The Curse of Lono

by Hunter S. Thompson

Four natives had now appeared, ceremonially dressed and bearing wands tipped with dogs' hair, and chanting the word Lono.*

  Richard Hough

  The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook

  * Or Orono, as Hough actually makes it out to be. "Orono" has been changed to Lono throughout.

  But he did. Almost everything he said was a lie. Our lives were about to become a living hell. Our Christmas would be a nightmare. Fear and loneliness would govern our lives, which would wander out of control. And we would all feel sicker and sicker every day. There would be no relief, no laughter; only craziness, despair and confusion.

  Mr. Heem, the realtor, was waiting when we arrived at Kailua -- Kona Airport, a palmy little oasis on the edge of the sea, about 10 miles out of town. The sun was getting low and there were puddles of water on the runway, but Mr. Heem assured us the weather was fine. "We'll sometimes get a little shower in the late afternoon," he said. "But I think you'll find it refreshing."

  There was not enough room in his car for all our luggage, so I rode into town with a local fisherman called Captain Steve, who said he lived right up the beach from us. We loaded the luggage into his El Camino pickup and I sent the others on with Mr. Heem.

  Ralph was agitated about leaving me alone with a stranger. "I can see it in his eyes," he said. "He's a dope addict. It's no accident that he was sitting here like a troll when we got off the plane."

  "Ridiculous," I said. "He's picking up his girl friend. People are friendly over here, Ralph. It's not like Honolulu!"

  "Oh God!" he moaned. "You're lying again. They're everywhere, like pods -- and you're one of them!"

  "That's right," I said. "And so is this man Heem. He slipped me a package the minute we got off the plane." He stared at me, then quickly pulled his daughter to his side.

  "It's horrible," he muttered. "Worse than perverts."

  The highway from the airport into town was one of the ugliest stretches of road I'd ever seen in my life. The whole landscape was a desert of hostile black rocks, mile after mile of raw moonscape and ominous low-lying clouds. Captain Steve said we were crossing an old lava flow, one of the last eruptions from the 14,000-foot hump of Mauna Kea to our left, somewhere up in the fog. Far down to the right a thin line of coconut palms marked the new western edge of America, a lonely-looking wall of jagged black lava cliffs looking out on the white-capped Pacific. We were 2,500 miles west of the Seal Rock Inn, halfway to China, and the first thing I saw on the outskirts was a Texaco station, then a McDonald's hamburger stand.

  Captain Steve seemed uneasy with my description of the estate he was taking me to. When I described the brace of elegant Japanese-style beach houses looking out on a black marble pool and a thick green lawn rolling down to a placid bay, he shook his head sadly and changed the subject. "We'll go out on my boat for some serious marlin fishing," he said.

  "I've never caught a fish in my life," I said. "My temperament is wrong for it."

  "You'll catch fish in Kona," he assured me as we rounded a corner into downtown Kailua, a crowded commercial district on the rim of the bay with half-naked people running back and forth through traffic like sand crabs.

  We slowed to a crawl, trying to avoid pedestrians, but as we passed the Kona Inn a potbellied man with white hair carrying a beer bottle in each hand came running out of the driveway yelling, "You dirty bitch! I'll break your neck!" and crashed against the car at full speed, smacking my arm against the door. He fell back on the street and I tried to open the car door to get out and stomp on him, but my arm was completely numb. I couldn't lift it, or even move my fingers.

  I was still in shock when we stopped at a red light and I noticed what appeared to be a cluster of garish-looking prostitutes standing in the shadows of a banyan tree on the sidewalk. Suddenly there was a woman leaning in my window, yelling gibberish at Captain Steve. She was trying to reach in and get hold of him, but my arm was dead and I couldn't roll up the window. When she reached across me again I grabbed her hand and jammed my lit cigarette into her palm. The light changed and Captain Steve sped away, leaving the whore screeching on her knees in the middle of the intersection.

  "Good work," he said to me. "That guy used to work for me. He was a first-class mechanic."

  "What?" I said. "That whore?"

  "That was no whore," he said. "That was Hilo Bob, a shameless transvestite. He hangs out on that corner every night, with all those other freaks. They're all transvestites."

  I wondered if Mr. Heem had brought Ralph and his family along this same scenic route. I had a vision of him struggling desperately with a gang of transvestites in the middle of a traffic jam, not knowing what it meant. Wild whores with crude painted faces, bellowing in deep voices and shaking bags of dope in his face, demanding American money.

  We were stuck in this place for at least a month, and the rent was $1,000 a week -- half in advance, which we'd already paid Mr. Heem.

  "It's a bad situation," Captain Steve was saying, as we picked up speed on the way out of town. "Those freaks have taken over a main intersection and the cops can't do anything about it." He swerved suddenly to avoid a pear-shaped jogger on the shoulder of the highway. "Hilo Bob goes crazy every time he sees my car," he said. "I fired him after he had a sex-change operation, so he got a lawyer and sued me for mental anguish. He wants a half-million dollars."

  "Jesus," I said, still rubbing my wounded arm. "A gang of vicious bull fruits, harassing the traffic on main street."

  "Yeah," he went on. "I made a real effort with Bob, but he got too weird for the clients. I'd get to the boat in the morning with a terrible hangover and find him asleep on the ice chest with his hair dyed orange and lipstick smeared all over his face. He got real bitchy and strange after he had his operation, and he started drinking a lot. I never knew what to expect. One morning he showed up with the ass cut out of his Levi's, but I didn't notice it until we were out of the harbor and I let him take the helm. I had a family of Japs on board, and they all went crazy at once. The grandfather was a famous fisherman, about ninety years old, and they'd brought him all the way to Kona to catch his last marlin. I was up in the tower, still half sick and asleep, when I heard a lot of screaming down in the cabin. It sounded like Bob was being killed. I came down the ladder, with a loaded forty-five in my hand, and got hit in the face with a spear handle by an old woman about four feet tall. It knocked me out cold. By the time I woke up the boat was running in circles and Bob was over the side, fouled in the outrigger lines. He had two hooks in his back and the water was full of blood, but they wouldn't let me stop to pull him back aboard. The old man wanted me to shoot him in the water. I had to give them five hundred dollars in cash before they let me pick Bob up, then they stabbed him three or four times on the way back to port." He laughed bitterly. "It was the worst experience I've ever had at sea. They reported me to the Coast Guard and I almost lost my captain's license. The story was on the front page of the newspaper. They charged me with sexual assault and I had to defend myself at a public hearing." He laughed again. "Jesus Christ! How do you explain a thing like that? The first mate walking around the deck with the seat cut out of his pants."

  I said nothing. The story made me uncomfortable. What kind of place had we come to? I wondered. And what if Ralph wanted to go fishing? Captain Steve seemed okay, but the stories he told were eerie. They ran counter to most notions of modern-day sport fishing. Many clients ate only cocaine for lunch, he said; others went crazy on beer and wanted to fight, on days when the fish weren't biting. No strikes before noon put bad pressure on the captain. For five hundred dollars a day, the clients wanted big fish, and a day with no strikes at all could flare up in mutiny on the long ride back to the harbor at sunset. "You never know," he said. "I've had people try to put a gaffing hook into me, with no warning at all. That's why I carry the forty-five. There's no point calling the cops when you're twenty miles out to sea. They can't help you out there." He glanced in the direction of the surf, booming
up on the rocks about a hundred yards to our right. The ocean was out there, I knew, but the sun had gone down and all I could see was blackness. The nearest landfall in that direction was Tahiti, 2,600 miles due south.

  It was raining now, and he turned on the windshield wipers. We were cruising slowly along in bumper-to-bumper traffic. The highway was lined on both sides with what appeared to be unfinished apartment buildings, new condominiums and raw construction sites littered with bulldozers and cranes. The roadside was crowded with long-haired thugs carrying surfboards, paying no attention to traffic. Captain Steve was getting edgy, but he said we were almost there.

  "It's one of these hidden driveways," he muttered, slowing down to examine the numbers on a row of tin mailboxes.

  "Impossible," I said. "They told me it was far out at the end of a narrow country road."

  He laughed, then suddenly hit the brakes and swung right through a narrow slit in the shrubbery beside the road. "This is it," he said, jamming the brakes again to keep from running up on the back of Mr. Heem's car. It was parked with all the doors open in a cluster of cheap wooden shacks about 15 feet off the highway. There was nobody in sight, and the rain was getting dense. We quickly loaded the baggage out of the El Camino and into the nearest shack, a barren little box with only two cots and a Salvation Army couch for furniture. The sliding glass doors looked out on the sea, like they said, but we were afraid to open them, for fear of the booming surf. Huge waves crashed down on the black rocks in front of the porch. White foam lashed the glass and water ran into the living room, where the walls were alive with cockroaches.

  The storms continued all week: murky sun in the morning, rain in the afternoon and terrible surf all night. We couldn't even swim in the pool, much less do any diving. Captain Steve was becoming more and more frantic about our inability to get in the water, or even go near it. We conferred each day on the phone, checking the weather reports and hoping for a break.

  The problem, he explained, was an off-shore storm somewhere out in the Pacific -- maybe a hurricane on Guam, or something worse down south around Tahiti. In any case, something we couldn't control or even locate was sending big rollers across the ocean from some faraway place. Hawaii is so far out in the middle of nothing that a mild squall in the straits of Malacca, 3,000 miles away, can turn a six-inch ripple into a sixteen-foot wave by the time it hits Kona. There is no other place in the world that so consistently bears the brunt of other people's weather.

  The Kona Coast is on the leeward side of the Big Island, protected by the towering humps of two 14,000-foot volcanoes from the prevailing northeast winds. The whole east coast of the island is a jagged wasteland of ferns and black boulders, lashed by the same Arctic winds that make the north coast of Oahu a surfer's paradise.

  But the same wave that picks up a surfboard can also pick up a boat and send it rocketing toward the beach at terrible speeds. Nobody who has ever taken that ride wants to do it again. "There's no way you can ride it out," Captain Steve told me. "If you try to keep it straight you'll get smashed on the rocks like some kind of flying egg -- and if you try to turn out of the wave, the boat will broach and start rolling. Either way, you're doomed."

  It happened to a friend of his once, he said. "He was coming in with a party of tourists one afternoon. They were in an ugly mood because nobody had caught a fish, so he was keeping an eye on them and talking to his wife on the radio at the same time, not watching the waves -- when all of a sudden he realized he was ten feet out of the water and coming into the harbor so fast that all he could do was jump. The boat kept on going and he said he could hear those poor bastards screaming all the way into the rocks." He smiled ruefully. "One guy was down below changing his pants when the boat finally flipped; he was trapped in an air pocket under the boat for two hours before we could get him out. We had to come up underneath him with tanks, then get hold of his legs and drag him down about eighteen feet before we could take him up." He shook his head, no longer smiling. "Jesus," he said, "I hope I never have to see a thing like that again. He was stark naked and completely hysterical by the time we got him to the dock. It was a terrible scene. The whole crowd was laughing at him, and that made him even crazier. One of the guys who tried to help him out of the dinghy still has teeth marks all over his arm. Then he locked himself in a car and we had to break a window to get him out.

  "The boat was a total loss," he added. "Probably fifty or sixty thousand dollars. What was left of it finally sank and blocked the entrance to the harbor for five days."

  We hear all our lives about the "gentle, stormless Pacific," and about the "smooth and delightful route to the Sandwich Islands," and about the "steady blowing trades," that never vary, never change, never "chop around," and all the days of our boyhood we read how that infatuated old ass, Balboa, looked out from the top of a high rock upon a broad sea as calm and peaceful as a sylvan lake, and went into an ecstasy of delight, like any other greaser over any other trifle, and shouted in his foreign tongue and waved his country's banner, and named his great discovery "Pacific" -- thus uttering a lie which will go on deceiving generation after generation of students while the old ocean lasts. If I had been there, with my experience, I would have said to this man Balboa, "Now, if you think you have made a sufficient display of yourself, cavorting around on this conspicuous rock, you had better fold up your old rag and get back into the woods again, because you have jumped into a conclusion, and christened this sleeping boy-baby with a girl's name, without stopping to inquire into the sex of it."

  From all that I can discover, if this foreign person had named this ocean the "Four Months Pacific," he should have come nearer the mark. My information is to the effect that the summer months give fine weather, smooth seas, and steady winds, with a month and a few days good weather at the far end of spring and the beginning of autumn and that the other seven or eight months of the year one can calculate pretty regularly on head winds and stern winds, and winds on the quarter, and winds several points aloft the beam, and winds that blow straight up from the bottom, and still other winds that come so straight down from above that the fore-stuns'1-spanker-jib-boom makes a hole through them as clean as a telescope. And the sea rolls and leaps and chops and surges "thortships" and up and down and fore-and-aft by turns, when the gales are blowing; and when they die out, the old nor'west swell comes in and takes a hand, and stands watch, and keeps up the marine earthquake until the winds are rested and ready to make trouble again.

  In a word, the Pacific is "rough" for seven or eight months in the year -- not stormy, understand me; not what one could just call stormy, but contrary, baffling, and very "rough."

  Therefore, if that Balboa-constrictor had constructed a name for it that had "Wild" or "Untamed" to it, there would have been a majority of two months in the year in favor and in support of it.

  Mark Twain

  Letters from Hawaii

  Waves like that are rare on the Kona Coast, where the waters are usually more placid than anywhere else in the islands -- except when the weather turns around, as they say, and the winds blow in from the west.

  Mark Twain did not lie -- at least not about the Pacific Ocean in winter. The Kona Coast in December is as close to hell on earth as a half-bright mammal can get -- and this is the leeward side of the "Big Island": this is the calm side.

  God only knows what happens over there on the windward side, around Hilo. . . That is the "wet coast," they say, and even real estate agents will warn you against going over there, for any reason at all.

  But they will not warn you about Kona. . . so that will have to be my job; for as long as the grass is green and the rivers flow to the sea. The Kona Coast of Hawaii might be a nice place to visit for a few hours on the hottest day in July -- but not even fish will come near this place in the winter; if the surf doesn't kill you, the Surge will, and anybody who tries to tell you anything different should have his teeth gouged out with a chisel.

  HST: I'm calling abo
ut a wave warning I just heard on the radio. We're visiting out here, tourists in fact.

  COP: Yeah-- where you staying at?

  HST: I'm out past Magic Sands.

  COP: Right on the beach?

  HST: Right smack on the beach.

  COP: Okay-- we are expecting high surf about four o'clock this morning.

  HST: What does this mean to me? We've had some pretty high surf out here.

  COP: Yeah, well, it means it's going to possibly crest at seventeen feet this morning at about four.

  HST: Seventeen feet? Is that measuring behind the wave? That's actually -- ah-- that's a real high sea, isn't it?

  COP: Right. Something about a storm to the north of the islands or whatever. However, right now, they're only advising. But if there's any loose gear, it should be secured.

  HST: Is this going to pick rocks out of the ocean and put them into my bedroom?

  COP: No, not quite that bad we hope. Ah-- of course if it worsens, if the situation worsens, the CD, the Civil Defense will become involved.

  HST: Well, if it's four o'clock in the morning most of us will be asleep, hopefully. How will we know when it gets serious?

  COP: Well, we'll probably use some police cars or the fire department with loudspeakers and go down Alii Drive recommending evacuation. But right now it's just an advisory.

  HST: This is that same storm from the North? And it's going to get worse?

  COP: At four this morning the high tides will be at their worst.

  HST: The worst.

  COP: Right. But right now it appears fairly calm.

  HST: It does. I was just downtown -- it looked very calm to me.

  COP: The waves in Kailua Bay are running five feet; Kaheo Bay, nothing-- no wave action at all.

  HST: What was the size of the waves we had about two weeks ago? That's when we had some trouble up here. They came up to the porch.