We found Ralph slumped at the bar in the Ho-Ho Lounge, cursing the rain and the surf and the heat and everything else in Honolulu. He had waded out from the beach for a bit of the fine snorkelling that Wilbur had told us about - but before he could even get his head in the water a wave lifted him up and slammed him savagely into a coral head, ripping a hole in his back and crushing a disc in his spine. Skinner tried to cheer him up with a few local horror stories, but Ralph would have none of it. His mood was ugly, and it became even uglier when Skinner demanded cocaine.

"What are you talking about?" Ralph screamed.

"The Dumb Dust, man," Skinner said. "The lash, the crank, the white death...I don't know what you limeys call it..."

"You mean drugs?" Ralph said finally.

"OF COURSE I MEAN DRUGS!" Skinner screamed. "You think I cam here to talk about art?"

That finished that. Ralph limped away in a funk, and even the bartender got weird. (p32-33, Thompson, 1983)

Ralph was being massaged by an elderly Japanese woman when his wife let me into the suite. His eight-year-old daughter was staring balefully at the TV set.

"Now you mustn't upset him," Anna warned me. "He thinks his back is broken."

Ralph was in the bedroom, stretched out on a rubber sheet and groaning piteously as the old crone pounded his back. There was a bottle of Glenfiddich on the sideboard and I made myself a drink. "Who was that vicious thug you introduced me to in the lounge?" he asked.

"That was Skinner," I said. "He's our contact for the race."

"What?" he shouted. "Are you mad? He's a dope addict! Did you hear what he said to me?"

"About what?" I asked.

"You heard him!" he yelled. "The White Death!"

"You should have offered him some," I said. "You were rude."

"That was your work," he hissed at me. "You put him up to it." He fell back on the rubber sheet, rolling his eyes and baring his teeth at me, wracked by a spasm of pain. "Damn you," he groaned. "Your friends are all sick, and now you've picked up a bloody dope addict!"

"Calm down, Ralph," I said. "They're all dope addicts out here. We're lucky to meet a good one. Skinner's an old friend. He's the official photographer."

"Oh my God," he groaned. "I knew it would be like this."

I looked over my shoulder to see if his wife was watching, then I whapped him hard on the temple, to bring him back to his senses.

He collapsed on the bed ... and just at that moment Anna came into the room with a pot of tea and some cups on a wicker tray that she'd ordered up from room service.

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 be alone, to relax by himself in the sea ... so he put on his flippers and paddled out toward the reef, only to be picked up by a wave and bashed on a jagged rock, punching a hole in his pine and leaving him to wash up on the beach like a drowned animal.

"Strangers dragged me into a hut of some kind," he said. "Then they shot me full of adrenalin. By the time I could walk to the lobby I was pouring sweat and screaming. They had to give me a sedative and bring me up in the service elevator."

Only a desperate call to Wilbur had prevented the manager from having him committed to the jail ward of a public hospital somewhere on the other side of the island.

It was an ugly story. This was his first trip to the tropics, a thing he'd been wanting to do all his life ... and now he was going to die from it, or at least be permanently crippled. His family was demoralized, he said. Probably none of them would ever get back to England, not even to be properly buried. They would die like dogs, for no good reason at all, on a rock far out in the middle of an utterly foreign sea. The rain lashed against the windows as we talked. There was no sign of a break in the storm, which had been raging for many days. The weather was worse than Wales, he said, and the pain in his back was causing him to drink heavily. Anna cried every time he asked for more whiskey. "It's horrible," he said. "I drank a litre of Glenfiddich last night." (p40-42, Thompson, 1983)