Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell, Chas Smith's first book, drops on Tuesday. How you feel about this depends entirely on how you feel about Smith himself, who for the past eight years has been surfing's most crowd-splitting writer, hated and loved in roughly equal measure, with almost nobody in between.

I would argue that Smith is the bravest surfer in existence, having seen and survived things during his war correspondent years in places like Beirut, Yemen and Somalia that would leave your average big-wave legend catatonic. At the same time, Smith is also incredibly, hilariously shallow, obsessed with designer labels, hairstyles, the proper cut of jeans, and anything else having to do with fashion, high-end merchandise, and good looks. (It gets tricky here, as Chas Smith the character lives at some remove from Chas Smith the human; part of the fun in reading him is trying to figure out just what that distance might be.)

Smith is our very own updated sun-kissed Hunter S. Thompson. He's got an amazing gift as a writer. Words love him. And Smith in turn heats words up, chops and dices them with great speed and the lightest of touches, like the best Benihana chef ever, and serves them to use with a big gleaming teeth-whitened smile.

Irony and frivolity run deep in Smith. Define him, almost. But look beyond the comically-played violence and incessantly dropped brand names, and you'll catch a glimpse, here and there, of a tiny wood-sprite of earnestness. Smith's hidden secret is that he cares. He loves surfing deeply, even while making fun of surfing, and if he and I live in different stylistic zip codes, writing-wise, I think Smith's take in this regard is spot-on. Love it and laugh at it.

Here is an exclusive excerpt from Welcome to Paradise, set on the North Shore in 2009. Fair to say that Smith won't be getting a Christmas card this year from Mick Fanning. Or Rip Curl. Or any truck-driving Hawaiians

There is a giant forearm around my neck. It is smooth. Not bodybuilder smooth, not shaved, but hairless and hot and pressing heavy on my trachea. It smells like yesterday’s beer turned into today’s sweat and spam. It smells like the North Shore of Oahu. Like Hawaii.

And what is the image of Hawaii that flickers across the tourist mind when sitting in Cleveland, Ohio, or Muncie, Indiana, or even a good place like San Diego, California? It is of paradise. It is of perfection. It is of a dreamy island where the normal struggles of life, like cable bills and a gutted IRA, are washed away in a golden-hued sunset and mai tai buzz. It is of coconut scent and relaxation. Getting off the plane in a garish floral shirt while a diminutive brown woman says “aloha” accompanied by ukulele covers of Elvis Presley’s “Loving You.” The temperature is a perfect eighty degrees, even, with just the right touch of humidity. Chaise lounge today. Snorkeling tomorrow. Maybe a luau. Maybe a hula. Maybe “mele kalikimaka” is the thing to say. A vacation that never ever ever ends. Greens, blues, splashes of tropical-flower red, splashes of piña colada white. No one imagines getting killed. No one imagines spam.

Another giant forearm has both my arms wrapped behind my back and the meaty paw at its end is squeezing my bicep. Really digging into it. I am in what ultimate fighters call an arm bar. And no matter my preference, I’ll be going where I’m taken.

I look around, awkwardly due to my physical predicament, and revelers are giving me drunken stares and I might detect sympathy in one or two of them but I also definitely detect condescension. “Asshole’s been asking for it all along” condescension. Fuckers. They all enjoyed the spectacle while it was happening. They’ve been enjoying my particular spectacle for three years.

The house I’m being danced through is packed with revelers because a celebration is in full drunken swing. Mick Fanning, dull professional surfer sponsored by the dull brand Rip Curl, has just won his second World Title this afternoon at the famous Banzai Pipeline right in front of the house. The most famous wave in the world. Mick is an Australian with a penchant for drink. He even has an alter ego that comes out, with enough alcohol, named Eugene. And even though a drunken alter ego with a name sounds interesting it is not. Nothing about him is interesting. Not his short, cropped blonde hair. Not his bland chipped-tooth smile. Not his broad Australian accent. Nothing.

The whole set design of the home is so totally ideally island, reflecting the surrounding area. It is beachfront, has an open floor plan and island-modern furniture and oversized faux palm frond fans spinning languidly just like the tourist mind in Muncie, Indiana, imagines. Inside it is hot and humid, so hot, and smells like beer, sweat, and spam or maybe that is just what I am smelling because of my currently intimate relationship with this hairless arm.

And I am being danced for sure. Between choke hold and arm-bar I have to do a deconstructed Lindy hop to keep moving. so I keep Lindy hopping and keep looking and revelers keep condescending. I am wearing very skinny jeans and they make the dance slightly more difficult.

I hear his voice too close to my ear, the voice of North shore authority filled with Hawaiian slang. “ho, brah. You lucky you no git one false-crack but you gonna learn some respeck outside.”

His voice is high. I’m always surprised by how so many North Shore Hawaiians are huge and scary but have voices like young girls. “You gonna git respeck, brah.” I keep hopping until we hit the back door.

It opens, revealing a rickety staircase leading down to a small walkway fronted by a plumeria hedge. The air outside feels different compared to the air inside. It is cooler and a breeze is pushing off of the Pacific but it also feels more sinister. The voice keeps on now that we are outside but gets louder and is not directed at me but at unseen forces floating somewhere nearby. “Hooooooo! Come, boys! Come, braddahs!” it is calling, for reinforcements.

We both stumble down the steps and fall against the hedge and a few white flowers fall innocently to the ground and his voice has grown still louder and higher. He is a mountain of a man. He is hot. Everything is hot. Everything is wrong. I don’t see the reinforcements yet but I do see a wooden fence in front of me. I assume they are outside. Waiting. Big. As big as the one grabbing me right now or bigger. Mokes. A “moke” is any Hawaiian who fits a particular stereotype. Usually fat, always angry, speaks pidgin, drives a giant pickup truck. Sometimes it is a term of endearment. Mostly it is a call to arms. If I was to shout, “Let go of my neck, you fucking moke!” it would be a call to arms. My head would get popped off. I can hear the pound of surf so near it almost drowns out the hooting in my ear. “HOOOOOO-Eeee!” But my focus is on the hooting.

The choke is getting tighter. Hawaiians love to choke people out. It is their trademark, their heritage.

Two days earlier, in the water at a wave called Rocky Point that breaks half a mile from my current situation, I had witnessed Cheeseburger choke out an unsuspecting mainlander. Rocky Point is as seemingly tropical perfect as anything on Oahu. White sand beach. Palm trees. Warm, blue water. It is beautiful but its beauty is only skin deep because its heart beats trouble.

Cheeseburger is Hawaiian and looks like someone’s chubby little brother but his heart also beats trouble. A mainlander kid, from Florida, maybe eighteen, floated next to him in the cluster of madness waiting turns to take a wave. There is a pecking order for who gets to go when. This is true of all surf spots the world over but nowhere is it enforced as severely as it is in Hawaii. And in Hawaii all Hawaiians are at the top.

So Cheeseburger and this kid were floating when over the horizon steamed a perfect wave all feathery and inviting. Cheeseburger started to paddle and this kid started to paddle. They were shoulder to shoulder, both head-down, both digging. Cheeseburger began to shout in his own Hawaiian slang, “Hooo! Gooo-een! Goooo-een!” and when Cheeseburger says “Gooo-een” it is impossible to differentiate if he is saying, “Hey, you paddling next to me. Go in (to the wave).” Or if he is saying, “I’m going.” Impossible. The mainlander must have assumed the former, popping to his feet and racing down the feathery inviting line. Surfing tropical perfection all alone. Cheeseburger also popped to his feet but ended up getting hit in the head with the lip of the wave and wiping out grandly.

When they were both back in the lineup, sitting on their boards, Cheeseburger started screaming at him and the kid raised his arms in a confused defense. Cheeseburger couldn’t care less, leaned over, grabbed him by the white neck, and began the hawaiian ritual. Choking him out. The kid sputtered and waved his still confused arms like a spastic ballerina as his face turned bright red. his eyes went crazy with terror and no one moved a muscle. Cheeseburger eventually let him go after squeezing to his heart’s content and the kid paddled to the beach as fast as he could. Cheeseburger howled with laughter, and everyone else out that day thought it was very funny.

But right now nobody is laughing, especially not me, and the wooden fence is getting closer and so is my fate. “HOOOOOOO-Eeee!”

Suddenly, and without warning, I am flung into open space. The forearms around my neck and bicep release with the addition of a hefty shove. so hefty that I am spun around and momentarily face my oppressor. He is taller than six feet and must weigh three hundred pounds. His black XXXL tank top features the numbers “808” in ghetto-scrawl white. Hawaii’s area code. I am unable to discern the finer of his features but can see a glimmer off his large golden chain and, right before slamming into the wood, can make out his slippahs and the fat, brown feet inhabiting them.

I slam. And expect the wood to be firm against my own skinny frame but instead feel it disappear behind me. The fence is actually a gate and one that opens outward.

I stumble but don’t fall and regain, if not my composure, then at least my footing, on the Kamehameha highway. The Kamehameha, or Kam, is the main road that runs parallel to the Pacific along the entire North shore. Highway is a generous name. It is a two-lane, potholed symbol of neglect sometimes buried beneath landslides.

My oppressor is staring at me openmouthed. His “808” flutters in the breeze. He is also surprised that the fence is an outward-opening gate.

I was flung so far that he can’t grab me even though he is reaching, grasping, and I scoot backward farther from those hairless arms. I see three mountainous shadows in the island foliage. The reinforcements. and they might be openmouthed too but it is dark everywhere except all around me. I am standing underneath a yellow streetlight. I am bathed in glory. I am an impressionist painting. “Haole Who has Momentarily Escaped his Destiny No. 4.”

I continue to scoot backward and feel a jig of freedom coming on. Not my forced-march Lindy hop of a few moments ago. But a jerky and spontaneous shimmy. I shimmy in the road, grooving free, while the mountainous shadows hoot and lurch forward.

“HOOOOOOOOOO-EEEEeeeee! What da fuck! What da fuck!”

And like that, I am gone. Into the tropical night. I jog to where my car is parked, not for a moment glancing backward. My car is a white convertible Mitsubishi spyder, top down, resting underneath an oversized banyan tree. Top down on a parked car is rare. Thievery is epidemic on Oahu’s North shore and cars are regularly destroyed for a dollar bill left in plain sight. But I feel top down is counterintuitive. There must be nothing worth stealing if no precaution is taken. and so I jump in without opening the door. Right through where the top would be. Right like Magnum, P.I., and turn the key. It purrs to life.

Gravel sprays everywhere while fishtailing onto the almost empty Kamehameha. I still haven’t glanced backward. They are there somewhere, the mountainous shadows, and maybe they are trying to find their own rusted Jeep Wranglers or jacked-up Ford F-150s or motor scooters, or maybe they have given up on smashing this particular haole tonight. The only notable damage I can find is to my Helmut Lang button-up, which has been violently torn. I have also left my shoes in the house. Stinky, cream-colored Vans that had been smashed in the heel since I refuse to ever wear them properly. And terribly stinky since I don’t ever wear them with socks.

I hear the pound of surf off to the right before I crank the stereo. Top 40 pours into the tropical night. My hair, like Christian Slater’s, blows back. I love Top 40 here. I love my white convertible, Helmut Lang shirt, skinny jeans, and all sorts of contrivance. It is my version of “island dandy” and it is purposefully at odds with everything Oahu’s North shore stands for. The image of Hawaii? Paradise? Relaxation? No worries? It is all a lie. The North shore, very much against its idyllic stereotype, stands for rough brutality but I don’t do rough brutality, stylistically. I do easy breezy. I do dandy. Yet I cannot help causing problems. I have learned that about myself. I cannot stop even when I want to. Even when I need to.

The slivered moon is low and semi-haze-obscured, and palm, banyan, hibiscus, plumeria speed past as I drive west toward Hale’iwa. It is overgrown and dirty. Not brown dirty but red dirty. Volcanic dirty. The one grocery store, Foodland, rushes past on the left and then I am hugging the curves near Waimea Bay. Hot. Humid. Alive. Dirty. Good jeans. Great hair. Thrilled.

I had become a fabulous surf journalist. I had fulfilled the promise I made to myself inside a dark Beirut dungeon. And I have received more death threats, more choke outs, more problems, more trouble than I ever had going to the Hezbollah dance. Or running from Somali pirates or drinking tea with Palestinian rebels or ducking al-Qaeda shoot-outs. And though it may seem that being kidnapped in the Middle East is much more bone-chilling than being strangled by a Hawaiian on Oahu’s North shore, I am here to say that it is not. Being kidnapped, shot at, chased, tracked, followed by terrorists in Africa and the Middle East is certainly unnerving but it also feels fantastical. It feels otherworldly because when the mob gathers, when the bullets start flying, everything turns into a strange dream and the adrenaline pops and aye-aye-aye! Lights, cameras, action! The film set is from 

 and the extras are too. And when the intensity is over, when the scene wraps, I get back on an Emirates flight bound for Los Angeles, California, and lounge in the peaceful sunshine near a blue swimming pool.

The North shore is as much of a film set as the Middle East or Africa, only it is 

. But the scene never wraps. The intensity never ends. There is no escape because the angered Hawaiian will not give up. Even as my white convertible Mitsubishi spyder zooms away I know I am not forgotten. I am not forgotten for the moment and I am not forgotten when I am back on a Hawaiian Air flight bound for Los Angeles, California. The Hawaiian lives on an island, true, but that island is still the United States of America. And he will find me, eventually, and he will physically destroy me.

There is simply no remove on the North Shore. Anyone related to the surf world, including a fabulous surf journalist, is fair game in this war. It crawls inside in a way that nothing I have ever experienced does. It is so completely “other” even though it is also completely “American” and thus “me.” The Middle East is only “other” but the North Shore is not and this otherization of one’s own self is horrifying in the same way that Colonel Kurtz was horrifying in 

. And I kid you not, it is a war. A brutal, brutal war. Who would have guessed that?

[Reprinted with permission from HarperCollins.]

CHAS SMITH GOES TO HELL: EXCLUSIVE BOOK EXCERPT

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