New ‘Pump House’ Generation Still Battles The Outsiders

The boys are stoked. The six young surfers kneel on the green grass at Calumet Park in La Jolla, excitedly waxing down their short boards, mesmerized by the ocean waves below, which slap the Pacific shoreline like the stern hand of almighty God.

“Epic,” says 17-year-old Tyler Hellingson, whose shoulder-length blond hair has a simple beauty that rivals the sun.

“On fire,” says his best friend, Warren Sharkey.

The boys, these young lords of the waves, are so intent on their ocean action that they ignore the three older couples who brush past to admire the silent sunset.

They don’t acknowledge the old woman with the metal walker, whose painfully slow progress is like a series of still photographs. And they don’t give a second thought to the gray-haired couple with the cheap straw hats like their grandmother might wear--standing hand-in-hand, looking lovingly at the orange horizon.

For these boys, nothing ever comes between them and the “Holy Water,” the fountain of youth where they play out their sport on endless sets of ocean waves. Each day, every day.

But, moments before they embark down the rocky trail to one of their regular surfing haunts, a spot called Sewer Line, the spell of the pounding surf is suddenly broken. The boys spot a surfer they’ve never seen before.

“That guy bugs me,” says Sharkey, whom the boys call the Shark Man. “He doesn’t surf here. He’s a stranger.”

Worse yet, they watch as two older men carrying boogie boards stroll towards the water. The Shark Man’s eyes narrow thinner than a house cat’s.

“Kooks,” he mutters, loud enough for the men to hear.

“Total barnies,” adds Jack Daniels Diruscio, named by his father for his favorite whiskey. “No boogie-boarders. No barney-boarders.”

The other day, Tyler Hellingson told his mother that he felt like a second-generation member of the pump house gang. His mom, Jackie Haddad Hellingson, was a feature character in Tom Wolfe’s “The Pump House Gang,” a story about the youthful social rebellion the author saw taking place on the Southern California shores during the mid-1960s.

It was a tale about a handful of territorial La Jolla teens who hung around the old salmon-colored pump house at Windansea Beach, chasing away Outsiders, the mommy-daddy tourists with wax paper-wrapped sandwiches and portable grills.

Twenty-five years after Wolfe researched his pump house story, most of his teen-age characters have left the beach--and their war against The Outsiders--to a new generation of youth.

But, for Tyler and the boys, the battle is being waged against a different breed of stranger. Unlike their predecessors, this beach gang no longer singles out the older generation for its wrath.

For them, older women are often seen respectfully as Soul Grandmas. And many of the older male beach-goers are local surfers who were shredding these same Pacific waves when the boys wore swaddling clothes.

In 1990, the social beach rebellion taking place on the La Jolla shores is something of a Civil War, a battle based not so much on age but on just being different. The arrogant young versus the young.

These days, The Outsider has become the strange young surfer from the next county up shore. Or the boogie-boarder who lies prone on stubby sheets of hard-packed polyurethane, engaging in a hybrid sort of wave riding. That really raises the ire of a young surfing crowd that considers its time in the water more a passionate calling than a kill-some-time sport.

The Shark Man, for example, says the boogie boards look like Styrofoam ice chests, not the much cooler water chariots they themselves ride. “I tell them, ‘Put a lid on that soda cooler.’ Because that’s all they are.

“These barnies don’t belong in the water with the surfers,” he said, using the term that has become the biggest insult for non-surfers. “Any epileptic or guy with one leg can boogie-board. It’s just not a sport.”

When it comes to turf wars, the difference between then and now is that today’s skirmishes have moved offshore into the chilly blue water, observes Jackie Haddad Hellingson.

The war is waged with insults, comments made to Outsiders meant to provoke. There have been fistfights at some surfing spots. Once, Tyler used his surfboard wax to scrawl an epitaph on the car window of an Outsider who had tried to move in on his spot.

“For these kids, the water is their protected turf,” Jackie Hellingson said. “For us, the world consisted of the beach. But they don’t care about what goes on there. Just don’t take it into the water.”

There are other differences. Hellingson’s gang returned day after day to the same spot, the old concrete pump house on Nautilus Avenue because, back then, most teens in their crowd didn’t have cars.

These modern boys have got wheels galore. Tyler drives a sleek black BMW 320i his parents bought him. The Shark Man lays tracks with a fiery red Toyota four-wheel-drive truck.

But they’ve got more than just the rubber. They’ve got the road.

These boys have got eight lanes of freeway to take them up and down the San Diego County coastline and into Mexico--freeways that weren’t there back in 1965.

So their protected turf has expanded. They’re mobilized for a shifting battlefront. One day, Point Loma. The next, it’s La Jolla. But, in their eyes, the waves are all theirs.

And, although they still occasionally surf Windansea Beach, the boys usually stay clear of the old pump house. Tyler says it smells like low tide there.

“These kids are laying claim to the whole county shoreline,” his mother says. “They’re more concerned with how the waves are than we were.”

Times have also changed. There’s no Vietnam War. Richard Nixon is just a memory now. And inner-city Los Angeles isn’t the inferno it was during the Watts Riots of 1965, when Tyler’s mother and her gang ruled Windansea Beach.

Tyler clearly sees the difference between himself and his parents as teen-agers.

“People were more together back then,” he says, guiding his BMW the three blocks from his house to Sewer Line, named for an old sewer line that juts out into the water from shore. “They had causes. People just don’t care as much now. Their concerns are so small.”

He includes himself in that group. Tyler never wants to turn 21, an age he knows brings adult responsibilities. And time away from the water, less time to answer the surfing call.

“Not even,” he says, doing a sort of surfers’ dance to squeeze into his tight-fitting wet suit. “Right now though, we don’t worry about that. Our concerns are girls and being popular and having friends. And the waves.”

And his boys. Fifteen La Jolla-area kids, any one of whom could show up at Tyler’s house after school for the daily pre-surf ritual: eating bagels with cream cheese and drinking Pepsi while scanning the daily surf reports.

To get really stoked, they watch surf movies and listen to heavy metal music. But, even in the music, there are connections with the past. The Shark Man prefers a rip-snorting song by Jimi Hendrix called “Crosstown Traffic.”

The boys are a close-knit bunch. There’s Tyler--whom the others call Meathead. And the Shark Man. And Jack Daniels. And Steve Lynn. And Brian Villani. And Sacha Ferrandi. They’re the older guys, the group’s Elder Statesmen.

But there are some younger tykes as well. Rug-rat surfers who have just entered their teens. They have braces and shorter “undergraduate hair,” not the long-flowing blond locks of the upperclassmen.

These youngsters are studying the etiquette of surfer cool, lessons that start each afternoon in Tyler Hellingson’s living room. Little Ari Davis and Uncle Walshy--Jason Walsh. And Naiche Kennedy, the star student of the younger class.

Kennedy, whom the older boys call Nacho, has his Nacho styles. Part Indian, he wears a T-shirt over his head like a desert turban. At 13, he already has the inside line on both tearing up the waves and with the girls--the bettys--back on shore.

He’s got the lingo down. And the look. That distant, almost smirking gaze he throws at you to suggest he’s riding an epic wave somewhere far off in his mind, that he’s floating through the world and the world can’t touch him. The girls go crazy over it.

By the time he’s 17, that gaze and the face that throws it will become honed to sun-tanned perfection. Already, the boys say, Nacho is the coolest kid in his ninth-grade class.

“We’ve taken him under our wing,” the Shark Man says. “We talk about the hazards of drinking and about birth control. We won’t let him smoke. Because we’ve got to set a good example for these younger guys.”

Each afternoon, when the time is just right, the boys rev their cars and trucks and head for their favorite surf spots. It could be anywhere from Point Loma to Trestles, up near the Orange County line.

Those without cars are called leeches. But that’s not as bad as being a gump--a follower, a wanna-be.

Worse, however, is to become a troll.

“They’re older guys who have these make-believe jobs in Burger King or Jack in the Box,” The Shark Man explains. “They work shorter hours so they can spend their time surfing.”

When surfers graduate from high school, they also unofficially graduate from the group, the boys say.

When you turn 19, the party’s over. You no longer cruise the streets with the boys, getting chased by the cops for throwing water balloons at cars with out-of-state plates and boogie boards on the roof.

You no longer cut holes in the smiling faces of enlarged photographs of old girlfriends and stick your own tongue out through the open mouth. And you no longer tell your mother never to mention girls’ first names when they call. Because she might get confused and blurt out the wrong name.

You don’t goof on the overweight girls at the beach, by yelling “No fat chicks!” or “Lose weight or lose us!” Or pull stunts like the night they yanked Nacho’s pants off in public.

Because, when you turn 19, the boys just sort of turn their backs on you. They’re still in high school, and you’re not. They’re in, and you’re out. Later, dude.

“When you get older, it’s just not happening to stick around any more,” Tyler says.

Lounging on the grass at Calumet Park, near the beach path that bears the sign “Locals Only,” The Shark Man describes the importance of being local, the surfer’s version of a home boy.

He explains why the boys have used stick-on deodorant to scrawl nasty epithets on the windows of cars belonging to foreign surfers. “We don’t so much hate these guys,” he says. “I mean, if we saw them in a different place, we might even be friendly.

“It’s like, when you were a little kid and you had your place on the swing set. You don’t want that new kid to come along.”

But Tyler and Warren and the rest of boys don’t want to become trolls. Soon, their full-time life on the beach will come to an end.

Warren talks about rooming with Tyler at Mesa College after they graduate from high school next year.

For now, though, both he and Tyler are worried about making a statement today. The Shark Man has complemented his beachy good looks with an earring. And lately, he’s started to smoke, letting the cigarettes dangle from his lips in a rebellious kind of way.

Tyler’s not so sure about what statement he wants to make. He’s thinking about getting a tattoo because none of his boys have one of those. He’s even considered getting a Mac Meda tattoo on his arm to match his father.

The tattoo stands for the Mac Meda Destruction Co., an underground society his parents once belonged to as teen-agers, an excuse to throw beer parties at the beach and slap themselves on the back of the head to remind themselves that they were still young.

But, for these Young Turks, Mac Meda is just a fading image of yesterday, of the days when his mother, Jackie Haddad Hellingson, and her gang hung around the old pump house steps and chased away anyone who even resembled the Older Generation.

“That was a long time ago,” The Shark Man says. “We’re young. Twenty-five years ago was like the beginning of time for us.”