The Curse of Lono

  COP: I really don't know, I wasn't working at that time, apparently, because I don't recall it.

  HST: There was no alert. It wasn't that high. Maybe eight or ten feet -- I was just trying to compare. Well, we'll see, won't we?

  COP: Yeah, as I said, right now they're just advising if you have any gear on your back porch or whatever, make sure it's secure.

  HST: (laughs) Secure. . .

  COP: And they will take steps to alert the populace near the beach.

  HST: Steps? What kind of steps? Phone calls? Sirens? How will we know? Like I said, we'll probably be asleep.

  COP: Well, as I said, they'll either use the loudspeakers on the police cars and fire department vehicles or they'll be using -- (PAUSE) -- they'll be using the Civil Defense siren -- which will wake you up, guaranteed.

  HST: Okay, but we won't be taken out of our beds by a tsunami?

  COP: No tsunami. Don't worry about that.

  HST: Okay, thank you.

  COP: You're welcome. Bye.

  TITS LIKE ORANGE FIREBALLS

  .

  All work ceased on my side of the compound as the holiday season approached. I hunkered down for the pro football playoffs, betting heavily with Wilbur on the telephone and squandering away my winnings on fireworks. The Christmas season, in Hawaii, is also the time of the annual Feast of Lono, the god of excess and abundance. The missionaries may have taught the natives to love Jesus, but deep in their pagan hearts they don't really like him: Jesus is too stiff for these people. He had no sense of humor. The ranking gods and goddesses of the old Hawaiian culture are mainly distinguished by their power, not their purity, and they are honored for their vices as well as their awesome array of virtues. They are not intrinsically different from the people themselves -- just bigger and bolder and better in every way.

  The two favorites are Lono and Pele, the randy Volcano goddess. When Pele had a party, everybody came; she was a lusty long-haired beauty who danced naked on molten lava with a gourd of gin in each hand, and anybody who didn't like it was instantly killed. Pele had her problems -- usually with wrong-headed lovers, and occasionally with whole armies -- but in the end she always prevailed. And she still lives, they say, in her cave underneath a volcano on Mt. Kiluea and occasionally comes out to wander around the island in any form she chooses -- sometimes as a beautiful young girl on a magic surfboard, sometimes a jaded harlot sitting alone at the bar of the Volcano House; but usually -- for some reason the legends have never made clear -- in the form of a wizened old woman who hitchhikes around the island with a pint of gin in her kitbag.

  Whether Pele and Lono ever got together is a question still shrouded in mystery, but as a gambler I would have to bet on it. There is not enough room on these islands for the two most powerful deities in Hawaiian history to roam around for 1,000 years without coming to grips with each other.

  King Lono, ruler of all the islands in a time long before the Hawaiians had a written language, was not made in the same mold as Jesus, although he seems to have had the same basically decent instincts. He was a wise ruler and his reign is remembered in legend as a time of peace, happiness and great abundance in the kingdom -- the Good Old Days, as it were, before the white man came -- which may have had something to do with his elevation to the status of a god in the wake of his disappearance.

  Lono was also a chronic brawler with an ungovernable temper, a keen eye for the naked side of life and a taste for strong drink at all times. This side of his nature, although widely admired by his subjects, kept him in constant trouble at home. His wife, the lovely Queen Kaikilani Alii, had a nasty temper of her own, and the peace of the royal household was frequently shattered by monumental arguments.

  It was during one of these spats that King Lono belted his queen across the hut so violently, at least once, that he accidentally killed her. Kaikilani's death plunged him into a fit of grief so profound that he abandoned his royal duties and took to wandering around the islands, staging a series of boxing and wrestling matches in which he took on all comers. But he soon tired of this and retired undefeated, they say, sometime around the end of the eighth or ninth century. Still bored and distraught, he then took off in a magic canoe for a tour of "foreign lands" -- from whence he would return, he promised, as soon as the time was right.

  The natives have been waiting for this moment ever since, handing his promise down from one generation to another and faithfully celebrating the memory of their long-lost God/King at the end of each year with a two-week frenzy of wild parties and industrial-strength fireworks. The missionaries did everything in their power to wean the natives away from their faith in what amounted to a kind of long-overdue alter-Christ, and modern politicians have been trying for years to curtail or even ban the annual orgy of fireworks during the Christmas season, but so far nothing has worked.

  THERE ARE NO RULES

  We learned these things -- or at least a few of them -- from Captain Steve, the local charter fisherman who befriended us when we arrived at the Kailua-Kona Airport and subsequently became our main man on the island. Captain Steve had a fully-rigged fishing boat and was determined to take us out and catch a marlin -- a gesture of fine hospitality that promised to make our stay in Kona even richer and more exciting than we'd known it was going to be, all along. Wilbur also had a fishing trip lined up for us; and Stan Dzura, an old friend from Colorado, had a boat that he'd offered to let us use any time we wanted.

  It had seemed up to that point, that we were definitely in good shape, and as the winter solstice approached I felt optimistic enough to invite my son, Juan, over to Hawaii for a week or so of the finest water sport. The Kona Coast is one of the world's best game-fishing grounds, regarded by serious anglers as the equal of anything to be found in the Bahamas or the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

  Both Ralph and I were pleased at our unexpected run of high luck. In addition to having our own pool and a private beach right in front of the compound for swimming and skin diving, now we also had our own boats to get out on the ocean and stalk the mighty marlin. Money was no problem, Captain Steve explained. Charter boats in Kona normally go for $500 a day, but for us that fee would be waived; all we had to do was bring our own food and drink. . .

  Indeed. Just the sight of these words on paper sends a shudder up my spine even now, long after we finally escaped and moved on to other ordeals. We will get to the details later, but the main bearings of the story and all we need to know for now are these: 1) Early in December we moved into a kind of seaside estate containing a pool and three wooden houses -- one for the caretaker, one for Ralph and his family, and another for me, Laila and Juan. 2) Captain Steve, who lived not far up the beach from us, became more and more obsessed with getting us out on the sea to catch fish. 3) In December of that year the Kona Coast was lashed by a series of terrible storms that made our lives a living hell. And 4) our social behavior turned so ugly and rude that we were shunned by the natives and eventually turned to excessive use of fireworks, whiskey and bad craziness in the compound.

  The Kona fishing fleet stayed safely in port during this period, leaving Captain Steve and the other seafaring types with a lot of time on their hands -- which most of them spent on barstools, bitching endlessly about the weather, the dearth of paying tourists on the island and the first bad signs of what some of them saw as the imminent collapse of the local real estate market. Hawaii had been the only state in the Union that didn't vote for Reagan, so there were a lot of people hanging idly around the bars who kept saying "I told you so" to anybody who would listen.

  This was the situation we found ourselves mired in, and the only escape -- for me, at least -- was watching football on television, which I did with a zeal that got more and more on Ralph's nerves. His lifelong hatred of sport made it impossible for him to share my preoccupation with gambling on the games, and we slowly drifted apart -- he to his kinky brooding, and me to the TV set, usually far up the mountain at Stan Dzura's hous
e. On the few occasions when we all went into town together, Ralph's eccentric behavior so offended the natives that some called him "the queer" and others called him "Wolfman." By the time we had been there two weeks he was known everywhere we went as "The Queer and Famous Wolfman," and he was not much fun to be with.

  One by one, we all got off the boat. Ralph went first, as always -- and, as always, he blamed it on me. Which was true, in a way. The whole thing was my fault. It was my plan that had gone wrong, not Ralph's, and now his whole family was in the throes of a profound psychotic experience. Some people can handle ten days in the eye of a hurricane, and some can't.

  Ralph was becoming more and more concerned about this aspect of our situation, as it daily became more desperate. His primitive Welsh ancestry would allow him to cling almost indefinitely to his own sanity, he felt, but he was not confident about the ability of his wife or young daughter to survive a shock of this magnitude. "How many days of abject terror can an eight-year-old girl endure?" he asked me one day as we shared a pint of hot gin in his kitchen. "I can already see the signs. She's withdrawing into herself, gnawing on balls of twine and talking to cockroaches at night."

  "That's why we have insane asylums," I said. "When your neighbors start talking about their children at Oxford or Cambridge, you can brag that you have a daughter in Bedlam."

  He stiffened, then shook it off and laughed harshly. "That's right," he said. "I can visit her on weekends, invite all my neighbors to attend her graduation."

  We were half mad ourselves, at this point. All of our desperate efforts to flee the Big Island had come to naught. We couldn't even get seats on a plane back to Honolulu, much less to anywhere else. . . And our Will to Flee was real: I would have written a bad check for a charter jet to Tahiti, 2,600 miles, one way -- but the storm had knocked out our telephones and there was no hope of getting through to anybody more than a mile or two away. The only place we could be sure of reaching was the bar at the Kona Inn.

  The long and tedious ceremony and feast were at last over, and Cook indicated that they would like to set up an encampment at the heiau. Chiefs Parea and Kanina understood at once, and when Cook selected a walled field of sweet potatoes, with many assurances of compensation for the owner, the priests stuck their wands on the wall to consecrate and "taboo" it.

  They now returned to their boat and as they passed through the village, Cook in his red cloak, men, women and children all dropped onto their knees and lay with their heads to the ground until they had passed. Lono!. . . Lono!. . .

  What he did not know, and never did learn, was that he had been acknowledged as the incarnation of the god Lono. His arrival was the greatest event in Hawaii's history. Lono makua was the Hawaiian god of the season of abundance and relaxation, who was said to process clockwise about the island to be greeted by white banners and elaborate ceremonies of obeisance. Cook had arrived, at the appointed time, and by reason of his decision to sail slowly offshore for better trading, had indeed progressed slowly and clockwise about the island, his standard at his masthead a divine acknowledgement of the white banners ashore. And properly, and according to tradition, he had come to rest at Kealakekua, "the path of the gods," in his miracle giant canoe opposite the heiau in the middle of the god's season, in time for the great ceremonies of worship annually accorded to him for the abundance of riches he caused the soil to grant them.

  Cook may have been late for the Arctic summer but the timing of his arrival off Hawaii could not be faulted. His subsequent actions did have a near-divine verisimilitude, and the climax had now been reached with the ceremonies he had just undergone. Everything that he experienced over the following two weeks conformed with the legend of the god Lono. It is little wonder that his reception -- "this remarkable homage" as King described it -- here at Hawaii was so different from that at any other Polynesian island, and that the natives had been thrown into a state of near-hysteria. Not even the oldest citizen with the longest memory could recall hearing from his oldest ancestor of the appearance in incarnated form of the great god Lono.

  Richard Hough

  The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook

  TRAPPED IN A QUEER PLACE

  It is Monday night on the Kona Coast, two days before Christmas. Three o'clock in the morning. No more Monday night football. The season is over. No more Howard Cosell and no more of that shiteating lunatic with the rainbow-striped afro wig. That freak should be put to sleep, and never mind the reasons. We don't need that kind of craziness out here in Hawaii, not even on TV. . . and especially not now, with the surf so high and wild thugs in the streets of Waikiki and this weather so foul for so long that people are starting to act crazy. A lot more people than normal for this time of year are going to flip out, if we don't see the sun by Christmas.

  They call it "Kona Weather"; gray skies and rough seas, hot rain in the morning and mean drunks at night, bad weather for coke fiends and boat people. . . A huge ugly cloud hangs over the island at all times, and this goddamn filthy sea pounds relentlessly up on the rocks in front of my porch. . . The bastard never sleeps or even rests; it just keeps coming, rolling, booming, slamming down on the rocks with a force that shudders the house every two or three minutes.

  I can feel the sea in my feet as I sit here and type, even in those moments of nervous quiet that usually mean a Big One is on its way, gathering strength out there in the darkness for another crazed charge on the land.

  My shirt is damp with a mixture of sweat and salt spray. My cigarettes bend like rubber and the typing paper is so limp that we need waterproof pens to write on it. . . and now that evil white foam is coming up on my grass, just six feet away from the porch.

  This whole lawn might be halfway to Fiji next week. Last winter's Big Storm took the furniture off every porch on this stretch of the coast and hurled boulders the size of TV sets into people's bedrooms. Half the lawn disappeared overnight and the pool filled up with rocks so big that they had to be lifted out with a crane.

  Our pool is a lot closer to the sea now. On the night we arrived I was almost sucked into the surf by a wave that hit while I was standing on the diving board, and the next day an even bigger one rolled over the pool and almost killed me.

  We stayed away from the pool for a few days, after that. It makes a man queasy to swim laps in a pool where the sea might come and get you at any moment, with no warning at all. It is like getting hit by a moeter (moeter). Meptpr? Meotor? Meteor. . . yes that sounds right: like getting hit by a meteor while driving to work on the freeway.

  Ralph is hunkered down next door in a state of abject terror. The whole family is sleeping on the living room floor with all their baggage packed and ready to flee for their lives on a moment's notice. When I tried to get in and steal Ralph's TV for the late basketball game I almost stepped on the child's head as I came over the edge of that slimy wooden porch.

  Why do they lie to us?

  That is what haunts me now, the weird fishhook in this story that keeps me from just leaping on it like some kind of brute on the run coming up on a high-polished brass fire pole and suddenly. . . yes, a way out.

  Zoom. . . Grab the pole, through the floor, out of sight, big black rubber pad at the bottom. And after that, run like a bastard and never look back. . . because whatever's after you is probably in better shape than you are, and it probably won't slow down.

  Those buggers run 26 consecutive five-minute miles. But not even that is fast enough to stay ahead of that thing that keeps gaining. . .

  Why don't they ride motorcycles?

  Why indeed?

  We will have to deal with that later, for good or ill.

  All we know, for now, and all we need to know, is that this goddamn rotten surf is still thundering up on the lawn at five in the morning and this dirty Hawaiian nightmare has been going on for thirteen straight days.

  BOMB FEVER

  After two weeks on the Kona Coast I found myself looking for stray dogs to run over, eve
ry time I drove into town. . . and the drunker I got, the more dogs I wanted to kill.

  The only other thing that makes sense is bombs, and we reached that point in Kona on Christmas Eve. Here is a wild scrawl that I found on a page in my notebook, dated December 25:

  This filthy goddamn sea is still raging and pounding on the rocks in front of my porch. Somewhere to the west is a monster storm of some kind, with 40-knot winds and 35-foot seas. That is a typhoon I think. We are paying $1,000 a week to sit out here in the rain on the edge of this savage black rock and wait for the annual typhoon-- like the fools they know us to be.

  Well, fuck these people. They lied to us, and their lies have caused us to suffer. . . which means we must go to the mattresses and bomb them into the sea. We've been crouched like dumb wet animals in this place for fifteen days now, and that's at least ten too many. We are living on the edge of the sea, but we can't go near the water. To dive off those rocks in front of the houses would mean instant death. Fifty feet in front of my typewriter is a living thundering hell of white foam and riptides and huge blasts of spray that not even a shark could survive in. The time has come for vengeance.

  The time came yesterday in fact. We finally got weird enough, around midnight on Christmas Eve, to set off a huge Chinese bomb on the front porch of a local charter fisherman's house. It went off with a genuinely terrifying blast about three-tenths of a second after I put the match to the fuse.

  I have set off a lot of firecrackers, but nothing I've ever lit had a kick like this bastard. I tried to run, but the fuse was so quick that I was only a step and a half into my stride when suddenly the whole world turned bright scorching yellow and I was tumbling around in the bushes about ten feet across the driveway. I wound up on my knees, with all the hair burned off my legs, staring back at the house as it disappeared in the eye of a wild fireball that I remember thinking at the time would be the last thing I'd ever see.