The Closest Thing To Being Born

"It isn't worth bringing a girl down here," says Dave Brooks, a regular who went to Boston University for a year before coming back to be close to the Wedge. "You get a girl all the way down from L.A. and wipe yourself out screaming wildly and showing her your moves on the waves. Then you come into shore, and she says, 'Did I see what?' You want to smash her face in. 'See what? See what?' I once yelled. 'I just killed myself for you, baby. Give me an ego trip, girl. See what? What were you doing, eating sand?' "

Ron Romanosky, who has a habit of throwing his knee board onto the rocks and damaging it severely whenever he considers his performance less than perfect, recently brought his girl, Linda, to watch him at the Wedge. After he had ridden some big ones and realized Linda had not watched any of them he stormed over to Kevin Egan. "Linda's been talking to your wife all day," he said. "You know what they're talking about? Shampoo. Shampoo! She didn't even see my rides. I'll kill her." And away went Romanosky's board onto the rocks, severely damaged again.

Only one area in all of body surfing has a more savage appearance than the Wedge, and that is its appendage 250 yards to the west. There, a huge curling wall of surf ("It's so big you could drive a truck through it," says one Wedge man) that smashes straight down into ankle-deep water is known, for obvious reasons, simply as Brutal. This mass of breakers, normally devoid of shape, is spoken of with reverence, almost as if Brutal were some terrible creature that awaits careless surfers and then systematically destroys them. Wedge men generally avoid Brutal, for it affords no escape route, such as diving underwater. As Kevin Egan says, "If you want to swallow a lot of water and sand and destroy your body, Brutal is ideal."

Whatever awe the Wedge men may have left over from a couple of barbarous days at Brutal is reserved for, and directed at, one of their own—a short, long-haired 28-year-old named Mike Virgil. Due to past reputation and recent modus vivendi, Virgil, by design or not, has stamped himself as the archetype of the Wedge, or, rather, as the kind of man our society has always wanted the archetype of the Wedge to be. He is somewhat of a mystery to most of the regular personnel, partly because he is quiet and withdrawn, usually absent from their get-togethers, and partly because he is considered to be somewhat abnormal. Virgil endures as a source of wonderment to his fellows because of the unique way in which he rides the Wedge—a flat-out, straight-down free fall, sometimes sideways, sometimes backwards, sometimes even over Brutal, most of the time looking for all the world like what he wants to do more than anything else is hit the bottom in such a way that he will snap his neck in half.

"Virgil is out there to take on the biggest wave he can find," says Egan. "He doesn't care where it is or if he can ride it or not. It might break at Brutal. It might break over the jetty. No matter. Sometimes he rides, but most of the time he just free-falls. That's his thing. He's amazing. He's a wild man. No, he's an animal."

Virgil will show up at the Wedge only on days of gargantuan waves. Anything less than 10 feet does not interest him. On these occasions he will sit on top of the berm alongside his pretty wife Cherilee, staring out at the Wedge but saying nothing. The other Wedge men watch him carefully to be sure not to miss any portion of the performance. "I didn't know they did that," says Virgil. "That's pretty neat. That's respect. I guess I do ride the biggest waves." When he has, as he says, "timed" the waves and is ready to go, he will rise as if by divine guidance and enter the water. Swimming out through the crashing surf, Virgil will pass up waves that might cause night moaning in lesser men and wait for what he thinks will be the biggest peak. Then he will proceed to catch his wave and start the "ride," first gliding through the water, then turning, kicking into a swim and falling on his side or his back, down, down, down, finally disappearing into the foam, where some spectators believe he will stay forever. Mike Virgil, however, always comes back up. "I may look like I'm being wiped out," he says, "but I'm not. I have a green room that I duck into where there's no turbulence. Only calm. I can reach out of the disaster and touch the calm. It's so damn great I can't even believe it."

Virgil grew up in Pasadena as a legend in the field of high school fisticuffs. He played football as a linebacker, maintaining an image, Nick Hudson says, "as the baddest guy around." Hudson says Virgil was "the baddest" both on and off the gridiron and "used to cold-cock guys and lay them out instantly." Perhaps because most of his time was spent engaged in such activity, Virgil never learned how to read.

When he was 16 he moved to the beach and became fascinated by the Wedge, seeing in it a chance to develop fully the body-surfing skills he had learned elsewhere. On his first ride at the Wedge, Virgil took off backward in an over-the-falls move, a stratagem that was to endear him forever to veteran Wedge riders since they believed it to be the product of mental derangement. As he hurtled over the top, a backwash wave thundered from the shore, swept him around and upside down, turned him over a second time and slammed him feetfirst into the sand. If he had gone down headfirst, Virgil says now, he would have been killed. As it was, the top half of his leg pointed south, the bottom half pointed west, his knee was "destroyed" and he was in a cast for three months. "I figured then the Wedge was a virility deal," he says. "At least it got me out of the Army. I had to keep going back."

From that point on Virgil was considered Mr. Wipeout. Six years ago he broke his collarbone when a wave did thrust him headfirst into the sand. Two years later in one of his perfectly demented straight-off numbers, he smashed head on into a goon and/or turkey who was coming the other way. The goon's jaw was caved in and broken in four places, while Virgil needed nine stitches to close the wound over his right eye.

"I don't usually get mad," says Virgil of the latter incident. "I mean, people see me up there and they usually get out of the way. People don't swim under me. I don't get uptight about others in the water. I don't call them turkeys or goons. I call them people. They're just out there doing their thing, like I am. Anybody who is out there at the Wedge has plenty of hair, let me tell you. I never head-hop, either. That's kid stuff. But this time I was hot. I came out of the water prepared to duke this guy. I might have killed him, but he was hurt bad enough already.