A few weeks ago we flew to Oahu for my daughter’s ankle surgery. On the Big Island there is a shortage of medical specialists, so our insurance company flew us to Honolulu.
We arrived at Honolulu International Airport in the early evening and took a taxi to the Pagoda Hotel which had been reserved and paid for by our insurance company. Earlier in the week I had checked out the hotel’s website. It looked like a boutique hotel comparable to the Ala Moana Hotel, where we’ve stayed a few times in the past, but with a definitely oriental motif and color scheme. I also asked a few friends about the Pagoda. Mostly they rolled their eyes knowing the type of hotels where we usually stay. One even offered me the use of her Waikiki condo in case we couldn’t handle it at the Pagoda.
The hotel front and signage are retro, calling to mind Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. The lobby is smallish, unlike the expansive, impressive lobbies on the strip at Waikiki. The furniture in both the lobby and rooms has nice style, is comfortable and has recently been updated but the bones of the hotel are shabby. What sets the Pagoda hotel apart from your average 2-2.5 star hotel is the friendliness of the staff. They really made us feel welcome. When I spoke to the maid about a television problem, she directed us to another room on our floor, which when I peaked in, looked just like our room, but seemed to be an employee break room just like the one described in Paul Theroux’s “The Hotel Honolulu” that my husband ironically had given me to read on this trip. At that point my daughter was laying in bed in a pain fog, having had her surgery earlier in the day. Within 5 minutes the repairman, returned with me to our room and solved the problem, which was an issue with the remote batteries. Because of the care we received from the staff, we began to feel at home in our room. The shabbiness turned into coziness because we felt safe and cared for, which helped my daughter and I get through a really long day, which for her was the most painful of her young life.
The Hotel Honolulu is about a well known novelist with writer’s block, who arrives “to these mute islands humbled and broke again” to work as a manager of a 2 star hotel for his friend Buddy. The hotel, as Theroux describes it, could be the Pagoda Hotel. "We were the last small, old hotel in Honolulu. The rooms were small, the elevator narrow, the lobby was tiny and the bar (the Momi's Paradise Lounge) was just a nook.” I couldn’t find the bar at the Pagoda Hotel (even though there was a card in the room advertising it’s “happy hour” drinks). I assume the bar they were speaking of was in the Floating Pagoda restaurant (which was not open at “happy hour” the days I was there) that is attached to the hotel. The book is a series of vignettes about his staff, Buddy the hotel’s owner, his few friends outside of the hotel and his much younger Filipino wife and small daughter. The hotel’s repeat visitors are also featured as main characters. For me one of the best chapters is when the main character joins his staff in a game of Scrabble, thinking he will easily win because he thinks that as a intellectual and a writer he is so superior. What he doesn't count on is that by their "local rules" all pidgin and Hawaiian slang words are legal. He plays several games and finishes last or near last in every one.
On the last day after we checked out of our room, we spent 2 hours in the lobby waiting with our luggage. We checked emails and surfed the internet to pass the time, but most entertaining was watching the hotel goings on and the interactions between the guests and the staff. We created back stories for each group. At one point we saw a uniformed security guard hurrying through the lobby following a male guest. We noticed her uniform looked new and that the badge was ultra shiny. Later we saw her speaking with what I took to be the hotel manager. After some time I began reading the “Hotel Honolulu” again and realized we had ourselves “become” characters in the Hotel Pagoda.
By Jill Steele
