The Endless Summer The world felt without end because I felt without end. Summer was the endless season, or the myth of the endless season.

During my childhood, compared to some big city schools, Philadelphia’s school terms seemed to last later. We went to school well into June. I remember doing art projects for Flag Day, June 14, usually creating an American flag from some sort of material that an art teacher found suitable. Classes continued for about another week after Flag Day. On the last day, our teachers would clear out their supply closets by giving us their excess or dated workbooks and texts—Fun with Phonics, math drill sheets, elementary readers like Fields and Fences and Streets and Roads that had been put out to pasture by newer editions. We eagerly took them, glad to have them, swearing to our teachers with all sincerity that we would use the books during the summer. If I was at all a representative, then it would be safe to say that sincerity is no reflection of the will. The books were hardly touched. Our mothers eventually but inevitably threw the stuff out. As soon as it hit us that we were free of school, interest in all things related to school ceased because, for a while, school itself ceased to exist. Our attitude, for better or worse, was “I will worry about school when I am in school.” Or “Render unto teachers when they are part of your life and forget about them when they are not.”

Summer came with a sense of relief. To a child, the break from school seemed longer than it actually was: the last week or so of June, all of July and August before the bell rang the day after Labor Day, about ten weeks. In childhood, the days seemed longer, and July and August had 31 days, they were two of “the long months,” as I used to call them, dreary, the slog of drudgery in January and March, but wonderful in the care-free summer. Daylight lasted longer in the summer, from as early as I could get up to nearly as late as I could stay up. And summer nights were glorious with fireflies, ladybugs, and heat, the cold white stars, the sky like a Black celestial prairie. Sex and innocence were infused with animal energy and the passivity of peace, the stillness and rhythmic rocking of houses without air conditioning, breathing its inhabitants in and out like lungs. The city was spangled with transistor noise, fresh light air plumed with the scent of the heat-rotted. The sensuous was languid yet overpowering in its attraction while also like something that had somehow spoiled a bit. Sidewalks hot like ovens when my PF Flyers hummed across them, light and airy, in a show to sweaty, leggy girls. Despite being a child, you were aware of yourself in some inchoate way as a sexual being, at least in its embryonic stage: a pleasure hunter. The world felt without end because I felt without end. Summer was the endless season, or the myth of the endless season.

As a boy, summers did not end for me, they kind of wore themselves out, sputtered like a car out of gas as the season came to a close and school loomed. Summer spent me in a way and the afterglow became numbing and exhausting or sort of flattening after a time. It was like spending a season in the tropics, the tropics of one’s imagination.

Nineteen sixty-six was the last summer I remember when my extended family vacationed in Atlantic City. My earliest memory of doing this was when I was seven or eight years old. My mother, her sisters and brothers, and some friends would all pool together to rent a house in Atlantic City for a week. (That the house was in a Black neighborhood goes without saying, but the significance of this was unknown to me at the time. Being around Black people seemed normal to me and I did not think this was so because I had to be around them, especially because I was also around a lot of working-class Whites at the time as well but under somewhat different circumstances. Naively, I thought I and everyone else had choices then, not just anxiety about limitations.) The trips to Atlantic City from Philadelphia are among the fondest memories of my childhood, wedged in an overcrowded car, speeding down the Black Horse or White Horse Pike. (The length of the trip was cut in half or more with the building of the Atlantic City Expressway which opened in 1964.) I slept on a pallet on the floor of the rented house or on a small cot. All the children did. Adults slept several to a bed. There was never the least hint of impropriety, as some of my aunts’ boyfriends were part of the entourage but never spent the night. I do not know how the romances were conducted but never in front of the children. But they were young women, so everything felt sexually charged. We spent every day at the Black end of the beach (proudly called Chicken Bone Beach). I would walk in the water a bit (I never learned to swim), collect seashells, and often just watch the waves as the ocean fascinated me, water as far as the eye could see, endless. I would watch and roast in the sun and hot sand as my aunts lotioned themselves with baby oil and a transistor radio blared some R&B station.

At night, we walked the Boardwalk, rode the rides at the Million Dollar Pier, ate Planters peanuts and saltwater taffy, and just talked and laughed half the night. (My mother allowed me and my sisters to stay up later than unusual on these trips as we played with the Black kids in the neighborhood. We envied them for living in Atlantic City and they envied us for living in Philadelphia.) The first time I entered a supermarket was in Atlantic City. An A&P store, or was it Food Fair? In Philadelphia, we bought our groceries from the American Store, where the counterman would get what you wanted from the shelves behind the counter. He would load them in boxes, put them in my wagon, and my mother and I would pull the wagon home. I was bedazzled by the supermarket with its automatic door, with its aisles of endless products that you chose yourself and put in a shopping cart. What a way to buy food! America was surely the land of abundance! Atlantic City or, more precisely, Black Atlantic City, was not simply the Black working-class resort of Philly, but it was a kind of education for me. I began to get crushes on girls there.

Nineteen sixty-six was the last year of the family outings to Atlantic City. Things were changing. The world was changing. My family was changing. A moment may feel endless but never is. I was a teenager; everything was sharp and awkward. I was going to high school in the fall. This was also the year that Bruce Brown’s documentary on surfing, The Endless Summer, opened in theaters. People who grew up in the 1960s know that beach/surfing movies were the rage for a time; fellow South Philadelphian Frankie Avalon made his name as an actor starring in several of them. As an adult, I watched all of these movies—Beach Blanket Bingo, Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini—but I could not watch them when they were current. All the Black people around me considered them to be particularly atrocious “White” movies for White kids. Going to see them in the theater meant I would have to go to a neighborhood White theater filled with White kids. That was not a good idea, as by then I had learned that I could not go just anywhere or do anything. Nothing bad would necessarily happen to me, but nothing good would either. Just isolation and this strange feeling that I would be looking at a lot of White girls in bikinis, which I really did not want to do in front of a lot of White kids. My race meant something to some people that I could not control. By this time, watching certain movies could make me feel uncomfortable because my self-consciousness made me aware of the movie in a way that I was asleep to before, and because of who might be with me in the theater.

I think the best of these films was Ride the Wild Surf (1964) with Tab Hunter and Gidget (1959) with Cliff Robertson. In 1967, Tony Curtis starred in a beach movie—not so much about surfing but a lot about sex—called Don’t Make Waves that perhaps was something of a send-up and a tribute to White Southern California beach culture. But I really did not know anything about these movies—that is, I knew nothing about how I could watch them—until I was well in my thirties. The Whiteness of the beach/surfing movie was made even more oppressive by the surf music by people like Jan and Dean, the Ventures, and the Beach Boys. Black people thought it was all a rip-off of Chuck Berry’s music, and some of it was, and that White kids cavorting to this music was unrhythmic and uncreative, almost spasmodic. I liked some of this music, but there was not a Black person I knew at the time who did, and I felt it was wrong for me to like it not simply because my Black friends would tease me mercilessly for it but more so because the music seemed so much to embody an almost alien Whiteness. It seemed like music from another culture and another country. God knows why any Black kid would want to like it!

I say this only because Brown’s The Endless Summer struck me in such an inexplicable way. The ad for the movie fascinated me: two guys holding surfboards, silhouetted by an orange sun, in search of the perfect wave. I suppose there was something romantic and male about how the film combined the road movie and the buddy movie, On the Road on a surfboard. I did not know how to swim, so I greatly admire people who could do it well. Oceans themselves, endless to the point of being a frightening void ready to swallow anything that entered them, were monsters that surfing seemed to slay without actually killing anything, just riding something until it ran out or it wiped you out. Learn to outlast the ride, surfing seemed to say. Surfing may have struck me as being “White” but there was something exciting about it, the skill, the risk, the challenge of it. Marvel Comics had, the same year as The Endless Summer hit theaters, created a character called the Silver Surfer who rode the galaxy on a surfboard. I was an inveterate reader of comics, and he became one of my favorite characters. Maybe the fact that he was silver taught me something else of “Whiteness” and surfing. For some reason, almost instantly when I saw the ad, I had to see this movie.

I did not see it during its initial run. I saw it maybe a year later, at a discount theater that at the time was nearly empty. I went to the first show in the morning. It was one of the first movies I remember going to see by myself. It was surely not the first documentary I ever watched but it is one of two I remember watching in my youth. (The other was David Wolper’s 1964 film Four Days in November about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.) The Endless Summer was not quite what I expected. The narration, by Brown himself, was informal and sort of, well, 1960s California hipster. But I did learn a great deal about surfing from the movie. The two lead guys, the surfers, the blond and brunette nomads, were attractive and appealing. (There were brief bits with women surfers, but the film concentrated on men.) I liked them immediately. What I did not expect was the film would mostly take place in Africa, from Senegal to Ghana to Nigeria to South Africa as the leads followed the arc of summer in a search not for the perfect wave but good waves, nice curls, not huge waves, which I learned from the film were dangerous, not only violently knocking the surfer from his board but making the board itself a missile that could cut the surfer in half if he is not careful. The good surfer wants manageable waves. So, these surfers would follow the summer arc that would eventually lead to Australia.

I did not think of coastal Africa as a place of beaches or at least of beaches that had recreational uses or possibilities. I had learned about slave ships and chained people being taken to beaches to be transported to another part of the world. It was hard to think of those beaches as being something else. In some places, Africans, those who were more fisher folk and drew their livelihood from the sea were curious about the White surfers and watched them by the hour, borrowed their surfboards, and even showed the surfers how they could make their boats “surf” the waves. In other places, the Africans were completely indifferent. The narration, speaking of “primitive” and “natives,” and its casual offhand White hipness, would be unacceptable today but the movie did something valuable in connecting Black people to surfing that probably wound up being more important and influential than Brown could have imagined. Black surfers speaking in a teaser when the film was re-released years later speak about how the Africa sequence made them want to become surfers. When the surfers arrive in South Africa, Black people disappear from the film. I knew enough about apartheid to understand why that happened. The film ignored all of this in a way that makes the absence of any political commentary or acknowledgment all the more striking and unsettling today. It was probably best to ignore the politics and simply see the quest for the endless summer as something transhistorical and apolitical, a bit like Neverland and never quite growing up, remaining on the edge of sex and experience without being transformed by it.

When I saw the film as a teenager, I liked it very much or, shall I say, I liked its sensibility very much, the idea of making one’s life very simple, searching for waves by following the summer as it moved across the world. Oddly, The Endless Summer came at the time in my life when Atlantic City as an innocent resort ended for me, when summer as a certain kind of stage in my life ended. Atlantic City became a shabby slum, later to be glittered over by casinos as an endless American Neverland that would make the resort worse than it ever was during my childhood, an urban purgatory in the throes of an anguish that does not kill but that cannot be escaped. As Jimi Hendrix intoned in his song, “Third Stone from the Sun”: “You will never hear surf music again.”