by Paul Theroux
“You’re an amazing success,” he said to a wealthy man who wanted to sponsor him. “And look at me.”
“You don’t understand that you’ve just articulated a very critical thing,” the man said—from California, his clothing and shoe factories in Vietnam.
Sharkey smiled his beautiful smile—that and his sunburned nose, and the pink ridge of the scar on his cheek, the fallen angel face of acceptance.
“You used the word ‘success.’ But success is a simple trick, it’s empty—anyone can make money. You buy low, you sell high,” the man said. His face was tense and urgent; he had large white teeth. “Success is different from achievement.” And he held Sharkey by his shoulder. “I’ve made a pile of money. But you’ve achieved something.”
Sharkey’s wish, a form of rebuke, was that his mother could see the businessmen and hustlers and money men and hear them praise him, introducing him proudly to his friends: “This is my buddy Joe Sharkey . . .”
But his mother was dead, and anyway would have said, “I always knew he’d be a surfer. I used to drive him down to Ala Moana. I watched him surf at Sunset Beach. I worried about him, like mothers do, but I was sure he’d be the best.”
Fables—he’d become a surfer to escape her. If he’d let her run his life and been denied the freedom of surfing, he’d have ended up a boozer like her, to ease the pain of hating himself.
Other surfers were better known and made more money on the circuit, but Sharkey was more photogenic, the face that these businessmen wanted as the face of their products—the scarred face, the Shark. He had burned blond hair, tousled and too long, his body was blue with tattoos, and even in furious water he had an easy stroke that powered him into the break. Most of all he had the smile. And as a result of having been an outsider, bullied at Roosevelt, snubbed by locals early on, having had to make his own way, he knew how to be a friend, to show humility, even when he resented having to be humble. His pretense of mildness made him approachable, and it worked with women.
Most money men were smooth and aloof, as smug and serene as magicians, and with that same well-it and unreadable face. You knew they were wealthy because they never looked hungry, they hardly smiled; they sat unmoved amid powerful silences, as though wreathed in clouds.
And yet some of these millionaires clung to him, wanted to be near him, wanted to know him, to have him as a trophy acquaintance, and after listening to his stories tried to impress him with stories of their own. But this bafflement became his muffled humility. He smiled to think he might have what they wanted, the thing that was lacking in their lives—and what was it? The freedom to spend every day exactly as he pleased, to paddle out and ride a wave, a boy’s dream: a life of playing hooky. Maybe that was the dream of the money man—maker of sunglasses and T-shirts and bathing suits, owner of a mansion in Malibu: to be a carefree boy on a wave.
Grateful for the endorsement money but embarrassed by their frank admiration, Sharkey affected to complain—the breaks were getting crowded, the pressure to perform more intense; the meets were gangbangs; surfers had discovered Bali.
“I want your problems,” one of the businessmen said.
“Seriously, it’s getting harder,” Sharkey said superstitiously, hoping he sounded sincere, because his life had never been happier.
“I’d trade places with you in a heartbeat,” the big men said, and Sharkey felt pity for them, for having inspired such envy and making their success seem small.
Incredibly, they wanted his life, even the cagiest and the most worldly of them, who had everything, or so it seemed. They were persistent, often crassly demanding. “I’ve got to have more face time with you,” one of his sponsors said, sounding like an insecure lover. And dealing with their attention, which seemed like clumsy wooing, he understood how a pretty woman felt, disgusted and repelled, dealing with the hot gaze and roaming hands of an unwelcome man—how did you fend him off without seeming like a complete bitch?
* * *
There was one exception, a man of the world, an occasional visitor to the islands, who wanted nothing from him but his friendship—one of the few whom Sharkey admired, someone almost unimaginable, a rogue and a pirate, shocking, confrontational, funny, infuriating, probably insane, but kept out of a madhouse by means of his wit and his medication—his drugs, pakalolo, acid, mushrooms, cocaine, whiskey. The drugs worked, they saved him, they were fuel, and finally, combustible, like fuel, they destroyed him.
This was how the friendship began. Sharkey, at a party, had been telling one of his stories. It was the tale of the Somali woman he’d met on a beach in Lamu, Kenya, after a trip to Jeffreys Bay in South Africa. The ludicrous racial rules, the obstacles and stupidities of apartheid, had depressed him and kept him from wandering freely, and apart from people he’d wanted to meet—local women especially. He’d flown first to Nairobi, then to Mombasa and Malindi, looking for waves, and found himself in Lamu, an island he’d reached by dhow, his surfboard lashed to the mast. There were no good waves in Lamu, but there were women, in black gowns they called hijabs, their heads covered by black shawls that wrapped across the lower portion of their face, only their eyes showing in the draping of all that black cloth.
“Her name was Aziza, she was waiting on the beach,” Sharkey said. “But out of the sun, in the shadows beyond the palms. To tease her I said, ‘What are you doing here?’”
“‘Waiting for you,’ she said.
“‘You speak English.’
“‘I was a teacher. They gave me the sack.’”
This was always the way in Africa, he said. You said hello, and they said they’d been waiting for you. Africa was a dream, a place without preliminaries. You were a white man. You’d been introduced long ago by other white men. Africans guessed what white men wanted, and they were seldom wrong.
But the strictures of South Africa had made him cautious, and he knew that Lamu was mostly Muslim, with strictures of its own. He waited until dark before continuing the conversation with the woman. He was staying at the only hotel on the island, an old whitewashed cube of a building called Petley’s—a small bar, and all meals at a long common table of rough planks.
“The word for weed in Swahili is bhangi,” Sharkey told the eager listeners. “A nice word, and a primo product.”
After dinner he smoked a joint on Petley’s veranda, then strolled onto the beach. As soon as he left the lights of the hotel he heard the crunch of coral behind him, slow footsteps, a chewing of soles—he was being followed, but he did not turn. Ahead, past a dinghy that had been drawn up on the sand, he saw that it was tethered to a fallen palm tree. The distant lights on the veranda illuminated the white eye painted on the bow of the dinghy. Sharkey sat on the palm trunk, and with a swish of cloth stirring warm air into his face, a black-gowned and partly veiled figure took a seat beside him.
“I didn’t say a word. I was still smoking. But I knew it was her from the aroma, mingled sweat and perfume.”
That she didn’t move was a sign that she was interested. He reached for her, fumbled with folds of her gown, and found an opening, more warmth, as though inviting his hand.
“She was completely naked underneath. But when I stroked her thighs she pulled away. I said, ‘Sorry.’”
“‘Not here,’ she said. That was encouraging.”
She took his big hand in her small one and, her billowing black gown swishing against his body, led him back across the beach, avoiding the veranda lights, to the rear entrance of Petley’s. The bar inside was so noisy it masked their sounds, their feet on the back stairs, his shutting the door to his room.
When he turned on the lamp beside the bed, the woman protested, a squawk, and reached for the lamp and switched it off. But he had seen two things in the flash of light—her Somali face in her Madonna’s shawl, angular, her pinched nose, her even teeth, her thin dark lips, her small chin; and because in her hurry the hem of her gown had jumped, he’d seen a mottled yellowish scar, wide and matted like a patch of
melted wax or hardened rags of flesh, on her thigh. She had once been badly burned, but she was lovely, and even her scar was bizarre and beautiful, like a weird medallion won by suffering.
“When she yanked her gown to cover it I turned on the light again and touched the scar on my face. Her eyes widened and she murmured a word, and a sigh of agreement. And that was not all.”
In the hot room, in the narrow bed (Sharkey now had everyone’s attention, and was speaking slowly), he’d slipped his hand between her legs and—so many secrets hidden by the gown—his fingers stroked an unfamiliar obstacle, more than one, a pattern of thin webbing, not flesh but raised sutures that were stiff to the fingertips, like an old wound or a scar, rough to the touch.
“She’d been sewn up,” Sharkey said. “Somali style.”
In the hush that followed someone said in a low greedy voice, “Hot damn.”
“She rolled over and faced the wall, then reached behind and took hold of me. Slowly she guided me into the warm cleft of her okole. And then . . .”
His listeners, all men, were transfixed, sitting with their mouths half open, wanting more, as he teased them with a pause. But in the next moment a woman entered the room, and Sharkey hesitated.
“Go on,” the woman said. She was young, fresh-faced, with sharp Slavic eyes and mocking lips, gesturing with a slender arm and beckoning fingers for him to resume his story.
Sharkey felt something hit his head and bounce into his lap—a bitten macadamia nut. Then another, which hit him harder, on his cheek.
“Hey—what the fuck!”
The woman laughed. “He’s flirting with you!”
Turning sharply to confront whoever was throwing the nuts at him, Sharkey saw a balding man in aviator sunglasses and an aloha shirt, a cigarette holder clamped in his teeth, grunting as he flipped another nut. Sharkey caught it and tossed it back, hitting the man’s chin.
The man laughed and staggered to his feet and hugged him.
“Then what happened with the chick!” one of the surfers yelled at him.
But the man had seized his attention and taken charge. The story was left unfinished, the party ended, and in the confusion that followed the man said, “I’m going to get you high.” He packed a pipe and passed it to Sharkey, and when Sharkey later asked, “Was that heroin?” the man laughed a gasping convulsed laugh.
That hug, a form of bumping assault but clumsily tender, stood out in Sharkey’s mind as the beginning of something important, the forming of his fame not as a surfer but as a celebrity friend—the acknowledgment of his power beyond surfing. The man saying “Nuts to you” had singled him out.
But that was an insight that came to him years later. At the time, in all the drinking and talk, it seemed to him that he was living in a turbulence of jarring and misleading colors, like being tumbled in the prismatic barrel of a dumping wave on a sunny day, spinning in a hold-down, then pushed aside, struggling to right himself to reach the surface. This was not fanciful: he spent many days in such waves.
“You’re illusionless,” the man said in a chattering voice. “That’s radical.”
That sweaty stranger’s hug marked the end of one period, the beginning of another, young adulthood into maturity and beyond, golden boy to leathery waterman. And he saw that he was growing not only older but weaker—and so soon!—that this passage, this bridge in time, was the transition into middle age, the man helping him across to a time when he would be overtaken, obscured, outdistanced, and forgotten.
“Hunter,” the man said that first night, after the hug, offering him the pipe that sent him into a drug stupor. It was, he saw, a kind of initiation.
The man was a reckless, delirious version of himself, and maybe Hunter saw Sharkey as the man he might have been had he not been a drunk, an addict, a show-off, a writer. But the man was brilliant. In his manic moods, screaming for attention, he was a monster, yet when he turned this energy into writing—and he could, the drugs and the whiskey fueling him—he had power.
Knowing nothing of surfing, he hero-worshiped Sharkey; and Sharkey, who never opened a book and had read none of Hunter’s work, came to idolize the screaming man for his outrageous talk and his debts and his companionship—the friend he wished he’d had when he was a boy.
“We’re both storytellers,” Hunter said. “Except I get paid for it!”
“I’m just a surfer.”
“I can’t do it, man. I’m hydrophobic.”
Sharkey began to laugh, because the word reminded him of dog bites.
“The lonesomeness of the ocean,” Hunter said. “Heavy shit.”
For Sharkey it sometimes seemed it was one of those periods, the Hunter years, he associated with indolence and stagnation and time-wasting and broken promises, hating himself for his laziness. But was it so? Looking back, he saw it was not an interlude of delay but important and pivotal, the making of him, the nearest he came to having an older brother.
And it mattered most because Hunter was rare in not wanting his life, as the others did; he wanted his friendship.
And Sharkey was admitted to another secret—that this careless, wasteful, mocking man, who raged, louder and crazier than anyone he’d known, this noisy man had a quiet, sober side that mumbled and was unsure and timid and bewildered and needed the praise of another hero.
16
Mr. Joe
The party in Kahala at a lumpy whitewashed Moroccan-style mansion that looked like large flood-lit sugar cubes tumbled at the edge of the beach was hosted by one of the tournament’s sponsors—a new energy drink, Prime Fuel. It was always something cheesy, with a stark logo—the label, not the contents, that was intensively marketed. The sponsor himself, looking varnished, gleaming with a deep tan, welcomed the wild boys from the North Shore, who pushed past him, saying, “Yo, we’re with Joe.” Like two distinct species: the plump brown bearlike man, the skinny sunburned monkeys.
“Mind taking off your shoes?” the man said.
They pushed past him, laughing because they had no shoes, and hurried inside on dirty feet, howling, in torn shirts and tangled hair, the man’s toothy smile becoming panicky.
“Never mind them,” Sharkey said.
“This is a rental,” the man said, pleading. “I don’t want trouble. Are you Joe Sharkey?”
“That’s me.”
“I saw you surf today—awesome,” the man said. “I’m Avery. Come on in.” Then he looked warily into the next room at the pack of surfers crowding the tables, intentionally tripping each other, and snatching food. “If there’s breakage or pilferage, I’ll lose my deposit.”
Sharkey gave him a smile lacking in reassurance, hoping there would be breakage or pilferage, delighted at the prospect of surfers walking across the white shag carpet on their dirty feet, teasing the other guests, monopolizing the sushi bar on the lawn, stuffing themselves and getting drunk on expensive wine or passing blunts and giggling. They were the poor gypsies from Hale‘iwa, admitted for one frantic night to a party on the far side of the island.
“Avery, the rich haoles here used to chase me off the beach when I was a kid,” Sharkey said, swigging a beer and laughing. “The local kids chased me too.”
Wandering past the buffet, he found Hunter hugging a bottle of Chivas Regal against his chest. “Son of a bitch,” Hunter said, lifting it awkwardly with his forearms, then tipping it, leaning back, and drinking. He snatched at the bottle, holding it by its neck, and wiped his mouth with his free hand. “You’re back, man.” He mumbled and growled, working his lips. “You’re needed here to keep the peace. All these rabid ferrets. Nice.”
Hunter smiled at the wild boys, ragged and dirty but bursting with health, seeming to approve of their antics and vitality, as though acknowledging another breed of outlaw. “Weevils!” Hunter said. “Vermin!” and he yelped, seeing them giggling over the food, slopping sauce on their shirts, plucking with their fingers—hunger in their reaching hands.
“You drip gravy on my foot, lolo!”
one shouted, kicking the other boy.
They were scarred and tattooed, and they kept together like a hunting pack.
“That the owner?” Hunter asked.
“Renter,” Sharkey said. “He’s one of the sponsors of the Pipe Masters.”
“Going heavy on the bronzer. Looks like a fucking walnut.”
“These guys pay the bills.”
“Money’s cheap,” Hunter said. “Freedom’s expensive.”
His thickened voice gave his assertions a tone of authority, running words together and grunting when he was done, the grunt like a mark of punctuation.
“That’s far out,” he said, turning to some musclemen in grass skirts twirling thick torches and lapping at the flames, holding them like big fiery lollipops.
With Hunter distracted by the fire-eaters, Sharkey roamed through the house, searching for a bathroom, opening doors as he strolled down the inner corridors. In each air-conditioned bedroom a wide-screen TV set was on, but muted, and he was put in mind of these TV screens as fireplaces, flickering with color, giving a sense of life to the room, the comfort and reassurance of a hearth.
When he returned to the lawn he saw Hunter propped against a fire-eater, teasing him, chanting incoherently, swigging at the Chivas bottle. The barefoot surfers were awestruck, not by the muscular men twirling the flaming sticks but by the gibbering man in the aloha shirt attempting to light a doobie in his mouth by leaning into the flapping flames of a torch.
“Da guy so kolohe,” one of the surfers said. “More worse than you, Shark.”
