DEEP HOLE

oysters, surfing, arts funding, crime literature, menopause

DEEP HOLE, Matunuck RI

One time I ate an oyster. I am and was vegan at the time, but was trying to let go of rigidity. My world had fallen apart and I was trying to pick myself up with experimentation and a broadening of horizons. I was not taken with the experience of oyster eating and thought that it tasted and felt like a wad of snot with like a splash of lemon. That night I was also a bit drunk and had somehow lost my clothes at the party (it was a hot tub party) and so I had to ride my bike home across town in my bathing suit at 2am, which I do not advise. But I was proud that I was not too proud to bend to eat the oyster. Another time I ate a mozzarella stick. It was Lent and I was dating someone who did this thing for Lent of giving up things that he had given up, which felt almost like an uptight New England Carnival type of inversion. And who am I to deny the spirits of liminality in a season of resurrection. And also who am I to deny fried things. So he (straight edge) drank a sixer of High-Life and I (vegan) ate a sixer of mozzarella sticks and neither of us got sick.

Not getting sick feels like the best to hope for in these times of abject American mind poison. Spirit poison. To not get sick you might be tempted to try to stay well, but then in said pursuit realize that wellness culture can be another awful strain of mind poison. But some of the wellness things are nice and purity will knock you down faster than poison so use whatever you need these days. I have been mainlining the ocean, maybe because in mid-life I know how to commune with god. Or I at least know how to space out and float. I have been reading about Jainism in the morning while I eat breakfast. On most days I could tell you when it will be high tide in Matunuck, which is a side effect of the tide widget that stares out at me from my phone. I also mainline the phone, though this is not entirely consensual and when given the opportunity I let it die.

Every time that I go to write about anything, politics hovers over it like an oversized hammer. Every time that I start an essay, it takes way longer than it should because politics have become knots in my brain and stones in my guts. Lately, I think a lot about Simone Weil’s On the Abolition of Political Parties. At times, I have wanted to be like Simone; philosophically rigorous, mystical and frail. But I am built out of 2x4’s. Rough cut and oddly sturdy. Last week a lid fell off of a coffee cup while I was drinking it and I accidentally poured scalding hot coffee onto my tits. A horror? Yes, but the silver lining was how astonishingly fast I healed. Most of my days are spent beavering about; lugging things here and there and I sometimes wonder if I would be smarter if I stayed still more. At night when I rest, I unconsciously pick scabs off of my breasts. Yesterday I burst into tears listening to Sarah McBride being interviewed by Ezra Klein. But it was like the good kind of crying, when you realize that you can let down your guard. Or maybe I just cried because it was the first time that I had ever heard a politician talk about beauty.

On the drive to Matunuck there is a small highway sign pointing in the direction to the oyster bar. Fifteen years or so ago my friend Arley had done a bunch of design work for an oyster farmer who was opening a restaurant and now all these years later I am reminded of Arley as I see his hand in the spelling out of the letters M-A-T-U-N-U-C-K.

I was working at AS220 and Arley had been the communications director at AS220, but had a scheme to keep working there, but move from doing full time communications for the org, to doing AS220 design work plus some graphic design client work. The idea being that it would help the org to be able to continue to have Arley’s hand made approach to branding in the mix and that affiliation with the org could help to stir up some clients. AS220 could be a wild place like that in the aughts where if you had an idea to change your job, you could run with it, so long as you hustled to bring in money that would cover your salary. Usually eventually people realized that for the effort it might just be worth it to go into business for themselves, but going into business by oneself can be kind of a deranged prospect, particularly for artists. Pretending that capitalism is marginally worth participating in can be too much when your heart wants to build utopias, nurture beauty and justice or at minimum tweak out on graphic design. In the AS220 office engaging with capitalism could at best feel like a weird form of avant garde performance art where artists proved that they could deliver lines about community development finance while wearing outfits vaguely mocking power suits that were often held together by safety pins. At worst it could feel like a nervous breakdown when cash flow just wasn’t there to make payroll and there were 50 people whose livelihoods depended on the organization’s paychecks not bouncing.

Sergi Diaghilev was a type of patron saint whose legacy lurked in our midst. His Ballet Russes were wildly popular, critically acclaimed, yet often lost massive amounts of money and so he’d shuffle around debts until a patron or money launderer would take interest. Or he’d flee town for a few, while trying to convince an heiress to support his vision. In short his hustle was hard. There is much to be said about trying to make ends meet in the arts. Where the shaking of trees becomes an art form unto itself. And the getting of ducks in a row, a craft above all others. None of us came into the game to practice these art forms and, but once you know how to throw yourself into learning a craft, that learning is transferable, so if tree shaking it must be, then so be it. And now the ducks have fled into the trees and the federal government is talking about clear-cutting. The business donors have put their pocketbooks behind digital portals. Chainsaws rev. But we had long been warned about the quantity of eggs to put into government baskets. Or the quantity of government to have in amongst the chickens. But the chickens have also been chainsawed, so here we are with the ducks in the trees, trying to catch their eggs before they smash to the ground.

Smash an egg on your head and the yolk is dripping down. The yolk is dripping down.

The dismantling of the National Endowment for the Arts has been lurking in the shadows. Always lunking, but especially lurking for the past few months. There are few places where I like to spend time less than the grants.gov portal used to apply to NEA grants, and yet I felt queasy reading the article about the NEA rescinding already awarded grants and many of the lead program officers quitting. A nausea that leads into a burning in the back of the throat. And then that righteous anger gurgling that can be one of my best and worst qualities. It is a pittance you know, the amount of money that the US government allocates to the arts. And yet still it is the single largest source of Arts Funding in the US with an annual budget of 207 million. RI Senator Jack Reed was quoted in the NY Times as saying that he’d fight tooth and nail for the NEA. He tweeted this quote with a link to the NY Times article and so far a month in it has three whop-de-do likes. I don’t know if this is a reflection of how over twitter people are, how little attention RI constituents pay to Elected Officials once in office, or if its part of the retribution algorithm.

I drive to Matunuck because I started to surf a year or so ago. I got surf-curious a bit before that, like got a wetsuit and all. Mostly at the urging of the painter Sue McNally. It might have even been the first time or second time that I met Sue. We were eating burritos in the Dirt Palace kitchen because Dan Wood was hanging out and I was bemoaning the dwindling days of being able to get into the ocean and she was like, you need to get a winter wetsuit. And I was like I’m not trying to be a surfer, and she was like, I’m not a surfer but I love my winter wetsuit. And then I found one on sale for 100 bucks and I was like I am doing this, even if I just jump in the ocean in January a couple of times, this is worth it. Simultaneously my friend Erik who grew up surfing in Florida had been talking up surfing to me. I went out with him once and it was super obvious that I could fall for it hard. Anything to be by the water. As a kid I would wake up early and walk to the town dock with a fishing pole over my shoulder and a bucket in hand. Jeans rolled up. A bandana out of my back pocket like the cool teenagers with feathered hair wore when they rollerskated. Except for my bandanna was mostly for wiping off fishy scaly hands. I have never in my life wanted to eat animals, fish included, but I have always been drawn to the things that one does as a pretense for staring out at the sea. For being with the sea. My poor father would mostly be tasked with eating the strange creatures that I would slosh home with in my bucket. Unsurprisingly I also did not like the killing or gutting of fish. Small bluefish called snapper were the regular catch. Followed in frequency by flounder and eel. But then sometimes you’d get something freaky and prehistoric like a sea robin or tautog with its oddly human teeth and there had better be an old timer hanging out on the dock to tell you what you were dealing with, because in 1982 there was certainly no internet to look this shit up on. A couple of times I caught sand sharks, but it was pretty well known that you gotta throw those back. In 1984 my fishing career came to an abrupt end thanks to Satan, or rather thanks to the fallout from a satanic murder in the small suburban seaside town where I lived. Turned out that the playground near the dock that I fished off of was covered with 666 hail Ozzy type graffitti and suddenly I was no longer allowed to walk down there by myself early on weekend mornings. In retrospect I should have protested though, on grounds that everybody knows that Satanists are not morning people.

Sometimes it can be hard to discern when you are running towards something from when you are running away. Luckily when you are in the ocean you are not running anywhere, so this type of orientation is not relevant unless you are becoming addicted to surfing, which is pretty much what happens if you are the kind of person who is incessantly drawn towards the sea. Addiction is a complicated subject, filled with heartbreak on top of heartbreak. But some of the most hopeful moments that I have felt in the past five brutal years have been sitting in the backyard reading some article about new frameworks for understanding addiction and new approaches for working through it. Last week or maybe the week before I read the book The Drop: How the Most Addictive Sport Can Help Us Understand Addiction and Recovery, by Thad Ziolkowski. The title, long and straightforward, might seem like it is telling us what we are in for, except for what is not made obvious from the title is that Ziolkowski is formally trained as a poet. So even though it is a book hovering on the edges of social science, self-help, recovery memoir and maybe even sports lit, at least once a chapter there are a cluster of words that forcibly pull you out of the logic of prose and sit you down in a wide expanse of loosely affiliated ideas and just makes you hang out in this place of beauty and uncertainty. It is also full of lurid descriptions of excessive partying which I realize has started to wear me down inside of literature. The idea of consecutive nights of bad sleep sandwiched with large quantities of social encounters and the roller coaster of shit decisions, body aches, head aches, and more bad sleep, is such a monumental bummer to me that I get a little queasy and itchy, just reading about others in the flow of a partying life.

Publicly announcing my enchantment with surfing is a bit nerve-wracking. Its hard to not simultaneously anticipate that I’ll be seen as a poseur or kook, and also it feels like coming out into a subculture that I have some major issues with. Surfing has some sociological aspects that overlap with the world of art. Sub-culturally it can be a place where people who don’t fit into mainstream society can find acceptance. It is an activity like art where while you’re doing it, it can be quick to enter a flow state where the shallow sounds of work-a-day consciousness fall silent under the spell of absorption and focus. It is a place where one can sit with pure feeling and glimpse it from the edges while tripping out on rainbows made by droplets of water beating up against offshore winds. And also, as I was also a little miffed to learn after I had been hooked, that surfing, it turns out is a sport! And so it comes with some of the derangements common in sports subcultures, namely misogyny and homophobia. I know that it sounds naive or stupid that it hadn’t occurred to me that it was a sport, but I think that I was thinking of it more like ballet, or hiking, sex or skateboarding: i.e. something physical and embodied, but also creative, expressive, a journey rather than a competition.*

The other thing that first lured me towards surfing were the psychedelic surf films of the 60’s and 70’s, which hold their own in dialogue with experimental films of the era. In 2017 Harvard Film Archive curated a mini festival around some of the master works of this genre. It was called The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun: Psychedelic Surf Films 1966-1979, and I went up to Boston to catch a projection of Morning of the Earth being shown on 16mm. As far as experimental film goes, I’ve been a pretty heavy user over the years - not a scholar, but a practitioner and someone who worked for a while in a technical capacity in the field (at a motion picture lab). The vast majority of experimental films are not feature length, largely for reasons having to do with finance and distribution. So I was fairly blown away to learn that the sub-culture of surfing had built a robust feature film touring/distribution circuit from around 1965 to 1975 that supported a number of really long, totally plotless, mostly abstract, slow, and mind boggling beautiful films with equally killer soundtracks. Morning of the Earth has elements of anthropological filmmaking, a strand that runs deep in experimental film and is broadly problematic in all of the ways that anthropology is. That said, much of the contemporary surf literature that I’ve encountered has fairly thoughtful takes on what it means to be a visitor from places that have wielded colonial power in places that only recently have decolonized. It can be a bit uncanny, I’ll like be watching Pinch my Salt, which is a contemporary you-tube podcast type show, that I think of as sort of like the CarTalk of surfing, i.e. two family members crack themselves up with surf shop talk, and they will articulate an argument about localism that almost borders on decolonial theory a la Franz Fanon, and then in the next breath say the most abjectly stupid thing about women as a category. Anyway, this is all a digression because I was talking about 1970’s psychedelic surf cinema. Even in just the cursory overview presented at the Harvard Film Archive, it becomes pretty clear that George Greenaugh sits at the center of this world. His work exudes a coolness that surpasses almost everything. An aloof visionary with a Ramones haircut in platinum blonde. Shoeless and shirtless, usually wearing pants covered with fiberglass resin from a prototype of something meant to float that he is working on. The 1973 masterpiece Crystal Voyager was his story (though directed by David Elfick). When it came time to create the soundtrack Pink Floyd came to them to offer their services in exchange for permission to use some of the footage shot by Greenaugh “inside of the barrel” for their live shows. The modern surfboard fin is based on Greenaugh’s design. He hand crafted all of the waterproof housings for the camera gear that he used to shoot inside of a barreling wave for the very first time in Crystal Voyager. It weighed 28 pounds, and despite having a smaller frame, he figured out how to operate it while riding on a kneeboard. It seemed fairly obvious to me on first encounter with his films and the legends around him that if you are an artist/surfer, this is your guy, though I can imagine that engineers and tinkers of all kinds might feel the same.

Its been a number of weeks since I started writing this piece, actually maybe a couple of months. The spring got supercharged and the to-do lists at the day-job mounted, and all there was, was to throw labor at problems and I stopped having quiet mornings to type into the void. In that time there was a devastating fire at the Matunuck Oyster Bar. And for a while the timing felt weird in the way that coincidence and tragedy can each dust the surface of life with a patina of unreality. I had written more about when Perry, the proprietor of The Matunuck Oyster Bar would pop into the AS220 office to talk about the design work, but I had cut it out. For every sentence I write I cut one out. But we liked it, we always liked it when someone outside of our realm seemed down with art in all of the ways. I’ve been reading articles and it sounds like hundreds of people, maybe three hundred worked there full time. Which is pretty astounding given that to be on the list of the top 100 largest employers in RI you only need to employ 375 people. As a vegan, who only once ate an oyster, it wasn’t really my thing, but I’d been there with friends on a honeymoon road trip trying to find the best lobster roll in New England. It was a nice time.

I sometimes imagine the words Deep Hole as a reclaimed slur describing old women. Menopausal women. Surfing is potentially a mid-life crisis enthusiasm for me, but its certainly not my first rodeo with doing off the beaten path type things in middle age. Somewhere in my mid-forties I went on an instagram selfie bender. But the selfies that I posted were weird, often not at all sexy selfies, or profoundly trying too hard to be sexy selfies that they became so grotesque that all that was left was a puddle of embarrassment that should not be looked at, maybe sarcastic selfies, but also sincere selfies. I posted one every day or so for a month and it was pretty excruciating. A forced visibility while in the crosshairs of the moment of life of suddenly vanishing visibility. I really didn’t know what was going on, or where this inquiry was coming from. But most of my adult life had been about figuring things out in real time through weird experiments, often shrouded with some aesthetic elements so that they could be passed off as art projects. My genius friend Mary-Kim recognized it immediately and sent me a link to the seminal poem Pause, by Mary Ruefle as well as some of the selfie poems that she had written a couple of years earlier. The poem Pause, is so good that it almost makes it so that there is nothing else that needs to be said on the topic of menopause. But, of course lately there is a lot to be said on the topic as the 6 trillion dollar wellness industry has realized that this particular Gen X cohort of middle aged women are quite a high spending power tranche that might be tempted to spill some disposable income on serums and the like. Some are calling it the Menopause Gold Rush, as it is very rare for it to be discovered that an entire category of health care that has been underserved by “the market”, involves a demographic that now has massive purchasing power that demands lots and lots of corporate attention. Anyway, here I am six years further into what I have been told is at least a decade long wild ride and I’m over photographing myself. Over overthinking in/visibility. I’m still punk enough to be highly skeptical about being part of anyone’s gold rush, skeptical about for-profit pseudoscience hocking potions at women with the same old subtexts: it is your duty to be better…to look younger, to have less hair on your arms, to have more hair on your head, to be thinner, except for don’t diet, that will stress other people out, you mustn't stress other people out, our potion that we are selling you can be taken without weird side effects that will stress other people out. Don’t get me wrong I’ll fuck around with hormones, because that seems actually interesting in this moment in American gender conversations. But personally I don’t wanna get into it with attempting to have inner glow or whatever the current incarnation of unrealistic beauty standards are these days. My current concept of self care is looking as tired on the outside as I feel on the inside. Anyway, the thing that I have found in this phase of life, is that middle aged people, at least of my generation, don’t really have crises - we have generally not been afforded the luxury of drastic irresponsible change in mid-life. Most middle aged people who I know are on call all of the time to deal with everyone else’s crisis from toddler freak outs, to early adult mental health breakdowns, to elder’s health emergencies, that the last thing that they would precipitate or willingly engage with on actual purpose is a crisis. We just expect so much of mid-life people that when they pick up a new hobby to cope or whatever, or attempt to change in a mostly positive, but maybe quirky way, it's derided as a crisis. Which is ok, who has the energy to bicker over semantics? I am 100% fine with outmoded stereotypes about middle age persisting in the zeitgeist if I don’t have to argue about it and can put my head down into work, hang out at Deep Hole and attempt to get more sleep.

Over the past year as I’ve gotten increasingly more obsessed with surfing, I’ve done what I usually do when taken with something, I read anything that I can get my hands on about it. I’ve probably read about fifteen surf adjacent books over the last year or so, most of them memoir with some fiction and history thrown in. My plan is to take this essay full circle and wrap up by telling you about the book that takes place at Deep Hole in Matuncuk, and is titled (you guessed it), Deep Hole. But first, a small digression telling you about the books of this topic of inquiry that have meant the most to me.

If you express even the slightest interest in surf literature, you will hear Barbarian Days this and Barbarian Days that. And the book by William Finnegan IS pretty much worth the Pulitzer prize-hype and all of that. But I will say that as this administration moves to diminish all permutations of identity categories and vilify diversity efforts, it is profound, in reading a library shelf’s worth of books on a given topic, how powerful the small handful of books written by women has felt to me. I had originally written mini book reports on each of them, but this essay was getting too long so I’m just going to do shout outs to: Rockaway by Diane Cardwell and Surf like a Woman by Pauline Menczer. Both are very suitable summer beach reading, easy page turners. Surf like a Woman has some laugh out loud moments when a childhood Pauline is running around the beach calling every dude who crosses her a dickhead. Puberty Blues by Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette is as deranged as it comes…which tracks as it comes straight from the hearts and minds of two Australian teenage girls in 1979. I would not call this one a fun read, it's too full of 13 year old girls facing punishing social pressures, but it's short, feels important, and the ending is incredible.

All of the above books are memoir in some way, which is a baffling genre to me, even though maybe there’s a lot of it in what I write. There is a danger to narrativizing a life, to collapsing various perspectives into a solitary voice and getting comfortable with ideas of truth offered in this form. And yet the intimacy can be undeniable; can feel more true than anything. Fiction is just real weird, especially when there is something known to be true, but in a different form lurking underneath. Like a cat dressed up for Halloween as a different kind of cat.

The Don Winslow short story, Deep Hole, is set in Matunuck RI in 1975 and centered around a surfer named Eddie who likes to gamble. He gets into the hole, deep. Get it? The story is a straight to audiobook “Audible Original” that is about an hour long. Winslow writes crime novels that some might call pulpy. At their best his books vibe a little Raymond Chandler-esque. Some of his characters surf. Some of the dialogue is hard boiled. I can be both totally into AND ALSO a total snob about genre fiction. At this point in my life I am both bored by and slightly resentful of plots that tie together neatly. In fact, as you may have caught wind of from these wandering, not really going anywhere essays, I don’t even really like plot as a concept, like at all. But I don’t want to be too hard on Winslow, largely because of the extraordinary efforts he has gone through to take on Trump. He basically retired from his writing career to fight MAGA in a way that is no joke. We all channel our resistance through a variety of means, actions and daily decisions. Most of us can’t drop everything to create anti-Trump propaganda for crime fiction fans. Most of us don’t have access to millions of followers whose politics are middle of the road enough that they might have voted on either side of the party divide at different times. But when somebody has this platform, a mainstream fan base and uses it unhesitatingly and relentlessly, I’m going to be grateful and get off of my soapbox about things like finding conventional plot devices a little bit annoying.

So anyway, in Deep Hole Eddie has bet on the URI Rams, and this bet has not paid off. And he has nothing to pay his debts with. His “friend” Chris, whose uncle is the mobster running the books has already taken his surfboard and wetsuit and gotten him fired from his job at a seafood joint that is a thinly veiled Aunt Carrie’s. He’s like barely paid off the vig.

Vigorish is a word that I have a very distinct & fond memory of learning. I was working at AS220 and going over some bookkeeping with Dr. Chazen, who for many years was the foremost patron of the arts in Rhode Island. He wanted to commission an artist to paint a mural on the side of a dialysis center in South Providence, but he also wanted a tax write off. Dr. Chazen was like what’s the vig? And I was like do you mean the fee for fiscal sponsorship? And he was like ok, you picked up correctly on context cues, I guess you pass, but also do you know nothing of Yiddish or sports betting? So then he explained that Vigorish meant the cut that the book-maker took and started to explain various approaches to calculating a vig that involved probabilities and proportions. This all basically went over my head, so I was like, uhhh…we were just going to factor in the standard 5% fee that we charge everyone, but if you want something more complicated, I’m sure we could figure something out. He rolled his eyes. I usually couldn’t parse exactly where I stood with this larger than life figure who had been so important to the career trajectory of so many local artists, but in that moment I knew that he had at least moderately enjoyed explaining underworld financing mechanisms to me. And I felt like some important occult knowledge had been gifted to me by just the right person.

Anyway back to the story of Deep Hole where Eddie’s friend Chris is getting more and more shit from his mobbed up uncle about how poor of a job he’s doing collecting the money that’s owed from Edie. So Chris cooks up a scheme for Eddie to rob the high roller card night that he works for his uncle. Eddie has no business wielding a gun, is terrified, but sees no other way out of the hole. Eddie pulls it off, narrowly escaping getting blown apart by mobsters at the card game by pissing himself. For a minute it seems like all might be right in the world but then the mob-uncle visits Chris and is like “how stupid do you think I am”. Chris and Edie are kidnapped and put onto a boat that motors to (you guessed it) Deep Hole. It seems like they’re going to go in with the classic cinderblocks attached to their feet, but then the mob uncle is like Psyche! Its ok, I’m just gonna keep the money that you stole from the game. So it becomes a story of a mob guy making money by essentially stealing from the mob. And this is where a fictional story set in Matunuck becomes a cat dressed like some other cat. Also set in 1975, there’s a famous (true) story of the mob in Providence sealing from the mob. It's often referred to as the Bonded Vault Heist. I’m not going to go into the details, because the story is pretty widely known. Known enough that it was hard for me to not project some outlines of it onto Winslow's Deep Hole plot. I’m not going to try to convince anybody that this novella is fantastic literature and I’ve probably spoiled a little of the ending, so if endings are your thing…apologies. But if you love finding reflections of this strange little state in odd nooks and crannies of culture, pop or otherwise, read it, I mean listen to it, maybe at 1.5 speed or something. And then go to Deep Hole wearing some kind of aquatic footwear and be dazzled by orange sugar kelp clinging to cobblestones deposited by glaciers. By red floating sea pom poms and the sweet rot of wrack as the tide goes out under the hot sun.

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*And there are certainly surfers who lean that way and eschew competition. Within the field they are called “free-surfers”.