Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

"Paradise Lost."

"Whatever." He had the blinking, stammering delivery of someone whose brain had been fried by chemical substances — overstimulated and fused circuits that made him smile or tune out for no obvious reason. "He's in the bar and a woman offers him a grand to go upstairs and hose her."

"Let me get this straight," I said, because one element in the story sounded familiar. "This surfer guy was offered money to sleep with a woman at the hotel?"

"Yeah," he said eagerly, reminded of what he had just said. "He's hanging out, drinking at the bar, and a woman comes up to him and buys him a drink. She's some tourist chick from the mainland, right? With a killer body. It's her birthday. She tells him that she's alone and wants a really nice birthday present. 'Like what?' Cody asks. 'Like you.'"

In a halting way, blurring his mimicry, attempting the two voices, pausing too long, sucking on the joint, he conveyed the information that Cody had demanded a thousand dollars, that the woman had laughed and said, "Follow me."

She had been wearing a light raincoat, buttoned to the neck, which was not odd, as a drizzle had been falling on Waikiki. When Cody had hesitated, the young woman unbuttoned a few buttons and showed that she was wearing lingerie underneath, nothing more. This glimpse gave Cody traction.

"It was like this incredible honeymoon suite at the hotel, with a huge mirror on the ceiling."

I nodded, because there was no such suite.

"The woman takes off the raincoat and she's just wearing this Victoria's Secret stuff. She hands him a Polaroid camera and says, 'You be the photographer."

"What was the point of the Polaroids?"

"Chicks like that love them. They collect them. But Cody was still sort of smiling. So she puts a porno on the VCR, to get him going."

I did not want to spoil a good story by telling him there were no VCRs in the rooms.

"The babe in the porno is wearing a dog collar and playing doggy. So this one with Cody does the same thing, puts on a dog collar and gives Cody a leash to hold. She shows him the stud in her tongue and goes down on him."

"What happened to the Polaroids?"

Camera, leash, collar, porno, mirror, stud — specific details, but the arrangement was vague. He didn't hear me.

"She's like, 'I'm your doggy. I'm your slave.'"

I said, "What kind of birthday present is this?"

"A skeevy one," he said, licking his teeth. "They order room service. They're in the Jacuzzi. When the food comes, they're like 'Hey, get in with us' to the Room Service babe."

No Jacuzzi either, and the Room Service waiter, our only one at night, would have been the limping middle-aged seasonal hires, either Charlie Wilnice or Ben Fishlow.

"She gets in with them! They do a few joints and pretty soon the two chicks are scarfing each other on the floor while Cody is standing over them choking his bone."

He thought he had impressed me, I laughed so hard, but I was laughing at the language. My laughter was a goad, so he laughed too, and went on.

"The husband comes in. He sees what's going down and there's a huge fight. Cody punches him out. The husband's covered in blood. He's just lying there. The women are so excited by the fight that they want more action. They both go down on Cody and he comes all over them. They love it. They're licking each other's faces and snapping Polaroids. Cody walks out with a thousand bucks."

Now he took a long, squeaking pull on the joint and sucked his teeth as he filled his lungs with smoke.

"Cody told you this?"

"He told TJ. TJ's a friend of Dean. Dean told me."

"What happened to the husband? the Room Service girl?"

"I don't know. They probably just grooved on it."

"What about all the blood?"

"Don't ask me. Hey, you're the one who works there."

For all its inventions and falsifications and outright lies, his story seemed truer than the one I had witnessed, for nothing was truer than fantasy. A little cry from inside the house signaled that Buddy's own fantasy had ended.

One of the happiest aspects for me of hotelkeeping in Honolulu was that we secretly assigned names to our guests — but only the odd, the impossible, the most colorful ones. "Chewy," "Dilbert," "Pac-Man," "Samurai," and one whose nose was always running, "Hana Bata." It made them easier to remember. I supplied "Mr. Prufrock," "Bunbury," "Mrs.

Alfred Uruguay," and "Pinfold." I saw that my staff could be observant and imaginative and witty; I felt I had succeeded with them when one of my names was accepted. Naming these people satisfied my need to fictionalize what I was seeing in this new world of mine. They never lost their names. "Crazy Al's coming back next week," someone would say, and we knew what we were in for. One guest who was always making dire predictions was awarded the name Hobart Flail.

The most apparently helpful, complaisant people are often the nosiest, the most intrusive and manipulative. Hobart Flail, here for his annual two weeks, was one of those, and more. He was a large, dark, horse-faced man who always looked uncomfortable — too many clothes, too hot, needed a shave, hair matted and tangled. Seeing Rose for the first

time, he said to me, "Be very careful. A child like that is always in danger. This is a world that devours its young."

He seemed to represent the modern tendency in public utterance toward prediction. Much of the day's news fell into the category of the prophetic — the direction of the economy, the eventual fate of a well- known figure, the outlook for a team, the prospects for a country, a yet-to- be-revealed trend. Was there anything more maddening than these overcertain and uncheckable pronouncements? There are news hounds who write about what has happened, but nothing is newer than a forecast of what is going to happen — the ultimate news is prophecy. Hobart Flail, who implied that he had the gift of prevision, was always making such forecasts, but in a sadistic manner, as though thrashing us. And he alone had the word. "What most people don't realize," he would begin, and he always finished with, "Very few people know this." It was always bad news — prophecy is often pessimistic, a kind of hostile gloating misery. He often said, "We live in wolfish times."

Flail had insulted me by predicting misfortune for Rose. He said he was doing me a favor. Usually he concentrated on larger issues. He surprised me one day by saying, "The whole Pacific is overfished. Fish stocks are at dangerously low levels. People don't realize that there is nothing for the sharks to eat. It's obvious they'll start feeding on swimmers."

If he had smiled even slightly, you would have taken this for black comedy. But no, he was serious.

"It's also the graywater runoff," he said. "Golf course pesticides are leaching into the aquifer. Very few people know that the low rainfall is already creating drought conditions and threatening the ecosystem. Bad water. Rationing. Toxic spillages are killing the reefs. Nick your shin on a reef and it's certain death."

Ozone depletion, ciguatera in sashimi, leptospirosis from rat urine in the Ala Wai Canal, projected drownings, fetal alcohol syndrome, the symptoms of lupus and osteoporosis and lymphoma, the frequency of cruise ships' tipping raw sewage offshore — he knew it all. And he knew medical terms. One guest announced at the bar in Paradise Lost that he had just peed red. He had eaten beets for dinner, but Hobart Flail said, "Renal carcinoma."

A guest who stayed with us to scuba-dive — "Scooby-Doo," from St. Louis — cut his leg on some coral.

"Even if you have that seen to, it's as good as infected. You're going to lose the leg."

Scooby stared at him and then cursed and limp-hopped away, favoring the leg.