Acres of sand glow gold in the sun. Dozens of bethonged lovelies jiggle down the strand. Christian Fletcher gazes out the car window, past the Venice Beach eye candy, and points to an imperceptible spot in the Pacific. "There's a pipe that runs out there from the county sewage plant," he says. "The pipe makes the waves do weird things. Nobody likes to surf here. But I do."

Regular people see sludge. Christian Fletcher sees twisted potential.

He grew up on beaches in Southern California and Hawaii, an ocean-salt encrusted prodigy, the third generation of a family that's revolutionized both the art and the commerce of surfing. Now the fourth generation, 11-year-old Greyson Thunder Fletcher, Christian's son, is poised to cash in. But the Fletchers have as much talent for mutiny as for bounty.

When Christian went pro in 1986 at 15, he was a sure bet to rule surfing. Christian looked at the pretty picture laid out before him -- and tore it up. "Boring," he says now.

Instead of dominating surfing, Christian transformed it. He took the fakie, McTwisting, gravity-defying tricks of his skate-rat buddies and adapted them to 15-foot breakers. He used the wave as a launching pad, breaking contact with the water, a bizarre concept in a world that worshiped riding the curl as long as possible. Pro surfers -- threatened by Christian's acrobatic style and his long-haired, tatted-out looks -- labeled him a freak. And he played the bad boy role to the hilt, supplementing the adrenaline rush of surfing and skateboarding with an addiction to speed, the chemical kind.

Now Christian, who turns 32 on Oct. 20, has been clean for six years. He thanks boredom, not some 12-step program, for pushing him to sobriety. He's rolling down Pacific Coast Highway on a crystalline afternoon with a nine-foot surfboard in the back of the car and a sloppy grin on his face, watching a half-dozen grommets attempt the aerial tricks he fathered. He's reminded of Greyson, the most gifted athlete the Fletcher family has produced, so talented that the Hawk Clothing skateboard team snatched him away from Volcom. But these are the lovable, gloriously profane, combustible Fletchers. Greyson's career could rocket. Or the kid could crash and burn in a toxic family feud that would make the Osbournes look like the Partridge family.

***

It's nearly 10 o'clock on a Tuesday night in May, a school night, and only the pros and hard-core older guys are still riding at Vans Skate Park in Orange, Calif. They gather on the lip of the Combi Bowl, a massive pool that has never tasted water. Suddenly everyone turns to watch. Greyson Fletcher tilts his homely little black World Industries board down into the bowl and carves right.

There's none of the squeaking and squealing that's erupted from everyone else's wheels. Greyson is grinning, his body parallel to the ground as he flies forward. He shifts his hips ever so slightly left and whirls a 360 into the big bowl. The kid doesn't bend so much as shape-shift. Greyson accelerates up a wall, grabs his board as he lifts off the lip and flips head over heels, landing softly. Smooth. He isn't just a great skater: The kid has presence.

"That was good," Christian says to his son, rubbing him affectionately on the helmet. Now dad takes a turn. His moves are as aggressive as his son's were subtle. He grinds, pounds, pulses through the bowl, each turn noisy and thrillingly rude. It's like Fugazi following Miles Davis.

An hour later, as Greyson and Christian head to the exit, Jennifer Fletcher appears. "Hi, Mom," Greyson says. Christian walks by his ex-wife, silent, staring straight ahead, right out the door. Vapor.

In the mall courtyard outside Vans, Greyson and Jennifer clear the Pizzeria Uno debris off a table and sit down. Jennifer, 34, grew up in Fullerton and met Christian on the Malibu beach in 1989. "He was just a long-haired, healthy-looking, Southern California beach kid," she says. "I could have gone to Newport and found another one just like him."

What started badly -- an unplanned pregnancy, a quick wedding -- rapidly got worse. The marriage staggered along for five years before collapsing. "She's the biggest nightmare in the world," Christian says. Jennifer parries: "I didn't want to be married to a drug addict. I was young and cut my losses."

Herbie and Dibi Fletcher, Christian's parents, adore Greyson, their only grandchild, and resent Jennifer for having custody. What really infuriates the Fletchers, though, is Jennifer -- just as action sports are paying dividends on the investment made by the Fletchers and other visionaries -- messing with Greyson's surf-and-skate birthright.

Since the divorce, Jennifer and Greyson have lived with her parents in Anaheim Hills, and mostly she sounds like an ordinary protective mom. "People are wondering how far Greyson is gonna take the sport," Jennifer says, teasing an iced mocha java latte through a straw, savoring her leverage even more than her beverage. "I don't care. I just want him to be happy."

Greyson has drifted off. He's a dreamy kid with gangly legs and purple-painted fingernails. A few minutes later, a joyous squeal comes from the distance. "Watch this!" Greyson says. He takes a couple of choppy running strides, then leaps, scaling the sides of light poles, benches, storefronts, surfing without a wave, skating without a board. Hanging in the air, his hair flying, Greyson bears an eerie resemblance to an old family snapshot.

***

Dibi Hoffman Fletcher, 51, plucks a glossy black-and-white out of a teetering pile. A long-haired skater is swooping through an empty swimming pool, a decade before the Dogtown boys "invented" pool riding. "This is Herb! In the '60s!" Dibi shrieks. She's floss-thin, a distance runner, painter and sculptor. Dibi doesn't talk. She rants, like her friend Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. "Goddamn it, where's the one I'm looking for?" Herbie Fletcher yells, charging through his office at Astrodeck, the company he founded in San Clemente in 1975 to manufacture his patented surfing footgrips. Herbie also owns companies that produce surf videos and make skateboard pads. He plows through thousands of prints and slides, every image a breathtaking original, like the shot of Herbie and surf-legend friend Buttons Kaluhiokalani knifing through the 25-foot waves at Hawaii's Banzai Pipeline.

Herbie is a 54-year-old, sun-bronzed leprechaun with silver-streaked, flyaway hair. He shouts, ecstatic. He's found the photo he wants: A teenage boy is soaring across the sky on his skateboard, blood flowing down his left shin. The view is from beneath the flying Fletcher. It's Christian's younger brother, shirtless and wearing shorts but no underwear. "It's Nathan with his balls hanging out!" Herbie cackles. There's no better snapshot to symbolize the way this family lives: balls out.

In the 1940s, Dibi's father, Walter Hoffman, lugged a 90-pound redwood surfboard from his hometown of Hollywood to Honolulu. Walter became the rare white mainlander accepted by the North Shore locals, befriending surf god Duke Kahanamoku and getting rich exporting aloha fabrics and "surf culture" back to the States. Her uncle Flippy Hoffman was a legendary big-wave rider, and sister Joyce Hoffman was four-time world champ.

	Christian is still making waves on the surfing circuit.

Dibi met Herbie on the beach at Makaha in 1964. Herbie, then 16 and known as The Kid, could ride the nose of a longboard like no one else. Dibi and Herbie were married in 1969. Christian was born in 1970, and his brother, Nathan, also a champion surfer, five years later. Friends like the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix would drop by the Fletcher house, where creativity and madness seemed mixed into the baby formula. At 16 months, Christian would crawl out a window and hang by his hands from a porch railing three stories high. "I used to make cookies when the kids came home from school," Dibi says. "I just had pink hair."

Christian was 5 when he won the first contest he entered, blowing away the 8-and-unders in the San Onofre Surf Club contest. He won the event nine of the next 10 years, too. When learning disabilities caused Christian to struggle in school, Herbie and Dibi sent him traveling the world on the pro surf tour at 15. "He was better off getting his ass kicked by giant waves than hanging around kids who were never going to be anything," Dibi says. "We sent him out to experience his own greatness."

Yet the family legacy weighed on Christian. "I've never been able to do anything that's totally mine," he says now. "Being 'the son of' is cool in some ways, but it's terrible in others."

He was drawn to the early '80s skateboard scene, a refuge for alienated kids. Christian was a step behind pals like Dogtown skater Jay Adams and rising pro Christian Hosoi in talent, but his imagination was limitless. The Dogtown crew may be credited with creating the lip-popping moves that evolved into vert skating, but Christian took those moves to the sea. Today, top pros such as Andy Irons and Kelly Slater make a nice living ripping the aerials that Christian invented. But back in the day, Christian's tricks were greeted like Eminem bum-rushing a Beach Boys show.

"They didn't just belittle Christian's surfing," Dibi says. "They attacked him. The surf industry was afraid for its profits. The image was still the aloha shirt and the ukulele. Were they going to change and sell heavy metal? 'Cause that was Christian."

At a Bud Surf Tour event in 1990, Christian exploded. "The day before the contest, I asked how they'd score a board-slide-to-fakie, fakie-shove-it-switchstance," Christian says. "The guy running the event was all, 'Huh?' So I did some standard stuff, then I did the trick, which nobody'd seen before. As I rode in, I threw up double birds." Christian reenacts his salute and laughs. Enraged after receiving a flipped-off score of 3.5 out of 10, he threw a muffin, hitting a judge on the head. "It was a good muffin, too," Christian says. "Blueberry."

He had surfed while high on mushrooms or acid since he was a kid, but now his drug use raged. "I'd soak crack rocks in PCP, smoke weed with acid, shoot heroin and coke together," he says, little-kid wonderment in his voice. He stopped surfing competitively and his new marriage was a mess. Christian eventually pawned his surfboards and ended up homeless. But one memory shines from those strange days: the son born in 1991. Before Greyson was a month old, he took his first ride on a skateboard, cradled in his dad's arms.

***

Christian, Herbie and Dibi are furious that Jennifer has started demanding that she accompany Greyson on skating trips. In retaliation, Herbie and Dibi are refusing to pay for Greyson's gear and travel. "It's time to pull the rug from under her," Dibi says. "She ruined Christian and now she wants to ruin Greyson. I can't allow that."

But Jennifer's real crime is karmic. "She's an inlander!" Herbie sputters. The landlocked of body and mind will never understand what the Fletchers feel in the waves. "Greyson has the flow," Herbie adds, with a reverence for the mystical force that elevates the artist above the merely talented, in math or skateboarding. "He has the creativity, too. It just needs to be brought out."

For the Fletchers, friction is fuel. Says Dibi: "Yeah, it's been painful for us. But without that aggression, that passion, Christian wouldn't have pushed to invent as much stuff as he has. See, you don't get one without the other."

Lately, though, everyone is stoked. Herbie is off to Spain to surf with Julian Schnabel, the painter and director who's gearing up to shoot a film about the Fletcher saga, based on a story written by Dibi. Schnabel has talked with Meg Ryan and Jessica Lange about the part of Dibi. Nathan Fletcher is in the movie biz too, touring the West Coast with a short flick he made. It was bankrolled by Quiksilver, his sponsor.

And Christian? He's living in Hollywood with a girlfriend he calls "awesome." Last spring, he traveled to France with Greyson for the Quik Cup, a skate-surf-snowboard triathlon, and Christian finished fourth. In September, Swatch flew him to Switzerland for street luge exhibitions. "My life now," Christian says, "it's so great, it's crazy."

As for Greyson, his skating trips for Hawk are on hold, a chip in the family battle. Greyson shrugs his bony shoulders, and happily rattles off the tattoos he plans to get when he turns 18, and the Russian swear words he's learned, and how he's going to nail sneakers to an old snowboard so he can pull wilder tricks. But right now he needs to get back to the Vans vert ramp and practice a trick he kept missing last night. "When I'm skating," Greyson says, "I feel weightless. I don't even feel myself."

He shrugs again. Let the grown-ups argue. The kid's gonna be alright.

This article appears in the October 14 issue of ESPN The Magazine.