Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

"Don't go!" He was laughing, but his face was grubby with tears.

That sudden reappearance became famous on the island, and Buddy's howl of "I'm back!" was soon a catch phrase among his cronies. It was shouted by those men who hung around him, who thought of themselves as rascals and basked in his reflected glory, borrowing money from him, eating his food, sleeping on his numerous sofas and hammocks, running up big bills at Paradise Lost. No one mentioned Buddy's tears.

The Buddy-back-from-the-dead story made the rounds. It was told hilariously by his friends, and it was muttered resentfully by his denigrators, the few who existed — people who owed him so much money that they avoided him and nervously tried to slander him, not realizing that the worst slander was like praise to him. When I expressed surprise, not to say shock, at his audacity, his friends said, "That's nothing," and recalled other, better, bolder practical jokes he had brought off.

Buddy and his family told me everything. "He wrote a book!" he had told his kids and his friends. None of them was a reader, so I was mysterious and magical, almost priestlike, treated with a respect I was unused to in my old indoor life among bitter writers and overfamiliar readers, the well-meaning bores of literacy.

This is who I am, Buddy seemed to be saying as he wheezily related something scandalous — the time he had sealed Willis's toilet with cement;

the night at the hotel when a guest's wife passed out after Buddy seduced her and he shaved off all her pubic hair before sending her upstairs to her husband; the scoop of dog shit he jammed into Bula's hair dryer. Bula said, "I went turn it on and what a stink, yah?" Far from shocked, I felt privileged to share these confidences.

That the husband and wife still stayed at the hotel was testimony to Buddy's powers of persuasion or, I suppose, his genius for friendship. He had envious denigrators, but he had no serious enemies. Despite all the emotion, all the tears and grief, cruelly hoaxing his friends, his family, and his new wife by playing dead, he was forgiven. More than that, soon everyone was laughing about it, praising him for having fooled them.

"Buddy's amazing!" they said, and laughed. Mostly they were relieved to have him back.

Not for the first time, I thought, Buddy's a sadist, and I didn't laugh at all. Still, I was even more curious about the man. Before I expressed this curiosity, I was offered many other examples of Buddy's great stunts.

Some were equally cruel, many were expensive and convoluted, all of them seemed gratuitous. A streak of childish brutality ran through them, but when I pointed out an especially painful aspect to my informants, they said, "That's the funniest part."

Sadism, which is an element in all practical jokes, perhaps the central element, was in the grain of Buddy's character. I witnessed him torturing his kids with jokes. But he could also be a gentle soul. "Horsing around," he called his style of joking, but sadism is horsing around too, just a wilder sort of horse. Buddy's gentleness was almost childlike, verging on the ridiculous — his doting on dogs and little children, the love letters he had written to his dead wife Momi, his devotion to Stella's ashes and the green flash at sunset, his assiduous attention to his flowers. He was sentimental as well as sadistic — not so unlikely a combination of traits, a natural pair in fact. I once asked him if he thought he was cruel.

"I am an American," he said whenever he was asked a question he could not answer, or sometimes he made a silly face and screamed, "Guilty!"

From what I heard, his life so far had been a series of practical jokes. Buddy had come from a long line of pioneers and bankers who had made so much money they had never had to pretend to be respectable and instead boasted of their crudeness. His ancestors had prospered at a time when America was huge and empty and hard up. Buddy followed their example, moving westward across the ocean. He had made his money in the postwar Pacific, a boom time of relative innocence. Buddy's forebears had headed west, inventing America en route. Buddy's great-grandfather had left Chicago in the late 1860s, driving a wagon into the prairie on a dare, to impress his father, who was a feed merchant. "I'll match any capital you make, if you come home," his father said. "If you get into debt, don't come home."

Perhaps jokes ran in Buddy's family. That man never came home to claim his prize. Instead, he put up a house, made improvements, started a farm, and ran a store. In doing so, he founded a settlement, the town of

Sweetwater, where travelers stopped on their way to California to buy supplies and to take on water. Buddy's great-grandfather had discovered a spring. Water was the key: thus the name Sweetwater. The town still stands. I drove through it on the only road trip I have ever taken crosscountry. I didn't stop — people don't anymore. But years ago it was famous for its spring water and its hospitality.

The family wealth allowed Buddy's grandfather to start a bank, just as useful an institution on the way west as the dry goods store and the blacksmith's shop and the water. The town prospered. Buddy's father broke with family tradition by investing in the new movie industry, and it gave Buddy a second home — homes, rathei for Ray Hamstra, an early backer of talkies, was married and divorced five times.

"Buddy had some famous stepmothers," Peewee the chef said. Buddy's own mother — his father's first wife — had been a wellknown horsewoman in Sweetwater. Two others were actresses, one was a dancer, the last a famous singer. No one in Hawaii knew their names. Peewee said, "You'd recognize them if I could remember them."

Buddy was raised by his grandmother, the widow of the banker, but as a boy he visited his father at various addresses in southern California. Did all this shuttling around anger him and turn him into an obsessive prankster? The violence in practical jokes is undeniable, and all jokes need a victim. Buddy's friends said he laughed a lot. He was reckless. He had money, too. Perhaps he was spoiled. All these wild elements, yet he had a sense of power and did not lack confidence.

His earliest jokes were played against his father: putting Limburger cheese on the steering wheel of the old man's car was an early one, which he repeated in Hawaii against his own children when they began to drive. At the age of ten or eleven he stuck a sign saying Smile if you want a blow job under the hood of his current stepmother's car, to be seen by the next garage mechanic who checked the oil. He used that one in Hawaii later, too — such jokes had a timeless simplicity. And the fact that they often backfired (his father drove the car that day) only made them sweeter.

At the age of thirteen Buddy lost his virginity at Sunshine Saloon, Sweetwater's other useful institution, the brothel. The joke was that the woman who initiated him was his father's mistress. He stole a pair of the woman's lace underpants and sent them to his father on his birthday, with a card saying, Love, Buddy.

Around this time he created a scandal in Sweetwater — something to do with a neighbor's dog — but no one I spoke to knew the details, only that it was shocking. Eventually he told me the story, as part of a projected autobiography, and I wrote it down and typed it for him.

Preying on the passive is a standby for practical jokers, but Buddy liked preying on strong people by finding their hidden weakness. The toughest kid in his school confided to Buddy that he wanted to lose weight. Buddy said he had just the answer. He sold the big brute a worm and said, "It's a tapeworm. It works day and night. You'll never be fat again. All you have to do is eat it." The big fellow ate it, and Buddy laughed and spread the story — it was an earthworm.