The Curse of Lono, Page 3

  ADVENTURES IN THE DUMB LIFE

  My friend Gene Skinner met us at the airport in Honolulu, parking his black GTO convertible up on the sidewalk by the baggage carousel and fending off public complaints with a distracted wave of his hand and the speedy behavior of a man with serious business on his mind. He was pacing back and forth in front of his car, sipping from a brown bottle of Primo beer and ignoring the oriental woman wearing a meter maid's uniform who was trying to get his attention as he scanned the baggage lobby.

  I saw him from the top of the escalator and I knew we would have to be quick with the luggage transfer. Skinner was so accustomed to working in war zones that he would not see anything wrong with driving up on the sidewalk in the middle of an angry crowd to pick up whatever he'd come for. . . which was me, in this case, so I hurried toward him with a businesslike smile on my face. "Don't worry," he was saying. "We'll be out of here in a minute."

  Most people seemed to believe him, or at least wanted to. Everything about him suggested a person who was better left alone. The black GTO had a menacing appearance, and Skinner looked meaner than the car. He was wearing a white linen reef jacket with at least thirteen custom-built pockets to fit everything from a phosphorous grenade to a waterproof pen. His blue silk slacks were sharply creased and he wore no socks, only cheap rubber sandals that slapped on the tile as he paced. He was a head taller than anyone else in the airport and his eyes were hidden behind blue-black Saigon-mirror sunglasses. The heavy, square-linked gold Bhat chain around his neck could only have been bought in some midnight jewelry store on a back street in Bangkok, and the watch on his wrist was a gold Rolex with a stainless steel band. His whole presence was out of place in a crowd of mainland tourists shuffling off an Aloha flight from San Francisco. Skinner was not on vacation.

  He saw me as I approached, and held out his hand. "Hello, Doc," he said with a curious smile. "I thought you quit this business."

  "I did," I said. "But I got bored."

  "Me too," he said. "I was on my way out of town when they called me. Somebody from the Marathon committee. They needed an official photographer, for a thousand dollars a day."

  He glanced down at a brace of new-looking Nikons on the front seat of the GTO. "I couldn't turn them down," he said. "It's free money."

  "Jesus," I said, "you're a photographer now?"

  He stared down at his feet for a moment, then pivoted slowly to face me, rolling his eyes and baring his teeth to the sun. "This is the Eighties, Doc. I'm whatever I need to be."

  Skinner was no stranger to money. Or to lying, either, for that matter. When I knew him in Saigon he was working for the CIA, flying helicopters for Air America and making what some people who knew him said was more than $20,000 a week in the opium business.

  I never talked about money with him and he had a visceral hatred of journalists, but we soon became friends and I spent a lot of time during the last weeks of the war smoking opium with him on the floor of his room in the Continental Palace. Mr. Hee brought the pipe every afternoon around three -- even on the day his house in Cholon was hit by a rocket -- and the guests lay down in silence to receive the magic smoke.

  That is still one of my clearest memories of Saigon -- stretching out on the floor with my cheek on the cool white tile and the dreamy soprano babble of Mr. Hee in my ears as he slithered around the room with his long black pipe and his little bunsen burner, constantly refilling the bowl and chanting intensely in a language that none of us knew.

  "Who are you working for these days?" Skinner asked.

  "I'm covering the race for a medical journal," I said.

  "Wonderful," he said quickly. "We can use a good medical connection. What kind of drugs are you carrying?"

  "Nothing," I said. "Absolutely nothing."

  He shrugged, then looked up as the carousel began moving and the bags started coming down the chute. "Whatever you say, Doc," he said. "Let's load your stuff in the car and get out of here before they grab me for felony menacing. I'm not in the mood to argue with these people."

  The crowd was getting restive and the oriental policewoman was writing a ticket. I lifted the beer bottle out of his hand and took a long swallow, then tossed my leather satchel in the back seat of his car and introduced him to my fiancée. "You must be crazy," she said, "to park on a sidewalk like this."

  "That's what I get paid for," he said. "If I was sane we'd have to carry your bags all the way to the parking lot."

  She eyed him warily as we began loading luggage. "Stand aside!" he barked at a child who had wandered in front of the car. "Do you want to be killed?"

  The crowd fell back at that point. Whatever we were doing was not worth getting killed for. The child disappeared as I trundled a big aluminum suitcase off the carousel, almost dropping it as I tossed it back to Skinner, who caught it before it could bounce and tucked it neatly into the back seat of the convertible.

  The meter maid was writing another citation, our third in ten minutes, and I could see she was losing her grip. "I give you sixty seconds," she screamed. "Then I have you towed away!"

  He patted her affectionately on the shoulder, then got in the car and started the engine, which came suddenly alive with a harsh metallic roar. "You're too pretty for this kind of chickenshit work," he said, handing her a card that he'd picked off his dashboard. "Call me at the office," he told her. "You should be posing for naked postcards."

  "What?" she yelled, as he eased the car into reverse.

  The crowd parted sullenly, not happy to see us escape. "Call the police!" somebody shouted. The meter maid was yelling into her walkie-talkie as we moved into traffic, leaving our engine noise behind.

  Skinner lifted another bottle of Primo out of a small plastic cooler on the floor of the front seat, then steered with his knees while he jerked off the top and lit a cigarette. "Where to, Doc?" he asked. "The Kahala Hilton?"

  "Right," I said. "How far is it?"

  "Far," he said. "We'll have to stop for more beer."

  I leaned back on the hot leather seat and closed my eyes. There was a strange song about "hula hula boys" on the radio, a Warren Zevon tune:

  . . . Ha'ina 'ia mai ana ka puana

  Ha'ina 'ia mai ana ka puana. . .

  I saw her leave the luau

  With the one who parked the cars

  And the fat one from the swimming pool

  They were swaying arm in arm. . .

  Skinner stomped on the gas and we shot through a sudden opening to the inside, missing the tailgate of a slow-moving pineapple truck by six inches and swooping through a pack of mongrel dogs on their way across the highway. We hit gravel and the rear end started coming around, but Skinner straightened it out. The dogs held their ground for an instant, then scattered in panic as he leaned out of the car and smacked one of them on the side of the head with his beer bottle. He was a big yellow brute with scrawny flanks and the long dumb jaw of a tenth-generation cur; and he had charged the GTO with the back-alley dumbness of a bully that had been charging things all his life, and always seen them back off. He came straight at the left front wheel, yapping wildly, and his eyes got suddenly huge when he realized, too late, that Skinner was not going to swerve. He braced all four paws on the hot asphalt, but he was charging too fast to stop. The GTO was going about fifty in low gear. Skinner kept his foot on the accelerator and swung the bottle like a polo mallet. I heard a muffled smack, then a hideous yelping screech as the beast went tumbling across the highway and under the wheels of the pineapple truck, which crushed it.

  "They're a menace," he said, tossing the neck of the bottle away. "Utterly vicious. They'll jump right into your car at a stoplight. It's one of the problems with driving a convertible."

  My fiancée was weeping hysterically and the warped tune was still coming out of the radio:

  I could hear their ukeleles playing

  Down by the sea. . .

  She's gone with the hula hula boys

>   She don't care about me

  Ha'ina 'ia mai ana ka puana

  Ha'ina 'ia mai ana ka puana. . .

  Skinner slowed down as we approached the exit to downtown Honolulu. "Okay, Doc," he said. "It's time to break out the drugs. I feel nervous."

  Indeed, I thought. You murdering swine. "Ralph has it," I said quickly. "He's waiting for us at the hotel. He has a whole Alka-Seltzer bottle full of it."

  He moved his foot off the brake and back to the accelerator as we passed under a big green sign that said "Waikiki Beach l½." The smile on his face was familiar. The giddy, screw-headed smirk of a dope fiend ready to pounce. I knew it well.

  "Ralph is paranoid," I said. "We'll have to be careful with him."

  "Don't worry about me," he said. "I get along fine with the English."

  We were in downtown Honolulu now, cruising along the waterfront. The streets were full of joggers fine-tuning their strides for the big race. They ignored passing traffic, which made Skinner nervous.

  "This running thing is out of control," he said. "Every rich liberal in the Western world is into it. They run ten miles a day. It's a goddamn religion."

  "Do you run?" I asked.

  He laughed. "Hell yes, I run. But never with empty hands. We're criminals, Doc. We're not like these people and I think we're too old to learn."

  "But we are professionals," I said. "And we're here to cover the race."

  "Fuck the race," he said. "We'll cover it from Wilbur's front yard -- get drunk and gamble heavily on the football games."

  John Wilbur, a pulling guard on the Washington Redskins team that went to the Super Bowl in 1973, was another old friend from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear, who had finally settled down enough to pass for a respectable businessman in Honolulu. His house on Kahala Drive in the high-rent section was situated right on the course for this race, about two miles from the finish line. . . It would be a perfect headquarters for our coverage, Skinner explained. We would catch the start downtown, then rush out to Wilbur's to watch the games and abuse the runners as they came by the house, then rush back downtown in time to cover the finish.

  "Good planning," I said. "This looks like my kind of story."

  "Not really," he said. "You've never seen anything as dull as one of these silly marathons. . . but it's a good excuse to get crazy."

  "That's what I mean," I said. "I'm entered in this goddamn race." He shook his head. "Forget it," he said. "Wilbur tried to pull a Rosie Ruiz a few years ago, when he was still in top shape -- he jumped into the race about a half mile ahead of everybody at the twenty-four-mile mark, and took off like a bastard for the finish line, running at what he figured was his normal 880 speed. . ." He laughed. "It was horrible," he continued. "Nineteen people passed him in two miles. He went blind from vomiting and had to crawl the last hundred yards." He laughed again. "These people are fast, man. They ran right over him."

  "Well," I said, "so much for that. I didn't want to enter this goddamn thing anyway. It was Wilbur's idea."

  "That figures," he said. "You want to be careful out here. Even your best friends will lie to you. They can't help themselves."

  We found Ralph slumped at the bar in the Ho-Ho Lounge, cursing the rain and the surf and the heat and everything else in Honolulu. He had waded out from the beach for a bit of the fine snorkeling that Wilbur had told us about -- but before he could even get his head in the water a wave lifted him up and slammed him savagely into a coral head, ripping a hole in his back and crushing a disc in his spine. Skinner tried to cheer him up with a few local horror stories, but Ralph would have none of it. His mood was ugly, and it became even uglier when Skinner demanded cocaine.

  "What are you talking about?" Ralph screamed.

  "The Dumb Dust, man," Skinner said. "The lash, the crank, the white death. . . I don't know what you limeys call it. . ."

  "You mean drugs?" Ralph said finally.

  "OF COURSE I MEAN DRUGS!" Skinner screamed. "You think I came here to talk about art?"

  That finished that. Ralph limped away in a funk, and even the bartender got weird.

  FIRE IN THE NUTS

  We settled down at the bar and watched the rain lash the palm trees around on the beach. The Ho Ho Lounge was open on three sides and every few minutes a gust of warm rain blew in from the sea.

  We were the only customers. The Samoan bartender mixed our margaritas in silence, a rigid smile on his face. To our left, on a rock in a small freshwater pool, two penguins stood solemnly side by side and watched us drinking, their deep unblinking brown eyes as curious as the bartender's.

  Skinner tossed them a chunk of sashimi, which the taller one caught in mid-air and gobbled instantly, whacking the smaller bird out of his way with a flip of his short black wing.

  "Those birds are weird," Skinner said. "I've had some real peculiar conversations with them."

  He had sulked for a while after Ralph spiked his vision of wallowing in pure London Merck for the rest of the day, but he accepted it as just another one of those illogical flare-ups that come with the territory.

  After three or four rounds the glint was back in his voice and he was looking at the penguins with the lazy eyes of a man who would not be bored too much longer.

  "They're a husband and wife team," he said. "The old man is the big one; he'd peddle her ass for a handful of fish." He glanced over at me. "You think Ralph likes penguins?"

  I stared at the bird.

  "Never mind," he said. "He'd probably kill the poor beast anyway. The British will fuck anything. They're all perverts."

  The bartender had his back to us, but I knew he was listening. The rigid smile on his face was looking more and more like a grimace. How many times had he stood calmly back there on the duckboards and listened to respectable-looking people talk about raping the hotel penguins?

  On the first day of December [1778]. . . he recognized that he was raising the greatest of all the islands he had discovered: what the natives appeared to call, and Cook wrote, "Owhyhee." By the next morning they were close in to the spectacular shore of massive cliffs, spines of land thrusting out into headlands, white streaks of great waterfalls tumbling into the white surf, more rivers emerging from deep valleys. Inland there were ravines with thundering torrents, a landscape of mixed barrenness and fruitfulness, a pocked landscape rising slowly and then higher and higher to the summits that were snow-capped. Snow in the tropics! Another new discovery, another new paradox. Here, it seemed, was another rich land, and far greater in extent than even Tahiti. Through a telescope, thousands of natives could be seen pouring from their dwellings and their places of work, and streaming towards the cliff tops to stare out and hold aloft white strips of cloth as if greeting a new messiah.

  Richard Hough

  The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook

  "How long is this goddamn rain going to last?" I asked.

  Skinner looked out at the beach. "God knows," he said. "This is what they call 'Kona Weather.' The winds get turned around and the weather comes up from the south. Sometimes it lasts for nine or ten days."

  I didn't really care. It was enough, at this point, to be away from the snow drifts on my porch in Colorado. We called for another brace of margaritas and relaxed to talk for a while. I kept one eye on the bartender while Skinner told me about Hawaii.

  People get edgy when the Kona weather hits. After nine or ten straight days of high surf and no sun you can get your spleen kicked completely out of your body on any street in Honolulu, just for honking at a Samoan. There is a large and increasingly obvious Samoan population in Hawaii. They are big, dangerous people with uncontrollable tempers and their hearts are filled with hate by the sound of an automobile horn, regardless of who's getting honked at.

  Caucasians are called "haole people" by the native Hawaiians and racial violence is a standard item in the daily newspapers and on the evening TV news.

  The stories are grisly, and a few are probabl
y true. A current favorite in Waikiki is the one about "A whole family from San Francisco" -- a lawyer, his wife and three children -- who got raped by a gang of Koreans while strolling on the beach at sunset, so close to the Hilton that people sipping pineapple daiquiris on the hotel veranda heard their screams until long after dark, but they shrugged off the noise as nothing more than the shrieking of sea gulls in a feeding frenzy.

  "Don't go near the beach after dark," Skinner warned, "unless you feel seriously bored."

  The Korean community in Honolulu is not ready, yet, for the melting pot. They are feared by the haoles, despised by the Japs and Chinese, scorned by Hawaiians and occasionally hunted for sport by gangs of drunken Samoans, who consider them vermin, like wharf rats and stray dogs. . .

  "And stay away from Korean bars," Skinner added. "They're degenerate scum -- cruel, bloodthirsty little bastards. They're meaner than rats and a hell of a lot bigger than most dogs, and they can kick the shit out of anything that walks on two legs, except maybe a Samoan."

  I shot a quick look at our bartender, shifting my weight on the stool and planting both feet on the floor. But he was working the adding machine, apparently deaf to Skinner's raving. What the hell? I thought. He can only catch one of us. I picked my Zippo off the bar and casually buttoned my wallet-pocket.

  "My grandfather was Korean," I said. "Where can we meet these people?"

  "What?" he said. "Meet them?"

  "Don't worry," I said. "They'll know me."

  "Fuck 'em," he said. "They're not people. It'll be another hundred years before we can even think about letting Koreans mate with anything human."

  I felt vaguely sick, but said nothing. The bartender was still engrossed in his money-work.

  "Forget it," Skinner said. "Let me tell you a negro story. It'll get your mind off Koreans."