The Sexual Life of Savages

And never plump your foot straight into your shoe in the morning," Willis said. Anyone could tell from the way he parted his lips and leered that he knew he had a meaningful gap between his two front teeth.

We waited for more, the five of us---Sandford, Ruddle, Peewee, Buddy and me---but I was on duty. Saturday night, quieter than usual in Paradise Lost, my wife, Sweetie, bowling with her team in Pearl City. At the other, quieter side of the bar, men whispered to their wives, or girlfriends---romance on the lanai, under the hula moon.

"I did it once in the Philippines," Willis went on. He sipped his drink, sucking it through the gap.

Drunks can be smilingly patient. Everyone was drunk but me. This was one of those evenings, like a meeting of chiefs, Buddy and his pals not listening, just taking turns to talk. Tran the bartender kept the glasses filled.

"There was a centipede inside," Willis said at last. "That cured me."

"That's in the book," Buddy said.

The book was The Sexual Life of Savages by Bronislaw Malinowski. Buddy had bought it for the title alone, believing it was racy. Discovering that it was anthropology, describing village life in the Trobriand Islands, he boasted that it proved he was an intellectual, and flashed it like a badge, saying, "I'm real area-dite." He said he had plenty he could tell Malinowski, but when I mentioned that the man was dead, he shouted, "I should write a fucking book! You'd help me, wouldn't you?"

"Sure."

Buddy's favorite section of the book described the island of Kaytalugi, populated entirely by man-hungry women who went about naked. The island was to the north of the Trobriands, two days' rough sailing, but it was worth it: The women were voracious and insatiable. They waited on the beach, and when men arrived the women pounced upon them. Buddy loved the part about the women using the men's fingers and toes when their penises were limp. Boys were sometimes born to the women of Kaytalugi, but they were fucked to death before they grew old. Buddy dreamed of going to Kaytalugi, as intensely as the men of the Trobriands.

"I am in the Philippines once. Nice place," Tran said, pouring gin, jerking caps off beer bottles, and no one heard what he said for his being an employee.

"I've seen (continued on page 172)Savages(continued from page 138) spiders like this," Peewee said. He made a fist and weighed it bravely, lifting it to his eyes, seeing a dangerous hairy creature. "In Tahiti."

"That's small for a spider in the Trobriands," Buddy said.

Sandford said, "Who hasn't had spiders in his boots?"

"The most poisonous spider in Australia is no bigger than your fingernail," Ruddle said, beckoning with his finger to display his bitten nail. "If you're stung you die. Nerve toxin. You're fried in five minutes."

"Goddamn rat curled up and died in my shoe in Samoa," Buddy said. "I wore the shoe all day without even noticing. It was a very small rat."

"Fungus is a lot worse than any animal. I went green between my toes from some crud I picked up in Mooréa," Peewee said.

"Ever get ulis in your crotch?" Buddy said. "I had them in Fakarava."

"Buddy loves saying Fakarava," Sandford explained to me.

Hearing that, I was reminded that they were not really talking to one another; they were talking to me, as other people did, with deadly insistence, knowing that I had once been a writer. I thought: If they had read what I had written they would never tell me stories.

Willis filled his cheeks with beer, but before he could swallow, he sneezed and spewed a mouthful, as mist, as droplets, as foam, as specks of surf, and everyone laughed at the coarseness of it, and his dripping chin.

"He's locked and loaded," Sandford said.

"You once asked me what a rat-fuck is," Buddy said to me. "This is a rat-fuck."

He was drunk, with a sense of relief---relieved to know that the others were too, and safe because of it, so it was like a brotherhood. When had I ever asked him what a rat-fuck was?

All their slurred and lispy talk of foreign places suggested bed, implied sex, and the word woman was unspoken so far yet conspicuous. There was a woman in each man's story, in the boots, in the bedroom, in the jungle hut. Each spider was a woman, each leggy centipede, the small rat was a woman, the fungus a woman, the mentions of poison and bites---women.

"This girl in Pukapuka," Ruddle said. What girl in Pukapuka? "She scratched and cut me until I was bleeding. She had these sharp little teeth. You wouldn't believe the things she did to my body."

"Yes, I would," Buddy said. "It's in the book."

"I had one of them little negritos in my room one morning," Willis said.

And he was going to say more, only then an older woman walked by, a hotel guest I recognized as Mrs. Bailey Nivens from Tucson, moving in that fastidious and balancing manner of a too-heavy woman, her hands slightly raised, like an overweight acrobat treading a tightrope---the hands giving a stateliness to her toppling gait---and Buddy and his friends fell silent, like bad boys caught boasting. She was just about their age, mid-60s, yet they looked utterly unlike her, furtive, conspiratorial, shamed by her motherly nearness. Willis swallowed his words until she went by.

"She must have came through the floor, this negrito woman---oiled her body and squeezed through. She was naked and greasy. I says, 'Get over here,' and she climbs into my rack and starts giggling."

"Amazing little people," Ruddle said. "And they fight like terriers."

"The reason she was there was we were having trouble with the locals. This was in Mindanao," Willis said. "They were stealing parts off our vehicles and hoisting our dogs. We had sent word to the negritos."

"Negrito women look like cute little girls with huge knockers," Buddy said.

"You can buy them---their families sell them. I knew a guy who outright owned one," Willis said. "Anyway, these negritos went out and killed some monkeys and cut off their heads, about 10 of them. They stuck the monkey heads on posts around the camp. We never had any trouble from the locals after that."

"Hoisted your dogs so they could eat them," Peewee said. "They marinate the dead dog in Seven-Up to get the smell off, and then stew it with potatoes and pineapple chunks."

"I've eaten that," Buddy said. He laughed in a chewing way, working his teeth. "I've eaten everything."

"Know how we used to catch monkeys when we were in New Guinea?" Sandford said. "We used to get 'em drunk."

Peewee asked, "How did you get 'em to drink?"

"We'd go buy a big bottle of the cheapest wine we could find. Then we'd go to where there were a bunch of 'em in the trees and pour it in a big flat bowl, put it on the ground, and walk away, and just sit there and watch, sometimes for hours. Sooner or later one would come down and taste it, splashing some into his mouth with his hand. Then he'd go back up into the trees. After a while, he'd come back and splash some more. There'd be others, too. Pretty soon, one of them would be jumping back and forth in the branches, and he'd miss and fall to the ground. Then we'd run in and grab him and put him in a sack, and run like hell. All the others would start throwing sticks and stones at us. If we got a real young one, the mother could be real tough. She'd hit you with a stick and knock you down."

Sandford said, "I saw a woman in New Guinea giving a monkey a bath. I don't know why, but it made me real horny."

Buddy said, "I once saw a woman breast-feeding a dog in Tonga. A little puppy."

"Most of the things you see in the Pacific were done in Hawaii once---probably right here, where we're standing."

The five of them straightened their backs and blinked through the entrance of Paradise Lost into the lobby of the Hotel Honolulu.

"I wonder if that's in the book," Buddy said, and leaned over the counter, grunting at Tran to pass him a thick book that was well-thumbed enough to be a Bible.

"Lots of times I've seen women getting it on with dogs in Olongapo---in bars. That used to be the big thing. 'Hey, Joe, you wanna see girl and dog?' "

Buddy picked up Malinowski. He moved his lips, looking prayerful as he read. "It mentions a guy who was caught sodomizing a dog. He was a laughingstock."

"Speaking of tattoos," Peewee said---who had said anything about tattoos? "That Marquesan woman I lived with in Tahiti was covered in tattoos. She used to cheat at cards. I brought her here once. She wanted a guitar. We visited my ex-wife and my mother. They couldn't believe I was with a 16-year-old. She waited on me like I was a king. I said, 'She's not my girlfriend. She's my pet.' "

"I had one of them in Zamboanga," Willis said. "She was just a kid. We used to fight and pretty soon we'd be in bed."

"That's in the book," Buddy said. "I remember one rat-fuck we had in (concluded on page 198)Savages(continued from page 172) Waimanalo. I was completely shit-faced. Stella was away. I woke up with a little wahine. She says, 'Mahalo. That was nice.' I didn't remember a thing! I says, 'Hey, how old are you?' She says, 'Fifteen next birthday!' "

"That one's in the ballpark," Sandford said. "The age of consent is 14 in Hawaii."

Willis said, "I knew this guy in the Philippines who had three girls living with him, none of them more than 16. His rule was that one of them had to be naked all the time. They took turns. It was kind of a harem-type thing."

"We had a welder in our crew in Bangkok who used to pay a hooker to go with him to restaurants and bars. He'd get her to jerk him off under the table while he looked out the window making faces at the people going by."

"What about these massage parlors---that's all they are," Peewee said, "places to get hand jobs for 35 bucks."

"Peewee knows the exact price!"

"Lap-dancing costs 20. It's just kids."

"Lots of the hookers in Fiji were schoolkids, making a few extra bucks," Ruddle said. "Wherever there's Christians, there's hookers."

"I don't blame them. If I was a 16-year-old girl, do you think I'd be working at McDonald's? I'd be selling my ass," Buddy said.

"And you'd starve," Sandford said.

Peewee said, "Friend of mine meets a girl in Aina Haina once a week. They have sex and then he takes her grocery shopping."

"I know islands where having sex is like shaking hands," Willis said, and showed the gap in his teeth.

"'Me want mary,' we'd say in New Guinea," Sandford said. " 'Mary' means woman."

Buddy said, "When I was in Kauai in the Sixties there was a hippie commune. I went over there whenever I was horny. They called me Pop. I used to nail the hippie girls in the back of my van."

"I once knew a woman who had five vibrators," Ruddle said.

"It's funny about Pinky. It's the best sex I've ever had in my life."

"She's crazy," Willis said.

"See, that's the reason."

"Just after the war, the best place to be was Japan," Sandford said. "They were defeated, humiliated, their currency was in the toilet. The country was practically destroyed. Everyone was looking for a dollar."

"Korea was like that," Peewee said. "Korean women---"

"You could get a Japanese woman to do anything! It was normal for them to be submissive, but after the war they were willing to be slaves. I had one that used to feed me with chopsticks. She gave me baths. She did it naked and then I realized that I wanted her to be dressed. She put on a kimono and that did it for me. I was just a kid!"

"This guy I knew in the Philippines with the harem. Ever see a naked woman cooking? A naked woman ironing clothes? A naked woman scrubbing the floor?"

"A naked woman polishing a big mirror. That would be nice," Buddy said. "That is not in the book."

"The thing about Tahiti," Peewee said, "was that there were always girls available. They loved going off with older men. She looked after you, and you looked after her whole family."

"Samoa's the same," Buddy said.

"I once had a mother and daughter," Willis said. "Not at the same time, though."

"There'll never be anything like Japan after the war," Sandford said.

"Look at the time," Buddy said. "Pinky's probably going nuts. Tough luck."

At that moment, my small daughter, Rose, entered the bar in her pajamas, carrying her bear.

Buddy hid his face in the Malinowski book. Willis looked ashamed, the others slouched like bad boys, as they had when the older woman, Mrs. Nivens, had walked past; but this was worse.

Rose ignored them and came to me, and when Willis cleared his throat she looked at him in annoyance.

Willis' wife had left him years before and now lived in Nevada. Sandford's third wife had recently left him and was living in his Manoa house with a younger man; Peewee's wife had run off with another woman. Ruddle was a diabetic who had not enjoyed an erection in 14 years. Buddy and Pinky slept apart. She claimed he snored. Buddy had found a method for divorcing her that would not cost him money, but she wouldn't sign the paper. As for me, Sweetie was bowling.

Rose said, "I can't sleep, Daddy."

Buddy and his friends looked ruined and old, like drunks who glimpse their faces in a mirror and are shocked by the corpses staring back, for the way mirrors late at night are like a reminder of death. Or maybe not. Just then, with a shout of vitality, Buddy said instead of going home we should head right then to Gussie L'Amour's out by the airport to watch women mud wrestling. On the way, he told us for the umpteenth time the story about the island of Kaytalugi, and the women of his dreams.

"It must be true," he said. "It's in a book."

Each spider was a woman, each leggy centipede, the mentions of poisons and bites---women.