The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (6 page)

We stop at Brooklyn Industries, where Karissa admires an army-green winter coat with a faux fur hood. She really loves it, but her credit card is maxed—as is mine—and she’s trying to save everything for the big move.

She wants to spend the rest of the night in my apartment, where no one can see her face, but I convince her to meet up with some friends at Pete’s Candy Store, a bar located in a former confectionary shop.

We have some beers and listen to a folksinger from Ohio until about eight thirty, when my friend Jocko shows up. He’s a big part of the reason I’m in New York; he helped me get the book contract with Soft Skull Press. He’d grown up in Colorado too, near Rocky Mountain National Park. Learning to skate up in the mountains features prominently in his memoir
The Answer Is Never
. He also makes an aptly titled zine called
Elk
.

When I introduce him to Karissa, he asks what part of the state she’s from.

“I live in the thrilling metropolis that is Fort Collins,” she says.

“Fort Collins? I used to skate a vert ramp there back in the eighties,” Jocko says.

“I skate in Fort Collins right now, in the—what is it that we’re calling this era? The zeros?”

“A Colorado girl who skates. I could totally hug you right now.”

“Well, why don’t you?” Karissa says.

Jocko gives her a big bear hug, which genuinely thrills Karissa. It’s something I love about her, the way she truly appreciates people, her authentic warmth. There’s absolutely no pretense to her, a rare thing in this neck of Brooklyn.

The next day Karissa and I drive up to the Berkshires for Thanksgiving dinner with my mother’s best friend and her family. We have a big kosher meal, and it’s a little awkward, spending the holidays with someone else’s family. Karissa hardly says a word.

After dinner, we finally get out for a walk, alone.

We slump around in the November drizzle, shuffling through fallen leaves, our hoods pulled up. I reach over to hold her hand, but she pulls away.

“I don’t think I belong here,” she says.

“They’re old family friends,” I say. “They’re happy to have us.”

“I’m talking about
here
. New York. That city; this whole coast.”

“You can belong wherever you want.”

“Maybe. The problem is
you
don’t think I belong here, either.”

There’s a long pause. I look down at the sodden earth beneath my feet, unable to lift my eyes out of the mud and dead leaves to face Karissa.

“You don’t want me to move here, do you?”

“Of course I do.”

“Don’t lie. You don’t want me to come. I can feel it.”

I finally look up. Her face seems hollowed out beneath her hood, two Rorschach semicircles of mascara beneath her eyes. I’m just as lost in these dark woods as she is; the only thing I know now is how to step on a city-bound train, regardless of how truly awful and alone it feels.

“I love you, but it doesn’t seem like you’re ready to move anytime soon, and I don’t know how to make this work long distance. It just seems like we’re at different places—”

“No,” she says, cutting me off. “We’re not at
different places in our lives
. You’re in this fucking place, and I’m nowhere.”

It’s silent on our drive back to the city, save for the sound of rain lashing the windshield. The next two days are equally silent and awkward, until it’s time for her to fly home. She goes on a shopping spree a couple hours before I take her to the airport.

She returns wearing the Brooklyn Industries army-green coat, the hood pulled up to cover her face.

I put my arms around her and she hugs me back weakly.

“I figured screw it,” she says. “I might as well spend the money on something.”

We get in my truck and she shows me the cookie she’d bought for herself at a bagel shop—a big sugar cookie with a smiley face made from yellow icing. It’s quite possibly the saddest thing I’ve ever seen considering that she is, at the moment, weeping. Just before I drop her off at LaGuardia, she looks at me one last time.

“You know, you talk about loving everyone all the time like you’re some sort of enlightened being,” she says. “But the only reason you love anyone is to make yourself feel better.”

T
he next few weeks I spend as much time as possible skating the Autumn Bowl, trying to numb out the pain and guilt over Karissa. Sometimes I skate well and the sessions are transcendent, and I feel like I’m exactly where I need to be. Other times we’re just a bunch of dudes carving circles inside a big brick cave on a Saturday night—moving really fast, straining ourselves, risking serious bodily harm from moment to moment, but never really getting anywhere.

M
y breakup with Karissa is theoretical at first; we continue talking on the phone almost daily, even after five or six months, when the weather finally warms up. This makes it difficult for either of us to move forward, but the one bright spot of summer is that I finally have time to learn how to surf.

It starts out on Long Island, where I spend Memorial Day weekend at Kyle Grodin’s beach house. Career-free and on the back side of thirty, Grodin spends his days surfing, skateboarding, and rock climbing; he’s independently wealthy
¹
and has what seems to me like the perfect life. His place is a rustic and comfortable Cape Cod with split cedar shingles, but it has a spooky,
Great Expectations
vibe to it. His father passed away when Kyle was still young, and then his mom died before he turned thirty. He was adopted, so losing his parents was doubly traumatic. He keeps up the house like a dusty museum, the living room lined in loud, seventies-era orange wallpaper with the words
peace
and
love
spelled out in silver foil. An old piano sits near the front entrance, covered with unused sheet music and knick knacks; the built-in bookshelves in the hallway are still filled with all his parents’ old books.

That first night at his house, Grodin leads me into a spare bedroom off the kitchen, a place cluttered with more books belonging to his father, who was also a writer.

“This is the room where my dad died,” Kyle says. “I thought since you’re a writer, you might like to sleep in here,” he says, his macabre sense of humor cranked all the way up.

While I’m getting ready for bed, I realize I forgot my contact lens solution. Kyle takes me upstairs, to his bathroom, where he still keeps some of his parents’ personal effects, including several boxes of saline. “Here,” Kyle says, handing me a bottle of Opti-Free with a 1995 price tag, “use all you want.”

Fortunately, Kyle doesn’t live alone. He shares the house with his fiancée, Anka, and a couple roommates, including a self-admitted boozehound named Scott Dio. I bump into Scott down in the kitchen, just before he heads out to the bars.

“Do you like my vest?” he asks, pointing both index fingers at the khaki, multi-mesh-pocketed affair.

“It’s great,” I say. “What is it, a fishing vest?”

“No sir. This here is a
beer
vest.” Without further explanation, he invites me out for drinks, then calls me a pussy when I decline.

“What are you going to do, hang around here with my tubby roommate?” Scott says, motioning upstairs, toward Kyle’s room.

“Actually, I’m just going to bed.”

“Okay, good night, sleep tight. You
pussy
.”

Later, when Kyle comes down for a nighttime snack—half a box of Honey Nut Cheerios—I bring up my conversation with Scott.

“Pay no attention to that fat ass,” Kyle says, mouth full of cereal. “He still owes me two months’ rent. I’m about to kick him out of this dirty flophouse.”

On our way to the skatepark the next afternoon, we battle the notorious Hamptons traffic. Fueled by refined sugar and caffeine, Grodin explodes into constant fits of road rage; they abate only during moments when he ogles young, well-heeled Manhattanite tourists, like the Uggs boot—wearing teenager who jaywalks in front of us on her way to the East Hampton Häagen-Dazs.

“You know what I’d do with that girl right there?” he says.

“Oh Jesus, Grodin. She’s like
fifteen
.”

“Yeah, she is a little old for my tastes. But I’d still like to buy her a nice big chocolate ice cream cake,” he says, checking out her ass in the rear view.

“Let me guess what you’d do with it.” In Kyle’s favorite fantasy tableau, he violates the object of his affections with various dessert items—cherry cobblers, upside-down pineapple cakes, all manner of fresh fruit, entire tubs of cake frosting, Hostess Ding Dongs.

“
Oh yeah
,” he says, “I’d cram that whole cake right up her crack.”

I bury my face in my hands, a little nauseated even though I’ve been hearing about his perverted dessert fantasies for years. It’s all just talk, of course, except for his love of sweets. He could easily devour an entire ice cream cake in a couple sittings, just like I’ve witnessed him eat a whole pumpkin pie, or a half dozen doughnuts, or two packages of jelly-filled Dutch cookies dipped in dark chocolate. The next morning, at a Kiwanis club community pancake feed in Amagansett, he eats seventeen flapjacks.

“I think I could do five more,” he says, relishing his last pancake. “But I want to skate later.”

“What this place needs is a vomitorium,” I say, feeling bloated even after my relatively meager seven pancakes.

“I feel great,” he says, rubbing and slapping his distended, deeply suntanned belly. It looks like a twenty-pound Thanksgiving turkey, lavishly basted and oven-browned. “This is actually an improvement on the breakfast I ate yesterday. Half a box of Fruity Pebbles, half a pound of peanut M&M’s, and a two-liter bottle of Pepsi.”

Kyle is the very definition of an emotional eater. A mutual friend remembers how, feeling terribly sad for him just after his mother’s death, she’d asked if there was anything in the world he needed.
Pizza
, he’d replied, grinning impishly. She thought there was something childlike and innocent about it, until the delivery pizza arrived and Kyle began gorging himself—folding two slices together and shoveling them down—clearly his way of dealing with grief. On more than one occasion I’ve heard Kyle make off-the-cuff remarks about killing himself with food.

“Grodin, have you ever heard of adult-onset diabetes?” I ask.

“Why, you think I’m gonna get it?”

“You’re like the ultimate candidate,” I say. “In one day you dump more refined sugar into your bloodstream than most people do in a month. Keep it up and you’ll have to inject yourself with insulin every day.”

He shrugs. Licks some maple syrup off his finger. “Ah, fuck it. Let’s go surfing.”

Grodin takes me out to a beach break called Wiborgs, where he out-fits me with a full wetsuit and his yellow nine-foot-five longboard. I follow him reluctantly into the cold, churning Atlantic, remembering my days as a skinny twelve-year-old in San Diego, before I had the sense to duck under the waves, when I got constantly worked over, held under, tossed around, and washed up onto the beach, choking for breath and swearing never again. On my thirteenth birthday, my dad bought me a six-foot fluorescent green surfboard and a wetsuit, then sent me out by myself on a stormy day at La Jolla Shores. I hadn’t even made it out into the lineup when I got nailed by a big guy on a ten-foot longboard. His massive single-fin slashed the top of my thigh, knifing through neoprene into my flesh, the blow so severe it temporarily paralyzed my entire left leg, leaving a permanent dent in my thigh. The apologetic longboarder picked me up and carried me out of the water, dripping and limp, like a reverse baptism. Shortly afterward we moved inland, where I took up skateboarding, and despite the constant road rash and sprained ankles, found it much safer than surfing.

“Get out here in the lineup,” Grodin yells, beckoning with his left hand. I flop my way through the shallows, trying to heft the huge board up and over neck-high ramparts of whitewater while staying clear of incoming surfers. Farther out in the bigger swells, I duck backward under a few breakers and pull the board over my head as Kyle had instructed.

“Why you paddling like that?” Grodin says when I finally reach him, panting and sputtering, my arm muscles cramping after ten minutes in the water. “Don’t let your legs hang off the side of the board. You look like a little girl on a pony.”

By the time I manage the proper position, Grodin has already caught a wave in, leaving me bobbing around by myself out in the open ocean, clueless and scared. I watch from behind as he drops into the peak and throws his arms up in the air like a referee signaling a touchdown, the same thing he does sometimes after landing a difficult trick on a skate ramp. He catches five or six waves while I flail around, paddling my heart out with zero results. Fortunately, he comes back out and explains what I’m doing wrong.

“You’ll never catch anything this far out,” he says, a hint of genuine patience in his voice now. “You have to come farther inside where the waves are actually walling up. And you have to paddle at the same speed as the wave or you’ll never—” Spotting another promising wave, he breaks off mid sentence and rides it all the way in to the shore, where he bellies up on the beach to sleep off the pancakes.

Determined to catch at least one ride, I stay out in the water, reluctantly coming closer in to the shore where they’re breaking at their heaviest, most dynamic point. What Kyle makes look easy and sometimes even graceful is actually one of the most difficult things in the world, even for a lifelong skateboarder. Imagine crossing a deep, swollen river on the back of an unbroken horse. Now imagine trying to stand up in the saddle. The muscles in my arms are completely spent, feeling almost as sore and paralyzed as my thigh after getting bashed by the longboarder back when I was thirteen.

Finally, after twenty minutes of failing, I catch a small wave, wobble my way to my feet, and ride it for a solid six seconds or more, licking salt spray off my lips and totally enjoying the feeling of skimming across the surface. I jump off in the shallows, splash in to shore, and sit down next to Kyle, feeling triumphant as I peel off the wetsuit.