Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [3]
Free stuff.
Longboards.
Anything made by O’Neill.
All-female outrigger canoe teams.
Fish tacos.
Big Wednesday.
“I propose,” Boone says to the line at large, “moving fish tacos over all-female outrigger canoe teams.”
“From ninth to eighth?” Johnny Banzai asks, his broad, generally serious face breaking into a smile. Johnny Banzai’s real name isn’t Banzai, of course. It’s Kodani, but if you’re a Japanese-American and a seriously radical, nose-first, balls-out, hard-charging surfer, you’re just going to get glossed either “Kamikaze” or “Banzai,” you just are. But as Boone and Dave the Love God decided that Johnny is just too rational to be suicidal, they decided on Banzai.
When Johnny Banzai isn’t banzaiing, he’s a homicide detective with the San Diego Police Department, and Boone knows that he welcomes the opportunity to argue about things that aren’t grim. So he’s on it. “Basically flip-flopping them?” Johnny Banzai asks. “Based on what?”
“Deep thought and careful consideration,” Boone replies.
Hang Twelve is shocked. The young soul surfer stares at Boone with a look of hurt innocence, his wet goatee dropping to the black neoprene of his winter wet suit, his light brown dreadlocks falling on his shoulder as he cocks his head. “But, Boone—all-female outrigger canoe teams?”
Hang Twelve loves the women of the all-female outrigger canoe teams. Whenever they paddle by, he just sits on his board and stares.
“Listen,” Boone says, “most of those women play for the other team.”
“What other team?” Hang Twelve asks.
“He’s so young,” Johnny observes, and as usual, his observation is accurate. Hang Twelve is a dozen years younger than the rest of The Dawn Patrol. They tolerate him because he’s such an enthusiastic surfer and sort of Boone’s puppy; plus, he gives them the locals’ discount at the surf shop he works at.
“What other team?” Hang Twelve asks urgently.
Sunny Day leans over her board and whispers to him.
Sunny looks just like her name. Her blond hair glows like sunshine. A force of nature—tall, long-legged—Sunny is exactly what Brian Wilson meant when he wrote that he wished they all could be California girls.
Except that Brian’s dream girl usually sat on the beach, whereas Sunny surfs. She’s the best surfer on The Dawn Patrol, better than Boone, and the coming big swell could lift her from waitress to full-time professional surfer. One good photo of Sunny shredding a big wave could get her a sponsorship from one of the major surf-clothing companies, and then there’ll be no stopping her. Now she takes it upon herself to explain to Hang Twelve that most of the females on the all-female outrigger canoe teams are rigged out for females.
Hang Twelve lets out a devastated groan.
“You just ripped a boy’s dreams,” Boone tells Sunny.
“Not necessarily,” Dave the Love God says with a smug smile.
“Don’t even start,” Sunny says.
“Is it my bad,” Dave asks, “that women love me?”
It’s not, really. Dave the Love God has a face and physique that would have caused a run on marble in ancient Greece. But it’s not even so much Dave’s body that gets him sex as it is his confidence. Dave is confident that he’s going to get laid, and he’s in a profession that puts him in a perfect position to have a shot at every snow-zone turista who comes to San Diego to get tanned. He’s a lifeguard, and this is how he got his moniker, because Johnny Banzai, who completes the New York Times crossword in ink, said, “You’re not a ‘life guard’; you’re a ‘love god.’ Get it?”
Yeah, the whole Dawn Patrol got it, because they have all seen Dave the Love Guard crawl up to his lifeguard tower while guzzling handfuls of vitamin E to replace the depletion from the night before and get ready for the night ahead.
“They actually give me binoculars,” he marveled to Boone one day, “with the explicit expectation that I will use them to look at scantily clad women. And some people say there’s no God.”
So if any hominid with a package could get an all-female outrigger canoe team member (or