The Curse of Lono - By Hunter S. Thompson Page 0,62
. . and when this Lono gig flashed in front of my eyes about 33 hours ago, I knew it for what it was.
Suddenly the whole thing made sense. It was like seeing The Green Light for the first time. I immediately shed all religious and rational constraints, and embraced a New Truth.
It has made my life strange and I was forced to flee the hotel after the realtors hired thugs to finish me off. But they killed a local haole fisherman instead, by mistake. This is true. On the day before I left, thugs beat a local fisherman to death and left him either floating facedown in the harbor, or strangled to death with a brake-cable and left in a jeep on the street in front of the Hotel Manago. News accounts were varied. . .
That's when I got scared and took off for The City. I came down the hill at ninety miles an hour and drove the car as far as I could out on the rocks, then I ran like a bastard for the Kaleokeawe -- over the fence like a big kangaroo, kick down the door, then crawl inside and start screaming "I am Lono" at my pursuers, a gang of hired thugs and realtors, turned back by native Park Rangers.
They can't touch me now, Ralph. I am in here with a battery-powered typewriter, two blankets from the King Kam, my miner's headlamp, a kitbag full of speed and other vitals, and my fine Samoan war club. Laila brings me food and whiskey twice a day, and the natives send me women. But they won't come into the hut -- for the same reason nobody else will -- so I have to sneak out at night and fuck them out there on the black rocks.
I like it here. It's not a bad life. I can't leave, because they're waiting for me out there by the parking lot, but the natives won't let them come any closer. They killed me once, and they're not about to do it again.
Because I am Lono, and as long as I stay in The City those lying swine can't touch me. I want a telephone installed, but Steve won't pay the deposit until Laila gives him $600 more for bad drugs.
Which is no problem, Ralph; no problem at all. I've already had several offers for my life story, and every night around sundown I crawl out and collect all the joints, coins and other strange offerings thrown over the stakefence by natives and others of my own kind.
So don't worry about me, Ralph. I've got mine. But I would naturally appreciate a visit, and perhaps a bit of money for the odd expense here and there.
It's a queer life, for sure, but right now it's all I have. Last night, around midnight, I heard somebody scratching on the thatch and then a female voice whispered, "You knew it would be like this."
"That's right!" I shouted. "I love you!"
There was no reply. Only the sound of this vast and bottomless sea, which talks to me every night, and makes me smile in my sleep.
RAGE, RAGE AGAINST THE
COMING OF THE LIGHT
Skinner brought me some whiskey last night. He flew over from Honolulu with two girls from the agency and five or six litres of hot Glenfiddich Scotch, which we drank on the beach in paper cups with some ice I got from the Rangers. The moon was dim and the clouds were low, but we had enough light from my portable hurricane lamp to see each other's faces when we talked. The girls were not comfortable here, and neither was Skinner. "I'm sorry," he said later, "but it's too weird to laugh at."
We were sitting on the floor of my house in the City of Refuge, about thirty miles south of Kailua on the Kona Coast of Hawaii. The girls had gone swimming in the bay, and from where I sat I could see them splashing around in the surf, their naked bodies shining in the moonlight. Occasionally one of them would appear in the small doorway and ask for a cigarette, then laugh nervously and run away again, leaving us alone to our baleful conversation.
The sight of these long-legged nymphs prancing around on the black rocks outside my door made concentration difficult. Skinner could not see the girls from where he sat, and his mood was becoming so grim that I tried not to see them myself. . . Because I