“I not you friend,” the man said, unblinking in his lizard look. “I’m you teacher. I’m too old to be you friend. I know more than you. You need to respeck me, to obey, to do what I say. I you kupuna.”

He was fierce—where had it come from? The jovial teasing Beach Boy had become a tyrant. He was gentle with everyone else, telling stories under the palms, giving surf lessons, renting boogie boards to tourists, talking about his friendship with Duke, and his ohana, and his memory of Pearl Harbor—describing that Sunday morning, delivering newspapers, seeing the planes, hearing the explosions, running for cover. Strumming his ukulele, he was the very image of the jolly carefree Hawaiian.

But there was someone else inside him. The inner Uncle Sunshine was a warrior, with no sense of humor and no patience. With Sharkey he was unforgiving, demanding that he exercise—run laps on the sand, do push-ups, and help with chores, carry boards to the tourists, wash them and rack them. And when at last, after demanding that he recite a Hawaiian prayer, he let Sharkey back into the water, he refused him a surfboard. “Swim into the waves, body-surf, practice breath control. Board is kapu. No board until I say so.” And Sharkey ran and swam until he was exhausted, until his throat burned and his arms ached and he found himself half weeping with fatigue.

“I will turn you into a water dog,” Uncle Sunshine said. “First you need practice. Rehearsing.”

This convergence—the old surfer and the boy—was the most important episode in his life; it was the making of him, though he did not tell anyone about it at the time, not the boys at school, not his mother. It was a solemn initiation, too complex to explain. “My father died. I met a guy who became a kind of father figure,” he later said. “He got me off drugs.” He did not say that Uncle Sunshine examined every aspect of his behavior: his swimming, his surfing, his schoolwork, his dealings with everyone on the beach. “Father figure” didn’t explain him. The man was his mentor, his teacher, hiskupuna, his tormentor, his scold. Sometimes Sharkey hated him, was afraid of him—feared most of all displeasing him, always having to be at his best. But he also knew that if he had not met him his life would have been quite different—he would have been a surfer, yes, but a different one, without Uncle Sunshine’s voice in his head, guiding him.

Most frustrating of all was Uncle Sunshine saying, “I know what you can do. I know more better than you. You have one big future.”

And Sharkey knew that as yet he had done nothing, and nothing in the future was apparent to him.

“You will be a water dog. You will ride monster waves at Waimea.”