The Gentlemen's Hour

never knew it. She just admired his energy, his presence, and wanted it for herself.

Other things K2 did?

Coached surfing at a local high school.

Sit back and ponder that a little bit. You’re a high school baseball player, and Hank Aaron shows up one day and is going to stay and teach you how to swing the stick? You play a little b-ball and Michael Jordan volunteers to spend his afternoons and weekends perfecting your jumper? Are you kidding me?!

K2, Mister Pipeline, the Zen Master himself, out there showing kids how to surf and how to do it right, how to carry themselves, how to behave, how to treat other people. K2, Mister Pipeline, the Zen Master, telling them to stay in school, spurn drugs and gangs. If you’re a kid and you’re hanging with K2, it’s cool to stay clean and straight, cool to stay off the corner, maximum cool to hang with that man, eat PB&J, and learn ukulele chords.

Get it—K2 had Samoan gangbangers out there on Saturday mornings with trash bags, cleaning up the beaches around O’side and laughing the whole time. K2, more silver than black in his full head of hair by then, had black kids from Golden Hill in the water on body boards, talking about saving their money to get the real thing. There was a downturn in gang violence, most of it having to do with sheer demographics, but the local police laid a piece of it right on K2’s doorstep.

K2 showed up at the charity events and the walkathons, always found some piece of memorabilia to donate to school auctions, never said no if he could find a way to say yes.

He became a fixture at the PB Gentlemen’s Hour, standing around the beach talking story, more often out in the water catching rides, his style still elegant if less hard-charging. Boone would see him around from time to time, at Jeff’s or The Sundowner, or just on the beach or some surf event. K2 would always ask after his parents, they’d exchange a few words. Every now and again they surfed together.

Boone admired him, looked up to him, learned from him.

He wasn’t alone in that. For good reason, San Diego loved that man.

He was a hero.

Maybe a saint.

Then Corey Blasingame killed him.

10

It happened outside The Sundowner.

Which makes what happened all the worse, because the restaurant-bar-hangout is an icon of the San Diego surf scene. Faded photos of great local surfers riding their waves decorate its walls; famous surfboards that have provided some of those rides hang from its ceilings.

It goes beyond memorabilia, though. The Sundowner stands for the brotherhood—and, increasingly, the sisterhood—of surfing. A hangout like The Sundowner stands for the surf ethic—peace, friendship, tolerance, individuality—an overall philosophy that people sharing a common passion are, indeed, a community. In short, everything that Kelly Kuhio taught by example.

In Pacific Beach, that community gathers in The Sundowner. To share a meal, a drink, some stories, some laughs. From time to time, a few tourists might come in and get overrefreshed, or some chucklehead from east of the 5 might walk in looking for trouble—which is where unofficial bouncers such as Boone, Dave, or Tide might be asked to intervene—but surfers never cause problems in The Sundowner. Sure, a surfer might have a few too many beers and get silly-stupid and have to be carried out by his buddies, a guy might yack on the floor (see Mai Tai Tuesdays), a boy might try to surf a table and end up in the e room for a few stitches, but violence just doesn’t happen.

Well, didn’t used to.

The ugly, painful truth is that violence has been seeping into the surf community for some time, really since the mid-eighties, when the drug-blissed hippie surfer era gave way to something a little edgier. Over the years, grass gave way to coke, and coke gave way to crack, crack to speed, speed to meth. And meth is a violent fucking drug.

The other thing was overpopulation—too many people wanting a place in the wave and not enough wave to accommodate them; too many cars looking for a place to park and not enough spaces.

A new word crept into surf jargon.

Localism.

Easy to understand—surfers who lived near a certain break and surfed it their whole lives wanted to defend their turf against newcomers who threatened to crowd them out of a piece of water they considered their home —but it was an ugly thing.

Locies started to put up warning signs: “If you don’t live here, don’t surf here.” Then they began to vandalize strangers’ cars—soap the bodies, slash the tires, shatter the windshields. Then it got directly physical, with the locies actually beating up the newcomers—in the parking places, on the beach, even in the water.

Which, to surfers such as Boone, was sacrilege.

You didn’t fight in the water. You didn’t threaten, throw punches, beat people up.

You surfed.

If a guy jumped your wave, you set him straight, but you didn’t foul a sacred place with violence.

“Fighting in the lineup,” Dave opined one Dawn Patrol, “would be like stealing in church.”

“You go to church?” Hang Twelve asked.

“No,” Dave answered.

“Have you ever been to church?” High Tide asked. He actually has—since he left his gangbanging days behind, Tide goes to church every Sunday.

“No,” Dave answered. “But I knew this nun once—”

“I don’t think I want to hear this,” Tide said.

“Well, she wasn’t still a nun when I knew her—”

“That I believe,” Boone said. “So what about her?”

“She used to talk about it.”

“She used to talk about stealing in church?” Johnny Banzai asked. “Christ, no wonder she was an ex- nun.”

“I’m just saying,” Dave persisted, “that fighting while surfing is . . . is . . .”

“‘Sacrilegious’ is the word you’re searching for,” Johnny said.

“You know,” Dave answered, “you really play into a lot of Asian stereotypes. Better vocabulary, better in school, higher SAT scores . . .”

“I do have a better vocabulary,” Johnny said, “I was better in school, and I did have higher SAT scores.”

“Than Dave?” Tide asked. “You didn’t have to be Asian, you just had to show up.”

“I had other priorities,” Dave said.

Codified in the List Of Things That Are Good, an inventory constantly under discussion and revision during the Dawn Patrol, and which conversely necessitated the List Of Things That Are Bad, which, as currently constituted, went:

1. No surf

2. Small surf

3. Crowded surf

4. Living east of the 5

5. Going east of the 5

6. Wet-suit rash

7. Sewage spills

8. Board racks on BMWs