Crazy for the Storm (23 page)

On Friday night I skateboarded to a party with the surfer crew and they got into a fight with some jocks, reminding me that I used to be a jock. I wanted to hit somebody—it would feel good, doling out a little punishment and not just taking it all the time. Instead I watched from the sidelines.

It was a weekend and I had just come back from the beach when my mom told me that Grandma Ollestad had lung cancer. I touched my neck remembering my sore throats and I thought that maybe I could get throat cancer.

She didn’t smoke, did she? I said.

Never. That’s what’s so strange about it, she said. She’s going to Tijuana for a special treatment they don’t offer in the States. I thought we’d drive down and visit her next weekend.

Okay, I said.

I sat down on the couch and stared out the window. Grandma’s black lungs crawled with cancer-worms and I zoomed toward the ocean below as if tumbling down the hillside. When I looked at my mom again she appeared to be scattered around the living room as if I were in a house of mirrors. I closed my eyes and wondered what the hell was wrong with me.

The following Saturday we loaded Nick’s station wagon and I put my surfboard in last so it would not get dinged by the suitcases.

You’re not bringing your fucking surfboard, said Nick.

Why not? I said.

We’re going down there to spend time with your grandmother, not to surf. Take it out.

I’m not going to surf the whole time. Just after we’ve been there all day. Just in case it’s good.

No. Absolutely not.

Nick, said my mom. Let him bring the board. We’re not going to be in the hospital all day every day.

His grandmother is dying, Jan. This might be the last time he sees her. He can manage not to surf for two days.

He turned to me.

This is not about you, Norman. It’s about your grandmother. I know that’s hard for you to comprehend.

I get it, I said. I just want to have the board in case there’s some extra time. What’s wrong with that?

Because it’s not about that. You have to learn to think of other people sometimes without putting your selfish needs into the equation.

He grabbed the board and walked it to the side door of the garage, unlocked the door and went inside with it.

What an asshole, I said to my mom.

Just let it go, Norman, she said.

This will be good for you, Norman, Nick said with a grin as we drove away.

I wanted to slug him. It brought me back to those days on Topanga Beach when I wished I were bigger and stronger. I had always believed that I’d be able to whip him by the time I turned thirteen and now my thirteenth birthday was a month away and I wasn’t close.

Grandma’s silver curls were flat on one side and she had tubes in her arms and her eyes were sunken back in their sockets and colorless behind a glassy film. Eleanor was there with Lee and she cried when she saw me. An aunt or uncle offered me a seat and I collapsed into it. Grandpa sat on a rickety chair beside the hospital bed and watched Grandma. He was slouched and his face was haggard.

Somebody said, Little Norman’s here, and Grandma sat up. She found me and her eyebrows perked. Her pupils were so dilated that she looked blind. The rest of her face, apart from the eyebrows, was limp and expressionless. Then she shifted her attention across the room and spoke toward the empty corner. It was pure babble. Her arms rose and she gestured and babbled.

The morphine makes her hallucinate, explained Eleanor.

I watched her moan and talk to different imaginary things. Then she fell back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling, motionless. Grandpa put his hand on her arm and she stared at the ceiling with a clinched mouth and nobody spoke.

She’s kinda like Sandra was, I thought. Her body is there but her mind is gone.

When we left for the night I kissed and hugged Grandpa and he was all skin and bones. I waited with Eleanor outside the room while my mom and Nick said their good-byes. I asked her how Grandma could get lung cancer if she never smoked and was so healthy.

Grief, said Eleanor. If you push it down it can grow into something toxic like cancer. Your father was her masterpiece.

In our hotel room I thought about how it would have killed my dad if I had died and he had survived, just like it was killing Grandma. We were staying out by Rosarita Beach and I heard waves crashing in the distance and I wished I could escape out into them.

After a second day at the hospital it was time to say good-bye to Grandma. She had been lucid all morning and when I hugged her I felt her muscles and bones vised together and I knew she was in excruciating pain and that the moment I left they would shoot her up with morphine and she’d relax and hallucinate again. That was the last time I ever saw her.

On the drive home I decided there was no God and that we were all on our own here.

The following weekend I went to a party at a house in Brentwood with a big pool and a tennis court and its own movie theater. I kicked my skateboard onto the brick flower planter in the driveway and grinded my trucks along the edge, chipping off slivers of brick.

You totally thrashed their wall, said one of the guys I was rolling with.

I glanced back at the slivers on the ground.

Yep, I said, feeling that same sense of relief as when I broke the stall door.

The gang let out a nervous laugh. I led them around the back, through a gate and onto a lush green lawn with rolling mounds and flowers and roses along the edges. We marched around the corner and the entire party—maybe twenty-five kids—turned around to see us. Missy the hostess was lounging poolside with her set of rich girls on gigantic pink towels. She lifted her Ray-Bans and waved only her fingers, ambivalent about our presence.

Immediately I met each and every pair of male eyes staring at us. I wanted to punch someone again. Feel myself unload. It seduced me. I scowled at the boys, hoping for a scowl back. There were no takers and I strutted to the cooler and got a beer.

We sat on our skateboards, kicking aside the chairs and benches—a rebuke of civilization—and sipped our beers, commenting on the digs. Where a half-pipe skateboard ramp would go, or if we should drain the pool and skate it.

Missy stood up and straightened her bikini and waddled over.

You guys need to promise to be mellow, okay? said Missy.

Can we drain your pool? I said.

Norman. No way. I’ll call the rent-a-cops if you mess with the pool. I’m not kidding.

Where’re your parents? I said.

They’re out of town, but the housekeeper’s here, so…

So we can totally rage, I said.

That got a big laugh and some howls of enthusiasm.

One of the rich girls whom I had never seen before made a comment. I whipped around and confronted her.

What’d you say?

The girl was pretty. Hair perfect. Skin even and supple. She wore a ridiculous gold dress and swanky gold sandals and clutched a frilly handbag to her bosom. She spoke with an accent—English maybe—and tightened her mouth into a sphincter when I addressed her.

You’re rude and immature, she said with her nose literally in the air.

Fuck being mature, I said. That’s boring.

What’s wrong with you? she said.

I opened my mouth to respond and I saw all those kids staring at me. I stumbled on my words and it seemed like everyone could see how weird and sad I really was and it scared me.

I grabbed her arm, tugged her off the lounge chair and flung her into the pool.

She came up with her hair in her face and her dress billowed
across the surface and her arms got caught in it and I thought I’d have to dive in and save her. Half the party was laughing.

Several girls and a boy went to her rescue and helped her out of the pool. Her eyes and nose were covered by wet limp hair and her mouth trembled. Her nipples were exposed through the wet gold material.

Missy and company took the girl inside and the party died. I was afraid to make eye contact with anyone so I opened another beer and skated onto the tennis court and did layback tail-slides on the smooth concrete. Thinking of that girl sobbing, her limp dress clinging to her like cellophane, triggered a strange emptying sensation in my face—it was eroding into a skull. My skin seemed to crawl off me, leaving the sinewy muscles and tendons of my entire body fully exposed. A grotesque, mutilated boy. I wondered what my dad would think of me now.

Missy appeared, trailing two rent-a-cops. It was time to leave. We gathered our boards and I flipped the cops off and we ran out the gate.

We rode the bus to Westwood and picked a fight with some Emerson Junior High kids. One of our crew got pinned in a telephone booth by three big Emerson guys. The rest of my crew was busy with their own battles. Again I found myself on the sidelines and I remembered a man at my dad’s funeral describing how a mob of Stanford football fans had jumped him at a game, and how my dad was the only guy that charged in there to help him. I charged headlong into the phone booth, ramming two big guys in the back with my skateboard. It broke them apart and somehow we scrambled away just as cop sirens were approaching.

The crew split up and I hid atop Makeout Mountain, then
took the back streets to Sunset Boulevard and rode the bus home. I made it just before my curfew. Nick was up watching TV and asked me how I got the cut on my nose.

Fell skating, man, I said.

I went downstairs and looked in the mirror. I couldn’t remember getting hit in the nose. My eyes looked tired and the dark circles were like a sick boy’s and my body vibrated and I told myself that rich chick got what she deserved. Still, her quivering mouth and the way she stumbled toward the house in her wilted dress bothered me and I turned away from my reflection in the mirror.

When I awoke the next morning I was still on edge. I went to Topanga and paddled out, not saying hello to anyone. I dropped in on every surfer except the legends and Rolloff. I slugged a big kid named Benji in the face when he splashed water in my eyes after I snaked his wave. He grabbed my hair and dunked me under. Shane called the kid off. Benji let me up and I told him to go fuck himself and paddled to the point.

We got your back, Norman, said Shane. But you might want to tone it down, you know.

I nodded.

The aggression and anger seemed to enfold and redouble inside me and it made me jittery and I kept blowing the waves, digging a rail or overextending my turns. Benji made a point to laugh loudly each time. I reminded myself that he could not punch me even though I deserved it and I relished that injustice.

I turned thirteen and that summer I spent half my time in fistfights. I got my ass kicked fairly often, and the blows to my nose
or jaw or ribs were strangely gratifying. Even in defeat I always made sure I got a couple licks in that the other guy wouldn’t soon forget. Sometimes getting whupped made me feel tougher than doing the whupping. I knew I could take anything and that made me feel like the winner in spite of my blackened eye or bloodied nose.

That fall I did poorly in school and Nick grounded me for a month.

One afternoon while I read surf magazines in my prison cell Nick came home early from work. I heard him banging around in the living room and then he called out my name. The blinds were drawn and there was a projector set up on the coffee table. Nick told me to sit down on the couch and watch the screen in front of the TV. He flipped a switch and the projector chugged and spit out a beam of light. On the screen appeared a Pop Warner football game. Nick had hired an editor to assemble a highlight reel of all my best plays—tackling big fullbacks that had darted through the defensive line into the backfield. Catching a pass over the middle as a monstrous linebacker engulfed me, the ball still in my arms when he pounded me into the grass. A quick shot of my dad eating peanuts in the stands with the sports section folded in a rectangle triggered a searing pain that burned a hole in my chest. I had to close my eyes until the ache went away.

When the reel tailed out Nick and I reminisced about me hiding fishing weights in my jockey cup during the weigh-in, about some of the dangerous neighborhoods that we played games in, and the various idiosyncrasies of the coaches and players.

You’ll have this film to look back on forever, he said.

And I compared how I was then to how I felt now. I was callused and irritable these days, brooding. Who was that sweet-
natured kid on the screen? What happened to him? Like most things that made me uncomfortable, though, I shrugged it off.

Rolloff called to give me surf reports and I read surf magazines to try to quench my hunger. After school I was pretty bored just loafing around the house, so I decided to fix the dings in my surfboard—at least I’d get to touch it. I fished out the can of resin and catalyst from the storage space under the garage and saw a cardboard box labeled Little Norman in the back corner.

I dragged it out and opened it up. I unearthed newspaper clippings, then yearbooks, then my Murcher Kurcher stories, and finally old photographs of me playing hockey, surfing Mexico, ski racing, me and Dad skiing St. Anton together, and me, as a baby, riding on my dad’s back while he surfed. Mom told me she had come home from grocery shopping to discover me and Dad out in the surf. I went buzzeerk, she said. How could you be so careless with his little body? she screamed at my dad.

I dropped the photograph and tears pressed against the back of my eyes. I stooped and pushed the tears back. You’re not some wimp that can’t handle what happened, I told myself.

I called Sunny over and hugged her and rubbed her belly. She flopped onto her back and wiggled around in canine bliss.

I’m happy like you, I said.

Then I threw the stick as far as I could, and she went bounding down the canyon.

I put the photos back in the box, then the other stuff, and one of the newspaper clippings caught my eye: a
Los Angeles Times
black-and-white photograph of me sitting in a wheelchair with bandages all over my swollen face, a black eye and a bulkily wrapped right hand.