Why miss him, this stranger? he wondered, because the man was a fidgeting freak who talked without moving his lips, holding the growl in his mouth, who hated sitting on a beach and would only watch surf on television, in his suite, usually screaming at the set. And the book Hunter had given him was a burden, like something a sponsor would give you—a watch, a hat, a bicycle—that you’d never use and end up giving away. Sharkey had never met a writer before, and associated with Hunter, the word “writer” seemed like an excuse for being half baby and half sage, living in a world without rules—the writer made the rules and had the last word, or at least Hunter said he did.
But when he was gone, Sharkey thought how Hunter was irreplaceable; the other surfers were as flaky but wordless, and Sharkey had been bewitched by Hunter’s talk.
Hunter’s enthusiasm for the monster wave—the hundred-foot wave out there, breaking somewhere on the planet—renewed his desire to find it. And it heartened him to see that Hunter, the writer, the reckless boy ten years older than he, seemed as random and improvisational as he was—“I’m a bum, I’m a gypsy”—and he remembered Hunter saying, “Perilous quest” and “holy grail of the ocean,” the powerful words justifying what he did every day and making it seem like it mattered.
But Hunter was gone now, and would not be back for months, or until the next Honolulu marathon.
Sharkey surfed every day, and every day tried something new—a turn, a cutback, swiveling on the face of a wave as though carving his signature on it, writing on water. It was not practice or preparation; it was a way of spending the day, easing the passage of time; a way of living his life, because he made the moves his own.
And every night he went out, either to a bar or to a friend’s house, to drink and smoke on a lanai, telling his stories, reminiscing about his beginnings, remembering incidents from surfing distant waves, episodes in his quest for the ultimate wave, the monster. Part of the drinking and drugging was listening to the surf report on the radio from Bryan the Hawaiian and planning where they’d go the next day. And that was useful, because he always vowed to go elsewhere, to have a wave to himself.
At some point in his smiling vacancy of mind a girl would rise from the shadows and wander over to him, sidling like a cat, grazing his leg, and come to rest at his feet. He’d reach for her; nothing would be said. She’d match him drink for drink—they were island girls, surfers, boogie boarders, and the ones with jobs had to be up early. But their nearness to him, leaning against him, was an understanding that they would leave with him, laughing on the way to his car, knowing what was to come.
No other preliminaries; they would kiss hungrily, become short of breath, all the while slipping out of the T-shirt, stepping out of the shorts, and then tipping themselves into the bed or onto the floor in a frenzied back-and-forth that ended with gasps of animal satisfaction. Sharkey would wake like a blinking monk seal in the early dawn, alone, ready to slide into the water.
He had everything he wanted except that wave, but his wanting it—his search—gave a richness and direction to his life.
Hunter sometimes called, always at two or three in the morning, strangled sounds, grunts, silences. Then, “It’s madness here, man.”
Sharkey could offer nothing of himself: he was content, no madness.
“We gotta do something together,” Hunter often suggested, after a silence.
That was the plan—a promise. But the next time Hunter returned to Hawaii he forgot the plan. He had the marathon to report on, and football to watch. Sharkey saw how the eager fan, mumbling in a friendly way, “Mr. Joe,” sitting in front of the TV, concentrating on a game, sipping whiskey, lifting a powdery knuckle to his nose, could transform himself into the other Hunter, crazed and incoherent, sometimes physically unrecognizable, shouting and abusive, sweaty, bleary-eyed, hollering, “Bestial! Reptiles! Pigface!”
But each time Hunter returned to Hawaii was a reality check, both men older: Sharkey, the reflective nonreader, watchful, cross-legged in a yoga pose in the hotel suite, beside Hunter the writer, agitated and explosive. The gypsy and the outlaw, Hunter said, the one man who admired him without wanting his life. Hunter’s life was big enough, full enough, and Sharkey looked forward to Hunter’s arrival when, around Christmas, the Honolulu Marathon was about to start and the winter swell was building on the North Shore. Hunter eager too, so he said, to hear Joe’s stories, to watch football in his hotel suite, to snort coke and drink whiskey, usually all at the same time.
“Mushrooms,” Hunter said one of those times. “See if you can find some.”
Sharkey asked Moe Kahiko, who said, “Got choke. Got plenny,” and brought him some in a plastic bag, saying “They magic. Eat one or two.” He took one from the bag, a damp gnome’s cap, holding it by its stem, stroking the gills on its underside. “Try eat.”
“What’s it like?”
“Insane.”
“Maybe later.”
“More better when they not come dry.”
Sharkey ate one that night, chopping it into small pieces and chewing a small handful. Then he sat, and the glow heated his head, he saw a sparkle in his house he’d never seen before, chairs and tables tingling. He was uplifted, he was on a wave, and the wave swelled, became phosphorescent and didn’t break but carried him through the luminous air. He walked to the lanai to enjoy the entanglement of starlight, whirls and blobs blazing in the night sky, and his body shriveled so small his muscle was tissue-thin. He thought, When have I ever been this happy? He sat weightless on his favorite chair and was propelled, steering it through the widening room.
Overtaken by exhaustion at the end, he dozed, and the next day asked Moe where he’d found the mushrooms.
“You know where you get da kine cows in Mokūle‘ia, near Dillingham? Plenny there, after one big rain. They growing around the cow shit.”
“I want to see.”
They went, Sharkey and Moe, one day after a sudden shower, hiking up the hill to the pastures where cattle were grazing. As Moe had promised, the small tawny gnome caps had sprouted on the fresh cowpats.
“Psilocybin,” Hunter said over the phone. “Hot damn. That’s the mother lode. Save some for me.”
Sharkey anticipated an outing, a mushroom hunt, and planned it carefully to please Hunter. He’d take him for lunch in Hale‘iwa, he’d supply baskets for collecting the mushrooms, they’d go to Sharkey’s house at Jocko’s and eat them, getting high while watching waves—a field trip followed by an evening of visions.
“I hate hiking,” Hunter said. “Fucking mosquitoes.”
“It’s an easy walk,” Sharkey said.
But Hunter said, “Football,” and “Got a deadline,” and “Feeling shitty, man,” and so there was no mushroom hunt.
Sharkey took some fresh mushrooms to the hotel. Hunter ate a handful them in his suite and trembled in his armchair and wailed ecstatically, gargling, his face gleaming, deaf in his delirium—and so Sharkey left him.
“More mushrooms,” Hunter said the next day.
Before he left, he showed Sharkey the page he had written about it, then, seeing that Sharkey only nodded at it, Hunter read it, stabbing at it with his cigarette, crowing about how he’d hunted with Sharkey on the muddy hillside at Mokūle‘ia, among the cows and the marauding pigs, plucking the mushrooms from splashes of cow shit, as Sharkey had described. And there were wild dogs and loud parrots, and Moe was a tattooed Samoan with fuzzy hair and a war club.
Sharkey, who had thought of himself as unreliable, untruthful, a procrastinator, a committed stoner, a heavy drinker, now understood that in comparison with Hunter he was moderate in his habits. He loved the man for making him seem normal, because Hunter seldom kept his word, spent the whole day fantasizing and doping, sometimes chattered like a monkey, and might not leave his room for days.
I surf, Sharkey thought. And Hunter hates the water. But Hunter’s mentions of writing were like a sorcerer’s promise of magic. How did he do it? Where did it come from? What did it mean? Sharkey could not say. He had not read a word Hunter had written, not even the inscribed book he’d been given. All he knew was Hunter declaiming the outrageous adventure of the mushroom-hunting, and if in reality something never happened, what was the point of reading about it?
The man’s evasions and untruths were obvious: he was in pain, he was lost, unable to cope, deranged at times. Yet Sharkey admired him for being able to turn his pain into something resembling strength, his weaknesses and his rage into a kind of heroism. That he was besieged by admirers for the books he’d written bewildered Sharkey—the sorcery in it; and Hunter allowed himself to be idolized by these hangers-on, who took charge of him and brought him to parties, to which Sharkey was swept along. Hunter was seen as a man of action, yet he was passive. He spent most of the time in a chair, watching TV. He hated to be alone. He could not manage without a woman, who—far from being a sexual partner—functioned as a nurse.
“Couldn’t make it yesterday,” he’d say to Sharkey. “Captured by freaks.”
And behind him the nurse-girlfriend would roll her eyes or shake her head.
Hunter was sober most mornings. But when he insisted on Sharkey’s driving him to the gun range at Koko Head he was drunk, and the range attendant, alarmed by his shouting, would not let him shoot. Hunter swore at him and, when the attendant turned his back, shouted at the man, his demon voice rising in his anger. He threatened the man, and only relented when Sharkey dragged him away. Later Hunter made it a story, added guns to it, and “demonic muzzle flip,” and barking dogs, and Hawaiian chants. He read it to Sharkey. What had happened was embarrassing. But the story was funny.
That was his magic, to make an awkward episode into a kind of fable. Sharkey had not known that there was a public firing range at Koko Head, that Hunter was a gun nut, that he had access to pistols and assault rifles from his cronies on O‘ahu. The sight of the guns in Hunter’s pale trembling hands worried Sharkey. Hunter’s moods shifted too; he complained of muscle aches, a bad back, insomnia—up all night, he needed a nap in the middle of the day.
“Great guy,” he said to the nurse-girlfriend, this one named Bonnie.
“He’s amazing,” she said.
“I wish I’d known him years ago,” Sharkey said.
She took it as a compliment to the man, but he meant that Hunter was faltering, in decline—repetitive, his memory misfiring. Even Hunter said so. “What do you expect?” he screamed into the phone one day—Sharkey guessed at an editor. “My brain’s fried. There’s a guy here who’s feeding me toxic mushrooms!”
Sharkey wanted to show him North Shore waves. The marathon always took place in the big-wave season. “Monster waves!” he said. “Maybe something to write about.”
“Scary waves,” Hunter said. “I want to see who you are when you’re scared. A different guy!”
“I’m myself on a gnarly wave. Not scared. That’s who I am,” Sharkey said.
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
But he couldn’t pin Hunter down. No one could, not even the people who’d flown him to Honolulu and paid for his hotel suite. He was reckless, and like many reckless surfers Sharkey had known, he was superstitious.
“No, no, no,” he’d say, entering a hotel room. “It’s all wrong.” And he would threaten to leave unless the room was arranged his way. He needed flowers, a view of the ocean, an ice bucket. And he was fickle, meeting Sharkey’s friends. “I don’t like the way your Samoan pal looks at me.”
“Moe Kahiko. He’s Hawaiian. He’s mellow.”
“No. He has a hairy feral quality. Ratlike cunning. Yellow eyes. He always looks like he’s planning some kind of caper.”
“It’s called survival. He was raised by a single mom on the North Shore. They lived in a car for a long time. It was parked under a tree on the service road in Kahuku.”
“See? I was right.” Hunter sniffed the glass of whiskey he was holding, then downed it and roared, his mouth open wide.
“Being homeless made him resourceful. That’s how he found the mushrooms.”
“He leans over when he stands.”
“You hate him for that?”
“He’s not perpendicular, man!” Hunter sounded genuinely angry—not the fake anger that he used to be funny. With rage-spittle on his lips, he said, “I want him to stop looking at me with his yellow rodent eyes, like he’s a fucking burnout!”
And not only Moe. Hunter took against surfers who were too tongue-tied to answer his growled questions, the woman at the 7-Eleven who, he said, “licked her prehensile fingers and then counted my change with them.” Hunter did not want to touch the money. “Keep it!” Drugs made him see double, and he complained of crowds where only a few people were lingering on a beach.
He was a gentle grouch who needed friends around him, his Hawaii friends, the old, lame ex-football player from ‘Āina Haina, a runner whom he’d profiled, a pair of strippers he’d picked up in his rented Mustang convertible (girlfriend-nurse driving), and a porn star he said was a celebrity, whom Sharkey had never heard of.
Sharkey, who hated crowds, understood Hunter best when he said, “Humans are an invasive species,” but Hunter liked an audience, and Sharkey, committed to solitude, kept to himself.
“That porn star I was telling you about?” Hunter said.
Sharkey said, “Yeah”—he’d seen her once, but Hunter had never said anything more about her.
“She accused me of sexual assault. We went to court. I won!” He was lying on a sofa in his suite, a glass of whiskey resting on his chest. “And we celebrated! Didn’t we, honey?”
“We sure did,” the girlfriend-nurse said.
The next moment Hunter was asleep, poleaxed by the whiskey, like a baby grown overtired, shouting, then snoring.
“We sure did,” the woman repeated sadly to Sharkey, twitching her lips in sorrow or regret, tearful, as though caught in a lie.
Sharkey knew from the tour that the surfers who were the most boisterous—the stylish ones—were the hardest to please, needing attention, like hyperactive children. A stoner would sit and giggle and be repetitive, but no one was more boring than a drunk. At his best, Hunter was appreciative and watchful; at his worst, unbearable.
Hunter was a container which when filled with drugs or alcohol became electric and lit up and began to vibrate, shouting, barking, throwing things, howling or going dark, looking like he was going to break something—a glass, a vase, a plate of spaghetti, the platter of cold pizza—as Sharkey had seen him do. Once, in a rage, he’d broken his leg; as a result he had developed an odd foot-dragging monkey walk, and often tripped and fell.
Hunter’s girlfriend at the time covered her face and whispered, “It was terrible. He slipped on the tile floor in the bathroom. He screamed and screamed. He couldn’t stop. They wouldn’t sedate him because he was full of coke.”
Never mind, Sharkey thought, Hunter was his advocate, he frankly admired him, he praised him to his friends, he listed him on the “Honor Roll” on the back page of two of his books, along with editors and athletes and rock stars he knew—he read the list to Sharkey, who wished he could have told his mother, My name’s in a book. And Hunter wrote a short profile for a magazine, “The Shark at Sunset,” and this too he read aloud—Sharkey smoking a joint and smiling.
“Going to Cortes Bank next month,” Sharkey said. “My sponsor’s paying. Fly over it in a helicopter. Film it first, then take a boat out and ride it.”
Hunter wasn’t listening, he was still talking. “I want to do a real profile of you for the magazine. They’re big on surfers. Where’ve you been lately?”
“On some great waves in Mexico. Todos Santos, and way south—Puerto Escondido. But Cortes—that’s a hundred-foot wave.”
Hunter was nodding. He tapped cigarette ash onto a half-eaten sandwich. “You see the thing I wrote about Clinton?”
“I guess so,” Sharkey said, though he had no idea. Clinton was a name to him, nothing more, one of Hunter’s names.
Hunter was growling, mumbling, perhaps talking, and then he was snorting a bump of coke off the back of his hand.
“Gotta do something big,” he said, adenoidal, gagging a little from the hit. “The whole surf culture deal. Like Hell’s Angels—wild men on boards instead of hogs. Crazed outlaw gods!”
“It’s not really like that,” Sharkey said.
“Outrageous, insane, screaming island girls.” He swallowed; he gasped and pushed at his nostrils. “Sex on the beach. Crashing waves.”
Sharkey laughed; Hunter hadn’t heard. He was preoccupied, drinking, drugging, determined to be high, paper twists of coke in his shirt pocket, bottles under his arms, amber containers of pills on the bathroom sink.
“Sometime I’ll tell you about it,” Sharkey said. “The ultimate wave.”
“I don’t have a lot of free time this trip,” Hunter said.
“Whenever,” Sharkey said, so as not to press him.
But his easy response put Hunter on the defensive, and he staggered to his feet and swayed in front of Sharkey, who stood up, fearing that Hunter might fall and thinking that he could catch him.
“I’m an addict,” Hunter said. “Do you know how much trouble it is to be an addict? It’s a full-time fucking job. I don’t have time to do anything else.”
He was writing less, he said—and, Sharkey suspected, perhaps not writing at all. Missing deadlines, he said. And when on a return visit Hunter invited Sharkey to his hotel and Sharkey said he was free to do the interview for Rolling Stone, Hunter said, “I don’t do anything for them anymore. They’re mainstream. I’m somewhere else, still tooling along, pedal to the metal, in the fast lane of the proud highway.” He panted a little, short of breath from his shouting. “With the freaks!”
“The stoners,” Sharkey said, because he was smoking a joint, midafternoon, assessing the waves off Kahala from the lanai of the hotel suite.
“Snorters,” Hunter said. “Snorting makes me bounce off the walls, if it’s good shit.”
“Snorting what?” Sharkey asked, speaking through his teeth, holding the smoke in his lungs.
“Coke, speed, chalk, crank, smack,” Hunter said. “Speed builds up dopamine, and that’s a rush. Depends on the ROA . . .”
Route of administration—Hunter had mentioned it before: he was a pedant when it came to drug use, and his knowledge was immense and all firsthand.
“Tweakers in Hawaii fry their brains on meth, or they slam smack into their arms. The beauty of meth is that it can be smoked, but it’s no good snorted.”
“You’re a snorter.” Sharkey exhaled a pale but visible breath of weed.
“Big-time,” Hunter said. “Like dabbing.” He saw Sharkey squint, and explained, “Getting some concentrated weed and heating it on a nail and inhaling the vapor. Or hot-railing.” Again he saw Sharkey frown, and said, “Heat up a glass tube end and snort a line through it, so it vaporizes up the tube. It’s an instant high but it messes up my nose so bad I blow huge blood boogers that scare my girlfriend.”
“Sounds like a trip,” Sharkey said, alarmed by Hunter’s intensity and feeling like a schoolboy with the damp roach of pakalolo in his fingers.
“Hot-railing—yeah. But you waste a lot of product that way. Still, I love blowing an insanely huge dragon cloud.”
“Gotta go,” Sharkey said. “Surf’s up tomorrow.”
Hunter said, “But either way you end up toothless.”
Sharkey smiled, thinking how Hunter rarely listened to him, especially now, when he was winning on the tour, traveling, finding new breaks, getting better sponsors, and always in search of waves.
So he was surprised when Hunter said one day, “Remember when you said to me once . . . that thing?”
Hunter was lying on the sofa in his suite, his shoes on the cushions, wearing a misshapen fedora and sipping a whiskey. Sharkey shrugged at the question, which was unanswerable in its vagueness.
“I was telling you about the Ali-Foreman fight in Kinshasa.” Hunter began to laugh, and his laughter gagged him.
The names meant nothing to Sharkey, even now, years later, this Ali Foreman—who could he be?
“You said, ‘Kinshasa—any waves there?’” He hooted and coughed and choked, gargling phlegm, then leaned over and spat on the carpet. “Fucking heavyweight championship of the world, and you didn’t have a clue! You didn’t even know who Ali and Foreman were!”
Sharkey said, “They probably don’t know who I am.”
“I love that,” Hunter said. “I mention people and you go, ‘Who?’”
“Because I don’t know,” Sharkey said, to deflect the shouting. He had the sense he was being teased, and he resented it. He didn’t understand what was behind it except the drunken ranting of Hunter, who was lying fully clothed—sweaty shirt, crushed hat, stained shorts—on the white sofa.
“Carville, Clinton, Wenner, Joe Montana, Ayn Rand, Carter, Ken Kesey, Johnson.”
“Which Johnson? Kimo—the long-boarder?”
“Samuel Johnson.”
“I guess I know Clinton. He stopped here once.”
“But politics,” Hunter said.
“Politics is a shit game. It’s just winners and losers.”
“Exactly. That’s why you’re focused. You’re on your own wave.”
“Where else would I be?” Sharkey said.
“Like Sherlock Holmes,” Hunter said. “Watson tells him that the earth revolves around the sun. Sherlock thinks it’s the other way around. Watson’s incredulous at this dumb fuck. Sherlock says, ‘So what? It doesn’t matter to me.’ He’s on his own wave!”
“I’ve heard of Sherlock Holmes,” Sharkey said.
“I tell people, ‘There’s this surfer dude in Hawaii. He’s never heard of Joe Montana or Jimmy Carter.’”
“So?” Sharkey said in a faltering voice.
He was beginning to redden, his face heating with shame, and he was a child again at Roosevelt, being interrogated by a teacher and then teased by the local kids—“Haole! Panty! You not akamai!”—and for those hot moments he hated Hunter, the greedy, careless, wasteful man who knew nothing about Hawaii and yet wrote books about it.
Then Sharkey witnessed Hunter do something he’d never seen him do before. He put his drink down on the floor; he removed the smoking butt from his cigarette holder and stubbed it out by pushing it into a hamburger bun that lay bitten on a plate on the coffee table. He swung his legs off the sofa and struggled to rise. When Sharkey made a move to help him, Hunter waved him away and got to his feet, breathless from the effort, and tottered a little. He was big but bent, hunched over, broken, and looked crippled as he stood before Sharkey, trembling slightly. With a grunt he threw his arms around Sharkey and hugged him hard, surprising him with his strength, as though Hunter were clinging to life, with the exertion Sharkey used to wrap himself on a board and duck-dive under a wave.
“That’s why I love you, dude.”
Sharkey was too startled to speak; such tenderness from Hunter was new to him.
“I love you for what you don’t know,” Hunter said. “I love you for knowing the things that matter. Wave-riding. The lonesomeness of the ocean.”
Just then the phone rang. Hunter answered, barking, hoarse, impatient. “The party’s on the fifteenth. When I’m back in L.A.”
His other world plucking at him, as it always did, the bigger world of power and celebrity and names that Sharkey did not know. Hunter was on good terms with everyone in that world—he needed them, they needed him, he was shamed by his need, or at least weakened, so he saw Sharkey as strong and solitary, because he didn’t see that Sharkey had friends too—the water dogs, the surf gypsies, the barefoot freaks of the surfing world for whom only waves mattered. But you had to be on the water to see that.
The surfing world was small, loose, inward-looking, mostly silent, competitive, and illiterate; mostly kind-hearted, mostly mellow, eager to be on the cover of a surfing magazine but never intending to read it.
Football was Hunter’s passion. He watched the games on TV and could not be torn from them. Interrupted, he swore or screamed, went red in the face, exploded. “Weasels! Vermin! Whores! Shut the fuck up!”
Seated, drugged, staring into space, wordlessly moving his lips, he was the Buddha of broken promises. “We’ll do something together” and “I’ll meet you there” and “I’ve got a plan.” But he seldom followed through. He was indecisive, haggard, repetitive.
And at a time when younger surfers were winning and attracting sponsors, Sharkey wondered, Am I like him?
A shoulder injury from a wipeout at Jaws, when he was hit by his board coming out of a barrel, sidelined Sharkey for almost a year. In that year a number of new surfers emerged, and Hunter showed up limping—“Fucking hip replacement, can you believe it?”—and Sharkey said, “I’ve been out of action too,” and thought, But I have nothing else.
Even limping, Hunter had an outlaw aura and a loud shout, was often pictured with a cigarette in one hand, a gun in the other, and the aura gave him a look of danger and celebrity. But more than that, his writing guaranteed that his achievement would last and be remembered—not the ride on water, leaving no trace, witnessed by a few guys onshore, but indestructible books, a legacy. Sharkey was dazzled by the very idea of a book. For the nonreader a book was a powerful fetish object, something magical, its creation a mystery. It contained secrets.
Even so, Sharkey was not provoked to read one. Reading made him feel like a child.
Their lives were parallel, and because Sharkey was ten years younger, he measured himself against Hunter, often gratified by the correspondences, or shocked when he realized that in ten years or so he might be like Hunter, angry, negative, raging, lame, because his youth was gone, his talent diminished.
“I can’t write this,” Hunter said. Another year, another week of the Honolulu Marathon, Hunter sitting at a table in the kitchen of his suite, his new girlfriend sobbing in the bedroom. “You have to do it.”
“Impossible,” Sharkey said. “No way.”
“You’re not high!” Hunter looked frenzied and resentful. He slapped his computer, avoiding the half-chewed slice of pizza that had dripped sauce on the keyboard.
“I’m a high school dropout, man!”
“All the better. It’ll sound raw.”
“I can’t write,” Sharkey said. “You have to do it.”
“I’m buzzed.” He licked his lips. “Can’t see. Dope sick.”
At times like this, his face gleaming with sweat, his skin pale, his eyes reddened, he did look sick and was probably feverish.
“Your friend, that guy Moe.”
“Moe Kahiko?”
“Yeah. He can write it.”
“Moe can barely speak English,” Sharkey said, trying not to smile at the thought of Moe sucking on a blunt, his big dirty fingers tapping at tiny computer keys. “What is it you need?”
“Column for ESPN. The deadline’s tomorrow.” Still sitting, elbows on the table, head down, he called out “Patty!”
The woman who had been sobbing softly in the bedroom came to the doorway, wiping her eyes, looking sorrowful.
“Find someone to write my piece. Or else do it yourself.” He had not turned or lifted his head; he spoke in animal grunts, crouched like a monkey, and then began to shout.
He was still shouting as Sharkey slipped out of the room.
The following year, after ten months of travel and struggle, Sharkey saw Hunter again. Both men were limping. Sharkey had injured his knee on a wave in Brazil—Cacimba do Padre—and the hospital in Pernambuco had discharged him with a knee brace that had split apart on the flight home. Hunter said he’d had back surgery.
But Hunter had a new woman by his side, attentive, lovely, much younger, nurselike in her concern. Hunter said, “This is the guy I was telling you about, the original Mr. Joe.”
Anita had a beautiful smile, and while Hunter sat and smoked and talked, Sharkey watched her and envied Hunter for having someone so patient and pretty looking after him. She was knowledgeable too.
“I want Joe to see that thing I wrote about Nixon,” Hunter said. “Where is it?”
“It’s in Better Than Sex.”
“That’s surfing,” Sharkey said. “Better than sex.”
“Find him a copy,” Hunter said. He tottered to his feet and hugged Sharkey. “You trigger-happy little shit. What have you been doing?”
“Blew out my knee in Brazil,” Sharkey said. “But I met a guy from Portugal there. Apparently there’s this humongous wave that breaks off a place called Nazaré. It’s so gnarly they call it the wave of death.”
“Yaaah!” Hunter’s mouth was open wide. “I love it!”
“Not from surfers—from the local fishermen that have died in it. Their widows are in the town, lots of them, all in black, giving the wave stink-eye.”
“You can ride it. I’ll write about it,” Hunter said. He sat back on the sofa and gave Sharkey a drowsy smile and mumbled, “Wave of death.”
At his best Hunter was an enthusiast. He didn’t know much about surfing, but he had a love of wild words and a frantic eagerness to please his friends, and he had always admired Sharkey’s surfing. Surfing was celebrity, surfing was glamour to Hunter, but it was also risk. Because he was no swimmer himself, at least not in a choppy ocean, perhaps he saw it as flirting with death, in the way his own life was self-destructive, comic and macabre.
Sharkey was able to convince him that the opposite was the case, that he never felt more alive than when he was on a wave; that death was unthinkable when he was skidding through a barrel.
“Monster wave,” Hunter said. “What if you wipe out?”
Sharkey said, “I’m a dog in the water.”
“You’re falling off a fucking cliff,” Hunter said.
“In surfing you fall off the cliff and then the cliff chases you.”
“Right. The wave is Mr. Death.”
“No. The wave is a dumb force of nature. It’s neutral. It’s lifted from a reef or a rock. It rises and falls, then it’s gone forever. A wave is a temporary shape. There’s a shoulder and a lip and a face in wave anatomy, but there’s no brain. You can measure its life in seconds or minutes. In the case of this monster wave, a lot of minutes. But no one has ridden it, because, like, how do you paddle your board into a hundred-foot wave? I figure if I can get towed in on a surf ski I might have a chance.” Sharkey accepted a bottle of beer from Anita and clinked it against Hunter’s glass of whiskey. “I’ve been looking for this wave my whole life.”
In his excitement Sharkey did not notice that Hunter had dropped his head, and when Sharkey looked closely, what he took for intense concentration was deep sleep.
“He’s had a long day,” Anita said. “Plus he’s on painkillers for his surgery. He’s hurting.”
Sharkey was abashed that he’d spoken with such enthusiasm and not been heard. He was chastened, and later, after Hunter had woken and revived himself with whiskey and a joint, Hunter asked him again what he’d been doing.
“The usual,” Sharkey said, thinking, True. Perhaps the wave really existed, but he had not found it or ridden it.
Hunter was subdued, in pain; he moved slowly, snatching at furniture, and the one evening they went out Hunter needed a wheelchair.
“You’ll be fine,” Sharkey said at the entrance to the hotel, Hunter in the wheelchair.
Hunter plucked his cigarette holder from his teeth. “There’s an answer.”
Sharkey glanced at Anita, who smiled and gave Hunter’s shoulder a maternal pat.
“There’s rehab, which is like prison. But sometimes—again like prison—it works.” He lifted his cigarette holder to his mouth and puffed, as though fortifying himself. “There’s moving here to Hawaii—nice weather—and you and me, we can teach a course at the university.”
“Me a teacher,” Sharkey said. “What subject?”
“Writing is surfing, surfing is writing,” Hunter said,
“That might work. As long as I don’t have to read anything.”
Chewing his cigarette holder, Hunter said, “And the subversion of young minds.”
“You guys!” Anita said, and hurried to the curb, where a limousine was drawing up.
Hunter leaned closer to Sharkey, speaking in his growl. “And there’s the nuclear option.” He was still murmuring to Sharkey but staring at Anita in the distance, who was talking to the limo driver. “Lead poisoning. Death spiral. Bleed out. Die off.”
“No, man,” Sharkey said.
Hunter made a pistol of his hand, pointed the finger of the barrel into his mouth, and fired, his hand jerking back. He didn’t smile. He trembled. He weighed the pistol-shaped hand and said, as though explaining, “Speed shakes. Chemical sweat.”
“Move here,” Sharkey said. “We need you.”
Then Hunter called to Anita, “Cancel the car. I don’t want to go. I’m not hungry.” And he gestured to Sharkey, holding his arms out, still seated in the wheelchair. “Thanks, bro. You’re a good listener.”
A good listener, because with Hunter he never knew what to say. But “bro” struck him: yes, they were like brothers, Hunter both an inspiration and a bad influence, always going his own way but revealing his weaknesses to Sharkey, his younger sibling. Sharkey knew nothing of books or football or the cities where Hunter was celebrated as a hero. Their common pursuits had been drugs and women, but now Hunter had Anita and Sharkey the location of a monster wave.
Sharkey had recovered from his knee injury and was surfing again. But Hunter, always in pain, had not healed. No wonder he was stoned most of the time, or always on drugs. He got no exercise—he reveled in having a wheelchair to get him onto a plane. Yet he was humiliated by his limping, as he moved with effort from the chair to the bag on the counter where he kept his stash of coke. Addiction did not wear him down; addiction was his mode of survival.
When, after a few weeks, Hunter left, Sharkey realized that when he talked to him about surfing, his sponsorships, his quest for the wave in Portugal, Hunter only half listened, or did not listen at all. Hunter was thinking of one thing only, the cruel distraction of his pain. Compared to that, nothing else mattered.
The phone rang at two in the morning. It had to be Hunter. It was five in the morning in Woody Creek, Hunter’s night of rocking or writing about to end; Sharkey knew by now that bedtime for him was dawn.
“Unner.” He grunted something unintelligible, then said, “I know you don’t care,” and Sharkey realized his grunt had been a mention of football, the Super Bowl. “You’re lucky. Just the essentials for you—it’s all about the senses. I’m done, I’m a mess, physical wreck. My head is full of trivia, and useless shit. But you—all you think about is water.” He paused, then gasped, “You don’t need books, you need water and women.” He gasped and added, “You’re a sensualist.”
Sharkey said—his first words—“I’m waiting for you, dude.”
A mumble, like chewing, then silence. Hunter was grunting again, but didn’t say, “I’ll be there,” as in other years. He said, “That’s cool. You’re smarter than the rest of us.”
“I’m a dropout, I’m a lolo, I’m not smart,” Sharkey said. “Listen carefully, man, can you hear me?” He jammed the phone against his mouth and shouted, “I don’t know anything! ”
“I mean, staying in shape,” Hunter said, unfazed by the shout. “Being in Hawaii. Riding the monster waves. Water is life, man.”
“I believe that.”
Hunter coughed—a terrible pain-filled cough, and when it subsided, he said, “Remember the time we went shooting at that outdoor gun range? And I was drunk, and they threw us out?”
“Yeah. They weren’t happy. And you with a loaded gun.”
“It was a forty-five-caliber Colt Buntline. Locked and loaded. Like me.”
“You puked in my car.”
“That’ll happen,” Hunter said. “Duke of Puke. My signature move. God, you put up with a bunch of shit from me.”
“I learned a lot.”
“So we’re even,” Hunter said, and began to cough again, and, gagging, struggled to speak, saying, “Gotta go.”
Two days later, the news that Hunter, without warning, had shot himself; and Sharkey knew that in the phone call he had been saying goodbye.
He was a man who had lived his life explosively, in bursts. As he had weakened, dabbing and snorting, in the frenzy of fueling his habit, he had become inward, and Sharkey had not seen until the very end that in his inattention, his lack of interest, his not listening, he was withdrawing from the world that had lost its novelty for him, and, preoccupied with his pain, he was readying himself to die.