10am on a clear weekday morning. Blue skies and gentle slack-tide surf, soft sand & the sun. We carry our boards & poles across warped planks of tetanus and splinters, laughing loud at stupid stories told louder. The three of us, or five or seven but never two, never too few, stride or saunter or strut oblivious to the glare of embittered old beach bums, the fat rich white dying kind with nothing left to do but sit & be angry.
Scraggly hair loose & skin tanned we strip down to something suitably scanty, adolescent as we are, and wax our boards, bait our lines; brand, quality and features are equally irrelevant, all of it unwitting hand-me-downs from the midlife crises of our fathers: futile ballast thrown to our greedy & waiting hands, futile as all things are against the steady march of time, the inevitability of wicker chairs, shady porches & wrinkled grimaces frozen.
We surf. We fish, unsure of what swims here, what it eats or whether we would want to eat it. We maim ourselves with sharp metal hooks & miscaught waves, pride ourselves on little more than sixty seconds of balance and grace and absurdity amidst minutes and hours of awkward bleeding. Pausing to catch breath & nurse saline-soaked pinhole punctures, we sit with our lines cast for more understandable quarry: slender legs, smooth stomach & pretty breasts, bronzed, blonde or brunette or dyed, walking calm & confident in trios or more of available perfection.
Later we laugh & banter more, clothes ever fashionable returning as the breeze rolls in and the sun sets, sitting around a sketchy fire quietly comparing (still enjoying) our prizes: wounds never serious & fish never scaly.