1
Paradise Lost
Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so
penetrated with life and death. Buddy Hamstra offered me a hotel job
in Honolulu and laughed at my accepting it so quickly. I had been
trying to begin a new life, as people do when they flee to distant
places. Hawaii was paradise with heavy traffic. I met Sweetie in the
hotel, where she was also working. One day when we were alone on the
fourth floor I asked, "Do you want to make love?" and she said, "Part
of me does." Why smile? At last we did it, then often, and always in
the same vacant guest room, 409. Sweetie got pregnant, our daughter
was born. So, within a year of arriving, I had my new life, and as
the writer said after the crack-up, I found new things to care about.
I was resident manager of the Hotel Honolulu, eighty rooms nibbled by
rats.
Buddy, the hotel's owner, said, "We're multistory."
I liked the word and the way he made it multi-eye.
The rooms were small, the elevator was narrow, the lobby was
tiny, the bar was just a nook.
"Not small," Buddy said. "Yerpeen."
I had gotten to these green mute islands, humbled and broke
again, my brain blocked, feeling superfluous, out of the writing
business, and trying to start all over at the age of forty-nine. A
friend of mine recommended me to Buddy Hamstra. I applied for this
job. It wasn't for material; it was the money. I needed work.
"My manager's a typical local howlie — a reetard," Buddy
said. "Fondles the help. Always cockroaching booze. Sniffs around the
guest rooms."
"That's not good," I said.
"And this week he stepped on his dick."
"Not good at all."
"He needs therrpy," Buddy said. "He's got lots of baggage."
"Maybe that's what he likes about the hotel — that he has a
place to put it."
Buddy sucked his teeth and said, "That's kind of funny."
The idea of rented bedrooms attracted me. Shared by so many
dreaming strangers, every room was vibrant with their secrets, like
furious dust in a sunbeam, their night sweats, the stammering echoes
of their voices and horizontal fantasies; and certain ambiguous
odors, the left-behind atoms and the residue of all the people who
had ever stayed in it. The hotel bedroom is more than a symbol of
intimacy; it is intimacy's very shrine, scattered with the essential
paraphernalia and familiar fetish objects of its rituals. Assigning
people to such rooms, I believed I was able to influence their lives.
Buddy Hamstra was a big, blaspheming, doggy-eyed man in
drooping shorts, a wheezy smoker and heavy drinker. His nickname
was "Tuna." He was most people's nightmare, a reckless millionaire
with the values of a delinquent and a barklike laugh. He liked
saying, "I'm a crude sumbitch." He was from the mainland —
Sweetwater, Nevada. But he pretended to be worse than he was. He had
the sort of devilish gaze that showed a mind in motion.
"What's yours, drink or weed?"
We had met in his hotel bar. He had a cocktail in one hand
and a cigarette in the other.
"I got some killer buds," he said.
"Beer for me."
We talked idly — about his tattoos, a forthcoming eclipse of
the sun, the price of gas, and the source of the weed he was smoking —
before he got down to business, and he asked suddenly, "Any hotel
experience?"
"I've stayed in a lot of hotels."
He laughed in his barking way. And then, out of breath from
the laughter, he went slack-jawed and gasped blue smoke. Finally he
recovered and said, "Hey, I've known a lot of assholes, but that
doesn't make me a proctologist."
I admitted that I had no experience running a hotel, that I
was a writer — had been a writer. Every enterprise I had run, I had
run in my head. I hated telling him that. I mentioned some of my
books, because he asked, but nothing registered. That pleased me. I
did not want to have a past.
"You're probably great at thinking up names," he said. "Being
as you're a writer."
"That's part of the job."
"Part of the hotel business, too. Naming your restaurants,
your lounges, your function rooms. Naming the bar."
His mention of the bar made me look up and see that we were
sitting in Momi's Paradise Lounge.
Buddy drank, held the booze in his mouth, frowned, then
swallowed and said, "The manager here is a complete bozo. Dangerous,
too."
"In what way dangerous?"
"Has an argument with a guest, right? The guest storms out.
When he comes back he finds that the manager has bricked up his
doorway, sealed the whole room off. What he was saying was, it's the
guest's room but it's our doorway."
I tried to imagine a guest opening the door and seeing fresh
bricks where there should have been an opening.
"Another guest — a real pain, granted — this manager put some
goldfish in his toilet so he couldn't use it, but the guest flushed
it, and so the manager filled the whole bathroom with industrial
foam." Buddy sipped his drink, looking thoughtful. "Someone asked
him, 'What's your problem?' The manager says, 'Masturbation takes
points off your IQ each time. Hey, I could have been a genius.'"
At that moment Buddy's mobile phone rang. He answered it and
handed me his business card and whispered for me to visit him the
next day at his house on the North Shore. Then he exploded into the
phone. Hearing him hollering at someone else, I realized how polite
he had been with me.
Buddy was watching an inaudible television when I found him the next
day. Because he was supine and less animated, he looked more
debauched. He lay in a hammock on a porch of his house, a large
square building with porches like pulled-out bureau drawers, standing
among rattling palm trees at the edge of Sunset Beach and the
toppling, sliding waves. The sound of surf overwhelmed the sound of
the television program he was watching. The women in bathing suits on
the TV were not half as attractive as the ones on the beach below
where he lay.
"This lolo manager," he said, rolling his eyes, continuing
where we had left off. "I'll give you another example. He sees a very
pretty guest and introduces himself. He accompanies her to her room,
they admire the view from her lanai, and he says, 'Excuse me.' He
goes into her john and takes a big loud leak." Buddy shook his head
with disapproval. "The woman is so spooked she moves out."
As I listened, I watched a rat moving smoothly along the
baseboard of Buddy's big house like a blown leaf.
"He's got a professional massage table in one room. He offers
massages to women. Now and then he goes a little too far. Some like
it, others don't. There are complaints."
"He's a qualified masseur?"
"He's a three-balled tomcat. Like I said, he stepped on his
dick."
I laughed in spite of myself, and Buddy joined me, barking.
This second time I saw Buddy, he seemed more devilish. Watching him
swinging in his hammock, like a big fish in a net, I was reminded of
his nickname. Holding a glass of vodka on the dome of his belly,
Buddy listed the manager's lapses. The man drank and disgraced
himself. The man dipped into the cash register. The man insulted
guests, sometimes using abusive language. He had been discovered
sleeping in his office. He had a weakness for giving deals to guests
who had done him favors, which was why the hotel had several long-
term residents who could not be dislodged. He took pleasure in
misleading people, and rubbed his hands when they went astray.
"This week he got into a world of shit," Buddy said. "He had
a little flirtation with one of the guests. She's a fox but she's
married — she's on vacation here with her husband. After this dipshit
manager made love to her she passed out, and he shaved off her pubic
hair. She had to explain that to her old man!" Buddy clucked, looked
closely at me, and said, "What do you think?"
I laughed so hard at this weird outrage I could not reply.
But I was also embarrassed. In the world I had left, people didn't do
those things.
Buddy said, "A person's laugh says an awful lot."
That made me self-conscious, so I said, "He sounds pretty
colorful. But I don't know whether I'd want him to run my business."
"You said writers are good at thinking up names," Buddy
said. "We need a new name for the bar."
"'Momi's Paradise Lounge' isn't bad."
"Except that Momi is my ex-wife. She used to tend bar. We
just got divorced. My new wahine, Stella, hates the name. So?"
He raised himself up in the hammock to face me. And I tried
to think through all these distractions — the TV, the dumping waves,
the women in bikinis lying on the beach, the scuttling rat.
"What about calling it 'Paradise Lost'?"
Buddy said nothing. He became very still, but his mind was in
motion. I was aware of a straining sound, like the grunt of a
laboring motor. Later I grew to recognize this as his way of thinking
hard, his brain whirring like an old machine, cocked with a
mainspring and the murmuring movement of its works coming out of his
mouth. At last, in a whisper, he said, "It's the name of . . . what?
Some song? Some story?"
"Poem."
"Poem. I like it."
And he relaxed. I stopped hearing the mechanism of slipping
belts and uncoiling springs and meshing cogs from his damp forehead.
"You'll do fine."
So I had the job. Was it because I was a writer? Buddy didn't
read, which made the printed word seem like magic to him and perhaps
gave him an exaggerated respect for writers. He was a gambler, and I
was one of his gambles. He was one of the last of a dying breed, a
rascal in the Pacific. His hiring me was another example of the sort
of audacious risk he boasted about.
"The staff is great," he said. "They'll do your job for you,
and the rest is oh-jay-tee. But I need someone who looks like he
knows what he's doing."
"I'll try."
"It's not rocket surgery," Buddy said. "And you've got the
basic qualification."
"What's that?"
"Reason being, you're a mainland howlie." He laughed and
hitched himself tighter in his hammock and sent me on my way.
The word "mainland," spoken in Hawaii, sounded to me
like "Planet Earth."
2
Castaways
Whenever I felt superfluous, which was an old intimation, I reminded
myself that I was running a multistory hotel. People in Hawaii asked
me what I did for a living. I never said, "I'm a writer" — they would
not have known my books — but rather, "I run the Hotel Honolulu."
That gave me a life and, among the rascals, a certain status.
After thirty years of moving around the world, and thirty
years of books, I was hired because I was a white man, a haole. I had
made and lost several — not fortunes but livings; lost houses, lost
land, lost family, lost friends; goodbye to cars, to my library.
Other people were now sitting in lovely chairs I had bought and
looking at paintings I used to own, hung on walls I had paid for.
I had never had a backup plan. My idea was to keep moving.
Hawaii seemed a good place for starting over. This hotel was ideal.
Buddy understood. He looked to be the sort of man who had also lost a
lot in his life — wives, houses, money, land; not books. I needed a
rest from everything imaginary, and I felt that in settling in
Hawaii, and not writing, I was returning to the world.
We were not on the beach. We were the last small, old hotel
in Honolulu. "It's kind of a bowteek hotel," Buddy said. He had won
the place on a bet in the early sixties, when the jets had begun to
replace the cruise ships. The hotel was a relic even then. What with
the rising price of land in Waikiki, we were sure to be bought as a
tear-down and replaced by a big ugly building, one of the chains.
When I considered our certain doom, my memory was sharpened. I
remembered what I saw and heard, every fugitive detail, and became a
man on whom nothing was wasted.
There were residents, and some people who stayed for the
winter, but most of the guests were strangers. By the time they
checked out, I knew them as well as I wanted to, and in some cases I
knew them very well.
"This the winner!" Keola, the janitor, said on my first day,
welcoming me to the hotel. Dees da weena! But there was not much for
me to do. Buddy had been right about the staff's running the place.
Peewee was the chef, Lester Chen my number two. Tran and Trey were
barmen. Tran was a Vietnamese immigrant. Trey, a surfer from Maui,
also had a rock band, called Sub-Dude, formerly known as Meat Jelly,
until all the band members found Jesus. "Jesus was the first surfer,
man. He walked on water," Trey told me, more than once. "I surf for
Christ." Charlie Wilnice and Ben Fishlow were our seasonal waiters.
Keola and Kawika did the grunt work. I liked them for being
incurious. Sweetie was for a time head of Housekeeping. She had been
raised in the hotel, by her mother, Puamana, another of Buddy's
gambles.
"In a small hotel you see people at their best and at their
worst," Peewee said. "As for this one, we're in the islands, right,
but this is where America stays. And some people come here to die."
We were too cheap for Japan, too expensive for Australia, too
far for Europe, had little to offer the New Zealander, and didn't
cater to backpackers. The business traveler avoided us, except when
he was with a prostitute. Now and then we got Canadians. They were
courteous and tried not to boast. They were budget-conscious. Another
characteristic of frugal people: no jokes, or else bad jokes.
Canadian guests despised us for not knowing their geography, while at
the same time being embarrassed about their huge empty spaces that
had funny place names. In conversation, Canadians were also the first
to point out that they were different, usually by saying, "Well, I
wouldn't know, I'm a Canadian." We had a Mexican family once. We
couldn't be called child-friendly, but Peewee was correct: America
walked through our doors.
People talked. I listened. I observed. I read a little. My
guests were naked. I sometimes trespassed, and it became my life —
the whole of my life, a new life in which I learned things I had
never known before.
"I had plaque cleared from my carotid artery," Clarence Greer
told me. A hotel manager in Hawaii hears lots of medical reports, as
well as weather reports from back home. The Scheesers were from
International Falls, where the temperature that day was minus-twenty.
Jirleen Cofield explained to me the making of a
po-boy sandwich. I got Wanda Privett's recipe for meatloaf, and other
recipes, and learned that many of them, being from middle America,
involved adding a can of soup. It worried me to see a man wearing a
toupee. I trusted people who lisped. Your diabetic needs to be
careful of infections in his feet. I was overprotective of African
Americans, always saw them as having among the oldest American
pedigrees. I tried to understand the sadness of soldiers, the
melancholy of the military. Was it the uniform? Was it the haircut? I
heard so many stories that I abandoned any thought of writing them;
their very number gave me writer's block and made me patient. Now and
then, on the day he was to leave, a guest might walk the two blocks
to the beach and sob in the sunshine.
I liked Hawaii because it was a void. There was no power here
apart from landowning, no society worth the name, just a pecking
order. There was a social ladder but it wasn't climbable, and the
higher on it people stood, the sillier they looked, because everyone
knew their secrets. On such small islands there was hardly any
privacy, because people constantly bumped into each other.
Hawaii is hot and cold volcanoes, clear skies, and open
ocean. Like most Pacific islands it is all edge, no center, very
shallow, very narrow, a set of green bowls turned upside down in the
sea, the lips of the coastline surrounding the bulges of porous
mountains. This crockery is draped in a thickness of green so folded
it is hidden and softened. Above the blazing beaches were the
gorgeous green pleats of the mountains.
The place was once empty and unchanging, as lush as paradise,
a peaceful balance of animals and plants. It was then visited by
humans. At about the time Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, the
second and largest wave of Polynesians were climbing out of double-
hulled canoes, chanting in relief at having found land. They claimed
it as theirs, but they were no more than castaways. They imposed a
society of kings and commoners. People were eaten. They venerated the
gods of fire and water they had brought with them. The first iron in
Hawaii was stolen from the ships of Captain Cook — so many nails
yanked out of the timbers that the ships lost much of their
seaworthiness. With the iron the islanders began to carve more subtly
in wood. After the arrival of the first canoes the islands changed.
The voyagers had brought dogs and pigs. The first whites brought guns
and gonorrhea. Everything began at once, and in that beginning was
decay. Now, half the people could not even swim, and an unspecific
paragraph of inaccurate history like this one was all they knew.
And there was the sun. The sun in Hawaii was so dazzling, so
misleading, yet we regarded sunlight as our fortune. We quietly
believed, "We are blessed because the sun shines every day. This is a
good place for its sunlight. These islands are pure because of the
sun. The sun has made us virtuous."
As the TV weathermen on the mainland took personal
responsibility for the weather, each of us in Hawaii took credit for
the sunshine here, as though we had discovered it and it was ours to
dispense. "Stranger, be grateful to me for this sunny day" was our
attitude toward visitors. The sun had been bestowed on us and we were
sharing it with these alien refugees from dark cloudy places. The sun
was our wealth and our goodness. The Hawaiian heresy, which we
thought but never said, was "We are good because of the sun. We are
better than our visitors. We are sunnier."
This conceit made us sloppy and careless. Never mind the
palmy setting, the people here were as cruel and violent and crafty
as people anywhere, but they were slower and so seemed mild. Close
up, the islands were disorderly, fragile, and sensationally littered,
with brittle cliffs and too many feral cats and beaches that were
sucked and splashed by big waves to vanish in the sea. Our secret was
that we hated hot weather and stayed out of the sun. The visitors
ended up with pink noses, peeling shoulders, freckle clusters,
sunstroke, and melanoma, while we kept in the shadows.
"They say the Hawaii state motto is Hele I Loko, Haole 'Ino,
Aka Ha'awi Mai Kala — Go Home, You Mainland Scum, but Leave Your
Money Behind," Buddy said. "The real motto is even funnier. Ua Mau Ke
Ea O Ka Aina I Ka Pono — The Life of the Land Is Perpetuated in
Righteousness. The fuck it is!"
* * *
The week I was hired, Buddy stopped coming to the hotel. I was glad.
Buddy always introduced me by saying, "Hey, he wrote a book!"
I hated that. And I needed to learn the job. He was the wrong
person to teach me. He was usually drunk and had the drunk's idiocy,
mood swings, and facetiousness; he repeated himself; drink made him
deaf.
To please me he tried to be funny, but that could be tedious,
especially the formulaic jokes he told in order to define himself, or
just to shock. I knew all the punch lines. The man at the bar who
says, "I used to think I was a cowboy, but, golly, I guess I'm a
lesbian." Buddy saying, in his terrible Mexican accent, "If God
hadn't meant us to eat it, then why did he make it look like a taco?"
The elephant telling the naked man, "How do you manage to breathe
through a little thing like that?" Or Buddy's croaky utterance that
amounted almost to a war cry: "Nine inches!" A boss's comedy is
always an employee's hardship.
A few days after I started at the hotel, Buddy invited me to
his house to introduce me to his new woman, Stella, whom I had not
yet met. She was from California, she said.
"She's a tool of my lust," Buddy said, and handed me a
platter of brownies. "Stella made them. There's weed baked into them."
I took one and nibbled it while Buddy praised them in a
wheezy voice, claiming they'd saved his lungs.
"You ever swim?" I asked.
"Bad current," he said, pronouncing it kernt.
"I'm surprised Buddy didn't make you manager of the hotel," I
said to Stella. "You're a great cook and you have the basic
qualification. You're a mainland howlie."
"But you also had the other important qualification," Buddy
said, poking me in the chest. "Reason being, you understood me."
I smiled at him, to show I didn't understand.
"That dipshit manager I was telling you about?" he said.
I remembered the aggression, the massage table, the blunders,
the drunkenness, the practical jokes. Larger than life. Three-balled
tomcat.
"That was me!"
He needed me to congratulate him for fooling me, and I did.
But I had guessed it, and people had whispered at the hotel. What
surprised me was that he felt I could do a better job. "A man who
doesn't make mistakes ain't doing nothing." But there were more
surprises for me, and they taught me to be watchful. I had asked for
a new life, but I saw that this meant many lives — wife, child, the
world of these islands, and my misapprehensions.
3
Birdsong
Not long after I nailed the janitor, Keola, as incurious, I saw him
emptying trash barrels into a dumpster in the alley beside the hotel.
Some papers flew out. He stooped and snatched at them with big blunt
fingers, but instead of throwing them away, he looked at them. He
began to read them, holding the flapping sheets to his face and
smiling. That shocked me. He glanced back at me and gave me what the
locals called stink-eye.
Later, when I summoned the courage to ask him why he had read
the discarded papers, he denied it. If he sometimes seemed to be
doing something crazy like reading, he said, it was because he
suffered from "nonselective blackouts." He said he didn't even know
what I was talking about.
"My short-term memory more worse, boss. Get real common in
the islands. Real falustrating."
A week or so later I was in my office and heard, coming from
outside the window, the voices of Keola and Kawika, who were weeding
the flower bed by the swimming pool.
"Eh, where you was yesterday?"
"Eh, was working."
"I call you up talfone."
"I never hear."
"Eh, you never dere already."
"Assa madda you, brah?"
Fascinated, I cocked my head to listen. It was like hearing
birds squawking.
"Figure us go Makaha. Catch some wave."
"I was lawnmowa da frikken grass. Weed Eater was buss."
"How was buss?"
"Da shaff."
"Eh, I get no more nothing to do."
"Was frikken choke grass. I just stay sweating. My pants all
broke. Later I wen cuttin da tchrees."
Two birds on a branch, squawking together, squawks I was
trying to remember and understand. A few days later, they were
squawking again.
"Was one udda bugga. Was rob."
"Who da bugga?"
"One howlie guy."
"Who da steala-rubba?"
"Udda howlie guy."
"Frikken howlies."
"It da djrugs."
"Yah."
"They in depf."
"Yah. Hey, how he go do it?"
"Hide in one tchree."
"Up the tchree?"
"Back fo the tchree. See a waheeny with one bag. He
say, 'That mines!' He cuckaroach the bag, and the waheeny she ampin
like hell."
"They all on djrugs."
"Take da cash. Buy batu."
"Batu. Ice. Pakalolo."
"Pakalolo one soff djrug. Batu is more worse."
Squawk, squawk. I sat at the window, pretending to work.
And another day:
"Eh, but da bugga."
"What bugga?"
"Da one new bugga."
"Da howlie, yah. He more betta."
"Eh, he look akamai."
"But talk hybolic."
"Yah. But everybody speak him too good."
"The waheeny she frecklish."
"She Housekeeping."
"She not Housekeeping. She Guess Services."
"But Tuna, he too much rascal."
"Man, numba-one pilau luna."
"And how come all da time he look us and then he laughing?"
"Bull liar. He job easy."
"Yah."
"Yah."
"Too much hard though my job."
"Stay sucking up beer. Talk story."
"And us stay sweating."
"Yah."
"Yah."
"Man, he got one big book, howlie bugga."
"I never wen see no book."
"In he office."
"Bugga office?"
"Yah. Howlie bugga office. Big book. Hybolical book."
"Eh, no easy fo read, yah."
"Too much easy for howlie."
"Yah."
"Yah. Bymbye, da howlie bugga be rascal."
"Frikken big rascal."
Squawk, squawk. There was more, and all in the dopiest
apocopes, but by then I had realized they were talking about me, and
my Tolstoy.
4
Rose
History happens to other people. The rest of us just live and die,
watch the news, listen to the guff, and remember the names. No one
remembers us, though sometimes we are brushed by those bigger events
or public figures. My boss, Buddy Hamstra, was a celebrity, because
he knew many of the famous people who had visited Hawaii. He talked
about them as though to prove that these little islands were part of
the world and he was part of history. Babe Ruth had stayed in this
hotel in 1927, before the renovation, when it was the height of a
coconut tree. So had Will Rogers. Buddy had played golf with another
rascal, Francis H. I'i Brown, who was part Hawaiian. Francis Brown
had known Bob Hope. Hope was a regular in the islands.
"Zachary Scott — cowboy actor — I knew him," Buddy said. "He
used to come here a lot."
I said, "His ex-wife ran off with John Steinbeck." But that
didn't impress Buddy, for he had never heard of Steinbeck.
Buddy had found Zachary Scott an island girlfriend. "They did
the horizontal hula." He could manage such an introduction in a
friendly, uncomplicated way that took the curse off it and made him
seem a matchmaker rather than a pimp.
A significant request of this sort was made early in 1962
when Sparky Lemmo asked whether Buddy could find him "an island
girl" — and the implication was that she would be young and pretty
and willing. Buddy asked for more details. She was needed, Sparky
said, to spend an evening with a visiting dignitary who was staying
the night with his official entourage at the Kahala Hilton. The man's
visit was secret, and he was so powerful he had not landed at
Honolulu Airport but at one of the other airports — there were
thirteen on the island of Oahu, including the military fields. The
man had been brought to the Kahala in a limo with blacked-out windows.
"Howard Hughes?" Buddy asked.
It was the sort of thing Hughes was doing in those years,
with his flunkies and his millions and his private jet. Sparky gave
no details; a hesitation in his manner, when the name came up,
suggested to Buddy that the man in question might have been Howard
Hughes.
Yet he could have been anyone. Famous people came to Hawaii
and famous people lived here. Doris Duke lived on Black Point, Clare
Boothe Luce on Diamond Head, Lindbergh was in Maui, Jimmy Stewart had
a ranch above Kona, Elvis visited Hawaii all the time. Famous people
had famous friends.
"Bing Crosby?" Buddy asked. Crosby played golf in Hawaii.
Sparky just ignored that. He repeated that the man wanted a
local girl, an island beauty.
"Ha!" Buddy Hamstra was triumphant. "So they can't find a
wahine at the Kahala. They have to come to the Hotel Honolulu!"
He was pleased to be in demand, because even then his hotel's
reputation had slipped. The Tahitian dancing on the lanai — his
Pretty Polynesia show — only convinced people that Buddy was a
rascal. And he was, which gave him some insight into how weak some
men could be. He would say, "I never had to pay for it" — one of
those men — but he was acquainted with the single-minded nature of
desire.
"Tell me who the guy is," Buddy said.
Sparky indicated by tightening his face that he wanted to
tell but couldn't. He said, "This man is very important. The idea is
to find a girl who won't recognize him."
"Would I recognize him?" Buddy said.
"Listen, this is urgent. And not a hooker. Just someone who's
friendly. A little coconut princess."
There was just such a girl, Puamana Wilson, who hung around
the hotel saying that she was looking for work. Buddy had sized her
up as a runaway and was protective of her. She had been educated in a
convent on the mainland but had run away, and was still hiding from
her family in Hilo. He gave her casual jobs in the kitchen, to keep
her out of the bar and under the protection of Peewee. He put her up
in a back room so he could keep his eye on her. If she stayed out of
trouble, he might marry her when she got a little older. She was
still a girl, twenty or so, immature for her age because of the
convent, freckled, funny, but experienced, as Buddy knew. She was
sweet, not very bright, alluring in the pouty island way, half surf
bunny and half shrew. She was simple and she was willing. But Buddy
said, "I want her back."
Puamana was summoned from the kitchen. Even damp-faced, in
her apron, she looked pretty.
"You're needed across town," Buddy said.
"What I have to do?"
"Just be nice."
She understood this and knew what to do without being told.
While she washed and dressed, Sparky offered Buddy a tip,
which Buddy waved away, offended by the imputation that he was part
of the deal or that it was a commercial arrangement at all. This was
something between friends, he said.
With a flower behind her ear and wearing a pareu, Puamana
left for the Kahala with Sparky Lemmo. Buddy was asleep when she
returned. Later that day he saw her in the kitchen — in a T-shirt and
apron and rubber sandals once more — and asked her how it had gone.
"Beautiful room," Puamana said. "Was a suite."
How like Puamana to comment on the room and say nothing
about
the man or the money. So Buddy asked about him.
"He was stoked."
She said nothing else. And she grew quiet, staying in her
room as though hatching an egg. Six weeks later, Puamana told Buddy
she was pregnant. When the little girl was born, Puamana said, "She's
hapa" — half islander, half haole. Puamana called her
Ku'uipo, "Sweetheart," and with the birth she became a serious
mother. She stopped flirting, saved her money, and devoted herself to
her daughter, a lovely child who, before she was a year old, could
totter across the hotel lobby and do hula moves without falling down.
That same year, President Kennedy was assassinated. Sparky
stopped by the hotel and found Buddy Hamstra drunk and weeping. "I
fought in the Pacific with that guy!" It wasn't true.
"He's the one that Pua cheered up at the Kahala Hilton,"
Sparky said.
Buddy said, "I don't believe it."
This sort of memory seemed wrong on a day when a nation
mourned a man whose coffin was draped with Old Glory and pulled by
six white horses on a gray caisson.
Buddy said, "Anyway, we'll never know the truth."
A short time after that, Buddy asked Puamana if the man at
the Kahala could have been Sweetie's father.
"I never sleep with no one else that month," she said.
Buddy had watched her closely. The child had made her
moralistic. He said, "You know anything about him?"
"That howlie guy," Puamana said. She smiled as she thought of
the man who had made love to her that night. "From the mainland."
"That's all you remember?"
There was a look of reminiscence like a particular memory in
her smile of concentration.
"He had one beautiful bed," she said, and laughed a
little. "But he wouldn't do it in the bed. He did it in the bathtub —
warm water, just him laying there, me on top. And after that,
standing up, his back against the wall."
"You never told me that."
"It was too crazy." She remembered something else. "He say he
have a bad back."
That one detail, the so-called "White House position,"
everyone knew about Kennedy, if you knew about Kennedy at all. Though
Puamana was innocent in an island way when she met him, and was an
attentive mother, that one-night stand seemed to corrupt her. When
she drifted into prostitution, Buddy took a greater interest in the
little girl, Sweetie, and for a time she became his hanai daughter
under the loose adoption system of the islands.
Buddy told me this story nearly thirty years later, after I
had fallen in love with Sweetie and we'd had a child of our own.
Sweetie wanted to call her Taylor, Brittany, or Logan. Logan? But I
suggested Rose, and Sweetie agreed, though she didn't know it was the
name of the child's paternal great-grandmother.
5
Baptism
The book of mine the Hawaiian staff called "hybolic" for its
pretentious size — all them big words — was the Penguin edition of
Anna Karenina, which I kept near me my first months at the Hotel
Honolulu so I could stick my nose in its pages for oxygen. Hawaii was
a sunny, lovely place, but for an alien like me it was no more than
an empty blaze of sunburn until I found love.
The problem with my plump Penguin was its unconcealable bulk,
and it was much plumper for having swelled up in the damp air. All
books fatten by the sea.
I sat and studied those big kindly waves rolling toward
Waikiki, slowly rising from the smooth sea, dividing themselves into
ranks, gathering shape near the shore to whiten in peaks before
sloping and softening, just spilling and dying, declining in a
falling off of bubble soup and draining into the drenched sand. It
was as though the whole event of each separate wave had started when
a great unseen hand far from shore had cuffed the ocean, shoving the
water into motion, creating waves, a study of beautiful endings.
My Tolstoy was regarded as a handicap and an obvious nuisance
crying out for bantering mockery. "What you gonna do with that
thing?" "That gonna keep you real busy." "More bigger than the
Bible," Keola said one day before setting down a lawn sprinkler so
casually that its spray slashed the walls of my office and wet me
through the window. The book, too, was doused, and swelled some more,
and with acute curvature of the spine stayed fatter even after its
pages had dried.
I said to Keola, who was watering the clusters of torch
ginger by the pool wall, "A man goes to the doctor for a verdict
about his illness. 'How sick am I?' he asks. The doctor says, 'Let me
put it this way. Don't start any long books.'"
In grinning querying confusion and saying "Eh?" Keola turned
to face me, playing the hose, wetting me and my book. He was a simple
soul who sometimes yanked the hooked stinger out of a centipede's
tail, and with the centipede in his mouth, he would smile at a
stranger, parting his lips to allow the centipede to slip out and
creep along his dusky cheek. "Dis what the devil look like." Keola
had found Jesus.
The hot days passed in Waikiki and already I was sick of
hearing "Pearly Shells" and "Tiny Bubbles" and "Lovely Hula Hands." I
was still single and celibate in those early days, and still believed
that I was starting anew, at an age when nothing seemed new. I was
Rimbaud, clerking and sweating in Abyssinia. I had rejected the
writing life. Writers who had abandoned writing to busy themselves in
other affairs were my patron saints: Melville, Rimbaud, T. E.
Lawrence, Salinger, Tolstoy himself. Now and then, Buddy showed up to
discuss a hotel matter. One day it was to find a way of getting the
old TV actor Jack Lord into the hotel once a week ("free food and
beverage") so that Madam Ma, our resident journalist, could mention
this fact in her newspaper column. People might visit just to be in
the same room with the former star of Hawaii Five-O. But Lord, a
reclusive sort, refused to show. Buddy said, "Tom Selleck has an
interest in the Black Orchid, but George Harrison lives on Maui.
That's a dynamite column item. 'Beatle Dines at Hotel Honolulu.'"
"What have we got to offer him?"
We were eating purple gluey poi and fatty kalua pig and
scoops of cold macaroni. Buddy was chewing and smiling. Like Vronsky,
he had a tightly packed row of white teeth, but he had Oblonsky's
problems.
"I was thinking of an all-you-can-eat buffet," Buddy said,
licking poi from his fingers, and without taking a breath
added, "Don't you get a headache reading books like that?"
"I'd get a headache if I didn't."
At that time, in the early days, I was still lusting for
Sweetie, waiting for an opportunity to take her on a date — I did not
want to be obvious and felt awkward wooing an employee. To be oblique
I asked Buddy about her mother.
"Puamana is the original 'Ukelele Lady,'" he said. "She
started out as a coconut princess."
"I take it she's not too bright."
"You sound like you think that's a bad thing."
"She's probably illiterate."
"Books aren't everything. She's got mana, like her name.
Spiritual energy." Buddy sniffed and said, "The longer you live here
in Whyee, the more you'll see that a woman's low IQ can be part of
her beauty."
"But your wife is smart."
"Stella's not my wife, she's my wahine. My fuck-buddy. In
fact, I got woman trouble. Stella's going to kill me. I still think
she's an amazing woman."
I wanted to tell him how he was a version of Oblonsky, just
to see what he would say. But after lunch, walking from the dining
room to the lobby, Buddy said, "Come here for a minute. I want you to
look at something." He knelt by the pool and so did I, beside him. He
said, "Do you see that dark thing on the bottom, near the drain?"
I leaned over and looked, and seeing nothing, leaned over
more. As I did so, overbalancing, Buddy pushed me into the pool.
"You walked straight into that one!" Buddy said as I
surfaced, thrashing in my heavy sodden clothes.
"Joker man," Lester Chen said as I passed by Reception,
dripping wet.
After that, whenever Buddy saw me he seemed to recall this
incident at the pool. The memory was a wistful glaze in his eyes, and
I could not help noticing a certain peculiarity of expression, a sort
of suppressed radiance on his face and in his whole person. That was
Oblonsky in Anna, when he was at lunch with Levin, eating oysters and
talking about love and marriage and not divulging his woman trouble,
the fact that he was having an affair with the French governess.
Around this time Keola said, "Jesus is Lord. I woulda been in
big pilikia without Jesus." I read Levin's expression of faith: What
should I have been and how should I have lived my life had I not had
those beliefs, had I not known that one had to live for God and not
for the satisfaction of one's needs. I should have robbed, lied and
murdered.
Like Levin, Keola had found Jesus, and I was so moved by his
faith that one day, checking his repair of the water fountain near
the restrooms, I found myself inquiring into the nature of his belief
and wondering at his passion.
"Jesus same like food. If you no eat, you go die," Keola
said, giving the chrome nut on the fountain one last twist. "Marry
for men and women. In Whyee we no want gay marry. Hey, I no mind
gays. I forgive them, if they repent. Some people so stupid. Like, it
one child, not one choice. It one human, not one monkey. I no tell
these school what for teach. But that bull lie that we come from
monkeys just another way of getting God out for you life. Try drink,
boss."
I did, and the fountain's stream splashed my face and went up
my nose.
"That so good for you," Keola said.
Was I saved? Keola wanted to know. I said I had been
baptized. Wasn't that enough?
He just laughed the mirthless pitying laughter of the born-
again Christian. "You never save! You one sinner! Just reading book
all the day, wicked book like that one."
"The man who wrote this book thought the same thing, funnily
enough."
"Howlie guy."
"I think you could say Tolstoy was a howlie. Anyway, he found
Jesus, like you."
"It more better if you born again. Get baptize, like this."
He flicked water on my face. "Take da plunge."
Seeing Kawika passing by with a five-gallon bucket of sticky
rice in each hand, Keola winked and flexed his arms body-builder
fashion and called out, "Hey, Rambo!"
When Rimbaud was in Harar, he wrote home: I'm weary and
bored . . . Isn't it wretched this life I lead, without family,
without friends, without intellectual companionship, lost in the
midst of these people whose lot one would like to improve, and who
try, for their part, only to exploit me . . . Obliged to chatter
their gibberish, to eat their filthy messes, to endure their
treachery and stupidity! But that isn't the worst. The worst is my
fear of becoming a slob myself, isolated as I am, and cut off from
any intellectual companionship.
But I liked Keola's euphemism for baptism — da plunge.
Trey the bartender said, "You think Samoans are tough? Only
when they're in a gang. One on one, Solies are cowards. They're big
but they're not tough. Remember that."
He squirted soda water from the bar dispenser into my drink
and it soaked my chin.
Peewee the chef said, "Popolos sink in the pool," using the
local word for black. "Ask any lifeguard. Something about popolos —
they don't float."
"Brothers don't surf," Trey said.
Such talk made me wonder why I had picked this job, and it
sent me back to my novel and a denser, subtler world: Vronsky
contemplating, in a poignant and painful moment, Anna's jealousy. He
looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had picked, in
which he found it difficult to discover the beauty that made him pick
and destroy it. And yet he felt that though when his love was
stronger, he could, had he wanted it badly, have torn the love out of
his heart, now when, as at this moment, it seemed to her that he felt
no love for her, he knew that the bond between them could not be
broken.
"That hybolic book keeping you real busy," Keola said.
I needed the novel as sustenance. Such paradoxes as I was
reading calmed me here, especially when Buddy was restless and needed
company. He would demand that we go to his favorite strip club, the
Rat Room, where he sat drinking rum at the edge of the mirrored stage
and encouraged women to squat in front of us. He slipped five-dollar
bills into their garters and gaped between their legs, nudging me.
"Look. Abe Lincoln without his teeth."
Back in my room I read Levin's reflection: If goodness has a
cause, it is no longer goodness; if it has consequences, or reward,
it is not goodness either.
The novel continued to be my oxygen, and while I worked up
the courage to make love to Sweetie, I usually fled to the beach,
where I could hide in a folding chair, reading in the sunshine as
waves broke on the sand, feeling I was fulfilling Lytton Strachey's
dream of reading between the paws of the Sphinx. Now and then I would
look up and see the brown bums of beach sleepers turned upward, the
women — but only the skinny ones — forever tugging and adjusting
their bathing suits, smoothing lotion onto their arms, sitting cross-
legged or walking with that odd climbing gait in the sand and looking
duck-butted. The waves laving the shore, the sparkle of sun in the
distance, a whole sea surface of glitter. On the beach everyone is a
body, no more or less than flesh, indistinguishable one from another,
like a great pale tribe of hairless monkeys. I found myself staring
at the small tidy panel between the women's legs, staring in fact at
nothing but space, for there was nothing to see, nothing specific,
just a wrinkle, a labial smile in the smoothness, for a bikini bottom
was both a vortex and a vanishing point.
Sometimes, staring this way, I found myself yearning for
love. And yearning, I dozed. I lay sleeping on the hot sand, snoring
on my back. Bliss.
I always woke drooling and sweating, my back coated with sand
grains, like a castaway, someone actually washed up on the beach,
feeling distant. Yet I was more rested and alert than if I had been
in bed: the heat was like a cure. The world was far away. I was a new
man here in this simple, incomplete place, just an old green volcano
in the middle of the sea. I was trying to make a life, but there was
something so melancholy and unreal about solitude in the sunshine
that it made me feel fictional.
There are no conditions to which a man cannot get accustomed,
especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.
Levin would not have believed it possible three months earlier that
he could go quietly to sleep in the circumstances he now found
himself.
Thus Levin, rusticated on his farm.
I was on the beach reading Anna Karenina one day and heard
singing, a vigorous hymn, and I looked up and saw a procession making
its way among the Japanese sunning themselves, and the children
playing, and the men selling ice cream. Keola led the procession,
singing loudly, with a woman in a white dress wearing a lei and
flowers in her hair. Others followed, some people I knew from the
hotel: Puamana, Sweetie, Kawika, Peewee, Trey and the rest of Sub-
Dude, Marlene and Pacita from Housekeeping, Wilnice and Fishlow from
the dining room, and Amo Ferretti, who did the flowers. There were
others I did not yet know — Godbolt the painter from the Big Island,
Madam Ma holding hands with her son, Chip, and Buddy's grown kids,
Bula and Melveen — each of them recording this event in his own way.
Keola walked into the surf, taking the woman in the white
dress by the arm, and he bent her backward and immersed her, all the
while shouting a prayer. The woman was soaked and joyful, spouting
water and raising her arms.
I watched, transfixed. This baptism gave the whole island a
meaning. Now it seemed like a real place, a natural font in the
middle of the ocean, built for baptisms. Although I did not in the
least believe in any feature of this ritual, I was moved, because
they believed. I beheld a powerful expression of faith. I walked
nearer, my forefinger in my book, marking my place. A sudden muscular
wave knocked me down hard and battered me, snatched my book, and
rolled me into the surf. I struggled for air, tried to right myself,
plunged in after Tolstoy, but I was tipped unsparingly again by a new
wave, was rolled again, and my power to save myself was taken from
me. More waves moved my whole body up and down before pushing me onto
the sand. All this happened in the seconds it took to baptize that
woman. My plump ruined book, more buoyant than me, danced in the foam
of the shore break.
6
The Lovers Upstairs
In the beginning, when I had asked Sweetie, "Do you want to make
love?" and she had said, "Part of me does," I took this for delicacy,
not humor. I was patient until all of her wanted it. Later I would
beckon her to room 409, and we would make love with the sexual
suddenness she gaspingly called a hurricane fuck. She had a beautiful
laugh, full of desire and willingness. That we might be caught in the
act was part of the excitement for her, and her excitement took hold
of me. We did have neighbors, for the hotel's compartments were dense
and busy.
The faded green plantation-style bungalow the height of a
coconut tree that you saw from the street, with a sign saying Hotel
Honolulu, was an optical illusion. The original building that Babe
Ruth had stayed in he would still recognize. But Buddy Hamstra had
built a squat eighty-room tower above and behind it. So what looked
like a charming island inn with a swinging sign and a monkeypod tree
in front was in fact a fairly ugly thirty-five-year-old hotel, twelve
stories high, with a roof garden (potted palms, patio furniture, cork
tiles) where guests seldom went, because it was the thirteenth floor.
You understood the Hotel Honolulu only when you got inside.
Narrow and deep, like a tall book on a low shelf, the hotel
was one of three on our side street — the Waikiki Pearl on our right,
the Kodama on our left. Our lobby, at street level, was conveniently
small. I could see everyone who entered, so I could distinguish the
guests from the gate crashers, and I was within eavesdropping range.
Being the manager here was like existing within an unpredictable
jumble of episodes and characters to which I alone knew the narrative
line.
Paradise Lost bar was unusual in Waikiki for being popular
with locals, especially when Buddy was introducing his favorite shows
on the poolside lanai: Tahitian dancers, topless hula, or the
enormous Samoan in a muumuu who husked coconuts with his teeth. The
lanai doubled as the Island Coffee Shop (thatched roof, scowling
constipated-looking tikis, glass net-floats). Just inside, sharing
Peewee's kitchen, was the Terrace dining room, unofficially known as
Buddy's.
The hotel pool was picturesque but dangerous, from the loose
tiles and slippery edges to the rusty ladder and the poor drainage.
The water itself was either algal and germ-laden or else so strongly
chlorinated as to seem toxic. Fortunately, most guests used the
beach, two streets away.
The Executive Office — my cubbyhole — opened onto the lobby,
where Lester Chen sat at Reception, his hands braced on the counter
as though steering it. Everyone got a plumeria lei at check-in, a
kiss from Marlene, and a coupon for a free Happy Hour drink at
Paradise Lost.
The man arranging the centerpiece of torch ginger in the big
lobby vase was Amo Ferretti, our flower man; the young man
saying "Stop fussing, pumpkin!" his lover, Chip. The Hawaiian with
the mop and bucket was Keola, and the cat taking up most of the lobby
sofa, Popoki, belonged to my mother-in-law, Puamana. Slack-key guitar
music, mainly Gabby Pahinui tapes, was played all day. Most of the
décor belonged to Buddy: cruise ship posters, framed feather leis,
fish traps that had been converted into lamps, bric-a-brac such as
the gaily painted signs saying, Duke Kahanamoku's and Boat Day, and
the small bubbling aquarium of island fish.
The woman entering the lobby on Rollerblades was my wife,
Sweetie, and the reason she did not ever hear you was that she was
wearing a Walkman and listening to a Stephen King audio book. The
odors in the lobby: Peewee's fresh bread, Amo Ferretti's homegrown
gardenias, and the guests' pungent sunblock. The laughter from
Paradise Lost was that of Buddy and his friends Sam Sandford, Sparky
Lemmo, Earl Willis, and the chef, Peewee Moffat.
The elevator was so unreliable we routinely put guests on the
lower floors, in case they had to use the fire stairs. Older
Americans, being fire-conscious, preferred this arrangement anyway.
A plaque screwed to the lobby wall boasted that the hotel
stood on the site of the beach hut where Robert Louis Stevenson
stayed in 1889, writing The Master of Ballantrae, when Waikiki was
swampland.
Some guests I hardly saw — they were just slammed doors or
ambiguous sounds — but the people right upstairs, in 509, were not
ambiguous at all. They made the most explicit noises I had ever
heard, and I became aware of them my first night in the hotel.
It was more than sound. It was physical motion, the walls
spoke, the room was jolted. I was well acquainted with these noises.
Once, in college, I had lived off campus, downstairs from a newly
married couple — young woman, middle-aged man — and for one whole
year I learned the rhythm and progress of such sounds: the repetitive
rising voices, the clinking glasses and laughter, the rumbling
floorboards and popping corks, the shrill teasing woman, the
throatier man, a sort of dissolving chaos — footsteps representing
whole bodies, silences standing for signals, and a shift from human
murmurs to snorts of strained furniture fittings, the squawk of seat
springs, the jingle of bed springs, the seesaw of the bed itself, the
frenzy of caged parrots in a pet shop.
To these sounds I added the man and woman. It all appealed to
my imagination. He was a grunting lover, she was a pleader —
whimpering, shifting, her cries not quite smothered by the creaking
bedstead. The lonely cries of the young woman were like a table saw
slicing through splintering plywood.
I had a girlfriend then. Unable to endure this sexual fury
upstairs, I would wake and startle her with my desire. She would
laugh softly, lean back, make a cradle of her legs, and rock me until
our bed was a squawking workshop too.
Sweetie and I had met on my first day on the job. And that
room, 409, was one of the first she showed me. I heard the urgent
murmurs, the yearning voices, the odd honks of the man, and the
sudden sawing of the bed in which the lovers upstairs were rocking.
Sweetie pretended not to hear, but when I touched her at the
window — she was showing me how to adjust the louvers — she did not
resist my hot hands.
I said, "Buddy would kill me if he knew what I was doing."
"Buddy would get a charge out of it," she said.
I stared at her.
"I don't mean to be facetious," she said.
I stared at that funny word, still damp on her lips, and
said, "Or your mother might kill me."
Puamana lived on the third floor near the back, so her
customers could come and go without passing through the lobby.
Sweetie had been raised in the hotel, and Buddy was the friendly
uncle in this arrangement.
Sweetie said, "My mother says you're a good
conversationalist."
Since her mother's contacts with men were confined to half-
hour encounters in bed, it did not take much to be regarded as a
great raconteur by Puamana.
As it was my first time in the islands, I could not gauge the
impression I made. The islanders seemed pleasant, but they were
giggly and inarticulate. They could sit for hours and say nothing. My
talk exhausted them. My questions silenced them and sometimes made
them suspicious.
Talk made Sweetie anxious, so I brought her presents — she
loved flowers and trinkets. I took her car to the Samoan car wash.
These to her were expressions of love. Her notion of intellectual
activity was Rollerblading with the joggers on the promenade at Ala
Moana Beach while listening to a Stephen King horror.
But I realized that it was fatal for me to linger in room 409
with those provocative sounds rippling through the ceiling. In my
first moments in the room I had been stirred, and, inspired by the
sensual polyphony from upstairs, nudged by the agreeable persuasion,
I had touched Sweetie for the first time.
I said, "If we don't leave here this minute you're going to
be in trouble."
She just laughed. She didn't push me away. The very fact of
being in a hotel room aroused me, but I was with a twenty-seven-year-
old girl and the people in the room above were groaning in the act of
love.
Copyright © 2001 by Paul Theroux