Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

"He's locked and loaded," Sandford said.

"You once asked me what a ratfuck is," Buddy said to me. "This is a ratfuck."

He was drunk, with a sense of relief — relieved to know that the others were too, and safe because of it, so it was like a brotherhood. When had I ever asked him what a ratfuck was?

All their slurred and lispy talk of foreign places suggested bed, implied sex, and the word "woman" was unspoken so far, yet conspicuous. Ihere was a woman in each man's story, in the boots, in the bedroom, in the jungle hut. Each spider was a woman, each leggy centipede, the small rat was a woman, the fungus a woman, the "ookoos" in your crotch, the mentions of poison and bites — women.

"This girl in Pukapuka," Lemmo said. What girl in Pukapuka? "She scratched and cut me until I was bleeding. "She had these sharp little teeth. You wouldn't believe the things she did to my body."

"Yes, I would," Buddy said. "It's in the book."

"I had one of them little Negritos in my room one morning," Willis

said.

He was going to say more, only then an older woman walked by, a hotel guest I recognized as Mrs. Bailey Nivens from Tucson. She moved in that fastidious and balancing manner of a top heavy woman, her hands slightly raised like an overweight acrobat treading a tightrope, the hands giving a stateliness to her toppling gait. Buddy and his friends fell silent, like bad boys caught boasting. She was about their age, mid-sixties, yet they looked utterly unlike her, furtive, conspiratorial, shamed by her

motherly nearness. Willis blew out his cheeks and held his words until she went by.

"She must've come through the floor, this Negrito woman, oiled her body and squeezed through. She was naked and greasy. She looked like a dead monkey in the moonlight. I says, 'Get over here,' and she climbs into my rack and starts giggling."

"Amazing little people," Lemmo said. "And they fight like terriers."

"Reason she was there was we were having trouble with the locals. This was in Mindanao," Willis said. "They were stealing parts off our vehicles and hoisting our dogs. Then we sent word to the Negritos."

"Negrito women look like cute little girls with huge knockers," Buddy

said.

"You can buy them — their families sell them. I knew a guy who outright owned one," Willis said. "Anyway, these Negritos went into the jungle and killed some monkeys and cut off their heads, about ten of them. They stuck the monkey heads on posts around the camp. We never had any trouble from the locals after that."

"Hoisted your dogs so they could eat them," Peewee said. "They marinate the dead dog in Seven-Up to get the smell off, and then stew it with potatoes and pineapple chunks."

"I've eaten that," Buddy said. He laughed in a chewing way. "I've eaten pretty much everything."

"Know how we used to catch monkeys when we were in New Guinea?" Sandford said. "We used to get 'em drunk."

Peewee said, "How'd you get 'em to drink?"

"We'd go buy a big bottle of the cheapest wine we could find. Then we'd go to where there were a bunch of 'em in the trees and pour it in a big flat bowl, put it on the ground, move off a little, and just sit there and watch. Sooner or later one would come down and taste it, splashing some into his mouth with his hand. Then he'd go back up into the trees. After a while, he'd come back and splash some more. There'd be others, too. Pretty soon one of them would be jumping back and forth in the branches, and he'd miss and fall to the ground. Ihen we'd run in and grab him and put him in a sack and run like hell. All the others would start throwing sticks and stones at us. If we got a real young one, the mother could be real tough. She'd hit you with a stick and knock you down."

Willis said, "I saw a woman in the Philippines giving a monkey a bath. I don't know why, but it made me real horny."

Lemmo said, "I once saw a woman breastfeeding a dog in Tonga. A little puppy."

"Most of the things you see in the Pacific were done in Whyee once," Buddy said. "Probably right here where we're standing."

Ihe five of them straightened their backs and blinked through the entrance of Paradise Lost into the lobby.

"I wonder if that's in the book," Buddy said, and leaned over the counter, grunting at Tran to pass him the thick book, which was well thumbed enough to be a Bible.

"Lots of times I've seen women getting it on with dogs in Olongapo," Willis said. "In bars. That used to be the big thing. 'Hey, Joe, you wanna see girl and dog?"

Buddy opened the Malinowski. He moved his lips, looking prayerful as he read. "It mentions a guy who was caught sodomizing a dog. He was a laughingstock."

"Speaking of tattoos," Peewee said — who had said anything about tattoos? — "that Marquesan woman I lived with in lahiti was covered in tattoos. She used to cheat at cards. I brought her here once. She wanted a guitar. We visited my ex-wife and my mother. They couldn't believe I was with a sixteen-year-old. She waited on me like I was a king. I said, 'She's not my girlfriend. She's my pet."

"I had one of them in Zamboanga," Willis said. "She was just a kid. We used to fight and pretty soon we'd be in bed."

"That's in the book," Buddy said. "I remember one ratfuck we had in Waimanalo. I was completely shitfaced. Momi was away. I woke up with a little wahine. She says, 'Mahalo. That was nice.' I didn't remember a thing!

I says, 'Hey, how old are you?' She says, 'Fifteen next birthday.'"

"That's in the ballpark," Sandford said.

Willis said, "I knew this guy in the Philippines who had three girls living with him, none of them older than sixteen. His rule was that one of them had to be naked all the time. They took turns. It was kind of a harem-type thing."

Sandford said, "We had a welder in our crew in Bangkok who used to pay a hooker to go with him to restaurants and bars. He'd get her to jerk him off under the table while he looked out the window making faces at the people going by.',

"Like these massage parlors in Whyee," Peewee said. "Places to get hand jobs from Flips for thirty-five bucks."

"Peewee knows the exact price!"

"Lap dancing costs twenty. It's just kids."

"Lots of the hookers in Fiji were schoolkids making a few extra bucks," Lemmo said. "Wherever there's Christians, there's hookers."

"I don't blame them. If I was a sixteen-year-old girl, do you think I'd be working at McDonald's? I'd be selling my ass," Buddy said.

"And you'd starve," Sandford said.

Peewee said, "Friend of mine meets a girl in Aina Haina once a week. She's part Whyan. They have sex and then he takes her grocery shopping."

"I know islands where having sex is like shaking hands," Willis said, and showed the gap in his teeth.

"'Me want mary,' we'd say in New Guinea," Sandford said. "Meaning a woman."

Buddy said, "When I was on Kauai in the sixties there was a hippie commune. I went over there whenever I was horny. They called me Pop. I used to nail the hippie girls in the back of my van."

"I once knew a woman who had five vibrators," Lemmo said.

"It's funny about Pinky. It's the best sex I've ever had in my life."

"She's crazy," Willis said.

"See, that's the reason."

"Just after the war, the best place to be was Japan," Sandford said. "They were defeated, humiliated, their currency was in the toilet. The country was practically destroyed. Everyone was looking for a dollar."

"Korea was like that," Peewee said. "Korean women. ." "You could get a Japanese woman to do anything! It was normal for them to be submissive, but after the war they were willing to be slaves. I had one that used to feed me with chopsticks. She gave me baths. She did it naked and then I realized I wanted her to be dressed. She put on a kimono and that did it for me. I was just a kid!"