Hunter was a container which when filled with drugs or alcohol became electric and lit up and began to vibrate, shouting, barking, throwing things, howling or going dark, looking like he was going to break something—a glass, a vase, a plate of spaghetti, the platter of cold pizza—as Sharkey had seen him do. Once, in a rage, he’d broken his leg; as a result he had developed an odd foot-dragging monkey walk, and often tripped and fell.

Hunter’s girlfriend at the time covered her face and whispered, “It was terrible. He slipped on the tile floor in the bathroom. He screamed and screamed. He couldn’t stop. They wouldn’t sedate him because he was full of coke.”

Never mind, Sharkey thought, Hunter was his advocate, he frankly admired him, he praised him to his friends, he listed him on the “Honor Roll” on the back page of two of his books, along with editors and athletes and rock stars he knew—he read the list to Sharkey, who wished he could have told his mother, My name’s in a book. And Hunter wrote a short profile for a magazine, “The Shark at Sunset,” and this too he read aloud—Sharkey smoking a joint and smiling.

“Going to Cortes Bank next month,” Sharkey said. “My sponsor’s paying. Fly over it in a helicopter. Film it first, then take a boat out and ride it.”

Hunter wasn’t listening, he was still talking. “I want to do a real profile of you for the magazine. They’re big on surfers. Where’ve you been lately?”

“On some great waves in Mexico. Todos Santos, and way south—Puerto Escondido. But Cortes—that’s a hundred-foot wave.”

Hunter was nodding. He tapped cigarette ash onto a half-eaten sandwich. “You see the thing I wrote about Clinton?”

“I guess so,” Sharkey said, though he had no idea. Clinton was a name to him, nothing more, one of Hunter’s names.

Hunter was growling, mumbling, perhaps talking, and then he was snorting a bump of coke off the back of his hand.

“Gotta do something big,” he said, adenoidal, gagging a little from the hit. “The whole surf culture deal. Like Hell’s Angels—wild men on boards instead of hogs. Crazed outlaw gods!”

“It’s not really like that,” Sharkey said.

“Outrageous, insane, screaming island girls.” He swallowed; he gasped and pushed at his nostrils. “Sex on the beach. Crashing waves.”

Sharkey laughed; Hunter hadn’t heard. He was preoccupied, drinking, drugging, determined to be high, paper twists of coke in his shirt pocket, bottles under his arms, amber containers of pills on the bathroom sink.

“Sometime I’ll tell you about it,” Sharkey said. “The ultimate wave.”

“I don’t have a lot of free time this trip,” Hunter said.

“Whenever,” Sharkey said, so as not to press him.