Eight, nine, ten hundreds?
I was nineteen when I hacked up the most I would ever pay for a surfboard. It was $560 and I’d worked for three months in an island bistro slinging drinks and being sexually assaulted most nights by the bar’s riotous manager (I have protruding nipples and rare is the woman in power who can resist the impulse to feel their hardness or to brush a palm against their stubborn points).
I kept my twenty-dollars bill in a velcro wallet and took a boat to the mainland where the board was displayed in a window. The shop owner took the board off a stand and handed it to me. No tailpad, leash, wax, not a damn thing but a surfboard I hoped would mirror the dancing I’d imagined in my head.
Of course it didn’t.
And I’ve never paid $560, in adjusted dollars it’s important to add, since. Which is no surprise, I suppose, because I work in the surf game although the favours I have to give to get a board at cost would price ’em at around ten gees apiece.
It’s you I wonder about. The man and then woman out there, without connections, who must go into a store and negotiate and offer trades and all those things. I see surfboards that cost one thousand dollars and I wonder, who pays that much?
Does anybody?
Do you?
Tell me, discreetly if you must: how much did you pay for your last surfboard?
