by Paul Theroux
When Sharkey was seated, Eddie slipped him a soft, well-made blunt bulging with weed.
Sharkey wagged it. “Maybe they’ll bust me.”
“This the Hotel Honolulu,” Eddie said, and clicked his lighter.
After one deep inhalation Sharkey said, “Primo.”
“I get plenny. Trey tell me you doing a pickup.” Then the man lowered his gleaming head, tugged down his sunglasses, and said, “Here’s my proposition.”
Sharkey had started to smile from the tickle of buoyancy swelling within him.
“My wife birthday,” the man was saying. “I want to give her something special.”
“Right on,” Sharkey said in a strangled voice, holding his breath.
“I had in mind a surfer dude like Trey.”
“Trey is cool.”
“But Trey is religious kine.”
“‘Jesus was the first surfer, man—he walked on water.’ I’ve heard all that. Trey don’t surf on Saturdays. It’s the Sabbath. His church”—Sharkey coughed and shook his head, and in a pinched voice said, “True Jesus Mission Church of the Latter Rain.” Then he chuckled and remembered. “What special—catch some waves?”
“No. Make my wahine happy.”
Sharkey wagged his head and stammered, but no words came out of his goofy smile as Eddie’s face went in and out of focus.
“She stay upstairs.”
“I hose your wife?” Laughing and levitating, a buzz in his ears, Sharkey remembered the punch line of an old joke. He said, “Like, what’s in it for me, man?”
Eddie had not expected that; he drew back, and though his expression was unreadable behind his sunglasses, his cheeks shook, he tugged at his chin, then he licked his lips and said, “Killer buds. Where you think Trey gets his holy weed?”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“Wait here.”
Watching Eddie leave the bar, Sharkey, floating and imprecise, marveled at the man’s efficient strut; and when Eddie returned, Sharkey clung to the arms of his chair, forcing himself upright, holding the crazy smoke in his lungs.
“You’ll need this,” Eddie said, handing him a key. “Five-o-eight. Just go on up.” He helped Sharkey out of his chair and led him to the narrow elevator, punching the number 5 button on the inside panel and withdrawing his arm as the doors closed, calling out, “Be nice.”
Sharkey squinted at the brass key tag, repeating the number. He found the door that matched it, feeling silly, poking the key at the lock but not managing to insert it, and as he tapped with the key the door opened and he was pulled into the darkness by frantic hands.
He stood murmuring softly as he was tumbled into a bed by a gasping, giggling woman with bony arms, who was yanking off his shorts, and he too was laughing in the darkness.
“I’m Cheryl—who are you?”
“Me, I’m the Shark.”
“Don’t bite me,” she said in a small girl’s voice.
On his back, rocking, then smacking the mattress, Sharkey said, “Far out, a water bed.”
For a moment he was dazzled by a sudden flash of the bedside lamp and a small pale woman in black lingerie peering at him. “You’re beautiful,” she said, then switched off the light and sat on him. “You’re mine,” and she clawed at him, with either her fingernails or her teeth. “This belongs to me.”
“Easy,” he said.
“I can be scary,” she said in a growly voice.
He struggled with her after that, as she pushed his head down, smothering him with her body, then riding his face. Pressed against the mattress, he heard the wavelike rumble and gulp of the water in the bed. Then the darkness was inside him, as though he’d drowned. But he was asleep, and soon she was shaking him. “Wake up, dude.”
He was dazed. He could barely stand. The woman in front of him looked fragile, wrapped in a hotel robe, gaunt and blinking in the lamplight. Sharkey paused before her.
“Don’t kiss me,” she said, and turned away.
He stumbled to the door. He was so shaken he left the hotel by the back entrance, pushing past two men in hotel uniforms, without seeing Eddie or Trey.
* * *
In the next season he and Bingo, a surfer from San Diego, rented a van and drove the length of the California coast, stopping for days, and sometimes weeks, at surf spots, some of them well known, others known only to Bingo. Having made their reputation in Hawaii and been written about and photographed in Surfer and Surfing World, they were recognized, and either welcomed as celebrities or else threatened: “This is our wave, man. Take a hike.”
“Bunnies,” Bingo would mutter, seeing girls on the beach, and they took turns on the mattress in the back of the van.
In Mexico, in Baja and Puerto Escondido, the girls needed persuasion, some wanting money or weed; many said flatly no—a novelty to Sharkey that he was not recognized.
“They don’t seem to know who we are,” Bingo said.
“Maybe that’s a good thing.” Sharkey felt as he had on his first day at Roosevelt, when he’d been called a fucking haole, and mocked.
The Mexican girls knew nothing of surfing and stood on the beach and laughed, unimpressed, seeing Sharkey and Bingo sliding toward them on big waves. In the evenings, as they sat drinking beer next to the van, they were approached by Mexican boys, who demanded money or beer or cigarettes. The van was broken into one day when they were surfing, Sharkey’s camera was stolen. They’d hidden their wallets inside a door panel. “It was a shitty camera,” Sharkey said. “They can have it.” They set off the next day for the border.
In Hawaii that March they learned that Eddie Aikau had drowned in an attempt to get help by paddling on his board from the overturned sailing canoe Hōkūle‘a in the Ka‘iwi Channel. The following year Sharkey won the Triple Crown and was regarded as Eddie’s natural successor.
But by then surfing had become busier, more competitive—not the mellow fooling of past years but a fiercely contested sport, silent men jostling on waves. The prizes were bigger, the rivalries stronger, the endorsements greater.
It was in this period, early eighties, that Sharkey left Hawaii for California, telling the other surfers he needed a rest. But he confided to Bingo, who was in Santa Cruz, “It’s not fun there anymore.”
They surfed Mavericks and sold pakalolo, or gave it away, saying, “You looking for trouble?” inviting surf bunnies into the back of the van for weed and sex. They believed they could continue this way for years. “I’ll be pushing forty one of these days, Bingo,” was Sharkey’s refrain.
But still in Santa Cruz at a coffee shop he met Stella, who said she was a teacher there, and got her into the van, and fell in love. He called it love. He thought he’d experienced the limits of desire before, but this was something new, a passion that turned him into a monkey.
She was small, pale, with full lips and ash-blond hair, and there lingered on her skin—her neck, her thighs—an aroma of overripeness, crushed flowers, stale ones, like musky vanilla, but creamy in their festering. It was sour sexual perfume that acted on him like a drug. Stella had no interest in surfing, but that didn’t matter. After her classes she would breathe into the phone, “Come and get me. I’m horny.”
And he laughed because she was a college professor, the backseat of her car full of books, and shelves of them in her apartment. After sex in her bedroom—books there too—her odor was much stronger, and when she parted her legs and he clutched her he was reminded of warm fish guts.
She flung her arms out and said, “I want to be like a man. I want to do what men do—anything I want.”
“With me,” Sharkey said, looking for reassurance.
“Of course, my darling,” she said, sounding insincere.
Her recklessness impressed him and made him want to keep her for himself; it cast a spell, it made him—he told her this and her eyes glittered—cannibalistic. “I want to eat you and eat you.” The feeling did not abate when he was back in Hawaii, away from her—it was passionate.
She wrote him long letters. He never wrote back. She called, needing to talk. He hated the telephone. To satisfy her, and himself, he often flew overnight to San Francisco to meet her on weekends, spending two days in a motel room (pizza, wine, the shades drawn) without leaving. Then his return flight to Hawaii, and Stella back to her classroom teaching—“Women’s Studies,” “Gender Identity in Women’s Literature,” “Body Narratives in Feminist Films”—she who wanted to be a man. Her work meant nothing to him, yet he listened. He did not tell her he never read a book; he was grateful that she didn’t ask.
Her big question was, “Where is this leading?”
“You want to be like a man?” He laughed and held her by the shoulders in a guy grip. He said, “Men never ask that question.”
Yet he could not get enough of her. He told her he loved her, that he wanted to live with her, he promised her travel and adventure—all because he did not want to lose her. He would have told her anything just to be with her, to devour her, to watch her devouring him. He wasn’t sure it was love—he had never known love; but it was unmistakably desire. And this small, smiling, almost plain but richly smelling woman with a great education in the heat of passion was foul-mouthed, the hot words burned into his memory a vivid gift to him that helped him remember, like a loop of wicked music, so he could savor what they’d done, and made him miss her. She had a word—some new to him—for everything, words he could not spell and some he could barely pronounce: “fellatio,” “polymorphous perversity,” “rimming,” and “undinism.” “What you just did?” she would say, stretching her nakedness, her fingers dabbing at her lips. “It’s called irrumation.”
“You so hybolic,” he said, the one word she didn’t know.
He took less pleasure in dominating her than in willingly surrendering, his body almost unrecognizable to him, unexpectedly awakened, with the same slippery completeness he felt when he plunged into a wave, all his flesh gripped and transformed by the water, his mind soaring. Sex with Stella was like that, capturing him; and she became more odorous afterward.
She believed his extravagant promises, but in the end, after months of this, finally exhausting himself of his sexual frenzy that was like an illness, and freed to think straight, he said he could not marry her—“I’ve already done that!”
He was relieved by the decision; she was maddened. In a crazed whisper, hot against his ear, she threatened to drown herself in their motel’s swimming pool. He felt obliged to calm her, though he wanted to run—fear had killed his desire. Holding her, he was depressed, imagining the indignity of drowning in the small, shallow, fenced-in, and cracked motel pool. Her suicide in a big blue five-star hotel pool, he reasoned, would have been just as tragic but not as shabby and pathetic, and nothing like drowning in a wave. In her sadness she lost all her allure, and then became fierce, someone suddenly much older and indignant. Stripped by rage of her sexual attraction, she was powerless, and he pitied her but was still afraid of what she would do to herself.
He fled to Hawaii. She called him and screamed abuse and sobbed. Hating the phone, he forced himself to listen, trying to be patient; and noticing that she always talked for a full hour, he was reminded that she’d once told him she saw a shrink every week, always for one hour. He was relieved when she stopped calling. But the following Christmas the phone rang. Sharkey was serving turkey to his surfing buddies, spooning gravy onto his mashed potatoes.
“It’s Stella,” she said, announcing herself in a victim’s voice, sounding sacrificial. She spoke as though addressing a large audience, loudly, like an exit line. “I’m coming apart!”
“Find someone else.” He was in the house at Jocko’s as he passed the gravy, looking out the window at the winter swell—another big day. “I can’t help you anymore.”
“You’ve got to do something,” she said, pleading, with tears in her voice. “What are you going to do?”
“Catch some waves.” And he hung up.
The sea never failed him. He was cured of his sexual obsession by fear, then boredom; but there was no end to the big waves. It was all he wanted, to be along the shore, alert, alive, afloat.
15
“I Want Your Life”
What’s your secret?” was the usual question—seldom from surfers but often from hangers-on and interviewers. Saying he had none sounded like an insincere denial, as though he were boasting that he had many secrets he was keeping to himself. He sometimes said, and later in exasperation pleaded, “I surf every day!” This was obvious, but who else did that?
“The best training for surfing is surfing” was his mantra.
“And getting pounded,” Garrett McNamara said. His North Shore neighbor, big-wave surfer Garrett, made no secret of the fact that he too was traveling the world, looking for the hundred-foot wave.
No one asked Sharkey’s secret on the North Shore, where he was always in the water, on a wave or waiting for one. He had done nothing else of value in his life, had quit school at sixteen, avoided Vietnam by using the trauma and disfigurement of his scar to gain a deferment, had never had a girlfriend for more than a few months nor held a job for long—lifeguarding in Hawaii was not a job but rather a privilege and a mission. Surfing was his obsession, but perhaps like other obsessions an evasion, an escape—in his case an escape from dry land.
Water was his natural element—life-giving, offering him buoyancy, weightlessness, purification. Except when attracted to a woman, in a sudden fever of desire, clutching at her, he was a slow talker, clumsy and torpid on land, like the clomping, gasping, flat-footed amphibian that glides so smoothly when it slips into the water and flashes away just beneath the surface.
He was silent in the water, like those creatures, and a talker onshore. Even the surfers he knew well, who’d heard his stories many times, wanted to listen to him tell the same stories again in his slow confident voice, growly from smoking weed, always the same opening, the same pauses and plotty reminders, the familiar dialogue. “You should write them down,” Bingo had once suggested. “No need,” Sharkey said—they were better recited, like folktales, and would be repeated by anyone who heard them. “They give people something to say”—because his listeners were the stammering, inarticulate grommets with goofy smiles, hearing Sharkey tell of the strangeness of the world beyond the islands, or narrow escapes, and brutes, and heavy water, and especially of women. He was the adventurer, whose tattoos illustrated the risks he’d taken, the marvels he’d seen; the explorer, reporting back; the storyteller, the survivor, who always had the answer to the persistent question, “Got waves there?”
He’d flown back to Tahiti and Fillette. That was a story. He’d found a new break in Indonesia, and a woman named Putri. “It means princess,” he said, and described some of their nights, and the danger of their nighttime lovemaking in the land of puritanical believers and honor killing for adultery. Another story. He’d surfed in Cornwall and Spain. “What kine language they speak in those places?” they asked in Hawaii. “And this Cornwall—it’s like some kine country?” They loved hearing stories of islands that were small and seedy, with foot-high dumpy shore breaks, places that proved that Hawaii was the center of the world.
Sharkey realized in time that, random, selfish, and improvisational in his choices—“I’m a bum, I’m a surf gypsy”—pleasing himself, he’d created a personal style. His stories suited that style. Among the silent watchful surfers he was the talker, and without saying anything, his fellow surfers, especially the younger ones, began to dress like him, with the same shorts, the same hoodie and flip-flops, the same board, though he had a quiver of them. And in mirror imitation they seemed to acknowledge that his style was unique, the result of his travels and his romances.
And some, the visitors especially, didn’t stop at imitating him. They wanted his life. They’d heard the talk about him, and—impatient, eager to learn the details of his career—they tried to befriend him, to know more. They told him about themselves, hoping to attract his inte
rest, relating their exploits in the water, and with a penetrating gaze and their own stories seemed to insist, Please, remember me.
In this they tried, by being close, to live through him—never his fellow surfers in the hui, who were secure in their own lives and routines and single-minded in their surfing: they too were in the water every day—they were locals, whose lives were small and circumscribed by the islands. The surf bunnies and the wahine—most of the women—were seldom envious, and were happy simply knowing him, wanting nothing more than a casual hookup. It was a reassurance to him that many of these North Shore women were no different from the men, just as good in the water, just as unreliable onshore, just as hungry and horny, laughing among themselves on the beach in the day, as foul-mouthed as the guys, and prowlers at night, looking to be stoned. He was not a hero to them but rather a vortex of energy, a source of pakalolo.
But the surf tourists, the hangers-on, the groupies, to whom he was a celebrity—they could be parasitical. Incredibly—to Sharkey at least—the sponsors too, the big-money businessmen who funded the surf meets and flew in from California and Australia, badly wanted to be in his orbit. Men older than he was, millionaires, powerful in their dealings, who rented expensive houses on the beach for the surfing season and gave parties—they wanted his friendship, they praised his life, the life he had made out of accident and desperation and dumb luck, his whole existence a form of escape, fleeing to the water to be himself and protecting himself on land by telling lies about his life.
It seemed that the lives of these big, talky businessmen, many of them part-time surfers, were incomplete. Yet Sharkey saw success and risk and power in the men and felt puny next to them, as though they’d mistaken him for someone else, and he feared being found out and discovered to be an imposter. Or were they dazzled by his recklessness—for truly he had launched himself into waves as a boy and done nothing for years but ride them. Could this be called a career, or was it an elaborate way of avoiding any responsibility? He had no beliefs, no attachments, and had been sustained by an abiding confidence in himself. He had never considered his life worth imitating; he had succeeded through trial and error, through failure and near drownings, every wipeout a lesson in humility.
