Looking Back—
WHO WAS JOHN STONEBREAKER AND WHAT WENT WRONG AT MAVERICKS?
BY JEN STONEBREAKER
Part four of a special series for Surf Tribe Magazine
In late December, a long-expected but devious winter swell bypassed Half Moon Bay and landed south.
Postponing the Monsters of Mavericks left fifty of us surfers huddled under tents in the rain at the Pillar Point landing, teeth chattering, all suited up but nowhere to go.
I counted twelve boats tied up and waiting in the water, ten trailered jet skis waiting to be unleashed, a bevy of photogs and videographers, writers and rescue teams. Lots of terse jokes and forced optimism. I can feel her turning around, John said, meaning the fugitive swell, but making me think of the miscarriage. Luckily, another storm-generated swell was forming—a potentially stronger one at this point—up on latitude 38, full of silence and possible fury.
ETA at Mavericks: twelve days.
Christmas Eve, sitting with John in his father’s impressive, new Hillview Chapel in Laguna Hills, I listened to the hymns and Christmas standards, watched the procession to the manger with real sheep and costumed shepherds, all part of Pastor Mike’s quaint and scented Christmas Eve service, which drew sellout crowds every year.
I sat in the pew with my reindeer scarf still around my neck, a bit of a cold since the Mavericks false alarm, one hand on John’s knee. I sang the hymn lyrics projected alongside the stained-glass windows that flanked Pastor Mike’s stately mahogany and mother-of-pearl pulpit. He was in great form, expansive and filled with the inner light that looked so good through him, especially on video. When we closed our eyes in prayer and Pastor Mike thanked the Lord for His blessings and asked Him to help us use them wisely, I asked the God of whom I was skeptical to give me once again the child who visited and left me, like a ghost.
With the monster swell stalled in the Northwest Pacific, but hungry for diversion, John and I went to a New Year’s Eve party out in Laguna Canyon.
The party was mostly older, drug-enthused people, everybody high and chipper, stoned on weed, dodging into rooms for the edgier stuff—you know the scene.
And it surprised me to find myself here, because I didn’t know many of these people and didn’t do drugs, and John didn’t either. I wondered why he’d accepted the invite without talking to me. I still let him keep our social calendar in those days. And our travel, training, and finances, too. Happy to. I was surfing and writing and he was more than I could keep up with. My orbit was busy and secure. A happy Earth to his sun.
The only person I really knew was Ronna Dean, who spun me around from behind and threw her arms around me. Hadn’t seen her in years.
She looked even prettier now, same golden skin and thatch of honey hair, same cagey smile and skeptical brown eyes. Dressed in a tailored black Western tux with red front yokes and plenty of rhinestones, she looked like a Nashville headliner.
She caught me up on her music in LA, mostly touring with artists I knew of—lots of work but decent money. And between tours she got time gratis from Cherokee Studio in Hollywood—best in the world, she said. Cherokee thought Ronna’s bluesy, vulnerable voice was something that everyone should hear. Even got herself a sponsorship from Taylor Guitars, which was giving her “the most sweet-ass acoustics” she’d ever played.
“I’m going to do a short set tonight,” she said. “And you, Jen? I know you’re big-waving now, up for the Monsters if they can get some waves. How do you ride those things?”
“Carefully,” I said.
I caught her up on the big-wave circuit, about John getting up to number five in the world on the surf tour, told her I was writing for newspapers, and helping Mom coach the girls’ water sports teams at the high school. I downplayed my modest successes, aware of how hard Ronna had taken it when I won the Miss Laguna pageant. Even then I knew she was prettier, more outgoing and talented than I’d ever be. I thought I saw that smiling disappointment still in her—rock star in the making that she obviously was.
“Johnny Angel!” Ronna said, waving him over. It was a girlhood nickname we’d taken from a corny old song Mom used to like. We used to giggle at.
John looked through the weed smoke layering down from the ceiling like fog, and started his way toward us.
One of Laguna’s young newspaper photographers did a slide show on the home-theater screen, focusing on the departing years’ highlights and personalities. Plenty of beaches, waves, and sunsets. Warm, sun-blushed pictures of the town where I was born, the town I loved, where I went to school and learned to surf and fell in love. Was married, and intended to raise my family. Where I would scatter Mom’s and Dad’s ashes, and die myself someday.
My Shangri-La.
Having been tipped that John and I would be here, the photographer included some of his most recent pictures of us: John, carving up a stormy Rockpile right, daring that frothing lip to knock him off.
Me, locked in a Thousand Steps barrel, then rifling out in a blast of spray.
Me, as Miss Laguna, in my blue formal dress and gold sash, holding roses—which brought hoots and whistles from the stoned partygoers. I was embarrassed. Don’t know why, because I was never embarrassed to be Miss Laguna. But I was surprised at how long ago that seemed, how innocent and young I looked. Three years!
Ronna took the stage after the photo show.
Voice like a fallen angel, and the guitar was a living, breathing instrument in her hands, “Romeo and Juliet” a hopeful, streetwise lament.
The overhead lights caught the sparkle in her eyes, and the amp threw her voice into the room like a handful of rough diamonds.
“Bringing Out the Elvis.”
“Angel from Montgomery.”
“Blue Rodeo,” written and recorded by Cat Parker, a friend of ours who had passed on:
Come on shoot us a star
Play some guitar
So we can find where you are
In the blue rodeo …
I loved these songs. Beautiful things, straight from the heart. During that set I felt alone with her, happily trapped in a small room, the notes falling on me like stars. I wasn’t worried about the child who had come to me, then left, or the swell that might or might not come, or the giant waves I’d be trying to ride, or money, or the article I was writing for the LA Times.
The songs took me away.
Later, John went back to the theater to watch himself in some Tahiti surfing videos he’d never seen. John loved surf movies with him as the star, as almost all surfers do. It’s vanity, sure, but it’s also a way of seeing yourself as you never do when riding a wave. Another adrenaline-charged moment. Another high. And a way of learning, too.
But I wasn’t in the mood for enormous waves. I suspected I’d be seeing plenty of those soon enough.
So I hung around the steaming backyard swimming pool, where hired bartenders circulated through the crowd with trays, serving big-bowl “midnight margaritas” made from “secret ingredients.” At midnight, we counted down and sang “Auld Lang Syne.” Our singing voices were bold and a bit wobbly by then. Our hosts lit against-the-law firecrackers on the pool deck, those snaky black ones that wiggle and smoke. I took a rare hit of grass off a hookah, and moments later was high beyond my experience. Felt like my horizontal hold was gone, and I was falling facedown and bouncing up, falling facedown and bouncing up, over and over—even though I was standing still. Flashes of color, floaters of light. Fragments of conversations, the words stretching and reforming like rubber. I found it incredibly funny when people—some fully clothed and some only in their underwear or less—started jumping into the pool. Someone pushed me in, so I purged most of my air and sank to the bottom and sat there in the overheated water, legs extended like an infant, blowing bubbles and watching them burst at the silver-blue surface. My denim pantsuit felt rough as shark skin. The deep-end pool light studied me—a monster’s eye. I wondered if John was enjoying his videos.
They had good towels for us New Year’s Eve party animals, so I got my long down coat from a rack in the foyer, wrung out my suit in the pool-house bathroom, ran my brush through my hair, and set out to find my husband.
Later, I found out that the midnight margaritas were laced with LSD and peyote, and the hookah weed with opium, and pharmaceutical cocaine supplied by a Laguna ear, nose, and throat specialist whose daughter was on our water polo team.
Some of our core Laguna surfers were in the theater toking up, the videos done and John gone. I sat down for a minute and watched the lights and colors on the projection screen. Eavesdropped on the surfers, loose-jawed and a little slurring as surfers can be, but with that stoked hopefulness we almost always have. It’s all about tomorrow. The next wave.
I went room to room, looking for John. The house was a three-story custom that climbed a steep hillside, and you could see the ocean from all the windows and the stairway landings. If I could afford a home in Laguna it would be something like this. I looked at myself in the mirror of a well-lit second-floor bathroom, and saw this almost cute chick with a pale green face and a bowl of orange hair on her head. Set one hand over the bottom of that bowl and lifted, seeing if it was attached. I leaned over and splashed some water on my face to sober up, but it sparkled musically going down the drain and I thought I heard a melody in it, so I let my face just hang there in the sink, watching the music go down.
Nobody on the third floor except behind a closed door, from which came the grunts and whimpers of Human Reproduction 101.
Muted and urgent.
A bump and a gasp.
A moan I knew.
John.
