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The Start of Something
 

My story begins in Texas, of all places.
That’s where my father was born in 1921, in Galveston. His parents, Rose and Lewis, were also born in Texas, so it’s not like they were just passing through. There was actually a small, close-knit Jewish community in and around Galveston, which was a popular port for Jews entering the country from Russia. My grandfather ran a dry-goods store, although from what I hear he didn’t do such a good job of it. He ended up as a door-to-door salesman—shoes, mostly, but he sold a bunch of stuff. Basically, he hustled his way all through the Depression. Whatever he could buy on the cheap and flip for a quick profit, that’s what he was into.
My father, Dorian, was the oldest of three. Behind him were his brother, Adrian, and his sister, Sonia—both characters, same as my dad. (Some quirk in our gene pool, I guess.) My dad and his sibs would all veer off in their own separate directions. Doing their own thing, their own way … that’s what they had in common. Uncle Adrian became a knockabout musician. He played the violin, here and there, off and on. Everyone always said how gifted he was, what an incredible teacher he was, what an incredible talent, but to us he was just crazy Uncle Adrian. Very creative, very artsy … but, also, very crazy. When I was a kid, he lived for a time in a big house in Hollywood Hills, but other than that he never seemed to have a steady job or stay in a relationship for too, too long. He did have a couple kids—our cousins Nina and Yoab—and we got together with them from time to time, but there was a lot we never figured out about Uncle Adrian. All we knew was that he played the violin. As a gift, he offered to play for my wedding, which is getting ahead of the story, I know, but as long as I’m on it I’ll hit these few notes. I happened to duck into the bathroom during the reception, and there was Uncle Adrian, completely naked. Surprised the crap out of me. He’d taken off all his clothes and was splashing water under his armpits, getting ready for his performance, and I remember thinking he was cut just like my dad. Whacky. Out there. Different. Yeah, he could play the violin like a dream, but he’d go at it his own way.
Aunt Sonia was on her own wavelength, too. As a young woman she was beautiful—stunning, really. After the family moved to California, she found her way to Hollywood and started working as an actress, during the last gasp of the old studio system. She’s probably best known for her role as Agnes Lowzier in the 1946 Howard Hawks classic, The Big Sleep, opposite Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. She acted under the name Sonia Darrin, but she was never credited for her most famous role, even though her character’s on-screen more than anyone other than Bogey or Bacall.
She bounced around Hollywood for a time, appeared in a bunch of pictures, but then the gigs stopped coming, which I guess is what happens to a lot of stunning young actresses, eventually. Everything is entirely and wildly possible … until one day it isn’t. By the time I was born, Aunt Sonia’s acting career had come and gone; she’d married a set designer named Bill Reese and started adopting a bunch of kids—my first cousins Mason, Suky, Lanny, and Mark. (Yep, that’s Mason Reese, of Underwood Deviled Ham fame, one of the first true child stars of the advertising age—and a good, good guy.) We saw a lot of them, too, back when we were kids, which I guess left us with the message that family was important. Also with the message that actually working for a living, in a traditional nine-to-five way, was for other families.
Here again I’m getting ahead of my story, or at least a little off to the side, so let me just head back to Texas for a bit. It was there, in the Gulf of Mexico, that my father rode his first wave. A lot of folks don’t think of Galveston as any kind of surf spot, but these days there’s a thriving surf community down there. Okay, so maybe it’s not thriving in the same way surfing is thriving in California or Hawaii or Australia, but everything’s relative, right? The waves along the Gulf coast in popular surf spots like Stewart Beach can be small and choppy, but if you time it right you can catch a good surf day. There wasn’t a whole lot of surfing going on back in the late 1920s, though. Wasn’t even called surfing, what there was of it, but my father saw a picture in the newspaper of a guy riding a wave off the coast of San Diego and thought this was something he’d like to try.
I’ve heard so many different versions of this story over the years, it’s tough keeping them straight. Every time my father tells it, he sprinkles in a couple new details and tosses out some old ones. Here are the nuts and bolts of it: When my father was seven or eight years old, he found some old strips of rubber tire and crimped and bound them together like a raft. Then he covered the whole deal in canvas and set off to do his thing. Guess you’d say he was a resourceful kid, the way he made something out of nothing, the way he’d seen a picture of something that captured his imagination and went out and grabbed at it for himself. Damn near amazing, when you think about it—only it wasn’t a very satisfying experience, he says, in almost every version of the story. Says it was more like white-water rafting than actually standing up on a hard surface and riding a wave into shore. But it was something. A germ, a seed, a kernel. A place to start.
And it wasn’t just a one-off with him, surfing. Once he tasted it, he wanted more. And more.
Soon, my father got to reading whatever he could about the legendary wave riders out in California or on the beaches of Hawaii. He’d cut surfing pictures from newspapers and magazines and tack them to his wall. He became almost fanatical about it, maybe even a little evangelical. Got it in his head that the only place he could be happy, truly happy, was out in San Diego, so he put it out there that the California sea air would help his asthma. Almost forgot that part: my father suffered from a serious case of childhood asthma; at least, he claims he was asthmatic, although I never once heard the man wheeze or cough. Not once, not ever. But somehow he convinced his parents the flats of Texas were debilitating to a young boy in his condition, and eventually they packed up their house and moved the whole family out to San Diego in the early 1930s.
Now, I’ve got no real idea if this is how things truly went down. All I know is that this is the story my father has told, for years and years. If I had to bet, I’d say there’s probably a grain of truth in it. I’d say there probably was a diagnosis of asthma, at some point, and a suggestion that my father might do better in a different climate. But there was also the pull of the ocean, the romance of surfing, so I’m sure he went all out to make his case to his parents. He could be very persuasive, my old man—even as a young man. When he sets his mind to a thing, he’s all over it, and he won’t back off until he gets his way. And he’s charming about it, make no mistake. He can be completely full of shit, but...