St. Augustine Part III-

We headed to the little pedestrian tourist street wanting ice cream. I got that feeling I get in Florida. The sun’s heat is like a yoke on my shoulders. I shuffle along, feet barely leaving the pavement. After a time, then, the release-my head seems to lighten, my legs start to move on their own. The motion becomes fluid and I gravitate towards food, drink, bright displays. We walked through the screen door and back to the ice cream counter of the old-fashioned store. We tried some flavors and decided on their famous butter pecan. Back on the street, the ice cream ran down our hands quicker than we could eat it. Wonderfully big bites of waffle cone started to come off, with intermittent wrist licking.
“You know what we need?” Josh said.
(pause) “Meet some girls?”
“Well, yeah, but we should pick up a bottle, then meet some girls and head back to the boat, grill out, drink it up.”
“Sheeeeeit.” We circled the small touristy district, which was also the historic district. Buildings from the 1600s were decked out with banners for Bud Light and bright plastic junk for kids. An entire store of fuzzy lizards on wire leashes, here in the oldest continually inhabited city in the country. And not a single place to purchase liquor? We headed into a no-name-brand-sandals-and-boardshorts beach store. Techno music bumped. A gay employee greeted me. I headed to the back wall where the sandals were. My Kinos had been reduced to ripped, broken flaps of leather, whisking across the linoleum. The no-name sandals were twenty or thirty dollars.
A group of girls was in the front of the store. I saw, from behind, a wonderful, slender body in a bikini top, with an enormous tattoo I couldn’t make out. When this girl turned around, speaking in French to her friends, I felt something I haven’t felt in a while. When I was fourteen or so, I would see a girl, or look into the eyes of a model in a picture, and think that was it-superlative beauty, a perfect design I could look at forever. It happens with cars, paintings-anything designed to be even remotely aesthetically pleasing. I would listen to “Scar Tissue” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and it would sound better than anything else ever had or ever could. I had been telling Josh a few days before that I think I’ve become jaded, that these feelings don’t really come to me much anymore.
I’m not really sure we made eye contact. I think she was making a sweep and maybe hit me with those paralytic eyes. I was wearing sunglasses, regardless. She left with her friends. Josh and I walked about thirty blocks in the afternoon sun to ABC liquor. It took me a good twenty minutes to decide what to get, while Josh waited outside. We had grilled steak, potatoes, and rum, and fell asleep on the deck, looking over at the Bridge of Lions and the orange-lit waterfront.