Paul Theroux: Hotel Honolulu

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."

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.