The Curse of Lono by Hunter S. Thompson (witn illustrations by Ralph Steadman).
Title: The Curse of Lono.
Author: Hunter S. Thompson.
Genre: Non-fiction, journalism, travel, politics, drugs, history, mythology, social criticism.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1983.
Summary: This book is to Hawaii what Fear and Loathing was to Las Vegas - a journalist’s news event “coverage” that ends up an unclassifiable twist of fiction, reportage, myth, and crazed surrealism. Featuring the feral artwork of Ralph Steadman, the book takes the two to friends to Hawaii to cover the 1980 Honolulu Marathon. After the marathon, Hunter, Ralph, and Ralph's family, move to a rented beach side "compound" on Hawaii's Kona coast. Hunter runs amok as usual, ending his story in the City of Refuge, hiding from those he upset with his antics at the docks. The story frequently breaks away to excerpts from The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook, which tells the story of the man the native Hawaiians thought was the reincarnation of Lono and was eventually killed by them when he overstayed his welcome on the island of Hawaii.
My rating: 7.5/10.
♥ 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 on 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 ever weirder now. We are talking, here, about a thing with more weight than we know. What looked like a paid vacation to 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 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.
♥ Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, Ralph. You’re pacing around over there in the war room at the Old Loose Court and thinking, “Why me And why now? Just when I’m getting respectable?”
Well… let’s face it, Ralph; anybody can be respectable, especially in England. But not everybody can get paid to run like a bastard for 26 miles in some maniac hype race called the Honolulu Marathon.
♥ “This running thing is out of control,” he said. “Every rich liberal in the Western world is into it. They run ten miles a day. It’s a goddamn religion.”
“Do you run?” I asked.
He laughed. “Hell yes, I run. But never with empty hands. We’re criminals, Doc. We’re not like these people and I think we’re too old to learn.”
“But we are professionals,” I said. “And we’re here to cover the race.”
♥ “They’re a husband and wife team,” he said. “The old man is the big one; he’d peddle her ass for a handful of fish.” He glanced over at me. “You think Ralph like penguins?”
I stared at the bird.
“Never mind,” he said. “He’d probably kill the poor beast anyway. The British will fuck anything. They’re all perverts.”
The bartender had his back to us, but I knew he was listening. The rigid smile on his face was looking more and more like a grimace. How many times had he stood calmly back there on the duckboards and listened to respectable-looking people talk about raping the hotel penguins?
♥ “Okay,” he said. “This is a wonderful story about how your worst nightmares can come true at any moment, with no warning at all.”
♥ 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 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 in 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 someone else’s tab.
That is what you miss: not the money, but the action.
♥ It was eleven o’clock on Christmas eve, our fourteenth day on this foggy, surf-whipped rock, and life was getting tense. But nobody had lied to me for three or four hours and I was just into the second stage of trying to relax…
♥ The British are very sentimental about Christmas. They want the snow and the slush of England, diseased beggars ringing bells on every street corner, news of food riots on the telly, the familiar sickening chill of a stone home with no furnace and the family huddled cheerfully around a pot of burning coal on Christmas morning. They are not comofortable with the idea of Saint Nick coming in on a surfboard with a sack full of cockroaches and a TV Guide filled with nothing but incomprehensible American “football” games for the next two weeks.
♥ That’s where I take them, no matter what they say or where they want to go. I take them all the way out to the end of Alii Drive and down the hill to that spooky little bay, and all the while I keep offering them a drink of hot gin out of a pint bottle with no top on it that I keep on the seat between my legs.
Most of them say they’ll do just about anything, just as long as it’s not drinking gin with a 200-pound bald psycho in an open car at high noon on Alii Drive or in the Kona Surf parking lot. Which is where I always dump them. Except for the ones who drink gin…
♥ Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.
♥ When he got into these moods, Mitch would roll a huge green cigarette for a while, and then I would hear a splash as he slithered over the side, leaving me to brood drunkenly in the dim glare of the hurricane lamp, hunched on the rocks like a stranded ape.
Over the side. Into the deep, blowing air like a porpoise as he slid away from the rocks and out to the open sea, disappearing into the ocean with the atavistic grace of some mammal finally remembering where it really wanted to be.