acres of babes

by peterbowes on February 18, 2013

There’s a narrow verandah bar for the smokers at the top pub in Byron, and it overlooks Jonson Street. Not a bad place to share a schooner with the worst plate of nachos in the country. How can you fuck up corn chips, cheese and bottled salsa?

Ask the head chef at the Beach Hotel; yesterday he was the fellow with some kind of irritation in his left armpit, burrowed in deep the way he was digging at it. Who says Byron Bay is good for food though, all a man has to do is count the pavement pizzas on a Sunday morning to see the local’s judgement of their dinner the previous night. Locals meaning non-locals.

They are what you watch from the verandah, plus the acres of babes.

You can see that the surfin’ bloke who’s just parked his SUV across the road has a problem. Do I take off the $220 shirt and walk up to the beach looking ripped? – or do I wear the shirt so the the babes get to look at two things and think of a third?

I’m looking down on this guy, I know he’s thinking this .

He’s thinking –

Look at me.

Look at my $220 shirt.

Imagine me without it.

So he tosses the shirt and when he gets to Main Beach it’s one foot. Meet surfer Joe.

Sometimes an older couple ghost their way through the unwashed. These two, checking the tyres of their car for a chalk mark. In this place if you overpark the uniforms come by and take it away to be destroyed. That’s why grandpa and nan are walking around their car a couple of times. Alzheimers is at work here, he checks the front left tyre three times. I should wave him up for a beer, those boys have a different view on about nearly everything.

There goes the Queensland ute again, and the two long-haired, bare-chested cruisers scope up to where we are sitting, just a glance. Like they are waiting for someone to be here. Maybe it’s the guy who went out the back to talk to security a little while ago.

The women, the girls, the acres of babes. They flow past like an uncrossable river and they all talk at the same time, like a babbling brook. How can four (girls but I gotta say women) women stop in the centre of foot traffic and all talk face to face at the same time? Imagine the Theoretics of that form of shared communication, where everyone is expecting to be heard by all the others, while all the others are talking – not so clever Facebook, these babes can speak and listen in multiples.

Friend me that.