The Curse of Lono

We were about 40 minutes out of San Francisco when the crew finally decided to take action on the problem in lavatory 1B. The door had been locked since take-off, and now the chief stewardess had summoned the copilot down from the flight deck. He appeared in the aisle right beside me, carrying a strange-looking black tool, like a flashlight with blades or some kind of electric chisel. He nodded calmly as he listened to the stewardess' urgent whispering. ''I can talk to him,'' she said, pointing a long red fingernail at the Occupied sign on the locked toilet door, ''but I can't get him out.''

The copilot nodded thoughtfully, keeping his back to the passengers while he made some adjustments on the commando tool he was holding. ''Any I.D.?'' he asked.

She glanced at a list on her clipboard. ''Mr. Ackerman,'' she said. ''Address: Box 99, Kailua-Kona.''

''The big island,'' he said.

She nodded, still consulting her clipboard. ''Red Carpet Club member,'' she said. ''Frequent traveler, no previous history ... boarded in San Francisco, one-way first class to Honolulu. A perfect gentleman. No connections booked.'' She continued, ''No hotel reservations, no rental cars....'' She shrugged. ''Very polite, sober, relaxed....''

''Yeah,'' he said. ''I know the type.'' He stared down at his tool for a moment, then raised his other hand and knocked sharply on the door. ''Mr. Ackerman?'' he called. ''Can you hear me?''

There was no answer, but I was close enough to the door to hear sounds of movement inside: first the bang of a toilet seat dropping, then running water.

I didn't know Ackerman, but I remembered him coming aboard. He had the look of a man who had once been a tennis pro in Hong Kong, then gone on to bigger things. The gold Rolex, the white-linen bush jacket, the Thai bhat chain around his neck, the heavy leather briefcase with combination locks on every zipper.... These were not the signs of a man who would lock himself in the bathroom immediately after take-off and stay inside for almost an hour.

Which is too long on any flight. That kind of behavior raises questions that eventually become hard to ignore--especially in the spacious first-class compartment of a 747 on a five-hour flight to Hawaii. People who pay that kind of money don't like the idea of having to stand in line to use the only available bathroom while something clearly wrong is going on in the other one.

I was one of those people. My social contract with United Airlines entitled me, I felt, to at least the use of a tin stand-up bathroom with a lock on the door. I had spent six hours hanging around the Red Carpet Room in the San Francisco airport arguing with ticket agents and drinking heavily and had finally secured a seat for myself and one for my girlfriend, Laila, on the last 747 flight of the day to Honolulu. Now I needed to get myself cleaned up.

My plan on that night was to look at all the research material I had on Hawaii. There were memos and pamphlets to read--even books. My task looked simple enough at the time: Some poor, misguided editor named Perry wanted to give me a month in Hawaii for Christmas, and all I had to do was cover the Honolulu Marathon for his magazine, a thing called Running. I didn't know then what queer and hopelessly confused reasons were, in fact, taking me to Hawaii. I never asked myself until much later what kind of awful power it was that caused me--after years of refusing all (and even the most lucrative) magazine assignments as cheap and unworthy--to suddenly agree to fly out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean to confront the half-wit spectacle of 8000 rich people torturing themselves for 26 miles through the streets of Honolulu, and calling it sport. There were many things to write, for many people--but I spurned them all until this strange call came.

And then I persuaded my friend Ralph Steadman--the British artist and my partner in more terrible misadventures than he cares to remember--not only to go with me but to take his whole family half-way around the world from London, for no good or practical reason, to spend what would turn out to be the weirdest month of our lives.

We are talking, here, about a thing with more power than I knew.

''These islands are full of mystery,'' Perry had told me. ''Never mind Don Ho and all the tourist gibberish--there's a hell of a lot more there than most people understand.''

Wonderful, I thought. Deal with the mystery. Do it now. Anything that can create itself by erupting out of the bowels of the Pacific Ocean is worth looking at. Now I needed a place to shave, brush my teeth and maybe just stand there and look at myself in the mirror and wonder, as always, who might be looking back.

I have never really believed that mirrors in airplane bathrooms are what they seem to be. There is no possible economic argument for a genuinely private place of any kind on a $10,000,000 flying machine. No. That makes no sense. The risk is too high. Too many people, like master sergeants forced into early retirement, have tried to set themselves on fire in those tin cubicles ... too many psychotics and half-mad dope addicts have locked themselves inside, then gobbled pills and tried to flush themselves down the long blue tube.

The copilot rapped on the door again with his knuckles. ''Mr. Ackerman! Are you all right?''

He hesitated, then called again, much louder this time. ''Mr. Ackerman! This is your captain speaking. Are you sick?''

''What?'' said a voice from inside.

The stewardess leaned close to the door. ''This is a medical emergency, Mr. Ackerman--we can get you out of there in 30 seconds if we have to.'' She smiled triumphantly at Captain Goodwrench as the voice inside came alive again.

''I'm fine,'' it said. ''I'll be out in a minute.'' The copilot stood back and watched the door. There were more sounds of movement inside--but nothing else except the sound of running water.

By this time, the entire first-class cabin was alerted to the crisis. ''Get that freak out of there!'' an old man shouted. ''He might have a bomb!''

The copilot flinched, then turned to face the passengers. He pointed his tool at the old man, who was now becoming hysterical. ''You!'' he snapped. ''Shut up! I'll handle this.''

Suddenly, the door opened and Ackerman stepped out. He moved quickly into the aisle and smiled at the stewardess. ''Sorry to keep you waiting,'' he said. ''It's all yours now.'' He was backing down the aisle, his bush jacket draped casually over his arm but not covering it.

From where I was sitting, I could see that the arm he was trying to hide from the stewardess was bright blue all the way up to the shoulder. The sight of it made me coil nervously into my seat. I had liked Ackerman at first. He'd had the look of a man who might share my own tastes--but now he was looking like trouble, and I was ready to kick him in the balls, like a mule, for any reason at all. My original impression of the man had gone all to pieces by that time. This geek who had locked himself in the bathroom for so long that one of his arms had turned blue was not the same gracious, linen-draped Pacific yachtsman who'd boarded the plane in San Francisco.

Most of the other passengers seemed happy enough just to see the problem come out of the bathroom peacefully: no sign of a weapon, no dynamite taped to his chest, no screaming of incomprehensible terrorist slogans or threats to slit people's throats. The copilot, however, was staring at Ackerman with an expression of pure horror on his face. He had seen the blue arm--and so had the stewardess, who was saying nothing at all. None of the other passengers had noticed it--or, if they had, they didn't know what it meant.

But I did, and so did the bug-eyed stewardess. The copilot gave Ackerman one last withering glance, then shuddered with obvious disgust as he closed up his commando tool and moved away. On his way to the spiral staircase that led back up-stairs to the flight deck, he paused beside me in the aisle and whispered to Ackerman, ''You filthy bastard, don't ever let me catch you on one of my flights again.''

I saw Ackerman nod politely, then slide into his seat just across the aisle from me. I quickly stood up and moved toward the bathroom with my shaving kit in my hand--and when I'd locked myself safely inside, I carefully closed the toilet seat before I did anything else.

There is only one way to get your arm dyed blue on a 747 flying at 38,000 feet over the Pacific. But the truth is so rare and unlikely that not even the most frequent air travelers have ever had to confront it--and it's not a thing that the few who understand usually want to discuss.

The powerful disinfectant that most airlines use in their toilet-flushing facilities is a chemical compound known as Dejerm, which is colored a very vivid blue. The only other time I ever saw a man come out of an airplane bathroom with a blue arm was on a flight from London to Zaire, en route to the Ali-Foreman fight. A British news correspondent from Reuters had gone into the bathroom and had somehow managed to drop his only key to the Reuters telex machine in Kinshasa down the aluminum bowl. He emerged about 30 minutes later, and he had a row to himself the rest of the way to Zaire.

It was almost midnight when I emerged from lavatory 1B and went back to my seat to gather up my books and papers. The overhead lights were out and the other passengers were sleeping. It was time to go upstairs to the dome lounge and get some work done.

When I got to the top of the spiral (continued on page 144)Curse Of Lono(continued from page 132) staircase, I saw my fellow traveler Mr. Ackerman sleeping peacefully on one of the couches near the bar. He woke up as I passed by on my way to a table in the rear, and I thought I saw a flicker of recognition in the weary smile on his face.

I nodded casually. ''I hope you found it,'' I said.

He looked up at me. ''Yeah,'' he said. ''Of course.''

Whatever it was, I didn't want to know about it. He had his problems and I had mine.

I walked up to the bar and got some ice for my drink. On the way back to my table, I asked him, ''How's your arm?''

''Blue,'' he replied. ''And it itches.'' He sat up and lit a cigarette. ''So what brings you to Hawaii?'' he said.

''Business,'' I said. ''I'm covering the Honolulu Marathon for a magazine.''

He nodded thoughtfully and put his feet up on the table in front of him, then turned to smile at me. ''You staying long in the islands?''

''Not in Honolulu,'' I said. ''Just until Saturday, then we're going over to a place called Kona.''

''Kona?''

''Yeah,'' I said, leaning back and opening one of my books.

''Why Kona?'' he asked. ''You want to catch fish?''

I shrugged. ''I want to get out on the water, do some diving.''

He nodded again, staring down at the long fingers of his freshly blued hand. ''The big island is different from the others,'' he said. ''Especially that mess in Honolulu. It's like going back in time. It's probably the only place in the islands where the people have any sense of the old Hawaiian culture.'' He smiled thoughtfully and handed me his card, which said he was in the business of Investments.

''Call me when you get settled in,'' he said. ''I can take you around to some of the places where the old magic still lives.''

I put down my book and we talked for a while about the island lore--the old wars, the missionaries and some of the native legends. One of the things he mentioned with particular relish was a place on Kona that he called the City of Refuge. It was a sacred enclosure, a sort of ancient safe house that provided inviolable sanctuary--and not just to imperiled women and children but to thieves and murderers and all manner of fugitives on the run. It was the first time anybody had told me anything interesting about Hawaii.

''This City of Refuge is intriguing,'' I said. ''You don't find many cultures with a sense of sanctuary that powerful.''

''Yeah,'' he said, ''but you had to get there first, and you had to be faster than whoever was chasing you.'' He chuckled. ''It was a sporting proposition, for sure.''

''But once you got there,'' I said, ''you were absolutely protected--right?''

''Absolutely,'' he said. ''Not even the gods could touch you once you got through the gate.''

''I might need a place like that,'' I said.

''Yeah,'' he said. ''Me, too. That's why I live where I do.''

''Where?''

He smiled and eased back in his seat again. ''On a clear day, I can look down the mountain and see the City of Refuge from my front porch. It gives me a great sense of comfort.''

I had a feeling that he was telling the truth. Whatever kind of life Ackerman lived seemed to require a built-in fall-back position. You don't find many investment counselors, from Hawaii or anywhere else, who can drop anything so important down the tube in a 747 bathroom that they will get their arms dyed bright blue to retrieve it.

We were alone in the dome with at least another two hours to go. We would be in Honolulu sometime around sunrise. Over the top of my book, I could see him, half-asleep now but constantly scratching his arm. His eyes were closed, but the fingers of his clean hand were wide-awake and his spastic movements were beginning to get on my nerves.

Finally, he seemed to be asleep. The dome was dark except for the small glow of table lights, and I settled back on the couch to ponder my research material.

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 has 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 for their awesome array of virtues. They are not intrinsically different from the people themselves--just bigger and bolder and better in every way.

The favorite, 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, though 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. That side of his nature, though 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 those spats that King Lono belted his queen across the hut so violently that he accidentally killed her. Kaikilani's death plunged King Lono 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 that and retired undefeated, they say, sometime around the end of the Eighth or Ninth Century. Still bored and distraught, he took off in a magic canoe for a tour of foreign lands--whence he would return, he promised, as soon as the time was right.

The natives have been waiting for that 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.

I was still reading when the stewardess appeared to announce that we would be landing in 30 minutes. ''You'll have to take your regular seats down below,'' she said, not looking at Ackerman, who still seemed asleep.

I began packing my gear. The sky out-side the portholes was getting light. As I dragged my satchel down the aisle, Ackerman woke up and lit a cigarette. ''Tell 'em I couldn't make it,'' he said. ''I think I can handle the landing from up here.'' He grinned and fastened a seat belt that poked out from the depths of the couch. ''They won't miss me down there,'' he said.

''I'll see you in Kona,'' I said.

''That's good,'' he replied. ''I have the (continued on page 290)Curse of Lono(continued from page 144) feeling you're going to need all the help you can get over here.''

•

We listened to the marathon on the radio and fled Honolulu after a week of steady rain, getting out just ahead of a storm that closed the airport and canceled the surfing tournaments on the north shore. But we were on our way to Kona now, and everyone assured us that it would be sun-soaked and placid. The houses were all set, and we'd soon be taking the sun and doing some diving out in front of the compound, where the sea was calm as a lake.

I was definitely ready for it--and even Ralph was excited. The wretched weather in Honolulu had broken his spirit, and when he'd waded out into the ocean one afternoon for some of the fine snorkeling we'd heard about, the surf had nearly broken his spine.

''You look sick,'' I said to him as he staggered into the airport with a huge IBM Selectric that he'd stolen from the hotel.

''I am sick,'' he shouted. ''My whole body is rotting. Thank God we're going to Kona. I must rest. I must see the sun.''

''Don't worry, Ralph,'' I said. ''A friend of mine has taken care of everything.''

Mr. Heem, the realtor, was waiting when we arrived at Kailua-Kona airport, a palmy little oasis on the edge of the sea, about ten miles out of town. The sun was getting low and there were puddles of water on the runway, but 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 befriended us at the 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 to catch a marlin--a gesture of 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.

The highway from the airport into town was one of the ugliest stretches of road I'd ever seen. 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 2500 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 when we stopped at a red light, 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 get hold of him, but 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 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 $1000 a week--''half in advance, which we'd already paid 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 when he wanted to have a sex-change operation, so he got a lawyer and sued me for mental anguish. He wants a half-million dollars.''

''Jesus,'' I said. ''A gang of vicious bull fruits harassing the traffic on Main Street. No one warned me about this.''

What kind of place had we come to? I wondered. And what would happen if we wanted to go fishing? Captain Steve seemed OK, but the stories he told were eerie. They ran counter to most notions of modern-day sportfishing. 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 $500 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 .45. There's no point calling the cops when you're 20 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 100 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, 2600 miles 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 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 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 offshore 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 Strait of Malacca, 7000 miles away, can turn a six-inch ripple into a 16-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.

Waves like that are rare on the Kona Coast, though, 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.

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. 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 may 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.

•

Ordinarily, the Kona Coast is the fishing capital of Hawaii, Kailua Bay is the social and commercial axis of the Kona Coast, and the huge, gallowslike rig of fish-weight scales on the pier in front of the King Kamehameha Hotel is where the fishing pros of Kona live or die every afternoon of the week--in full view of the public, such as it is.

Sportfishing is big business in Kona, and four o'clock at the end of the city pier is show time for the local charter captains. That is where they bring their fish to be weighed and to have their pictures taken if they're bringing in anything big. The scales are where the victors show their stuff, and the vanquished don't even show up. The boats with no blood on their decks take the short way home--to the Honokohau harbor, eight miles north. As each boatload of failures ties up there at sundown, the harbor curs rush to the edge of the black lava cliff that looks down on the dock and start barking. They want the leftover lunch meat, not fish, and it is an ugly scene to confront at the end of a long, futile day at sea.

On any given day, most boats go back to Honokohau, but a few return to the pier, where the crowd begins gathering around three. Jimmy Sloan, the commercial photographer who has the pier concession, will be there with his camera to make the moment live in history on 8 x 10 glossies at ten dollars each. And there will also be the man from Grey's taxidermy, just in case you want your trophy mounted.

Every successful charter-boat captain understands the difference between the fishing business and show business. Fishing is what happens out there on the deep-blue water, and the other is getting strangers to pay for it. So when you come swooping into Kailua Bay at sunset with a big fish to hang up on the scales, you want to do it with every ounce of style and slow-rumbling, boat-handling drama that you and your crew can muster. The Bringing In of the Fish is the only action in town at that hour of the day--or any other hour, for that matter--because big-time fishing is what the Kona Coast is all about (never mind those rumors about marijuana crops and bizarre real-estate scams).

Kicking ass in Kona means rumbling into the harbor and up to the scales at sunset with a big fish, not three or four small ones, and the crowd on the pier understands this. They will laugh out loud at anything that can be lifted out of a boat by anything less than a crane.

There is definite blood lust in the air around the scales at sundown. By five, the crowd is drunk and ugly and the tension picks up as each new boat comes in. On a good day, they are yelling for 1000-pounders, and woe unto the charter captain who shows up with anything small.

But after two weeks on the Kona Coast, I'd had no occasion to show up at the Kailua pier at all. This filthy goddamn sea was still raging and pounding on the rocks in front of my porch. Somewhere to the west was a monster storm of some kind, with 40-knot winds and 35-foot seas. That is a typhoon, I think. We were paying $1000 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 knew us to be.

Ralph snapped first, as always--and, as always, he blamed it on me. Which was true, in a way. It was my plan that had gone wrong, not Ralph's, and now his entire 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 that 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 nought. We couldn't even get seats on a plane back to Honolulu, much less to anywhere else. And our Will to Flee was real. 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.

•

It is Monday 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 shit-eating 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 madness out here in Hawaii, not even on TV--and especially not now, with the surf so high and wild thugs in the streets 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 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 heavy machinery.

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.

Ralph is hunkered down next door in a state of abject terror. The whole family is sleeping on the living-room floor. 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. All their baggage is packed and they're ready to flee for their lives on a moment's notice.

But the goddamn surf is still thundering up on the lawn at five in the morning. This dirty Hawaiian nightmare has been going on for 13 straight days, and there is still no way out.

•

As New Year's Eve approached and the weather showed no signs of breaking, it was clear that we were going to have to do something desperate to get in the water. We had been trying to take Captain Steve's boat out for almost a week, but the sea was so rough that there was no point in even leaving the harbor. ''We could probably get out,'' he said, ''but we'd never get back in.''

After a week of bad drinking and brooding, Captain Steve finally came up with a plan. If it was true that the weather had really turned around, then logic decreed that the normally savage waters on the other side of the island would now be as calm as a lake.

''No problem,'' he assured me. ''It's South Point for us, big guy. Let's get the boat ready....''

Which we did. But the surf got worse, and after five or six more days of grim waiting, my brain began to go soft. We drove to the tops of volcanoes; we drank heavily, set off many bombs.... More storms came, the bills mounted up, and the days dragged like dead animals.

The first person I saw when we walked into the Kona Inn on the 28th night of our doomed Hawaiian vacation was Ackerman. He was sitting at the Kona Inn bar with a sleazy-looking person in bell-bottom Levi's whom I recognized as a notorious dope lawyer from California, a man I had met at a party in Honolulu, where he was passing out his business cards to everybody within reach and saying, ''Hang on to this--you'll need me sooner or later.''

Jesus, I thought. These leeching bastards are everywhere. First they only smoked the stuff, then they started selling it, and now they're gnawing at the roots of the whole drug culture, like a gang of wild moles. They will be standing, like pillars of salt, at all our doorways when the great bell rings.

One reason I'd come to Hawaii was to get away from lawyers for a while, so I herded our party in the other direction and down to our table looking out on the sea wall. Ralph and the family were already there, and Ralph was raving drunk.

''We're off to South Point tomorrow,'' I said. I sat down at the table and lit a joint, which nobody seemed to notice. Ralph was staring at me with a look of shock and disgust on his face.

''I can't believe it,'' he muttered. ''You're really going out on that silly boat.''

I nodded. ''That's right, Ralph. We finally figured it out--if this side of the island is rough, then the other side must be calm.'' Captain Steve smiled and shrugged his shoulders, as if the logic spoke for itself.

''And South Point,'' I continued, ''is the closest place we can get to the other side--that's where the weather breaks.''

''You should come with us, Ralph,'' said Captain Steve. ''It'll be calm as a lake down there, and it's a real mysterious place.''

''It's the Land of Po,'' I said. ''A desolate, bottomless pit in the ocean, teeming with fish and within sight of the cliffs on shore.'' I nodded wisely.

''There are no fish,'' he muttered, ''not even on the menu. All they have tonight is some kind of frozen mush from Taiwan.''

''Don't worry, Ralph,'' I said. ''We'll have all the fresh fish we can eat when I get back from South Point. Once we get around the corner down there to some calm waters, I will plunder this sea like no man has ever plundered it before.''

Just then, I felt a hand on my shoulder. ''Hello, Doc,'' said a voice behind me. ''I've been wondering where you were.''

I swung quickly around in my chair to see Ackerman smiling down at me. The arm he extended was still blue. I was glad to see him, and now that he'd shaken the dope lawyer, I stood up and took him aside. We walked out to the lawn and I handed him the joint. ''Hey,'' I said. ''How'd you like to make a run down to South Point tomorrow?''

''What?'' he said. ''South Point?''

''Yeah,'' I replied. ''Just you and me and Steve. He says the weather should be OK once we get around the point.''

He laughed. ''That's insane,'' he said, ''but what the hell; why not?''

''Good,'' I said, ''let's do it. At least we'll get out on the water.''

He chuckled. ''Yeah. We will do that.'' He finished off the joint and flipped it into the sea. ''I'll bring some chemicals,'' he said. ''We may need them.''

''Chemicals?''

He nodded. ''Yeah. I have some powerful organic mescaline. I'll bring it along.''

''Right,'' I said. ''That's a good idea--just in case we get tired.''

He slapped me on the back as we walked inside to the table. ''Welcome to the Kona Coast, Doc. You're about to get what you came for.''

•

When I arrived at the Union Jack Liquor Store in the middle of downtown Kailua the next morning, Ackerman was waiting for me in a Datsun pickup full of grocery bags. ''I got everything,'' he said. ''You owe me $355.''

''Good God,'' I muttered. Then we went into the Union Jack and loaded up my VISA card with four cases of Heineken, two quarts each of Chivas Regal and Wild Turkey, two bottles of gin and a gallon of orange juice, along with six bottles of their best wine and another six bottles of champagne for the cocktail party that night.

The plan was for Laila, Ralph and the family to meet us at South Point around sunset for an elegant evening meal on the fantail of the Haere Marue. It would take us six hours to get there at trolling speed, but it was only an hour by road--so they could spend the afternoon at the City of Refuge and still get to South Point before we did. Captain Steve had arranged our meeting point--a small beach in a cove at the southernmost tip of the island.

We left Honokohau not long after 10:30, and as we passed the main channel buoy, I looked back and saw the peaks of both Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea for the first time since I'd been there. The whole island is normally covered with a hamburger-shaped cloud for most of every day, but this morning of our departure for South Point was a rare exception.

I took it as a good omen, but I was wrong. By nightfall, we would find ourselves locked in a death battle with the elements, wallowing helplessly on the ridge in the worst surf I'd ever seen and half-crazy with fear and strong chemicals.

We had both The Wall Street Journal and Soldier of Fortune on the boat, but the run down to South Point was not calm enough for reading. We staggered around the boat like winos for most of the trip, keeping the boat headed due south against a crossing sea. The swell was coming strong out of the southwest. At one point, we stopped to pick up a rotted life preserver with the words Squire/Java painted on the cork.

Captain Steve spent most of his time at the wheel, high up on the flying bridge, while Ackerman and I stayed down in the cockpit smoking marijuana and waiting for the reels to go off.

I had long since got over the notion that just because we were fishing, we were going to catch fish. The idea of trailing big-bore lines from the outriggers and rumbling along at trolling speed was absurd. The only way we were going to get any fish, I insisted, was by going over the side with scuba tanks and spear guns, to hunt them where they lived.

We trolled all the way down, but the only signs of life we saw between Kailua and South Point were a school of porpoises and some birds. It was a long, hot ride, and by midafternoon, all three of us were jabbering drunk on beer.

It was just before sundown when we finally rounded the corner at South Point. The sea had been rough on the run down the Kona side of the island--but it was nothing compared with what we encountered when we came around the point.

The sea was so high and wild that we could only gape at it. No words were necessary. We had found our own hurricane, and there was no place to hide from it.

At sundown, I switched to gin and Ackerman broke out a small vial of white powder that he sniffed up his nose off the tip of a number-ten fishhook, then offered the vial to me.

''Be careful,'' he said. ''It's not what you think.''

I stared at the vial, examining the contents closely and bracing my feet on the deck as the boat suddenly tilted and went up on the hump of a swell.

''It's China White,'' he said, gripping the back of the fighting chair as we came down hard in the slough.

Jesus, I thought, I'm out here with junkies. The boat rolled again, throwing me off balance on the wet deck with a cup of gin in one hand and a vial of heroin in the other.

I dropped them both as I slid past Ackerman and grabbed the ladder to keep from going over the side.

Ackerman lunged for the vial with the speed of a young cobra and caught it on one bounce, but it was already wet and he stared at it balefully, then tossed it away in the sea. ''What the hell,'' he said. ''I never liked the stuff anyway.''

I pulled myself over the chair and sat down. ''Me either,'' I said. ''It's hard on the stomach.''

He eyed me darkly for a moment and I planted both feet, not knowing what to expect. It is bad business to drop other people's heroin--especially far out at sea with a storm coming up--and I didn't know Ackerman that well. He was a big, rangy bastard, with the long, loose muscles of a swimmer, and his move on the bouncing vial had been impressively fast. I knew he could get me with the gaffing hook before I reached the ladder.

I resisted the urge to call Captain Steve. Were they both junkies? I wondered, still poised on the edge of the white-Naugahyde chair. What kind of anglers carry China White to work?

''It's a good drug for the ocean,'' Ackerman said, as if I'd been thinking out loud. ''A lot of times, it's the only way to keep from killing the clients.''

I nodded, pondering the long night ahead. If the first mate routinely snorted smack at the cocktail hour, what was the captain into?

It occurred to me that I didn't really know either one of these people. They were strangers, and now I was trapped on a boat with them, 20 miles off the far-western edge of America with the sun going down and deep black water all around us.

The land was out of sight now, lost in a desolate night fog. The sun went down and the Haere Marue rumbled on through the waves toward the terrible Land of Po. The red and green running lights on our bow were barely visible from the stern, only 30 feet away. The night closed around us like smoke, cold and thick with the smell of our diesel exhaust.

It was almost seven o'clock when the last red glow of the sun disappeared, leaving us to run blind and alone by the compass. We sat for a while on the stern, listening to the sea and the engines and the occasional dim crackling of voices on the short-wave radio up above the high bridge, where Captain Steve was perched, like some kind of ancient mariner.

The sea was not getting any calmer as we approached our destination, a small beach at the foot of sheer black cliffs. Captain Steve took us in about halfway, then slowed to a crawl and came scrambling down the ladder. ''I don't know about this,'' he said nervously. ''The swell seems to be picking up.''

Ackerman was staring at the beach, where huge breakers foamed. The first alarm came from Captain Steve, up above, when he suddenly shut down the engines and came back down the ladder.

''Get ready,'' he said. ''We're in for a long night.'' He stared nervously into the sea for a moment, then darted into the cabin and began hauling out life jackets.

''Forget it,'' said Ackerman. ''Nothing can save us now. We may as well eat the mescaline.'' He cursed Captain Steve. ''This is your fault, you stupid little bastard. We'll all be dead before morning.''

Captain Steve shrugged as he swallowed the pill. I ate mine and set about assembling the hibachi I'd bought that morning to cook our fresh-fish dinner. Ackerman leaned back in his chair and opened a bottle of gin.

We spent the rest of the night raving and wandering distractedly around the boat, like rats cast adrift in a shoe box, scrambling around the edges and trying to keep away from one another. The casual teamwork of the sundown hours became a feverish division of labor, with each of us jealously tending his own sector.

I had the fire, Ackerman had the weather and Captain Steve was in charge of the fishing operation. The hibachi was tilting dangerously back and forth in the cockpit behind the fighting chair, belching columns of flame and greasy smoke every time I hit it with another whack of kerosene. The importance of keeping the fire going had become paramount to everything else, despite the obvious and clearly suicidal danger. We had 300 gallons of diesel fuel in the tanks down below, and any queer pitch of sea could have spilled flaming charcoal all over the cockpit and turned the whole boat into a fireball--putting all three of us into the water, where we would instantly be picked up in the surf and dashed to death on the rocks.

No matter, I thought. We must keep the fire going. It had become a symbol of life, and I was not about to let it die down.

The others agreed. We had long since abandoned any idea of cooking anything for dinner--and, in fact, we had thrown most of the food overboard by that time, thinking to use it for bait--but we all understood that as long as the fire burned, we would survive. My appetite had died around sundown, and now I was covered with layers of cold mescaline sweat. Every once in a while, a shudder would race up my spine, causing my whole body to tremble. In those moments, my conversation would collapse without warning, and my voice would quaver hysterically for a few seconds while I tried to calm down.

''Jesus,'' I said to Captain Steve sometime around midnight, ''it's lucky you got rid of that cocaine. The last thing we need right now is some kind of crank.''

He nodded wisely, then suddenly spun around in his chair and uttered a series of wild cries. His eyes were unnaturally bright and his lips seemed to flap as he spoke. ''Oh, yes!'' he blurted. ''Oh, hell, yes. That's the last thing we need!'' Captain Steve had never tried mescaline before, and I could see that it was reaching his brain. It was obvious from the confusion in his eyes that he had no recollection at all of taking our last bottle of stimulant with him, in the pocket of his trunks, when he'd gone down with the scuba tanks to secure our anchor line around a big rock on the bottom, about 90 feet below. Any fool who will dive to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean with two grams of cocaine in his pocket is capable of anything at all; and now he was losing his grip to the psychedelics.

Bad business, I thought. It's time to collect the knives.

•

When I woke up at sunrise, I found Ackerman passed out like a dead animal and Captain Steve wandering frantically round the cockpit, grappling with a tangle of ropes and saying over and over to himself, ''Holy Jesus, man! Let's get out of here!''

I stumbled up from the cabin, where I'd spent two hours sleeping on a cushion covered with fishhooks. We were still in the shadow of the cliffs, and the morning wind was cold. The fire in the hibachi had gone out and our Thermos bottle of coffee had cracked open sometime during the night. The deck was awash with a slimy mixture of kerosene and floating soot.

Ackerman had dropped a scuba tank on his foot, crushing the big toe and splattering blood all over the deck. He'd then gobbled a handful of Dramamine and fallen into a deep stupor. Captain Steve had been awake all night, he explained, never taking his eyes off the anchor line and ready, at any moment, to leap into the surf and swim for it.

''I'll never understand how we survived,'' he muttered. ''Now I know what they mean about South Point. It is a dangerous place.''

''The Land of Po,'' I said.

''Yeah,'' he said, reeling in the last of our all-night fishing lines. All the hot dogs had been gnawed off by eels, but the hooks were otherwise clean. Not even a sea snake had taken our wrong-minded bait, and the water all around us was littered with floating debris: beer bottles, orange peels, plastic Baggies and mangled tuna-fish cans. About ten yards off the stern was an empty Wild Turkey bottle with a piece of paper inside. Ackerman had tossed it over sometime during the night, after finishing off the whiskey and stuffing the bottle with a sheet of Kona Inn stationery on which I had scrawled, beware. There are no fish.

I made my way up to the bridge, where I could look straight down on the main deck of the Haere Marue and see both the captain and the first mate badly disabled. One appeared to be dead, with his mouth hung open and his eyes rolled back in his head, and the other was twitching around like a fish with a broken neck.

The maze of human wreckage down below looked like something the legendary King Kam might have brought back to Kona in one of his war canoes that got caught in an ambush on Maui. We were victims of the same flaky hubris that had killed off the cream of Hawaiian warriors in the time of the Great Wars. We had gone off in a frenzy of conquest--to the wrong place at the wrong time and probably for all the wrong reasons--and now we were limping back home with our decks full of blood and our nerves turned to jelly. All we could hope for now was no more trouble and a welcoming party of good friends and beautiful women at the dock. After that, we could rest and lick our wounds.

Nobody was there to meet us, but it didn't matter. We were warriors, returned from the Land of Po, and we had terrible stories to tell.

Captain Steve was still hunkered down on the bridge when Ackerman and I finished off-loading our gear and prepared to leave. ''Where're you guys going?'' he called out. ''To Huggo's?''

''No,'' Ackerman said. ''There's only one place for us now--the City of Refuge.''

•

Ackerman's notion had seemed like a good idea at the time, but the scene we found back at the compound on our return from South Point was too ugly to cure by anything as simple as a drive down the coast to some temple of ancient superstition where we might or might not find refuge. Right, I thought, never mind that silly native bullshit. It's time to leave. Where's a telephone? What we need now is a quick call to Aloha Airlines.

Ackerman agreed. We were both stunned by the chaos we saw when we turned the little VW convertible into the driveway. The storm that had almost whipped us to death in the ocean off South Point the night before had moved north and was now pounding the Kona Coast with 15-foot waves and a blinding monsoon rain. Both houses in the compound were empty, the pool was swamped, the surf was foaming up on the porch and deck chairs were scattered around the lawn in a maze of what looked like red seaweed. On closer examination, it turned out to be slimy wet remnants of 200,000 or 300,000 Chinese firecrackers, a flood of red rice paper from the dozens of thunder bombs we'd been amusing ourselves with. I thought it had been washed out to sea--which was true for a while--but it had not washed out far enough, and now the sea was tossing it back.

Ralph and the family were gone. The door to their house stood open and the place where he'd parked his car was ankle-deep in salt water. The fronts of both houses were gummed up with a layer of red slime and there was no sign of life anywhere. Everything was gone; both houses had been abandoned to the ravaging surf and my first thought was that everything in them, including the occupants, had been sucked out to sea by rip tides and bashed to death on the rocks.

I was still rummaging through the bedrooms, looking for signs of life with one eye and watching the sea with the other. A big one, I knew, could come at any time with no warning at all, rolling over me like a bomb. I had a vision of Ralph clinging, even now, to some jagged black rock far out in the roaring white surf, screaming for help and feeling the terrible jaws of a wolf eel grip his leg.

I heard Ackerman's voice just as a monster wave hit the pool and blasted 10,000 gallons of water straight up in the air. I scrambled over the porch railing and ran for the driveway. High ground, I thought. Uphill. Get out of here.

Ackerman was calling from the balcony of the caretaker's cottage. I rushed up the stairs, soaking wet, and found him sitting at a table with five or six people who were calmly drinking whiskey and smoking marijuana. All my luggage, including the typewriter, was piled in the corner.

Nobody had drowned, nobody was missing. I accepted a joint from Laila and breathed deeply. Ralph had flipped out sometime around noon, they explained, when the sea hurled a 50-pound stalk of green bananas up onto his porch, followed by the wave of red slime. Hundreds of dead fish washed up onto the lawn, and the house was suddenly filled with thousands of flying cockroaches.

The caretaker said Ralph had taken his family to the King Kam Hotel on the pier in downtown Kailua after failing to find seats on a night flight back to England. He handed me a crumpled piece of hotel stationery, damp and dark with Ralph's scrawl and folded into a knot:

''I can't stand it anymore,'' it said. ''The storm almost killed us. Don't call. Leave us alone. Do it for Sadie. Her hair is turning white. It was a terrible experience. I'll get even. Love, Ralph.''

''Jesus,'' I said. ''Ralph went soft on us.''

''He knew you'd say that,'' said the caretaker, accepting the joint from Ackerman and inhaling deeply.

Ralph was gone, and soon the whole family would be on a plane back to England, clinging desperately to one another and too exhausted to sleep for more than two or three hours at a time. Like survivors of some terrible shipwreck, only half understanding what had happened to them, disturbing the other passengers with sporadic moans and cries, finally sedated by the stewardess.

•

March 15

Dear Ralph,

OK. Things are really different now. It took a bit longer than I figured, but I think the Kona nut is finally cracked.

Part of the reason it took so long to get to the bottom of this story was that your tragic and unexpected departure from the islands left me with a swarm of odd problems. For starters, I still hadn't caught my fish, which caused the charter captains and fishermen who sat around the bar at Huggo's to constantly humiliate and degrade me. I was drifting into a macho way of life, you see. There was no doubt about it. And no help for it, either. I was living with these people, dealing with them on their own turf--which was usually out at sea, on their boats, mean drunk by noon and still unable to catch a goddamn fish.

Then there was the problem of Heem, the realtor, who wanted the rent for the compound--at least $2000 in cash, and questions would certainly be raised about the crust of red scum on the property. Once it hardened, not even a diesel sand blaster could get it off. I drove past the compound a few times and noticed a strange red glow; the lawn seemed to glitter and the pool appeared to be full of blood. There was a certain beauty to it, but the effect was unsettling, and I could see where Heem might have trouble renting to decent people. Problem was, Ralph, I didn't have the money. I had given Heem $2000 up front, and the rest of the debt was yours.

Finally, even our fishermen friends at Huggo's were getting nervous about why I was still hanging around so long after you left. By that time, even Ackerman had fled (to Bimini--or so he said). Rumors were beginning to take root all around me--most of them concerning our story. Leaving, as you did, battered and broken was a sure sign to our friends that whatever we finally published would not be good for business--specifically, the selling of real estate, which was all that ever concerned them. There are 600 registered realtors on the Kona Coast alone, and the last thing they need right now is an outburst of bad publicity in the mainland press. The market is already so overpriced and overextended that a lot of people are going to have to go back to fishing for a living. I knew it had reached a break point when even the bartenders at the Kona Inn began saying, ''What kind of story are you really writing?''

But nobody patronizes me anymore, Ralph. I could drink with the fishermen now. The big boys. We could gather at Huggo's around sundown, to trade lies and drink slammers and sing wild songs about scurvy. I am one of them now. I caught the big fish.

It was, as you know, my first. And it came at an awkward time. I was ready to flee. We had an eight-o'clock flight to Honolulu, then an overnight haul to L.A. and Colorado. But the whole plan went wrong, due to booze, and by midnight my mood had turned so ugly that I decided--for some genuinely perverse reason--to go out and fish for marlin once again.

All you need to know about my attitude at that point is that I didn't pack that goddamn brutal Samoan war club in my sea-bag for the purpose of crushing ice. (You remember the war club, Ralph--the one I bought in Honolulu to pulverize aloe plants to treat your back wound.) There is a fearful amount of leverage in that bugger, and I knew in my heart that by the end of the day I would find a reason to use it--on something.

Maybe on those drunken macho bastards at Huggo's. They don't dare even lie to one another about boating a 300-pound marlin in less than 45 minutes. Then it usually takes them another 15 minutes to kill it. My time was 16 minutes and 55 seconds on the line and another five seconds to whack it stone-dead with the club.

The beast fought savagely. It was in the air about half the time I was fighting it. The first leap came about ten seconds after I clipped myself into the chair, a wild burst of white spray and bright-green flesh about 300 yards behind the boat, and the second one almost jerked my arms off. Those buggers are strong, and they have an evil sense of timing that can break a man's spirit. Just about the time your arms go numb, they will rest for two or three seconds--and then, in that same split second when your muscles begin to relax, they will take off in some other direction like something shot out of a missile launcher.

Yeah ... that poor doomed bastard was looking me straight in the eye when I reached far out over the side and bashed his brains loose with the Samoan war club. He died right at the peak of his last leap: One minute he was bright green and thrashing around in the air with that goddamn spear on his nose, trying to kill everything within reach....

And then I smacked him. I had no choice. A terrible blood lust came on me when I saw him right beside the boat, so close that he almost leaped right into it, and when the captain started screaming, ''Get the bat! Get the bat! He's gone wild!'' I sprang out of the goddamn fighting chair and, instead of grabbing that silly aluminum baseball bat they normally use to finish off these beasts with ten or 15 whacks, I laughed wildly and said, ''Fuck the bat, I brought my own tool.''

That's when I reached into my kit bag and brought out the war club and, with a terrible shriek, I hit that bastard with a running shot that dropped him back into the water like a stone and caused about 60 seconds of absolute silence in the cockpit.

They weren't ready for it. The last time anybody killed a big marlin in Hawaii with a short-handled Samoan war club was about 300 years ago.

It was very fast and savage work, Ralph. You'd have been proud of me. I didn't fuck around.

But the real story of that high-strung, blood-spattered day was not so much in the catching of the fish (any fool can do that) as in our arrival at the Kailua pier.

We came in wild and bellowing. They said people could hear me about a half mile out.... I was shaking the war club and cursing every booze-crazy, incompetent son-of-a-pig-fucking missionary bastard that ever set foot in Hawaii. People cringed and shrunk back in silence as this terrible drunken screaming came closer and closer to the pier.

They thought I was screaming at them. Which was not the case. But to the big afternoon crowd on the pier, Laila said later, it sounded like the Second Coming of Lono. I raved for 15 minutes, the whole time it took us to tie up. Then I got out on the pier and gave the fish six or seven brutal shots with the war club while it was hanging by its tail on the gallows.

The crowd was horrified. They hated everything we stood for, and when I jumped up on the pier and began whipping a little 15-pound tuna with the club, nobody even smiled.

But there is one thing I feel you should know, Ralph: I am Lono.

Yeah. That's me. I am the one they've been waiting for all these years.

Or maybe not--and this gets into religion and the realm of the mystic, so I want you to listen carefully, because you alone might understand the full and terrible meaning of it.

A quick look back to the origins of this saga will raise, I'm sure, the same inescapable questions in your mind that it did in mine, for a while....

Think back on it, Ralph--how did this thing happen? What combination of queer and (until now) hopelessly muddled reasons brought me to Kona in the first place? What kind of awful power was it that suddenly caused me to agree to cover the Honolulu Marathon for one of the most obscure magazines in the history of publishing?

And then I persuaded you to come along, Ralph--you, who should have known better.

Strange, eh?

But not really. Not when I look back on it all and finally detect the pattern--which, in fact, I failed to see clearly myself until very recently.

I am Lono ... that explains a lot of things, eh? It explains, for instance, why I am writing to you, now, from what appears to be my new home in the City; so make note of the address:

The trouble began when I came into the harbor bellowing, ''I am Lono!'' in a thundering voice that could be heard by every Hawaiian on the whole waterfront. Many of those people were deeply disturbed by the spectacle. I don't know what got into me, Ralph, I didn't mean to say it--at least not that loud, with all those natives listening. Because they are superstitious people, as you know, and they take their legends seriously.

It is not surprising, in retrospect, that my King Kong-style arrival in Kailua Bay on that hot afternoon had a bad effect on them. The word traveled swiftly up and down the coast, and by nightfall the downtown streets were crowded with people who had come from as far away as South Point and the Waipio Valley to see for themselves if the rumor was really true--that Lono had, in fact, returned in the form of a huge, drunken maniac who dragged fish out of the sea with his bare hands and then beat them to death on the deck with a short-handled Samoan war club. It was not easy for me, either, to accept the fact that I was born 1700 years ago in an ocean-going canoe somewhere off the Kona Coast of Hawaii, a prince of royal Polynesian blood, and lived my first life as King Lono, ruler of all the islands, god of excess, undefeated boxer.

How's that for roots?

What?

Don't argue with me, Ralph. You come from a race of eccentric degenerates; I was promoting my own fights all over Hawaii 1500 years before your people even learned to take a bath.

And besides, this is the red thread of high craziness that ties it all together. Suddenly, the whole thing made sense. It was like seeing the green light for the first time. I immediately shed all religious and rational constraints and embraced a New Truth. And I suggest you do likewise, old sport, because we have it now: The True Story of the Second Coming of Lono.

The real-estate Bund won't like it. Indeed, they never liked us, despite all the money we gave them. And when the natives started calling me Lono and the whole town got stirred up, the realtors decided to make their move.

I was forced to flee after they hired thugs to finish me off. But they killed a local Caucasian fisherman instead, by mistake. This is true. On the day before I left, thugs beat a local fisherman to death and left him either floating face down in the harbor or strangled with a brake cable and slumped in a jeep on the street in front of the Manago Hotel. News accounts were varied.

That's when I got scared and took off for the City of Refuge. I came down the hill at 90 miles an hour and drove the car as far as I could, out on the rocks; then I ran like a bastard for the sanctuary--over the fence like a big kangaroo, kicked down the door, then crawled inside and started screaming, ''I am Lono'' at my pursuers, a gang of hired thugs and realtors, turned back by native park rangers.

They can't touch me now, Ralph. I am in here with a battery-powered typewriter, two blankets from the King Kam, my miner's head lamp, a kit bag full of speed and other vitals, and my fine Samoan war club. Laila brings me food and whiskey twice a day and the natives send me women. But they won't come into the hut--for the same reason nobody else will--so I have to sneak out at night and fuck them out there on the black rocks.

I like it here. It's not a bad life. I can't leave, because they're waiting for me out there by the parking lot, but the natives won't let them come any closer.

Because I am Lono, and as long as I stay in the City, those lying swine can't touch me. I want a telephone installed, but Captain Steve won't pay the deposit until Laila gives him $600 more for bad drugs.

Which is no problem, no problem at all. I've already had several offers for my life story, and every night at sundown, I crawl out and collect all the joints, coins and other strange offerings thrown over the fence by natives and others of my own kind.

So don't worry about me, Ralph. I've got mine. But I would naturally appreciate a visit and, perhaps, a bit of money for the odd expense here and there.

It's a queer life, for sure; but right now, it's all I have. Last night, around midnight, I heard somebody scratching on the thatch, and then a female voice whispered, ''You knew it would be like this.''

''That's right!'' I shouted. ''I love you!''

There was no reply. Only the sound of this vast and bottomless sea, which talks to me every night and makes me smile in my sleep.

''Lono was a chronic brawler with an ungovernable temper and a taste for strong drink at all times.''

'' 'A gang of vicious bull fruits harassing the traffic on Main Street. No one warned me about this.' ''