Editor’s Note: The following is the conclusion to a three-part memoir from former professional surfer and recording artist Jim White. We think you’ll enjoy it, as three years later, the themes Jim tackles ring perennially true. Also, be on the lookout for Jim White‘s recently released CD, Where It Hits You. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Jim White, in the studio making music.
After my accident at Rocky Point, as I lay twisting and writhing on the examination table in the doctor’s office while he probed the long L shaped wound, I thought about my dreams of becoming a pro and wondered what might become of me if I failed. I had few peripheral interests aside from surfing. What would I do with myself? I couldn’t imagine myself as anything other than a surfer. Starting the next morning I had no choice but to find out. I couldn’t walk, much less surf or glass boards. I was crippled in every sense of the word. I tried laminating on crutches but that didn’t work and so had to quit my job with Aipa. The swells continued to pour in. Living so close to an endless supply of perfect waves but unable to ride them caused a wild desperation to well up in me. A month crawled by and the morning that I finally got the stitches out, I was so pent up with surf madness that, against the doctors orders, I drove straight to Velzyland and paddled out. Again it was a small day by Hawaiian standards. Again Thom Hamilton was there to take photos. Again things went badly. Stupid impatient me. On the second wave the wound predictably tore open, prompting another visit to the infirmary in Haliewa. More stitches, more bandages, more crutches. I was told to stay out of the water for another month. I ran out of money a week later and, unable to work or surf, was forced to leave the islands.
Upon my return to San Diego I felt restless and out of place, limping here and there as I tried to do fulfill my duties at work. A month later I quit my job at G & S and moved back to the panhandle of Florida, to the smallest, crappiest surf in America. Somehow the notion of home seemed like the remedy I needed to get back on track. I took to soaking my troublesome foot in the salty Gulf water and slowly the wound closed. I was able to walk again, to surf again, but needed a job, so I tried my hand at opening my own surfboard factory, teaming up with a shaper who I’d crossed paths with on Oahu. He was from Pensacola as well but had been shaping for Lightening Bolt over in Wahiwa for a few years. When he heard I was moving back to Pensacola he contacted me and said we should join forces and run roughshot over the smaller board manufacturers in area. Sounded like a good plan. We started our business with a couple of grand in seed money that I borrowed from a childhood friend and between the shaper’s island pedigree and mine, soon enough we were selling some boards.
A few months into this enterprise I got called out of town on some personal business. It was two weeks or so. This would have been in 1980, when the first cocaine mania was hitting America. In the short time that I was gone, my business partner indulged himself in a frenetic coke binge, embezzling every penny of our capitol and assets in the process. By the time I got back and found out the score it was too late. Game, set, match. We were bankrupt. To complicate matters upon my return, my guilt-riddled partner did a dime bag of coke, ate some reds, drank half a bottle of Jack Daniels, then attempted suicide by throwing himself into the path of an oncoming car on the busy highway that passed our tiny factory. I’m sure to him it seemed like a poetic, heroic, meaningful gesture, but, ever the fuck-up, this guy was so wasted he overlooked the all- important fact that he was standing in a school zone at the time. The car that hit him was sailing along at a brisk ten miles an hour. All my coke-head ex-partner got for his troubles was a broken arm. Unable to shape and the laughing stock of the surfing community, he split town, leaving me holding the bag on many thousands of dollars of debt.
Talk about lost baggage…
Soon thereafter one of my best friends was killed in a motorcycle wreck, then my girlfriend started cheating on me with this slime-ball pentecostal romeo who sat behind us in the evangelical church I belonged to at the time. Thank you, Jesus. I was in full shit magnet mode. A couple of stray cats I’d adopted died weird gruesome deaths, then the wound in my foot began leaking a thick clear viscus fluid and I was back on crutches . What a spiral. The one bright spot in this period came two months later when I placed second in a small pro contest held there in Pensacola. On the way to the finals I beat my childhood idol, former world champion Yancy Spencer, in the quarters. When they announced the results of that heat, somewhere deep inside my troubled mind I heard a strange popping sound, like a spider web snapping loose from a high branch in some distant tree. A few weeks later I had the first of my nervous breakdowns.
Desperate for money to pay off that mountainous debt owed my childhood friend, I quit surfing cold turkey and moved to New York City where I became, of all things in the weird and wild universe, a fashion model. My sister was working up there and she’d heard there was easy money to be made in modeling and so I chased it. I moved on to Italy, then Switzerland, then Germany, pursuing the green on the modeling circuit, landing a few choice jobs here and there, but, like my surf career, never quite breaking through. The easy money I’d heard about wasn’t so easy to come by after all. I’d work four or five days a month, modeling pajamas, or underwear in some podunk market in Holland or Belgium, taking whatever cash I earned and wiring it back to the friend who loaned me the money to start the surfboard business. It took me over a year of subsistence living to clear that debt.
