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.