I was surfing a steep right at Suis when the Sundance Kid dropped in on me and cut back, running over my feet.

He apologized; I checked my feet. They were intact.

Back in the lineup, the Kid, not a Suis regular, boasted to a pal about his upcoming surf trip to Bali. “My boss said I’m living his dream — and I’ve sold more top-price bottles of wine than any other waiter — so he’ll hold my job till I get back.”

I pictured this golden boy, short, muscular and blond, darting between tables instead of waves. Then I thought of a Suis regular who also works in a restaurant, but as a dishwasher.

Twelve-step Sammy (not his real name) often talks about how alcohol and drugs led to being fired from his longtime job.

After losing his car and sleeping for a time in our neighborhood right-of-way, he joined a 12-step program and finally found a full-time gig.

“I’ve been clean for two years,” he announced to the lineup on a recent morning.

Sammy’s a talker. We know when he’s happy (“I got barreled!”) or sad, as he was during the long terminal illness of his dad.

We know when he’s binged on plate lunch. “I stay too fat. No can surf. Too heavy.”

When Sammy complains that he’s surfing poorly, he still gets three times more waves than me. He offers me helpful tips and comments on my weight (thanks, Sammy!).

While Sammy still calls himself an addict, I tend to think of all of us in the lineup as functioning “surf-aholics.” Of course, it’s a comparatively harmless addiction — isn’t it?

Maybe not. In “Hawaiian Surfing: Traditions from the Past,” John R.K. Clark recounts that when the waves were up in old Hawaii, many surfers abandoned work and home, letting their families go hungry.

If I didn’t surf, maybe I would have finished those novels gathering dust on my nightstand, mastered jazz piano and run a marathon.

On a recent Saturday, I realized Sammy and I were alone at Suis. Catching my eye, grinning, he burst into song.

“Just the two of us, building castles in the sky … just the two of us … we can make it if we try!”

I grabbed the next wave and hele’d in to shore. When I told my surf pal Grace, she gave a shudder. “I’m glad I’m not the only privileged one!” she said with a laugh.

When the waves are too gnarly to talk, Sammy escapes his demons for a time. “I was out at Rice Bowls,” he said at the end of one big day. His eyes were bloodshot — he looked fried, wrung out — but his smile was radiant.

“I’m feeling light now,” he said. “I’m going to go see my mother.”

Listening to Sammy, “providing free talk therapy,” as Grace says, is one of the things that makes our lineup a community. We drop in on each other sometimes — hey, no one’s perfect — but we don’t run over each other’s feet. Sometimes we even share, like the time Moshe, the big bald guy from Israel, yelled “Go, go, go!” as I hopped on his wave. He followed me, cheering, all the way to the Christmas tree on the reef.

The nonregulars are agents of chaos, like the novice who dropped in on me four years ago and scared Grace — she thought the crack she’d heard was my head (it was my new board). She yelled at him and chased him, lecturing, all the way to the beach.

We never saw him again.

Six years before that, I did get hit in the head — by a Japanese tourist — and Sammy, then known as Stoner Sammy, paddled in with me. I felt faint, but his talking kept me awake.

We regulars have our spats, but we’re there for each other when it counts.

The Sundance Kid may have it made, but he doesn’t know what he’s missing.

“In the Lineup” features Hawaii’s oceangoers and their regular hangouts, from the beach to the deep blue sea. It appears every other Sunday. Reach Mindy Pennybacker at mpennybacker@staradvertiser.com or call 529-4772.