Then Sharkey witnessed Hunter do something he’d never seen him do before. He put his drink down on the floor; he removed the smoking butt from his cigarette holder and stubbed it out by pushing it into a hamburger bun that lay bitten on a plate on the coffee table. He swung his legs off the sofa and struggled to rise. When Sharkey made a move to help him, Hunter waved him away and got to his feet, breathless from the effort, and tottered a little. He was big but bent, hunched over, broken, and looked crippled as he stood before Sharkey, trembling slightly. With a grunt he threw his arms around Sharkey and hugged him hard, surprising him with his strength, as though Hunter were clinging to life, with the exertion Sharkey used to wrap himself on a board and duck-dive under a wave.

“That’s why I love you, dude.”

Sharkey was too startled to speak; such tenderness from Hunter was new to him.

“I love you for what you don’t know,” Hunter said. “I love you for knowing the things that matter. Wave-riding. The lonesomeness of the ocean.”

Just then the phone rang. Hunter answered, barking, hoarse, impatient. “The party’s on the fifteenth. When I’m back in L.A.”

His other world plucking at him, as it always did, the bigger world of power and celebrity and names that Sharkey did not know. Hunter was on good terms with everyone in that world—he needed them, they needed him, he was shamed by his need, or at least weakened, so he saw Sharkey as strong and solitary, because he didn’t see that Sharkey had friends too—the water dogs, the surf gypsies, the barefoot freaks of the surfing world for whom only waves mattered. But you had to be on the water to see that.

The surfing world was small, loose, inward-looking, mostly silent, competitive, and illiterate; mostly kind-hearted, mostly mellow, eager to be on the cover of a surfing magazine but never intending to read it.

Football was Hunter’s passion. He watched the games on TV and could not be torn from them. Interrupted, he swore or screamed, went red in the face, exploded. “Weasels! Vermin! Whores! Shut the fuck up!”

Seated, drugged, staring into space, wordlessly moving his lips, he was the Buddha of broken promises. “We’ll do something together” and “I’ll meet you there” and “I’ve got a plan.” But he seldom followed through. He was indecisive, haggard, repetitive.

And at a time when younger surfers were winning and attracting sponsors, Sharkey wondered, Am I like him?