Tapping the Source

Ike Tucker has never seen an ocean. His barren world is the vast California desert, a world from which he suddenly departs after learning that his missing sister was recently seen in the patently alien coastal town of Huntington Beach. After an inauspicious arrival, Ike assimilates with some locals who interacted with the missing girl. He learns things, and quickly drowns in the vortex of the hedonistic playground that is H.B. In the course of one summer, Ike will transform from naive innocent to hardened realist.

It all starts when a blonde haired stranger directs his convertible into Ike's uncle's Texaco in the fictional wasteland known as San Arco. The stranger is looking for "the big bad brother" of Ellen Tucker. Seems she blew into Huntington Beach, got friendly with the town's key players, and then disappeared. The stranger produces a scrap of paper with the names of three of the alleged players. It also seems that Ellen went with them to Mexico one weekend, and did not return. Ellen had skipped San Arco some two years earlier, just like their mother years before. Ike believes it is his duty to travel to H.B. to try to unravel the mystery, seeing as he is the only real family she has.

The Huntington Beach Ike finds is a dirty, rowdy surfing mecca, filled with a menacing history of shattered alliances and plenty of drugs. H.B. reality is far from the picturesque illusions Ike previously held: oil wells groan in weedy lots, beaches are littered with human filth and the dead embers of bonfires. The pecking order in the water is intimidating, but Ike is all too aware that he must assimiliate the surf culture in order to learn anything. His first day, he gets himself punched after a nasty drop onto another surfer. He eventually becomes proficient, and meets Hound Adams, owner of one of those aforementioned names. Hound is the town's prince: master surfer, entrepreneur, hustler. Ike also meets a grouchy biker named Preston Marsh, who has more than a passing connection to Hound, as the reader (and Ike) eventually learns. Both Hound and Preston become allies to Ike, in one way or another. With each meeting, some of which drift into blinding violence, Ike begins to piece together what had played out in this very landscape just months earlier, when his sister had passed through. A stage is set, and the finale ain't pretty.

My partial synopsis makes author Kemm Nunn's remarkable 1984 novel Tapping the Source sound like a script treatment for some ancient B-movie, or an earnest coming-of-age story. Neither is not entirely inaccurate. The skeleton of the plot does indeed involve the literal and figurative journey of a small town kid who gets a hard and fast dose of Real Life after he learns what really goes on outside of his former hermetic world. As the brutality of the summer wears on, the kid transforms, sometimes to his own acknowledgement as it occurs (or, for example, after a particularly eventful evening). His naivete melts a little more with each scourging event, with each new realization that real, concentrated evil does exist, and that it causes individuals to do inexplicable things. I see I haven't mentioned that this story is considered a "surf noir." Indeed it is. 

Duplicity lurks within many of the main characters. There are are cat-and-mouse games, swindles, double-crosses. Interestingly, the most noirish behavior is exhibited by the males in this story. The women, such as 16 year old runaway Michelle, with whom Ike becomes involved, is a three-dimensional character, but free of any Stanwyckian tendencies. The same cannot be said for the likes of Frank Baker, owner of one of the other three names on that paper scrap, and most certainly not for Milo Trax, an aging film mogul who figures quite prominently in the mystery. Southern California itself, from Balboa Island to Santa Barbara, is also a shadowy force.

But this is also a surfing tome, a love poem to the organics of being outside on the water, sunlight moving over the crests of waves. Nunn grew up in California and knows the territory. His descriptions of the act of surfing are stunningly detailed, enough so as to really draw in the reader. I took lessons myself a few years after falling in love with this book and upon rereading, it became even more entrancing. The details are so romantic, so evocative.."he joined them in the waves, letting jewel-strung faces slip beneath his board, carving lines out of crisp morning glass."

What really makes Tapping the Source a classic for me? The mood. Nunn paints such a vivid (if bleak) picture of isolation, especially in the midst of supposed joy. Ike meets scores of lost youths who seem to be just as confused as him, if not moreso. All are seduced by the illusion of sun-baked grandeur, idolatry of celebrity, skill, pleasure, and some sort of artificial high. Huntington Beach is, at first glance, an idyllic playground. It becomes clear very quickly that what lurks behind it is, as is described at one point, "a grinning skull, leering with bloodstained teeth." The town itself is personified more than once, described as a place where the overpowering stillness always seems ready to literally break with the explosion of unspeakable secrets. Ike more or less finally learns some of them. By the end of the summer, he transforms, worse for wear, permanently scarred and jaded. And wiser.