Under the Wave at Waimea

by Paul Theroux

  He had everything he wanted except that wave, but his wanting it—his search—gave a richness and direction to his life.

  * * *

  Hunter sometimes called, always at two or three in the morning, strangled sounds, grunts, silences. Then, “It’s madness here, man.”

  Sharkey could offer nothing of himself: he was content, no madness.

  “We gotta do something together,” Hunter often suggested, after a silence.

  That was the plan—a promise. But the next time Hunter returned to Hawaii he forgot the plan. He had the marathon to report on, and football to watch. Sharkey saw how the eager fan, mumbling in a friendly way, “Mr. Joe,” sitting in front of the TV, concentrating on a game, sipping whiskey, lifting a powdery knuckle to his nose, could transform himself into the other Hunter, crazed and incoherent, sometimes physically unrecognizable, shouting and abusive, sweaty, bleary-eyed, hollering, “Bestial! Reptiles! Pigface!”

  But each time Hunter returned to Hawaii was a reality check, both men older: Sharkey, the reflective nonreader, watchful, cross-legged in a yoga pose in the hotel suite, beside Hunter the writer, agitated and explosive. The gypsy and the outlaw, Hunter said, the one man who admired him without wanting his life. Hunter’s life was big enough, full enough, and Sharkey looked forward to Hunter’s arrival when, around Christmas, the Honolulu Marathon was about to start and the winter swell was building on the North Shore. Hunter eager too, so he said, to hear Joe’s stories, to watch football in his hotel suite, to snort coke and drink whiskey, usually all at the same time.

  “Mushrooms,” Hunter said one of those times. “See if you can find some.”

  Sharkey asked Moe Kahiko, who said, “Got choke. Got plenny,” and brought him some in a plastic bag, saying “They magic. Eat one or two.” He took one from the bag, a damp gnome’s cap, holding it by its stem, stroking the gills on its underside. “Try eat.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Insane.”

  “Maybe later.”

  “More better when they not come dry.”

  Sharkey ate one that night, chopping it into small pieces and chewing a small handful. Then he sat, and the glow heated his head, he saw a sparkle in his house he’d never seen before, chairs and tables tingling. He was uplifted, he was on a wave, and the wave swelled, became phosphorescent and didn’t break but carried him through the luminous air. He walked to the lanai to enjoy the entanglement of starlight, whirls and blobs blazing in the night sky, and his body shriveled so small his muscle was tissue-thin. He thought, When have I ever been this happy? He sat weightless on his favorite chair and was propelled, steering it through the widening room.

  Overtaken by exhaustion at the end, he dozed, and the next day asked Moe where he’d found the mushrooms.

  “You know where you get da kine cows in Mokūle‘ia, near Dillingham? Plenny there, after one big rain. They growing around the cow shit.”

  “I want to see.”

  They went, Sharkey and Moe, one day after a sudden shower, hiking up the hill to the pastures where cattle were grazing. As Moe had promised, the small tawny gnome caps had sprouted on the fresh cowpats.

  “Psilocybin,” Hunter said over the phone. “Hot damn. That’s the mother lode. Save some for me.”

  Sharkey anticipated an outing, a mushroom hunt, and planned it carefully to please Hunter. He’d take him for lunch in Hale‘iwa, he’d supply baskets for collecting the mushrooms, they’d go to Sharkey’s house at Jocko’s and eat them, getting high while watching waves—a field trip followed by an evening of visions.

  “I hate hiking,” Hunter said. “Fucking mosquitoes.”

  “It’s an easy walk,” Sharkey said.

  But Hunter said, “Football,” and “Got a deadline,” and “Feeling shitty, man,” and so there was no mushroom hunt.

  Sharkey took some fresh mushrooms to the hotel. Hunter ate a handful them in his suite and trembled in his armchair and wailed ecstatically, gargling, his face gleaming, deaf in his delirium—and so Sharkey left him.

  “More mushrooms,” Hunter said the next day.

  Before he left, he showed Sharkey the page he had written about it, then, seeing that Sharkey only nodded at it, Hunter read it, stabbing at it with his cigarette, crowing about how he’d hunted with Sharkey on the muddy hillside at Mokūle‘ia, among the cows and the marauding pigs, plucking the mushrooms from splashes of cow shit, as Sharkey had described. And there were wild dogs and loud parrots, and Moe was a tattooed Samoan with fuzzy hair and a war club.

  * * *

  Sharkey, who had thought of himself as unreliable, untruthful, a procrastinator, a committed stoner, a heavy drinker, now understood that in comparison with Hunter he was moderate in his habits. He loved the man for making him seem normal, because Hunter seldom kept his word, spent the whole day fantasizing and doping, sometimes chattered like a monkey, and might not leave his room for days.

  I surf, Sharkey thought. And Hunter hates the water. But Hunter’s mentions of writing were like a sorcerer’s promise of magic. How did he do it? Where did it come from? What did it mean? Sharkey could not say. He had not read a word Hunter had written, not even the inscribed book he’d been given. All he knew was Hunter declaiming the outrageous adventure of the mushroom-hunting, and if in reality something never happened, what was the point of reading about it?

  The man’s evasions and untruths were obvious: he was in pain, he was lost, unable to cope, deranged at times. Yet Sharkey admired him for being able to turn his pain into something resembling strength, his weaknesses and his rage into a kind of heroism. That he was besieged by admirers for the books he’d written bewildered Sharkey—the sorcery in it; and Hunter allowed himself to be idolized by these hangers-on, who took charge of him and brought him to parties, to which Sharkey was swept along. Hunter was seen as a man of action, yet he was passive. He spent most of the time in a chair, watching TV. He hated to be alone. He could not manage without a woman, who—far from being a sexual partner—functioned as a nurse.

  “Couldn’t make it yesterday,” he’d say to Sharkey. “Captured by freaks.”

  And behind him the nurse-girlfriend would roll her eyes or shake her head.

  Hunter was sober most mornings. But when he insisted on Sharkey’s driving him to the gun range at Koko Head he was drunk, and the range attendant, alarmed by his shouting, would not let him shoot. Hunter swore at him and, when the attendant turned his back, shouted at the man, his demon voice rising in his anger. He threatened the man, and only relented when Sharkey dragged him away. Later Hunter made it a story, added guns to it, and “demonic muzzle flip,” and barking dogs, and Hawaiian chants. He read it to Sharkey. What had happened was embarrassing. But the story was funny.

  That was his magic, to make an awkward episode into a kind of fable. Sharkey had not known that there was a public firing range at Koko Head, that Hunter was a gun nut, that he had access to pistols and assault rifles from his cronies on O‘ahu. The sight of the guns in Hunter’s pale trembling hands worried Sharkey. Hunter’s moods shifted too; he complained of muscle aches, a bad back, insomnia—up all night, he needed a nap in the middle of the day.

  “Great guy,” he said to the nurse-girlfriend, this one named Bonnie.

  “He’s amazing,” she said.

  “I wish I’d known him years ago,” Sharkey said.

  She took it as a compliment to the man, but he meant that Hunter was faltering, in decline—repetitive, his memory misfiring. Even Hunter said so. “What do you expect?” he screamed into the phone one day—Sharkey guessed at an editor. “My brain’s fried. There’s a guy here who’s feeding me toxic mushrooms!”

  Sharkey wanted to show him North Shore waves. The marathon always took place in the big-wave season. “Monster waves!” he said. “Maybe something to write about.”

  “Scary waves,” Hunter said. “I want to see who you are when you’re scared. A different guy!”

  “I’m myself on a gnarly wave. No
t scared. That’s who I am,” Sharkey said.

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  But he couldn’t pin Hunter down. No one could, not even the people who’d flown him to Honolulu and paid for his hotel suite. He was reckless, and like many reckless surfers Sharkey had known, he was superstitious.

  “No, no, no,” he’d say, entering a hotel room. “It’s all wrong.” And he would threaten to leave unless the room was arranged his way. He needed flowers, a view of the ocean, an ice bucket. And he was fickle, meeting Sharkey’s friends. “I don’t like the way your Samoan pal looks at me.”

  “Moe Kahiko. He’s Hawaiian. He’s mellow.”

  “No. He has a hairy feral quality. Ratlike cunning. Yellow eyes. He always looks like he’s planning some kind of caper.”

  “It’s called survival. He was raised by a single mom on the North Shore. They lived in a car for a long time. It was parked under a tree on the service road in Kahuku.”

  “See? I was right.” Hunter sniffed the glass of whiskey he was holding, then downed it and roared, his mouth open wide.

  “Being homeless made him resourceful. That’s how he found the mushrooms.”

  “He leans over when he stands.”

  “You hate him for that?”

  “He’s not perpendicular, man!” Hunter sounded genuinely angry—not the fake anger that he used to be funny. With rage-spittle on his lips, he said, “I want him to stop looking at me with his yellow rodent eyes, like he’s a fucking burnout!”

  And not only Moe. Hunter took against surfers who were too tongue-tied to answer his growled questions, the woman at the 7-Eleven who, he said, “licked her prehensile fingers and then counted my change with them.” Hunter did not want to touch the money. “Keep it!” Drugs made him see double, and he complained of crowds where only a few people were lingering on a beach.

  He was a gentle grouch who needed friends around him, his Hawaii friends, the old, lame ex-football player from ‘Āina Haina, a runner whom he’d profiled, a pair of strippers he’d picked up in his rented Mustang convertible (girlfriend-nurse driving), and a porn star he said was a celebrity, whom Sharkey had never heard of.

  Sharkey, who hated crowds, understood Hunter best when he said, “Humans are an invasive species,” but Hunter liked an audience, and Sharkey, committed to solitude, kept to himself.

  “That porn star I was telling you about?” Hunter said.

  Sharkey said, “Yeah”—he’d seen her once, but Hunter had never said anything more about her.

  “She accused me of sexual assault. We went to court. I won!” He was lying on a sofa in his suite, a glass of whiskey resting on his chest. “And we celebrated! Didn’t we, honey?”

  “We sure did,” the girlfriend-nurse said.

  The next moment Hunter was asleep, poleaxed by the whiskey, like a baby grown overtired, shouting, then snoring.

  “We sure did,” the woman repeated sadly to Sharkey, twitching her lips in sorrow or regret, tearful, as though caught in a lie.

  Sharkey knew from the tour that the surfers who were the most boisterous—the stylish ones—were the hardest to please, needing attention, like hyperactive children. A stoner would sit and giggle and be repetitive, but no one was more boring than a drunk. At his best, Hunter was appreciative and watchful; at his worst, unbearable.

  Hunter was a container which when filled with drugs or alcohol became electric and lit up and began to vibrate, shouting, barking, throwing things, howling or going dark, looking like he was going to break something—a glass, a vase, a plate of spaghetti, the platter of cold pizza—as Sharkey had seen him do. Once, in a rage, he’d broken his leg; as a result he had developed an odd foot-dragging monkey walk, and often tripped and fell.

  Hunter’s girlfriend at the time covered her face and whispered, “It was terrible. He slipped on the tile floor in the bathroom. He screamed and screamed. He couldn’t stop. They wouldn’t sedate him because he was full of coke.”

  Never mind, Sharkey thought, Hunter was his advocate, he frankly admired him, he praised him to his friends, he listed him on the “Honor Roll” on the back page of two of his books, along with editors and athletes and rock stars he knew—he read the list to Sharkey, who wished he could have told his mother, My name’s in a book. And Hunter wrote a short profile for a magazine, “The Shark at Sunset,” and this too he read aloud—Sharkey smoking a joint and smiling.

  “Going to Cortes Bank next month,” Sharkey said. “My sponsor’s paying. Fly over it in a helicopter. Film it first, then take a boat out and ride it.”

  Hunter wasn’t listening, he was still talking. “I want to do a real profile of you for the magazine. They’re big on surfers. Where’ve you been lately?”

  “On some great waves in Mexico. Todos Santos, and way south—Puerto Escondido. But Cortes—that’s a hundred-foot wave.”

  Hunter was nodding. He tapped cigarette ash onto a half-eaten sandwich. “You see the thing I wrote about Clinton?”

  “I guess so,” Sharkey said, though he had no idea. Clinton was a name to him, nothing more, one of Hunter’s names.

  Hunter was growling, mumbling, perhaps talking, and then he was snorting a bump of coke off the back of his hand.

  “Gotta do something big,” he said, adenoidal, gagging a little from the hit. “The whole surf culture deal. Like Hell’s Angels—wild men on boards instead of hogs. Crazed outlaw gods!”

  “It’s not really like that,” Sharkey said.

  “Outrageous, insane, screaming island girls.” He swallowed; he gasped and pushed at his nostrils. “Sex on the beach. Crashing waves.”

  Sharkey laughed; Hunter hadn’t heard. He was preoccupied, drinking, drugging, determined to be high, paper twists of coke in his shirt pocket, bottles under his arms, amber containers of pills on the bathroom sink.

  “Sometime I’ll tell you about it,” Sharkey said. “The ultimate wave.”

  “I don’t have a lot of free time this trip,” Hunter said.

  “Whenever,” Sharkey said, so as not to press him.

  But his easy response put Hunter on the defensive, and he staggered to his feet and swayed in front of Sharkey, who stood up, fearing that Hunter might fall and thinking that he could catch him.

  “I’m an addict,” Hunter said. “Do you know how much trouble it is to be an addict? It’s a full-time fucking job. I don’t have time to do anything else.”

  He was writing less, he said—and, Sharkey suspected, perhaps not writing at all. Missing deadlines, he said. And when on a return visit Hunter invited Sharkey to his hotel and Sharkey said he was free to do the interview for Rolling Stone, Hunter said, “I don’t do anything for them anymore. They’re mainstream. I’m somewhere else, still tooling along, pedal to the metal, in the fast lane of the proud highway.” He panted a little, short of breath from his shouting. “With the freaks!”

  “The stoners,” Sharkey said, because he was smoking a joint, midafternoon, assessing the waves off Kahala from the lanai of the hotel suite.

  “Snorters,” Hunter said. “Snorting makes me bounce off the walls, if it’s good shit.”

  “Snorting what?” Sharkey asked, speaking through his teeth, holding the smoke in his lungs.

  “Coke, speed, chalk, crank, smack,” Hunter said. “Speed builds up dopamine, and that’s a rush. Depends on the ROA . . .”

  Route of administration—Hunter had mentioned it before: he was a pedant when it came to drug use, and his knowledge was immense and all firsthand.

  “Tweakers in Hawaii fry their brains on meth, or they slam smack into their arms. The beauty of meth is that it can be smoked, but it’s no good snorted.”

  “You’re a snorter.” Sharkey exhaled a pale but visible breath of weed.

  “Big-time,” Hunter said. “Like dabbing.” He saw Sharkey squint, and explained, “Getting some concentrated weed and heating it on a nail and inhaling the vapor. Or hot-railing.” Again he saw Sharkey frown, and said, “Heat up a glass tube end
and snort a line through it, so it vaporizes up the tube. It’s an instant high but it messes up my nose so bad I blow huge blood boogers that scare my girlfriend.”

  “Sounds like a trip,” Sharkey said, alarmed by Hunter’s intensity and feeling like a schoolboy with the damp roach of pakalolo in his fingers.

  “Hot-railing—yeah. But you waste a lot of product that way. Still, I love blowing an insanely huge dragon cloud.”

  “Gotta go,” Sharkey said. “Surf’s up tomorrow.”

  Hunter said, “But either way you end up toothless.”

  Sharkey smiled, thinking how Hunter rarely listened to him, especially now, when he was winning on the tour, traveling, finding new breaks, getting better sponsors, and always in search of waves.

  So he was surprised when Hunter said one day, “Remember when you said to me once . . . that thing?”

  Hunter was lying on the sofa in his suite, his shoes on the cushions, wearing a misshapen fedora and sipping a whiskey. Sharkey shrugged at the question, which was unanswerable in its vagueness.

  “I was telling you about the Ali-Foreman fight in Kinshasa.” Hunter began to laugh, and his laughter gagged him.

  The names meant nothing to Sharkey, even now, years later, this Ali Foreman—who could he be?

  “You said, ‘Kinshasa—any waves there?’” He hooted and coughed and choked, gargling phlegm, then leaned over and spat on the carpet. “Fucking heavyweight championship of the world, and you didn’t have a clue! You didn’t even know who Ali and Foreman were!”

  Sharkey said, “They probably don’t know who I am.”

  “I love that,” Hunter said. “I mention people and you go, ‘Who?’”

  “Because I don’t know,” Sharkey said, to deflect the shouting. He had the sense he was being teased, and he resented it. He didn’t understand what was behind it except the drunken ranting of Hunter, who was lying fully clothed—sweaty shirt, crushed hat, stained shorts—on the white sofa.