THE DROP

THE little shop smelled of fruity surf wax and factory-fresh rubber and neoprene. It was so jammed with surfboards and wetsuits and dacron-polyester surfwear that you could barely walk through the place without brushing up against something. Flipping through a surf magazine with his thonged feet on the glass counter was a guy wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of yellow nylon trunks with scalloped slits in the sides. He had bleached-blond hair and bleached-blond eyebrows and a bleached-blond mustache and the hair on his legs stood out from his baked brown skin like a stubborn culture of white fuzz. We knew him. Or at least his name. We’d browsed through here a couple times before and heard him being called “Flea.”

“Hiyadoon,” he said.

“Good,” said Jim. “We need a couple boards.”

“New ones?”

“Used.”

“Got plenny of those,” said the Flea, kicking his feet down and scaling his magazine beneath the counter. “Whujya have in mind?”

“Something progressive,” said Jim.

“Progressive?” said the Flea. “Progressive compared towhat?”

Jim and I exchanged looks. I kept my mouth shut. Before entering the shop he’d told me to be cool and let him do the talking – you couldn’t let these Malibu locals know you were a beginner or else they’d rip you off major.

“Uh, like, you know,” said Jim uneasily. “Something … state-of-the-art.”

The Flea gave him an unblinking deadpan.

“Yeah man, I like get your id