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.