The Ice Storm

You heard of methamphetamine? Like, Ice? Devil Dust? The hi-fi shizzle that’s ripping apart minds from LA to Coolangatta? Pro surfer Anthony Ruffo knows about it – he was dealing crank until the cops took him down. To find out more about the phe nome non th at is ice , Stab went to Santa Cruz, California, to hear Anthony’s inspiring story …

Methamphetamine is the most awesome drug that I’ve ever, ever heard of. Ever. You can make it in your fucking bathtub. All you need is some Sudafed, Drano and a ”can-do” ‘tude. It opens the doors of perception for weeks, not hours, and is, like, a third of the price of cocaine. It’s the people’s drug. The working man’s high. I’m soooo so sick of all these bourgeois shithead doctors/policemen/politicians/mums who are trying to “purge” it from our streets. Fuck them. They don’t know how to party like enlightened sages. Truckers, prisoners, Hell’s Angels and a growing number surfers do know how, darling. Party like a plugged-in Kate Moss circa last year. From California to Hawaii to Australia to Indonesia, everybody’s drooling for a giant swell of Devil Dust. Call it what you want: glass, amp, crank, speed, white cross… it’s all ice. Ice, baby.

ASP on coke The surfer/speed connection ain’t as new as it seems. In 1989, San Diego was considered the Crystal Capital of North America. Yet, it’s always been stigmatised. The drug-enjoying surf community will think nothing of marijuanee, special k or coke, but don’t bring no methamphetamine around. No, no, no. It’s yucky. It’s low-brow.

Like I said, though, underground use is growing! It’s considered an “epidemic” on the North Shore, a “very serious problem” on the Goldie and a “cancer” in Bali. Fuckin’ good news for a fuckin’ great drug! Seriously, at the present growth rate, each and every one of us going to be addicted to the shit pretty soon. It looks like it follows good waves around, so unless your homebreak is Penrith, west Sydney, you are going to be snorting pre-surf lines of crystal off your cracked dashboard. Nobody stops “epidemic serious problem cancers.” The thing to do is roll with it, baby. Ice, Ice baby.
There’s only one element we need (besides baggies of evil yellow), and that’s a leader. Someone who has walked the path of the white dragon. Someone who can show us all how to live in our tweaky new world. Someone who has been to methamphetamine nirvana and returned to earth; an awakened one. A Blanco Buddha.
Stop right there, because before shab-soaked Pipe, Kirra and Uluwatu there was Steamer Lane. There was Anthony Ruffo.

Anthony Ruffo is a Santa Cruz surf icon, tow pioneer, Teahupoo charger, enlightened meth buddha and convicted felon. He was busted on July 28, 2005 for “possession and sales” of methamphetamine. Fuck, yeah! Sounds good… sounds like he was walking the walk! What the world knows about the show is courtesy of the boring ol’ media. Newspapers, magazines and television stations across the country jumped all over his story like hipsters into skinny jeans.
Santa Cruz CA: Professional surfer Anthony Ruffo was beat like a drum last night. Narcotics officers invaded his house and found him shoving blue funk into the veins of a 12-year-old girl. He was subsequently arrested and will spend his life behind bars sharing a cell with Charles Manson. Burn in fucking hell, Mr. Ruffo. Back to you in the studio! Ruffo was treated badly. Very, very badly. His good name was dragged through Northern Californian dirt by respected, highly-valued, chaste news outlets and… GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK. Like, newsmen don’t all snort coke together at the end of a tough day? All of them, in their ugly ties and foam covered microphones, lining up around a giant glass coffee table piled high with yayo taking turns licking and snorting and babbling incoherently about Bill Clinton’s sweet titties. Fucking please.
Oh, and the surf community jumped right in, too.
Ruffo is a disgrace to everything we stand for. We hate his poohead guts. He’s a jerk. He did very naughty drugs and now our squeaky clean alternative sport won’t be as beloved in the Midwest. Boooo on A. Ruffo. Booo all over him. (Toke toke. Snort snort). Assholes.

e was tried and convicted a junkie pervert in the court of public opinion. Luckily, he had a better lawyer for the court of law (a waaaay better lawyer, but we’ll get to that). After doing his “time”, Ruffo gave a couple interviews to the magazines that smeared him, apologising for his wayward life and said he was a changed man. “I got in a little to deep; I’m glad that everything is behind me…blah, blah, blah… .I’m a bad guy…blah blah blah.”
What tkind of shitty, ham-fisted drivel do you expect when douchebag editors are asking, how’s it going staying clean?
Dumb. Boring. Unoriginal. Not helpful.
With his legal situation in check Anthony’s determined to make only good come from the bad. ARGH! Fuck that motherfucking shit! Ruffo is like a saffron robe-wearing Tony Montana, sitting cross-legged underneath the lighthouse at Steamer Lane. I decided to go on a pilgrimage to fucking Santa Cruz to talk with Bohdisattva Anthony Ruffo myself. I will find him sitting under that lighthouse and bring his experience of enlightenment back to the surfing masses so that we, too, can walk his path.
When I got to the Lane, Ruffo wasn’t meditating meth nirvana. He was ripping a five-foot swell. This whole place is his domain, anyhow: from the lighthouse out to middle peak. He is the top dog, height of the foodchain. Westside shot-caller par excellence. Awakened one. In a vicious lineup, no one dropped in on him for two hours. Three helpful guys standing on the bluff pointed out which neoprene water dot was Ruffo. I told ‘em I was going to have a chat with him. They said he was the best left-handed surfer at the Lane and told me to have fun with the cons. (If there were cons around it was going to be sick! At that point, I knew no more then you do now. Anthony Ruffo had been busted for meth-am-phet-a-mine and had reached enlightenment. I really hoped there would be cons around.)
Ruffo soon exited the freezingness and fielded congratulatory “Way to go, bro” from his comrades. They love him here, or at least the guys who matter. I marched up and told him my name was Charlie and I was there to interview him. “Coooooool, bro.”
His voice was soft, sunny warm and full of secret knowledge. He introduced me to all his buddies and called me “Scottie.” It’s cool, dude. All Santa Cruz surfers have nicknames: Condor, Skindog, Ratboy, Barney. I guess mine was now Scottie. Charlie “Scottie” Smith. Fuckin’ badass. His bros were Darryl “Flea” Virotsko, Anthony “Taz” Tashnik and Nathan “Cromagnatard” Fletcher. Flea suggested that everyone join him at his house, hopped into his 1972 pimped-out purple Impala, picked up two stray girls and sped out of the lot. I followed in my recently wrecked, bottom-ofthe- line Saturn sedan. Fucking badass, Scottie.
The moment I walked in to Flea’s house I knew that Ruffo held the keys to enlightenmeth. The house was a total fucking disaster. Mungey clothing strewn empty shot glass all over a blackleather couch underneath a glass bong no fish in an algaefied fishtank giant cardboard cheque decorated wall disaster. Ruffo tailed me in, pushed some shit off the couch and crossed his legs. “So bro, what do you want to know?” “Please, please… tell me how to get to Yellow Barn Nirvana. I’m not like those others, those hypocrites. Show me the way. Tell me what I need to know."
He began to share his noble eightfold path.

FIRST: RIGHT VIEW

It all started when Ruffo was a grom, a little fella. At the time, the older Santa Cruz surfers were making a living off surfing, but they weren’t sponsored (in the traditional sense). They were selling Thai weed and coke in order to support their surf habit. Self-sponsored, making good money, surfing everyday, and not having to answer to some dickhead “team manager.” Every so often, they’d throw lil’ Ruffo bags of weed to roll.
Here, kid. Get to work. Wide-eyed future Meth Buddha soaking it all in.
These self-sponsored older surfers had chicks and waves. Ruff was like, “Fuck, all I want to do is surf everyday.” As he got older, he started to rip, which meant olde fashioned regular surf co. sponsorship… but the image of those guys, those early guys, was always in the back of his head. So, pretty soon he started growing weed in his backyard to pay off the surf trips he accumulated on his credit card. That was his thing, his boogie.
He got into sweet sha-bang in either 2000 or 2001 because his dogs died, and…“Meth? It’s a good high, man…very unlike coke.”
Coke is a 15-minute up and down then you want more, more, more. Leave the coke to WCT judges.
“The high off coke is crampy, you know? It’s so fucking… I don’t know… the high when you do a line of meth… you’re way more clear. It’s not an up and down thing. Snorting a line, it hurts, but your high is 10-to-12 hours.” He could see where it wasn’t good for everyone, but for Ruffo – the shit was the shit.

SECOND: RIGHT-INTENTION

So, he was hanging around with these different people (aka former convicted felons), doing his shizznittlebang, but wasn’t making a lot of money. He just barely scraped by with sponsorship and side jobs.
Then, it hit him. Hit him like a giant sacred fig falling from a Bodhi branch. He perceived a void, an emptiness, and thought, “Fuck, there are people who want this shit and, I know, A plus B… I can put them together and I can make some money.”
Enlightened fucking epiphany, baby. Sir Isaac Newton sitting under the apple tree; Pythagoras discovering that the world is round; Buddha’s awakening – epiphany.
Ruffo didn’t start selling to be cool. He was already cool. He simply saw that he could make good money and, again, surf all the time. A self-sponsored pro. Just like his forefathers.
Meth wasn’t big in Santa Cruz at that time. The white wave hadn’t washed through. Of course, everybody had heard of it from places like biker bars, and fucked-up backwoods towns, but nobody was really using it. Plus, it was looked down upon. Stigmatised. Everyone using coke would say that they were worried about the guys doing twack. Yet, they would preach this shit while high as fuck on cocaine.
Ruffo was like, “I’ll listen to you, bro, if you’re telling me this at three in the afternoon instead of three in the morning. Look at you right now. You’re a mess. You’re doin’ an eight ball, and I did one line of fuckin’ the shit and you’ve done – how many lines now? Six or seven already? I mean, I’m worried about you, bro.”
Weird social clashes. Ruffo had to keep his shit low key. Under the ray-dar.

THIRD: RIGHT SPEECH

Along with methamphetamine sales came some new friends. Now Ruffo had two whole separate sets of pals. His surfing bros helped him patrol the Westside line-ups, tow into macking Mavericks, and party like a rock star.
His convict buds helped him move the quartz to all those enlightenmentstarved souls… and also party like a rock star. The cons are actually called Norteños (or Nuestra Familia), and are a prison gang that started in 1960’s California. American jails have always been a slice of shower rape hell, but you know what they say, When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Northern California Mexicans had it doubly tough because their Southern California counterparts thought they were farmer douchebags, and would beat the shit out of them. Thus they got doubly going and started to kick ass. Drugs, guns, drugs, death, drugs. It’s their ruthless cut-your-fucking-headoff- while-you-sleep commitment that has made them one of today’s most powerful gangs, in and out of prison. They are armed to the gills, wear red, claim the number 14 and rule large swatches of the American drug trade. Ruffo was cool with them because he was a trustworthy dharma cat, which is rare in the game. He had hundreds of thousands of dollars coming in and going out. Tempting to dip into the coffers… unless you’re awakened. He also had other gangs coming after him, trying to co-opt his network. No worries, mate. The family provtected him. Nortenos run all out mafia style. Shot-callers, hitmen, muscle, omerta. The full 14 yards.
Usually things went alright for Ruff-O’s awakened business venture, but there were times he had to call on the gangster “know-how.” If guys were being pricks and not paying, then they would get “dealt with”. That’s the way the boogie went. Fist-flying extravaganzas of pain resulting in immediate restitution. Sometimes these “scuffles” would happen at his house, and he witnessed how powerful those Norteños were. Blood-stained carpets. Samsara, baby.
The ever-important cycle of suffering dished out on those who needed some correction. “Now go, my child, and next time DO NOT FUCK WITH BOHDISATTVA RUFFO!”

FOURTH: RIGHT ACTION

He never made the shit (mashing up the Sudafed with the Drano, etc. etc.). That is for mountain hicks, and Ruffo ain’t no mountain hick. He was a distributor, a first-class salesman.
“The shit” was all coming out of Mexico. First it would come out as crank, the raw, orange-y junk. Then, “certain people” would turn it into “shards.” Shards, for the uneducated, is what you have when the orange-y junk is purged. They clean it which makes it more powerful, potent. Pretty soon, it was just coming in as shards (crystal), because they were purifying it in Mexico. The dudes who were bringing it up lived in Nor Cal, but had their ties down south, so they’d just go over the border, get their boogie and bring it back. Smuggle it in. Ruffo simply received the quantity and got rid of it. Easy as 1,2,3. He had guys working under him who were engineering most of the person-to-person sales. Ruffo, the ever-powerful businessman and networker, was great at his job. He reached Fizz Wizz Nirvana. Fully awakened. Now he was the Master, tweaking under the Bodhi tree.

FIFTH: RIGHT LIVELIHOOD

Ruffo was putting money away instead of accessorising his lifestyle. No diamond-encrusted grills, pimp cups running over or jade Uzis. Don’t get me wrong, he had his enlightened tweak. For example, he collected baseball cards.
“Hey Ruffo, come out to the strip club tonight!”
“No. I almost have every player on the ’92 Milwaukee Brewers. Leave me alone, unless you have Dante Bichette’s Upper Deck in mint condition.” Everyone knows that gak takes you on weird creative trips, but the downside is that you forget you’re getting caught up.
C A U G H T up.
All of a sudden, you’re not sleeping and eating, or doing the things you should be doing as a “normal” person. Ruffo would never stay up for more than two days. He’d surf, always surf, but then he’d be out for a day. He’d have good sessions and bad. In other words, sometimes he was geeked… charging down the line at the speeeeeed of light and here comes a giant monster head lip and thwwwwaaaaack! Decapitation! Salt-water blood pouring all over the open-mouthed little groms. Other times he would have been up for a few straight days and the legs… just… couldn’t… do…battle. Side note: In between the fifth and sixth paths the White Buddha got hungry so everyone packed up and went out for some sushi. Over saki and unagi rolls Nathan Fletcher talked about how watching Ruffo at Teahupoo made him unafraid. Flea chimed in that nobody was a better guy then Ruff. Scottie ate pure, uncut washabi and nodded.

SIXTH: RIGHT EFFORT

The most exhilarating, far-out, crazy-fun, happenin’ times were when everything was running smoothly. Dealers, gangsters, producers all paid. Smooooooooth. Then everyone was stoked. The Norteños were twice as stoked because their main man was a fucking surf legend. Ruffo would take them to the beach and they’d watch him rule the line-up and know that he was special, a one-of-a-kind awakened meth surf Buddha.
He took care of people who needed to be taken care of, too. Paying guys’ bail, mortgages and car payments. What would you do? Tell all the tweakers to fuck off? You’re a dickhead and you’re unenlightened. There bobbed Ruffo under the Steamer Lane lighthouse peacefully meditating and dolling out his financial largesse to the less-fortunates who crawled along the spracked path. Karma is the engine which drives the wheel of samsara (or something like that), and Ruffo knew he needed to be on the good side. Sometimes when he was overwhelmed, he would jet up the coast for a surf sesh. No matter how long he’d been awake or how much stress was brewing back home, surf always set him right. Centred his head.
There were all sorts of girls. Everywhere. Groupies, I guess, of the surf rockstar sketcher Buddha. He feels bad because he had a really good girl in the thick of it, but he fucked her off. At the same time, though, she was reaping the rewards of his boogie, too. He accumulated diamond rings, Tiffany certificates, bling bling bijou baubles and he gave all of it to her. She must have looked like Liz Taylor at the Academy Awards.
The last, most important expenditure was putting money away for the best lawyer in the world. Johnny Cochrane (RIP), eat your fucking heart out. Ruffo knew that when the shit finally hit the fan, it would splatter all over the Italian-suit of his barrister… leaving him to peacefully paddle out to his line-up and radiate

SEVENTH: RIGHT MINDFULNESS

Ruffo’s house got raided three times by the police. In the last raid they found a three-gram trail leading to the bathroom (because he was flushing the shit). Let’s just say he had a lot more than three grams but his toilet ate it. So, he got busted on sales because he also had a little digital scale, too. (Note: get rid of your little digital scales, people!)
A year earlier the fuzz had also come kickin’ in his door. He had just come home from surfing, still in his wetsuit, not really in the mindset to deal with his trashed house. There it was, anyhow: destroyed couch cushions, books, art, and a dozen cops scraping his floor. They found, literally, a speck of talkie. They arrested him and he had to go to court. When the case rolled around, it was dropped because the judge said, “What the fuck is this? A speck? What are you doing?” The Po-Po cried big tears onto their powdered-sugar donuts and swore that next time things would be different…
…And they were. With three grams, digital scales and the toilet busily flushflush- flushing… they had him. It looked bad. Fucking Police.
In court – aha! – it was all that good karma, baby. The DA fucked the case. It’s got to be harder than that to send Anthony Ruffo to the can! The police lost the warrant, and Ruffo’s fancy, expensive bulldog lawyer pounced. Usually methamphetamine salesmen get 10-to-30 years. Ruffo was offered probation if he plead to felony sales. Probation. Not one minute behind bars, and he wasn’t even sure he should take that!
“Fuck, felony sales? I’ve got to plead to felony sales?” he questioned.
That’s a good lawyer! It was the week of the Coldwater Classic and he figured, “Oh, fuck. OK.” He took the deal because he wanted it over. He surfed the Coldwater and ripped the shit out of the Lane, spraying mythical plumes of good-karma water all over the spectators.
A year later, after all this was done, came his birthday. He partied. Yeah, he did a line of meth. A long line of meth----am----phet-----amine. It was a good party, baby! A few days later the door knocked and Ruffo thought it was some chick. Oooops. It was the fucking sheriff. He didn’t have a “No Alcohol Clause” in his court contract (meaning he could drink all he wanted), but he wasn’t supposed to do any crystal. This time he went to jail. He was in the can for 30 days but it was entirely cool because he got to hang out with the Norteños. They sat around and talked about how stupid prison is, and laughed, too. If there were no prison, there’d be no Norteños, and probably no famous meth-dealing awakened Anthony Ruffo. Karma.

EIGHTH: RIGHT CONCENTRATION

Ruffo still surfed all the time (except for the 30 days in jail). Professional… Self-made… Enlightened… Crystal-white Buddha. Surfing is why he got into the trade in the first place, and probably why you’re going to get into it, too. He just liked it, and he wanted to surf all day, everyday. Fuck those hours from nine to five, you know what I mean? So he was doing what he had to do to keep surfing and travelling.
It just all went shitty with the cops (those meddling bastards). The Norteños are still cool. They know he’s off the boogie and he didn’t owe them any money when he got busted. They come by and say “hi” every once in a while, and they all go out for a beer. Yeah, they’ll sit around the bar and talk about the good ‘ol days: Meth, women and song… He’ll still see them at the beach sometimes, too, wearing their blazing red UNLV basketball jerseys (cuz’ “Us Norteños Love Violence”).
Everything is cool. Ruffo’s boys up in Santa Cruz – Flea and Nathan and all of them – have his back. They wrote seething letters to the magazines and always only stick up for him. He’s got their backs, too, in the surf and on land.
En-light-ened. When the court made him talk about his “problem” in fucking drug classes, he’d be honest: “Really, I had a good time.” His shit was tight. His world was tight. People would say that he was destroying lives. Yeah? Well, they can say what they want because they’re fuckfaces. If he had a chance to do it over, he wouldn’t change a thing. From start to finish, he made methamphetamine fit seamlessly with surfing, fit with life…
Thus liveth the meth Buddha. Follow his lead, surfing children. Walk his noble eightfold path toward awesome drug enlightenment. You’re going to be addicted pretty soon, anyway. Make it look good.

It’s better to travel well then to arrive. – Buddha

Dear Forum Folks,

The writer, Charlie Smith, a master of linguistics from UCLA, and I discussed the most honest way of dealing with the conviction of a relatively well-known professional surfer as a meth dealer. We agreed that he would interview the surfer, Anthony Ruffo, without any preconceived notions of good or bad. We both agreed that the Reefer Madness-style approach to drugs alienates and doesn’t educate.

Charlie decided that satire would be the most effective approach to the piece. Hence the first paragraph, and the coverline that reads: meet the surfing legend supplying this year’s fab drug. The satire continues with the link from Ruffo to the Buddhist’s Pathway to Enlightenment.

Does the satire work? Or does it urge 15-year-olds to bite the pipe?

Two things. If you’re the sort of reader who’ll navigate the entire 2000 words, you’re probably going to get it. It’s not an easy read. It’s a dense, colloquialism-riddled humour piece, suited to the sharper end of our readership. Second, what easily-influenced kid, who doesn’t read the piece, would want to emulate the strange middle-aged man pictured?

Stab appreciates your feedback. In our latest issue, Charlie has written a straighter piece about Ice, this time about its influence in Hawaii. It paints an ugly picture of desperate souls lost to a man-made evil. An excerpt: “For starters, ice is the most addictive drug around. 98% of first-time meth users become addicted after a year and not more than 6% of meth users can ever really kick the habit. It permanently destroys your brain, rots your teeth and pocks your face.”

DR

Stab Magazine