Inconvenience Store

BOOK REVIEW: In Search Of Captain Zero

A Surfer’s Road Trip Beyond The End Of The Road
Allan Weisbecker, 2001, Putnam

Van’s in there attempting to keep up with Clapton, as a Spoonful of Wheels of Fire roars down a road tessellated with time signature quirkiness that seems to go on forever.

It’s a song I like, but the volume is annoying as hell and it’s almost impossible to concentrate enough just to find the desired key on this keyboard, nevermind string a few lucid sentences together.

And if that’s not enough, I just put down one of the damnedest books I’ve ever read in my life.

Captain Zero has already hit the big time and has been looked over by all the Right People. Certainly, the thing needs exactly no help from myself.

Which, I guess, is why I haven’t bothered to pick it up until a couple of days ago, at the local library here in Cocoa Beach.

Anything that hits the big time is usually something I can do without.

Just a personal little deal with me.

AW seems to have finally performed the impossible: SENSIBLY explicated surfing.

That and a whole lot more.

This is a travel book.

This is a surfing book.

This is a drug dealing book.

This is a lost romance book.

This is an introspective lament book.

This is a piercing look at humanity book.

This book is all this and more. Much MUCH more.

The story sort of takes on a life of its own, evolving and growing as it winds it way along. Things in the beginning are different from things in the middle and different yet from things at the end. But somehow it all hangs together in the most uncanny way imaginable.

Aww fuck, I don’t have the faintest clue as to how to describe this one. My very limited talents as a writer don’t even come close to measuring up to a proper description of Zero.

Go get it and read it for your own self.

If you surf, and you’ve had to deal with that swarm of brainless idiots who think they know all about surfing ‘cause they watched Fast Times at Dumbfuck High (and who among us has not had to deal with these dumb asses?) or saw the latest Eyewitless news presenter breathlessly describing the latest shark attack (even as they resolutely ignore the serious meatcuttery of the automobile infrastructure), or any of the other ways that incredibly ignorant fuckheads manage to acquire bogus information on subjects they are fundamentally incapable of understanding; tell THEM to read it too. Not that it will do them the least little good, but at least you’ll rest comfortable in the knowledge that they were given a fair shot at understanding by yourself. After which, you are perfectly justified in savaging them verbally or otherwise, whenever they deign to make an incautious remark that you recognize for the bullshit it really is.

A lifetime resident (despite having travelled all over the damn place at one time or another) of Central Florida, James MacLaren took a four-year degree in death thrills riding giant waves on the North Shore back in the 70's. Wound up in the inconvenience store following a lay off from the Cape, where he was involved with the construction of the Space Shuttle launch pads, among other things. Father of best son in the world.