The Dazzling Blackness
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THE DAZZLING BLACKNESS By Jamie Brisick I’m thinking about Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas, who shot himself in the heart in 1954; I’m thinking about Pepê Lopes, who died in a hang gliding accident while trying to win a second world title in Japan in 1991; I’m thinking about Aryton Senna, the Formula One racer who died on lap seven of the San Marino Grand Prix in Italy in 1994. I am not thinking about death explicitly, but death hangs over all of this. I’m bodysurfing the north end of Barra da Tijuca, a spot called Praia do Pepê, named after the hang glider. The swell is out of the southwest; the waves are a whomping four foot, mostly lefts, with the occasional short burst of right. The water smells of sewage, with a distinctly Rio tang. My romantic self likes to think of it as bathing in the collective DNA of this city of six million. My more practical self fears Hep A. On my feet, Da Fins, recommended by bodysurfing guru Mark Cunningham. At the tip of my fingers, a Danny Hess-shaped hand plane, which I have learned to hold with my inside hand. This is why I love bodysurfing. This is why, in my recent trips to Rio, I end up bodysurfing more than board surfing: I’m still learning new things. At age 47 I may be declining as a surfer, but as a bodysurfer I’m unquestionably improving. The tadpole grows feet and hops across the terra firma. The surfer sheds board and swims off to eternity. Along the beachfront are high-rises, one of which is a 15-story brick and concrete apart-hotel that is my home for the next month. It’s really my wife’s place. She is here on a three-month contract to co-direct “Amor e Sexo,” a documentary TV series that 1 explores love and sex. She arrived from New York, where we live, a week before me. “We’re staying here,” she said over Skype, and aimed her computer at the building. I recognized it immediately: Barra Beach Towers. I used to stay there in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s when I was a pro surfer; in fact most everyone on tour stayed there. I had what now seem to be prescient moments. In 1989, while sharing a room with fellow pro Bryce Ellis and playing heated games of Backgammon into the wee hours, I became haunted by the Rolling Stones It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, specifically the song “Time Waits For No One.” One night I couldn’t sleep. The melody was soothing, but the lyrics were galvanizing. I had the idea that I should get up and run sprints along the shoreline. We pros did a lot of this: raising heartbeats, inciting adrenalin, simulating make-or-break moments in the dying seconds of world title-deciding heats. But it is never a good idea to be alone on the beach in Rio at three a.m. So instead I ran mental sprints. In 1991, in that same hotel, possibly the same room, possibly even the same room where I now stay with Gisela, I cried in synch with Sinead O’Connor, who cries spectacularly in her video “Nothing Compares 2 U.” I watched it on MTV, again in the wee hours, horribly jetlagged. Melancholy consumed me. I was in a relationship that was dying, and in my efforts to revive it I vowed to paint a portrait of my girl, turquoise and gold, with drips like the tears falling down Sinead’s face. I would give it to her as a Christmas present. But we never made it to Christmas. Bobbing on the bottle green sea, a plane roaring across the rainbow sherbet sky, a jet-skier 100 yards out fucking up my waves, I remember moments at the breakfast buffet with Tom Carroll, Ross Clarke-Jones, Gary “Kong” Elkerton. I miss how simple life was 2 with that bull’s eye focus of the pro tour. I do not miss having my self-esteem dictated by where I sat on the rankings. An A-frame looms. I put my head down and kick. I have learned to feign dolphin to catch waves. I less drop down the face than insinuate myself into the middle of it, and superman across the trim line. I’m amazed at how long I can go, that I can almost do off the lips. I ride to shore, trot across the squeaky sand, and run across the one-way street where busses barrel along at dangerous speeds. I enter the Barra Beach Towers from the side entrance, for beachgoers, with a tap to rinse feet and a security lady named Daniela with whom I chat in my third grade Portuguese, hop in the elevator and press nine. On the way up I think about the story I want to write: Rio is the best bodysurfing city in the world. Those same iconic granite rocks that brought us Sugarloaf and Corcovado also bring us ricocheting wedges that zipper off the north and south corner of every beach. The biiing of my floor, the doors open, I make my way down the tiled hallway, anticipating this late afternoon routine I know all so well: approach apartment #905, smell weed, hear GloboNews on the TV, knock on door, Gisela shouts “Jimmerrr!” in the warmest way, door opens, vibrant wife of mine stands there all sinewy, big smile, glassy eyes. We hug. I kiss the side of her dirty blond head. It’s a world, a life, though I fail to fully appreciate it at the time. I’m preoccupied with the memoir I’m trying to write, with a particularly North American brand of career advancement. I’m a cliché. I take it for granted, think it will always be there. I’m terribly wrong. The Shot 3 There is an absurdity to “getting the shot,” and I experience this profoundly in 1987 at Fernando de Noronha, a tropical island off the northern coast of Brazil. I wait out the back in the bathtub-warm turquoise water while photographer Robert Beck stands in the shallow impact zone. When a wave pops up Beck hollers me into it. I stroke, hop to feet, paw face, pose in barrel, then get crushed. I do this about twenty times in a row. In one wipeout I feel Beck’s fins, head, housing. I’m reminded of the slam pits I used to bounce around back in the punk days. At the bar near the pousada where we stay, there is cachaça, forró dancing, the music of Caetano Veloso and Gal Costa, an impossibly hot lioness of a 19-year-old whose father is some big-time politician, but I participate in none of it. I go to bed early, creatively visualize a win in the Marui Pro, which kicks off the 1987 ASP World Tour next week in Japan. I wake at dawn and do plyometrics, a new jumping/rebounding style of exercise that’s supposedly part of Tom Curren’s training regimen. I do what I think a pro surfer is supposed to: keep the blinders on, focus on the win. But impressions from this first trip to Brazil stay with me. In the diary that my father has encouraged me to keep during my travels, I write about running into fellow pro Dave Kennedy on the runway of Fernando’s tiny airport. I was coming; he was going. “Whatever you do, go hiking,” he advised, pointing to the Land of the Lost topography that surrounded us. Kennedy had a raised-by-wolves mien. He smelled of patchouli and sweat. “See that ridiculous-looking thing over there?” he said, nodding toward a vertical rock face. “Climbed it yesterday on acid.” I write about Tatiana, the stewardess I met on my flight from Fernando to Rio. She spoke no English, but her co-worker did, and in a racy dialogue that felt like 4 something out of From Here To Eternity, we discover that we like each other. When she asks where I’m staying in Rio I go for it: “With you,” I say, and he translates, and there’s laughter between the two of them, and some words in Portuguese. By the time we hit the tarmac a plan has been hatched. I will pose as Tatiana’s cousin from the USA, and stay with her and her co-workers at the Hotel Intercontinental in Copacabana, where Varig flight attendants stay on Rio layovers. Breezing through the CREW line at the airport, riding in the Varig shuttle bus to the hotel, dragging my coffin board bag through the elegant hotel lobby with this tall, thin, deeply-tanned blond woman I’d met not two hours earlier—never have I felt more Miki Dora-ish. My closeout tubes in Fernando de Noronha featured in magazines from the US, France, Japan, and Brazil, where I scored the cover of Surfer. I also got my first written piece published: “Yahtzee Jones,” about the fierce games Robert Beck and I played in our little imperialistic cocoon. But far more formative, far more life-changing, was the sign language and drawings on napkins that doubled for words between Tatiana and me as we ate pizza at an open-air restaurant on Avenida Atlântica, where trans-prostitutes sashayed on corners and street kids—barefoot, no older than ten—begged for spare change. There was Tatiana’s Caesarian scar, which I discovered in the dark, by Braille— it felt like a thrust into some complex, exotic adulthood.