Run in with the mob

Wow, the waves were bigger today---up to two feet! I got my ass up early, only to confront a sight I don't see very often: high tide. The surfer's dilemma: do you wait until the tide will be more favorable taking a chance that the wind won't come up and turn in the wrong direction which it usually does---or do you take the higher tide with the favorable wind? I chose B.

That meant that even though I got out early the first 45 minutes or so were not so good until the tide filled in a bit. I tried, but the waves were just breaking too close to shore. Plus I really wasn't in the best spot. It wasn't until a couple other people came out and started catching waves that I realized that. So I spot-hopped, which I usually try not to do, and it worked.

Had a reasonably congenial vibe going with the others in the water, though all nonverbal: not a word was said. Thick wetsuits with hoods are a deterrent to conversation under the best circumstances, and I didn't even know these guys.

I got some rides right by the jetty, which usually is the best spot, but today it was really farther over, where there was a shoulder. It took me a while to figure this out. I kept getting knocked off my board by waves I thought I was going to get.

I was feeling pretty good, a couple more people came out, one of them noticeably female. Ugh. A high ranking member of the Surf Mafia. She won't usually acknowledge my existence, but if she does she's fake-nice. I'd prefer the claws out.

Today she did the thing the Surf Mafioso usually do: Act all weird, like oh oh, cooties in the water, whenever they see me. Calling my name, and speaking as if to an exceptionally retarded child, she started giving me a fake-nice lecture on how I had just gotten in her way and forced her to back off on a wave. Of course, I had done no such thing. Matter of fact, I'd been careful not to get in her way. Then she blew the wave. (Mafiosa doesn't surf as well as she thinks she does.)

There was a time when I would have given a shit about getting along with the Mafia, or at least maintaining a superficial veneer of fake friendliness, and would have nodded and said, Oh, forgive me, I'm sorry, I won't do it again. I would have resolved any doubt in favor of her. I would have done this hoping for----what? That one day the Surf Mafia would acknowledge my right to exist? That they'd let me get waves?

I can't do that any more. I can't play dat.

I just looked at her. I couldn't even speak. I knew that if I opened my mouth, I wouldn't stop. Four years of not saying anything to her about what an incredible dickwad she's been would have ended right there. That might have been a good thing, actually, but I was there to surf, not to deal with her bullshit. I didn't even care about her enough to bother.

"OhI'mJustTryingToHelpYouOutIt'sJustaMatterofCourtesy" she said in her fake-nice, talking to a retarded child way, surprised that I wasn't going along with her; but I continued to simply stare in incredulity and she withered away.

Christ, I've been surfing this break longer than she has. She doesn't own the ocean.

It really is a Mafia, a small group that think all the waves belong to them and they make up all the rules including who can be where when doing what in the water. And the funniest (not funny hah hah, funny disgusting) thing that everybody knows is, their rules are for other people; among themselves they break all the universal rules of surfing etiquette, because they feel entitled to do so. Their only real rule is: We're the cool people and we get to do whatever we want.

It is worth saying that some Mafia members were once, or may even still be when encountered in isolation, decent or even nice people who are fully capable of not acting like dickwads. This woman, for instance, was once, a long time ago, a friend of mine. That ended the day she met the Mafia for the first time. Maybe I should call it a cult instead of a mob, because she changed, just like that, when she became one of them. Belonging to them became her life, and she took on their values, learned their rituals and history and language...yeah, like a cult. There is definitely some strange group dynamic that happens, whatever you call it...clique, cult, mob. I've seen it over and over, as others I once knew as friends (such as K. and I.) joined the cult and turned into different people, unable to think for themselves. It's creepy.