JUST MY LUCK, I THOUGHT TO MYSELF, AS I COUGHED UP AN OYSTER SIZED RADIOACTIVE GREEN FLEM SEA SLUG OF OOZE THAT SEEMED TO COME FROM DEEP DOWN SOMEWHERE BETWEEN MY KIDNEY AND CHEST REGION.
Here I was, finally, in Tahiti and somehow I’d come down with the dreaded swine flu. A lifelong dream was being shattered by some fucked up panseptic. To think that only two weeks prior I’d been having the time of my life, living cheap in Mexico City, fucking a beautiful 55-year-old pig farmer’s wife, feasting on bacon sandwiches, pork scratchings and raw chorizo and then bang, out of nowhere, I come down with a temperature that could blow up the donk of a HT Holden and more painful joints than an eight story skyscraper kiff spliff.
Still on the upside, I was in Tahiti, and stuck in a very small village with 45 of my best mates, not to mention the best surfers in the world. I was still as happy as a pedophile at school closing time, even if I couldn’t even walk to the dunny and was forced to piss in the closest creek, which doubled as the town’s water supply.
As always though, I was all about putting my mates first. I mean there was no need to unduly concern the pros with my minor pig disease, especially on the eve of such an important contest. I mean it would only serve to distract them. As I said to Parko, in between secretive slurps on his cold can of Hinano, “Mate, listen to Rod, this year you’ve been getting it all vagina end round. You have to change it all or there’s a chance you might not qualify for 2010.” I’m pretty sure he took most of it onboard, or at least I heard he did before he managed to persuade a 185 kilogram Tahitian security guard to whip me around the face with three live stingrays, a stonefish and an electric eel.
Yeah, that Parko, he’s a joker all right. But once again Rod had the last laugh. A bit of kerosene in all the official jetskis’ fuel lines, a few tubes of lube on the new sticks laying about, a few choice nicks of some anchor ropes in the channel and I was laughing almost as hard as the ASP Director was when I cut the power to the only onsite generator mid-way through the final.
Of course though, as usual, I did most of my talking in the surf. Unlike all those so-called “pro surfers” I didn’t follow the norm and try and surf that overrated, close out, joke of a wave they call Chop Poo. Instead, in true Cunthorpe style, I found this river-mouth beachbreak down the road that was twice as good and twice as heavy. I quickly dominated the line-up by punching out Freddy P and Dustin Barca’s girlfriends who were mucking around on stand up paddleboards, sending in two local six-year-olds who were learning to surf on old hand me down malibus and spearing some ancient Polynesian grandmother in the neck, when she had the stupidity to get in the way of one of my signature foam climbs whilst she was washing her clothes in the river. Fair dinkum, it made my blood boil, although to be fair, that may have been due to the bacon boils that were festering and bubbling on my back.
Of course though there came a time when I had to deal with the circus that is Chop Poo, putting you, the filthy, sexually perverted, cross dressing Tracks readers before my high performance super sessions, stealing some dork called Poto’s jetski and seeing what all the fuss was about. I’ll tell ya, what a joke that fat roller is. Those Hobgood clowns still haven’t worked out how to go right, some joker called Drollet kept squatting his arse in the face, while Andy Irons, who despite me telling him a thousand times over, couldn’t even pig dog the place, obviously being so fucking goddamn afraid of touching his rails. And that was before I rubbed my bacon boil weep juice on them before his third round heat.
In the end I gave up on the whole bloody thing. I mean where’s the competition at the waves that matter – at the Hat Heads, at the South Points and the Middletons? I was also having a problem with my vision, while the fever-driven hallucinations from that piggy disease were affecting my work. I swear the last thing I saw before I was quarantined by eight security guards who looked like the same dudes that pinched ET, was 44 of the top 45, keeled over, coughing up radioactive green golleys into the channel at Chopes. I mean, how the fuck did that happen? I must have been seeing things.
