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1

Paradise Lost

Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death. Buddy Hamstra offered me a hotel job in Honolulu and laughed at my accepting it so quickly. I had been trying to begin a new life, as people do when they flee to distant places. Hawaii was paradise with heavy traffic. I met Sweetie in the hotel, where she was also working. One day when we were alone on the fourth floor I asked, "Do you want to make love?" and she said, "Part of me does." Why smile? At last we did it, then often, and always in the same vacant guest room, 409. Sweetie got pregnant, our daughter was born. So, within a year of arriving, I had my new life, and as the writer said after the crack-up, I found new things to care about. I was resident manager of the Hotel Honolulu, eighty rooms nibbled by rats.

Buddy, the hotel's owner, said, "We're multistory."

I liked the word and the way he made it multi-eye.

The rooms were small, the elevator was narrow, the lobby was tiny, the bar was just a nook.

"Not small," Buddy said. "Yerpeen."

I had gotten to these green mute islands, humbled and broke again, my brain blocked, feeling superfluous, out of the writing business, and trying to start all over at the age of forty-nine. A friend of mine recommended me to Buddy Hamstra. I applied for this job. It wasn't for material; it was the money. I needed work.

"My manager's a typical local howlie -- a reetard," Buddy said. "Fondles the help. Always cockroaching booze. Sniffs around the guest rooms."

"That's not good," I said.

"And this week he stepped on his dick."

"Not good at all."

"He needs therapy," Buddy said. "He's got lots of baggage."

"Maybe that's what he likes about the hotel -- that he has a place to put it."

Buddy sucked his teeth and said, "That's kind of funny."

The idea of rented bedrooms attracted me. Shared by so many dreaming strangers, every room was vibrant with their secrets, like furious dust in a sunbeam, their night sweats, the stammering echoes of their voices and horizontal fantasies; and certain ambiguous odors, the left-behind atoms and the residue of all the people who had ever stayed in it. The hotel bedroom is more than a symbol of intimacy; it is intimacy's very shrine, scattered with the essential paraphernalia and familiar fetish objects of its rituals. Assigning people to such rooms, I believed I was able to influence their lives.

Buddy Hamstra was a big, blaspheming, doggy-eyed man in drooping shorts, a wheezy smoker and heavy drinker. His nickname was "Tuna." He was most people's nightmare, a reckless millionaire with the values of a delinquent and a barklike laugh. He liked saying, "I'm a crude sumbitch." He was from the mainland -- Sweetwater, Nevada. But he pretended to be worse than he was. He had the sort of devilish gaze that showed a mind in motion.

"What's yours, drink or weed?"

We had met in his hotel bar. He had a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

"I got some killer buds," he said.

"Beer for me."

We talked idly -- about his tattoos, a forthcoming eclipse of the sun, the price of gas, and the source of the weed he was smoking -- before he got down to business, and he asked suddenly, "Any hotel experience?"

"I've stayed in a lot of hotels."

He laughed in his barking way. And then, out of breath from the laughter, he went slack-jawed and gasped blue smoke. Finally he recovered and said, "Hey, I've known a lot of assholes, but that doesn't make me a proctologist."

I admitted that I had no experience running a hotel, that I was a writer -- had been a writer. Every enterprise I had run, I had run in my head. I hated telling him that. I mentioned some of my books, because he asked, but nothing registered. That pleased me. I did not want to have a past.

"You're probably great at thinking up names," he said. "Being as you're a writer."

"That's part of the job."

"Part of the hotel business, too. Naming your restaurants, your lounges, your function rooms. Naming the bar."

His mention of the bar made me look up and see that we were sitting in Momi's Paradise Lounge.

Buddy drank, held the booze in his mouth, frowned, then swallowed and said, "The manager here is a complete bozo. Dangerous, too."

"In what way dangerous?"

"Has an argument with a guest, right? The guest storms out. When he comes back he finds that the manager has bricked up his doorway, sealed the whole room off. What he was saying was, it's the guest's room but it's our doorway."

I tried to imagine a guest opening the door and seeing fresh bricks where there should have been an opening.

"Another guest -- a real pain, granted -- this manager put some goldfish in his toilet so he couldn't use it, but the guest flushed it, and so the manager filled the whole bathroom with industrial foam." Buddy sipped his drink, looking thoughtful. "Someone asked him, 'What's your problem?' The manager says, 'Masturbation takes points off your IQ each time. Hey, I could have been a genius.'"

At that moment Buddy's mobile phone rang. He answered it and handed me his business card and whispered for me to visit him the next day at his house on the North Shore. Then he exploded into the phone. Hearing him hollering at someone else, I realized how polite he had been with me.

Buddy was watching an inaudible television when I found him the next day. Because he was supine and less animated, he looked more debauched. He lay in a hammock on a porch of his house, a large square building with porches like pulled-out bureau drawers, standing among rattling palm trees at the edge of Sunset Beach and the toppling, sliding waves. The sound of surf overwhelmed the sound of the television program he was watching. The women in bathing suits on the TV were not half as attractive as the ones on the beach below where he lay.

"This lolo manager," he said, rolling his eyes, continuing where we had left off. "I'll give you another example. He sees a very pretty guest and introduces himself. He accompanies her to her room, they admire the view from her lanai, and he says, 'Excuse me.' He goes into her john and takes a big loud leak." Buddy shook his head with disapproval. "The woman is so spooked she moves out."

As I listened, I watched a rat moving smoothly along the baseboard of Buddy's big house like a blown leaf.

"He's got a professional massage table in one room. He offers massages to women. Now and then he goes a little too far. Some like it, others don't. There are complaints."

"He's a qualified masseur?"

"He's a three-balled tomcat. Like I said, he stepped on his dick."

I laughed in spite of myself, and Buddy joined me, barking. This second time I saw Buddy, he seemed more devilish. Watching him swinging in his hammock, like a big fish in a net, I was reminded of his nickname. Holding a glass of vodka on the dome of his belly, Buddy listed the manager's lapses. The man drank and disgraced himself. The man dipped into the cash register. The man insulted guests, sometimes using abusive language. He had been discovered sleeping in his office. He had a weakness for giving deals to guests who had done him favors, which was why the hotel had several long-term residents who could not be dislodged. He took pleasure in misleading people, and rubbed his hands when they went astray.

"This week he got into a world of shit," Buddy said. "He had a little flirtation with one of the guests. She's a fox but she's married -- she's on vacation here with her husband. After this dipshit manager made love to her she passed out, and he shaved off her pubic hair. She had to explain that to her old man!" Buddy clucked, looked closely at me, and said, "What do you think?"

I laughed so hard at this weird outrage I could not reply. But I was also embarrassed. In the world I had left, people didn't do those things.

Buddy said, "A person's laugh says an awful lot."

That made me self-conscious, so I said, "He sounds pretty colorful. But I don't know whether I'd want him to run my business."

"You said writers are good at thinking up names," Buddy said. "We need a new name for the bar."

" 'Momi's Paradise Lounge' isn't bad."

"Except that Momi is my ex-wife. She used to tend bar. We just got divorced. My new wahine, Stella, hates the name. So?"

He raised himself up in the hammock to face me. And I tried to think through all these distractions -- the TV, the dumping waves, the women in bikinis lying on the beach, the scuttling rat.

"What about calling it 'Paradise Lost'?"

Buddy said nothing. He became very still, but his mind was in motion. I was aware of a straining sound, like the grunt of a laboring motor. Later I grew to recognize this as his way of thinking hard, his brain whirring like an old machine, cocked with a mainspring and the murmuring movement of its works coming out of his mouth. At last, in a whisper, he said, "It's the name of...what? Some song? Some story?"

"Poem."

"Poem. I like it."

And he relaxed. I stopped hearing the mechanism of slipping belts and uncoiling springs and meshing cogs from his damp forehead.

"You'll do fine."

So I had the job. Was it because I was a writer? Buddy didn't read, which made the printed word seem like magic to him and perhaps gave him an exaggerated respect for writers. He was a gambler, and I was one of his gambles. He was one of the last of a dying breed, a rascal in the Pacific. His hiring me was another example of the sort of audacious risk he boasted about.

"The staff is great," he said. "They'll do your job for you, and the rest is oh-jay-tee. But I need someone who looks like he knows what he's doing."

"I'll try."

"It's not rocket surgery," Buddy said. "And you've got the basic qualification."

"What's that?"

"Reason being, you're a mainland howlie." He laughed and hitched himself tighter in his hammock and sent me on my way.

The word "mainland," spoken in Hawaii, sounded to me like "Planet Earth."

Copyright © 2001 by Paul Theroux