Under the Wave at Waimea

by Paul Theroux

  “He’s a famous writer,” Sharkey said.

  “You read da kine?”

  Sharkey said, “No can read, brah,” and the boy laughed crazily and bumped fists with Sharkey.

  Hunter was now among the Tahitian dancers, mimicking the men’s tramping and knee-shaking, and when the women ran onto the lawn, wearing high crownlike headdresses, Hunter whooped and snatched at them, egged on by the whistling surfers. Seeing him clowning, Sharkey thought, He’s a boy, an excitable boy, demanding to be seen—and licensed in his disruption because he was, of all things, a writer. Hunter was the center of attention now, more conspicuous than the fire-eaters and the Tahitians with the shiny coconut-shell bras.

  “Everything all right?” It was Avery, the sponsor, smiling in anxiety as Hunter humped the hip-shaking Tahitian women, the surfers cheering and whistling.

  “Cool,” Sharkey said.

  “We’re planning to showcase a new energy drink,” Avery said. “Is that something that might interest you?”

  “Oh yeah,” Sharkey said, thinking, Free money, that’s what interests me—money without work, money without strings or office hours. And the sight of Hunter swigging from the Chivas bottle and the words “energy drink” made him smile, because he knew it was water and syrup and a label.

  “I loved those little flips you did coming out of the barrel today,” Avery said.

  “Off the lip. Tail slide.”

  “That’s my dream.”

  “Not my dream. Just ways of getting points.”

  “What’s your dream?”

  “There’s a wave—a perfect barrel in Indo,” Sharkey said. “You can ride for three whole minutes in that barrel. That’s one dream.”

  “You have more?”

  Shouting to be heard over the drumming, Sharkey said, “The hundred-foot wave!”

  “Where?”

  “I’m looking!”

  “Get in touch with me when you find it.”

  “When I ride it,” Sharkey said.

  Then Hunter intruded, hugging him—gasping, sweaty, looking smaller and misshapen, as drunks do, gabbling with spittle-flecked lips. After the beer, the wine, the Chivas, the pakalolo, the cocaine, it seemed he had outlasted the others. Six surfers were sprawled on the lawn under the lights.

  “Hundred-foot wave,” Hunter said. So he had heard. “That’s what I want to see, the monster wave—the biggest fucking wave in the world.”

  “Me too,” Sharkey said.

  “Show me some waves,” Hunter said, stumbling.

  Demanding, shouting, more like a badly behaved child than a rude man—loud and harmless, he made Sharkey laugh. Hunter stamped his feet and swigged again from his Chivas bottle.

  “Wanna to see some waves!”

  “Over there,” Sharkey said, and pointed at the waves illuminated by spotlights at the edge of the mansion’s property, the break off the Kahala reef, far-off bands of tumbled froth, feathery in the lights.

  “You surf there?”

  Hunter, leaning to see better, was pink, glowing with sweat, as though he’d been pumped up with a drug, his eyes looking boiled, his shirt torn at the neck, buttons missing, his pale belly showing. He clutched the empty Chivas bottle with both hands, as though steadying himself.

  Seeing that Avery the sponsor had slipped away, Sharkey said, “I came here as a kid. The rich haoles here set their dogs on me.”

  “You afraid of dogs?”

  “No,” Sharkey said sharply, then softly, “Yes.”

  “Where did you usually surf?”

  “In town. Where I first learned—from a beach boy. An old guy, actually, Uncle Sunshine.”

  “Waikiki?”

  “Magic Island.”

  “Fantastic,” Hunter said. He was stirred by the name. He muttered, working his jaws, keeping the words in his mouth. “I gotta see it.”

  And it was then that Sharkey remembered that he had come to the party with Winnie, his recent girlfriend. He whistled for her.

  “This is Winona,” Sharkey said.

  “Tell him your name, honey,” Hunter said to the woman approaching him.

  “Call me Honey,” the woman said, and gave Sharkey a kiss.

  In the driveway, Sharkey thought, Always that feeling of relief when I leave a party, always the anxiety at arriving. The thought provoked by Hunter seemed the opposite: leaving, he looked defenseless, he was talkative, jumpy, furtive, seeming to look for reassurance, as though he’d been expelled, banished to the darkness of the street.

  “Where are we?” he mumbled later, crouched in the car.

  “Passing Diamond Head.”

  The famous name calmed him, but still he stayed bent over, hugging the whiskey bottle, and he looked like a nervous child, now and then tugging at his baseball hat and still wearing sunglasses, peering at the road ahead.

  Slightly tipsy, and buzzed from the pakalolo, Sharkey drove hunched on the steering wheel, overcautious and squinting into the glare of oncoming cars, Hunter in the passenger seat, grunting. Hunter’s girlfriend—she insisted they call her Honey—in the backseat with Winona, who’d come for the party and been reluctant to leave. The two young women talked in whispers, like spouses determined to be friendly out of respect for their men, deferential but strong, hoping to find something in common.

  “Old lady wants to join a biker gang,” Hunter was murmuring.

  At first Sharkey could not follow, there was no emphasis in the gabble, but he realized Hunter was telling a joke in a monotone.

  “‘Got a bike?’ She says yeah. ‘Any tattoos?’ ‘Yup.’ ‘Ever been picked up by the fuzz?’” And the rest was a succession of grunts and throat clearings.

  Sharkey said, “What was that?”

  “She says, ‘No, but I got yanked by my nipples once.’”

  “Hunter!” his girlfriend called out from the backseat.

  Sharkey squinted out the window. “Waikiki.”

  “Far out,” Hunter said, still groggy, his head down, swaying heavily.

  After Sharkey parked at Magic Island, he helped Hunter out of the car—Hunter had been fumbling with the door handle—and led him through the palms to the far end. The two women followed, again like spouses, something tribal and old-fashioned in their trooping behind the men in the moonlight to the break.

  “No waves tonight,” Sharkey said. “All the action’s on the North Shore. This is great in the summer, though—the south swell. I spent my boyhood here.”

  “The snot-green sea,” Hunter said.

  “True, you know, in some places. Not here.”

  “The sea. The snot-green sea. The scrotum-tightening sea,” Hunter said. Then he grunted, “Joyce.”

  Sharkey considered the name for a moment. He said, “You don’t get too many surfer chicks. Rell Sunn—Auntie Rell. Couple of others.”

  “What about me?” Winona called out behind him.

  “And, yeah, this wahine.”

  A ship’s lights winked in the distance, and the glow smoothed the ocean, shimmered on it and made it silky under the paler gleam of the moon, as they watched above the gulping lava rocks, amid the rattling palms.

  “Mother ocean,” Sharkey said.

  “My mother is a drunk,” Hunter said.

  “Mine was,” Sharkey said. “‘Just a cocktail, darling. I can’t move until I’ve had a drink.’ Got drunk, broke her hip. Make-die-dead.”

  In a forced prissy voice, Hunter said, “Make mine a highball.”

  They were still standing on the grassy outcrop over the rocks, the two men, the women just behind them. Hunter mumbled, almost as though he were eating something, and then threw his arms out and leaned back and howled into the night. The two women stepped back, to give him room in case he did it again, but he rubbed his nose with his knuckles and mumbled some more, quieter now that he had released what seemed like a bellow of anxious rage.

  Sharkey had not moved. He said, “My mother said surfing is a waste of time. Hey, it’s my living. I never as
ked her for a penny.”

  “You can pick your nose but you can’t pick your relatives,” Hunter mumbled.

  “She never watched me surf.”

  “My mother never reads my stuff. She thinks I’m a fuck-up.” He laughed, the laugh gargling low in his throat. “She’s probably right. I keep telling her it’s part of my image.” He then leaned over the ledge to where the small waves were slapping the rocks. “I saw you on TV today, surfing at Pipeline. I gotta hand it to you, man. They were some diabolical waves. I’m thinking, I could never do that.”

  Sharkey said, “I could never write a book.”

  “That reminds me, I’ve got a copy of my new book for you. Curse of Lono. It’s at the hotel.”

  Sharkey felt a slight sense of oppression, of obligation, thinking, He’ll want me to say something about it, I’ll have to read it, I’ll never finish it.

  To change the subject, Sharkey said, “What about your father?”

  “He died.”

  “Mine too. I was a kid.”

  “How old are you?”

  Sharkey said, “Thirty-five.”

  “I remember when I was thirty-five. Good year. My first book, Hell’s Angels.”

  And Sharkey felt that oppression again—another book, a big brick of pages, daring him to open it, and his always thinking, There’s too much of it, it’s heavy. The mildewed smell of books in Hawaii made them seem poisonous—you couldn’t open them without sneezing.

  Talk of books, here especially, seemed irrelevant. What was the point of mentioning these inert objects while on the beach, facing the moonlit sea flickering with chop and now and then a wave bursting in blackness offshore and crusted in white; these palms, this mild air and moonglow—it was all beyond books. People who did not have this beauty in their lives found some strange squirrelly indoor comfort in books.

  Sharkey did not know what to say, and was glad when Winona broke the silence, saying, “You guys going in?”

  “Waiting for that monster wave,” Hunter said. “It’s bullshit, right? Hundred-foot wave?”

  “No,” Sharkey said. “People talk about them. Some people have seen them—you’d never forget a thing like that. The one west of San Diego—Cortes Bank. Other places—Tahiti, maybe Indo. They appear out of nowhere and then they’re gone.”

  “Waimea,” Winona said. “They come forty-five, some days in the season.”

  “Twice that size is what I’m looking for,” Sharkey said.

  “Perilous quest!” Hunter said, gagging. “The hundred-foot wave, holy grail of the ocean,” and began to cough, batting his arms and tramping in circles as he fought to get his breath, spitting and choking.

  “You all right, Hunter?” Honey asked.

  “No!” he screamed and, trying to speak, gagged some more, then said in a pinched voice, “I’m drunk.”

  “Remember we’re supposed to change rooms tonight.”

  “Shit!” Hunter shouted, and spat, then crossed his arms and looked helpless.

  “You said you wanted a suite,” Honey said. She turned to Sharkey. “Can you take us to the Kahala?”

  In the car on the way back, Hunter found the empty Chivas bottle on the floor and cradled it like a doll and dozed off, snoring softly. But he came awake as Sharkey pulled away from a stoplight and cried out, “Hey, I could kill us all!” He lunged at Sharkey and grabbed the steering wheel and yanked at it.

  But Sharkey held tight to it and raised his elbow, jamming it against Hunter’s chin. He said, “But then we’d miss the weed, and the sex, and the waves,” and slipped his elbow into Hunter’s neck, applying more pressure.

  “He’s freaking out,” Winona said.

  “He’s fine,” Sharkey said. “Aren’t you, buddy?”

  But Hunter had sagged sideways. He had not heard; he was dozing again.

  “That happens,” Honey said.

  Hunter emitted bubbly snores, but when they drew into the porte cochere of the Kahala he roused himself and said, “They’re going to be driving me nuts,” and looked again like a fretful child. Then in a plaintive tone he called to Sharkey, “Joe!”

  Sharkey gave his keys to the bellman and guided Hunter to the reception desk, Hunter sleepily eyeing the clerk, a woman with a flower behind her ear and a welcoming smile.

  “Name?”

  “Thompson,” Honey said.

  Hugging Sharkey, Hunter said, “Put me down as Mr. Joe.”

  “You’re moving us to a suite,” Honey said, conferring with the clerk while Sharkey sat with Hunter on a sofa in the lobby, Hunter breathing hard, saying nothing.

  When Honey had the key and Sharkey got to his feet, preparing to leave, Hunter said, “Come on up, check it out. Drink. Smoke. Hang out.” And his voice trailed off as they walked to the elevator, Hunter clutching Honey now and limping. “After all that, I want a doobie the size of an Airbus.”

  They entered the suite—a large sitting room, bedrooms to the left and right. Winona whistled softly, murmuring, “I never seen anyting like this kine,” but Hunter had begun to complain, not in distinct words but in a succession of grunts.

  “It’s a total bugfuck, this room,” he finally said, shuffling toward the sofa. “Gotta move this thing. Give me a hand, Joe.”

  “Move it where?”

  “There.” He sounded petulant. “I need it nearer the TV.”

  “Maybe move the TV?”

  “No—fuck, no. Then it would block the window. It would fuck up the view.” He shoved at the sofa and barked at Honey, “Minibar!”

  When they had moved the sofa, Hunter sat heavily and kicked his shoes off and slumped sideways. Honey brought him a drink, putting it to his lips in a mothering way and saying to Sharkey and Winona, “Help yourselves.”

  “Those flowers,” Hunter said of a bouquet in a vase on a side table. “They’re too tall. What are they?”

  “Bird of paradise,” Winona said. “Heliconia.”

  “They’re going to tip over—move them.” He put his drink down, took a twist of paper from his shirt pocket, and tapped some powder onto the back of his hand. He lifted it to his face and snorted it, and gasped, and tapped his nose, and said in a new voice, “Best ROA—route of administration,” then, “Give him the book.”

  “Curse of Lono,” Sharkey said, taking the book from Honey. “Cool.”

  “Captain Cook. Mayhem. Wild nights. Roast pig. Fishing. That’s Hawaii.”

  Sharkey said, “Surf. ‘Fucken haole.’ ‘Get off my wave.’ Hammajang houses. Starry nights. And long mellow days.”

  “Insanity,” Hunter said.

  “It’s all good,” Winona said.

  “Who asked you?” Hunter said, pushing his sweaty face at her.

  Sharkey put his arm around her and said, “We have to split—long drive to the North Shore,” but Hunter had begun to snort more coke.

  “I need another bump,” he said, and seeing Sharkey edging away, said, “Don’t go!” He lurched to his feet, snuffling and rubbing his nose, and hugged Sharkey and whimpered a little, then let go. “I’m the Duke of Puke!”

  “He so lolo,” Winona said in the car.

  “He writes books,” Sharkey said.

  “Since when you read books?” And she laughed and poked his arm.

  But Sharkey said, “I’m going to miss him.”

  17

  Reality Check

  Why miss him, this stranger? he wondered, because the man was a fidgeting freak who talked without moving his lips, holding the growl in his mouth, who hated sitting on a beach and would only watch surf on television, in his suite, usually screaming at the set. And the book Hunter had given him was a burden, like something a sponsor would give you—a watch, a hat, a bicycle—that you’d never use and end up giving away. Sharkey had never met a writer before, and associated with Hunter, the word “writer” seemed like an excuse for being half baby and half sage, living in a world without rules—the writer made the rules and had the last word, or at least Hunter said he did.
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  But when he was gone, Sharkey thought how Hunter was irreplaceable; the other surfers were as flaky but wordless, and Sharkey had been bewitched by Hunter’s talk.

  Hunter’s enthusiasm for the monster wave—the hundred-foot wave out there, breaking somewhere on the planet—renewed his desire to find it. And it heartened him to see that Hunter, the writer, the reckless boy ten years older than he, seemed as random and improvisational as he was—“I’m a bum, I’m a gypsy”—and he remembered Hunter saying, “Perilous quest” and “holy grail of the ocean,” the powerful words justifying what he did every day and making it seem like it mattered.

  But Hunter was gone now, and would not be back for months, or until the next Honolulu marathon.

  * * *

  Sharkey surfed every day, and every day tried something new—a turn, a cutback, swiveling on the face of a wave as though carving his signature on it, writing on water. It was not practice or preparation; it was a way of spending the day, easing the passage of time; a way of living his life, because he made the moves his own.

  And every night he went out, either to a bar or to a friend’s house, to drink and smoke on a lanai, telling his stories, reminiscing about his beginnings, remembering incidents from surfing distant waves, episodes in his quest for the ultimate wave, the monster. Part of the drinking and drugging was listening to the surf report on the radio from Bryan the Hawaiian and planning where they’d go the next day. And that was useful, because he always vowed to go elsewhere, to have a wave to himself.

  At some point in his smiling vacancy of mind a girl would rise from the shadows and wander over to him, sidling like a cat, grazing his leg, and come to rest at his feet. He’d reach for her; nothing would be said. She’d match him drink for drink—they were island girls, surfers, boogie boarders, and the ones with jobs had to be up early. But their nearness to him, leaning against him, was an understanding that they would leave with him, laughing on the way to his car, knowing what was to come.

  No other preliminaries; they would kiss hungrily, become short of breath, all the while slipping out of the T-shirt, stepping out of the shorts, and then tipping themselves into the bed or onto the floor in a frenzied back-and-forth that ended with gasps of animal satisfaction. Sharkey would wake like a blinking monk seal in the early dawn, alone, ready to slide into the water.