We surfed all the next morning at Rockpile.
Rough stuff. Didn’t catch a wave. Stand-up surfing isn’t boogie boarding, not that we thought it would be.
Didn’t see John Stonebreaker until almost a week later, when I cruised past his house again on my skateboard and saw him in the garage, doing I knew not what under strong lights.
I hopped off, flipped my board into my hand, and walked back.
Squeezing in between the cars in the driveway—an old hippie van and a newer VW Westphalia—I stood just outside the entrance.
John was taller than he looked from shore the week before. He was dressed in red surf trunks with a baggy, white, long-sleeved T-shirt. He had a tool in both hands, bearing down on a white surfboard blank on sawhorses.
“Hey, I’m Jen Byrne. I saw you surf. I’d like to join your team.”
“There’s no team.”
“When there is one. I’m learning.”
He straightened and looked at me, goggles and face misted with foam dust, hair tucked into a Dodgers cap, knees and feet knotted from hours on surfboards.
“Paddle hard and don’t take off too early.”
“I’ve got a six-two Infinity.”
Another blue-eyed once-over. “Sounds about right.”
“I’ll be the best female surfer in Laguna someday. Soon.”
“I’ve seen a few okay ones. Only been here a few weeks, though.”
“How long have you been surfing?”
“Since I was ten. The San Onofre waves are a lot easier than these beach breaks here in Laguna. Slower, more wave.”
“Is that going to be your board?”
“If it comes out right.”
“What color?”
“Haven’t decided.”
“What kind of waves is it for?”
He looked at me thoughtfully. “Bigger. Blacks. Huntington. Malibu and Rincon.”
“I don’t know those.”
“All six of us pile into the vans. Takes two, for the bodies and the boards. Well, back to work, Jan.”
“Jen.”
He nodded and turned to his blank.
Five years later Belle and I were the best chick surfers in Laguna. John was already away from home a lot, surfing the big waves of Steamer Lane and Ocean Beach, and a much-rumored break just south of San Francisco, Mavericks. Of the four Stonebreaker surfer kids at Top of the World, John was the most driven and skilled, and his parents were able to give him a worldly surfing education. Summers in Hawaii. A week in Fiji. A month in Australia. I got a few postcards. Thumbtacked them to my wall, over the Surfer Magazine covers.
In those five years, Mike Stonebreaker’s Hillview Chapel in Laguna Niguel had taken off, gradually then suddenly. As a high school teen busy with watersports and grades, I was only vaguely aware of John’s dad’s growing new church.
Then, suddenly, no more donut shopfront.
Pastor Mike and his new Hillview Chapel were everywhere, in full-page ads for Sunday services in the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register, and the several small papers published in Laguna Beach. Posters in shop windows, too, billboards on Interstate 5 and the big inland boulevards in Santa Ana and Huntington Beach, and on Coast Highway from San Clemente all the way north to the LA county line.
Pastor Mike was everywhere you looked.
The ads and the posters and billboards all used the same graphic: Mike Stonebreaker in a white robe, arms raised, his back to you as a bright white light washed toward him like a wave from the sky. There was darkness all around the light and the man. I thought it was dramatic but overblown.
Not long after I befriended the Stonebreaker girls—Kate and Robin—Mike and Marilyn took me under their generous wings. They had room in their vans for an only child, her surfboard, wetsuit, and a duffel for food and water, a towel, tubes of sunscreen, and a wide-toothed comb to get through her sun-and-salt-blasted copper helmet of hair.
John and his older brother Raymond pretty much ignored us girls, all three of us at least five years younger. Which, when you’re twenty-two, is a lot. Especially if the women your own age are more than a little interested.
On the Stonebreaker family caravans, I’d find a way to get seated in the old hippie van, which John always drove, and I’d watch him secretly. From the right angle, I could see his eyes and part of his face in the rearview mirror. I never got more than a quick glance back. Even though he was sitting just a few feet from me, shoulders hunched over the big steering wheel in the slow, straining van, John always seemed to be miles away. Already there, I thought, in the barrel.
In the lineup at Blacks or Salt Creek or Trestles, I’d position myself medium distance to John, so I could study his technique and just basically gawk at how beautifully he handled these—now, to him—little waves.
I don’t remember John saying more than just a few sentences to me over those five years, mostly surfing pointers, weather and swell forecasts, tides and wind. He didn’t say much to his girlfriends either, as I observed.
On my eighteenth birthday we had an island-themed party in the backyard. Dad manned the barbecue for burgers and hot dogs; Mom made a couple of giant salads and a pot of fettuccini steeped in olive and truffle oil.
Forty or so people showed up on that chilly winter Sunday afternoon, mostly my friends and their parents. They came early and stayed late. Belle got a little more than tipsy and Raymond drove her home.
