The Gentlemen's Hour Page 0,8

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

9. Tourists on rented boards

10. Localism

Items 9 and 10 were controversial.

Everyone admitted to having mixed feelings about tourists on rented boards, especially the Styrofoam longboards. On the one hand, they were truly a pain in the ass, messing up the water with their inept wipeouts, ignorance, and lack of surf courtesy. On the other hand, they were an endless source of amusement, entertainment, and employment, seeing as how it was Hang’s job to rent them said boards, and Dave’s to jerk them out of the water when they attempted to drown themselves.

But it was item 10, localism, that sparked serious debate and discussion.

“I get localism,” Tide said. “I mean, we don’t like it when strangers intrude on the Dawn Patrol.”

“We don’t like it,” Johnny agreed, “but we don’t beat them up. We’re broly.”

“You can’t own the ocean,” Boone insisted, “or any part of it.”

But he had to admit that even in his lifetime he had witnessed the gradual crowding out of his beloved surf breaks, as the sport gained in popularity and became cultural currency. It seemed like everyone was a surfer these days, and the water was crowded. The weekends were freaking ridiculous, and Boone was tempted sometimes to take Saturdays and Sundays off, there were so many (mostly bad) surfers hitting the waves.

It didn’t matter, though; it was just something you had to tolerate. You couldn’t stake out a piece of water like it was land you’d bought. The great thing about the ocean was that it wasn’t for sale, you couldn’t buy it, own it, fence it off—hard as the new luxury hotels that were appearing on the waterside like skin lesions tried to block off paths to the beaches and keep them “private.” The ocean, in Boone’s opinion, was the last stand of pure democracy. Anyone—regardless of race, color, creed, economic status, or the lack thereof—could partake of it.

So he found localism understandable but ultimately wrong.

A bad thing.

A malignantly bad thing, because more and more often, over the past few years, Boone, Dave, Tide, and Johnny all found themselves playing peacemaker, intervening in disputes out on the water that threatened to break into fights. What had been a rare event became commonplace: preventing some locies from hammering an interloper.

There was that time right at PB. It wasn’t the Dawn Patrol, it was a Saturday afternoon so the water was crowded with locals and newcomers. It was tense out on the line, too many surfers trying to get in the same waves, and then one of the locals just went off. This newbie had cut him off on his line, forcing him to bail, and he sloshed through the whitewater and went after the guy. Worse, his buddies came in behind him.

It would have been serious, a bad beat-down, except Dave was on the tower and Johnny was in the shallows playing with his kids. Johnny got there first and got between the aggro locies and the dumb newbie and tried to talk some sense. But the locies weren’t having it, and it looked like it was on when Dave came up, and then Boone and Tide, and the Dawn Patrol combo plate got things settled down.

But Boone and the other sheriffs from the Dawn Patrol weren’t at every break, and the ugly face of localism started to scowl at a lot of places. You started to see bumper stickers proclaiming “This Is Protected Territory,” and the owners of those cars—too often fueled by meth and beer—felt entitled to enforce