2001-08-08 || 2:07 p.m.

|| san o and aqua lung ||

in 1994 the majority of our cars had surf racks. bumper stickers: 'one god one country one fin' and 'longboards rule.' kelly had won contests. she had a surf team jacket with her name embroidered on the front. there were cakes of surf wax half-melted in the bathroom and wet suits perpetually slung over the brick wall out front. boys in volvos and buick wagons and vans honked their horns at 4:30 in the morning outside our house, windows down, tapes blasting, answered by the garage door roaring open and closed and my sister running into the street with her lucky surfboard. some times i went with her on the weekends: san onofre at seven in the morning. waiting in a car line to get down to the beach. listening to jethro tull and cat stevens and led zeppelin. lying in the back of the truck on towels and corduroy pants and crumpled waxed paper from del taco. the smell of mildew and rubber very strong. we parked at dogpatch and she stood in her two dollar bikini top and cut offs looking at waves and various crushes and all the regulars: 50 year-old men with bleached hair and mustaches, tanned, throwing remarks at kelly that would make me blush and stammer. i went out in the water twice. the water was cold and deep and felt full of razor blades and serrated teeth and flying objects as big as me shaped like daggers. i preferred staying on land. i liked the dfeel of cold sand. saturday mornings: curled up inside a blanket on the sand, listening to waves and fog and canned music coming from car stereos. falling in and out of sleep. periodically scanning the water for my sister, a small fluorescent dot cutting up waves and taking no shit from anybody.

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