“Hunter,” the man said that first night, after the hug, offering him the pipe that sent him into a drug stupor. It was, he saw, a kind of initiation.

The man was a reckless, delirious version of himself, and maybe Hunter saw Sharkey as the man he might have been had he not been a drunk, an addict, a show-off, a writer. But the man was brilliant. In his manic moods, screaming for attention, he was a monster, yet when he turned this energy into writing—and he could, the drugs and the whiskey fueling him—he had power.

Knowing nothing of surfing, he hero-worshiped Sharkey; and Sharkey, who never opened a book and had read none of Hunter’s work, came to idolize the screaming man for his outrageous talk and his debts and his companionship—the friend he wished he’d had when he was a boy.

“We’re both storytellers,” Hunter said. “Except I get paid for it!”

“I’m just a surfer.”

“I can’t do it, man. I’m hydrophobic.”

Sharkey began to laugh, because the word reminded him of dog bites.

“The lonesomeness of the ocean,” Hunter said. “Heavy shit.”

For Sharkey it sometimes seemed it was one of those periods, the Hunter years, he associated with indolence and stagnation and time-wasting and broken promises, hating himself for his laziness. But was it so? Looking back, he saw it was not an interlude of delay but important and pivotal, the making of him, the nearest he came to having an older brother.

And it mattered most because Hunter was rare in not wanting his life, as the others did; he wanted his friendship.

And Sharkey was admitted to another secret—that this careless, wasteful, mocking man, who raged, louder and crazier than anyone he’d known, this noisy man had a quiet, sober side that mumbled and was unsure and timid and bewildered and needed the praise of another hero.

16

Mr. Joe

The party in Kahala at a lumpy whitewashed Moroccan-style mansion that looked like large flood-lit sugar cubes tumbled at the edge of the beach was hosted by one of the tournament’s sponsors—a new energy drink, Prime Fuel. It was always something cheesy, with a stark logo—the label, not the contents, that was intensively marketed. The sponsor himself, looking varnished, gleaming with a deep tan, welcomed the wild boys from the North Shore, who pushed past him, saying, “Yo, we’re with Joe.” Like two distinct species: the plump brown bearlike man, the skinny sunburned monkeys.

“Mind taking off your shoes?” the man said.

They pushed past him, laughing because they had no shoes, and hurried inside on dirty feet, howling, in torn shirts and tangled hair, the man’s toothy smile becoming panicky.

“Never mind them,” Sharkey said.

“This is a rental,” the man said, pleading. “I don’t want trouble. Are you Joe Sharkey?”

“That’s me.”