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he's a pothead who chokes in competitions. And then there are the even-nastier names he's had to deal with, slurs that burned in deep: retard, moron, slacker, zombie. In middle school, Marzo was treated so badly that his mother, Jill, had to pull him out and teach him at home, where he wouldn't be punched for staring at wannabe thugs. His agonizing shyness has fractured his family and sparked ugly set-tos with his father, Gino, an old-school hard-hat striver who accused him of flaking off and screwing up his shot at stardom. That charge hurts Clay more than the others combined: when your own father misconceives you so badly, how can you hope that strangers will understand?
    Now, pushing back from lunch at a Maui fish stand, bits of ahi po'boy dotting his face and lap, Marzo wears the grin of a birthday boy who gets to eat as much cake as he wants. To see him like this, hands clasped across belly, is to encounter a kid whose first and last directive is pure, physical joy. But the facts are more complex and less happy. Marzo has Asperger's syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism that causes no end of social confusion and anguish, and that commonly burdens those afflicted with a single, smothering obsession: bird songs or train routes or the history of naval warfare. "Though Asperger's teens are typically bright and verbal, they can't connect with kids their age or with people they don't know well," says Dr. Michael Linden, an autism specialist who diagnosed Marzo at the age of 18, after a dozen years of botched assessments. "Feelings are a foreign language to them, and they're unable to pick up social cues. A lot of them retreat from relationships and get stuck in a special activity or interest that they devote themselves to intensely."
    Like a lot of adult Aspies, as some with the diagnosis have taken to calling themselves, Marzo is a baffling mix of powers and deficits. He has no interest in the written word (and has read few of the dozens of stories about him in sports magazines, which regularly anoint him one of surfing's saviors) but is brilliant, even clairvoyant, in the water. Looking at the horizon, Marzo can read waves that others can't and intuit where they'll break before they crest. Traveling fills him with such dread that he's sick with nausea days before boarding a plane, but he gets up each day and surfs lethal points on Maui's western shore. The kinds of waves he lives on don't crash near sandy beaches; instead, he climbs down lava cliffs to reach breaks rife with boulders and a seafloor of spear-tipped coral reefs that can turn a surfer's chest to chum. His body is a travelogue of scars and welts, but it bores him to talk about the dangers he courts—the boards he routinely snaps taking hellish falls; the waves that hold him down till his lungs scream, half a minute or more during really heavy sets. Only once, he says, has he been afraid of the surf. "There were tiger sharks behind me," he says, wiping a quarter-size splotch of mayo off his cheek. "They were pretty big, so I bailed quick."
    After lunch, Marzo pays a visit to Adam Klevin, a muscular, bald-shaved man who's seen more of Clay in water than anyone besides his mother. For the past five years, Klevin has risen at dawn to film every wave that Marzo catches and compile the highlights. Today, on one of the flatscreens in the unkempt room that Klevin uses as an editing suite, Marzo is up and riding a 12-foot swell. Dancing on the wave front with cha-cha turns that brace him for a bigger move, he whips the back of the board into a savage 360 that surfers call a throw-tail reverse. It's a common trick, but there are few people on the planet who can successfully nail it in Maui after a recent storm has raised waves the size of houses. Marzo is barely upright as he exits the spin, his mouth a perfect
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of exaltation. He bangs a hard left into the next section of wave and throws a front-side snap that lifts him clean out of the water, arms and knees in