Hotel Honolulu

13 The Prevision of Hobart Flail

One of the happiest aspects for me of hotelkeeping in Honolulu was that we secretly assigned names to our guests — but only the odd, the impossible, the most colorful ones. "Chewy," "Dilbert," "Pac-Man," "Samurai," and one whose nose was always running, "Hana Bata." It made them easier to remember. I supplied "Mr. Prufrock," "Bunbury," "Mrs.

Alfred Uruguay," and "Pinfold." I saw that my staff could be observant and imaginative and witty; I felt I had succeeded with them when one of my names was accepted. Naming these people satisfied my need to fictionalize what I was seeing in this new world of mine. They never lost their names. "Crazy Al's coming back next week," someone would say, and we knew what we were in for. One guest who was always making dire predictions was awarded the name Hobart Flail.

The most apparently helpful, complaisant people are often the nosiest, the most intrusive and manipulative. Hobart Flail, here for his annual two weeks, was one of those, and more. He was a large, dark, horse-faced man who always looked uncomfortable — too many clothes, too hot, needed a shave, hair matted and tangled. Seeing Rose for the first

time, he said to me, "Be very careful. A child like that is always in danger. This is a world that devours its young."

He seemed to represent the modern tendency in public utterance toward prediction. Much of the day's news fell into the category of the prophetic — the direction of the economy, the eventual fate of a well- known figure, the outlook for a team, the prospects for a country, a yet-to- be-revealed trend. Was there anything more maddening than these overcertain and uncheckable pronouncements? There are news hounds who write about what has happened, but nothing is newer than a forecast of what is going to happen — the ultimate news is prophecy. Hobart Flail, who implied that he had the gift of prevision, was always making such forecasts, but in a sadistic manner, as though thrashing us. And he alone had the word. "What most people don't realize," he would begin, and he always finished with, "Very few people know this." It was always bad news — prophecy is often pessimistic, a kind of hostile gloating misery. He often said, "We live in wolfish times."

Flail had insulted me by predicting misfortune for Rose. He said he was doing me a favor. Usually he concentrated on larger issues. He surprised me one day by saying, "The whole Pacific is overfished. Fish stocks are at dangerously low levels. People don't realize that there is nothing for the sharks to eat. It's obvious they'll start feeding on swimmers."

If he had smiled even slightly, you would have taken this for black comedy. But no, he was serious.

"It's also the graywater runoff," he said. "Golf course pesticides are leaching into the aquifer. Very few people know that the low rainfall is already creating drought conditions and threatening the ecosystem. Bad water. Rationing. Toxic spillages are killing the reefs. Nick your shin on a reef and it's certain death."

Ozone depletion, ciguatera in sashimi, leptospirosis from rat urine in the Ala Wai Canal, projected drownings, fetal alcohol syndrome, the symptoms of lupus and osteoporosis and lymphoma, the frequency of cruise ships' tipping raw sewage offshore — he knew it all. And he knew medical terms. One guest announced at the bar in Paradise Lost that he had just peed red. He had eaten beets for dinner, but Hobart Flail said, "Renal carcinoma."

A guest who stayed with us to scuba-dive — "Scooby-Doo," from St. Louis — cut his leg on some coral.

"Even if you have that seen to, it's as good as infected. You're going to lose the leg."

Scooby stared at him and then cursed and limp-hopped away, favoring the leg.

"Algal blooms," Flail said. That was another thing. He used oddly poetic terms in this dire news. "A cocktail of poisons," "a salad of rotting vegetation," "a plume of effluent." Another was "strange fruit."

And still his refrain was "We live in wolfish times."

It distressed me when he concentrated his attention on Rose. I wanted to shove him aside. I didn't mind his gabbling at me, but something diabolical darkened his eyes when he looked at my daughter, and I could see that she felt it too, the darkness like a bad smell.

"What is that man for?" she screeched, then clamped her mouth

shut.

He winced at the remark; he was unused to anyone challenging him. Rose's small size seemed to enrage him. He was never more furious or animated than when he was among weak or simple people, because he was a bully. Hobart Flail was an enemy of the underdog. If he saw a football team struggling to win on TV he said, "They'll lose." He loved world news for all the disasters that were reported. Earthquakes. Cyclones. Fires. Massacres. Plagues. He was well acquainted with the horrors of Rwanda and Ethiopia and Chernobyl. He knew the death tolls.

"I predicted all that."

Years before, he had called attention to the logging that had caused rivers to be silted up and the terrible floods that had resulted. People's stupidity had brought them diseases and war. He had previewed it all; few people had listened.

The world's major religions were corrupt, he said. "The Vatican has the largest collection of pornography in the world."

Tunnels linked convents with monasteries; the cellars of nunneries were used for orgies. Some of his stories predicted the disinterring of

thousands of strangled fetuses that had been buried alongside convents. Politicians were cheats, the police were crooks, sales clerks were thieves, waiters spat in your soup before they served it, waitresses were whores, the unions were run by the Mob, the Mob was run by the Vatican, the Vatican by the Freemasons — assassins all of them, funded by the drug trade. All of this would be revealed in the near future.

"We live in wolfish times."

If you were incautious enough to say, "Lovely day," he became agitated and would flail and reply, "You think so?"

"Ever been to Michigan?" he said. "There's some real funny smells in Michigan. Chevron had a spill they admitted to, but there are other smells. No one knows what they are, and I know they're bad."

He spoke, even in Hawaii, of dust particles in the air, of tainted water, adulterated food, carcinogens in peanut butter, mouse droppings in the Happy Meals he saw me bringing home to Rose.

After my first encounter with him, I asked Buddy Hamstra who he was. Buddy said, "He's one brick short of a load," and just laughed. "Don't listen!" The man was harmless. He stayed at the Hotel Honolulu for two weeks every winter. He had been born somewhere in the Midwest to elderly parents and had polio as a child. He had not been expected to live. His recovery had been slow, and, bedridden, he had received his education at home, from those old, fretful people. For his first seventeen years he had not left the house. His parents died while he was still housebound. He

was diagnosed with clinical depression. He refused all medication. "Side effects!" Even so, he was afflicted by severe weight loss, liver damage, migraines.

None of this stopped him from prophesying a catastrophic future to anyone who would listen — arson and mayhem and decay. "Wolfish times." Understandably, no one listened. I first named him "Doctor Wolfpits" and then "Hobart Flail."

Nothing would induce him to take his medication. Rose was afraid of him, and Sweetie just laughed uneasily and walked the other way. Unless a guest was a public nuisance, you tolerated his eccentricity. I could not eject him for his ridiculous predictions, nor the way he dressed, though both made me uncomfortable. He wore dark long-sleeved shirts, heavy wool trousers, and fuzzy socks with his sandals. He was rumpled; he sweated. Why did he come to Hawaii?

"While it lasts," Hobart Flail said. "A little more global warming and one bad storm and the whole of Whyee is history."

We laughed and at last he went away. But that man ScoobyDoo, who nicked his shin on the reef? He lost his leg.