Virginia-born Tom Wolfe invented the stylized exclamation-point-filled New Journalism with a 1963 Esquire feature titled “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” For decades, Wolfe was one of America’s most popular and acclaimed authors in both fiction and nonfiction, and his bestselling books include The Right Stuff (1979), The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), and A Man in Full (1998).

“The Pump House Gang,” Wolfe’s 7,000-word essay on Southern California surf culture, first ran as a feature in a 1966 issue of the New York World Journal Tribune; two years later it was the lead essay in a book of the same title.

Our boys never hair out. The black panther has black feet. Black feet on the crumbling black panther. Pan-thuh. Mee-dah. Pam Stacy, 16 years old, a cute girl here in La Jolla, California, with a pair of orange bell-bottom hip-huggers on, sits on a step about four steps down the stairway to the beach and she can see a pair of revolting black feet without lifting her head. So she says it out loud, “The black panther.”

Somebody farther down the stairs, one of the boys with the 

 hair and khaki shorts, says, “The black feet of the black panther.”

“Mee-dah,” says another kid. This happens to be the cry of a, well, 

 society known as the Mac Meda Destruction Company.

All these kids, seventeen of them, members of the Pump House crowd, are lollygagging around the stairs down to Windansea Beach, La Jolla, California, about 11 a.m., and they all look at the black feet, which are a woman’s pair of black street shoes, out of which stick a pair of old veiny white ankles, which lead up like a senile cone to a fudge of tallowy, edematous flesh, her thighs, squeezing out of her bathing suit, with old faded yellow bruises on them, which she probably got from running eight feet to catch a bus or something. She is standing with her old work-a-hubby, who has on 

dals: you know, a pair of navy-blue anklet socks and these sandals with big, wide, new-smelling tan straps going this way and that, 

. Man, they look like orthopedic sandals, if one can imagine that. Obviously, these people come from Tucson or Albuquerque or one of those hincty adobe towns. All these hincty, crumbling black feet come to La Jolla-by-the-sea from the adobe towns for the weekend. They even drive in cars all full of thermos bottles and mayonnaisey sandwiches and some kind of latticework wooden-back support for the old crock who drives and Venetian blinds on the back window.

Nobody says it to the two old crocks directly. God, they must be practically 50 years old. Naturally, they’re carrying every piece of garbage imaginable: the folding aluminum chairs, the newspapers, the lending-library book with the clear plastic wrapper on it, the sunglasses, the sun ointment, about a vat of goo—

It is a Mexican standoff. In a Mexican standoff, both parties narrow their eyes and glare but nobody throws a punch. Of course, nobody in the Pump House crowd would ever even jostle these people or say anything right to them; they are too cool for that.

Everybody in the Pump House crowd looks over, even Tom Coman, who is a cool person. Tom Coman, 16 years old, got thrown out of his garage last night. He is sitting up on top of the railing, near the stairs, up over the beach, with his legs apart. Some nice long willowy girl in yellow slacks is standing on the sidewalk but leaning into him with her arms around his body, just resting. Neale Jones, 16, a boy with great lank perfect surfer’s hair, is standing nearby with a Band-Aid on his upper lip, where the sun has burnt it raw. Little Vicki Ballard is up on the sidewalk. Her older sister, Liz, is down the stairs by the Pump House itself, a concrete block, 15 feet high, full of machinery for the La Jolla water system. Liz is wearing her great “Liz” styles, a hulking rabbit-fur vest and black-leather boots over her Levis, even though it is about 85 out here and the sun is plugged in up there like God’s own dentist lamp and the Pacific is heaving in with some fair-to-middling surf. Kit Tilden is lollygagging around, and Tom Jones, Connie Carter, Roger Johnson, Sharon Sandquist, Mary Beth White, Rupert Fellows, Glenn Jackson, Dan Watson from San Diego, they are all out here, and everybody takes a look at the panthers.

The old guy, one means, you know, he must be practically 50 years old, he says to his wife, “Come on, let’s go farther up,” and he takes her by her fat upper arm as if to wheel her around and aim her away from here.

But she says, “No! We have just as much right to be here as they do.”

,” the work-a-hubby says, calling his own wife by her official married name, as if to say she took a vow once and his word is law, even if he is not testing it with the blond kids here—“farther up, 

They start to walk up the sidewalk, but one kid won’t move his feet, and, oh, god, her work-a-hubby breaks into a terrible shaking Jell-O smile as she steps over them, as if to say, Excuse me, Sir, I don’t mean to make trouble, please, and don’t you and your colleagues rise up and jump me, screaming 

 verboten for people practically 50 years old. This is a segregated beach. They can look down on Windansea Beach and see nothing but lean tan kids. It is posted “no swimming” (for safety reasons), meaning surfing only. In effect, it is segregated by age. From Los Angeles on down the California coast, this is an era of age segregation. People have always tended to segregate themselves by age, teenagers hanging around with teenagers, old people with old people, like the old men who sit on the benches up near the Bronx Zoo and smoke black cigars. But before, age segregation has gone on within a larger community. Sooner or later during the day everybody has melted back into the old community network that embraces practically everyone, all ages.

But in California today surfers, not to mention rock ‘n’ roll kids and the hot-rodders or Hair Boys, named for their fanciful pompadours—all sorts of sets of kids—they don’t merely hang around together. They establish whole little societies for themselves. In some cases they live with one another for months at a time. The “Sunset Strip” on Sunset Boulevard used to be a kind of Times Square for Hollywood hot dogs of all ages, anyone who wanted to promenade in his version of the high life. Today “The Strip” is almost completely the preserve of kids from about 16 to 25. It is lined with go-go clubs. One of them, a place called It’s Boss, is set up for people 16 to 25 and won’t let in anybody over 25, and there are some terrible I’m-dying-a-thousand-deaths scenes when a girl comes up with her boyfriend and the guy at the door at It’s Boss doesn’t think she looks under 25 and tells her she will have to produce some identification proving she is young enough to come in here and live The Strip kind of life and—she’s 

 it, because she can’t get up the I.D. and nothing in the world is going to make a woman look stupider than to stand around trying to argue 

I’m younger than I look, I’m younger than I look

. So she practically shrivels up like a Peruvian shrunken head in front of her boyfriend and he trundles her off, looking for some place you can get an old doll like this into. One of the few remaining clubs for “older people,” curiously, is the Playboy Club. There are apartment houses for people 20 to 30 only, such as the Sheri Plaza in Hollywood and the E’Questre Inn in Burbank. There are whole suburban housing developments, mostly private developments, where only people over 45 or 50 can buy a house. Whole towns, meantime, have become identified as “young”: Venice, Newport Beach, Balboa—or “old”: Pasadena, Riverside, Coronado Island.

Behind much of it—especially something like a whole nightclub district of a major city, “The Strip,” going teenage—is, simply, money. World War II and the prosperity that followed pumped incredible amounts of money into the population, the white population at least, at every class level. All of a sudden here is an area with thousands of people from 16 to 25 who can get their hands on enough money to support a whole nightclub belt and to have the cars to get there and to set up autonomous worlds of their own in a fairly posh resort community like La Jolla—

—Tom Coman’s garage. Some old bastard took Tom Coman’s garage away from him, and that means eight or nine surfers are out of a place to stay.

“I went by there this morning, you ought to see the guy,” Tom Coman says. Yellow Stretch Pants doesn’t move. She has him around the waist. “He was out there painting and he had this brush and about a thousand gallons of ammonia. He was really going to scrub me out of there.”

“I don’t know. I’ll stay on the beach. It wouldn’t be the first time. I haven’t had a place to stay for three years, so I’m not going to start worrying now.”

Everybody thinks that over awhile. Yellow Stretch just hangs on and smiles. Tom Coman, 16 years old, piping fate again. One of the girls says, “You can stay at my place, Tom.”

Pam Stacy says, “You can have these.”

Tom Coman lights a cigarette and says, “Let’s have a destructo.” A destructo is what can happen in a garage after eight or 10 surfers are kicked out of it.

“Wouldn’t that be bitchen?” says Tom Coman. Bitchen is a surfer’s term that means “great,” usually.

It’s incredible—that old guy out there trying to scour the whole surfing life out of that garage. He’s a pathetic figure. His shoulders are hunched over and he’s dousing and scrubbing away and the sun doesn’t give him a tan, it gives him these . . . 

 on the back of his neck. But never mind! The hell with destructo. One only has a destructo spontaneously, a Dionysian . . . 

, like those holes through the wall during the Mac Meda Destruction Company Convention at Manhattan Beach Mee-dah!

Something will pan out. It’s a magic economy—yes!—all up and down the coast from Los Angeles to Baja California kids can go to one of these beach towns and live the complete surfing life. They take off from home and get to the beach, and if they need a place to stay, well, somebody rents a garage for twenty bucks a month and everybody moves in, girls and boys. Furniture—it’s like, one means, you know, one 

 furniture from here and there. It’s like the Volkswagen buses a lot of kids now use as beach wagons instead of woodies. Woodies are old station wagons, usually Fords, with wooden bodies, from back before 1953. One of the great things about a Volkswagen bus is that one can . . . 

 motors in about three minutes. A good VW motor exchanger can go up to a parked Volkswagen, and a few ratchets of the old wrench here and it’s up and out and he has a new motor. There must be a few nice old black panthers around wondering why their nice hubby-mommy VWs don’t run so good anymore—but—then—they—are—probably—puzzled—about—a—lot of things. Yes.

Cash—it’s practically in the air. Around the beach in La Jolla a guy can walk right out in the street and stand there, stop cars and make the candid move. Mister, I’ve got a quarter, how about 50 cents so I can get a 

 draft. Or, I need some after-ski boots. And the panthers give one a Jell-O smile and hand it over. Or a guy who knows how to do it can get $40 from a single night digging clams, and it’s nice out there. Or he can go around and take up a collection for a keg party, a keg of beer. Man, anybody who won’t kick in a quarter for a keg is a jerk. A couple of good keg collections—that’s a trip to Hawaii, which is the surfer’s version of a trip to Europe: there is a great surf and great everything there. Neale spent three weeks in Hawaii last year. He got $30 from a girl friend, he scrounged a little here and there and got $70 more and he headed off for Hawaii with $100.02, that being the exact plane fare, and borrowed 25 cents when he got there to . . . blast the place up. He spent the 25 cents in a photo booth, showed the photos to the people on the set of 

 and got a job in the movie. What’s the big orgy about money? It’s warm, nobody even wears shoes, nobody is starving.

All right, Mother gets worried about all this, but it is limited worry, as John Shine says. Mainly, Mother says, 

, you all, and you head off for the beach.

The thing is, everybody, practically everybody, comes from a good family. Everyone has been . . . 

, as they say. Everybody is very upper-middle, if you want to bring it down to that. It’s just that this is a new order. Why hang around in the hubby-mommy household with everybody getting neurotic hang-ups with each other and slamming doors and saying, Why can’t they have some privacy? Or, it doesn’t mean anything that I have to work for a living, does it? It doesn’t mean a thing to you. All of you just lie around here sitting in the big orange easy chair smoking cigarettes. I’d hate for you to have to smoke standing up, you’d probably get phlebitis from it—Listen to me, Sarah—

—why go through all that? Its a good life out here. Nobody is mugging everybody for money and affection. There are a lot of bright people out here, and there are a lot of interesting things. One night there was a toga party in a garage, and everybody dressed in sheets, like togas, boys and girls and they put on the appropriated television set to an old Deanna Durbin movie and turned off the sound and put on Rolling Stones records, and you should have seen Deanna Durbin opening her puckered kumquat mouth with Mick Jagger’s voice bawling out, 

. Of course, finally everybody started pulling the togas off each other, but that is another thing. And one time they had a keg party down on the beach in Mission Bay and the lights from the amusement park were reflected all over the water and that, the whole design of the thing, those nutty lights, that was part of the party. Liz put out the fire throwing a “sand potion” or something on it. One can laugh at Liz and her potions, her necromancy and everything, but there is a lot of thought going into it, a lot of, well, mysticism.

You can even laugh at mysticism if you want to, but there is a kid like Larry Alderson, who spent two years with a monk, and he learned a lot of stuff, and Artie Nelander is going to spend next summer with some Outer Mongolian tribe; he really means to do that. Maybe the “mysterioso” stuff is a lot of garbage, but still, it is interesting. The surfers around the Pump House use that word, mysterioso, quite a lot. It refers to the mystery of the Oh Mighty Hulking Pacific Ocean and everything. Sometimes a guy will stare at the surf and say, “Mysterioso.” They keep telling the story of Bob Simmons’ wipeout, and somebody will say “mysterioso.”

Simmons was a fantastic surfer. He was fantastic even though he had a bad leg. He rode the really big waves. One day he got wiped out at Windansea. When a big wave overtakes a surfer, it drives him right to the bottom. The board came in but he never came up and they never found his body. Very mysterioso. The black panthers all talked about what happened to “the Simmons boy.” But the mysterioso thing was how he could have died at all. If he had been one of the old pan-thuhs, hell, sure he could have got killed. But Simmons was, well, one’s own age, he was the kind of guy who could have been in the Pump House gang, he was . . . 

, he was plugged into the whole pattern, he could feel the whole Oh Mighty Hulking Sea, he didn’t have to think it out step by step. But he got wiped out and killed. Very mysterioso.

Immune! If one is in the Pump House gang and really keyed in to this whole thing, it’s—well, one is . . . 

, one is not full of black pan-thuh panic. Two kids, a 14-year-old girl and a 16-year-old boy, go out to Windansea at dawn, in the middle of winter, cold as hell, and take on 12-foot waves all by themselves. The girl, Jackie Haddad, daughter of a certified public accountant, wrote a composition about it, just for herself, called “My Ultimate Journey”:

“It was six o’clock in the morning, damp, foggy and cold. We could feel the bitter air biting at our cheeks. The night before, my friend Tommy and I had seen one of the greatest surf films, 

. The film had excited us so much we made up our minds to go surfing the following morning. That is what brought us down on the cold, wet, soggy sand of Windansea early on a December morning.

“We were the first surfers on the beach. The sets were rolling in at eight to 10, filled with occasional 12-footers. We waxed up and waited for a break in the waves. The break came, neither of us said a word, but instantly grabbed our boards and ran into the water. The paddle out was difficult, not being used to the freezing water.

“We barely made it over the first wave of the set, a large set. Suddenly Tommy put on a burst of speed and shot past me. He cleared the biggest wave of the set. It didn’t hit me hard as I rolled under it. It dragged me almost 20 yards before exhausting its strength. I climbed on my board gasping for air. I paddled out to where Tommy was resting. He laughed at me for being wet already. I almost hit him but I began laughing, too. We rested a few minutes and then lined up our position with a well known spot on the shore.

“I took off first. I bottom-turned hard and started climbing up the wave. A radical cut-back caught me off balance and I fell, barely hanging onto my board. I recovered in time to see Tommy go straight over the falls on a 10-footer. His board shot nearly 30 feet in the air. Luckily, I could get it before the next set came in, so Tommy didn’t have to make the long swim in. I pushed it to him and then laughed. All of a sudden Tommy yelled, ‘Outsidel’

“Both of us paddled furiously. We barely made it up to the last wave, it was a monster. In precision timing we wheeled around and I took off. I cut left in reverse stance, then cut back, driving hard toward the famous Windansea bowl. As I crouched, a huge wall of energy came down over me, covering me up. I moved toward the nose to gain more speed and shot out of the fast-flowing suction just in time to kick out as the wave closed out.

“As I turned around I saw Tommy make a beautiful drop-in, then the wave peaked and fell all at once. Miraculously he beat the suction. He cut back and did a spinner, which followed with a reverse kick-up.

“Our last wave was the biggest. When we got to shore, we rested, neither of us saying a word, but each lost in his own private world of thoughts. After we had rested, we began to walk home. We were about half way and the rain came pouring down. That night we both had bad colds, but we agreed it was worth having them after the thrill and satisfaction of an extra good day of surfing.”

John Shine and Artie Nelander are out there right now. They are just “outside,” about one fifth of a mile out from the shore, beyond where the waves start breaking. They are straddling their surfboards with their backs to the shore, looking out toward the horizon, waiting for a good set. Their backs look like some kind of salmon-colored porcelain shells, a couple of tiny shells bobbing up and down as the swells roll under them, staring out to sea like Phrygian sacristans looking for a sign.

John and Artie! They are—they are what one means when one talks about the surfing life. It’s like, you know, one means, they have this life all of their own; it’s like a glass-bottom boat, and it floats over the “real” world, or the square world or whatever one wants to call it. They are not exactly off in a world of their own, they are and they aren’t. What it is, they float right through the real world, but it can’t touch them. They do these things, like the time they went to Malibu, and there was this party in some guy’s apartment, and there wasn’t enough 

 parking space for everybody, and so somebody went out and painted the red curbs white and everybody parked. Then the cops came. Everybody ran out. Artie and John took an airport bus to the Los Angeles Airport, just like they were going to take a plane, in khaki shorts and T-shirts with Mac Meda Destruction Company stenciled on them. Then they took a helicopter to Disneyland. At Disneyland crazy Ditch had his big raincoat on and a lot of flasks strapped onto his body underneath, Scotch, bourbon, all kinds of stuff. He had plastic tubes from the flasks sticking out of the flyfront of his raincoat and everybody was sipping whiskey through the tubes—

—Ooooo-eeee—Mee-dah! They chant this chant, Mee-dah, a real fakey deep voice, and it 

. They don’t know what the hell it is. It is the cry of the Mac Meda Destruction Company. The Mac Meda Destruction Company is . . . an 

 society that started in La Jolla about three years ago. Nobody can remember exactly how; they have arguments about it. Anyhow, it is mainly something to 

 people with and organize huge beer orgies with. They have their own complete, bogus phone number in La Jolla. They have Mac Meda Destruction Company decals. They stick them on phone booths, on cars, any place. Some mommy-hubby will come out of the shopping plaza and walk up to his Mustang, which is supposed to make him a hell of a tiger now, and he’ll see a sticker on the side of it saying, “Mac Meda Destruction Company,” and for about two days or something he’ll think the sky is going to fall in.

But the big thing is the parties, the “conventions.” Anybody can join, any kid, anybody can come, as long as they’ve heard about it, and they can only hear about it by word of mouth. One was in the Sorrento Valley, in the gulches and arroyos, and the fuzz came, and so the older guys put the young ones and the basket cases, the ones just too stoned out of their gourds, into the tule grass, and the cops shined the searchlights and all they saw was tule grass, while the basket cases moaned scarlet and oozed on their bellies like reptiles and everybody else ran down the arroyos, yelling Mee-dah.

The last one was at Manhattan Beach, inside somebody’s poor hulking house. The party got 

 that night and somebody put a hole through one wall, and everybody else decided to see if they could make it bigger. Everybody was stoned out of their hulking gourds, and it got to be about 3:30 a.m. and everybody decided to go see the riots. These were the riots in Watts. The 

 were all saying, WATTS NO-MAN’S LAND and STAY WAY FROM WATTS YOU GET YO’ SE’F KILLED, but naturally nobody believed that. Watts was a blast, and the Pump House gang was immune to the trembling gourd panic rattles of the L.A. 

So John Shine, Artie Nelander and Jerry Sterncorb got John’s VW bus, known as the Hog of Steel, and they went to Watts. Gary Wickham and some other guys ran into an old man at a bar who said he owned a house in Watts and had been driven out by the drunk niggers. So they drove in a car to save the old guy’s house from the drunk niggers. Artie John had a tape recorder and decided they were going make a record called “Random Sounds from the Watts Riots.” They drove right into Watts in the Hog of Steel and there was blood on the streets and roofs blowing off the stores and all these apricot flames and drunk Negroes falling through the busted plate glass of the liquor stores. Artie got a nice recording of a lot of Negroes chanting “Burn, baby, burn.” They all got out and talked to some Negro kids in a gang going into a furniture store, and the Negro kids didn’t say Kill Whitey or Geed’um or any of that. They just said, Come on, man, it’s a party and it’s free. After they had been in there for about three hours talking to Negroes and watching drunks collapse in the liquor stores, some cop with a helmet on came roaring up and said, “Get the hell out of here, you kids, we cannot and will not provide protection.”

Meantime, Gary Wickham and his friends drove in in a car with the old guy, and a car full of Negroes 

 stop them and say, Whitey, Geed’um, and all that stuff, but one of the guys in Gary’s car just draped a pistol he had out the window and the colored guys drove off. Gary and everybody drove the old guy to his house and they all walked in and had a great raunchy time drinking beer and raising hell. A couple of Negroes, the old guy’s neighbors, came over and told the old guy to cut out the racket. There were flames in the sky and ashes coming down with little rims of fire on them, like apricot crescents. The old guy got very cocky about all his “protection” and went out on the front porch about dawn and started yelling at some Negroes across the street, telling them “No more drunk niggers in Watts” and a lot of other unwise slogans. So Gary Wickham got up and everybody left. They were there about four hours altogether and when they drove out, they had to go through a National Guard checkpoint, and a lieutenant from the San Fernando Valley told them he could not and would not provide protection.

But exactly! Watts just happened to be what was going on at the time, as far as the netherworld of La Jolla surfing was concerned, and so one goes there and sees what is happening and comes back and tells everybody about it and laughs at the L.A. 

. That is what makes it so weird when all these black pan-thuhs come around to pick up “surfing styles,” like the clothing manufacturers. They don’t know what any of it means. It’s like archaeologists discovering hieroglyphics of something, and they say, god, that’s neat—Egypt!—but they don’t know what the hell it is. They don’t know anything about . . . 

. It’s great to think of a lot of old emphysematous pan-thuhs in the Garment District in New York City struggling in off the street against a gummy 15-mile-an-hour wind full of soot and coffee-brown snow and gasping in the elevator to clear their old nicotine-phlegm tubes on the way upstairs to make out the invoices on a lot of surfer stuff for 1966, the big nylon windbreakers with the wide, white horizontal competition stripes, nylon swimming trunks with competition stripes, bell-bottom slacks for girls, the big hairy sleeveless jackets, vests, the blue “tennies,” meaning tennis shoes, and the . . . 

, the Major Hair, all this long lank blond hair, the plain face kind of tanned and bleached out at the same time, but with big eyes. It all starts in a few places, a few strategic groups, the Pump House gang being one of them, and then it moves up the beach, to places like Newport Beach and as far up as Malibu.

Well, actually there is a kind of back-and-forth thing with some of the older guys, the old heroes of surfing, like Bruce Brown, John Severson, Hobie Alter and Phil Edwards. Bruce Brown will do one of those incredible surfing movies and he is out in the surf himself filming Phil Edwards coming down a 20-footer in Hawaii, and Phil has on a pair of nylon swimming trunks, which he has had made in Hawaii, because they dry out fast—and it is like a grapevine. Everybody’s got to have a pair of nylon swimming trunks, and then the manufacturers move in, and everybody’s making nylon swimming trunks, boxer trunk style, and pretty soon every kid in Utica, N.Y., is buying a pair of them, with the competition stripe and the whole thing, and they never heard of Phil Edwards. So it works back and forth—but so what? Phil Edwards is part of it. He may be an old guy, he is 28 years old, but he and Bruce Brown, who is even older, 30, and John Severson, 32, and Hobie Alter, 29, never haired out to the square world even though they make thousands. Hair refers to courage. A guy who “has a lot of hair” is courageous; a guy who “hairs out” is yellow.

Bruce Brown and Severson and Alter are known as the “surfing millionaires.” They are not millionaires, actually, but they must be among the top businessmen south of Los Angeles. Brown grossed something around $500,000 in 1965 even before his movie 

 became a hit nationally; and he has only about three people working for him. He goes out on a surfboard with a camera encased in a plastic shell and takes his own movies and edits them himself and goes around showing them himself and narrating them at places like the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, where 24,000 came in eight days once, at $1.50 a person, and all he has to pay is for developing the film and hiring the hall. John Severson has the big surfing magazine, 

. Hobie Alter is the biggest surfboard manufacturer, all handmade boards. He made 5,000 boards in 1965 at $140 a board. He also designed the “Hobie” skateboards and gets 25 cents for every one sold. He grossed between $900,000 and $1 million in 1964.

God, if only everybody could grow up like these guys and know that crossing the horror dividing line, 25 years old, won’t be the end of everything. One means, keep on living 

 and not get sucked into the ticky-tacky life with some insurance salesman sitting forward in your stuffed chair on your wall-to-wall telling you that life is like a football game and you sit there and take that stuff. The hell with that! Bruce Brown has the money and 

. He has a great house on a cliff about 60 feet above the beach at Dana Point. He is married and has two children, but it is not that hubby-mommy you’re-breaking-my-gourd scene. His office is only two blocks from his house and he doesn’t even have to go on the streets to get there. He gets on his Triumph scrambling motorcycle and cuts straight across a couple of vacant lots and one can see him . . . 

 to work over the vacant lots. The Triumph hits ruts and hummocks and things and Bruce Brown bounces into the air with the motor—

—moaning away, and when he gets to the curbing in front of his office, he just leans back and pulls up the front wheel and hops it and gets off and walks into the office barefooted. 

; why not? He wears the same things now that he did when he was doing nothing but surfing. He has on a faded gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off just above the elbows and a pair of faded corduroys. His hair is the lightest corn yellow imaginable, towheaded, practically white, from the sun. Even his eyes seem to be bleached. He has a rain-barrel old-apple-tree Tom-Sawyer little-boy roughneck look about him, like Bobby Kennedy.

Sometimes he carries on his business right there at the house. He has a dugout room built into the side of the cliff, about 15 feet down from the level of the house. It’s like a big pale green box set into the side of the cliff, and inside is a kind of upholstered bench or settee you can lie down on if you want to and look out at the Pacific. The surf is crashing like a maniac on the rocks down below. He has a telephone in there. Sometimes it will ring, and Bruce Brown says hello, and the surf is crashing away down below, roaring like mad, and the guy on the other end, maybe one of the TV networks calling from New York or some movie hair-out from Los Angeles, says:

“What is all that noise? It sounds like you’re sitting out in the surf.”

“That’s right,” says Bruce Brown, “I have my desk out on the beach now. It’s nice out here.”

The guy on the other end doesn’t know what to think. He is another Mr. Efficiency who just got back from bloating his colon up at a three-hour executive lunch somewhere and now he is Mr.-Big-Time-Let’s-Get-This-Show-on-the-Road.

“Yeah. It’s cooler down here. And it’s good for you, but it’s not so great for the desk. You know what I have now? A warped leg.”

Those nutball California kids—and he will still be muttering that five days after Bruce Brown delivers his film, on time, and Mr. Efficiency is still going through memo thickets or heaving his way into the bar car to Darien—in the very moment that Bruce Brown and Hobie Alter are both on their motorcycles out on the vacant lot in Dana Point. Hobie Alter left his surfboard plant about two in the afternoon because the wind was up and it would be good catamaranning and he wanted to go out and see how far he could tip his new catamaran without going over, and he did tip it over, about half a mile out in high swells and it was hell getting the thing right side up again. But he did, and he got back in time to go scrambling on the lot with Bruce Brown. They are out there, roaring over the ruts, bouncing up in the air, and every now and then they roar up the embankment so they can . . . fly, going up in the air about six feet off the ground as they come up off the embankment—

—all these people in the houses around there come to the door and look out. These two . . . nuts are at it again. Well, they can only fool around there for 20 minutes, because that is about how long it takes the cops to get there if anybody gets burned up enough and calls, and what efficient business magnate wants to get hauled off by the Dana Point cops for scrambling on his motorcycle in a vacant lot.

Bruce Brown has it figured out so no one in the whole rubber-bloated black pan-thuh world can trap him, though. He bought a forest in the Sierras. There is nothing on it but trees. His own wilds: no house, no nothing, just Bruce Brown’s forest. Beautiful things happen up there. One day, right after he bought it, he was on the edge of his forest, where the road comes into it, and one of these big rancher king motheroos with the broad belly and the $70 lisle Safari shirt comes tooling up in a Pontiac convertible with a funnel of dust pouring out behind. He gravels it to a great flashy stop and yells:

Of course, what he sees is some towheaded barefooted kid in a torn-off sweatshirt fooling around the edge of the road.

“Don’t you know this is private property?”

“Well, then, why don’t you get your ass off it?”

“Because it’s mine, it’s my private property,” says Bruce Brown. “Now you get 

And Safari gets a few rays from that old apple-tree rain-barrel don’t-cross-that-line look and doesn’t say anything and roars off, slipping gravel, the dumb crumbling pan-thuh.

But . . . perfect! It is like, one means, you know, poetic justice for all the nights Bruce Brown slept out on the beach at San Onofre and such places in the old surfing days and would wake up with some old crock’s black feet standing beside his head and some phlegmy black rubber voice saying:

“THE PUMP HOUSE GANG,” BY TOM WOLFE (1966)

Subscribe or Login

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Features

The Sunday Joint

Videos