Sharkey squinted at the brass key tag, repeating the number. He found the door that matched it, feeling silly, poking the key at the lock but not managing to insert it, and as he tapped with the key the door opened and he was pulled into the darkness by frantic hands.

He stood murmuring softly as he was tumbled into a bed by a gasping, giggling woman with bony arms, who was yanking off his shorts, and he too was laughing in the darkness.

“I’m Cheryl—who are you?”

“Me, I’m the Shark.”

“Don’t bite me,” she said in a small girl’s voice.

On his back, rocking, then smacking the mattress, Sharkey said, “Far out, a water bed.”

For a moment he was dazzled by a sudden flash of the bedside lamp and a small pale woman in black lingerie peering at him. “You’re beautiful,” she said, then switched off the light and sat on him. “You’re mine,” and she clawed at him, with either her fingernails or her teeth. “This belongs to me.”

“Easy,” he said.

“I can be scary,” she said in a growly voice.

He struggled with her after that, as she pushed his head down, smothering him with her body, then riding his face. Pressed against the mattress, he heard the wavelike rumble and gulp of the water in the bed. Then the darkness was inside him, as though he’d drowned. But he was asleep, and soon she was shaking him. “Wake up, dude.”

He was dazed. He could barely stand. The woman in front of him looked fragile, wrapped in a hotel robe, gaunt and blinking in the lamplight. Sharkey paused before her.

“Don’t kiss me,” she said, and turned away.

He stumbled to the door. He was so shaken he left the hotel by the back entrance, pushing past two men in hotel uniforms, without seeing Eddie or Trey.

In the next season he and Bingo, a surfer from San Diego, rented a van and drove the length of the California coast, stopping for days, and sometimes weeks, at surf spots, some of them well known, others known only to Bingo. Having made their reputation in Hawaii and been written about and photographed in Surfer and Surfing World, they were recognized, and either welcomed as celebrities or else threatened: “This is our wave, man. Take a hike.”

“Bunnies,” Bingo would mutter, seeing girls on the beach, and they took turns on the mattress in the back of the van.

In Mexico, in Baja and Puerto Escondido, the girls needed persuasion, some wanting money or weed; many said flatly no—a novelty to Sharkey that he was not recognized.

“They don’t seem to know who we are,” Bingo said.

“Maybe that’s a good thing.” Sharkey felt as he had on his first day at Roosevelt, when he’d been called a fucking haole, and mocked.