Hotel Honolulu

Hotel Honolulu

A shabby Hawaiian hotel provides the backdrop for a series of interwoven stories about love, crime, friendship, and family, as seen through the eyes of a down on his luck writer who takes a job as hotel manager. Every guest at this hotel has a story, and we get to hear them all including that of the new manager, a down-on-his-luck kind of guy whose life is taken over by his job. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. "a cunningly assembled affair...'Hotel Honolulu' is Theroux at his diabolical best." -- Portland Tribune "a delightful, loose-limbed riff of a novel...full of Theroux's sharp wit, unashamed crankiness, pungent observations and surprising insights." -- The Seattle Times "(Theroux's) stylistic brilliance...and his extraordinary ear make him one of the most impressive living American writers." -- Review Paul Theroux’s highly acclaimed novels include Blinding Light, Hotel Honolulu, My Other Life, Kowloon Tong, and The Mosquito Coast. His renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Dark Star Safari, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, and The Happy Isles of Oceania. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod. 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 therrpy," 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.