Chapter 1

Playa Norte

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TOCAYO
Part 1
Prologue
Playa Norte
Charly the American
A Catholic Education
Cold Showers
A Peruvian Name...
Tossing Armando...
Bob Cousey's Shorts
Inside Immaculada
Warming the Bench...
A Little Socrates...
Running From Lola
Ping Pong Politics
A Perfect Basketball Day
A Man Needs His Friends
A Pig In a Hole
Condors Over Ticlio
Wrestling in the Plaza
Handcuffs and Curfews
Rochabus
A Hero Hiding
Hitting A Brick Wall
Part 2

My conquest secure, I pushed off the window sill. With my arms behind my head, swaying side to side, I looked out the window at the beach.

My parents, known to the outside world as Doctor and Señora Ernesto Gamarra Leon, built our family a beach house at the northern edge of Dos Playas, a pretty village of fishermen one hour from Lima. Our home looked over the ocean in a place where the Peruvian desert spills over black rock cliffs and mixes with the sands of two beaches shaped like crescents. The southern beach, Playa Sur, curves in a long sweep to the South until it fades out of sight in the mist. The northern beach, Playa Norte, is small and cozy. Over the years it became peppered with simple beach houses built by thrifty families from Lima who wanted a summer house close to home.

This had been another great summer. I spent every day at the beach, and every day had been sunny and warm. The waves had been good almost every day, so I had surfed almost every day. However, it was all about to change. Not because summer was about to end, but because Semana Santa was about to begin.

Since all but the very topmost tip of Peru is located south of the Equator, Semana Santa, or Easter Holy Week, arrives at the end of summer. With the start of Semana Santa, devout Peruvians prepared their prayers, their robes, their music, their floats, and their souls to mourn the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ. Teachers, with perhaps greater trepidation, prepared their prayers, their lectures, their books, and their patience for the start of the school year. Surfers prepared their courage for Pico Alto.

Pico Alto is a monster wave that breaks over a submerged reef a kilometer to the west of my family’s beach house. The reef requires so much force to make a wave that it breaks only a few times a year. Semana Santa is one of them.

Every year during Semana Santa the surfers, the very best surfers from all the beaches north and south of Lima, they came to Playa Norte in ones and twos, driving Beetles and Volvos that looked like upside down bathtubs with long, skinny surfboards strapped to the roof. Some belonged there, some did not, but they all bunched up along the malecon overlooking the beach, just below my house, and paced back and forth, examining the ocean, each other, and their own hearts. Some checked their glove compartments for lost bars of wax. Then they checked the seams in their front seats for the keys they lost last summer. They re-tied their bathing suit strings. They warmed up their muscles. They stretched their muscles. They examined their surfboards, still on the roof racks. They examined each other’s surfboards. They invited others to examine their sufboards.

Eventually the brave ones would nod to each other and agree that it was time. The word quickly spread, and soon everyone had unstrapped their board and joined the thin line descending the steps from the malecon to the beach. Huddled close for companionship, they waxed their boards on the sand, keeping a wary eye on the horizon where Playa Norte's waves, five meters high, rolled toward them like the brigades of the Russian army.