Last week I attended the Kelly Slater Outerknown Party in *Hollywood. Being low tide I walked up with Cindy Crawford and her husband Rande Gerber and their grommets from their house. Cindy has a strange mole on her face, but I didn’t let that get in the way of our friendship. The tequila helped. Her old man, the Randy Fella, has brought a case of the Casamigos brand he has started with George Clooney. Before we left the pad, me and George did seven tequila suicides. You know, where you snort the salt, drink the tequila, squirt the lemon in the eye. His beautiful brown eyes were smoldering. Literally.
Anyway as I walked lightly upon the golden Malibu sands, arms interlinked with Cindy’s long, elegant, bony arms, I sensed that this was going to be a great party. There’s nothing I love more than when Kelly Slater launches an ethical, if a little expensive, clothing label at a tree studded Malibu beach house. It makes me feel important, and ethical, and real. And a surfer.
Not long after I was just eating an artisanal marshmellow, by the beach fire, chewing it slowly, with a tiny fork made from ethically sourced dolphin skin when I saw Julia Roberts. “Robbo,” I called, my marshmellowed voice swirling through the smoke of the 300-year-old Redwood logs, “skin up, ya mole.” As you probably know Julia Roberts is both Hollywood’s best joint roller and preeminent backside tube rider. I remember one surf during a break of the shooting of Erin Brockovitch where she air dropped a six footer at Malibu back beach, pigdogged a seven-second tube and came out blowing smoke rings. Talk about a Pretty Woman!
Fairly Mystic Pizzad I headed into the party proper. I was hankering for some ethical surf chat and had spotted Kim Gordon and Anthony Kiedis, two of LA’s premier skimboarders. Gordon, as ever, was all Dirty Boots and Jack Johnson covers, while Kiedis, fresh from a meth session under the bridge with Brad Domke, was talking with increasing confidence on why he had laid down 500 grand on Adriano de Souza to win the World Title. The Chilli Pepper is a red hot ADS fan, and has three thousand signed ADS Pena undershorts. I could, and would have, talked forever with Ant, but I could feel the magnetic pull of intense surf celebrity and knew I had to mingle. There is nothing stronger, or more potent, in the known surfing universe.
I bypassed Laird and Reece, who were three hours into a chin up competition. Steph Gilmore told me that Jason Statham hadn’t even lasted an hour, and was now being used an added competition weight, jumping on the back of the Volleyball and SUP God each up, whilst yelling to Gerard Butler that surfing, was now, finally getting the credibility it deserved.
Butler, to his credit, was in agreement. The pioneering Maverick’s big wave actor, probably the best surfer since Turtle, was handing out the press releases for Kelly’s new label. The press releases were printed on the finest sheaths of A4 gold and written with the silk from that of the most luxurious of all silkworms, mulberry leave eating the Antheraea pernyi. B. mori. Gerard explained that Kelly’s conspirator and designer John Moore kept the silkworms on his body at all times, in a special pouch just to the left of his groin. It was this that, in part, gave him the inspiration for his original Hollister range, although this was soon disputed by Thor. Not the actor who plays Thor, but the actual Norse God of Thunder, who pulled his head out of woodfire oven that was lightly roasting the aubergine, artichoke and ox tongue pizza, to say that no, it was surfing, and always surfing, and nothing but the surfing, that was the inspiration.
“I’m trying to be as responsible as I can be with what I do and what I put my name to,” Slater said, loudly and perhaps drunkenly (Clooney’s moonshine sure has some kick) to an LA Times reporter. “If a brand approaches me and I don’t believe in their kind of ethos, I don’t work with them. The money is not an issue,” he added, hooking a thumb under his $385 bomber-style puffer jacket constructed from recycled nylon and polyester, and sauntering down to where a carefree, magical, gaggle of high net worth celebrities, rubeneqsue children and hard core ocean dwellers were holding hands and dancing around a burning effigy that, from my viewpoint, looked like the very spirit of surfing itself. It was as if an Instagram shot of what surfing could be had it come to life and been projected on to the moon, the stars and the sun.
It was perfect and therefore the perfect time to leave. Kicking Mark Cunningham’s dog, punching Johnny Knoxville in the left tit and taking one last toke from Julia’s three paper blunt, I had never felt so alive, so sure of where I was, and where surfing was headed. I was sustainable. I was free. I was me.
*Not true, this is all utter bullshit.
