Chas Smith - Cocaine + Surfing: A Sordid History of Surfings Greatest Love Affair

This is a Genuine Vireo Book

A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302
Los Angeles, CA 90013
rarebirdbooks.com

Copyright 2018 by Chas Smith

Simultaneously published in respective territories by Hachette Australia,
and in audio by Audible

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address:
A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302
Los Angeles, CA 90013

Set in Dante

epub isbn : 9781947856745

Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Smith, Chas, author.
Title: Cocaine + Surfing : a sordid history of surfings greatest love affair / Chas Smith.
Description: First North American Hardcover Edition | A Vireo Book |
New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2018.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781945572814
Subjects: LCSH Smith, Chas. | SurfersBiography. | Surfing. | Cocaine. | Cocaine abuse. | BISAC BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Sports. |
SPORTS & RECREATION / Surfing.
Classification: LCC GV838.N65 .S65 2018 | DDC 797.32/092dc23

For Derek Rielly

Contents

Introduction

by Matt Warshaw

H ere are two things to know before diving into Chas Smiths remarkable Cocaine and Surfing: A Love Story .

Drugs are funny. Not always. Not often, in fact. But often enough. Like any other culturally attuned Baby Boomer, I learned this from Richard Pryor, who alchemized a raging drug habit into comic gold. Maybe youve heard of the Pryor-on-fire episode? After a five-day freebase bender in 1980, Pryor, hallucinating and hearing voices, poured a bottle of Bacardi 151 over his head, flicked his cigarette lighter, then ran flaming down his driveway and into the street. God himself was a Pryor fan, though, and Richard survived. Eighteen months later, I was in a packed movie theater for the opening weekend of Pryors Live on the Sunset Strip , and there he was onscreen, earlobes all waxy and scarred, reenacting a conversation between his drug-addled self and a menacingly calm-voiced base pipeI wont quote here; quoting Pryor never worksand while part of me knew the story was horrifying, like everybody else in the theater I was gasping and weeping and rocking back and forth with laughter.

Surfing is pointless. Thats the second thing. It is joyful and gorgeous and exciting and more, absolutely, in spades, and not pointless in the nihilistic way that drugs are pointless. But pointless enough. This was hard for me to accept. At age nine, riding waves became the maypole of my life, and everything elseschool, career, travel, family, friends, love interestswould trail behind like so many fluttering ribbons. Surfing first, the rest second or third or whatever. I did that for forty years. For a long time, it felt noble and serious and superior. Eventually I got married and had a son, demoted surfing to its rightful place below family, friends, career, and came to believe that surfing was simply a way of pleasuring yourself. A beautiful thing to do, healthy and compelling and of a far higher order of pleasure than what all of us think of when the phrase pleasuring yourself is used. I would argue in fact that surfing is indeed a most supreme pleasure, as Captain Cook (or his ghostwriter) put it centuries ago. I would go even further and say that surfing is to sports-world pleasure what Richard Pryor is to comedy.

Isnt that enough? For a totally nonproductive act of self-pleasure, isnt it enough that it be a very good type of self-pleasure, maybe the best of all? Apparently not. We want more. We want significance and weight.

And thus a tendency for the long-form examination of surfing (and many short-form takes as well) to overreach. To burden the sport with importance, to pair it thematically with all manner of greater meaning, up to and including enlightenment. A filmmaker called me last week to pitch a multi-part documentary series on surfing that would provide viewers with (his words) a holistic examination of the human condition past, present, and future through the lens of international surf culture. I dont speak for all surfers. But my experience, and the experience of pretty much everyone Ive surfed with over the past fifty wonderful wave-filled years, is that were not doing anything constructive, much less enlightening, out there. We are mostly practicing. Because, wow, this is a hard sport. We are trying to do it right for just a few seconds in a row. We unwind a little afterward, if things go well. But just as often, we end up frustrated, sometimes horribly so. Because, and I mean seriously , it is a really fuck-off hard sport.

I would devour a book on surfing and frustration with the same single-mindedness I give to avoiding books on surfing and enlightenment.

But for now we have Cocaine and Surfing , which, now that I think about it, is actually a much better fit, book-wise, than frustration and surfing.

Nobody but Chas Smith could have pulled off Cocaine and Surfing . His comedic chops, for starters, are unequaled in the world of surf, and not just in 2018, but for all time. More importantly, he understands, to the finest degree, that drugs are horrible but funny and surfing is amazing but pointless. Which makes Cocaine and Surfing a high-wire act. Comedy leads, but other, darker elements are present at all times. There are shadows behind the laughter. You get that from the opening pages, as two nameless, gacked-out pro surfers wrestle in Chass car while he chauffeurs them to a club in Huntington Beach, half amused and half pissed off. It is a three-page comic riff, but with an aftertaste of sadness, as you realize that both surfers are destined for a ten-year hangover, and very likely a depressed middle age. Hilarity cut with pain and sadness and anger. Its a hard mix to get right. Incredibly hard. You bring Pryor-grade skills to the table when you sit down and write a book like this, in other words, or you burn the first draft and go back to bitchy three-paragraph blog posts about world tour judging system.

Back to the anger for a moment, because anger is the secret power of Cocaine and Surfing , as it is for nearly all of Chas Smiths work. The sport may be amazing and pointless to him, but it is also dear, and personal in the way that all obsessions are personal. Something worth protecting. Chas watches as our once-undomesticated sport is yoked and dragged from the cultural outback to a bland common area filled with committee-designed surfwear and bloodless journalism and drone-like pros who, after a close loss, rather than impaling their boards on the nearest fence post and storming off the beach, smile gamely into the camera and say their opponent surfed great, that its all a learning experience, that theyre looking forward to the next event. All of this makes Chas angry. The blandness, yes. But mostly the hypocrisy. The sports own self-betrayal. We should know betterwe used to know betterthan to try and reshape surfing into a sport that fits into a Mutual of Omaha ad campaign, or an Olympic telecast. Selling the sport isnt a crime. But sell it on our own terms, the way Bruce Brown did with Endless Summer . Make them come to us. And if they dont, so what? But no, we continue slicing off our legacy of cool, of independence, piece by piece, in exchange for a seat in the nosebleed section of mainstream culture. Then we compound the error (not we, actually, but the World Surf League, the NYSE-traded surfwear companies, and whoever convinced the IOC to make surfing an Olympic sport for the 2020 games in Tokyo) by passing off this auto-swindle as growth and progress.