Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

Dark, moody, shiftless, ravenous, abusive — they were, most of them, the opposite of the popular stereotype: happy island folk, playing the ukulele, doing the hula, and singing off-key.

They were as puritanical, censorious, and hypocritical as any priest- ridden Third Worlders could be, and in private — because Buddy said he knew their most intimate thoughts — every last one of them was racist.

"Tourists say 'aloha'! Tourists wear leis! Tourists go topless!" Buddy

said.

Local people feared the Hawaiians — the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, anyone with an investment or money, the nonconfrontational Asians who just hid when a Hawaiian blalah raised his voice.

"Hawaiians talk about culture — that's all they talk about," Buddy said, "which is funny, because I mean, what culture?"

The hula, hymn singing, high school football, and Spam.

"You once said that if you lose your language, you lose everything," Buddy said to me.

Had I said that?

"How can you have culture if you have no language?"

"I don't know."

"That's what you asked me once when we were talking story," Buddy said. "Talking story" made him sound so local. "If you don't speak Hawaiian, how can you be Hawaiian?"

"Some of them speak it."

"Maybe three. The rest of them just fiddle-fuck with a few words."

"Lost souls" just about summed them up, Buddy said. They had welcomed the missionaries — and they had swallowed them up. So blame the missionaries if you like — they had transformed the Hawaiians, taken everything away, even their memory. They could not remember a time when they were not Christians. Their history was the Bible, the language was Bible language, and even the ones who claimed they worshiped Pele the fire goddess sounded as sanctimonious and tiresome as Bible-thumping Baptists.

Topless hula was Buddy's obsession. When breasts were bared on the islands there might be hope, but until then Hawaii was just another place with a colorful minority, the least-educated state in the Union.

"What crap I've seen here," Buddy said. "Can you imagine all the Whyan nonsense I've had to listen to? It's worse than all the Paiute Indian crap I had to listen to growing up in Nevada."

Hawaiians were angry, and they were so tongue-tied they couldn't explain why they were angry, so they got angrier, Buddy said, sounding angry himself.

"They come to me for handouts. No one ever says, 'Give me money and I'll wash your car or work in your hotel.' It's just 'Hand it over.'"

The very people who were on welfare, got food stamps, and demanded handouts and government assistance were the ones who claimed they hated the government and wanted to be left alone. The reclaim-our-heritage fanatics wanted to open casinos on ancestral lands.

"They're more American than I am," Buddy said. They loved Twinkies and Christmas and beer and ball games and high school proms. The highlight of the year was the January Super Bowl, which Hawaiians watched at the beach, running an extension cord from the car. Virtually the only Hawaiian heroes were football players and entertainers like Brudda Iz.

Buddy raged on and on, and in describing the Hawaiian people, and especially Brudda Iz, he was of course describing himself.

Being deaf in one ear, Peewee walked slightly lopsided, scuffing the sole of one foot, his head cocked to the side, his finger always at his bad ear. "Pacific" he said for "specific," and "pwitty good" and "pwoblem." And you had to shout. Even so, he heard everything Buddy had said about Brudda Iz. As though there were something moral in his hearing, he never missed anything that was unjust. Brudda Iz had the sweetest voice imaginable and could sing in the most plangent falsetto, Peewee said. He was the nearest thing there was to Hawaiian royalty; his size and his presence proved that.

"Don't talk to me about Whyan royalty," Buddy said as Pinky pushed him through the lobby in his wheelchair. "Most Hawaiian royals are gay or blond or howlie-looking or all three. They boast that they're ali'i, as though being a noble meant something."

"Don't it?" Peewee said.

"Only if you're Yerpeen," he said.

Peewee, a pacifist, just smiled and waited for Buddy to be rolled away on the rubber tires of his wheelchair. He reminded me of someone I knew well, but at first I could not make the connection. He was kind, generous, solicitous, most contented when he was pleasing someone. He

seemed very familiar to me in this, and I liked to be with him for this reason.

His long residence in Hawaii and his travels in the Pacific had left him half deaf, blotchy and liver-spotted, blind in one eye, and he was small, not much taller than my eight-year-old Rose. As a chef and a habitual sampler of his own cooking, particularly his creamy coconut cake, he was plumper than he should have been. He had had a heart bypass, and because a vein had been torn out of his leg, he got calf cramps when he walked upstairs. He was about seventy-five and uncomplaining. Because of his sunny disposition, he seemed to me a healthy man. He said his afflictions were part of being old. He had adjusted to them. "Lots of people have it worse than me." He was always bright — up early, accommodating, helpful to me, praising me when I was least deserving of it, as though to buck me up with encouragement.

To be with him was always a pleasure and a relief, for like many other thoroughly sane and healthy people I had known, he made me feel stronger and gave me hope for myself.

After a few years of working with Peewee, I was able to make the connection. As with Leon Edel, he had many of my father's traits: upbeat, no grudges, an avoider of conflict, not a forced smiler but a naturally happy man. Being with him was like being with my father, whom I had loved. Treating him like my father, I was rewarded, for he became more like my father. "I'm a hollow oak," my father had said in his old age. After my father had been dead for some years, I began to see that many kind old men resembled him in the way he talked, deflecting hostility, offering generosity. In his apparent meekness there was such strength it helped me understand the Sermon on the Mount.

Peewee did not contradict Buddy to his face, nor even behind his back. In a casual way he said that even if some of what Buddy had said was true, it wasn't the whole story. Hawaiians could be just as lovely or mean as anyone else.

"Back in the days when Buddy was happy, he used to get along great with the locals, and he loved Whyan music," Peewee said. "We played it at night, at sunset, and Momi would do the hula for him. I never saw a happier guy than Buddy."

Peewee had once been married to an island woman. "I feel a lot of aloha for them," he said, using a characteristic turn of phrase. When he thought of Hawaiian history he got miserable.

"These people were here when we came. It's their land. They are kanaka maoli. If you don't know that, you don't know anything," Peewee said. "But that's why history is so sad."

Nothing on earth was more beautiful to him than a woman doing the hula at sunset — and all women were beautiful doing the hula, no matter what they looked like when they weren't doing it. The music was sweet, he said, and even the corny tunes, like "Lovely Hula Hands," were wonderful. As for the shouted chants, they gave him chicken skin.

Hawaiian-style objects — the calabashes, the wooden poi bowls, the old fish hooks — pleased him. They might look simple but thought had gone into them. What looked to us like a pile of stones might be an altar to a Hawaiian, and when you understood it was an altar, you saw how important it was and everything around it; you knew why it was there. Buddy had once known that. You had to be happy to understand, and understanding made you even happier.