Soul Surfer Johnny Returns
More Wild Adventures...As The Puerto Grinds
by
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As Puerto grew year by year, the most noticeable area of change was on Playa Zicatela, home to one of the western hemisphere’s premier surfing waves. When Johnny first came to Zicatela, the beach was covered with two miles of wild scrub oak, with no houses or businesses on its entire length. Now the beach was practically denuded of vegetation and the old dirt road was crawling with newly built hotels, restaurants, and shops. “Hey, when I started coming down here, there was nothing out there,” said Digger, the resident dean of Puerto during tourist season. Clutching his ever-present half-gallon bottle of rum, he growled, “Back in those days, it was all covered with manzanita, scrub oak.” His full name was Digger Dan, and he was one of the famous Diggers who used to feed the hippie invasion crowds for free in Berkeley’s People’s Park back in the ‘60s. Digger came to Puerto every year, after he harvested his crop from his little 4-H project up in Mendocino. He hadn’t cut his hair or beard for many years, and he looked like the roly-poly hippie grandfather he was. He was as street-smart as they came, and his wise ways ruled Puerto for many years. He was revered by many, and liked by all. However, many were afraid of him until they got to know him well. He growled when he talked, in a frequently bellicose tone of voice meant to instantly intimidate anyone on the receiving end, frequently backed up by threatening body language if necessary. Then he would chuckle, relax his defensive pose, and the real Digger would come out, a real sweetheart of a guy, just posing as the old Digger Dan again. Half the guys in town could do imitation Digger growls. He celebrated each morning by cracking a new half-gallon bottle of Bacardi rum, which he knocked off before the end of the day, every day. He bought it by the case, eight bottles to the case, at a 10 percent discount. After 4 in the afternoon, he started getting a little unintelligible, but nobody cared. He played poker every afternoon there was a game, and rarely lost. “Hey, Digger,” said Johnny, “tell ‘em about the time Troubadour John torched Gary’s car.” “Oh, God,” said Digger, “I’d better have a beer for this one.” They were sitting at the Swill Stop, where the crazed and depraved hung out with the regular happy-hour crowds. The Swill Stop had only three rules: “1. No needles. 2. No assholes. 3. Break a bottle, buy a round.” It was run by Crow, one of the carnies. Johnny was a regular, because everybody worth meeting in Puerto dropped by the Swill Stop sooner or later, some every day. “Well, you know Zicatela Dave got it on video, don’t ya?” Digger began. Zicatela Dave Ogle was a surf photographer who filmed wave riders daily for his excellent Puerto Underground video series. “He saw Gary’s car go up in a ball of flames that morning,” Digger said, “and got it on video.” Zicatela Dave had coincidentally just stepped out of his Zicatela hotel room shortly after dawn to test a new video camera, and the first scene the new camera captured was Gary’s brand new white Nissan looking like Hiroshima, just down the street.
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About the Book
While writing Soul Surfer Johnny, the first book in this series, I was flooded with so many additional memories of “Puerto Tranquilo” that I knew a second book was waiting to be written. By the time the first book was finished, I had jotted down more than 125 other memorable episodes. I was challenged to write the book that became Soul Surfer Johnny by Joel Fotinos, vice president for spiritual books for Penguin-Putnam publishers, during a lunch we had in 2007. He had just read my Awakening The Soul: The Trilogy, and challenged me to write a novel incorporating the essence of that tome, ala the most successful novel of the millennium, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. While Soul Surfer Johnny is certainly no Da Vinci Code, it does carry forth that essence of spiritual growth, describing a young man’s soul awakening. The heart of the story, however, remains his many wild surfing adventures, most in Puerto. But it wasn’t planned that way. A number of years ago, I began compiling a list of topics for my Puerto book, which I knew I would write some day. But I had no plans of incorporating those memories into the book Fotinos challenged me to write, revealing how to create the spiritual awakening possible within each of us. However, when I started writing, it was immediately apparent where this story was going … to Puerto, where my personal spiritual awakening occurred some 25 years earlier. Thus, the first Soul Surfer Johnny book had a serious underlying story of spiritual awakening that seemed out of place in a surfing adventure novel. But it really wasn’t, because what was being portrayed as happening to Johnny really had happened to me, and has occurred to others, so I knew it was eminently possible. I had so much fun writing Soul Surfer Johnny that I immediately started writing this book, its direct sequel, but with a difference. This volume does not have that heavy underlying story of spiritual growth, but rather only occasional references to Johnny’s continuing awakening. It’s mostly outrageous tales of his many Puerto adventures and episodes. This book richly continues the adventures of Soul Surfer Johnny, the story of an East Coast bad boy who becomes a good kid as he learns to surf in the waves off Southern California. In the process, he joins his own sort of “gang,” then ventures south to the big waves of Southern Mexico. He is guided to “Puerto Tranquilo” in the late 1970s by several of his fellow Tyrony Bros. “gang” members, who had discovered the fantastic surf break there several years before. There he is witness to and participates in a bizarre series of adventures. Unexpectedly, he begins to explore his spirituality, and discovers his true inner self for the first time, dramatically improving his life. Like its predecessor, this continuing wild tale is almost true, however sometimes the actual circumstances are slightly “enhanced,” while conveying the basic truth. For example, a few wave heights may have been exaggerated occasionally – except in the “Big Wednesday” chapter, which is Johnny’s true, eye-witness account. But most of the book’s stories actually happened as described. It makes no claim toward being all-inclusive, or a legitimate history of the town. It’s just a lot of mostly true stories about a wonderful little town in Southern Mexico. All stories are re-told as accurately as memory serves.
About the Author
About the author .... Bill Missett, a retired California daily newspaper editor, lives in a small fishing/surfing village in Southern Mexico. Some 30 years ago, Bill experienced a life-saving incident of spontaneous mental telepathy while bodysurfing. That prompted more than three decades of study and investigation into metaphysics and psychic phenomena, which led to the spiritual experiences that helped create this book. He’d been bodysurfing for 10 years before coming to Puerto, but had never ridden a wave like Puerto before, which is extremely fast and steep. It requires a whole new skill level which can be learned only on the job in the surf, one that escalates every time a large new swell arrives, for every swell is different. You learn something new every day surfing Playa Zicatela’s Main Break and Far Bar, as he did for years. Bill first visited Puerto in 1979, and for a month every year thereafter. He lived there for 18 months in 1987 and 1988, surfed Zicatela almost every day, and decided to move there for my retirement years. He met his wife Patrice there in 1987, and they vowed to return as soon as possible. Puerto finally became their home in October, 1992. He is married to Patrice Perillie, a prominent human rights/political asylum attorney with offices in New York City and Oaxaca, Mexico. He is the father of two adult sons, Bill III and Jeffrey, who live in California. His personal interests include archaeology, artifact hunting, raising trees from seed, preparing homegrown chili spices, bodysurfing, bird watching, music and reading. He can be reached at missett@prodigy.net.mx .