Hotel Honolulu

37 Joker Man

That sudden reappearance became famous on the island, and Buddy's howl of "I'm back!" was soon a catch phrase among his cronies. It was shouted by those men who hung around him, who thought of themselves as rascals and basked in his reflected glory, borrowing money from him, eating his food, sleeping on his numerous sofas and hammocks, running up big bills at Paradise Lost. No one mentioned Buddy's tears.

The Buddy-back-from-the-dead story made the rounds. It was told hilariously by his friends, and it was muttered resentfully by his denigrators, the few who existed — people who owed him so much money that they avoided him and nervously tried to slander him, not realizing that the worst slander was like praise to him. When I expressed surprise, not to say shock, at his audacity, his friends said, "That's nothing," and recalled other, better, bolder practical jokes he had brought off.

Buddy and his family told me everything. "He wrote a book!" he had told his kids and his friends. None of them was a reader, so I was mysterious and magical, almost priestlike, treated with a respect I was unused to in my old indoor life among bitter writers and overfamiliar readers, the well-meaning bores of literacy.

This is who I am, Buddy seemed to be saying as he wheezily related something scandalous — the time he had sealed Willis's toilet with cement;

the night at the hotel when a guest's wife passed out after Buddy seduced her and he shaved off all her pubic hair before sending her upstairs to her husband; the scoop of dog shit he jammed into Bula's hair dryer. Bula said, "I went turn it on and what a stink, yah?" Far from shocked, I felt privileged to share these confidences.

That the husband and wife still stayed at the hotel was testimony to Buddy's powers of persuasion or, I suppose, his genius for friendship. He had envious denigrators, but he had no serious enemies. Despite all the emotion, all the tears and grief, cruelly hoaxing his friends, his family, and his new wife by playing dead, he was forgiven. More than that, soon everyone was laughing about it, praising him for having fooled them.

"Buddy's amazing!" they said, and laughed. Mostly they were relieved to have him back.

Not for the first time, I thought, Buddy's a sadist, and I didn't laugh at all. Still, I was even more curious about the man. Before I expressed this curiosity, I was offered many other examples of Buddy's great stunts.

Some were equally cruel, many were expensive and convoluted, all of them seemed gratuitous. A streak of childish brutality ran through them, but when I pointed out an especially painful aspect to my informants, they said, "That's the funniest part."

Sadism, which is an element in all practical jokes, perhaps the central element, was in the grain of Buddy's character. I witnessed him torturing his kids with jokes. But he could also be a gentle soul. "Horsing around," he called his style of joking, but sadism is horsing around too, just a wilder sort of horse. Buddy's gentleness was almost childlike, verging on the ridiculous — his doting on dogs and little children, the love letters he had written to his dead wife Momi, his devotion to Stella's ashes and the green flash at sunset, his assiduous attention to his flowers. He was sentimental as well as sadistic — not so unlikely a combination of traits, a natural pair in fact. I once asked him if he thought he was cruel.

"I am an American," he said whenever he was asked a question he could not answer, or sometimes he made a silly face and screamed, "Guilty!"

From what I heard, his life so far had been a series of practical jokes. Buddy had come from a long line of pioneers and bankers who had made so much money they had never had to pretend to be respectable and instead boasted of their crudeness. His ancestors had prospered at a time when America was huge and empty and hard up. Buddy followed their example, moving westward across the ocean. He had made his money in the postwar Pacific, a boom time of relative innocence. Buddy's forebears had headed west, inventing America en route. Buddy's great-grandfather had left Chicago in the late 1860s, driving a wagon into the prairie on a dare, to impress his father, who was a feed merchant. "I'll match any capital you make, if you come home," his father said. "If you get into debt, don't come home."

Perhaps jokes ran in Buddy's family. That man never came home to claim his prize. Instead, he put up a house, made improvements, started a farm, and ran a store. In doing so, he founded a settlement, the town of

Sweetwater, where travelers stopped on their way to California to buy supplies and to take on water. Buddy's great-grandfather had discovered a spring. Water was the key: thus the name Sweetwater. The town still stands. I drove through it on the only road trip I have ever taken crosscountry. I didn't stop — people don't anymore. But years ago it was famous for its spring water and its hospitality.

The family wealth allowed Buddy's grandfather to start a bank, just as useful an institution on the way west as the dry goods store and the blacksmith's shop and the water. The town prospered. Buddy's father broke with family tradition by investing in the new movie industry, and it gave Buddy a second home — homes, rathei for Ray Hamstra, an early backer of talkies, was married and divorced five times.

"Buddy had some famous stepmothers," Peewee the chef said. Buddy's own mother — his father's first wife — had been a wellknown horsewoman in Sweetwater. Two others were actresses, one was a dancer, the last a famous singer. No one in Hawaii knew their names. Peewee said, "You'd recognize them if I could remember them."

Buddy was raised by his grandmother, the widow of the banker, but as a boy he visited his father at various addresses in southern California. Did all this shuttling around anger him and turn him into an obsessive prankster? The violence in practical jokes is undeniable, and all jokes need a victim. Buddy's friends said he laughed a lot. He was reckless. He had money, too. Perhaps he was spoiled. All these wild elements, yet he had a sense of power and did not lack confidence.

His earliest jokes were played against his father: putting Limburger cheese on the steering wheel of the old man's car was an early one, which he repeated in Hawaii against his own children when they began to drive. At the age of ten or eleven he stuck a sign saying Smile if you want a blow job under the hood of his current stepmother's car, to be seen by the next garage mechanic who checked the oil. He used that one in Hawaii later, too — such jokes had a timeless simplicity. And the fact that they often backfired (his father drove the car that day) only made them sweeter.

At the age of thirteen Buddy lost his virginity at Sunshine Saloon, Sweetwater's other useful institution, the brothel. The joke was that the woman who initiated him was his father's mistress. He stole a pair of the woman's lace underpants and sent them to his father on his birthday, with a card saying, Love, Buddy.

Around this time he created a scandal in Sweetwater — something to do with a neighbor's dog — but no one I spoke to knew the details, only that it was shocking. Eventually he told me the story, as part of a projected autobiography, and I wrote it down and typed it for him.

Preying on the passive is a standby for practical jokers, but Buddy liked preying on strong people by finding their hidden weakness. The toughest kid in his school confided to Buddy that he wanted to lose weight. Buddy said he had just the answer. He sold the big brute a worm and said, "It's a tapeworm. It works day and night. You'll never be fat again. All you have to do is eat it." The big fellow ate it, and Buddy laughed and spread the story — it was an earthworm.

During one of his father's rare visits to Sweetwater from California, Buddy filled his father's car with sand. It was another practical joke he repeated as he grew older, substituting sand with cat litter, cow manure, and potting soil, and at last expanding industrial foam, which hardened like cement. Technology is the prankster's friend, but so are traditional skills and peasant cunning. Buddy was expert at obtaining smears and swipes of bitches in heat — I did not ask how — and applying these to the clothes of schoolteachers who punished him. His revenge was seeing them besieged by packs of amorous dogs.

Sabotage can be simple. The exploding toilet seat. The potato jammed in the exhaust pipe. Sugar in the gas tank. The collapsing chair leg. Phantom voices on the phone. The dismantled lawnmower. The reusable cockroach. Mail-order madness: a pileup of Sears, Roebuck deliveries. The believable turd. The reversed road sign. The ambiguous classified ad, inviting breathy phone calls. These were practical jokes for the cash-strapped schoolboy. Buddy was soon expelled from school.

He was hired at the family bank and with a little income was able to conduct his first experiments in turning the staff toilet into an aquarium — first eels, then goldfish, then the tropical fish that belonged to the manager, dipping and diving in the hopper. At the very moment he was being berated for this offense, he contrived to slip some glue on his tormentor's chair. Before he could be fired, he was able to smuggle a live pig into the walk-in vault, leaving it to be discovered, dung-smeared and skidding, in the morning.

In themselves, none of these practical jokes were unusual, but their simultaneity gave them force and made them memorable. He was fired from the bank by a man who, later that same day, found another pig in his car. Live pigs were to play a prominent part in many of Buddy's jokes.

Now seventeen, Buddy was sent to live with his father and a new stepmother, who were soon contemplating the significance of an enormous torpedo in their bed when they retired one night. Perhaps a bizarre form of salutation? They knew the perpetrator, of course, but weren't able to discover the means by which he had shunted the half ton of metal. Had they known, they would have rid themselves of it more quickly. The expensive removal took days.

"I think your son is insane," the new wife said.

Putting his finger in his mouth, clownishly playing dumb, Buddy said he knew nothing about it. I was wondering what a psychiatrist would make of the symbolism of the torpedo in the marital bed when I heard of his next embellishment. Buddy insinuated himself in the bed one night when his father was delayed by a ruse Buddy himself had rigged. Buddy was welcomed in the darkness by his stepmother, who took his bulk for her husband's, and it was only after they were engaged in strenuous foreplay that Buddy revealed himself — by braying like a donkey. The woman was too ashamed and humiliated to report him, but before long Buddy was evicted.

Hobbling his friends and family with large, immovable objects was a recurring motif in these jokes of his late teens, as though the object in

question stood for Buddy himself: the gigantic safe sinking into the rain- softened lawn, the anvil in the bathtub, the motorcycle on the roof, the porch swing in the swimming pool. As he grew heavier, Buddy himself became harder to remove. On his twenty-first birthday he was six feet three and weighed 220 pounds.

Incidentally, he was working at a film studio owned by his father, but what seemed like relentless aggression was too much for the man, and Buddy was soon on his own. He was never to return home, and though he looked after his mother for a while in Hawaii when she was senile and near death, he did not see his father again.

At the age of twenty-two he got a job on a merchant ship out of San Francisco, his first joyous taste of the Pacific. But the work was hard, he was a fractious seaman, so he was punished. His revenge: stinky cheese on the hatch handle, the ship's horn blown in the wee hours outside the first officer's cabin, his signature turds in the desk drawers of senior officers.

He knew what was coming; he welcomed it. The Pacific ports, battered by the war and thoroughly corrupted and deranged, were an invitation to Buddy. Put ashore in Noumea for insubordination, Buddy laughed and learned French. In New Caledonia he discovered firsthand France's designs in Indochina — it was 1952 and the French were recruiting soldiers locally. Buddy tended bar and kept a mistress. He was hired as an informant by the CIA, and he thrived.

To Tahiti. He made himself popular with bootleg whiskey and married a sixteen-year-old. The CIA found him and demanded their money back. Buddy gladly gave it to them, two thousand dollars — in pennies.

Buddy's practical jokes, essentially vindictive, became for a time inseparable from pure revenge. He was a card player, an irrational and usually successful gambler. He won the Hotel Honolulu in a card game. He made the hotel popular by bringing the first Tahitian dancers to Hawaii, putting on a show on the hotel's poolside lanai. His envious friends, led by Lemmo, intending to deflate him, sealed up his office — bricked in the doorway and painted it.

Buddy broke through. And laughed. He liked the extravagance of it. He declared war, and lodged a telephone pole through the length of Lemmo's house, skewering the whole dwelling through its windows.

Once, returning from Tahiti with some black pearls Buddy had ordered, Peewee was taken in for questioning by the airport police. Buddy had called Honolulu customs and tipped them off that Peewee was an international jewel thief. And often, in an excess of sentiment, he installed live pigs in offices overnight and got fat men to eat "tapeworms" he had dug up in his garden.

The magazine he started, Teen Hawaii, put him in touch with as many pretty girls as his Tahiti show had done, but the magazine failed. For a time his hotel was a meeting place, crackling with Buddy's diabolical energy, but before long othei bigger hotels were built, and his was shoved to the edge of Waikiki.

Claiming at his sendoff dinner that Stella's ashes had been in the pepper mill was a great joke, Buddy thought, but the best by far was his coming back from the dead. Many of his friends said they had guessed the outcome all along, but it put the fear of God into Pinky and made her a compliant wife.