Biracial Buddies, a Nazi, and Total Chaos
A short story by Michael Mohr
A Fatal Whiff of Youth By Michael Mohr
In the early 2000s I had a close friend named Tyrell; he and I were about as different from each other as you could possibly imagine.
For starters, Tyrell was black; I’m white. He grew up in Ventura, an hour and a half north of Los Angeles along the coast—where I was born—and I grew up in Ojai, a little mountain town nestled within the Topa Topa mountains 12 miles east of Ventura. He was tall and had a hard, sculpted torso. His dark eyes were constantly bloodshot from ripping bong hits in his white Mazda. He had short, nettled black hair. His father had split when he was ten; his older brother had been fourteen. A single mom had raised the two boys and a younger sister. They struggled. There was drugs; violence in the home; fighting; police. It was, to say the least, tumultuous.
I, on the other hand, came from money. Single child. Two married, happy, productive parents. Dad was a computer engineer; mom was a nursing instructor at a local college. That said: I was troubled. In 2002—a senior in a Catholic, college-prep high school in Ojai—I was expelled from school three weeks prior to graduation for my turgid reputation (angry, rebellious punk rocker who slept with many girls, shot up dope, and stole cars; the rumors were only half true) and for bringing a backpack full of pot and booze. It was within this globulous teen confusion that Tyrell and I connected.
Our introduction came through the mutual world of Ventura surfing. Growing up near the coast—driving Highway 101 and Pacific Coast Highway obsessively—surfing had become for most males between the ages of 13-25, The Thing. We waxed and unwaxed our shortboards. We watched surfing videos until the wee hours of the morning. We subscribed to and religiously read Surfer Magazine. We went on epic surfing adventures to places like Baja. For a while, me and some of my friends were even sponsored, enlisting in paid competitions.
I don’t remember the exact day or moment that we met. I think it was at one of our favorite pointbreaks, a place called Solimar, a football field length of narrow beach, million-dollar homes behind it, the green glimmering sea facing us and always beckoning us toward it like a mother with open arms. I was twenty. I can still see all the cars and trucks parked on the hard-packed dirt in front of the ragged boulders at the beach; can still smell the rancid, lovely stink of wafting pot, kids hitting from a glass pipe. I can smell the Sex Wax on fiberglass, that chemical reek. I can picture all the smiling hoodlum faces, the jerking chins, guys always saying, Sup, bro. Many wore baseball caps, either normally or backwards. White wife-beaters were not unusual. Lifted trucks with flowmasters to increase the noise. Some brought their girls with them; others, like me and my crew, just came us boys. We were on a mission. Destroy waves. Destruction of nature was our lazy, ambitious art.
And then I picture Tyrell, bloodshot eyes, arms dramatically outstretched, one hand holding a marble pipe, the other lighting the green packed bud, his dark skin, his black baseball cap that said, Billabong, the bill shielding his eyes, his cheeks now puffed, inhaling, like some wild shaman. His arms were taut and cut; he was shirtless and had most of a six-pack. I was not gay but I’d experimented a little, even back then, and I couldn’t deny the man’s natural beauty. He looked like natural perfection wrapped up in a time bomb; violence not yet stretching its wings.
That afternoon—it was some time, I think, in late January—with the air bitingly cold and the sun fresh and warm on our bodies, the green waves crashing hard fifty yards away, the parking lot half empty, he glanced over, blowing smoke out his mouth, saw me, smiled, and offered the pipe to me.
He jerked his chin. “Hit that shit, dog.” His voice, contrary to what I’d expected, was soft and warm, like heated honey sliding slowly down a tree. The voice seemed to contradict the body: He now appeared to me some sort of alien creature; a poem in physical form.
I nodded, took the pipe. Sunlight glanced off the thing into my eyes. I squinted. I watched the sea, pretending not to be nervous about the eyes I felt on me like nails being hammered into wood. I lifted the pipe to my lips and took a hit. The hit seared my throat, burning my lungs in a good way. I took it in, held it, blew out. I felt the eyes on me soften.
“What’s your name?” he said.
“Andrew, I said, suppressing a pot cough.
He hit the pipe again, arms in harsh angles like a gangster, then, his voice cracking from the toke, said, “I’m Tyrell.”
Six months had passed since we’d met. We had become fast best friends, in that way men do in their tumultuous early twenties. He drove a little white Mazda, low to the ground, with a sound system which was so loud, and contained such throttling bass, that it rattled the entire car. He often played either rap (Dead Prez was a favorite) or contemporary melodic pop punk. He played guitar quite well himself and had started a band. He loved music. He mocked me for the way I acted and dressed. In his eyes I was too attached to “the punk rock thing.” How was I going to score with any girls, he wanted to know, when I dressed like a jackass?
Tyrell wore the usual Southern California uniform: Van’s shoes; surfer-brand shorts; wife-beater or surfer-brand T-shirt; baseball cap on normal or backwards. The idea was to look cool and loose and unafraid. As if you were just putting it all out there. He wanted to show off as much of his glorious body as possible. I couldn’t blame him for that. I, on the other hand, was different. No hat. Pants—usually tight, torn jeans. Ripped punk T-shirts. And, Tyrell’s worst enemy: A beat-up leather jacket.
We fought constantly and yet we were close. He’d drive all the way out to Ojai—half an hour—just to pick me up in his Mazda, and then turn around and take us to the beach. He loved to drive. He loved the feeling of control, of sharp contours on the road. He saw driving as a challenge. He saw existence as a challenge. Survival.
That evening—it was the tail end of summer—he pulled up outside. I was living essentially in “the ghetto,” an area called The Avenue in Ventura, a rough patch where Latino gangbangers shot guns off at night like fire crackers. The rent was dirt cheap. I lived with two punk friends. We were disasters. Nearly twenty one, I was not in college. I worked a dead-end job. One roommate worked the overnight shift at Target as a stocker. The other one was unemployed. We were aiming to dissolve our parents’ middleclass dreams for us. Why follow the path we hadn’t chosen ourselves?
I said goodnight to my roommates, who sat playing a videogame, sitting on our ratty orange thrift store couch, listening to a Dead Boys album spinning sluggishly on the silver turntable. They did not respond. I shut the door and walked down the sidewalk to the waiting Mazda, steam billowing from the exhaust. It was cool out; the last remaining wisps of summer still barely clinging to the air. We were going to some house party in Santa Barbara. A friend of his told him about it.
“What up,” he said, eyes averted, baseball cap on.
“Hey,” I said, plopping into the passenger seat. (TO READ THE REST CLICK HERE)