Hotel Honolulu

2 Castaways

Whenever I felt superfluous, which was an old intimation, I reminded myself that I was running a multistory hotel. People in Hawaii asked me what I did for a living. I never said, "I'm a writer" — they would not have known my books — but rather, "I run the Hotel Honolulu." That gave me a life and, among the rascals, a certain status.

After thirty years of moving around the world, and thirty years of books, I was hired because I was a white man, a haole. I had made and lost several — not fortunes but livings; lost houses, lost land, lost family, lost friends; goodbye to cars, to my library. Other people were now sitting in lovely chairs I had bought and looking at paintings I used to own, hung on walls I had paid for.

I had never had a backup plan. My idea was to keep moving. Hawaii seemed a good place for starting over. This hotel was ideal. Buddy understood. He looked to be the sort of man who had also lost a lot in his life — wives, houses, money, land; not books. I needed a rest from everything imaginary, and I felt that in settling in Hawaii, and not writing, I was returning to the world.

We were not on the beach. We were the last small, old hotel in Honolulu. "It's kind of a bowteek hotel," Buddy said. He had won the place

on a bet in the early sixties, when the jets had begun to replace the cruise ships. The hotel was a relic even then. What with the rising price of land in Waikiki, we were sure to be bought as a tear-down and replaced by a big ugly building, one of the chains. When I considered our certain doom, my memory was sharpened. I remembered what I saw and heard, every fugitive detail, and became a man on whom nothing was wasted.

There were residents, and some people who stayed for the winter, but most of the guests were strangers. By the time they checked out, I knew them as well as I wanted to, and in some cases I knew them very well.

"This the winner!" Keola, the janitor, said on my first day, welcoming me to the hotel. Dees da weena! But there was not much for me to do. Buddy had been right about the staff's running the place. Peewee was the chef, Lester Chen my number two. Tran and Trey were barmen. Tran was a Vietnamese immigrant. Trey, a surfer from Maui, also had a rock band, called Sub-Dude, formerly known as Meat Jelly, until all the band members found Jesus. "Jesus was the first surfer, man. He walked on water," Trey told me, more than once. "I surf for Christ." Charlie Wilnice and Ben Fishlow were our seasonal waiters. Keola and Kawika did the grunt work. I liked them for being incurious. Sweetie was for a time head of Housekeeping. She had been raised in the hotel, by her mother, Puamana, another of Buddy's gambles.

"In a small hotel you see people at their best and at their worst," Peewee said. "As for this one, we're in the islands, right, but this is where America stays. And some people come here to die."

We were too cheap for Japan, too expensive for Australia, too far for Europe, had little to offer the New Zealander, and didn't cater to backpackers. The business traveler avoided us, except when he was with a prostitute. Now and then we got Canadians. They were courteous and tried not to boast. They were budget conscious. Another characteristic of frugal people: no jokes, or else bad jokes. Canadian guests despised us for not knowing their geography, while at the same time being embarrassed about their huge empty spaces that had funny place names. In conversation, Canadians were also the first to point out that they were different, usually by saying, "Well, I wouldn't know, I'm a Canadian." We had a Mexican family once. We couldn't be called child-friendly, but Peewee was correct: America walked through our doors.

People talked. I listened. I observed. I read a little. My guests were naked. I sometimes trespassed, and it became my life — the whole of my life, a new life in which I learned things I had never known before.

"I had plaque cleared from my carotid artery," Clarence Greer told me. A hotel manager in Hawaii hears lots of medical reports, as well as weather reports from back home. The Scheesers were from International Falls, where the temperature that day was minus-twenty. Jirleen Cofield explained to me the making of a po-boy sandwich. I got Wanda Privett's recipe for meatloaf, and other recipes, and learned that many of them, being from middle America, involved adding a can of soup. It worried me to see a man wearing a toupee. I trusted people who lisped. Your diabetic needs to be careful of infections in his feet. I was overprotective of African Americans, always saw them as having among the oldest American pedigrees. I tried to understand the sadness of soldiers, the melancholy of the military. Was it the uniform? Was it the haircut? I heard so many stories that I abandoned any thought of writing them; their very number gave me writer's block and made me patient. Now and then, on the day he was to leave, a guest might walk the two blocks to the beach and sob in the sunshine.

I liked Hawaii because it was a void. There was no power here apart from landowning, no society worth the name, just a pecking order. There was a social ladder but it wasn't climbable, and the higher on it people stood, the sillier they looked, because everyone knew their secrets. On such small islands there was hardly any privacy, because people constantly bumped into each other.

Hawaii is hot and cold volcanoes, clear skies, and open ocean. Like most Pacific islands it is all edge, no center, very shallow, very narrow, a set of green bowls turned upside down in the sea, the lips of the coastline surrounding the bulges of porous mountains. This crockery is draped in a thickness of green so folded it is hidden and softened. Above the blazing beaches were the gorgeous green pleats of the mountains.

The place was once empty and unchanging, as lush as paradise, a peaceful balance of animals and plants. It was then visited by humans. At about the time Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, the second and largest wave of Polynesians were climbing out of double-hulled canoes, chanting in relief at having found land. They claimed it as theirs, but they were no more than castaways. They imposed a society of kings and commoners. People were eaten. They venerated the gods of fire and water they had brought with them. The first iron in Hawaii was stolen from the ships of Captain Cook — so many nails yanked out of the timbers that the ships lost much of their seaworthiness. With the iron the islanders began to carve more subtly in wood. After the arrival of the first canoes the islands changed. The voyagers had brought dogs and pigs. The first whites brought guns and gonorrhea. Everything began at once, and in that beginning was decay. Now, half the people could not even swim, and an unspecific paragraph of inaccurate history like this one was all they knew.

And there was the sun. The sun in Hawaii was so dazzling, so misleading, yet we regarded sunlight as our fortune. We quietly believed, "We are blessed because the sun shines every day. This is a good place for its sunlight. These islands are pure because of the sun. The sun has made us virtuous."

As the TV weathermen on the mainland took personal responsibility for the weather, each of us in Hawaii took credit for the sunshine here, as though we had discovered it and it was ours to dispense. "Stranger, be grateful to me for this sunny day" was our attitude toward visitors. The sun had been bestowed on us and we were sharing it with these alien refugees from dark cloudy places. The sun was our wealth and our goodness. The

Hawaiian heresy, which we thought but never said, was "We are good because of the sun. We are better than our visitors. We are sunnier."

This conceit made us sloppy and careless. Never mind the palmy setting, the people here were as cruel and violent and crafty as people anywhere, but they were slower and so seemed mild. Close up, the islands were disorderly, fragile, and sensationally littered, with brittle cliffs and too many feral cats and beaches that were sucked and splashed by big waves to vanish in the sea. Our secret was that we hated hot weather and stayed out of the sun. The visitors ended up with pink noses, peeling shoulders, freckle clusters, sunstroke, and melanoma, while we kept in the shadows.

"They say the Hawaii state motto is Hele I Loko, Haole 'Ino, Aka Ha'awi Mai Kala — Go Home, You Mainland Scum, but Leave Your Money Behind," Buddy said. "The real motto is even funnier. Ua Mau Ke Ea O Ka Aina I Ka Pono — The Life of the Land Is Perpetuated in Righteousness. The fuck it is!"

The week I was hired, Buddy stopped coming to the hotel. I was glad. Buddy always introduced me by saying, "Hey, he wrote a book!"

I hated that. And I needed to learn the job. He was the wrong person to teach me. He was usually drunk and had the drunk's idiocy, mood swings, and facetiousness; he repeated himself; drink made him deaf.

To please me he tried to be funny, but that could be tedious, especially the formulaic jokes he told in order to define himself, or just to shock. I knew all the punch lines. The man at the bar who says, "I used to think I was a cowboy, but, golly, I guess I'm a lesbian." Buddy saying, in his terrible Mexican accent, "If God hadn't meant us to eat it, then why did he make it look like a taco?" The elephant telling the naked man, "How do you manage to breathe through a little thing like that?" Or Buddy's croaky utterance that amounted almost to a war cry: "Nine inches!" A boss's comedy is always an employee's hardship.

A few days after I started at the hotel, Buddy invited me to his house to introduce me to his new woman, Stella, whom I had not yet met. She was from California, she said.

"She's a tool of my lust," Buddy said, and handed me a platter of brownies. "Stella made them. There's weed baked into them."

I took one and nibbled it while Buddy praised them in a wheezy voice, claiming they'd saved his lungs.

"You ever swim?" I asked.

"Bad current," he said, pronouncing it kernt.

"I'm surprised Buddy didn't make you manager of the hotel," I said to Stella. "You're a great cook and you have the basic qualification. You're a mainland howlie."

"But you also had the other important qualification," Buddy said, poking me in the chest. "Reason being, you understood me."

I smiled at him, to show I didn't understand.

"That dipshit manager I was telling you about?" he said.

I remembered the aggression, the massage table, the blunders, the drunkenness, the practical jokes. Larger than life. Three balled tomcat.

"That was me!"

He needed me to congratulate him for fooling me, and I did. But I had guessed it, and people had whispered at the hotel. What surprised me was that he felt I could do a better job. "A man who doesn't make mistakes ain't doing nothing." But there were more surprises for me, and they taught me to be watchful. I had asked for a new life, but I saw that this meant many lives — wife, child, the world of these islands, and my misapprehensions.