The Early Years

Skilled body surfer shows how it's done

Take away, Take Away

Take away this ball and chain

Cause I'm sick and I'm tired

I can't take anymore pain

Take away, Take Away

Never to return again

Take Away, Take Away

Take away... This ball and chain

                                          -- Mike Ness, Social Distortion, released 1987

Before I knew it, the wave had sucked me up like an angry sea monster, swallowed me with its maw of churning foam, tossed me around so that I did not know up from down. I was totally at its mercy. How did I know to hold my breath? Instinctive reaction. I had no sea-going experience. 

Time stopped while I tumbled and flipped and flopped like a marionette cut loose. I saw newspaper headlines of drownings. I was a casualty, a goner.  I could not hold my breath one second longer, not one second longer, not one second more. I inhaled, expecting volumes of water to fill my lungs. I had committed the final act, only to breathe in... air. Precious air. 

I was alive. My face had emerged from the chaos of seawater at the precise second I had inhaled. A miracle? Stupid luck? Suddenly, I became aware that I was breathing. Then, just as suddenly, I was thrown down again. Another wave. Another period of holding my breath. But not as long. Never as long as that first wave.

Finally, my feet touched sand and I stood. 

I stumbled onto the beach where Conahan was sitting. He had seen the whole thing. He was smiling that wide, fish-eating grin, his bluish-yellow eyes creased and the ends of his sun-streaked hair flipping in the breeze. Was he smiling because I was still alive and glad to see me? Or was he smiling because he found my situation insanely comical? Maybe that's just how I remember him: always smiling.

"How long was I down?" I asked.

"About three minutes," he said, seemingly unfazed.

"Three minutes?!" I replied. "That was only three minutes!"

I figured that if I hadn't come up, at least he would be able to tell where I had been last seen. 

I was 15-years-old. It was my introduction to the shore-break waves at Newport Beach, a popular destination for high school kids from greater Orange County and beyond. We came from eastern-most Los Angeles County. Newport was the closest beach. I had, unknowingly, broken rule number-one of water safety: Never turn your back on the ocean.

Unlike most of the kids with whom I made the trek to the beach, I had not grown up going to the sandy shores of Southern California. My parents were old-school prairie folk more accustomed to farms and horses than beach-going. We rarely went to the beach. I never saw either of my parents in a bathing suit. 

Surfing was an inescapable attraction for my generation who were growing up in the land of milk and honey during the 1950s-60s.

One way or another -- with friends who had cars, by hitch-hiking, and for one marathon weekend by bicycle -- I found a way to get to the beach, some 40-60 miles through semirural Orange County.

The day before my near-death experience at Newport, Andy Conahan, Joe Voss and I had spent the night at the Fotheringham's beach house on Balboa Island. We had been invited as guests by Joe Fotheringham. Andy and Joe were freshman classmates of mine at Pomona Catholic Boy High School. Joe Voss was a year older. He had a driver's license and a car.

The next morning as Joe Voss tooled his old Chevy coupe along the empty Newport Beach streets on our way to the beach the AM radio station KFWB broke from its rock 'n roll format with a news flash: Movie actress Marilyn Monroe had died in her Brentwood home at age 36. Cause of death was presumed to be an overdose of sleeping pills.

The public announcement of a celebrity's death, especially someone as well known as the voluptuous blonde Marilyn Monroe, leaves a lasting impression.  My hearing the news on the way to the beach that morning and my subsequent near-drowning became tied together in my memory like a tight knot. I can mark that exact day, August 4, 1962.

As my high school years unfolded, I would spend more time with friends at Newport Beach -- primarily 15th Street where I learned to body surf -- as well as Laguna Beach and Doheny State Beach farther south where I learned to ride a surfboard. I never had my own board. I borrowed one from a schoolmate,  Bill Ciora, who generously offered his.  My ability to surf was self-taught, instinctive athleticism. I played football, basketball and ran track, so, I surmised, why couldn't I surf as well.

Our trips to Doheny (or Do-ho, as we called it) were more than sport: They were coated with adventure, from the road trip to get there, the subtle beauty of morning breaking at the beach, meeting girls and hanging out, feeling the natural warmth lying under the sun following a session in the water, then going to Henry's, a tiny market on Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) where we purchased a can of refried beans and a package of tortillas that were heated for us in a small oven. 

After a day of sun and salt, paddling and riding waves with friends, those simple, self-rolled burritos  tasted as good as any food I have ever eaten. Nick DeLorenzo, Pat Kady, Corky Dominic and Vince Dominic are names I remember from those days, my surfing buddies.

Although I became more familiar with riding waves, I never felt completely comfortable in the water, not nearly so much as the confidence I felt with my feet grounded on land. That would come later, many years later, when I lived at the beach and learned to study the tides and currents and how to judge waves, the essential elements of surfing.

Perhaps that August day at Newport in 1962 when I came face-to-face with mortality stayed with me, at least until I had a deeper understanding of the ocean and my relationship with it. Still, I have never approached the ocean since then without at least a twinge of anxiety. At the same time, due to many years of experience in the water, I have never felt the tension in my body disappear so easily and completely as when I am out there on a surfboard, floating free, feeling the ever changing rhythm of the ocean beneath me.

Last Wave:

Andy Conahan became a number-one rated tandem surfer with his girl friend, Candy. They competed in the world championships at Huntington Beach, Calif. circa 1966 which was featured on ABC TV's Wide World of Sports. After living the life of a free-and-easy surfer for several years, Andy quit surfing, became a police investigator and started a family.  He died of ALS at age 61.

Joe Fotheringham's younger brother, Mark, married my sister Mary. They have two children, my niece Lisa and nephew Peter, who are both married with children of their own.

The above lyrics by Mike Ness of Social Distortion are from the song, Ball and Chain. This song was covered in the beautifully lyrical body-surfing documentary film, "Come Hell or High Water" -- the plight of the torpedo people -- (released in 2012) directed by Keith Malloy.