Desperation Reef

“Johnny Angel!” Ronna said, waving him over. It was a girlhood nickname we’d taken from a corny old song Mom used to like. We used to giggle at.

John looked through the weed smoke layering down from the ceiling like fog, and started his way toward us.

One of Laguna’s young newspaper photographers did a slide show on the home-theater screen, focusing on the departing years’ highlights and personalities. Plenty of beaches, waves, and sunsets. Warm, sun-blushed pictures of the town where I was born, the town I loved, where I went to school and learned to surf and fell in love. Was married, and intended to raise my family. Where I would scatter Mom’s and Dad’s ashes, and die myself someday.

My Shangri-La.

Having been tipped that John and I would be here, the photographer included some of his most recent pictures of us: John, carving up a stormy Rockpile right, daring that frothing lip to knock him off.

Me, locked in a Thousand Steps barrel, then rifling out in a blast of spray.

Me, as Miss Laguna, in my blue formal dress and gold sash, holding roses — which brought hoots and whistles from the stoned partygoers. I was embarrassed. Don’t know why, because I was never embarrassed to be Miss Laguna. But I was surprised at how long ago that seemed, how innocent and young I looked. Three years!

Ronna took the stage after the photo show.

Voice like a fallen angel, and the guitar was a living, breathing instrument in her hands, “Romeo and Juliet” a hopeful, streetwise lament.

The overhead lights caught the sparkle in her eyes, and the amp threw her voice into the room like a handful of rough diamonds.

“Bringing Out the Elvis.”

“Angel from Montgomery.”

“Blue Rodeo,” written and recorded by Cat Parker, a friend of ours who had passed on:

Come on shoot us a star
Play some guitar
So we can find where you are
In the blue rodeo...

I loved these songs. Beautiful things, straight from the heart. During that set I felt alone with her, happily trapped in a small room, the notes falling on me like stars. I wasn’t worried about the child who had come to me, then left, or the swell that might or might not come, or the giant waves I’d be trying to ride, or money, or the article I was writing for the LA Times.

The songs took me away.

Later, John went back to the theater to watch himself in some Tahiti surfing videos he’d never seen. John loved surf movies with him as the star, as almost all surfers do. It’s vanity, sure, but it’s also a way of seeing yourself as you never do when riding a wave. Another adrenaline-charged moment. Another high. And a way of learning, too.

But I wasn’t in the mood for enormous waves. I suspected I’d be seeing plenty of those soon enough.

So I hung around the steaming backyard swimming pool, where hired bartenders circulated through the crowd with trays, serving big-bowl “midnight margaritas” made from “secret ingredients.” At midnight, we counted down and sang “Auld Lang Syne.” Our singing voices were bold and a bit wobbly by then. Our hosts lit against-the-law firecrackers on the pool deck, those snaky black ones that wiggle and smoke. I took a rare hit of grass off a hookah, and moments later was high beyond my experience. Felt like my horizontal hold was gone, and I was falling facedown and bouncing up, falling facedown and bouncing up, over and over — even though I was standing still. Flashes of color, floaters of light. Fragments of conversations, the words stretching and reforming like rubber. I found it incredibly funny when people — some fully clothed and some only in their underwear or less — started jumping into the pool. Someone pushed me in, so I purged most of my air and sank to the bottom and sat there in the overheated water, legs extended like an infant, blowing bubbles and watching them burst at the silver-blue surface. My denim pantsuit felt rough as shark skin. The deep-end pool light studied me — a monster’s eye. I wondered if John was enjoying his videos.

They had good towels for us New Year’s Eve party animals, so I got my long down coat from a rack in the foyer, wrung out my suit in the pool-house bathroom, ran my brush through my hair, and set out to find my husband.

Later, I found out that the midnight margaritas were laced with LSD and peyote, and the hookah weed with opium, and pharmaceutical cocaine supplied by a Laguna ear, nose, and throat specialist whose daughter was on our water polo team.

Some of our core Laguna surfers were in the theater toking up, the videos done and John gone. I sat down for a minute and watched the lights and colors on the projection screen. Eavesdropped on the surfers, loose-jawed and a little slurring as surfers can be, but with that stoked hopefulness we almost always have. It’s all about tomorrow. The next wave.