FIXATIONS Couple of Swells : The Wedge doesn’t make bodysurfer Mel Thoman’s life complete. The Wedge <i> is </i> Mel Thoman’s life. It’s as though they were made for each other.

Mel Thoman 1 hates seeing Boogies2 at the Wedge 3, which is why his Felix the Cat 4 tattoo is hoisting a black-ball flag 5.

Perhaps a few footnotes would be in order before we continue:

1 He’s actually Kevin Thoman, but there were these aliens on “Star Trek” called the Kelvins, so friends started calling him that, which some guys misheard as Melvin, and now he’s Mel. These guys are all bodysurfers, which may explain the water in their ears.

2 Boogies are folks who ride Boogie Boards. Bodysurfers consider Boogies artless land filth who crowd the waves that rightfully belong to them.

3 The Wedge is that spot at the end of the Balboa Peninsula where a man-made jetty and Neptune’s smiling grace have combined to form the world’s most perfect body-surfing wave, intended, in perpetuity, only for bodysurfers. Check it out, it’s in the Bill of Rights.

4 Thoman loves that cartoon cat, Felix. Right-e-oo!

5 In the summer, a flag with a black circle flying on a lifeguard tower means that no flotation devices (that is, surfboards and Boogies) are allowed in the water. Thoman would like to see those flags super-glued in place.

Thoman’s Felix tattoo is affixed to a well-tanned arm, with the “WW” on his opposing limb standing for Wedge Wear, his custom beach clothing that he distributes only to the deserving few. He is a complete Wedgehead.

If there’s even a hint of a swell, he’s down there. His Corona del Mar rental home, meanwhile, is known as the Wedge Museum to his friends. The stairwell is lined with hundreds of photos of the waves breaking, and he has days’ worth of Super 8 film and videos of the action there, of tiny figures persevering in the midst of massive tubular waves that one could drive a truck through. He has calendars going back to 1978, with detailed surf conditions recorded for each day.

Thoman doesn’t answer his phone when it rings, since most people are just calling to hear his daily Wedge report, trusted estimations humorously delivered in the voices of Felix, Clint Eastwood, Don Knotts, Elvis, Robin Leach, a jazz hipster and a host of other voices he mimics or creates. When it’s the season, he gets some 50 calls a day. Sometimes he’ll have an evening message as well, with the inside word on where the cool parties are.

Thoman, 35, was first caught in the Wedge’s tow when he was 17. He’d heard of its legendary break and came down from his Culver City home to try it out. “I was so stoked from the first time I rode it,” he says. He began coming down every chance he got, which continued when he went to the USC film school.

“If it was breaking, I’d go to class and then haul ass down here, and I was working nights, too. People probably thought I was smoking a lot of pot, but my eyes were just red from salt water and lack of sleep,” he said.

Along with the waves, he also found most of his friends in the water, and rather than attend the USC frat parties, he’d head down to the scene at Newport. When he graduated, he relocated here--not exactly a career move.

“I just had to be near the Wedge. I can’t really explain it. I used to wonder when I’d get tired of it, move back to L.A. and start making movies, but I don’t really worry about it lately,” he said.

Instead he works nights as a stocker at the Lucky supermarket in Laguna, explaining, “I can do what I want in the daytime. It’s like having a vacation every day.”

Though the worn, blanket-covered couches in Thoman’s house have seen their share of parties--he had 120 pals over for New Year’s and a mere 60 on a recent non-holiday weekend--he and his five roommates aren’t “Dude!” dolts. Thoman numbers a couple of Ph.D.s among his surfing friends. If the surf’s not up, sometimes he’ll just go to the Wedge to read, everything from Stephen King to Camus and Kerouac.

Two of the Wedge Museum’s resident acolytes, Devin Howell and Craig Plitt, both in their early 20s, acknowledged they aren’t quite living the lives their parents might prefer for them. “But we’re both going to college,” Howell said, “so it’s not like we’re complete bums.”

The brand of bodysurfing the Wedgeheads go in for bears little resemblance to the splashing around that most of us do. They practically hydroplane, only touching the water’s surface with their extended hands and the fronts of their thighs.

“What we’re doing, I consider to be an art form--it’s that special,” Thoman said. “Sometimes people watching from the beach won’t believe we’re not on some type of board. With the right wave, there’s things you can do that are unbelievable.”

The right wave happens to be at the Wedge. Waves bouncing off the jetty double back on incoming waves, making them powerful, fast-breaking and unpredictable.

“It’s the psycho wave. It can double and triple in size; there’s a strange backwash. It can really mess you up.”

Though the Wedge has been immortalized in Dick Dale instrumentals and Surfer magazine, not many attempt it on a surfboard. It’s a tough wave most riders can’t handle. It’s none too easy on bodysurfers either, and Thoman suggests that beginners learn somewhere else.

“There have been back injuries and broken necks there because sand comes up very quickly on the beach,” he said. “The waves sometimes land in shallow water, and if you go down head-first you can break a few things.” Even the experienced surfers have broken clavicles, hands, shoulders and feet to show for that experience.

It takes more than that to keep them out of the water, though. Thoman pointed out one photo on the wall with him and some buddies in some unpleasant-looking swill.

“That sheen is all oil on the water. That’s during the oil spill in February of 1990. We weren’t even supposed to be in the water, but we got to ride for an hour-and-a-half before we got kicked out. My friend here (he pointed to one of the figures) ended up in the hospital with bronchial pneumonia.

“Then there was one year when we called one swell the ‘dead seal swell,’ because there was a dead seal washed up on the beach, and a lot of guys got sick from that. We don’t know what it was, but there was a bad smell in the water. There have been some other days when I’ve kind of wondered.”

Thoman said bodysurfing is something of an underground sport because there are few beaches suited to it. He also thinks attempts to organize the sport have been pitiful. He says bodysurfing competitions are out of touch, with the more radical surfing styles being employed these days. He’s not interested in the competitions anyway. “I don’t need a trophy to validate my art,” he said.

Not that he’s entirely opposed to trophies. He has sporadically hosted a tongue-in-cheek tanning tournament at the Wedge, with awards for best dorsal, best ventral, most cancerous and the Casper award for the whitest skin.

Some of his contemporaries have settled down and left the beach, and several of his current surfing buddies are more than a decade younger, but Thoman doesn’t see changing lifestyles anytime soon.

“This is the best thing in the world for me. Everybody’s got their own passion, hopefully, and this is ours. I think the Wedge is the most unique wave on the planet, and I think it makes everybody in the group feel more special that they can say they ride it. You can never say you’ve conquered it, it’s too much of a crazy thing, but to be one of the best on it is pretty special.

“It feels right. To this day I get such a rush, even when it’s a small swell. I just love that wave. The passion is there, and it just makes me appreciate everything else in life that much more.”