You’re so happy,” a journalist had said to him once, a woman from a surfing magazine, wearing a T-shirt with his face on it and lettered DA SHARK! She meant, You’re impossible—and she seemed to be complaining, because she wanted a different story. “And you’re younger than I thought.”
“Days you spend on the water are not deducted from your life,” he said, and laughed. “Surfing keeps you from growing old.”
A life of happiness was too easily summed up, and who cared? In books, in gossip on the tour, in life generally, a happy man was a rarity—usually someone minor, one-dimensional, shallow, careless, often a fool. And with surfing’s emphasis on struggle and risk, they were dopers, they were stoners, they were beer drunks, but they were happy when the surf was up. He did not contradict the interviewer. He smiled and snapped his fingers as he did in idle moments, mouthing a song.
Bum
Bum
Bum
Biddly-bum . . .
Yet for a long time—years perhaps—a shadow had been creeping across his life. This advancing darkness had been preceded by ominous mutters, and a sticky damp as of stinking fingerpads, the prickle of hairy hands, a rising odor—an animal smell, or that of a desperate tramp—overripe, like decay. It was the sense that a creature had been stalking him, and he took this shadow to be a premonition—of what, he could not say.
Engrossed in surfing, the pure frolic on water, he hadn’t paid much attention, and when he mentioned it to Olive soon after he met her, she had not taken any interest. You couldn’t scare a nurse, nor impress a nurse with a horror story or a mention of a bad smell: their working lives dripped with blood and wounds and puke. One of the traits he loved in Olive was that she could cap any gruesome tale with one much more macabre. She’d seen people in every form of distress, humans trapped and suffering—the ailing, the maimed, the dying; drowning victims, battered wives, dope-sick tweakers.
If Sharkey mentioned a surfer who had planted himself headfirst on a reef, she could counter with the head trauma of a motorcyclist tipped into the path of an oncoming car. She was unshockable in the face of physical injuries. If anything, the sight of a mangled body made her more efficient, more studious and attentive—as she’d been the first day he’d seen her in the house at V-Land, reviving with the kiss of life a boy who’d overdosed—so Sharkey’s stories did not mean much to her. Human cruelty was to her the great offense; it was all the worse when it was bloodless, and so “I hit a drunk homeless guy” was an outrageous statement, one she found hard to forgive or explain.
Sharkey had not noticed anything unusual. In his improvisational life, the awkward or intrusive incidents that had preceded the collision had at the time seemed unremarkable, more annoyances than portents. He was as confident in his daily life on land as he was on the water, where he could ride any wave that lifted him.
Surfing was the pulse and passion of his life, not like a sport that involved catching a ball or swinging a bat, and not a recreation either. It was a way of living your life that only other surfers understood—even the posers and punks who’d somewhat spoiled it; and good waves took precedence over everything on land. When the surf was up Sharkey was on it, no matter what else was happening. And nothing was compatible with surfing—no job, no enterprise, no other event. Surfing had dominated his existence, made him a hooky-playing student and a wayward son but a happy man. At just the point he was criticized by his disapproving mother—then a recent widow—for spending so much time in the water, when he had seemed so self-indulgent, he had begun to win surf contests and make money, on the tour and from appearance fees. He was well known at sixteen, a champion at seventeen, famous at twenty, a winner of the Pipeline Masters and the Eddie at Waimea, holder of the Triple Crown.
“Being on the water is all that matters,” he said, “and surfing is the best way of being on the water.”
Surfing was easy, everything else was hard; but he had been blessed. He was the luckiest man he knew, a success as a teenager doing something he loved, later living on endorsements and on the inheritance from his dead mother’s investments, in the most beautiful place he’d ever seen—and it was a surfer’s privilege to know the loveliest coastlines of the world.
He’d come with his parents to Hawaii as a ten-year-old, after bumping from one army base to another. His father, who had risen through the ranks, was promoted to colonel when they arrived at Fort Shafter, and was soon assigned a regiment and sent to Vietnam to command them as advisers, arming and training ARVN soldiers and Montagnard irregulars—the Degar people—in the Central Highlands to fight the Vietcong. Two tours, with frequent trips home, and on the second he’d been wounded, not by the enemy but in an accident, a hard chopper landing in Danang that crushed his spine. He was treated in Saigon, then airlifted to Tripler Hospital in Honolulu, where he died of liver failure.
“A sad memory,” Olive had said.
“He was someone I didn’t know anymore. Not the big intimidating colonel but a thin yellow man connected to plastic tubes, gasping to breathe.”
By then Sharkey had been in and out of two schools and was failing at a third.
His father’s death confused him, angered him, made him reckless. He found refuge in the waves. His mother, distraught, collected the insurance and, unexpectedly, a large inheritance from her husband’s family—cash, a stock portfolio, real estate on the mainland. There was money now where once there had been a man.
Her money kept his mother suspicious of suitors, and single. She had boyfriends, but she steered them away from her teenaged son, who was doing so poorly at school. Yet the boyfriends persisted in trying to befriend the boy, as a way of ingratiating themselves with his mother. They were either too stern or too indulgent, and Sharkey found them ridiculous in their attempts to interact with him, as though auditioning for the role of father and husband. It was known that Sharkey’s widowed mother was wealthy. She moved to a bigger house in Manoa, but by then Sharkey had been expelled from Punahou School and was struggling at Roosevelt High.
It had never been easy for him to be the son of an army colonel; it was even harder to be the son of a rich widow.
“I’m not going to marry again,” she said. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Joe. I wouldn’t do it to myself. A woman with money would be a fool to get married.”
So in addition to the role of son he assumed the roles of husband, friend, confidant, lover almost—he held her, he soothed her, he listened to her complaints—and he was oppressed. Some days he wished she would die, and he was ashamed of that feeling in himself. Knowing that she was a burden on him, she said frankly that if he looked after her and kept her safe and remained her companion—“companion” meant everything: her friend, her walker, her support and comfort—he would never have to work; that on her death he would inherit everything she had. Just hearing that, he saw her small coffin.
This promise made her contemptuous and him cynical, but it bound them together in a bitter bargain, each one trying to prove the opposite of what they felt. Some days the power was hers, other days his, and in that seesawing way it was like a love affair—or something resembling the lingering end of an affair, each one hanging on, insecure, fearful of letting go, and resentful, as when his mother didn’t get her way she wept, and he wanted to scream, not at her but at himself.
He tried to please her and of course he failed: she would not allow him the satisfaction of pleasing her, because that would make him confident, and she might lose him. Sharkey understood her manipulation, and there were days when he saw her—stiff permed hair, makeup that gave her a floury face—propped up in the armchair where his father had once sat, and he pitied her for the drunken buzz in her tiny head. She reminded him of an animal holding still so that it will not be seen, like a rabbit stiffening on a shadowy late-afternoon lawn but standing out, the more obvious for its stillness in the breeze. She sat, and she drank.
He was saved by the sea, he thrived offshore. He found a school friend, a surfer, a misfit like himself, who introduced him to the moves and vouched for him at the beach, where he was guided by an older surfer—Uncle Sunshine. His form of rebellion was to swim away, and in time to surf the most dangerous waves, to build his confidence and to scare his mother; in doing so, he made his reputation. His mother did not understand enough of surfing or the power of the waves to be scared, and that frustrated him. Sometimes his mother insisted on attending his surf meets, taking photos of him while sitting in a folding chair under a wide-brimmed hat, on the sand—the only surfer parent on the beach, watching with admiration, possessing him by showing up, by her very presence keeping the girls away—the girls half fearful of the widow and half respectful of the loyal son, but also mocking both.
All this time he was a student, first at Radford with the other army brats, then—with their move to Manoa Valley—at Punahou, where he was intelligent enough to do little work and still manage to pass but was soon expelled for smoking pakalolo and finally sent to Roosevelt, where he was one of the few haoles, failing in his studies and bullied by the tough local boys. Hating school, he escaped to the beach, surfed most days, and longed to go away, to be free of his mother. He dropped out of Roosevelt and devoted all his days to surfing. He traveled to the mainland, and at Mavericks he saw his first epic waves—sixty-footers—and later added Jaws on Maui and Cortes Bank to these monsters, and still searched for a hundred-foot wave to ride.
By then he was on the world tour and had his first tattoos. He traveled—to Portugal and Spain, and Bali, his mother saying that she wanted to follow him; but the effort was too great, the flights too long. He managed to exhaust her. She stayed home, like a wife abandoned, and welcomed the attention of men. She queened it with her suitors, amused by their promises and flattery, and in this ideal situation fell into a casual decadence, drinking too much, indulging herself, encouraging the men just so far and then rejecting them, reverting to a sudden iciness that was itself perverse.
Sharkey traveled the world, wherever there was surf—and there was surf on almost every coast, at the edge of every continent, on most Pacific islands. You could not be a big-wave surfer, or surf year-round, without being a traveler.
And when he began to make money, in contests and from endorsements and appearances—he was still in his twenties—he became defiant; and his mother knew her hold on him was weakening. The money was modest, but it pleased him that it came so easily. Being away from her made him independent, and she objected; she wanted her boy back, not realizing that in her stubbornness she had made him succeed; her selfishness had kept him away, and being away from her had made him a man.
His mother complained of obscure aches and pains, which Sharkey disbelieved, regarding her complaints as attention-seeking. In what seemed like an act of revenge his mother broke her hip, became an invalid, and died. He inherited everything his mother owned—money, property, the investments, the stock portfolio. And he knew a greater freedom, more travel, continuing success as a surfer, more latitude in his search for the hundred-foot wave. He had always guessed that he would not be wholly free until his mother was dead. He was released, to fall in love, but the feeling that he had wished his mother dead—that had he believed her in her misery, he might have lengthened her life—this guilt never left him. That, and something else he could not undo.
Saying he was too grief-stricken to view her body, he received her ashes by mail and scattered them off Shark’s Cove on a day of big surf that would disperse them, perhaps dissolve them. As the dust of her remains left his fingers he was given life, a fortune, a long career as a surfer that was easily summed up.
He was interviewed often, and always he was described as a natural waterman, with effortless grace and bravery, able to ride the biggest waves, imitated by many, admired by nearly everyone, envied, and praised, but not loved—surfers were too selfish and single-minded to be loved. He had achieved his goal of riding a one-hundred-foot wave, which was not a wave but a life on the water.
This was what most people knew of Sharkey, the account of his life that he offered to interviewers, such as the young woman from the surfing magazine who said, “This is the hardest assignment I’ve ever had. You have everything, especially that thing that makes you impossible to write about—you’re happy.”
But, like most of what people tell you about themselves, little of this was accurate. Because the messy essentials, the painful, shaming episodes, were left out; this version of Sharkey was misleading, and incomplete, and much of it false.