Hotel Honolulu

67 Full House

Hearing that Buddy had recovered, his children appeared again, and now they stayed at his North Shore house for days at a time. And not just Buddy's family but Pinky's too, the odd assortment: Uncle Tony and Auntie Mariel moved from under the stairs to the garage, where they made the workbench into bunk beds; her friends the Malanuts, from way back, turned up with hammocks. Evie and Pinky's brother Bing were now cohabiting. Pinky was glad, because it removed Evie as a sexual threat, and she admitted, "He not my real brother." All of them wandered around the house, listening and gaping.

Ihe whispers were that the operation had been a failure, but that Buddy somehow managed to remain upright. He used his wheelchair less, and he had a narrow elevator installed. As it was big enough for only two people, he enjoyed trapping someone in it with him and farting in sharp trumpet blats as he ascended three floors.

Buddy was a spectacle, his illness a subject of gossip: the weakness, the medical details ("lungs fill up with water," "lungs like a sponge," "lungs leak"), the hospital visits and post-ops. The house was crowded with starers and mutterers. At first Buddy had been like someone back from a distant journey that people gaped at, but after they took a good look, he was like someone back from the dead.

He was haggard, slack-jawed, slow, with vacant watery eyes. He was often drunk. People said, "You look good," because he looked terrible, much oldei more breathless. He had choking fits, during which he turned purple and put his hands up, as if to say "I surrender." Seeing him gag, Bula looked at his father's bright bulging face and said, "At least you got good color."

"You need round-the-clock nursing care," Melveen said.

"I take care for him," Pinky said.

"Yah. Is the problem."

For it was known that Pinky had threatened to burn the house down, to kill Buddy. Her bite marks were still visible on his arm, bluer, inkier, darker than his tattoo. She had made a serious suicide attempt, overdosing with pills — it must have been serious, because everyone in the house had been inconvenienced, which it seemed was one of the intentions of suicide. Her stomach had been successfully pumped, though afterward she spoke (perhaps to spite me, perhaps to ruin business) of drowning herself in the Hotel Honolulu swimming pool.

Bula moved into the house with his three children. "My wife stay in rehab," he explained. Pinky's brother shared the downstairs room with Evie, Uncle Tony moved from the garage to the garden shed, and low froggy noises suggested he, too, had taken a new lover. Buddy knew what was happening, but it was a sign of his feebleness that he didn't care.

More quarrels erupted than usual, and at some point he was always asked

to intervene — Buddy blow-sucking on his oxygen mask, a big man struggling simply to breathe.

Because there was more of him, it was worse than seeing a small man fading away. He looked like a wounded bear, roaring and smashing his giant paw against his head.

There had always been some shouting and banging in the house, but now the place seemed violent and disorderly. Buddy shouted back, to assert himself over the nine adults, five small children, and their many pets. The worst sort of illness was the one that made a man visibly a spectacle, helplessly suffocating. Often the oxygen bottle did no good, and Buddy was left snorting at the plastic tube or blow-sucking into the face mask. All the relatives, his and Pinky's, stood by, watching with their mouths open as he fought for air.

When we were alone Buddy said to me, "They're waiting for me to

die."

Desperate to be included in his will because he looked doomed, they lacked the subtlety that might have strengthened their case. They were worse than obvious and kept appealing to him, demanding that he referee their grievances. When Bing put a nick in one of the doors of Bula's pickup truck, Buddy had to rule on the liability. When Uncle Tony left dirty dishes in the sink, Melveen said, "If you no talk to him, then I talk, and he no like it."

"They're my dishes!" Buddy said. "It's my kitchen!"

"What I say?" Melveen said, squinting, her tongue clamped in her

teeth.

Evie played loud music, but it wasn't the noise that was objectionable but the reason for it — to cover the sound of her lovemaking with Bing. The music was silenced. Evie said, "He not my brother." Before, when Evie had been discovered in bed with Uncle Tony, she had said, "He not really my uncle." And for all this sexual rotation, Pinky's family showed scabby symptoms of herpes and spoke, as Buddy did, of "flare-ups."

Buddy was asked to calm Pinky's family, but instead of sorting them out, he saw that he could promote greater uncertainty by doing nothing.

He allowed the chaos to continue, and it gave him more power.

For her supposedly wayward behavior, Buddy's family sniped at Pinky. "She after his money." "She bite him again." "She cuckaroach Stella jewelry." "She try kill herself." "She one lolo."

"Tony drank all the beer from the cooler, Dad," Bula said.

"It's my beer," Buddy said. He was annoyed that Tony drank it, but when had Bula bought any? Reflecting on this, Buddy concluded that he hated them both.

Finding Evie alone on the lanai one night, Buddy said, "How about you and me going upstairs?"

"Pinky you wife, not me."

"Pinky's in town tonight. You got no aloha for me?"

The sister refused. Buddy guessed that he seemed so feeble to her that she didn't feel she needed even to attempt the pretense of pleasing him. As was the case with many sick men he had known, he was already dead, as far as his household was concerned.

"We out for rice," Melveen said. Or it might be flour, sugar, cream crackers, potato chips, soda, Spam, corned beef, cookies, macaroni, tubs of poi, bundles of laulau — the staples. In the past, when Buddy had been well, and with a robust man's appetite, he had kept the kitchen well stocked. Now he ceased to care.

The quarrels continued, all of them petty, over sheets that were washed but not dried, leaky pipes, loud radios, mouse holes in the screens, sand tracked in from the beach, gecko turds which had the look of two- toned exclamation marks. "Someone stole my Boogie board." Bula's kids claimed that Uncle Tony swore at them. Aunt Mariel borrowed Melveen's house key and lost it. The house needed painting. There were never enough towels. "Who use all the t.p.?"

Uncle Tony said, "What we gonna do about the revetment?"

The rocks on the beach below the house had been tumbled apart by recent storms, and the house was in danger of being undermined by the tides. It was worth my driving the forty miles from Waikiki to hear the man utter that word.

Receiving no reply, Uncle Tony said, "How about the TV?"

Apparently the TV in the family room was broken, or perhaps the cable bill had not been paid.

"This Evie, she a slut like her sister Pinky," Melveen said.

"Pinky's your mother," Buddy said, to annoy her. Sometimes he stood in the doorway and watched them eating at the long dining table, gobbling their plates, their snouts in the trough, and he thought, Porkers!

Buddy realized that he had the answer to all this. He didn't bother to make an announcement or post one of his usual notices, signed "Da Boss." He just roused Pinky and his driver, Chubby, packed a bag and his oxygen tank.

One of Bula's children was playing in the driveway the day Buddy

left.

"Where you going, Gampy?"

"Into town."

"When you coming back, Gampy?"

"Never."

You had a problem, you disappeared. So did the problem. It was perfect, really. His whole life he had lived that way.