Jim White surfing Velzyland during an earlier trip. Photo: Courtesy Jim White
A couple of more years passed. I never surfed. Some door in my mind had slammed shut and the lifestyle that I held so precious no longer inspired me. I rejected my Christian faith and started playing guitar six or more hours a day, writing songs just to pass the time. It was a secret hobby, a sort of self imposed therapy to help me cope with the ever-clearer realities of who I was and wasn’t. I grew weary of life in gloomy, freezing northern Europe, so I moved back to the loving arms of Pensacola. It’s a poor town so you generally take whatever work you can find. Although I had no practical experience doing carpentry I landed a job building chaise lounges. Within the first hour there I got my left hand caught in a fully engaged table saw, nearly severing several fingers in the process. I was self destructing. With a constellation of orthopedic pins holding various shattered finger bones in place I was out of work again and so, for reasons that are to this day unclear to me, I loaded up my 1964 Buick LeSabre and moved back to New York City, where I ended up an indigent, eating out of dumpsters and selling scavenged items at thieves markets in order to keep from disappearing beneath the relentless waves of time and circumstance. You do what you have to. It’s a different kind of surfing.
When the larger pins were removed from my hand I started learning, or relearning, guitar. I only had two fingers that worked on my fretting hand, so I relied on slack key tunings like I’d heard back in the islands. I tried to be more creative with my picking hand—you know, use my limitation as an asset and teh songs I began to write somehow started to have more coherence that ever before. After a long struggle to find steady work I started driving a cab in Manhattan. This was the mid 80’s when the crack epidemic was ravaging New York. Insurance companies wouldn’t issue life insurance policies to cab drivers because so many were getting murdered that they were deemed too high a payout risk. I lost a buddy, shot in the head during a robbery. I sometimes was issued the very cab he was killed in. You could see the bullet hole in the ceiling liner. Jesus. Every night as I drove out onto the mean streets of the the Big Apple I knew it might be my last on this earth.
There was this one ride I’ll never forget. I was driving this Puerto Rican thug up to Kingsbridge, one of the toughest neighborhoods in the South Bronx at that time. There had been a dozen or more cab drivers murdered in the prior months—several in Kingsbridge— and so I was a little jumpy. My nerves were calmed when my passenger complimented me on my wild-eyed approach to driving. “You drive like a fucking maniac!” he shouted approvingly as I banked hard between two slower moving vehicles on the West Side Highway. I told him I drove the cab like I used to surf. There was a moment of stunned silence from the back seat, then he incredulously replied, “What??? You used to surf?” I told him how I’d been a pro and lived in Hawaii. “In Hawaii?” he sputtered, then added “Oh shit man, what happened to you??”
Good question.
I drove a cab in New York for ten years, surfing every now and again, slowly losing my ability to paddle, to catch waves. At one point in my late thirties I heard about a summer swell hitting the East Coast. I grabbed my board, borrowed a car and hit out for Cape Hatteras. It was late in the day when I arrived, greeted with perfect 4-6 foot offshore lefts grinding off the Lighthouse jetty. Having spent many summers there I knew the wave well, so I paddled out, whipped my board around and, easy as pie, promptly dropped into a good sized peak. I hit my backside turn, leaned in, instinctively tucked and, grabbing the rail, got deeply tubed. A group of young kids paddling out on the shoulder started hooting and hollering at me. I could see their silhouettes out the spinning hole formed by the cascading lip and that old magical feeling overcame me…like I was still a surfer. I popped out of the tube, banked a cutback, hit the soup hard then kicked out next to the last kid in the line. He was maybe sixteen. He grinned wildly at me and barked out, “Woooohhh!! Where’d you get that weird old board, old timer??” He was taking the piss out of me. They all were. My time had come and gone.
I continued to play guitar in my crippled style and write long rambling songs. It was therapy. Very few people had ever heard these songs. The few that did had very little positive to say about them. Then somehow, in the most unlikely of fashions, at that moment when I by all rights should have just given up, maybe blown my brains out or become embittered by decades of failure, I caught a lucky break. A cassette tape of songs I’d written found it’s way into the hands of pop music legend David Byrne. Before I knew what was happening I was offered a six record deal with distribution by Warner Brothers. Byrne befriended me, taking me on tour with him for almost a year. I was the opening act. It was one of those show-biz miracle stories that the press just eats up: a friend passed my cassette to a friend who passed it to another, on and on until miraculously it ended up being listened to by one of the most famous art/pop musicians of the era. So one day I’m driving Puerto Rican thugs to war zones and being taunted by dim witted teenage surfers, the next day I’m playing to two thousand screaming Talking Heads fans. It was utterly surreal. I released my first album to critical acclaim and haven’t looked back since.
