At the same time, I had figured out early on that achieving in school could give me the parental latitude to do what I wanted. As long as my grades were good, I could goof off with my friends or work on plays, dance performances, and the school newspaper—pursuits that fed my artistic, dramatic side and made me, surprisingly, one of the cool kids.
I loved all of it, but I had another motivation for wanting to avoid going home for as long as I could: my father was, as he might have put it, a boozer. I never knew what awaited me when I came home and he’d be three, four, maybe five enormous martinis into his evening. When he was sober, he could be funny and fun-loving. He was a quintessential charmer who was good with a story, quick with a joke, and a keen reader of people. When he was drunk, all those traits hardened into a weapon that he would use, with uncanny aim, to probe and eviscerate my weak spots, leaving me crying so hard sometimes I felt I would never stop.
“You’re a hedonist! An ingrate!” he would yell, warning that if I didn’t shape up, I’d never amount to anything, wasting all that he had sacrificed on my behalf. Compared to him, I didn’t know what it was to struggle. I had it so easy. What he could have done with all he’d given me! All he asked for in return was academic achievement and obedience, “and is that so goddamned much to ask?”
On some level it wasn’t—and I pretty much did what I could to comply. But for him, nothing short of perfection would do. I stood with him one afternoon on our concrete terrace, proudly showing him the ninety-seven I’d gotten on a math test. “Why isn’t it a hundred?” he asked, smiling but not really joking as the paper flapped in the breeze. It was clear that if I wanted my life to go on with any kind of peace and joy, failure would not be an option, a lesson that became a kind of organizing principle for everything I did going forward.
So what am I to do about surfing? The only way I could achieve even a basic competence would be to practice, but that alone presented a challenge. Surfing wasn’t like jogging or even tennis or golf, where equipment and facilities—public courts and courses, driving ranges, the concrete walls of handball courts against which to hit a ball—were readily available. Aside from the somewhat difficult matter of buying and storing a wetsuit and a board, there was the need for a large body of water with rideable waves, something in short supply in the middle of New York City.
Despite all that, I was determined to figure out how to take the lessons I sorely needed. I lived far from the ocean and had a demanding day job and only intermittent access to a car. I owned a barely used silver Honda SUV that I’d bought in California and loved, but it spent most of its time on the Upper West Side with my sister, who lived in the apartment where we grew up. She hadn’t left home for college but instead attended St. John’s in Queens, where our father had gone, and then followed in my mother’s footsteps to become a gifted public school teacher. After getting master’s degrees in education at Bank Street and Harvard and specializing in early childhood development and teaching, she was now back in New York, pursuing her doctorate at CUNY. Given her studies, she didn’t have a lot of extra cash or time, and she was managing the care of our father, a widower then in his nineties who could barely see and needed help with basic daily functions. The car had been an offering on my part to lighten her burden—make it easier to grocery shop, run errands, escape to the Paramus, New Jersey, malls where my mother had taken us on weekends—as well as assuage my guilt over not doing more to help.
It occurred to me that there must be someplace closer to Bed-Stuy where I could take lessons—maybe Long Beach or somewhere else not too far out on Long Island that I could get to by train. Late one night tooling around on the Internet, I came across a business called New York Surf School, located near an A train stop in the Rockaways.
The Rockaways? I hadn’t even noticed there was surfing when I was blithely eating fish tacos at Bob’s earlier in the summer. The neighborhood where the school taught was near his, and I couldn’t believe my luck in finding it. It appeared to be one of only two programs anywhere close to Brooklyn. They taught kids and adults in individual and small-group sessions, it wasn’t break-the-bank expensive, and I could get there on the subway. The school’s low-tech website felt friendly to me, and I saw pictures that included lots of smiling female students, some who even looked near my age. I figured I’d splurge on a few private lessons and then maybe try out the groups. After I paid online, I texted with a guy named Frank, who ran the school, to schedule my first session for a Saturday a few weeks later.
I woke up at about seven that morning to a storm raging outside the window behind my bed overlooking Atlantic Avenue, even at that hour a clogged, multichannel artery of speeding cars and trucks. Charcoal clouds stained the pearl-gray sky, rain bounced hard off the concrete alley downstairs, wind whipped tree limbs over the metal mesh fence that separated my building from an empty lot. I texted Frank, wondering if the lesson would still be on and if I should start heading out.
“We surf in the rain!!!” came the response, though he suggested I wait a little to allow it to let up. Of course you do, I thought, burrowing back under the covers. You’re going to be wet anyway.
An hour later I slipped out of bed, pulled on a bathing suit, got dressed, and packed a towel, underwear, and a water bottle into my bag. I can’t believe I’m doing this, I thought with a kind of mad excitement as I began making a smoothie and espresso to take with me, surprised that I wasn’t using the excuse of bad weather to talk myself out of going, that I was actually following through. Part of me ached to climb back into bed. But a bigger part was pushing me out into the wet, convinced that what lay beyond the soggy walk past the discount shops, food markets, storefront churches, and the old Slave Theater to the A train would be something to help fill the yawning chasm of my solitary weekend. That alone made it worth the foray.
The rain had nearly stopped, but it was still cold and gray by the time the train climbed the tracks from underground and headed toward an elevated station, marking the passage from Brooklyn to Queens. I’d been traveling for forty minutes already and I still had a whole ’nother borough to go. I watched as the train wound through the outer urban landscape, row after row of two- and three-story houses, a jumble of pentagons, squares, and triangles rendered in brick, stone, and vinyl siding.
We headed past Aqueduct Racetrack, crossing high over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway toward Howard Beach and Kennedy airport, and it hit me how far I was from the city I knew. It wasn’t even the same Rockaway I’d visited over the summer: instead of going toward the wealthy, suburban west end near Jacob Riis, this time I was aiming for the center of the peninsula, connected to the rest of the city by a different bridge and train trestles that led to the more densely populated high-rise neighborhoods that rub shoulders with Long Island. Suddenly the landscape shifted, with strands of marsh grass and scrub brush poking up between the train tracks and becoming thickets lining the passageway as we crossed into the wildlife refuge that surrounds Jamaica Bay. I caught glimpses of houses built on docks, boat hulls stretching over backyards, ducks and swans floating behind a fleeting screen of tree branches and vines just beginning to hint at turning from green to gold and russet as we rumbled through Broad Channel. Finally the Rockaway Peninsula came into view.