Accessory Guy

by James MacLaren

These people are a riot. And a marketing manager’s dream come true. Suffering from a definite case of Television Poisoning, they’re driven like lemmings to encase themselves in a cloud of designer crap that they believe will make their lameness invisible to all the rest of us.

Wrong.

Pull up to the damn beach in some kinda SUV that costs as much as some people’s houses, or perhaps a fucking tricked out woody that, through it’s finely polished ambiance, has become the EXACT antithesis of what it originally meant to own a woody. To wit: The fucker was twenty years old when I bought it and was a total piece of shit, but it’s the only thing I can afford that will swallow this ridiculous giant surfboard I’m riding.

Put down the cell phone and outta the yuppymobile and check the waves. Hair combed as neatly as Jimmy Johnson’s, sixty dollar “Hawaiian” shirt neatly tucked into his walk shorts (sporting “real coconut buttons”, no doubt), and a pair of sandals that costs more than a night out on the town with your ex-wife[base ‘]s lawyer.

Of course he’s got the latest in computerized internet gizmodium at home, which will tell him in precise detail what the swell’s gonna look like next month in Fiji, but he still has to come down to the fucking beach at home and eyeball the damn thing in person. I’m quite sure that annoys the hell out of him, but that’s life baby.

Squint into the morning glare through two hundred and fifty dollar sunglasses.

Two foot slop.

Decision time.

To surf or not to surf, that IS the question.

After an appropriate length of time is spent to ensure that anybody watching this goof is properly impressed with the mental work involved in such a momentous decision, it’s “go surf.”

Another whole fucking procedure in itself.

Open the back of the damn car and it’s pick and choose time. Three different boards, and an equal number of wetsuits. Rash guards. Two kinds of sunblock. Takes off the Rolex and puts on a dive watch while considering his options. Calf leash? Ankle leash? What to do? What to do?

Discuss it with some of the other accessory people who’ve arrived a bit earlier and are all sorta milling around, scratching their asses and trying to figure out what to do. These guys like each other’s company and it shows. Forty five minutes get totally wasted debating the various pros and cons of all that damn gear. It’s all just a dodge anyhow. Allows anal retentive bastards to obliquely refer to all that expensive crap they’ve got without appearing as if it’s the hot-gas cloud of braggadocio that it really is.

Yeah. Sure fooled us, Accessory Guy.

Finally, after putting on more damn crap than a drag queen, Accessory Guy enters the water. The wind has already switched onshore but that doesn’t seem to make the least difference.

Paddle the nine-hundred dollar signature model into the lineup.

Stroke for a wave.

Pearl on takeoff, face plant into the water, board rebounds and knocks Accessory Guy squarely in the head.

You were expecting Kelly Slater perhaps?