But his easy response put Hunter on the defensive, and he staggered to his feet and swayed in front of Sharkey, who stood up, fearing that Hunter might fall and thinking that he could catch him.

“I’m an addict,” Hunter said. “Do you know how much trouble it is to be an addict? It’s a full-time fucking job. I don’t have time to do anything else.”

He was writing less, he said—and, Sharkey suspected, perhaps not writing at all. Missing deadlines, he said. And when on a return visit Hunter invited Sharkey to his hotel and Sharkey said he was free to do the interview for Rolling Stone, Hunter said, “I don’t do anything for them anymore. They’re mainstream. I’m somewhere else, still tooling along, pedal to the metal, in the fast lane of the proud highway.” He panted a little, short of breath from his shouting. “With the freaks!”

“The stoners,” Sharkey said, because he was smoking a joint, midafternoon, assessing the waves off Kahala from the lanai of the hotel suite.

“Snorters,” Hunter said. “Snorting makes me bounce off the walls, if it’s good shit.”

“Snorting what?” Sharkey asked, speaking through his teeth, holding the smoke in his lungs.

“Coke, speed, chalk, crank, smack,” Hunter said. “Speed builds up dopamine, and that’s a rush. Depends on the ROA . . .”

Route of administration—Hunter had mentioned it before: he was a pedant when it came to drug use, and his knowledge was immense and all firsthand.

“Tweakers in Hawaii fry their brains on meth, or they slam smack into their arms. The beauty of meth is that it can be smoked, but it’s no good snorted.”

“You’re a snorter.” Sharkey exhaled a pale but visible breath of weed.

“Big-time,” Hunter said. “Like dabbing.” He saw Sharkey squint, and explained, “Getting some concentrated weed and heating it on a nail and inhaling the vapor. Or hot-railing.” Again he saw Sharkey frown, and said, “Heat up a glass tube end and snort a line through it, so it vaporizes up the tube. It’s an instant high but it messes up my nose so bad I blow huge blood boogers that scare my girlfriend.”

“Sounds like a trip,” Sharkey said, alarmed by Hunter’s intensity and feeling like a schoolboy with the damp roach of pakalolo in his fingers.

“Hot-railing—yeah. But you waste a lot of product that way. Still, I love blowing an insanely huge dragon cloud.”

“Gotta go,” Sharkey said. “Surf’s up tomorrow.”

Hunter said, “But either way you end up toothless.”

Sharkey smiled, thinking how Hunter rarely listened to him, especially now, when he was winning on the tour, traveling, finding new breaks, getting better sponsors, and always in search of waves.

So he was surprised when Hunter said one day, “Remember when you said to me once . . . that thing?”