Can't You Get Along With Anyone?

504 Pages·2007·9.27 MB·English

by  Allan C. Weisbecker

Can't You Get
Along With Anyone?
a writer’s memoir
and a tale of a lost surfer’s paradise
Allan C. Weisbecker
Published in 2007 by Bandito Books
www.banditobooks.com
© 2006 Allan C. Weisbecker. All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied
in critical articles or reviews. Allan C. Weisbecker asserts the moral right to
be established as the owner of this work.
The views and opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the author,
and his quoted subjects. They are not neccessarily the views and opinions
of Bandito Books Ltd or any of its employees or directors.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade
or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without
the publishers’ prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than
that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Cover design by Allan Weisbecker, John Benedetti and Scott Massey
Front Cover photograph by Walter Iooss. Back cover photograph by
Warwick Saint. Interior design by Peggy LeTrent and iluminada design.
ISBN: 0-9797117-0-3
ISBN 13: 978-0-9797117-0-1
Printed in the United States
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contents
Author’s Notes & Backstory 9
Part One At Age 55 21
Part Two Big Turkeys 95
Part Three The Max Dalton Investigation 165
Part Four On the Run 217
Part Five The Real Thing 309
Part Six Package Deals 373
Part Seven Butterfly Effects 427

Young and Wild and Beautiful Once*
Odd the way a moment returns, a life-occurrence apparently lost through
time’s neglect, the mental resurrection the end result of a sequence of
recollected images, a one-to-the-next process ruled by the arcane illogic of
the subconscious, but then, unexpectedly, the procession climaxing with
perfect sense -- the summoned moment as clear, flawless, and inevitable
as the finale of a well-wrought tale.
I daydreamed a seascape of long ago in a foreign land, blurry but for
a certain wave my old surf-chum Christopher rode upon it, which image
then segued to a remote shore-side campsite the two of us shared at
another faraway place, which in turn conjured a certain risk we took, a
law we broke, a laugh we had at the certainty of our invincibility.
I see the logic of it now: the shared laugh, the lawlessness, the
invincibility, the endeavor of wave riding in foreign lands; how they all
connected and culminated in the resurrected moment, so long lost.
It was the south of France, near Biarritz, in the summer of 1970. The
European surf scene was in its infancy back then. All the good surfers
on the continent were foreigners, primarily Americans, Aussies, and a
few South Africans. Christopher and I had made friends with a cadre
of beginning but stoked French surfers who were hell-bent on staging
a contest, up the coast at a little town called Hossegor, which has since
become famous for its fine beach breaks. I didn’t believe in surf contests in
those days, still don’t, but these French had been very nice to Christopher
and me, had taken us into their homes and so forth, so I agreed to enter.
Christopher, who felt even more negatively about contests than I did,
finally acquiesced at the last minute.
Well, I won the thing, or at least that’s what the judges said; aside from
Christopher, there were some pretty good surfers in the finals, all serious
foreign travelers. (Christopher placed third or fourth, I recall.) After the
awards ceremony, Christopher and I paddled back out for a sunset session.
I came in first and was walking down the beach toward the parking lot
when she approached me, this exquisite young French girl whose name
has been (truly) lost to me over the years. Although we had no common
* Written on the road in Central America in 1997.
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language, we’d smiled and flirted a bit that day. Now it was dusk and the
beach was deserted and the image is so clear of her sliding off her bikini
top in the warm glow of that perfect light, her wide, slightly crazed eyes
daring my response.
This is the resurrected moment I refer to, real and true these many years
later -- as if just a heartbeat ago I’d shut my eyes on that distant beach,
*
perhaps the better to contemplate the simple perfection of my young life, as it
was there and then.
The French girl had never been with a man before and decided to give
it up to a foreign surf bum. Whether she’d picked me earlier in the day
or waited to see who would win the contest, mattered not at all to me.
Confronted by this vision -- part designing woman, part naughty child,
part female animal possessed by some deep biological imperative -- I
was suddenly and completely overcome with pure lust, mindless and
unencumbered.
But how beautiful she was…
It seems incredible that she’s in her fifties now -- although I’d bet a valued
possession that she’s still beautiful. I can imagine her in a few years, that
physical beauty fading now, talking to a granddaughter, and the adolescent
girl asking who her first lover was. Oh, this young American surfer, she’d
say, then, smiling at her own resurrection of the moment, she’d describe
the evening on the beach at Hossegor in 1970 when she threw off her
bikini top and drove herself and that young surfer mad with desire. The
granddaughter would laugh and scold her jokingly and then they’d hug
and the grandmother would say that she was young and wild and beautiful
once too.
* Italics added for my purposes here.
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Writing is easy. You just stare at the blank page until your
forehead bleeds.
Gene Fowler

A (Brief) Note on Veracity
The people and events described in this book are real.
What I mean by real in the above claim is a good question, and will be
dealt with. Suffice for now to say that I haven’t misrepresented anything.
At least not anything important.
What I mean by anything important in the above claim is a good question,
and will be dealt with. Suffice for now to say that this book is nonfiction.
What I mean by nonfiction…
And so forth.
ACW
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Author’s Note
First, there’s something I have to get off my chest in this writer’s memoir.
If you’ve ever said or even thought the words “I’m going to write a book,”
you may eventually do so, write a book. But if you tacked on at the end the
word someday, as in “I’m going to write a book someday,” you never will.
Trust me on this. I’ve done the research.
Along the same lines: If you’ve ever said or even thought the words “I
could write a book” – with or without the emphasis on “I” – you never will
do so, write a book. This is just the way it is. It’s annoying when people
who’ve never written anything make these statements to people who
actually do write. And it happens all the time, at least to me. One time
this guy, in finding out I’d written a book he read, said, “I could write three
books.” I wanted to pop him then and there.
That writing is difficult is best exemplified by the Gene Fowler quote I
use as the opening epigraph: Writing is easy. You just stare at the blank page
until your forehead bleeds.
Someone could write a whole book, a good book, let’s assume, about
how difficult writing is and it would not come close to saying as much as
Mr. Fowler does in that second sentence, and I very much hope you agree.
If not, it may not work out between us.
But what’s my point?
If you’re one of those non-writers who has said, or has thought of saying,
or is capable of saying, “I’m going to write a book someday,” or “I could
write a book,” maybe now, knowing my attitude about these sentiments
and with the imparted image of your forehead bleeding while you stare at
the blank page, you’ll shut the fuck up.
But I doubt it. You’ll say it anyway. You and I happen to meet somewhere,
you’ll probably even say it to me.
In one ear and out the other is the expression that comes to mind.
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