Читать книгу That Crazy Perfect Someday - Michael Mazza - Страница 9

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Google “Mafuri Long.”

Click video.

And voila!

That’s me, surfing the monster of all waves—an eighty-foot beast. I’m like a tiny knife slicing through a gigantic wall of blue that’s rearing up behind me, a total H2O Everest. Scale? Picture me standing next to an eight-story building. In 2023, I became the first “chick” to win the Nike XX Big Wave Classic: one of the few women in history to surf a wave that big, the only one to do it officially. I followed Daddy’s advice before we left the dock for the open sea. “Don’t ride that horse with half your ass,” he said, sending me off with a fist bump. “Go after it, cowgirl.”

The freaky part is that the wave is a hundred miles off the San Diego coast in the middle of nowhere. The surf spot’s called the Cortes Bank, where the fish around you are the size of Volkswagens and very big things can swallow you whole. The only way out there is in a decent-size boat, and the only way to be saved after a serious wipeout is to be rescued by that decent-size boat or plucked up by a Coast Guard helicopter, which one big-wave legend experienced firsthand after a three-wave hold-down. The bank sits just under the water and can kick up epic hundred-footers. It’s one of the biggest, scariest waves in the world, and I mastered it: little five foot three sandy-haired me.

You’d usually have to wait until winter for a wave like that, but weather patterns are so crazy with the globe heating up the last few decades, it’s monumental—like, who can predict? I had no clue how ginormous the wave was. I mean, nobody anticipated it—not my surf coach, the safety team, the other surfers, or the pilots in the choppers circling above—but a tiny voice inside and the never-ending elevator ride up confirmed it was going to be borderline cataclysmic. When the wave hit its peak, I was staring down a seventy-five-foot vertical drop, fear shrieking inside me. Ride or die, that’s what I thought. Like, seriously, flinch on a wave like that and it’s bye-bye, girly-girl. I went supersonic after that, faster than I had ever gone before, my legs feeling the board’s feedback full force, completely in the zone, focused, the entire ocean an angry fist beneath me . . . Then I pulled out of the wave.

When the video hit social, it ping-ponged around the world, out into space, and back again, sending up a collective girl-power supercheer, pretty much locking up a ton of cash in surf sponsorships and placing me on every news feed from here to Alice Springs. Jax—that’s what people call my dad—says I have a gift. He says he noticed it the first time I stood up on a wave in Sendai, Japan, back when I was five and we were surfing together, years before that tsunami leveled the place.

The sponsorship money let me set my marine biology degree aside for a while. I couldn’t find a job in the field anyway. Let me restate that: I was offered one at SeaLand San Diego straight out of UCSD, basically to put on a carnival show with a thirteenth-generation orca after her act was reintroduced, but I passed because that isn’t science, and a creature like that should be ambushing seals out in the ocean and not squeaking for mackerel treats in a man-made swimming pool for some spoiled kids’ amusement. So the money lets me spend my days training, and my eyes are on the big prize when the Olympics begin on August 4.

It’s around 8:00 the following morning, and I’m out in the water at Mission Beach for a photo shoot, which I do on occasion for sponsors that include Google, Target, and Nike. Today it’s ad posters for Nike, in partnership with Target, who will put them up in their stores or something. I really don’t pay attention.

We’re an hour into the shoot and Jax’s episode last night still troubles me even in the bright, post-dawn sun. A photographer named PK is trailing me in the water while the hipster-kook art director in wannabe surf garb, a Parisian beret, and sunglasses watches from the shoreline and barks at us through a bullhorn.

“I need an ass shot! Ass shot, PK!” he yells for the second time. “Ass shots sell wet suits!”

“Is he serious?” I ask.

“He’s serious,” PK says.

I shout back to shore, “Here’s your ass shot!” and follow up with a not-so-friendly hand gesture.

“That’s not nice,” he yelps back. Behind him, a robotic beach Zamboni combing the sand swings a wide arc and nearly takes him out. He doesn’t flinch.

“Darn,” I say. “Just a little more to the right . . .”

PK is treading water next to me in his wet suit. The black neoprene hood and his bushy mustache make him look like a walrus. He’s adjusting the f-stop on his waterproof camera above the surface.

“Between you and me, the guy’s a total dick,” PK says, setting the motor drive. “Most of these ad guys are.”

“What a perv.”

There’s a loud squawk and a click from shore.

“I can’t go home without an ass shot!”

“That’s the third time he’s said that.”

Squawk!

“Ass shot!”

“Fourth,” I say. “I’m done.”

PK swipes his hand across his throat to say we’re finished. The bullhorn crackles.

“That’s good,” the art director says dryly. “Real fucking nice.”

PK looks at me like it’s just another dick day. I watch the guy drop the horn into the sand and fire up a cigarette. It isn’t enough that last night’s events put me in a funky funk, but now I’ll have to deal with more of the art director’s nonsense when I get to shore. Not to mention the funny feeling that a whole lot of madness is yet to come.