Free Last Notes from Home by Frederick Exley Page B

to the saintliest among us!”
    “Oh, I see. I used to do public relations myself. Your job is kind of employee relations, setting up tours like this, planning annual company picnics, that kind of thing?”
    “Oh, no, Frederick, me lurve. Don’t slight me. As I’ve said, this tour is only one of the reasons that this outing was set up. My personal public relations is a rather more discreet and delicate operation than this little group would suggest.”
    Although O’Twoomey would say no more, I never for a moment doubted that sooner or later he would. Shortly before Jimmy passed out completely, when at last I could get back to the memory of my brother, when we were about midway between San Francisco and Honolulu, Ms. Robin Glenn, inevitably joined by Padre Maguire, who would take the mike from her hand and repeat her every word, gave us American Airline’s canned spiel on the Hawaiian niceties. Across the aisle, the old lady, her head back, her mouth open, the Demerol doing its work, still slept. A must word in the islands was mahalo, which meant “thank you.” Ms. Robin Glenn pronounced it for us, as Father Maguire did directly after her. “Maw- h ow -low!” In unison we were all asked to pronounce it. Save for O’Twoomey, we did so. “Mah- h ow -low!” (In the first bar I would enter in Hawaii, that of the Honolulu International Airport, a classily dressed mainlander, after having a mere two highballs, would leave the bartender a five-dollar tip and start for the door. “Mahalo!” the bartender would cry after him. The guy would turn back, smile, wave and say, “Yeah, bah-fungoo or whatever!”) We had of course all heard the word aloha. This meant both hello and good-bye and many other things as well, as, for example, in the expression “aloha spirit” which would be interpreted as “the true spirit of hospitality.” Parroting both Ms. Glenn and Father Maguire, we all, save Jimmy, twice chirped “Ah-low- haw !”
    With abruptly seething, near-obscene, and terrifying bitterness, Jimmy grumbled, “Aloha, me bleeding arse!”
    Alarmed, nearly unmanned at the vastness of Jimmy’s loathing, I, agape and wide-eyed, turned to him. Jimmy gave me a rueful but sneering smile of apology, the smile seeming to suggest that of a rabid fox.
    “Oh, I forget, lurve, this is your first trip to Hawaii. I suspect you imagine it Elysium. It is true, Frederick, as your Mr. Samuel Clemens has claimed, that they are the lurvliest group of islands on God’s green earth. It’s what’s on them that sours the bleeding stomach and has one eating Turns like popcorn. Nothing but a bunch of bleeding wogs and dagos, bleeding savages come right down to it. They can’t even speak English, Frederick. You’ll have the bleeding devil’s time trying to comprehend a word the bleeding eejits are saying to you.”
    Here, adopting his most hyperbolic Oxford accent to date, Jimmy gave me a lesson in the pidgin he claimed all Hawaiians used. When they want to know where you have “been” (Jimmy said “bean”), “Instead of saying, ‘Where have you bean?’ these wogs say, ‘Where you went?’” For “What do you want?” it was, “What you like?” Rather than answer. “I do not want anything,” one heard, “I no like nawting.” By this time Jimmy was working himself into such a state—he’d already told me “I’m peloothered, lurve, bleeding peloothered”—that I felt he’d be unable to proceed, so excruciatingly difficult had it become for him to form his fish mouth and articulate. But proceed he did, his exasperation far outweighing his inebriation.
    “Suppose, Frederick, I wished to exhort you to make your best effort. Do you know what these bleeding wogs will say to you? These bleeding dagos will say, ‘Geev-um!’ Now tell me, lurve, if I hadn’t told you that, would you have known what anyone was saying to you when you got to Hawaii? Of course you wouldn’t!”
    “Nevertheless, having read a lot of Irish