by Paul Theroux
“Carville, Clinton, Wenner, Joe Montana, Ayn Rand, Carter, Ken Kesey, Johnson.”
“Which Johnson? Kimo—the long-boarder?”
“Samuel Johnson.”
“I guess I know Clinton. He stopped here once.”
“But politics,” Hunter said.
“Politics is a shit game. It’s just winners and losers.”
“Exactly. That’s why you’re focused. You’re on your own wave.”
“Where else would I be?” Sharkey said.
“Like Sherlock Holmes,” Hunter said. “Watson tells him that the earth revolves around the sun. Sherlock thinks it’s the other way around. Watson’s incredulous at this dumb fuck. Sherlock says, ‘So what? It doesn’t matter to me.’ He’s on his own wave!”
“I’ve heard of Sherlock Holmes,” Sharkey said.
“I tell people, ‘There’s this surfer dude in Hawaii. He’s never heard of Joe Montana or Jimmy Carter.’”
“So?” Sharkey said in a faltering voice.
He was beginning to redden, his face heating with shame, and he was a child again at Roosevelt, being interrogated by a teacher and then teased by the local kids—“Haole! Panty! You not akamai!”—and for those hot moments he hated Hunter, the greedy, careless, wasteful man who knew nothing about Hawaii and yet wrote books about it.
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?
A shoulder injury from a wipeout at Jaws, when he was hit by his board coming out of a barrel, sidelined Sharkey for almost a year. In that year a number of new surfers emerged, and Hunter showed up limping—“Fucking hip replacement, can you believe it?”—and Sharkey said, “I’ve been out of action too,” and thought, But I have nothing else.
Even limping, Hunter had an outlaw aura and a loud shout, was often pictured with a cigarette in one hand, a gun in the other, and the aura gave him a look of danger and celebrity. But more than that, his writing guaranteed that his achievement would last and be remembered—not the ride on water, leaving no trace, witnessed by a few guys onshore, but indestructible books, a legacy. Sharkey was dazzled by the very idea of a book. For the nonreader a book was a powerful fetish object, something magical, its creation a mystery. It contained secrets.
Even so, Sharkey was not provoked to read one. Reading made him feel like a child.
* * *
Their lives were parallel, and because Sharkey was ten years younger, he measured himself against Hunter, often gratified by the correspondences, or shocked when he realized that in ten years or so he might be like Hunter, angry, negative, raging, lame, because his youth was gone, his talent diminished.
“I can’t write this,” Hunter said. Another year, another week of the Honolulu Marathon, Hunter sitting at a table in the kitchen of his suite, his new girlfriend sobbing in the bedroom. “You have to do it.”
“Impossible,” Sharkey said. “No way.”
“You’re not high!” Hunter looked frenzied and resentful. He slapped his computer, avoiding the half-chewed slice of pizza that had dripped sauce on the keyboard.
“I’m a high school dropout, man!”
“All the better. It’ll sound raw.”
“I can’t write,” Sharkey said. “You have to do it.”
“I’m buzzed.” He licked his lips. “Can’t see. Dope sick.”
At times like this, his face gleaming with sweat, his skin pale, his eyes reddened, he did look sick and was probably feverish.
“Your friend, that guy Moe.”
“Moe Kahiko?”
“Yeah. He can write it.”
“Moe can barely speak English,” Sharkey said, trying not to smile at the thought of Moe sucking on a blunt, his big dirty fingers tapping at tiny computer keys. “What is it you need?”
“Column for ESPN. The deadline’s tomorrow.” Still sitting, elbows on the table, head down, he called out “Patty!”
The woman who had been sobbing softly in the bedroom came to the doorway, wiping her eyes, looking sorrowful.
“Find someone to write my piece. Or else do it yourself.” He had not turned or lifted his head; he spoke in animal grunts, crouched like a monkey, and then began to shout.
He was still shouting as Sharkey slipped out of the room.
* * *
The following year, after ten months of travel and struggle, Sharkey saw Hunter again. Both men were limping. Sharkey had injured his knee on a wave in Brazil—Cacimba do Padre—and the hospital in Pernambuco had discharged him with a knee brace that had split apart on the flight home. Hunter said he’d had back surgery.
But Hunter had a new woman by his side, attentive, lovely, much younger, nurselike in her concern. Hunter said, “This is the guy I was telling you about, the original Mr. Joe.”
Anita had a beautiful smile, and while Hunter sat and smoked and talked, Sharkey watched her and envied Hunter for having someone so patient and pretty looking after him. She was knowledgeable too.
“I want Joe to see that thing I wrote about Nixon,” Hunter said. “Where is it?”
“It’s in Better Than Sex.”
“That’s surfing,” Sharkey said. “Better than sex.”
“Find him a copy,” Hunter said. He tottered to his feet and hugged Sharkey. “You trigger-happy little shit. What have you been doing?”
“Blew out my knee in Brazil,” Sharkey said. “But I met a guy from Portugal there. Apparently there’s this humongous wave that breaks off a place called Nazaré. It’s so gnarly they call it the wave of death.”
“Yaaah!” Hunter’s mouth was open wide. “I love it!”
“Not from surfers—from the local fishermen that have died in it. Their
widows are in the town, lots of them, all in black, giving the wave stink-eye.”
“You can ride it. I’ll write about it,” Hunter said. He sat back on the sofa and gave Sharkey a drowsy smile and mumbled, “Wave of death.”
At his best Hunter was an enthusiast. He didn’t know much about surfing, but he had a love of wild words and a frantic eagerness to please his friends, and he had always admired Sharkey’s surfing. Surfing was celebrity, surfing was glamour to Hunter, but it was also risk. Because he was no swimmer himself, at least not in a choppy ocean, perhaps he saw it as flirting with death, in the way his own life was self-destructive, comic and macabre.
Sharkey was able to convince him that the opposite was the case, that he never felt more alive than when he was on a wave; that death was unthinkable when he was skidding through a barrel.
“Monster wave,” Hunter said. “What if you wipe out?”
Sharkey said, “I’m a dog in the water.”
“You’re falling off a fucking cliff,” Hunter said.
“In surfing you fall off the cliff and then the cliff chases you.”
“Right. The wave is Mr. Death.”
“No. The wave is a dumb force of nature. It’s neutral. It’s lifted from a reef or a rock. It rises and falls, then it’s gone forever. A wave is a temporary shape. There’s a shoulder and a lip and a face in wave anatomy, but there’s no brain. You can measure its life in seconds or minutes. In the case of this monster wave, a lot of minutes. But no one has ridden it, because, like, how do you paddle your board into a hundred-foot wave? I figure if I can get towed in on a surf ski I might have a chance.” Sharkey accepted a bottle of beer from Anita and clinked it against Hunter’s glass of whiskey. “I’ve been looking for this wave my whole life.”
In his excitement Sharkey did not notice that Hunter had dropped his head, and when Sharkey looked closely, what he took for intense concentration was deep sleep.
“He’s had a long day,” Anita said. “Plus he’s on painkillers for his surgery. He’s hurting.”
Sharkey was abashed that he’d spoken with such enthusiasm and not been heard. He was chastened, and later, after Hunter had woken and revived himself with whiskey and a joint, Hunter asked him again what he’d been doing.
“The usual,” Sharkey said, thinking, True. Perhaps the wave really existed, but he had not found it or ridden it.
Hunter was subdued, in pain; he moved slowly, snatching at furniture, and the one evening they went out Hunter needed a wheelchair.
“You’ll be fine,” Sharkey said at the entrance to the hotel, Hunter in the wheelchair.
Hunter plucked his cigarette holder from his teeth. “There’s an answer.”
Sharkey glanced at Anita, who smiled and gave Hunter’s shoulder a maternal pat.
“There’s rehab, which is like prison. But sometimes—again like prison—it works.” He lifted his cigarette holder to his mouth and puffed, as though fortifying himself. “There’s moving here to Hawaii—nice weather—and you and me, we can teach a course at the university.”
“Me a teacher,” Sharkey said. “What subject?”
“Writing is surfing, surfing is writing,” Hunter said,
“That might work. As long as I don’t have to read anything.”
Chewing his cigarette holder, Hunter said, “And the subversion of young minds.”
“You guys!” Anita said, and hurried to the curb, where a limousine was drawing up.
Hunter leaned closer to Sharkey, speaking in his growl. “And there’s the nuclear option.” He was still murmuring to Sharkey but staring at Anita in the distance, who was talking to the limo driver. “Lead poisoning. Death spiral. Bleed out. Die off.”
“No, man,” Sharkey said.
Hunter made a pistol of his hand, pointed the finger of the barrel into his mouth, and fired, his hand jerking back. He didn’t smile. He trembled. He weighed the pistol-shaped hand and said, as though explaining, “Speed shakes. Chemical sweat.”
“Move here,” Sharkey said. “We need you.”
Then Hunter called to Anita, “Cancel the car. I don’t want to go. I’m not hungry.” And he gestured to Sharkey, holding his arms out, still seated in the wheelchair. “Thanks, bro. You’re a good listener.”
A good listener, because with Hunter he never knew what to say. But “bro” struck him: yes, they were like brothers, Hunter both an inspiration and a bad influence, always going his own way but revealing his weaknesses to Sharkey, his younger sibling. Sharkey knew nothing of books or football or the cities where Hunter was celebrated as a hero. Their common pursuits had been drugs and women, but now Hunter had Anita and Sharkey the location of a monster wave.
Sharkey had recovered from his knee injury and was surfing again. But Hunter, always in pain, had not healed. No wonder he was stoned most of the time, or always on drugs. He got no exercise—he reveled in having a wheelchair to get him onto a plane. Yet he was humiliated by his limping, as he moved with effort from the chair to the bag on the counter where he kept his stash of coke. Addiction did not wear him down; addiction was his mode of survival.
When, after a few weeks, Hunter left, Sharkey realized that when he talked to him about surfing, his sponsorships, his quest for the wave in Portugal, Hunter only half listened, or did not listen at all. Hunter was thinking of one thing only, the cruel distraction of his pain. Compared to that, nothing else mattered.
* * *
The phone rang at two in the morning. It had to be Hunter. It was five in the morning in Woody Creek, Hunter’s night of rocking or writing about to end; Sharkey knew by now that bedtime for him was dawn.
“Unner.” He grunted something unintelligible, then said, “I know you don’t care,” and Sharkey realized his grunt had been a mention of football, the Super Bowl. “You’re lucky. Just the essentials for you—it’s all about the senses. I’m done, I’m a mess, physical wreck. My head is full of trivia, and useless shit. But you—all you think about is water.” He paused, then gasped, “You don’t need books, you need water and women.” He gasped and added, “You’re a sensualist.”
Sharkey said—his first words—“I’m waiting for you, dude.”
A mumble, like chewing, then silence. Hunter was grunting again, but didn’t say, “I’ll be there,” as in other years. He said, “That’s cool. You’re smarter than the rest of us.”
“I’m a dropout, I’m a lolo, I’m not smart,” Sharkey said. “Listen carefully, man, can you hear me?” He jammed the phone against his mouth and shouted, “I don’t know anything! ”
“I mean, staying in shape,” Hunter said, unfazed by the shout. “Being in Hawaii. Riding the monster waves. Water is life, man.”
“I believe that.”
Hunter coughed—a terrible pain-filled cough, and when it subsided, he said, “Remember the time we went shooting at that outdoor gun range? And I was drunk, and they threw us out?”
“Yeah. They weren’t happy. And you with a loaded gun.”
“It was a forty-five-caliber Colt Buntline. Locked and loaded. Like me.”
“You puked in my car.”
“That’ll happen,” Hunter said. “Duke of Puke. My signature move. God, you put up with a bunch of shit from me.”
“I learned a lot.”
“So we’re even,” Hunter said, and began to cough again, and, gagging, struggled to speak, saying, “Gotta go.”
Two days later, the news that Hunter, without warning, had shot himself; and Sharkey knew that in the phone call he had been saying goodbye.
He was a man who had lived his life explosively, in bursts. As he had weakened, dabbing and snorting, in the frenzy of fueling his habit, he had become inward, and Sharkey had not seen until the very end that in his inattention, his lack of interest, his not listening, he was withdrawing from the world that had lost its novelty for him, and, preoccupied with his pain, he was readying himself to die.
18
The Ultimate Wave
Your fr
iend dies, Sharkey thought, and takes part of your being away, and you live on, smaller, with an unfillable hole in your life. The worst of it for the living is that the friend has vanished: the one person you loved listening to, the one who would have understood and taken pleasure in hearing about what you’ve discovered; the one person who’d believe you. Your well-wisher, dead.
The great self-pitying sadness for Sharkey was that he had found the wave but had no one to share it with, no one he trusted enough. It had to be a secret from other surfers, all of whom were looking for the ultimate wave themselves, the Big Mama. Just Sharkey’s mention of its vast size had seized Hunter’s attention—made him howl, his baboon bark of pleasure, because he was a man who celebrated the biggest, the best, the loudest, the weirdest, the craziest; someone who gloried in extremes. Hunter would have loved to hear of the monster wave, massive and strange and brief; an intrusion that swelled and broke and fell and was gone. He was like that outrageous wave, the one that Sharkey had searched the world for, that he’d prepared for throughout his surfing life; the one to crown a career.
* * *
In Pernambuco one evening after his knee surgery, Sharkey had seen a surfer sitting alone, having a beer on the veranda of a bar, and joined him. They talked of waves and travels—the out-of-the-way breaks. Sharkey mentioned that he’d surfed Cortes Bank but that it had been a bust—a long trip out to the wave and a disappointing swell when they got there, bobbing in the water a hundred miles from shore.
“We got a big one in my country,” the man said.
“Where is it?”
“Place called Nazaré.”
“How big?”
“Too big. You never seen one so big. Thirty meters sometimes.”
Sharkey thought, I’ve heard that too many times to believe it. He said, “Who’s ridden it?”