Read Online Delicious by Mark Haskell Smith - Free Book Online Page A

Everywhere he looked there were Chinese-looking island people going about their business. Even some of the signs were in Chinese or Japanese or something. They might as well be in Hong Kong.
    The white people, people like Jack, stuck out like the sunburned Hawaiian-shirt-wearing bumpkins they were. They weren’t from around here. They were from Michigan and North Carolina, Kansas and Oregon, Ohio and Minnesota. They’d come all this way, to the middle of nowhere—the single most isolated group of islands in the massive Pacific Ocean—for some sun. They looked like they’d got it, too. Skin peeling off their noses, their foreheads and necks the color of boiled lobsters, Day-Glo gaudy shirts draped over beef-fed guts, and stick legs as white as a picket fence back home.
    â€œWe need to get some sunscreen.”
    â€œI got some. SPF thirty.”
    â€œIs that good?”
    â€œYeah. I think it is.”
    â€œI don’t wanna look like these French-fried motherfuckers.”
    â€œWear a hat.”
    â€œDrive, will ya? I’m roasting in here.”
    Stanley cranked up the AC. “Better?”
    â€œJust hurry up.”
    Stanley was driving. This meant they crawled along as slowly as possible; stopping for every little thing they could stop for. Jack wondered if Stanley had ever run a yellow light in his life. The car lurched to a stop the nanosecond the light turned yellow. Nope. But then Stanley had never had an accident, either.
    The constant stopping and painstakingly glacial maneuvering was tedious; in fact, it bugged the shit out of Jack. If he’d watched
Oprah
or had any kind of psychological training, he would’ve recognized that Stanley’s driving was passive-aggressive behavior designed to make him crazy. And it did; it drove him nuts.
    â€œDrive. Please.”
    â€œLook at the traffic.”
    â€œI can see it. It’s all going past us.”
    â€œYou want to drive?”
    That was a rhetorical question. In Las Vegas, Jack drove. He didn’t even like to have Stanley ride in the same car. But the car rental agency wouldn’t let Jack drive in Honolulu. Stroke survivors weren’t allowed on the insurance plan. This was news to Jack, and it really pissed him off. The clerk—she looked Chinese but her name tag said GAYLE-ANNE —had stood there, not a drop of aloha in her manner, not even pretending to be friendly, and told them that only Stanley could drive. She said the word
liability
over and over again. Loud and slow. Like Jack was a retard. As if
he
was the liability.
    Jack made sure to bang his walker against the side of the Lincoln a few times just to show them what kind of liability a cripple could be.
    So Stanley was at the wheel, the demonically sluggish pace giving Jack plenty of time to check out the city.
    Jack saw a sign that read: LA FEMME NU. It had all the graphic nuance of strip club signage. But what language was that? Maybe the D and E were burned out. Jack smiled to himself. Maybe this town will be all right after all. A strip club. Wonder what those Chinese chicks look like bangin’ their pussies against a pole?
    He’d come back later, after he’d dumped Stanley at the hotel, and find out. But first they had work to do.
    ...
    Francis needed to lie down. He desperately needed an hour of sleep and perhaps a hit of Xanax just to take the edge off. His body shook and quivered; he looked and felt like a palsy-riddled octogenarian as he made his way down the corridor toward his room.
    The stress of keeping it together while dealing with the Teamsters, coupled with the reek coming off the Asian girl, had been too much. He’d thought that having a good hearty breakfast might turn the tide against the relentless pounding of his hangover, but all he’d really accomplished was to give himself a barbaric case of indigestion and greasy pork-product burps. There was actually one point where he thought he might lose it