Jag Right

June gloom looms today on the Santa Cruz coast. It’s the type of cold you feel in your bone marrow, the kind of chill you will only tolerate when the waves are at least shoulder high, super quality, and barreling.

Thursday morning at 5:45 a.m. the phone rings. I hang it up, it’s way too early to get up. It rings again… I hang up. Another ring. Ok, I pick up.

“Why are you calling me this early Buffalo? Can you call me at 9:30,” I plead?

“Just checked it, it’s flatter than Lake Tahoe, Boxer and I are cruising over.”

Buffalo and Boxer grab some tall Toots Coffee after checking the Hook and head over to my house. It’s about a twenty-five-minute drive so they have time for chatting. Cruising in the slow Volvo, they barely make it up over the summit and as they drop down to town, Boxer dreams out loud,

“Buff, you think they’ll ever make a wave-pool in a reservoir?” as he glances over at the Lexington Reservoir.

Buffalo replies, “On whose budget, braddah?” It would probably cost a couple million to install some hydraulics and shape the bottom with the right topography and such.”

Boxer follows up with another question, “How about one in Vasona Park for days like today during June gloom? We could all pitch in and put it on Hammer’s credit card.”

Buffalo laughs and nods, “It would be unreal.”

They pull up in Buff’s 1983 Volvo station wagon or the “Volvonic” as he Buffalo calls it.

Da Braddahs cruise over the hill to chill here in the land

where the palms meet the pines in the den of the wildcats

nestled in the southwestern foothills of Silicon Valley

We call it “The Valley,” or “The Oven” because you can experience a twenty-degree difference in temperature from the ocean. These micro-climates are pretty unique and amazing and give us an advantage with options when the June-July fog gets thick on the coast.

Temperatures have been pushing 98 degrees Fahrenheit lately and we’ve been hunkering down in the air conditioning, watching surf movies like Blazing Boards from the 1980s and raiding my dad’s fridge. We also spend a good amount of the day swimming and lounging at the local Swim & Racquet Club pool. While sprawled out on the pool deck later that afternoon, we notice a couple of kids bring their Super Soaker water guns to the pool. These kids, maybe middle-school aged, are having the best time of anyone around. Leave it up to big kids to learn from the smaller ones. Johnny Boy, the biggest kid in our crew suggests,

“Guys, let’s go buy some Super Soakers. No one’s having as much fun as these kids.”

I figure why not. It’s scorching hot, summertime and homework are miles away from my mind. So, we drive over to the drugstore and buy a couple of Super Soakers and go back to the pool. Boxer rips one out of the package and Johnny Boy opens the other. They start a water blasting battle that takes them all over the pool, on the deck, running through the grass, in the men’s locker room, and even shooting the lifeguards accidentally, I hope?

“Guys, we’re going to get booted if you don’t chill out!”

Boxer turns and yells, "No worries," and then squirts the honey-lifeguard right in the face. Johnny Boy jumps into the madness and shoots her a couple of times as well. The lifeguard shouts sarcastically,

“You guys are probably in your early twenties and you’re worse than those kids. Knock it off.” Boxer and Johnny Boy calm it down for a few brief minutes. Buffalo and I are kicking it on the lounge chairs.

Buffalo pulls out a huge stack of 5” x 7” notecards that are color-coated perfectly and asks me to quiz him on his GRE (Graduate Record Exam) vocabulary words. I interject, “Dude, this has to be over a 1000 word stack?”

He replies, “Well, that’s only a small fraction of the words I have to know for the test!”

I begin, “Okay, here’s one, “Jag”

“What a piece of cake” I comment.

Buffalo confidently answers, "as a noun, it's a sharp edge, but as a verb, it means to go on a non-stop drinking binge like Boxer last night. Oh, and there’s a third meaning as a verb, to jerk quickly.”

“Nice, I didn’t realize the secondary and tertiary connotations.”

Meanwhile, Boxer keeps squirting the girl lifeguard, probably acting out his fantasy crush on the poolside Bay Watcher. So, I pull the plug and rally the guys to go home for some barbecue.

We return home and cue up some barbecue chicken and stuff ourselves silly. We watch a few surf movies then feel like going out in the hot summer night. At age twenty we are stuck between the party world and the bar life. We are too young for the bars and sick and tired of the same ole neighborhood parties.

Boxer blurts out a brilliant idea,

"Let's fill the Super Soakers and head downtown to carouse. After all, it's 84 degrees tonight anyway, right?"

I remember how much fun we had a few summers back in Palm Springs for spring break when we got squirt guns and filled them with water and invisible ink that would change colors when sprayed on college girls. The only problem was we had to get close enough to them to share our colorful expressions of admiration. The Beastie Boys song, “Brass Monkey” was blaring out of every other low rider truck with an insane display of auto gymnastics, hydraulics, pumps, breaks, beeps, etc.

We all pile into the Volvonic with Buffalo driving and Boxer riding shotgun. Johnny Boy and I position ourselves nicely in the back seat. Boxer has a fully water-loaded Super Soaker at room temperature ready to fire and keeps it under wraps by the floor mats near his feet. Johnny Boy recommends with a higher intelligence that we drive downtown on the strip at the local bar hang out.

“Let’s roll down North Santa Cruz Blvd. and see what the honeys are up to…”

Buffalo drops into town and approaches the strip of bars. The first bar is Last Call, nothing there, boring. It’s at the end of the strip anyway. Next is our friendly local Irish pub, CB Hannegan's but is sort of tucked away down the street with not too much excitement, so we keep rolling…

Boxer spots a nice line at the Black Watch and yells out, “over there, look at the girls in line. Nice! Buff, slow down.”

Boxer lifts the Super Soaker and points it out the window and aims for the two girls in line but shoots and hits one of the only cowboy looking guys in line. This guy has Wrangler jeans, kick-ass cowboy boots, a button-up red-orange shirt, and an authentic-looking Stetson hat.

“Oh Shoots, Boxer you nailed the cowboy in line at the end," I exclaimed.

We all look at each other and scream, “NO….”

Johnny Boy commands, "Floor it, Buff!" Buffalo short circuits for a second then hit the gas. The cowboy starts sprinting toward the back-right corner of the Volvonic.

“More gas Buff!” I yell.

Buffalo accelerates to about eight miles per hour and gets some distance between the cowboy, and us but we approach a red at the next stoplight. The cowboy gets about fifteen feet from grabbing the car and I shout,

“Jag Right!”

Buffalo slows to turn right at the intersection. The cowboy reaches the Volvonic and slaps the car and gets a hold of Johnny Boy's TEAM SUGAR green T-shirt that Boxer made for all of us. He rips the shirt in half and takes it with him but loses steam a bit as Buffalo accelerates out of the turn. We gain momentum and get away further down the road. The cowboy threatens us with a few screams,

“Dip-shits, I’ll get you guys!”

He slowly fades away in the rear-view mirror and we make our way through the mountain back roads and return to my house. We all sigh with relief and Buffalo laughs,

“All those seemingly meaningless hours of studying vocab words sure paid off, Hammer. Jag Right. Ha, classic.”