After valiant battles with leukemia and bowel cancer, surfboard shaper, writer, magazine editor, and meteorologist Mike Perry has left for greener pastures. I feel very fortunate to have been one of “Perry’s Kids.” When the affluenza epidemic hit West LA during the 1980s, I caught a nearly fatal case that he and Australia helped cure. Perry saw past my flaws, took me (and many others) under his wing, and guided me back to the angels of my better nature in a way that my teachers and parents could not. During our forty-year friendship, we saw each other through triumphs, tragedies, marriages, lawsuits, death threats, and divorce. In addition to being one of my most trusted and tight-lipped friends, Mike Perry taught me by quiet example what it meant to be a friend, a good son, a loyal husband, and an engaged father. In short, a man.
Perry died with the same humility and dignity that he lived. After years dominated by surgery and chemo, doctors told him that there was still cancer in his body and suggested more of the same. “8 months and a month of radio not enough?” he wrote me in a 2022 email, “I’ve got a little thinking to do. Anyway, onward into the fog.” In the end, Mike Perry chose “to hang in and not hang on.” “I reckon I’ll live until I die. Seems better than dying while I yo-yo between treatments!” he wrote White Horse Magazine editor and fellow Perry Kid, Gra Murdoch. “That’s it. How long? It’s the old ‘piece of string’ question. Don’t care. I’m driving the bus now.”
From the day I left California for college in 1984, until the day he died, Mike Perry was one of my most trusted readers. Perry suffered through dreadful college papers, interminably boring undergrad and grad theses, my longwinded PhD dissertation, hundreds of essays, and various drafts of all six of my books. He read and commented on everything that I sent him and Perry’s ability to sniff out pretention, pedantry, pomposity, and all other forms of bullshit was second to none.
Before he died, I asked Mike Perry to write a story for Sour Milk that he had once told me over beers. Writing came easily to Mike and a few days later, he sent me “Just After Midnight.” I was pushing him to expand it into a memoir, but he had other plans. On January 2, 2024, I received this text from his beloved wife, Lee:
Hey Peter. This is Mike’s wife Lee Perry here.
Mike passed away on 31/12.
He wanted me to tell you he loves you very much and to say goodbye for now.
He sent you an article he wrote very recently. He read it to me. I loved everything about my darling and I loved the way he told a story. He appreciated that you respected his writing skills and allowed him to proofread your work.
My heart is in pieces 💔💔 he is the king of my heart.
Bless your family from Mike and I.
Mike Perry died on December 31, 2023, surrounded by friends and family. Even his old friend Huey, the Australian God of surf, stopped by to pay his respects. “There was an extraordinary unrest and fury in the sky that night. It was fitting for the man who understood weather better than anyone,” wrote former pro surfer and fellow Perry Kid, Glen “Rocky” Rawlings. “He lit the night sky in a frenzy of flashes, blasted out to sea with the roaring thunder.”
Just After Midnight: Watts, 1965
by Mike Perry
Just after midnight. I’m standing at the left rear corner of our big Chevy. I have a .20 gauge shotgun in my hands loaded with 00 buckshot, the equal of a handful of 9mm bullets in each shell. Right front is my neighbor, Dave. He’s got an old, loaded, Springfield rifle, and to my immediate right is Louie, another neighbor. He has a handgun. We are all teenagers.
The car is parked on my grandparents’ front lawn, nose-out, engine running. Dad's in the house trying to gather my grandparents, but Grandpa is on the front porch waving a Colt .45 and screaming in Norwegian-tinged English: “I’ll never leave my home!” There’s a short scuffle with Grandma, but she's quickly bundled into the car.
The bar at the end of the block has shut, and a crowd of drunken blacks has walked down the street, stopping in front of us, shouting abuse. “Guns?! Hell we got guns too, you fuckin’ crackers!” Things are getting scary and I have an epiphany: I may just have to shoot some people here. Never really occurred to me before this moment.
“Get in!” my Dad shouts, and we do. He punches the 327-cubic inch V8. Swinging to the right of the crowd, we plow through five homes worth of front lawns and vegetation. I look back to see the lights go out in the house and the blacks milling about.
We come to a police barrier somewhere in Crenshaw. The same cops who told us “Drag ‘em in the house if you shoot one” greet us. We’re glad as hell to be leaving Watts.
A deathly, red glow illuminates the sky behind us as literally thousands of buildings are burning furiously in the perpetually divided town of Watts. Borne of frustration, neglect, gang violence and a possibly botched arrest of a black motorist, the people of Watts in South Central L.A. are burning up their own town.
Later my Dad gets a call from the big boss of a men’s clothing store in the Crenshaw Center. He’s the manager, and the boss wants him to go back and “protect the store.” Being a good soldier of the firm, he takes a .38 pistol and returns to South Central where he spends a long night huddled in the darkness chasing off occasional looters with warning shots. Some cops drop by, find my dad and tell him he’s on his own. As they drive away he notices that the rear window of the police car has been shot out.
My father never gets any recognition for his bravery, nothing, and I learn a big lesson about corporate loyalty. A few years later, Dave is a deputy Sheriff, and Louie has moved away, Watts is partially rebuilt, and as a surfer, I’m looking for greener pastures. I’m looking for greener pastures still.
—Mike Perry, November 9, 2023
If the Watts Riots weren’t enough of a wake-up call for Mike Perry, the Vietnam War was. By 1965, 125,000 young American soldiers were in Southeast Asia. Soon, all but the most privileged would face a draft and the prospect of combat in the swamps and jungles. For the Culver City teenager, this conflict further widened the chasm between the America he had learned about in school and the one that he saw around him.
Mike Perry’s deepest suspicions about this escalating conflict were confirmed after a friend from high school decided to do his patriotic duty by enlisting. Instead of going surfing with his friends, he joined the Marines. When he returned home six months later, it was in a flag-draped coffin, and Perry was there to greet him. The honor guards’ rifle shots punctuated Mike’s decision to go surfing with his friends whatever the cost. “Fun show. The families coming unglued at the gun salute. An LSD level reality moment. A true ‘moment of clarity,’” Perry later wrote.
Long before I met Mike Perry, I had heard of him. If nothing else, the surfing world is ruled by philosopher and phenomenologist Alfred Schutz’s concept of umwelt, “a world of relationships that are based not on concrete knowledge but on reputation…” Growing up in Malibu, Santa Monica Canyon, and Pacific Palisades during the 1970s, my surf idols—Jay Riddle, Davey Hilton, and George Trafton—were rockstars to me, and our region’s surfer shapers—Robbie Dick, Dean Edwards, and Mike Perry—were their lead guitarists. Perry began making boards at the age of 18 and had many prominent mentors, including Hawaiian George Downing. His boards wore many labels—Blue Cheer, Hobie, Con, Natural Progression—until he began shaping under his own Mike Perry label in 1970.
In 1973, Perry befriended Australian surfer Peter Townend who was in town for the world contest. After he showed the future world champion a heaping helping of Southern California hospitality, in true Aussie fashion Townend felt compelled to reciprocate. Before he left, Townend said simply, “Come down Perry. We'll show you a good time.” He did not have to ask twice. In short order, the twenty-five-year-old vacated his house and shaping room in Topanga, sold many of his belongings, and left for Australia “thinking well, that's the wildest time of my entire life in the can,” wrote Perry. “Now on to Australia and more serious pursuits. Wrong.”
The next nine months, “made Topanga’s lusty decadence look like a tea party at Pepperdine. Coolangatta in ‘73, on the other hand,” wrote Perry, “was more like Caligula's court by the sea!” The next nine months were a “blur of sunburn, reeducation, rooting, drinking to excess and making lifelong friends.” During the days, he shaped tiny, hot rod single fins in rough sheds, glassed them “with eye dropper size gobs of preciously expensive imported resin,” then surfed them at Kirra, Snapper and Duranbah. “I was really having a great time there with Michael Peterson and PT and Rabbit in the water, or in our house, and it never went flat,” wrote Perry. “I spent as much time staring into the bottoms of the stainless steel piss trough at the infamous Patch Dance Hall, wondering at the perpetual motionness of drinking beer, at the same moment, pissing out the substance.”
The cynical, caustically funny Angeleno didn’t just go native in Australia, he felt like a lost child who had finally found his way home. Unlike Southern California where the naïve, utopian optimism of the 60s was being replaced by the “Me” generation, Australians put friendship, or “mateship,” above everything else. That said, the Aussies had sharp elbows, sharper tongues, and a frontier sense of justice. Disputes in the water were often settled with fists after a few Schooners at the pub. “I was treated fairly, honestly and irreverently,” he wrote. “Australians don't like people who don't have opinions either. They'd rather you be an opinionated jerk than a non opinionated jerk.”
What intrigued me about Mike Perry, long before I met him, was that he bailed on the still-private Topanga Beach and the still-secret right points of Baja. He started a new life in Australia and never looked back. By 1980, his trips to California were getting shorter, fewer, and further in between. That year, late one afternoon, I was killing time at the Natural Progression Surfboard shop in Santa Monica Canyon, when a small, wiry man in Ugg Boots and a neatly trimmed mustache walked into the shop with a surfboard under his arm. Perry cut a very rakish figure.
“Check this out,” he said to the shopkeeper, as he pulled the first channel bottom surfboard I had ever seen out of its bag. In Aussie-tinged English, Perry described the difficulty of glassing and sanding the “clinker bottom.” “But,” he said, “Given how fast this board went at Kirra, it was worth the effort.” Then he put the board back in the bag and left as fast as he had arrived.
By the early 1980s, my American dream, like Mike Perry’s before me, was curdling. Unlike Perry, I came from wealth and power, and the world, theoretically, was my oyster. However, I wanted nothing to do with Reagan’s jingoistic America or the coke-sniffing country club boys who were being groomed to inherit it. I had grown into a reckless, restless, resentful and arrogant teen. As my classmates at Crossroads, the Westside private school I sometimes attended during my El Niño senior year, earnestly filled out college applications, I plotted my escape.
Although I read and reread every issue of Surfer and Surfing, the magazine that spoke to me the loudest was a hard-to-find Australian quarterly called “Surfing World.” The long, lavish, beautifully photographed stories about adventurous young Aussies exploring their continent’s vast, untamed coastline became my book of dreams. For a Californian like myself, who preferred long range Baja expeditions and camping on coastal ranches to colored jerseys and crowds, it reminded me that surfing’s frontier was alive and well.
For all of 1983, I worked two jobs, one in construction and one in California’s burgeoning marijuana trade, and made more money that year than I did decades later as an Ivy League professor. Each morning I dragged myself out of bed at 5 am to drive in the dark to downtown LA. I looked at the Air New Zealand plane ticket pinned to my wall and reminded myself that it is always darkest before dawn.
As my departure date for Australia grew closer, my friend and fellow Reagan Revolution dissident, Ray Kleiman (who chronicled our youth in his Runman films), arranged for me to meet Mike Perry at the cottage he was renting at Point Dume. When I pulled into his driveway, Perry stepped into the doorway and waved me in. “I think Trish has got a beer for you if you ask her nicely,” he said by way of introduction. A pretty, spunky, Kiwi brunette, put the cute baby boy she was holding on her hip, smiled warmly, and handed me a Budweiser tall boy.
Mike Perry and I fell into an easy conversation about our shared mistress, the remote world-class Baja point break where under the right conditions, you could ride a wave for a mile. During my sixteenth summer, for better or worse, I had made my first pilgrimage to “Rattlesnakes” with an older neighbor and it had changed my life forever.
Perry must have liked something about me because he began to share classified information with me: the importance of sand and tide at Rattlesnakes, how to get the earliest report of a “New Zealand Swell” from the National Weather Service office in Westwood, and an introduction to his close Mexican friend, Arturo Meza Robles.
After more than an hour and more than one beer, I asked Mike Perry why he moved to Australia. He grew serious and said that “White Mexico” was the perfect cross between old California and Hawaii. The waves were better than California, beer flowed like rivers, the women liked Americans, and friendship, or “mateship” was something they took very seriously.
Perry warned me that I would definitely be called a “Seppo” (septic tank/yank), and probably be given an unfortunate nickname based on my most obvious personal trait. Even though I would probably not like it, I would never shake it. In Perry’s case, due to the prodigious size of his testicles, he had been given the sobriquet “Saddlebags.” He added that beneath the merciless, sometimes cruel, and always full-contact banter, “Aussies truly care about one another.”
Finally, he offered this frank advice on Australian life and culture:
1. “Rooting” (sex): “It’s a small place. If you put in the time and do a good job, she’ll tell all her friends, and there’ll be a line at your door. Be careful, they have kids young. Lots of young, hungry, single mums where you’re going” (Byron Bay).
2. The Pub and the Club: “When the fights start, don’t be surprised if someone punches you in the face for no reason. There’s a certain breed of Aussie that doesn’t consider it a full night out without a ‘blue.’ Also beware of the ‘King Hit’ (sucker punch).
Finally, Mike Perry advised me to have fun, take it all in with good humor, and not to take myself too seriously. As I got up to leave, Perry shook my hand and said that he looked forward to seeing me on the Gold Coast.
In January of 1984, I moved into surfer/shaper Mike Cundith’s house at 8 Broken Head Beach Road. Unlike Mike Perry, I was not enamored with the perfect, but crowded, surf on the Gold Coast and preferred surfing Broken Head and Lennox Head. My favorite spots, however, were the sharky and empty deep water waves off Cape Byron, Flatrock, and the back beaches of Byron.
Months into my stay, Mike Perry and I met up at the now mythic and extinct Gold Coast nightclub, The Playroom. This was the Palm Beach venue where Midnight Oil, Australian Crawl, INXS, Men At Work, Cold Chisel and so many other greats got their start.
It was also a place that could grow so raucous that even Motorhead, no stranger to riotous crowds, fled the stage after they were pelted with beer cans. When they refused to finish their set, a riot ensued.
That night at the Playroom, all but the Christian pro surfers were there. I was on the Gold Coast with former Australian schoolboy and cadet surfing champ, Ant Corrigan, who was competing. I saw Perry from across the room, and he looked at me like a proud parent. I had taken his advice to heart, traveled there alone and immersed myself in Australian culture. While I didn’t realize it at the time, Ant was teaching me, also by example, not to let surfing mediocre waves, much less a “conest,” get in the way of a reunion with old friends from all over the nation and the world.
Before I knew it, I had been in Australia for six months and my visa extension would soon expire. Prior to my departure, I saw Perry at his house in Palm Beach. He was glad that I had had such a good trip, wished me well on my travels, but added that one day I would come back “home.” Perry knew that Australia had set its hooks in me the same way it had done to him. I had found something there that was missing from my life in California. Not only did Australia now hold a special place in my heart, but I would never look at surfing or life the same way again.
Unlike California, there was a welcome humility to the Australian surfers of my generation. While Ant Corrigan and many other friends were world class and could have competed on the pro tour, they chose not to. Moreover, once their feet touched the sand, they were ordinary blokes with regular jobs, lives, even wives and children.
I returned to Los Angeles in the late summer of 1984 heartbroken. After a few surfs at my old haunts, I began to long for Australia—the waves, the people, and the place. A week after I got home, I went to an Olympic rowing event at Lake Casitas. When the crowd began to chant “USA! USA! USA!” for the umpteenth time, just as I had had an instinctual feeling to move to Australia, now I wanted to get as far away from California as possible. Somehow, I managed to get into Bard College in New York, and with Perry’s encouragement, support, and blessings, became a serious student for the first time and never looked back.
Fair winds and following seas, old friend. Thank you for making me a better person.
Great article Peter and a wonderful tribute to your old friend.
I WAS disappointed when your column ended as I could’ve continued reading this the rest of the day.
Thanks for sharing
Thanks for sharing