Free Mahu by Neil Plakcy Page A

was a little too skinny to be a great surfer—he didn’t have enough weight to master the really big waves, but he made up for it with endurance.
    If you want to be a good surfer, I mean a really good one, you have to work at it. You have to be totally focused on making yourself the best surfer you can be. You spend hours out on the water, learning to anticipate the waves, practicing your moves. You have to understand a little about physics, a little about oceanography, a little about wind speed. Surfing has to be what you live for.
    I thought I could live for surfing when I was twenty-two, crashing on the floor of somebody’s house on the North Shore, surfing Haleiwa from dawn to dusk and talking surfing the rest of the time. Nobody screwed around too much up there—we were too focused, and at the end of the day, too tired. So I could ignore the part of my brain that was always scared, always holding my secret.
    Then I came in fifth in the Pipeline Spring Championships. By March, the great winter waves on the North Shore have died down a little, and the best surfers have gone to chase waves elsewhere on the globe. So I wasn’t facing top competition, but still, it was the best I’d ever done. I was riding high, thinking I was finally reaching for my potential. Most surfers start when they’re fifteen or sixteen, peak in their early twenties, and lose the competitive edge by thirty. I was twenty-three, and at the top of my form.
    A bunch of the guys took me out drinking that night, buying me beers and shots until they closed the bar and dawn started to streak the dark sky over the North Shore. I was in no condition to drive home, so my buddy Dario dragged me over to his place to crash. He was staying at a one-room cottage north of Haleiwa, right on the sand. I remember wanting to lay down right there on the beach, I was so wasted.
    The next thing I remember is waking up in Dario’s bed, naked, with his mouth on my left nipple. He bit and sucked at both nipples until they were hard and sore, and then licked a trail down my stomach to my crotch, where he gave me a blow job.
    Then I must have passed out again, because when I woke again it was almost noon and there was a note on the refrigerator from Dario. “You’re a champ, Kimo,” it read. “I’m on the water.”
    I felt paralyzed. My mouth was dry and my head pounded, and my body was sore in unaccustomed places. When I looked in the mirror I saw my nipples were raw and red, and I had a hickey on the side of my neck. I knew then that I had made the best showing I would ever make in a competition. It would only get harder to keep holding back my desire for men, and the effort I had to put to that task would take away from what I had left for surfing.
    So I left. I hitched back to the place where I was staying, packed up, and went home . Afterhanging around my parents’ house for a while, I entered the police academy, the most macho thing I could think to do. I thought if anything could save me from being gay, being a cop would be it.
    Alvy and I talked for a while, and eventually I felt better. If Akoni couldn’t deal with me, that was his problem. Alvy went back to the locker room to change out of his uniform, and I walked home.
    There were still a couple of hours of daylight left when I got home, so I went surfing. It felt good to empty my mind of all my troubles—my sexuality, the danger I might face if I came out as a gay cop, the dead ends in Tommy Pang’s murder case.
    On my way home, I stopped at a little grocery just across Lili’uokalani from my apartment and picked up some shrimp, mushrooms, and red and green peppers to grill on my little barbecue. It’s a tiny, dark little store, and from the outside you’d think it was nothing more than a place for cigarettes and beer. But the owners, an elderly Chinese couple, t ook a fierce pride in the quality of the produce, and it was better than any grocery I knew in Honolulu. The clerk was a surfer, and he