I am Emily Maya Mills. This is my stuff.

20th June 2011

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The Beach Boys, Babylon and a Dad They Call Bruce

My daddy was a surfer. And he wasn’t just a surfer. He surfed Kelly’s Cove in San Francisco, where the Pacific Ocean cast a fog so thick it felt like you were looking through a ghost. An aged lady whose breasts dripped perfectly into your eye sockets and dared you to see the car in front of you. The waves were brutal and the temperature of the water was pain—it unleashed brain freeze with the force of ten thousand rocket pops.  On the most dreary days, when I was too little and my dad and brother had gone surfing, I would raid his vinyl collection and listen to Surfer Girl by the Beach Boys, over and over, dreaming about the warm barrel waves and impossibly tan, bikinied butts of Southern California.

The Beach Boys. They were the sunlight through the speakers. They sounded like what Sex Wax smelled like. If you’re not familiar, Sex Wax is just another name for board wax and to a 4-year-old, it smells like something you want to cram so far up your nose you could smell it forever.  They were dreamboats and high school and long, powder blue Chevys. They were good, clean American boys. They were everything I imagined life could be if life could just be fucking perfect.

Now, my surfing daddy was the coolest daddy. Still is. He’s an artist, an intellectual, a mad scientist, a rare vinyl collector, a real sweetheart, an old hippie. But he has a grit to him.  He read us bedtime stories well into our teens, but to this day he can’t say, “I love you,” at the end of a phone call. He was Mr. Mom—dressed us, packed our lunches, drove us to school—but he would often disappear into his wood shop with a large can of Fosters to make crude slingshots for the goddamned raccoons who were stealing the goddamned meat right off the goddamned barbecue. He may have once knocked a pigeon out of the sky with is bare hands and stomped on it, but in his defense he felt he was under attack.

On, July 4^th, 1985, when I was a tiny child, my family celebrated the nation’s birth on the Mall at Washington with 750,000 other sweaty Americans. I wasn’t used to East Coast summers and the air was so still and scorching, I worried we would all burst into flames. Just as I started to meltdown,—the way that strange-minded, depressed babies do at the thought of the world holding it’s breath and choking us all—the sun set and The Beach Boys started playing. I was blown away. It was actually them: the sunlight from the speakers. I knew them, and their wave of melodic familiarity soothed me so. I climbed onto my dad’s igneous shoulders and as we rocked, gently back and forth, he told me how they weren’t as good since Dennis died. I asked him how come Dennis died and he told me he had been drinking and drugging when he went diving for treasure and he drowned. He said it the way that one would say, “that’s a pony and that’s a duck.” We rocked and swayed and watched the mediocre, Dennis-less Beach Boys and that was the first of many weird ways my dad would deliver life lessons.

Years later, as the Dennis-less Beach Boys bumped along their post-Wipeout-pre-Kokomo career, my aunt started seriously dating their keyboardist. We drove out to San Jose to see them live at a dumpy little theater-in-the-round that was about the size of a hatchback. The stage rotated round, at sluggish, burn-out speed, and I got to dance like a lunatic in all the empty seats around us. On about the third rotation, I realized there was something wrong.  Something was wrong with Brian. At the time, I had never been to Chuck E. Cheese but I realize now, that’s what he looked like—an animatronic robot doll that someone spilled Mountain Dew on and maybe squirted Ketchup into its brain parts. His mouth kind of flopped open and closed along to the lyrics but they did not make the shape of words.  He was positioned off to the side, his hands bounced above the keyboard like they were dangling on strings. “What’s wrong with him?” I asked my dad. 

“Fried,” he replied. “Fried his brain on drugs.”

“Permanently?”

 “Yeah, permanently,” he said with the casual certainty of “that’s Mickey Mouse and that’s Daffy.” He further explained, “This used to be his band. Him and Dennis. That guy up front. He’s their cousin. He was always kind of a dork. Now he’s the one in charge.” “Ahhh,” I said, understanding, but not sure what because I was 8-years-old.

It took me a long time to grasp what my father was trying to instill in me with those learning moments, but I get it now. He may have had a strange way of communicating but his were lessons of undeniable, petrifying truth—the kind that shapes who we become.  To this day, I always make sure not to go diving for treasure when I’m drinking and drugging and I would never, ever let anybody’s dorky cousin steal my band.