Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [36]
By the time he phoned Houtz, Kirkwood was no longer acting or golfing professionally. He owned a bowling alley in Studio City. Shortly after the initial call, Houtz drove up to meet a man he found a charismatic wellspring of irrepressible energy. When the former celebrity boxer sat back in his chair and asked, “Have you ever heard of a spot called the Cortes Bank?” Houtz’s brows arched. He had pulled thirty-five-pound lobsters from deep caves atop Bishop Rock, and he had fished among swarms of feeding albacore so frenzied that the water boiled for miles. An hour amid a school like that, and your forty-three-foot-long sportfisher was stuffed to the gunwales with high-grade sashimi. Yeah, he was familiar with the Bank.
Kirkwood announced his intention to refloat Cortes Island, and Houtz’s jaw slackened. The effort was already well underway. Kirkwood had lined up solid financial backers and a partner with a huge rock quarry in Ensenada. He had signed a memorandum of agreement with the Los Angeles sanitation district to barge three thousand tons of landfill garbage to the Bank a day. There was money and legend to be made. What Kirkwood needed was a partner with Houtz’s diverse maritime skill set to survey the Bank and help figure out how best to proceed. Houtz immediately thought Kirkwood “was nuts,” but he was also clearly a big thinker and a risk taker. Houtz had spent his life among men of his ilk.
“The idea really got the wheels spinning,” Houtz said. “It was like, ‘Okay, I’ve got a project here. What will it take to do it?’ My philosophy is, I don’t accept the word impossible—I can’t.”
He would have to convince a highly skeptical wife, and take out a second mortgage on the family home, but Houtz was in.
Today, Jim Houtz is in his seventies. He’s fit and compact with a pair of blazing blue eyes, a mischievous grin, and a few wicked scars on his arms and legs from motorcycle racing and other treasured memories of an ill-spent youth. He recounted his tale on a flawless fall day at the immaculate Laguna Beach hilltop ranch house he shares with his lovely wife, Joan. From his backyard, the Pacific is an endless cobalt expanse that stretches easily to San Clemente Island. With a telescope, it’s easy to imagine you might see waves above Bishop Rock.
When I contacted him, Houtz was surprised that someone wanted to hear of his experience atop the Cortes Bank. He was even more surprised when I showed him a sixty-page manuscript that Joe Kirkwood had written about his role in the adventure. The manuscript and a small collection of photos had reached me anonymously and out of the blue. It seems Kirkwood penned the tale around 1967 and sent it to Sports Illustrated, whose editors surely knew of Kirkwood from his golf career. For some reason, it was never published.
“His story—it’s in thirds,” Houtz said, flipping through the pages. “One-third is fact. One third is a theatrical script for a movie. One third is fantasy—over and above all to cover his rear end. I will say, if this had been published anywhere, I’d have sued his ass.”
Thus, what follows is a hybrid, a combined tale of sometimes competing perspectives. Only two men, Houtz and Kirkwood, really know what happened atop Cortes Bank, and Kirkwood, it seems, is no longer around to counter Houtz’s differing recollections.
In 1952, Joe “Palooka” Kirkwood Jr., one of the originators of the idea of sinking the SS Jalisco atop Cortes Bank’s Bishop Rock to create the nation of Abalonia, was at the top of his game. He was a well-paid actor