After six hours of failure and drunken confusion, I had finally secured two seats on the last 747 flight of the day to Honolulu. Now I needed a place to shave, brush my teeth, and maybe just stand there and look at myself in the mirror and wonder, as always, who might be looking back.
- The Blue Arm
The tea calmed him down and soon he was talking normally. The twelve-thousand-mile trip from London had been a fiendish ordeal. His wife tried to get off the plane in Anchorage and his daughter wept the whole way. The plane was struck twice by lightning on the descent into Honolulu and a huge black woman from Fiji who was sitting next to them had an epileptic seizure.
When they finally got on the ground, his luggage was lost and a cab charged him twenty-five pounds for a ride to the hotel, where their passports were seized by a desk clerk because he had no American money. The manager put the rest of his pounds in the hotel safe, for security, but allowed him to sign for snorkeling equipment at the surf shack on the beach by the Ho Ho Lounge.
He was desperate for refuge at this point, he said, wanting only to be alone, to relax by himself in the sea… so he put on his flippers paddled out toward the reef, only to be picked up by a wave and bashed on a jagged rock, punching a hole in his spine and leaving him to wash up on the beach like a drowned animal.
- He was NOT One of Us