Hotel Honolulu

12 Sex, Thirdhand

Sneaking looks at other people's mail, I told myself, was part of my job, my exploratory life as a writer. Yet after I abandoned writing in Hawaii I felt an even greater need to poke into people's mail. There were treasures in my boss's files — his own mendacious obituary, and years after his first wife had died, he still wrote love letters to her. Was he just lonely, or was this a bizarre form of atonement? The only qualm I had — it was my perennial qualm — was that I would be found out in my snooping and seen living my life thirdhand, the writer's maddening distance from the real world.

So as not to embarrass him, or myself, I took Buddy's entire filing cabinet, containing the personal papers I had read and the business documents I had shuffled, and hand delivered it to him at his house on the North Shore. I was directed by his bulky son, Bula, to the lanai.

Buddy lay face down, regal, on a massage table and was being scrubbed with what looked like fine white gravel by an island girl wearing a wet bikini and dripping mittens. She walked barefoot, on tiptoe, in decorous silence, and even the tiny bows on her bikini looked delicate to me, asking to be tugged. Buddy looked baked and iced, like an enormous sugar-coated pastry.

"This is Mariko. She's half Japanese and half popolo," Buddy said. "Every seventh of December she has an uncontrollable urge to bomb Pearl Bailey."

"Not true," said Mariko in the squeaky, grinning voice of local girls that still set my teeth on edge.

"Salt scrub," he explained. "She's another tool of my lust."

She just laughed and went on coating him with salt.

"Recognize this table? It sure has seen plenty of action."

He showed no interest in the papers I had brought.

"If I cared about that stuff, would I have left it at the hotel for everyone to read?"

This seemed to be his way of saying that he knew what I had done. Now I was sorry I had not read the whole lot and studied it for its fantasy and invention.

"Just toss it."

Had he forgotten the self-serving fictions he had placed in the Pending file? Only a writer like me could be so concerned, and I was perhaps the more obsessive for being unable to write myself. So I had become a more intense listener and snooper — niele, as the Hawaiians said. Nosy.

Now the girl stood aside and a young man hosed off the clinging salt slush, spraying it from Buddy's skin. Sludge and coarse salt and water splashed to the blue-tiled floor of the lanai.

"That's the old me," Buddy said, sitting up, looking pink and peeled. "I'm exfoliated."

"Finish," the girl said. "Time for massage."

"This is the part I like best," Buddy said. "Hula hands."

At that moment I had a vivid glimpse of a man his age in a soaked raincoat hurrying in wet shoes down the Strand on a winter-dark afternoon to join a mass of sodden people jamming themselves into the entrance of a tube station smelling of damp newspapers to begin the stifling trip back to a clammy house. Then the vision passed. It made me more attentive to Buddy, who had tucked his towel together like a pareu and was entering his house, followed by the pretty girl.

The young man with the hose said, "Buddy mentioned the hotel. You connected with the Hotel Honolulu?" He smiled. Something was happening behind his eyes, a memory surfacing and glazing them.

Most of the people I knew at the hotel, both locals and visitors, were essentially undomesticated. They hated questions, because a question required an answer that forced them to think; usually the process of thought convulsed them and produced nothing more than a grunt. I became used to silences as replies, or talk so slow as to have no meaning. This man surprised me by saying something more.

"Because I hear some amazing things about that place, man."

"I work there." I didn't want to encourage him by seeming too interested, though I was struck by his using the word "amazing." "But nothing ever happens at the Hotel Honolulu."

Glancing around, the instinctive head-swivel of a cautious bird just before it pecks, he said, "Want to burn a fat one?"

"I'll pass."

Dropping the sprayer he had used to wash the salt off Buddy, he approached me and lit a chubby joint. He sucked and gasped and said, "That place rocks."

I smiled again. Amazing? Rocks? I wondered what he knew of the old seedy hotel on the back street in Waikiki where I worked. The doubt on my face must have been obvious. It made him energetic.

"There's this surfer, Cody, a real gnarly dude. He rides the big waves out at Waimea, came eighth in the Eddie Aikau. Like, he was drinking at the bar, the Paradise Bar — "

"Paradise Lost."

"Whatever." He had the blinking, stammering delivery of someone whose brain had been fried by chemical substances — overstimulated and fused circuits that made him smile or tune out for no obvious reason. "He's in the bar and a woman offers him a grand to go upstairs and hose her."

"Let me get this straight," I said, because one element in the story sounded familiar. "This surfer guy was offered money to sleep with a woman at the hotel?"

"Yeah," he said eagerly, reminded of what he had just said. "He's hanging out, drinking at the bar, and a woman comes up to him and buys him a drink. She's some tourist chick from the mainland, right? With a killer body. It's her birthday. She tells him that she's alone and wants a really nice birthday present. 'Like what?' Cody asks. 'Like you.'"

In a halting way, blurring his mimicry, attempting the two voices, pausing too long, sucking on the joint, he conveyed the information that Cody had demanded a thousand dollars, that the woman had laughed and said, "Follow me."

She had been wearing a light raincoat, buttoned to the neck, which was not odd, as a drizzle had been falling on Waikiki. When Cody had hesitated, the young woman unbuttoned a few buttons and showed that she was wearing lingerie underneath, nothing more. This glimpse gave Cody traction.

"It was like this incredible honeymoon suite at the hotel, with a huge mirror on the ceiling."

I nodded, because there was no such suite.

"The woman takes off the raincoat and she's just wearing this Victoria's Secret stuff. She hands him a Polaroid camera and says, 'You be the photographer."

"What was the point of the Polaroids?"

"Chicks like that love them. They collect them. But Cody was still sort of smiling. So she puts a porno on the VCR, to get him going."

I did not want to spoil a good story by telling him there were no VCRs in the rooms.

"The babe in the porno is wearing a dog collar and playing doggy. So this one with Cody does the same thing, puts on a dog collar and gives Cody a leash to hold. She shows him the stud in her tongue and goes down on him."

"What happened to the Polaroids?"

Camera, leash, collar, porno, mirror, stud — specific details, but the arrangement was vague. He didn't hear me.

"She's like, 'I'm your doggy. I'm your slave.'"

I said, "What kind of birthday present is this?"

"A skeevy one," he said, licking his teeth. "They order room service. They're in the Jacuzzi. When the food comes, they're like 'Hey, get in with us' to the Room Service babe."

No Jacuzzi either, and the Room Service waiter, our only one at night, would have been the limping middle-aged seasonal hires, either Charlie Wilnice or Ben Fishlow.

"She gets in with them! They do a few joints and pretty soon the two chicks are scarfing each other on the floor while Cody is standing over them choking his bone."

He thought he had impressed me, I laughed so hard, but I was laughing at the language. My laughter was a goad, so he laughed too, and went on.

"The husband comes in. He sees what's going down and there's a huge fight. Cody punches him out. The husband's covered in blood. He's just lying there. The women are so excited by the fight that they want more action. They both go down on Cody and he comes all over them. They love it. They're licking each other's faces and snapping Polaroids. Cody walks out with a thousand bucks."

Now he took a long, squeaking pull on the joint and sucked his teeth as he filled his lungs with smoke.

"Cody told you this?"

"He told TJ. TJ's a friend of Dean. Dean told me."

"What happened to the husband? the Room Service girl?"

"I don't know. They probably just grooved on it."

"What about all the blood?"

"Don't ask me. Hey, you're the one who works there."

For all its inventions and falsifications and outright lies, his story seemed truer than the one I had witnessed, for nothing was truer than fantasy. A little cry from inside the house signaled that Buddy's own fantasy had ended.