Driving Minnie's Piano (24 page)

^{Some surfers visiting from
California for the waves, including David Pu'u, a legendary
in-the-water surf photographer, who wanted to get some shots of me
for his magazine. It was one of those things I had once dreamed
about while growing up as a surf geek in New
Jersey.}

^{On the fourth day of the
hurricane waves, I was trying to shed my middle-age caution for
teenage abandon on six-to-eight foot waves that were forming
perfect barrels within a few feet of the bouldered shoreline of
Seaforth. Steep, fast and clean as a whistle. I would slide back
into the tube and allow the wave to cover me. Some granted me a
quick return to daylight as I scooted out of the tunnel while other
waves had me for lunch. But the water was warm and I was enjoying
the capture nearly as much as the release.}

^{David appeared as this
floating head with a camera on the steepest part of the wave. In
order to get the shot he wanted he urged me to “drive straight for
the camera. Don't worry about me.” He claimed he had his instincts
honed. He'd drop beneath the sea at the last second to avoid
getting slammed in the head by my board. I trusted him enough to
aim straight for him, but I always cut back away in time, just in
case he miscalculated.}

^{Not long after David got the
shot he was looking for, my first big glossy magazine crack at
California surf mag immortality, I began to get cocky. I took off
later, deeper in the pocket. I slipped back into the tube farther
than before and then I slid back out into the golden evening
sunlight. I did this over and over, surfing beyond my usual ability
and expectations, with grace and precision.}

^{And it was about then that I
stopped expecting things to go wrong. In other words, I broke rank
with my tribe. I was no longer the shy, the awkward, the insecure
fourteen-year-old boy who maintained residence in my middle-aged
body. I felt like I had achieved some kind of state of
grace.}

^{That's also when I was
plundered by one of the finest oversize walls of cyclonic energy
ever to knock me off my board. The wave had its way with me,
slamming me hard, nose first, pitch-poling my board, giving me
three excellent concessive hammerings that suggested the ocean was
trying to tear my limbs from their sockets. And I came up sucking
for that precious commodity of Nova Scotia air only to discover
another surfer dropping down the face of an overhead and equally
tubular wall of water. I was down in the water, still tethered to
my board while Rob Spicer was already in a critical drop with no
way out of a collapsing wall of water.}

^{I yelled something
monosyllabic. (Who has time for two syllables when you are about to
have your skull parted by your friend's exquisitely sharp and
knife-like fin?) Rob countered with a familiar monosyllable of his
own. He was still on his feet and hopelessly trying to avoid me as
I dove deep, looking for the sanctity of sea floor in this great
time of need.}

^{Rob avoided shredding my
carcass but failed to avoid my own surfboard, which he skewered
with that razor fin of his, slicing fibreglass and foam of what was
recently a pristine new custom board. The waves swallowed him for
his foul deed and I retrieved my board, sulked briefly and
remembered old surfing algebra that seemed to factor in standard
payments for excellent sessions. Over the years I had replaced the
“ding the body not the board” with the reverse anthem. Fibreglass
repair used to seem expensive compared to Band-Aids and bruises but
times had changed.}

^{The waves of September gave
way to airplane wings to New Jersey in October and that reunion
with the Class of '69 from Cinnaminson High School. Here were guys
I had begun surfing with when I was thirteen, girls I had kissed in
kindergarten (I had very early romantic instincts). Ignoring the
more formal trappings of the event, I was eager to explore the
pains and passions of youth.}

^{Kids who were once picked on
by bullies were now designing nuclear power plants. Old chums who
used to steal cars were in charge of chemical factories in South
America. There were architects and lawyers and investment bankers
and some were “into retail.” When one former classmate, a girl (now
a woman) with two-storey hair, asked me what I did, I told her I
“live in Canada and write books.” Her response was, “No, I mean
really.”}

^{Bodies had changed and so had
a few souls. I found communion among old allies and enemies and I'm
sure I was not the first to admit we had not changed the world
significantly. (How could we have failed, this class of 1969?) Nor
was I the first to feel overwhelmed by the slippage of time. Tim
Stack, former class president, had a photo of himself and his kids
on the beach with his old 9v6 Dewey Webber. Old half-true
adventures were recounted even as spouses of graduates sat
glassy-eyed and removed.}

^{Tim Stack would point across
the room to the president of a multinational corporation and say,
“We used to make fun of him in school.” Motive enough for success -
an American's healthiest form of revenge.}

^{Paramount on my personal
agenda that night was a heart-to-heart talk with Cherie Devlin. My
ninth grade failed relationship with Cherie was something that had
haunted me for decades. And a class reunion is all for naught if it
is not the place to spew words of unstated truth buried in the
archival vault of the heart.}

^{My first attempt to breach the
barricade of years failed. At first I didn't even recognize her. An
insult, I suppose. We had the polite drill about jobs and kids and
geography. She had two children, did some acting and TV commercial
work and lived in Phoenix, Arizona. Soon we were swallowed by the
crowd and I kept getting absorbed into conversations with
accountants who had once been high school basketball
players.}

^{Bobby Carr was there. We'd
been friends from the time we were four. Our mothers had revealed
to us that we had even been in the same hospital room together
after our births, our birthdays a mere two days apart. We had been
blood brothers at seven - in those pre-AIDS halcyon days of
innocence where we actually cut our fingers with knives and bled
into each other's wound. We had drifted apart in high school but
now here we were, recounting Tarzan swings, Boy Scout adventures in
the Pine Barrens and trying to fill in the three absentee decades
with a five-minute synopsis.}

^{I danced with a girl who
claimed to have had a crush on me from the first to the fourth
grade. But I never knew. I reminisced with cheerleaders who had
ignored me through high school. I pretended to remember others who
I could not place at all. These things you do at such
events.}

^{But it was after midnight and
I was working my way back to Cherie. Her husband was tall and mute
and looked as uncomfortable as I would have been in such a
situation. He was looking forward to getting the hell out of Jersey
and home to Arizona, I'm sure.}

<sup>As the crow flies, New Jersey
is only about eight hundred miles from Nova Scotia. Psychologically
- for me at least - it's light-years. I was shocked to rediscover
how American everybody was. The obvious truth had eluded me: if you
are born in the United States, grow up there, go to school there,
settle down there and raise kids, work at a job there - you end up
being an American. I'm a slow learner in many
respects.</sup>

^{It was getting late and I had
given up on unfinished business with Cherie. I was waylaid by a
high school acquaintance who I would politely refer to as a kid who
was once a cruel, masochistic, small-minded son of a bitch. I'll
call him Larry. Now he looked like someone who had been knocked
around but he also seemed like a rather gentle person. This, after
a pair of heart attacks and enough physical therapy to put him back
on his feet to attend a high school reunion.}

^{“Was I ever mean to you?” he
asked me out of the blue.}

^{Mean would be putting it
mildly. “Not really.”}

^{“No, come on. Tell me the
truth. Was I ever insulting or nasty?”}

^{In the mid 1960s he had taught
me how simple everyday words could be laced with emotional
hydrochloric acid. “It was a long time ago,” I
said.}

^{“This is important to me,” he
insisted. “Did you ever see me go after somebody just to be cruel
and rotten?”}

^{I could have kept a logbook.
“Don't worry about it.”}

^{“It's okay. Tell the truth. I
was rotten to people, wasn't I?”}

^{“Maybe
sometimes.”}

^{He looked at me, swallowed
hard and said, “I don't know why I was like that back then. I can't
understand it.”}

^{“We were
kids.”}

^{“I was an
asshole.”}

^{“Yeah, well . . .
”}

^{“No, I just wanted to say I'm
sorry to you or to anyone else I might have hurt.” He was shouting
it now. And I was deeply moved. We were each of us here for a
reason. Larry was here to apologize to everyone he'd hurt and I
thanked him for that, told him all was forgiven as far as I was
concerned. But I'd never been the worst victim. In an odd way, he
had even given me strength. We had wrestled each other in gym
class. On the street he would have had me face down on the
pavement, bloody-nosed, lips kissing oil stains from Ed Gressick's
old '57 Pontiac. But in a gym class with rules, I pinned Larry and
shocked his friends. One small step for man.}

^{I left Saul on the road to
Damascus and headed down the hall to the bar to see who was left.
Most of my old classmates had vanished into the same Camden County
night air that had allowed them to materialize.}

^{I found Cherie, however, and,
after a bit of small talk, I found myself holding out my hands in
front of me like a preacher would. Or like they were pages from a
book I was reading. I told her that I had really been in love with
her in the ninth grade. “I was never able to express it,” I said,
“and it's haunted me ever since.”}

^{I would not come out and
wallow in telling her what a truly hurting soul I was back then:
insecure, awkward, shy and somehow way too self-aware of how inept
I was in making contact with the world, especially the world of a
girl whom I wanted to be deeply involved with.}

^{“There was that party at Lynn
Dunn's, remember?” I said.}

^“Yes.”

^{“It was the night that you and
I were going to be together, really together for the first
time.”}

^{“Everybody
knew.”}

^{“You didn't show up. It was
just a stupid kids' party. Records on the stereo in Lynn's
basement, dancing. Kids showing off, nothing
serious.”}

^{“I wanted to be there,” Cherie
said.}

^{“The other girls knew why you
didn't come but they didn't tell me. They felt sorry for me and
some of them danced with me. But I was mad at you. For not showing
up.”}

^{“I can understand
that.”}

^{“And then I called you,” I
said. “I had to stretch the phone line out of the kitchen to sit on
the steps to the basement. My hands were sweating. It took me two
days to get up the nerve to call. I was really in love with you.
But I couldn't understand why you weren't there at that party. I
was mad at you.”}

^{“And I really cared for you
but . . . ”}

^{I interrupted her, I don't
know why. It was my Ancient Mariner thing. This part of the story
had to be told by me. “It was really awkward. I know I sounded
pissed off. And then you told me on the phone why you weren't at
the party. None of the girls who knew would tell me. Your brother
had been killed in Vietnam.”}

^{“It took me a long while to
recover.”}

^{“And I didn't know how to deal
with it.”}

^{“That's not your
fault.”}

^{I had been a Boy Scout in
those days and had a merit badge for everything from corn-farming
to public safety. But what I was really an expert at was an
inability to rise above my own petty self-consciousness and
communicate with another human being. Someone I cared deeply
for.}

^{“When you came back to school
you seemed okay. You were cheerful, friendly. You were always kind
to everyone,” I reminded her.}

^{“It was just my way of
covering it up.”}

^{“I wish you could have let me
know how I could have helped.”}

^{“You seemed to be ignoring
me.”}

^{“You were nice to me but you
were the type who was nice to everybody. I was afraid I was reading
too much into it.”}

^{“I rode my bike past your
house,” she told me, “just so that maybe I would see
you.”}

^{I had ridden past Cherie's
house dozens of times myself for a similar purpose. Two ships in a
deadly storm trying to save each other but failing to understand
the signals.}

^{We slowly and painfully pieced
together the tragic series of errors that kept us apart. It's
painfully obvious that I could have been of monumental help to her
in the darkest days of her life had I only the most rudimentary
ability to communicate, to rise up out of my own silly adolescent
insecurity and self-loathing to tell her how much I cared and how I
would have done anything to help her.}