DEREK UPDEGRAFF
The Bull from Kelp Forest “Fat girl/skinny guy is my favorite combination,” he says to me. He’s driving, and I’m in the passenger seat of his truck, our boards in the bed, bungee-corded down. We’re about five minutes from the beach now, on surface streets, and when we were at that stoplight a minute ago, a fat girl and a skinny guy walked down the crosswalk, real sweet-like, his arm around her big waist, all proud, him in a tank top with those toothpick arms near those ham legs, and so Rob said that thing about the fat girl and the skinny guy being his favorite combo. And he’s a jerk like that, but I’m just wondering where those two are heading in the dark, cold morning, with him in that tank top and her in her jean shorts. And now Rob says to me, “But there are other good ones too. Like rich girl/sketchy dude. Beefy guy/skinny chick. Short guy/tall girl. Like tree-tall girl with really short dude. That’s a good one. But fat girl/skinny guy is hard to beat. It’s a classic pairing.” Rob picked me up about a half-hour ago since my car’s in the shop again. It was dark when he pulled up just after 4:30 a.m., and I was outside, not wanting to wake my wife and kids. I stood out on the curb for about ten minutes. The night/morning air was damp, and I missed how I used to get up early to do stuff like this. Get up early to surf in the morning before high school. Get up early in college to drive to the mountain and spend an entire weekday snowboarding, in both cases doing as much as we could to avoid crowds—me and Rob or another friend like him, and sometimes Dale was with us, but he could never quite keep up in big waves or on steep mountains—and if you don’t have that impulse to rush down the tall, steep face of a wave or a mountain at sixteen or twenty-two, you’re not going to get it later, because from what I’ve heard, people get more protective of their bodies as they get older, and I can’t get that, but I think it’s true for most, and I look at my life 64 | Raleigh Review
