What’s your secret?” was the usual question—seldom from surfers but often from hangers-on and interviewers. Saying he had none sounded like an insincere denial, as though he were boasting that he had many secrets he was keeping to himself. He sometimes said, and later in exasperation pleaded, “I surf every day!” This was obvious, but who else did that?
“The best training for surfing is surfing” was his mantra.
“And getting pounded,” Garrett McNamara said. His North Shore neighbor, big-wave surfer Garrett, made no secret of the fact that he too was traveling the world, looking for the hundred-foot wave.
No one asked Sharkey’s secret on the North Shore, where he was always in the water, on a wave or waiting for one. He had done nothing else of value in his life, had quit school at sixteen, avoided Vietnam by using the trauma and disfigurement of his scar to gain a deferment, had never had a girlfriend for more than a few months nor held a job for long—lifeguarding in Hawaii was not a job but rather a privilege and a mission. Surfing was his obsession, but perhaps like other obsessions an evasion, an escape—in his case an escape from dry land.
Water was his natural element—life-giving, offering him buoyancy, weightlessness, purification. Except when attracted to a woman, in a sudden fever of desire, clutching at her, he was a slow talker, clumsy and torpid on land, like the clomping, gasping, flat-footed amphibian that glides so smoothly when it slips into the water and flashes away just beneath the surface.
He was silent in the water, like those creatures, and a talker onshore. Even the surfers he knew well, who’d heard his stories many times, wanted to listen to him tell the same stories again in his slow confident voice, growly from smoking weed, always the same opening, the same pauses and plotty reminders, the familiar dialogue. “You should write them down,” Bingo had once suggested. “No need,” Sharkey said—they were better recited, like folktales, and would be repeated by anyone who heard them. “They give people something to say”—because his listeners were the stammering, inarticulate grommets with goofy smiles, hearing Sharkey tell of the strangeness of the world beyond the islands, or narrow escapes, and brutes, and heavy water, and especially of women. He was the adventurer, whose tattoos illustrated the risks he’d taken, the marvels he’d seen; the explorer, reporting back; the storyteller, the survivor, who always had the answer to the persistent question, “Got waves there?”
He’d flown back to Tahiti and Fillette. That was a story. He’d found a new break in Indonesia, and a woman named Putri. “It means princess,” he said, and described some of their nights, and the danger of their nighttime lovemaking in the land of puritanical believers and honor killing for adultery. Another story. He’d surfed in Cornwall and Spain. “What kine language they speak in those places?” they asked in Hawaii. “And this Cornwall—it’s like some kine country?” They loved hearing stories of islands that were small and seedy, with foot-high dumpy shore breaks, places that proved that Hawaii was the center of the world.
Sharkey realized in time that, random, selfish, and improvisational in his choices—“I’m a bum, I’m a surf gypsy”—pleasing himself, he’d created a personal style. His stories suited that style. Among the silent watchful surfers he was the talker, and without saying anything, his fellow surfers, especially the younger ones, began to dress like him, with the same shorts, the same hoodie and flip-flops, the same board, though he had a quiver of them. And in mirror imitation they seemed to acknowledge that his style was unique, the result of his travels and his romances.
And some, the visitors especially, didn’t stop at imitating him. They wanted his life. They’d heard the talk about him, and—impatient, eager to learn the details of his career—they tried to befriend him, to know more. They told him about themselves, hoping to attract his interest, relating their exploits in the water, and with a penetrating gaze and their own stories seemed to insist, Please, remember me.
In this they tried, by being close, to live through him—never his fellow surfers in the hui, who were secure in their own lives and routines and single-minded in their surfing: they too were in the water every day—they were locals, whose lives were small and circumscribed by the islands. The surf bunnies and the wahine—most of the women—were seldom envious, and were happy simply knowing him, wanting nothing more than a casual hookup. It was a reassurance to him that many of these North Shore women were no different from the men, just as good in the water, just as unreliable onshore, just as hungry and horny, laughing among themselves on the beach in the day, as foul-mouthed as the guys, and prowlers at night, looking to be stoned. He was not a hero to them but rather a vortex of energy, a source of pakalolo.
But the surf tourists, the hangers-on, the groupies, to whom he was a celebrity—they could be parasitical. Incredibly—to Sharkey at least—the sponsors too, the big-money businessmen who funded the surf meets and flew in from California and Australia, badly wanted to be in his orbit. Men older than he was, millionaires, powerful in their dealings, who rented expensive houses on the beach for the surfing season and gave parties—they wanted his friendship, they praised his life, the life he had made out of accident and desperation and dumb luck, his whole existence a form of escape, fleeing to the water to be himself and protecting himself on land by telling lies about his life.
It seemed that the lives of these big, talky businessmen, many of them part-time surfers, were incomplete. Yet Sharkey saw success and risk and power in the men and felt puny next to them, as though they’d mistaken him for someone else, and he feared being found out and discovered to be an imposter. Or were they dazzled by his recklessness—for truly he had launched himself into waves as a boy and done nothing for years but ride them. Could this be called a career, or was it an elaborate way of avoiding any responsibility? He had no beliefs, no attachments, and had been sustained by an abiding confidence in himself. He had never considered his life worth imitating; he had succeeded through trial and error, through failure and near drownings, every wipeout a lesson in humility.
“You’re an amazing success,” he said to a wealthy man who wanted to sponsor him. “And look at me.”
“You don’t understand that you’ve just articulated a very critical thing,” the man said—from California, his clothing and shoe factories in Vietnam.
Sharkey smiled his beautiful smile—that and his sunburned nose, and the pink ridge of the scar on his cheek, the fallen angel face of acceptance.
“You used the word ‘success.’ But success is a simple trick, it’s empty—anyone can make money. You buy low, you sell high,” the man said. His face was tense and urgent; he had large white teeth. “Success is different from achievement.” And he held Sharkey by his shoulder. “I’ve made a pile of money. But you’ve achieved something.”
Sharkey’s wish, a form of rebuke, was that his mother could see the businessmen and hustlers and money men and hear them praise him, introducing him proudly to his friends: “This is my buddy Joe Sharkey . . .”
But his mother was dead, and anyway would have said, “I always knew he’d be a surfer. I used to drive him down to Ala Moana. I watched him surf at Sunset Beach. I worried about him, like mothers do, but I was sure he’d be the best.”
Fables—he’d become a surfer to escape her. If he’d let her run his life and been denied the freedom of surfing, he’d have ended up a boozer like her, to ease the pain of hating himself.
Other surfers were better known and made more money on the circuit, but Sharkey was more photogenic, the face that these businessmen wanted as the face of their products—the scarred face, the Shark. He had burned blond hair, tousled and too long, his body was blue with tattoos, and even in furious water he had an easy stroke that powered him into the break. Most of all he had the smile. And as a result of having been an outsider, bullied at Roosevelt, snubbed by locals early on, having had to make his own way, he knew how to be a friend, to show humility, even when he resented having to be humble. His pretense of mildness made him approachable, and it worked with women.
Most money men were smooth and aloof, as smug and serene as magicians, and with that same well-it and unreadable face. You knew they were wealthy because they never looked hungry, they hardly smiled; they sat unmoved amid powerful silences, as though wreathed in clouds.
And yet some of these millionaires clung to him, wanted to be near him, wanted to know him, to have him as a trophy acquaintance, and after listening to his stories tried to impress him with stories of their own. But this bafflement became his muffled humility. He smiled to think he might have what they wanted, the thing that was lacking in their lives—and what was it? The freedom to spend every day exactly as he pleased, to paddle out and ride a wave, a boy’s dream: a life of playing hooky. Maybe that was the dream of the money man—maker of sunglasses and T-shirts and bathing suits, owner of a mansion in Malibu: to be a carefree boy on a wave.
Grateful for the endorsement money but embarrassed by their frank admiration, Sharkey affected to complain—the breaks were getting crowded, the pressure to perform more intense; the meets were gangbangs; surfers had discovered Bali.
“I want your problems,” one of the businessmen said.
“Seriously, it’s getting harder,” Sharkey said superstitiously, hoping he sounded sincere, because his life had never been happier.
“I’d trade places with you in a heartbeat,” the big men said, and Sharkey felt pity for them, for having inspired such envy and making their success seem small.
Incredibly, they wanted his life, even the cagiest and the most worldly of them, who had everything, or so it seemed. They were persistent, often crassly demanding. “I’ve got to have more face time with you,” one of his sponsors said, sounding like an insecure lover. And dealing with their attention, which seemed like clumsy wooing, he understood how a pretty woman felt, disgusted and repelled, dealing with the hot gaze and roaming hands of an unwelcome man—how did you fend him off without seeming like a complete bitch?
There was one exception, a man of the world, an occasional visitor to the islands, who wanted nothing from him but his friendship—one of the few whom Sharkey admired, someone almost unimaginable, a rogue and a pirate, shocking, confrontational, funny, infuriating, probably insane, but kept out of a madhouse by means of his wit and his medication—his drugs, pakalolo, acid, mushrooms, cocaine, whiskey. The drugs worked, they saved him, they were fuel, and finally, combustible, like fuel, they destroyed him.
This was how the friendship began. Sharkey, at a party, had been telling one of his stories. It was the tale of the Somali woman he’d met on a beach in Lamu, Kenya, after a trip to Jeffreys Bay in South Africa. The ludicrous racial rules, the obstacles and stupidities of apartheid, had depressed him and kept him from wandering freely, and apart from people he’d wanted to meet—local women especially. He’d flown first to Nairobi, then to Mombasa and Malindi, looking for waves, and found himself in Lamu, an island he’d reached by dhow, his surfboard lashed to the mast. There were no good waves in Lamu, but there were women, in black gowns they called hijabs, their heads covered by black shawls that wrapped across the lower portion of their face, only their eyes showing in the draping of all that black cloth.
“Her name was Aziza, she was waiting on the beach,” Sharkey said. “But out of the sun, in the shadows beyond the palms. To tease her I said, ‘What are you doing here?’”
“‘Waiting for you,’ she said.
“‘You speak English.’
“‘I was a teacher. They gave me the sack.’”
This was always the way in Africa, he said. You said hello, and they said they’d been waiting for you. Africa was a dream, a place without preliminaries. You were a white man. You’d been introduced long ago by other white men. Africans guessed what white men wanted, and they were seldom wrong.
But the strictures of South Africa had made him cautious, and he knew that Lamu was mostly Muslim, with strictures of its own. He waited until dark before continuing the conversation with the woman. He was staying at the only hotel on the island, an old whitewashed cube of a building called Petley’s—a small bar, and all meals at a long common table of rough planks.
“The word for weed in Swahili is bhangi,” Sharkey told the eager listeners. “A nice word, and a primo product.”
After dinner he smoked a joint on Petley’s veranda, then strolled onto the beach. As soon as he left the lights of the hotel he heard the crunch of coral behind him, slow footsteps, a chewing of soles—he was being followed, but he did not turn. Ahead, past a dinghy that had been drawn up on the sand, he saw that it was tethered to a fallen palm tree. The distant lights on the veranda illuminated the white eye painted on the bow of the dinghy. Sharkey sat on the palm trunk, and with a swish of cloth stirring warm air into his face, a black-gowned and partly veiled figure took a seat beside him.
“I didn’t say a word. I was still smoking. But I knew it was her from the aroma, mingled sweat and perfume.”
That she didn’t move was a sign that she was interested. He reached for her, fumbled with folds of her gown, and found an opening, more warmth, as though inviting his hand.
“She was completely naked underneath. But when I stroked her thighs she pulled away. I said, ‘Sorry.’”
“‘Not here,’ she said. That was encouraging.”
She took his big hand in her small one and, her billowing black gown swishing against his body, led him back across the beach, avoiding the veranda lights, to the rear entrance of Petley’s. The bar inside was so noisy it masked their sounds, their feet on the back stairs, his shutting the door to his room.
When he turned on the lamp beside the bed, the woman protested, a squawk, and reached for the lamp and switched it off. But he had seen two things in the flash of light—her Somali face in her Madonna’s shawl, angular, her pinched nose, her even teeth, her thin dark lips, her small chin; and because in her hurry the hem of her gown had jumped, he’d seen a mottled yellowish scar, wide and matted like a patch of melted wax or hardened rags of flesh, on her thigh. She had once been badly burned, but she was lovely, and even her scar was bizarre and beautiful, like a weird medallion won by suffering.
“When she yanked her gown to cover it I turned on the light again and touched the scar on my face. Her eyes widened and she murmured a word, and a sigh of agreement. And that was not all.”
In the hot room, in the narrow bed (Sharkey now had everyone’s attention, and was speaking slowly), he’d slipped his hand between her legs and—so many secrets hidden by the gown—his fingers stroked an unfamiliar obstacle, more than one, a pattern of thin webbing, not flesh but raised sutures that were stiff to the fingertips, like an old wound or a scar, rough to the touch.
“She’d been sewn up,” Sharkey said. “Somali style.”
In the hush that followed someone said in a low greedy voice, “Hot damn.”
“She rolled over and faced the wall, then reached behind and took hold of me. Slowly she guided me into the warm cleft of her okole. And then . . .”
His listeners, all men, were transfixed, sitting with their mouths half open, wanting more, as he teased them with a pause. But in the next moment a woman entered the room, and Sharkey hesitated.
“Go on,” the woman said. She was young, fresh-faced, with sharp Slavic eyes and mocking lips, gesturing with a slender arm and beckoning fingers for him to resume his story.
Sharkey felt something hit his head and bounce into his lap—a bitten macadamia nut. Then another, which hit him harder, on his cheek.
“Hey—what the fuck!”
The woman laughed. “He’s flirting with you!”
Turning sharply to confront whoever was throwing the nuts at him, Sharkey saw a balding man in aviator sunglasses and an aloha shirt, a cigarette holder clamped in his teeth, grunting as he flipped another nut. Sharkey caught it and tossed it back, hitting the man’s chin.
The man laughed and staggered to his feet and hugged him.
“Then what happened with the chick!” one of the surfers yelled at him.
But the man had seized his attention and taken charge. The story was left unfinished, the party ended, and in the confusion that followed the man said, “I’m going to get you high.” He packed a pipe and passed it to Sharkey, and when Sharkey later asked, “Was that heroin?” the man laughed a gasping convulsed laugh.
That hug, a form of bumping assault but clumsily tender, stood out in Sharkey’s mind as the beginning of something important, the forming of his fame not as a surfer but as a celebrity friend—the acknowledgment of his power beyond surfing. The man saying “Nuts to you” had singled him out.
But that was an insight that came to him years later. At the time, in all the drinking and talk, it seemed to him that he was living in a turbulence of jarring and misleading colors, like being tumbled in the prismatic barrel of a dumping wave on a sunny day, spinning in a hold-down, then pushed aside, struggling to right himself to reach the surface. This was not fanciful: he spent many days in such waves.
“You’re illusionless,” the man said in a chattering voice. “That’s radical.”
That sweaty stranger’s hug marked the end of one period, the beginning of another, young adulthood into maturity and beyond, golden boy to leathery waterman. And he saw that he was growing not only older but weaker—and so soon!—that this passage, this bridge in time, was the transition into middle age, the man helping him across to a time when he would be overtaken, obscured, outdistanced, and forgotten.
“Hunter,” the man said that first night, after the hug, offering him the pipe that sent him into a drug stupor. It was, he saw, a kind of initiation.
The man was a reckless, delirious version of himself, and maybe Hunter saw Sharkey as the man he might have been had he not been a drunk, an addict, a show-off, a writer. But the man was brilliant. In his manic moods, screaming for attention, he was a monster, yet when he turned this energy into writing—and he could, the drugs and the whiskey fueling him—he had power.
Knowing nothing of surfing, he hero-worshiped Sharkey; and Sharkey, who never opened a book and had read none of Hunter’s work, came to idolize the screaming man for his outrageous talk and his debts and his companionship—the friend he wished he’d had when he was a boy.
“We’re both storytellers,” Hunter said. “Except I get paid for it!”
“I’m just a surfer.”
“I can’t do it, man. I’m hydrophobic.”
Sharkey began to laugh, because the word reminded him of dog bites.
“The lonesomeness of the ocean,” Hunter said. “Heavy shit.”
For Sharkey it sometimes seemed it was one of those periods, the Hunter years, he associated with indolence and stagnation and time-wasting and broken promises, hating himself for his laziness. But was it so? Looking back, he saw it was not an interlude of delay but important and pivotal, the making of him, the nearest he came to having an older brother.
And it mattered most because Hunter was rare in not wanting his life, as the others did; he wanted his friendship.
And Sharkey was admitted to another secret—that this careless, wasteful, mocking man, who raged, louder and crazier than anyone he’d known, this noisy man had a quiet, sober side that mumbled and was unsure and timid and bewildered and needed the praise of another hero.