always see me.  They’d hear the music and stop in their tracks, or stare over their parents’ shoulders, wide-eyed.  It was good to play for them.  One day they’d remember seeing a ghost on the pier, and wonder if it had all just been a dream.

At 7:08 the announcer came over the loudspeaker.  The Men’s Challenger Series would begin at 7:35 where they’d left off, at Heat 17.  That would be followed by the first of the women’s heats, 1-8.  The waves were small but expected to increase as the day progressed.  Thanks to Hurricane Frank off the coast of Mexico, the next day looked promising indeed.

The Vietnamese man passed me, going the other way, and by the bathrooms I saw a group of Vietnamese women begin the calisthenics I’d observed them doing the day before.  A tall man with headphones who obviously wasn’t a member of their group, was shadowing their routine, but that disturbed no one.  I sat and quietly plucked out a tune about a life that has turned into a street fight.

A family passed by with a child who went googly-eyed with wonder when he heard the flurry of bright little notes that were tumbling out of my instrument.  His father tried to nudge him along, but he planted his feet and refused to be hurried.

One of the biggest regrets of my life was that I’d never learned to surf, especially since I’d been born in Hawaii and had spent almost forty years in California, off and on.  My brothers had grown up surfing and would occasionally drag me out with them, usually when the water temperature was fifty degrees and the sea was throwing up frightening walls.  I’d cling to the board like a drowned rat and be carried two miles down shore before finally clambering out and trudging back to the car.

The truth is that good surfers make surfing look easy, when it is not at all easy to learn and get good at.  The waves look much different when you are lying on a board on a pitching, tumultuous sea, as opposed to standing on shore, watching the orderly swells come in.

My brother John had seen a good price on a second-hand longboard that he’d alerted me to a few years earlier, and I’d ended up riding three miles up Beach Boulevard with the hundred dollars they were asking for it in my pocket.  When I got there, I discovered it was a Wavestorm, one of the foam boards they sell at Costco for the same price new, but since I was already there, tucked it under my arm and rode home with it.  It had sat in my mother’s backyard since.  There was always an excuse not to paddle out. 

When I stumbled across the Gathering during the pandemic, what I noticed right away was a few ghosts appearing out of the sea every morning, dripping wet, with their surfboards in tow.  That’s when I met Jason and Buddy.  When they heard I had a board at home they urged me to bring it, and still I made excuses not to.

One week at the end of the summer, however, the sea and the sky were so blue, and the water temperature was so warm, that I took the Wavestorm down to Tower 7 an hour before the Gathering was set to start.  Buddy was sitting close to shore and started waving his arms and shouting when he saw me.  A few seconds later he pearled so badly that his feet went tumbling over his head.

I understood the basic principles behind surfing, but had a hard time putting them into practice.  The Wavestorm was so thick and buoyant that it was impossible to duck-dive on it.  That meant I bore the brunt of every breaker, unless I flipped over and did the turtle, holding the board over my head like a sheet of plywood in a thunderstorm.  I would usually manage to struggle out to the lineup, but on a lot of days that’s all I could do.

I chased after every wave, like a dog chasing cars, but either they passed me by, or I’d get too far ahead and they’d come crashing down on my back.  If I did manage to get to my feet, I could be counted on to do a stuntman, diving to one side like a movie stuntman leaping out of the way of an explosion, or my patented cat on a hot tin roof where I’d leap into a crouch and get stuck up on the roof of the wave, eventually just falling off the backside.

There was one freak day, where almost every member of the Gallows was paddling towards me at the same time and I took off on a monstrous, head-high wave at the last second, somehow staying on my feet on the ass-end of the board, and flailing in a way that made it appear like I was shredding across the face of the wave.  That earned me a reputation as a big-wave charger that I knew I didn’t deserve.  The truth is that Jason was a great surfer, Doc and Ezra were at least competent, and the rest of us were a clown squad. 

Were we having fun?  Jason assured us that was all that mattered.

When I got my father’s old bike back from JAX and mounted the surf rack on it, then I really went to town, expanding my surf patrol from Blacky’s at the Newport Pier to Bolsa Chica.  My priority was always Tower 7, however, and when I’d show up there at sunrise and see the other ghosts crossing the bike path, their boards tucked under their arms, it made me feel like I was one of the New Avenger’s.  It was the oddest sensation to feel like I belonged anywhere, much less to a tribe of supernatural soul-surfers.

Around the end of October, the water got cold and the north swell kicked in.  At that point the crew largely disbanded.  If I heard they were getting together I’d make a point to meet up, even if it meant getting up earlier and riding further than I felt like.  Gradually, it started feeling like I was the only one left.  New ghosts would sometimes show up with their boards and I’d regale them with stories about the good old days.

Outside of the Gathering, there is another group that I stumbled across around the same time the pandemic broke out, and that is the Drum Circle that meets Sunday night.  While the Gathering attracts ghosts who want to work through their issues and resolve their afflictions, the Drum Circle draws most of the poltergeists in the area, who are just looking to party and have a good time.  I feel at ease in both circles, but don’t know many of the poltergeists by name since they are often incapacitated and can be extremely antisocial.

The first time I happened upon the Drum Circle I was mesmerized by the beat and wanted to participate.  The only thing I could think of to do was to dance, strut, and point at the drummers.  They knew what I was talking about.  The next time I showed up, I dropped some gravel into a plastic coke bottle, screwed the lid on, and began to shake it like a maraca.  At last, I got my hands on a black djembe drum, never tightening the head, instead just thumping out the same low tone.

The second evening of the US Open, there was a smaller crowd of drummers than usual holding down their corner of the plaza.  Most of the hardcore regulars were there.  As far as poltergeists, I recognized one they call Big Steve, wearing a blue nylon over his face and playing a bass drum.  The Wizard was there, twirling a stick with a roll of paper streaming from the end of it, casting a spell over the proceedings.  Susan, a ghost from Gathering, showed up with Mark the Shark.  That probably meant bad news but I didn’t know her that well.  On one of the backwalls the White Rastafarian stood, screaming his head off in time to the music, that being his signature expression.

There was too much rhythm and too little beat, so everything felt off and disjointed.  I began to feel very alone, so got on the Cruiser as the sun was setting over the sea, and headed north on the bike trail.  At the Dog Beach I ran into Ezra, the dark prophet of the Gallows surf crew.  He was hunched over the railing, glaring into the sunset, the whiskers spouting from his face, which was drawn up like a shrunken apple.  He was contemplating the end of the world as he’d been known to do.

Ezra had been rooting for the destruction of society half of his life, yet here it continued to prosper all around him, and he remained squatting in his van, preaching mostly to his dog.   In a similar way, I had counted on the system being too wicked to survive.  Yet the winners continued to win while I sat playing my ukulele on the pier to no one. 

If there is justice in the world, where is the evidence?   The game that we’d been taught as kids was too rigged to want to play.  Still, Ezra reminded me that it could be worse.  How was that, I wondered. 

We could be in San Bernardino.