I found him leaning against the trunk of a monkeypod tree at the far end of the redwood deck, arguing bitterly with a stranger about the price of marijuana.
"It's a bloody awful habit," he was saying. "The smell of it makes me sick. I hope they put you in prison."
"You shiteating wino!" said the stranger. "It's people like you that give marijuana a bad name!"
I stepped quickly between them, dropping my full cup of beer on the deck. The stranger jumped back like a lizard and went into a karate crouch. "Don't touch me!" he shouted.
"You're going to prison," I said to him. "I warned you not to sell drugs to this man! Can't you see that he's sick?"
"What?" he screamed. Then he lunged at me, kicking savagely at my legs with a cleated running shoe. He missed and fell toward me, off balance, and I pushed my cigarette into his face as he staggered between us, slapping wildly at the fire on his chin.
"Get away!" I shouted. "We don't want any drugs! Keep your goddamn drugs to yourself!"
Others restrained the man as we hurried off. The limo was waiting at the top of the driveway. The driver saw us coming and started the engine, picking us up on the roll and careening out of the driveway with a long screech of rubber. Ralph had two spasms on the way to the hotel. The driver became hysterical and tried to flag down an ambulance at a stoplight on Waikiki Boulevard but I threatened to put a cigarette out on his neck unless we went straight to the hotel.
When we got there I sent the driver back to the party, to pick up the others. The Samoan night clerk helped me carry Ralph up to his room, then I ate two bags of valerian root and passed out.
We spent the next few days in deep research. Neither one of us had the vaguest idea what went on at a marathon, or why people ran in them, and I felt we should ask a few questions and perhaps mingle a bit with the runners.
This worked well enough, once Ralph understood that we were not going to Guam and that Running was not a political magazine. . . By the end of the week we were hopelessly bogged down in a maze of gibberish about "carbo-loading," "hitting the wall," "the running divorce," "heel-toe theories," along with so many pounds of baffling propaganda about the Running Business that I had to buy a new Pierre Cardin seabag to carry it all.
We hit all the prerace events, but our presence seemed to make people nervous and we ended up doing most of our research in the Ho Ho Lounge at the Hilton. We spent so many hours talking to runners that I finally lost track of what it all meant and began setting people on fire.
It rained every day, but we learned to live with it ... and by midnight on the eve of the race, we felt ready.
THE DOOMED GENERATION
We arrived at ground zero sometime around four in the morning -- two hours before starting time, but the place was already a madhouse. Half the runners had apparently been up all night, unable to sleep and too cranked to talk. The air was foul with a stench of human feces and Vaseline. By five o'clock huge lines had formed in front of the bank of chemical privies set up by Doc Scaff and his people. Prerace diarrhea is a standard nightmare at all marathons, and Honolulu was no different. There are a lot of good reasons for dropping out of a race, but bad bowels is not one of them. The idea is to come off the line with a belly full of beer and other cheap fuel that will burn itself off very quickly. . .
Carbo-power. No meat. Protein burns too slow for these people. They want the starch. Their stomachs are churning like rat-bombs and their brains are full of fear.
Will they finish? That is the question. They want that "Finishers" T-shirt. Winning is out of the question for all but a quiet handful: Frank Shorter, Dean Matthews, Duncan MacDonald, Jon Sinclair. . . These were the ones with the low numbers on their shirts: 4, 11, 16, and they would be the first off the line.
The others, the Runners -- people wearing four-digit numbers -- were lined up in ranks behind the Racers, and it would take them a while to get started. Carl Hatfield was halfway to Diamond Head before the big number people even tossed their Vaseline bottles and started moving, and they knew, even then, that not one of them would catch a glimpse of the winner until long after the race was over. Maybe get his autograph at the banquet. . .
We are talking about two very distinct groups here, two entirely different marathons. The Racers would all be finished and half drunk by 9:30 in the morning, or just about the time the Runners would be humping and staggering past Wilbur's house at the foot of "Heartbreak Hill."
At 5:55 we jumped on the tailgate of Don Kardong's KKUA radio press van, the best seats in the house, and moved out in front of the pack at exactly 11.5 miles per hour, or somewhere around the middle of second gear. The plan was to drop us off at Wilbur's house and then pick us up again on the way back.
Some freak with four numbers on his chest came off the line like a hyena on speed and almost caught up with our van and the two dozen motorcycle cops assigned to run interference. . . but he faded quickly.
We jumped off the radio van at Wilbur's and immediately set up a full wet-bar and Command Center next to the curb and for the next few minutes we just stood there in the rain and heaped every conceivable kind of verbal abuse on the Runners coming up.
"You're doomed, man, you'll never make it."
"Hey, fat boy, how about a beer?"
"Run, you silly bastard."
"Lift those legs."
"Eat shit and die," was Skinner's favorite.
One burly runner in the front ranks snarled back at him, "I'll see you on the way back."
"No, you won't. You'll never make it back. You won't even finish! You'll collapse."
It was a rare kind of freedom to belch any kind of cruel and brutal insult that came to mind because the idea of anybody stopping to argue was out of the question. Here was this gang of degenerates hunkered down by the side of the racecourse with TV sets, beach umbrellas, cases of beer and whiskey, loud music and wild women, smoking cigarettes.
It was raining -- a light warm rain, but steady enough to keep the streets wet, so we could stand on the curb and hear every footfall on the pavement as the runners came by.
The front-runners were about thirty seconds behind us when we jumped off the still-moving radio van, and the sound of their shoes on the wet asphalt was not much louder than the rain. There was no sound of hard rubber soles pounding and slapping on the street. That noise came later, when the Racers had passed and the first wave of Runners appeared.
The Racers run smoothly, with a fine-tuned stride like a Wankel rotary engine. No wasted energy, no fighting the street or bouncing along like a jogger. These people flow, and they flow very fast.
The Runners are different. Very few of them flow, and not many run fast. And the slower they are, the more noise they make. By the time the four-digit numbers came by, the sound of the race was disturbingly loud and disorganized. The smooth rolling hiss of the Racers had degenerated into a hell broth of slapping and pounding feet.
We followed the race by radio for the next hour or so. It was raining too hard to stand out by the curb, so we settled down in the living room to watch football on TV and eat the big breakfast that Carol Wilbur had fixed "for the drunkards" before leaving at four in the morning to run in the Marathon. (She finished impressively, around 3:50.) It was just before eight when we got a call from Kardong in the radio van to be out on the curb for a rolling pickup on the way to the finish line.
Duncan MacDonald, a local boy and previous two-time winner, had taken command of the race somewhere around the 15-mile mark and was so far ahead that the only way he could lose this race would be by falling down -- which was not likely, despite his maverick reputation and good-natured disdain for traditional training habits. Even drunk, he was a world-class racer, and a hard man for anybody to catch once he got out in front.
There was nobody near him when he passed the 24-mile mark in front of Wilbur's house, and we rode the final two miles to the finish line on the tailgate of the radio van, about 10 yards ahead of him. . . a
nd when he came down the long hill from Diamond Head, surrounded by motorcycle cops and moving like Secretariat in the stretch at Churchill Downs, he looked about 10 feet tall.
"Jesus Christ," Skinner muttered. "Look at that bastard run."
Even Ralph was impressed. "This is beautiful," he said quietly, "this man is an athlete."
Which was true. It was like watching Magic Johnson run the fast break or Walter Payton turning the corner. A Racer in full stride is an elegant thing to see. And for the first time all week, the Running Business made sense to me. It was hard to imagine anything catching Duncan MacDonald at that point, and he was not even breathing hard.
We hung around the finish line for a while to watch the Racers coming in, then we went back to Wilbur's to have a look at the Runners. They straggled by, more dead than alive, for the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. The last of the finishers came in a few minutes after six, just in time to catch the sunset and a round of applause from the few rickshaw drivers still loitering in the park by the finish line.
Marathon running, like golf, is a game for players, not winners. That is why Wilson sells golf clubs, and Nike sells running shoes. The Eighties will not be a healthy decade for games designed only for winners -- except at the very pinnacle of professional sport; like the Super Bowl, or the Heavyweight Championship of the World. The rest of us will have to adjust to this notion, or go mad from losing. Some people will argue, but not many. The concept of victory through defeat has already taken root, and a lot of people say it makes sense. The Honolulu Marathon was a showcase example of the New Ethic. The main prize in this race was a gray T-shirt for every one of the four thousand "Finishers." That was the test, and the only ones who failed were those who dropped out.
There was no special shirt for the winner, who finished so far ahead of the others that only a handful of them ever saw him until the race was long over. . . and not one of them was close enough to MacDonald, in those last two miles before the finish, to see how a real winner runs.
The other five or six or even seven or eight thousand entrants were running for their own reasons. . . and this is the angle we need; the raison d'être as it were. . . Why do those buggers run? Why do they punish themselves so brutally, for no prize at all? What kind of sick instinct would cause eight thousand supposedly smart people to get up at four in the morning and stagger at high speed through the streets of Waikiki for 26 ball-busting miles in a race that less than a dozen of them have the slightest chance of winning?
These are the kind of questions that can make life interesting for an all-expense-paid weekend at the best hotel in Honolulu. But that weekend is over now, and we have moved our base to Kona, 150 miles downwind -- the "gold coast" of Hawaii, where anybody even half hooked in the local real estate market will tell you that life is better and bigger and lazier and. . . yes. . . even richer in every way than on any one of the other islands in this harsh little maze of volcanic zits out here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 5,000 miles from anywhere at all.
There's no sane reason at all for these runners. Only a fool would try to explain why four thousand Japanese ran at top speed past the USS Arizona, sunken memorial in the middle of Pearl Harbor, along with another four or five thousand certified American liberals cranked up on beer and spaghetti and all taking the whole thing so seriously that only one in two thousand could even smile at the idea of a 26-mile race featuring four thousand Japanese that begins and ends within a stone's throw of Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1980. . .
Thirty-nine years later. What are these people celebrating? And why on this bloodstained anniversary?
It was a weird gig in Honolulu, and it is even weirder now. We are talking, here, about a thing with more weight than we know. What looked like a paid vacation in Hawaii has turned into a nightmare -- and at least one person has suggested that we may be looking at the Last Refuge of the Liberal Mind, or at least the Last Thing that Works.
Run for your life, sport, because that's all you have left. The same people who burned their draft cards in the Sixties and got lost in the Seventies are now into running. When politics failed and personal relationships proved unmanageable; after McGovern went down and Nixon exploded right in front of our eyes. . . after Ted Kennedy got Stassenized and Jimmy Carter put the fork to everybody who ever believed anything he said about anything at all, and after the nation turned en masse to the atavistic wisdom of Ronald Reagan.
Well, these are, after all, the Eighties and the time has finally come to see who has teeth, and who doesn't. . . Which may or may not account for the odd spectacle of two generations of political activists and social anarchists finally turning -- twenty years later -- into runners.
Why is this?
That is what we came out here to examine. Ralph came all the way from London -- with his wife and eight-year-old daughter -- to grapple with this odd question that I told him was vital but which in fact might mean nothing at all.
Why not come to Aspen and have some fun with the New Dumb?
Or why not skewer Hollywood? If only to get even with that scum. . . Or even back to Washington, for the last act of "Bedtime for Bonzo"?
Why did we come all the way out here to what used to be called "the Sandwich Islands" to confront some half-wit spectacle like eight thousand rich people torturing themselves in the streets of Honolulu and calling it sport?
Well. . . there is a reason; or at least there was, when we agreed to do this thing.
The Fata Morgana.
Yes, that was the reason -- some wild and elegant hallucination in the sky. We had both retired from journalism; then years of working harder and harder for less and less money can make a man kinky. Once you understand that you can make more money by simply answering your telephone once a week than by churning out gibberish for the public prints at a pace keyed to something like three hours of sleep a night for thirty, sixty, or even eighty-eight hours in a stretch, it is hard to get up for the idea of going back into hock to American Express and Master Charge for just another low-rent look at what's happening.
Journalism is a Ticket to Ride, to get personally involved in the same news other people watch on TV -- which is nice, but it won't pay the rent, and people who can't pay their rent in the Eighties are going to be in trouble. We are into a very nasty decade, a brutal Darwinian crunch that will not be a happy time for free-lancers.
Indeed. The time has come to write books -- or even movies, for those who can keep a straight face. Because there is money in these things; and there is no money in journalism.
But there is action, and action is an easy thing to get hooked on. It is a nice thing to know that you can pick up a phone and be off to anywhere in the world that interests you -- on twenty-four hours notice, and especially on somebody else's tab.
That is what you miss: not the money, but the action -- and that is why I finally drilled Ralph out of his castle in Kent for a trip to Hawaii and a look at this strange new phenomenon called "running." There was no good reason for it; I just felt it was time to get out in the world. . . get angry and tune the instruments. . . go to Hawaii for Christmas.
WHY DO THEY LIE TO US?
We fled Honolulu the next day, getting out just ahead of a storm that closed the airport and cancelled the surfing tournaments on the north shore. Ralph was half crazy from the pain in his back and the weather, but Wilbur assured him that Kona was sunsoaked and placid.
The houses were all set and the agent, Mr. Heem, would meet us at the airport. Uncle John would be over to see us in a few days, with the family. Meanwhile take the sun and do some diving out in front of the house, where the sea would be calm as a lake.
Indeed. I was definitely ready for it -- and even Ralph was excited. The constant rain in Honolulu had broken his spirit, and the wound on his spine was not healing. "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 s
ick," 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. "Wilbur's taken care of everything."
Which I believed at the time. He had no reason to lie, or at least none I could see at the time.
It was. . . as if the ships had by chance arrived at some culmination in the lives of this community, a climax that would affect their destiny. Polynesian excitement was one thing, and they were familiar with that. In this bay the whole population gave the impression of being on the brink of mass madness. . .
The canoes directed Cook's boat to Kealakekua village on the eastern arm of the bay. As soon as they were ashore Cook, King and Bayly were conscious of the silence by contrast with the bedlam surrounding the ships. They were conscious, too, that the atmosphere was quite different from any previous ceremony, as if they were at the same time venerated yet restricted: half god, half captive. Kanina took Cook firmly by the hand when they landed on the volcanic rock shore and led him away as if he were his prisoner. A native walked ahead of them incanting a dirge which was repeated again and again. The word Lono was predominant, and when the natives who had come out to greet them heard it they prostrated themselves.
The party proceeded along the length of a wall of lava rocks, through the village, towards the morai, here called a heiau. It was huge and impressive, a rectangular black block set among the waving coconut trees and about 20 by 40 yards in size, surrounded by a fence in a state of disrepair on which were set 20 human skulls. Crudely carved grotesque wooden images grinning down at them from poles added to the threatening aspect of this holy place, which also featured an elaborate but dangerous looking scaffold with 12 more images set in a semi-circle, and a high altar upon which lay some sacrificial offerings, among them a lot of fruit and a huge half decayed hog.
The Curse of Lono Page 5
