~ Review 1 ~

John Severson
Founder - Surfer Magazine

"Fred made me laugh and squirm through Malibu culturati. I choked on the asphalt fumes of the PCH, and breathed the salt spray of the "Bu" again. Im with him in the pre-dawn perfection, taking off until…but let Reiss tell it. Hell suck you over-the-falls with his wild surf yarn (or is it?)."

~ Review 2 ~

Drew Kampion
Author

John Severson recently loaned me his copy of "Gidget Must Die" saying he thought Id find it interesting and I did. He said some elements of the surf establishment were incensed by the book, upset with the author and his brash incorrectness. But Mr. Severson thought the author, Fred Reiss, nailed some excellent points, expressing what a lot of post-renaissance surfers are feeling. "While squirming and gasping at the accounts of self-destruction, he made me laugh." I read it on the plane and I agree.

Gidget Must Die is a witty, surreal, and insulting text laced with keen perceptions and dead-on portraits of our sports archetypes.

Make no mistake about it, this guy Fred Reiss is sick. He describes himself as an average surfer who loved riding waves since he was a Jersey kid in Asbury Park on a rubber mattress. He says he started surfing late in life; he was 29 and had cancer. "I laid in the hospital and vowed Id quit journalism (After eight years) and do stand-up comedy. I swore Id move to California, learn to surf and go to Australia. Three out of four ain’t bad."

The cancer got handled with a scalpel, and Fred came West. True to his vows, he did stand-up comedy for 12 years, and even got a popular morning talk show called "Fred For Your Head." He worked doing traffic reports for radio stations (Got laid off.). As a part-time employee at Pat Farley’s soulful "Santa Cruz’n Surf Shop, Reiss says he "met all the legends" and heard their stories. "I traveled to the surf spots and surfed my own spot. In the shop everyone kept talking about how surfing changed at Gidget, everyone! They had that one thing in common."
Fred’s brand of humor was insult comedy, and he spun off two books, Insult and Live!, How To Abuse And Insult Everyone, before knocking out Gidget Must Die on the surf-shop computer. Satire, sarcasm, and flaming are the guys modus, and that’s the way to read this book. Amazingly, some surfers miss the point.

"I got lots of flak for the damn thing from various surfers," Reiss told me. "It’s a lot of politics with some of these pros and semi-pros. Their image. When you bring stuff up like this, these guys just get mad. Dogs hate having their nose stuck in their own poop."

Surfer Joe also misses the point—Malibu Point. The books premise is that, after a long hiatus (punctuated with jail time for credit card fraud), legendary rebel Surfer Joe Campion returns to Surfrider Beach to kill everyone involved with the Hollywood film, The Gidget, for destroying his beloved Bu, where life had been absolutely perfect until a certain short female appeared upon the scene.

Reiss uses his relatively straight-forward storyline to engage a plethora of cultural myths and icons. It’s a damn latter day Dante—a Devine Comedy, which was a lot less funny than Gidget Must Die.

While its clear that Surfer Joe is Dora, and that Sally and Francis Koolner refer to Kathy and Frederick Kohner, and Matt Young is Nat, etc., Reiss uses the names of surfers as subcultural iconographs that they’ve become. He gives his compositely recognizable characters monikers like Skip Purpose, Grubby Devine, and Corker Barber, and Flippy Weaver so he can paint them as types we can all recognize.

Reiss launches his larger-than-life characters onto the archetypal Malibu beachscape, where they engage in every kind of mayhem and witty exchange you’ve had the pleasure to witness or imagine. Here is hyperbole cut with realism and underpinned with a serene sensitivity to local myth. Some example will illustrate and whet the appetite.

The situation: "Johnny Slickmeyer kneepaddled on his longboard to get into a Malibu wave. He wasn’t alone. He was surrounded by a flotilla of teenagers on shortboards who were competing for the same wave. They glared and sneer and frantically clawed into the slightly chilly water. The oceans flat surface suddenly bulged and lifted Slick to its cream-tipped peak where the wave began to break. He looked down at the six-foot ledge that slanted below him to the right. Slick was in the perfect spot. It was clearly his wave. But no one else saw it that way."

The Gidget: "Surfer Joe despised kooks. They destroyed everything. Kooks. They ruined Malibu. She gave birth to them. She was the mother of all kooks. She did this."

The Wave: "The succulently peeling Malibu wave obliviously continued without them to shore., undemanding, indifferent, and perfect. Slick admired the flawless wave and gloomily wondered why something so beautiful could bring out so much ugliness in people."

Surfing: "Slick felt a force beside his own move him forward. He slid down the rising wave, angling to the left, slowly standing up, and smoothly bring the board around to the right in one flowing motion. A sweep of spray fanned out from its tail. He straightened the longboard into a parallel position across the shoulder. Slick stood with his knees slightly bent. He rode in the curved pocket just ahead of the spilling crest behind him. Cool foam splattered on his muscular back."
The Valley: "The Valley is a rusty orange smog. You can easily get misled in its haze. It will make you flail, stumble, trip, grope. You cant find its pulse or your own. You don’t know who you are or what you want anymore. Sharp gleaming glass and angry traffic lights. It’s a maze, a trap, a swamp, a comfortable first marriage without love…The Valley deluded you, used you, drained you—well, by then, and unless this insight happens to you at an early age, you’re too weak to escape it. You’re a dying man, adrift on the land away from the ocean, away from the surf, fading away from your style, away from your shoreline. You died in pursuit of a false stoke.

Surfer Joe: "The kooks were getting closer and closer to his Malibu. The tract housing was advancing. The kooks were establishing their positions, building supply lines of supermarkets and freeways, passing ordinances. The kooks were coming. It was inevitable. But Joe would find some way to play the kook game without being part of it—no social security number, no property, no children, no bank account, no debts…Joe would have their pleasures but never their pain. Any wave they threw at him, he’d use to his advantage. The kooks would never make him feel like a failure."

The Bu: "Regardless of the numerous collisions, the bulk of confrontations rarely developed into fistfights. Most of the combatants indifferently resigned themselves to the lawlessness of the spot, threatened each other, then turned away and paddled out, ready to commit the same offenses again because everybody else was. And since the crowd was its own refuge, the same violators could keep coming there and never be held accountable for their repetitive behavior. It just didn’t matter."

And one more to show Reiss touch with dialogue:
"Joe glowered at the gawking duo. They had vapidly glazed eyes. Bright smiles. One had blonde hair hopelessly tangled in Rastafarian locks. He had zinc oxide on his nose. It gave the impression he was made of metal and his tanned colored paint had peeled off. The other had a buzzcut, a nose ring, and skull tattoos. His face was coated with different colors of sunscreen that resembled war paint. They carried six-foot boards with painted flames on them. Shortboarders, thought Joe, arrogant nothings.

"Kooks," growled Joe, pronouncing the word with a twig-snapping k-sound and stretching the "oo" into a prolonged and very disgusted ooooo (as if it was something foul he stepped in). Joe finished the word off with a hard "k" and a juicily sizzled s. "Shortboards, small minds, tiny dicks."
"Hey, chill dude," said the Rasta white guy.

"Uh, don’t call me dude," tautly said Joe, menacingly. "That type of language increases my tension. You don’t want to do that."

Its true. Here we are in the twilight of the modern era, crushing a fading beauty with out mindless greed. Why couldn’t we have left it as it was for the greedy few who at least were there first? It’s the same story everywhere, but Malibu is a stout archetype and its cast of characters generally familiar. This is Big Wednesday with teeth big enough for carnivores.

"I just wanted to capture that stoke that comes up with each wave," said Reiss. "I’ve never read a book that every came close. The core of the book to me is having the form of purity and whether you decide to live within it, or corrupt it…and obviously sometimes the world and time will just do it for you." Bitter as only a humorist can be.

I recommend Gidget Must Die for a hundred or so other reasons—compelling passages, acerbic truths, and the kind of outrageous and absurd exaggerations that help you remember its just your basic stand-up insult comedy.

Anyone who has stood in sub-zero misery, pouring boiling water over the frozen lock on their car door knows that you don’t live in Chicago for the weather. No wimps allowed here. We Chicagoans just pull our Bulls caps down over our ears and gut it out until April. Or May. Sometimes June.
And for outdoor ventures, a second Bulls cap is always recommended. Oh yes, we are a brawny bunch. But it doesn’t mean we have to like the Chicago climate.

We all have a warm place we dream of escaping to when the snow turns to freezing rain and the frost starts forming on the inside of the windows.

I picture myself frolicking on a pristine beach in Malibu, just another gorgeous woman slinging her waist-length blond hair, living the carefree surfing life.

For many years, my fantasy has deliberately ignored the glaring peculiarities of the people who live in southern California, their obsession with cleavage, celebrity, clothing, and the healing power of crystals.

Also, mudslides, raging fires, floods, and earthquakes.

But now, word is reaching me of controversy roiling the surfing community. Frankly, it started me wondering if my wintertime escape dream wants to take place in a regions where people get in a snit over Gidget.

It started when Fred Reiss, a surfer-writer-comedian (a typical occupation in California) wrote a novel entitled "Gidget Must Die."

The books main character is a vengeful surfer-serial killer who goes on a rampage trying to rub out all the characters from the 1959 movie "Gidget."

The books premise is that the film—starring Sandra Dee in the title role and James Darren as "Moondoggie"—ruined surfing by popularizing the sport and the lifestyle, leading to vicious competition and worse.

Some of the biggest names in surfing went ballistic over the book. Lance Carson, 52, one of the all-time American surfing legend greats, told me angrily, "Gidget is a personal friend of mine."

Gidget turns out to be a real person, and she didn’t much fancy the whole concept of Reiss’ book either.

"Surfing is suppose to be so laid back. The idea of them getting upset about a book is pretty unbelievable," says Reiss.

I’ll say, I didn’t think surfers read books. That was part of their charm.

Later, to my great relief, I learned that the objections of Carson and others were based solely on judging the book by its cover: a guy on a blood-red ocean, surfing and aiming a revolver at the same time.

Writer-surfer Reiss, 41, paid to have the book published himself out of the Santa Cruz’n Surf Shop in Santa Cruz. And he’s streamed because some of the country’s top surfers have persuaded other surf shops (his main outlets) from carrying the book.

Reiss sys this is a violation of the surfers written code of not caring too much about anything. And it certainly doesn’t fit my get-out-of-freezing Chicago-fantasy where the 1st amendment issues do not intrude in any way.

Calling around to some of the men who actually lived the beach idyll of the "Gidget" movie, I discovered there is a dark underbelly of surfing life today. The "Gidget Must Die" book is not entirely fiction.

"On the water, we’ve got crowd problems, pollution problems. And from all the years in the sun, I’ve had minor skin cancers," says surfer Carson.

Slip Frye, 54, another legendary surfer of the late 50s and early 60s has become a clean-water activist.

Most remarkable is that Frye, who owns Harry’s surf shop in San Diego, now says people ought to get a job so they can fully savor the freedom and glories of surfing in their spare time. "Work’s a part of the deal. You got to work to appreciate anything," he says. A surfer preaching to values of hard work? Now that’s scary.

But I’ve got news for you. And it’s even more frightening.

When I confided my California Dreamin scheme to surfer Steve Pezman, publisher of a surfing magazine, he had a suspiciously wicked edge to his laugh.

Pezman, 54, says it is quite possible to surf the Great Lakes. Even in Winter. And with the growing, rowdy crowds fighting to ride the waves out west, Illinois is looking better and better to the California surfers.

"Beware Lake Michigan," this surfer warned. "We’re coming to get you."

This new release from insult comedian/Santa Cruz’n shop rat Fred Reiss has created a bit of a hubbub in the surf community. Several surf shop owners were put off by the press kit packaging, which featured the titled scrawled in a garage font on a plain envelop, an illustration of a pony tailed surfer aiming a revolver at an unseen target.

At least one member of the industry felt that the last thing the surf world needed was a piece that glamorized a merging of the Sport Of Kings with small-arms violence. However, having seen the packaging, I must say that my five-year old daughter views much more graphic imagery during Saturday morning re-runs of old Tom and Jerry cartoons.

More potentially hazardous than any violent message (though I’ve yet to play the book backwards at 33 & 1/3 RPMS.) is the fact that many of surfing legendary figures are represented in the novel, transparently camouflaged via composite characterizations. These men, which include a legendary Bu nose rider, the Gidget scrivener, a famous foam pourer, and a Santa Monica shop owner, are all summarily killed off by an embittered Malibu anti-hero (abominably named "Surfer Joe"). At least one citizen of the South African township of Jeffeiesbaii will be livid over this fictionalized and grossly misappropriation of his life story.

The book is essentially satire, and it should be read as such. Throughout the text you’ll find authorial pulpit-pounding on what constitutes good surfing, detailed studies of hi-tech munitions, tongue-in-cheek renderings of easily identifiable (Matt "The Animal" Young) personages, and overall, the liberal utilization of some heavy poetic license. If any of the above interests you, you can order the volume via the above address.