High Noon at the Peak
sunflower shining in the beautiful La Jolla Garden
True Story. Check the County records for corroboration.
It was a hot, humid day in August. The sunflowers were in full bloom.
It was 1985. The swell was
running three to five feet on the faces and the crowd was enlarging as
the noontime sun beat down on the surfers.
Unfortunately, the larger sets were spaced out at fifteen minutes, and
the outside pack was restless.
My client, still living, so unnamed in this piece, was with the four long-boarders
southwest of the pack.
He was riding a 9'6" Charlie Carter knockoff of the Hynson board,
made for catching waves at their formation,
dropping and waiting til the last second to sweep the bottom turn and drive
along the right peak.
There is no drama without conflict.
This conflict came in the person of, for want of a better fictitious appellation, one Dog-Boy.
in open and apparent shame, Dog-Boy covers his appearance with costume
Dog-Boy was a surfer of onetime renown. In the mid-seventies, on a north
swell one cool February at the Rock, Dog-Boy,
going backside, caught three successive nine foot face pipes which he made
standing up. On the second wave of
that reputation-sealing morning, he free-fell on the takeoff four
feet, his board finally slicing into the
wave face at an angle, where it took over the ride and freight-trained Dog-Boy
thirty feet down the line,
through the closed door and out into the blue sky. Dog-Boy's name was spoken
in awe up and down the coast
for the next year. Young-things would throw themselves at him at the local
watering holes; grems would bring
him his next beer, and, unfortunately for Dog-Boy, somebody gave him some
nasty acid.
Not a rocket scientist before his trip, he became a broccoli after his
trip. Doesn't take a brain to surf.
So he kept his day job at the ding repair shop and continued with his life.
Fast-forward to 1985. Dog-Boy, still enamored with himself, living with
his widowed mother in the room above the
garage at the family house in north Pacific Beach, is surfing WindanSea
with my client. Solid six foot face rolls in
on the third wave of the set and my client takes off and is dropping down
to the bottom as he sets up his sweeping
bottom turn. Dog-Boy, older, not wiser, the peripheral vision fading, takes
off on the shoulder just as my client
starts to sweep his flowing bottom turn to the right. Still quick of feet,
Dog-Boy is standing tall as he drops
down and onto my client's board, cutting a two-inch ding into his right
rail, causing Dog-Boy to fly over and on
to him and throwing him off his injured board. My client, Old School, is
leashless. Dog-Boy's leash wraps itself around
himself and the two surfboards, all three brainless planks banging against
one another, bruising Dog-Boy unmercilessly.
The energy of the wave breaks my client's board free, sending it to the
beach. He swims after it, leaving the
screaming, cursing, apoleptic Dog-Boy to disentangle himself from his board.
My client body surfs three waves into the
beach to locate his board. He finds Dog-Boy, in heat, next to his 9'6".
He ignores the screams of the Dog-Boy and reaches
down to pick up his board. As he does, Dog-Boy kicks him in the side of
the ribs, knocking him onto his board. As the second
kick moves toward him, my client uses both hands to block the foot,
then stands up and head-butts Dog-Boy in the stomach,
knocking the wind out of him. My client then leans down and this time picks
up his board and starts to walk up the beach.
He moves about twenty-five feet, before Dog-Boy leaps on his back with an
agonized cry. My client releases his board, jumps up
and back, making himself parallel to the ground, landing on the sand with
Dog-Boy as his cushion. Unfortunately, for the Boy Dog,
there is a rock covered by the summer sand, at the site of impact. Again,
my client gets up, walks over to his board, picks it up,
and walks up the cliffs, over to his car, where he packs up and drives
away. The Boy Dog doesn't move for about fifteen minutes,
when one of his friends discovers the immobilized One, and helps him up
the cliff to the Lot for a beer.
Case closed? Nope. Dog-Boy found a lawyer and sued my client. "No!"
you say, and I have to inform you that there are
quite often, more than one or even two sides to a story. That his lawyer
was not a percipient witness to the events, and can
only go by the facts as presented to him by the Boy Dog and any witnesses
he may produce. And, "yes," there are people who lie
in court. Happens every day. Sometimes they don't get caught, sometimes
they do. Sometimes they go to jail for perjury.
Shameless, the Boy Dog smells the gold: this photograph was obtained from
an insurance
fraud investigation where Boy Dog faked getting struck by
a motor vehicle in an accident
conspiracy set up by an unethical lawyer and a chiropractor. Dog-Boy
served County time for this
feeble felony attempt at earning an income.
the fact that a person was recently convicted of a felony may be used to impeach their credibility as a witness.
The lawyer for the Innocent One tried to introduce into evidence
the fact that my client was a karate black-belt of two-digit
years, and that in the sixties he once took on, and out, three fellows from
the Valley who made the mistake of running over his
board when it was propped against his car in the parking lot. The tres
amigos made a mistake, they refused to pay or apologize
for it; they took their beating. The trier-of-fact, in her wisdom and in
sustaining my objection, ruled that there was no
credible evidence that presented a prima facie case that Dog-Boy was acting
in self-defense. And because of the lack of this
prima facie case, Dog-Boy's attorney could not bring in the general reputation
of my client as a person who could punish. But then,
from what I knew, my client was only violent with those people who attacked
him or his friends, and I didn't believe these facts
were admissible even if Dog-Boy's claim of self-defense had some shred of
evidence to support it.
You ask, "where is the self-defense in this case, and I answer, Dog-Boy
felt that my client was going to go up to his car
in the parking lot, clean himself up, and then proceed to punish Dog-boy
for his indiscretions. There was a witness who had
seen the brief beach encounter, a bitch-friend of Dog-Boy. She said that
my client was moving away from Dog-Boy with a
determined look on his face, like he was planning on doing something. Objection,
speculation, and whatever she thought my
client planned to do was inadmissible.
Really not much of a case. My client compensated me for my services.
Dog-Boy sulked out in the water for several weeks
and never snaked my client again. An interesting part is that after it
was all over, my client told me that apparently nobody
had seen him release his board and then grab both of Dog-Boy's legs, fixing
Dog-Boy to his back as he made the up and back
leap with the human cushion. Said it was actually a soft landing, because
the Dog-Boy had dissipated his once hard body with
the freebies that had passed his way since his big day at the Rock.
finis