It’s really REGGIE’S STORY, told to me, retold a few times, and now, it’s here at realsurfers.

SO, real surfer Reggie is at the Port Angeles Safeway. “You know,” Reggie told me, “the first word in Safeway is safe. I didn’t feel so safe.” SO, again, there’s two dudes, both with those dayglo kind of shirts meant to keep people working in the street from getting run over; and they’ve got on hats with the brims (Reggie claims this means something) “Really curved.” Okay. Now maybe he was trying to read whatever message was actually printed on their hats, and maybe he looked too long, but the dudes showed no sign of putting on their masks before entering, and “they had that look that was, like, daring someone to say something, but the one hillbilly looks at me… I’ve got my mask on… and he kinda pulls up his shirt enough, because he wants to make damn sure that I can see that he’s got a gun.”

Whoa.

“Yeah; and he makes sure I notice this; gives me this look.” Reggie adds what I would have to call an Elvis Presley snarl, though, if that’s too out-dated, imagine, maybe, Billy Idol; who, incidentally, Reggie includes in another story; some dude Reggie saw in a Seattle area Home Depot parking lot, the guy hanging out, promoting Trump, with an oversized truck flying an oversized American flag, and Billy Idol playing overloud on the guy’s radio. “Haven’t you anything better to do?” Reggie asks. “What, better than defending ‘merica?” The guy probably snarled when he was mouthing, “White Wedding.” More more more. Maybe that’s a different Idol song.

So, so, so, the snarling dude and his color-matched partner do the white guy shuffle through the Safeway doors; no masks, and the main billy grabs a cart, turns, again, to Reggie, says, “Black carts matter.”

I’m not sure if that’s a punchline or not. I found the story more unsettling than amusing. Reggie, who always claims he was raised in a tough part of Seattle, and that he’s had guns actually pointed at him on several occasions, and that he has bought and sold vans, which he restores and turns into camper-ready rigs, sort of was amused, but he said, when I offered to post the story here, and, if he wanted, change his name, that, “No, the punchline is that Reggie is actually white.”

Very white. I have described Reggie as “kind of a pretty boy with neck tattoos.” That may be insensitive. Not sure. I could change it to something with a more macho tone like, uh… well, I do have it on good authority that some of the women surfers on the Olympic Peninsula call him Reggie ‘good abs.’ Good authority as in I heard it from a woman surfer.

Anyway, surf’s still non-existent out here, the smoke’s heavy, air unbreathable, Trump supporters are prowling the parking lots and supermarkets, and, uh, let me see if I have a photo of Reggie.