The Curse of Lono

by Hunter S. Thompson

They heard me coming, they said later, but there was nowhere to run except up to the front of the boat or into the water. So they ran. But not soon enough. The next sound they heard was my brakes locking up and the awful roar of tires skidding sideways on gravel. . . and then a sharp metallic bang as my front bumper nicked the rear of the El Camino just hard enough to make it leap about three feet straight forward, so quick that it looked like a frog jumping.

  The whole thing happened in milliseconds, so fast that it seemed like a dream. No damage, no problem. . . but when I walked out to the edge of the cliff with the first case of beer and looked down on them, nobody spoke. It was like talking to pillars of salt.

  "Don't worry," I said, "I have another case in the car."

  Still nobody spoke.

  Jesus, I thought. These bastards are drunk.

  Then I realized that they were not looking at me, but at the front bumper of Steve's El Camino, which was very close to the edge. From where they stood, it looked almost ready to fall straight down on the boat, which would mean certain death for all three of them -- either crushed by the falling car, pinned in the wreckage and drowned as the boat sank, or burned alive in a holocaust of flaming gasoline and exploding diesel tanks that would probably destroy the whole harbor and burn out of control for three days.

  These things happen. . . Yeah, and let's jump this one forward a bit and pick up the story.

  We had the fish in the boat by noon. 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. These buggers are strong, Ralph, 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.

  It is not like fishing for trout. What we are talking about here is a beast the size of a donkey that is fighting for its life on its own turf. A ten-pound trout might put up an elegant fight, but a 300-pound marlin with a hook in its throat can rip your arm-bones right out of their sockets, then leap right into the boat and snap your spine like a toothpick. The marlin is a very mean fish, and if it ever develops a taste for human flesh we will all be in trouble. People who fish for blue marlin don't even consider big sharks like the mako and the hammerhead a sporting proposition.

  Most sharks won't even put up a fight. You can reel a big hammerhead right up next to the boat in ten or fifteen minutes. No problem.

  Until you get to that sixteenth minute. That is when the real fun starts, with a hammerhead. They are harder to kill than most Buicks, and getting one into the boat without killing half the crew is a trick that very few marlin fishermen will ever want to learn.

  But that is a different story, Ralph, and right now I'm not in the mood for it. People who fish for big sharks usually do it at night, for their own reasons. Some people want to catch fish, and others want to kill them.

  Sharks are not hated and feared in Hawaii like they are in the Caribbean. These Kanakas spend half their time in the water, but you never see anything in the newspapers about "shark attacks." Not even the deep coral divers seem to worry much about sharks, except at night, when they tend to get hungry -- and I have never heard a surfer even say the word "shark."

  Which could mean nothing at all, as you know. They are not big on words, and they rarely even talk to each other. But anybody who spends twelve hours a day thrashing around in the surf like a bait-fish is either half-shark himself or knows something about them that we don't.

  And it occurs to me, now that I think on it, that they don't even worry me. Which is dumb, because I know the bastards are down there. I have seen them up close, in the waters off the Keys. . . and now that I've said this, the taboo is broken and the next time I go down with a tank anywhere in Hawaii some blood-hungry rogue mako will probably rip both of my legs off.

  OK

  HST

  High Priest Koa had been told that he was not to return to the ship without the body of Cook. Several days passed before he fulfilled his promise. From accounts provided by the girls, it appeared that King Terreeoboo and his family and entourage of chiefs had retired to some caves high up in the clifftops. There, the captain's corpse had been shared out among the highest chiefs, the hair to one, the scalp to another, the skull to a third, the hands to another -- and the lion's share, so to speak, being retained by Terreeoboo. High Priest 'Bretannee' Koa's difficult task was to extract these prized parts from the chiefs, and arrange for their return in one parcel.

  It was not until 19 February that Priest Hiapo sent a message that the body was on shore and awaited collection. Clerke in his pinnace and King in the cutter put off from the Resolution, and under strong guard approached the shore at Kaawaloa. Beneath flags of peace, a party of priests and chiefs in solemn and ceremonial state paraded on shore with a massive pile of fruit and hogs from the king. . . Priest Hiapo carried in his hands a large parcel wrapped in plaintain leaves and covered with a mourning cloak of black and white feathers.

  'On opening it,' wrote King, 'we found the captain's hands, the scalp, the skull, wanting the lower jaw, thigh bones and arm bones.' The hands had been pierced and salt rammed in to preserve them.

  King Terreeoboo himself at last made a reappearance after receiving assurances that he and his family would be safe and that the quarrel [would be] buried along with the body of the old god Lono. Clerke was able to receive him briefly.

  Tears were falling from the bloodshot eyes of the king as he begged to know if they would be friends again when they returned to leave behind, as promised, Lieutenant King, the new god Lono. Clerke reassured him, and as he wrote later, 'he expressed great satisfaction and appeared very happy.'

  'And when will Lono return?' asked Terreeoboo.

  Lieutenant King replied that he would return before long.

  Richard Hough

  The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook

  WE KILLED LIKE CHAMPIONS

  June 21, 1981

  Kona

  Dear Ralph,

  Yes. . . the fish 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, Ralph. I had no choice. He went limp with the first hit, about two inches behind the same eye he was using to look at me. . . and in fact my first instinct was to go for the eye itself, but I altered my swing at the last split second, because I knew that kind of hideous mutilation would raise unpleasant questions at the pier.

  Anyway, that should answer your question. After 47 days and 47 nights of dumb shame and futility, that bastard might as well have been blind in both eyes from birth, for all the mercy he was going to milk out of me with one final piteous stare. At that point, I'd have bashed the brains out of a killer whale, if we'd got it up next to the boat. . . A terrible blood-lust came on me when I saw him leaping right beside the boat, so close that he almost leaped right into it, and when the captain up on the bridge 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 little aluminum baseball bat they normally use to finish off these beasts with ten or fifteen whacks. . .

  That's when I reached into my kitbag and brought out the war club and kicked Steve out of the way and then, with a terrible shriek, I hit the beast with a running shot that dropped it back into the water like a stone and caused about sixty seconds of absolute silence in the cockpit.
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  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 three hundred years ago. . . and let me tell you, King Kam was lucky that fisherman used a paddle on his head, instead of that thing I swung on the fish; we might never have had any talk about "Laws of the splintered etc. . ."

  Anyway, here's a selection of photos. I wish I could send you more, but it all happened so fast that I had a hell of a time getting any pictures at all. . . I not only had to use the business end of a rod and reel for the first time in my life to drag a 300-pound monster out of the sea in less than twenty minutes and then kill it in the midst of a frenzy right in front of my face, but I also had to rush back into the cabin and get the camera and shoot a whole roll/pack in less than 30 seconds.

  Very fast and savage work, Ralph. You'd have been proud of me.

  Indeed. . . 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) -- but in our arrival at the pier, which freaked everybody, even Laila.

  We came in wild and bellowing, Ralph. They said they could hear me screaming about a half mile out. . . I was shaking the war club at the drunken bastard Norwood on the pier 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. Nobody on the pier had any idea that I was talking (at the top of my lungs) to Norwood -- and the rumbling of our diesel engines was so loud that it seemed to me that I could barely make myself heard.

  Which was not the case. They could hear me at the bar in the Kona Inn, 500 yards across the bay. . . and to the big afternoon crowd on the pier, Laila said, it sounded like the second coming of Lono. I raved for fifteen minutes, the whole time it took us to tie up. . .

  The crowd was horrified, and even Laila tried to act like she didn't know us when I hurled a 15-pound ahi at her from about 10 yards out. It hit on the concrete pier with a nasty wet smack, but nobody picked it up, or even spoke. . . they hated everything we stood for, and when I jumped up on the pier and began whipping on the fish with the war club, nobody even smiled.

  OK

  HST

  YESTERDAY'S WEIRDNESS IS

  TOMORROW'S REASON WHY

  June 30, 1981

  City of Refuge

  Dear Ralph,

  Enclosed please find some pages I did in Kona, along with a photograph suitable for framing.

  Your letter of 24/6 arrived today, along with the book on shark care, which I suspect we can use. . . And I also like your notion of the Cro-Magnon man reemerging on the point of a new Ice Age, both ahead and behind his time. Which is a serious trick to pull off, as you know, and it has given me no end of trouble, in both the personal and the professional arenas. Few people are comfortable with this concept, and even fewer can live with it. Thank God I have at least one smart friend like you.

  But there is one thing I feel you should know, Ralph, before you take your theory any further: I am Lono.

  Yeah. That's me, Ralph. I am the one they've been waiting for all these years. Captain Cook was just another drunken sailor who got lucky in the South Seas.

  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 mix of queer and (until now) hopelessly confused reasons brought me to Kona in the first place? What kind of awful power was it that caused me -- after years of refusing all (and even the most lucrative) magazine assignments as cheap and unworthy -- to suddenly agree to cover the Honolulu Marathon for one of the most obscure magazines in the history of publishing? I could have gone off with a planeload of reporters to roam the world with Alexander Haig, or down to Plains for a talk with Jimmy Carter. There were many things to write, for many people and many dollars -- but I spumed them all, until the strange call came from Hawaii.

  And then I persuaded you, Ralph -- my smartest friend -- to not only come with me, but to bring your whole family halfway around the world from London, for no good or rational reason, to spend what might turn out to be the weirdest month of our lives on a treacherous pile of black lava rocks called the Kona Coast. . .

  Strange, eh?

  But not really. Not when I look back on it all and finally see the pattern. . . which was not so clearly apparent to me then, as it is now, and that's why I never mentioned these things to you while you were here. We had enough problems, as I recall, without having to come face to face with the Genuinely Weird. Merely getting on and off the island required thousands of dollars and hundreds of man-hours; and the simple act of sending a packet from Kona to Portland, Oregon, was a full-time job for both of us, for three or four days.

  And then, when you left, the massive shame and humiliation I suffered at the hands of those fools made me both too crazy to talk about what I was only then beginning to understand was the real reason for it a//. . . and in fact I failed to see it clearly, myself, until last night.

  Many things happened after you left, Ralph, and that is why I am writing you, now, from what appears to be my new home in The City; so make note of the address:

  c/o Kaleokeawe

  City of Refuge

  Kona Coast, Hawaii

  You remember the Kaleokeawe, Ralph -- it's the hut where you told me they were keeping King Kam's bones; the place where you dared to climb over the wall and pose in the yard for some Polaroid shots, like the buggering fool you are and always will be. . .

  What?

  Did I say that?

  Well. . . yeah, I did. . . but never mind these idle jabs, Ralph; you weren't there when the deal went down.

  The trouble began on the day I caught the fish -- or, more specifically, it began when I came into the harbor on the flying bridge of the Humdinger and started bellowing at the crowd on the dock about "filthy drunken sons of missionaries" and "lying scum" and "doomed pig-fuckers" and all those other things I mentioned in my last update letter.

  What I didn't tell you, old sport, is that I was also screaming, "I am Lono!" in a thundering voice that could be heard by every Kanaka on the whole waterfront, from the Hilton to the King Kam -- and that many of these people were deeply disturbed by the spectacle.

  I don't know what got into me, Ralph -- 1 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. Which is understandable, I think, in the minds of people who still shudder at the memory of what happened when they bungled Lono's last visit.

  It was not surprising, in retrospect, that my King Kong-style arrival in Kailua Bay on a hot afternoon in the spring of 1981 had a bad effect on the natives. 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 dock with a short-handled Samoan war club.

  By noon the next day these rumors of native unrest had reached our friends in the real estate bund, who saw it as the "last straw," they said later, and reached a consensus decision to get me out of town on the next plane. This news was conveyed to me by Bob Mardian at the bar of the Kona Inn, which he owns.

  "These guys are not kidding," he warned me. "They want to put you in Hilo Prison." He glanced nervously around the bar to see who was listening, then grasped my arm firmly and leaned his head close
to mine. "This is serious," he whispered. "I've got three waitresses who won't come to work until you're gone."

  "Gone?" I said. '"What do you mean?"

  He stared at me for a moment, drumming his fingers on the bar. "Look," he said finally. "You've gone too far this time. It's not funny anymore. You're fucking with their religion. The whole town is stirred up. The realtors had a big meeting today, and they tried to blame it on me."

  I called for another brace of margaritas -- which Mardian declined, so I drank them both -- while I listened. It was the first time I'd ever seen Mardian take anything seriously.

  "This Lono thing is dangerous," he was saying. "It's the one thing they really believe in."

  I nodded.

  "I wasn't here when it happened," he went on, "but it was the first thing I heard about when I got off the plane -- 'Lono is back, Lono is back.' " He laughed nervously. "Jesus, we can get away with almost anything out here -- but not that."

  The bar was quiet. People were staring at us. Mardian had obviously been chosen -- by his own people -- to deliver an ugly message.

  OK

  HST

  July 1, 1981

  City of Refuge

  (24 hours later). . . I must be getting old, Ralph, eight pages is about all I can do in one night; so I took a break and got some sleep. I also felt I should back off and have a long look at this I am Lono business, because I was wary of being fooled by another false dawn.

  That was the problem, Ralph. We were blind. The story we wanted was right in front of our eyes from the very start -- although we can be excused, I think, for our failure to instantly understand a truth beyond reality. It was not an easy thing for me to accept the fact that I was born 1,700 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.