But Hunter said, “Football,” and “Got a deadline,” and “Feeling shitty, man,” and so there was no mushroom hunt.

Sharkey took some fresh mushrooms to the hotel. Hunter ate a handful them in his suite and trembled in his armchair and wailed ecstatically, gargling, his face gleaming, deaf in his delirium—and so Sharkey left him.

“More mushrooms,” Hunter said the next day.

Before he left, he showed Sharkey the page he had written about it, then, seeing that Sharkey only nodded at it, Hunter read it, stabbing at it with his cigarette, crowing about how he’d hunted with Sharkey on the muddy hillside at Mokūle‘ia, among the cows and the marauding pigs, plucking the mushrooms from splashes of cow shit, as Sharkey had described. And there were wild dogs and loud parrots, and Moe was a tattooed Samoan with fuzzy hair and a war club.

Sharkey, who had thought of himself as unreliable, untruthful, a procrastinator, a committed stoner, a heavy drinker, now understood that in comparison with Hunter he was moderate in his habits. He loved the man for making him seem normal, because Hunter seldom kept his word, spent the whole day fantasizing and doping, sometimes chattered like a monkey, and might not leave his room for days.

I surf, Sharkey thought. And Hunter hates the water. But Hunter’s mentions of writing were like a sorcerer’s promise of magic. How did he do it? Where did it come from? What did it mean? Sharkey could not say. He had not read a word Hunter had written, not even the inscribed book he’d been given. All he knew was Hunter declaiming the outrageous adventure of the mushroom-hunting, and if in reality something never happened, what was the point of reading about it?

The man’s evasions and untruths were obvious: he was in pain, he was lost, unable to cope, deranged at times. Yet Sharkey admired him for being able to turn his pain into something resembling strength, his weaknesses and his rage into a kind of heroism. That he was besieged by admirers for the books he’d written bewildered Sharkey—the sorcery in it; and Hunter allowed himself to be idolized by these hangers-on, who took charge of him and brought him to parties, to which Sharkey was swept along. Hunter was seen as a man of action, yet he was passive. He spent most of the time in a chair, watching TV. He hated to be alone. He could not manage without a woman, who—far from being a sexual partner—functioned as a nurse.

“Couldn’t make it yesterday,” he’d say to Sharkey. “Captured by freaks.”

And behind him the nurse-girlfriend would roll her eyes or shake her head.