Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

"Nuh," Pinky said.

"Maybe when you were little?"

"Then I was a little animal."

That was the image I had always had. It was easy to see her crouched on her dirty knees, sniffing and blinking in a foul hut on a hillside.

"Maybe when you first came to the States?"

Pinky just held her glass in both skinny hands and glowered, saying nothing.

"The best day of my life started off like this," Buddy said.

"Frustrating, things going wrong, guests on my case, the help going nuts, the plumber not showing up, checks bouncing. Everything sideways."

"What he saying?"

"Shut up. I want this in the book."

"What book?"

"Shut up."

Pinky sucked on her straw, silent but unafraid.

"But I was so used to it I didn't even realize how angry I was. You know me — I'm the one who doesn't take anything seriously. I'm the clown."

His attempt at making a funny face only made him look insane and possibly dangerous and more ill than ever.

"That night I discovered that the till was short about five hundred bucks. I figured the barman had stolen it, but how could I prove it? I was married to Momi then. She wasn't happy."

At the mention of Momi's name, Pinky became apprehensive. She was at her most animal in this mood, seeming to sense in advance when a threat was neai something upsetting about to be said or done — like a ground-feeding creature, spooked by instinct, a faint whir of peculiar molecules, a vagrant smell — and she made as though to flee. Buddy pushed her back on her bar stool.

"I was on Kalakaua, near the taxi stand. I had to get to the bank to drop the cash I had in the night deposit. Three thousand bucks in cash and traveler's checks."

He savored the moment, nodding at me, meaning, This goes into the

book.

"Just then, two guys came over. One of them held the taxi, the other walked up to me. They were grinning — I knew exactly what was happening. They were going to rob me and take off in the taxi."

Hearing this ominous prologue, Pinky gathered herself compactly, like a monkey on a rock, moved her elbows against her sides, drew up her knees, shortened her neck. She seemed to know that a vicious blow was about to be struck.

"They didn't know that I'd had a bad day," Buddy said. "The guy next to me said 'Hand it over' while the other one opened the taxi door."

"So did you hand it over?" I asked.

Making me wait, calling attention to himself, Buddy gargled with his ice cubes, cracked them with his back teeth, spat them back into his glass, and gave me a taunting smile.

"I didn't know what got into me. I pulled back as if to run, kind of sucker-punched him, and then swung — a roundhouse — and connected with the side of his jaw. I felt his jaw crack, the bone under my fist. I loved the snapping noise. My fist felt like a rock. Every bad thing in my body shot up my arm and passed through my fist into that guy's jaw."

He weighed his fist as though he were measuring a handful of sand.

"It was the best feeling in the world. I had never punched anyone before. And not just the feeling but the sound of the crunch, like a basket breaking and seeing his eyes go dead and his legs wobble. He just crashed down. It was beautiful."

"Lucky punch," Pinky said, but she winced as she said it, for she had been startled by the story.

"Maybe. But it worked. I wanted to hit him again, but he was gone — on his back. He cracked his head open." Buddy sipped his drink, loving this. "The friend jumped over and helped him. I thought of hitting the friend too. My fist was a weapon of destruction. But then they both took a hike."

He swilled and swallowed the last of his drink with a satisfied gasp.

"That was the greatest day of my life. Nothing can compare with that. What did you think I would tell you? Something about sex or money? No, this was better than anything."

Now Pinky was fearful, looking at him in alarm, silent on her stool.

"That's for the book," Buddy said. "I'll tell you the rest later."

On another average day at the hotel, under the lovely sponged- looking skies of Honolulu, a young woman checking in asked for a discount because she was a travel writer. Guests could be ruthless, but ones claiming to be writers were the worst. I was summoned to the front desk to adjudicate.

"What's the most recent thing you published?"

She did not say, I did a think piece for Forum on penis size. But she might as well have.

At lunch I was told an elderly couple from Baltimore, the Bert Clambacks, had wet their king-size bed; another couple, the Wallace Caulkins from Missouri, a late check-out, had swiped the hotel's terry-cloth robes. Keola had put a bumper sticker on the staff bulletin board, The Only Thing I'm Hooked On Is Jesus, and Kawika countered with one of his own: Hawaiian Sovereignty. Rose said she wanted to change her name to Meredith. "Or Madison. Or Lacey. Or Brittany. But not Rose. And also I want a DVD player." Nigel Gupta, a guest from California, defying the rules (No Glass Receptacles), brought a jug of ice water, a bottle of whiskey, and a glass tumbler to the pool. He tipped over his table, resulting in so many scattered glass shards we had to close the pool. Among the guests who protested, Bill and Maureen Gregorian demanded a reduction in that

day's rate and threatened a class-action lawsuit, since the pool was unusable. The elevator jammed; some guests were trapped for fifteen minutes; the thing itself was out of service for three hours. Guests had to be reminded not to hang wet bathing suits from the room lanais. A homeless man was reported wandering the corridors.

The homeless man was Buddy Hamstra. It was an example of how grim he had begun to look, how careless in his mode of dress, that the owner of the hotel, a multimillionaire in a dirty bathing suit and a Paradise Lost T-shirt, was mistaken for a tramp who had temporarily strayed from his shopping cart and his plastic bags.

Everyone found him funny; that became a theme. Without any effort on his part, he was rediscovered as a colorful character. This unasked-for comeback was so bewildering to him it made him furious, loudly so, resulting in more notoriety. "The old Buddy," people said, not realizing that his illness had made him seem clownish.

I waited for him to give me more material for his memoirs. "I'll tell you the rest later," he had promised. But there was no more. There was only pantomime, his blundering and shouting, and this unexpected excess energy made Buddy funnier than ever. He was angry at the world. Exasperated outrage is often the best comedy, for a protester's futile howls make him sound like a victim, the natural butt of a joke.

His cronies, constantly quoting him, attributed Buddy's new mood to the fact that he had found a method for getting rid of Pinky — to divorce her, give her some money, and send her away. The prospect of his new

freedom, instead of concentrating his mind and making him lighthearted, confused him and made him explosive and forgetful. He had difficulty with names. He called Pinky, at various times, Stella and Momi. His friends found this hilarious.

Peewee said, "We're having dinner on the lanai. Someone asks Buddy to pass the salt. He just picks it up and drops it" — dwops it — "into the serving bowl of soup with a big splash."

"Is that funny?"

"We couldn't stop laughing."

To someone who asked for pepper, he made a big sprinkling gesture with the heart-shaped jar of Stella's ashes. "Just like the old days!" his friends said.

The mayor of Honolulu visited the hotel on a publicity tour of Waikiki, which was filmed for a promotion by the Hawaii Visitors Bureau. Buddy gave the mayor a lei, a raffia bag containing a jar of Peewee's salsa, some macadamia nuts, and a Paradise Lost T-shirt.