The Curse of Lono - By Hunter S. Thompson Page 0,22

out of his Levi's, but I didn't notice it until we were out of the harbor and I let him take the helm. I had a family of Japs on board, and they all went crazy at once. The grandfather was a famous fisherman, about ninety years old, and they'd brought him all the way to Kona to catch his last marlin. I was up in the tower, still half sick and asleep, when I heard a lot of screaming down in the cabin. It sounded like Bob was being killed. I came down the ladder, with a loaded forty-five in my hand, and got hit in the face with a spear handle by an old woman about four feet tall. It knocked me out cold. By the time I woke up the boat was running in circles and Bob was over the side, fouled in the outrigger lines. He had two hooks in his back and the water was full of blood, but they wouldn't let me stop to pull him back aboard. The old man wanted me to shoot him in the water. I had to give them five hundred dollars in cash before they let me pick Bob up, then they stabbed him three or four times on the way back to port." He laughed bitterly. "It was the worst experience I've ever had at sea. They reported me to the Coast Guard and I almost lost my captain's license. The story was on the front page of the newspaper. They charged me with sexual assault and I had to defend myself at a public hearing." He laughed again. "Jesus Christ! How do you explain a thing like that? The first mate walking around the deck with the seat cut out of his pants."

I said nothing. The story made me uncomfortable. What kind of place had we come to? I wondered. And what if Ralph wanted to go fishing? Captain Steve seemed okay, but the stories he told were eerie. They ran counter to most notions of modern-day sport fishing. 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 five hundred dollars 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 forty-five. There's no point calling the cops when you're twenty 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 a hundred 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, 2,600 miles due 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 far 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 Mr. 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