I Do Two!
an excerpt
Stripes by Nigel Puerasch
I used to go to surfin’ at Torquay or Jan Juc or Bell’s Beach with my flatmate. To tell the truth, Gazza was more than my flatmate. I was in love with him. He wasn’t in love with me though. Oh, he liked havin’ me around. And when he didn’t have a girlfriend over he was happy enough to have sex with me. Sometimes when he did he’d even mutter my name as he emptied himself into me. But when he’d picked up some chick at a bar he wouldn’t even talk to me when he got home with her. Too afraid of what his women would think about his “flatmate,” I reckon.
We would go down from the city on Friday evenin’s, and head back on Sunday afternoons, and we’d find a place to crash in one of the caravan parks or on the beach if it was the end of the month and we were short. I loved goin’ with him. He treated me like shit, but it beat stayin’ at home on my tod. The surfin’ almost made up for everythin’. I’d go out and for a while I had no problems, no worries. Just the sea, and the air, paddlin’ hard to catch a good break, then the magic of the slide along the face of the wave, the sea green and white around you, the board slicin’ through the water, crestin’ the water, makin’ you feel as if you were flyin’.
When I got tired I would strip off my wetsuit—the water was almost always freezin’, but often the sun was too warm on the thick black neoprene—and lie around on my towel enjoyin’ the scenery. Some blokes wear board shorts to surf in, but that’s in places where the water’s warm. Where it’s cold, you need a wetsuit, and board shorts are a pain underneath a wetsuit, they get all crumpled up and itch and irritate. So we used to wear swim briefs. I had a couple, but my favorite were sapphire, because they made my tan look better and matched my eyes and my blond hair. I liked the way they showed off my bum and my doings. The day I met Mattie, I was wearin’ the sapphire pair.