L^{ong Pig by James R. Cooley}

Typee, Herman Melville's first novel, was based on four months the author spent roaming the Marquesas, a South Pacific island group not far from Tahiti, after jumping ship off the whaler Acushnet. Published in 1846, it and its successor Omoo won the author a modest literary reputation, but enduring fame as "the man who lived among cannibals. " Conversely, Moby Dick, which Melville considered his greatest masterpiece, was widely ignored in his lifetime.

I should have been more careful. I was, after all, reading Melville, and great literature is always dangerous. It was a comment in Mumford's biography, though, that pushed me over the edge: "Typee is a book to make one go visiting tropical islands, a book to make one question the well-arranged career, the carefully ironed routine, the dull inevitability of the life one has chosen to lead. "

Twenty-two years I had labored in the bowels of the phone company, half a lifetime before the mast, making the world safe for dial tone. Now the bean-counters were closing my division. I'd be damned if I'd move to Dallas. Suddenly my career wasn't so well-arranged, my days so dully inevitable. I decided to try the Marquesas.

My friend Killian wasn't working again, so I asked him to apply for three jobs every week under my name, then mail my card to the unemployment office while I set sail on a clipper -- a Pan Am Clipper -- in search of love and adventure. Killian had experience with forgery and agreed, for a small gratuity, to endorse my checks and forward the proceeds. A 45-year-old white guy with a flame-red Afro, a double-pierced eyebrow and tattoos up both arms, Killian made the perfect surrogate job-hunter.

"Far out, man!" he said in a high, smoky voice when I laid out my plan. He took another hit off the bong. "You gonna live among the cannibals?"

"Or among their great-great-grandchildren. Whoever is available. What kind of meat dishes they serving these days?"

"Just keep filling out the apps, old buddy. Stick with accounting firms, or any government agency requiring a security clearance. Even if some idiot offers you a position, there's always the drug screen."

I had to charter a seaplane to get to my chosen island. Unlike in Melville's day, no bevy of naked, brown-skinned babes came swimming across the lagoon to greet me when I arrived. Polynesian hospitality has slipped a great deal in the last century and a half.

I was looking for my Fayaway, of course. It didn't take long to find her. She was hustling drinks in the airport lounge, a delicate, dark-skinned beauty with hair.to her waist, an alluring smile, and almond-shaped eyes as deep as eternity. I have no idea what she saw in a balding, middle-aged fat guy with two right eyes. Maybe I looked self-basting.

I started by ordering something called "the zombie." She needed both hands to carry them to my table, padding over on tiny, bare feet. By the time the bottom of the second drink surfaced through the coconut-flavored foam, I was moaning and patting her rump when she passed, blowing her exaggerated kisses across the room, sighing noisily. She seemed coyly amused. Other patrons, and the rest of the hired help, were less enchanted.

The hell with them. I was primed for new experiences -- and I had one. I'd never been thrown out of a Marquesan bar. When I hit the sand outside the back door, my little waitress followed, squeezing her lithe body between the bamboo doorframe and the bouncer's girth. He muttered some guttural phrase indicating, I guessed, a change in the lady's employment. She acknowledged him with a surprisingly obscene gesture.

"Pretty feeble work ethic among you people," I slurred. She smiled, leaned down, and kissed me on the lips. I took her virginity that night. We took a shack on the beach together the next day.

Melville was right: Polynesian chicks know how to party. Hoori-Soo didn't speak English, so our relationship was unencumbered by verbal misunderstandings. We found another dive to drink in, run by an expatriate British medical doctor, an impotent rummy who styled himself "Long Ghost. " Using him as a translator, I filled Hoori-Soo in on the birds, the bees, and some important modifications a urologist had made to my plumbing.

Two weeks passed. One afternoon, having once again been put up wet, I awoke from a well-earned nap on the beach to find myself looking up the noses of three painted savages, who were towering beside me. All of them held thick-shafted spears, butts down in the sand, tipped with massive blades gleaming in the sun above and beyond those nostrils. And here I had always thought the halberd was both European and obsolete.

The middle fellow was the shortest of the three and had white hair.

Neither he nor the other two gorillas looked happy, standing there in nothing but loincloths and bone earrings. One of the apes gripped Hoori-Soo by the arm. She was struggling to get away.

"Pan-um tau! Pan-um tau!" the little guy yelled, alternately pounding his chest with his fist and pointing at the girl. That was the last thing I wanted to hear. The Brit had used that phrase several times during our recent discussion of birth control. It meant "father."

I scrambled to my feet as the man continued to yell and advance. Occasionally he thumped the butt of his spear in the sand, adding an emphasis to his words that was wholly superfluous.

"Pan-um tau! Pan-um tau! " he cried, stabbing the air at me with his free hand. Reaching over to the girl, he back-handed her on her firm, flat tummy. "Kun-um tau naugi? Kun-um tau naugi? Kwa? KWAT'

Just then Hoori-Soo wrenched free and threw herself toward me, spinning around to interpose herself between me and my assailants. She overshot the mark, though, and crashed into me, tumbling us both backward into the sand.

To my surprise -- and showing what a quick study she was -- in one smooth motion she pulled my shorts to my knees. No one wears underwear in the Marquesas. Before I could stop her, she seized a particularly delicate part of my anatomy with a tight grip, pulling the skin taut.over the two underlying structures. Her father and what turned out to be her two brothers leaned forward, lowering the points of their spears.

My memory becomes hazy here. I think my remarks were something on the order of, "Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit! " I do recall addressing a silent but sincere imprecation toward the Deity.

"Uma koon-pay! Uma koon-pay!" Hoori-Soo was saying, making a scissoring motion with her fingers directly in front of the appendage she gripped in her hand. I tried to crawfish in the sand, but to no avail. She had me, well and truly -- the idiom made flesh.

I dropped my head back into the sand and looked up into the blue, blue Polynesian sky. My life, and a few fluffy, South Pacific clouds, passed before me. I waited for the slicing of skin, wondering how it would feel this time, without benefit of anesthetic.

Hoori-Soo then grabbed the other half of my equipment, circling the base her thumb and forefinger. Never was a woman's touch so unwelcome. I was proud of that little guy. I would hate to see him go. But what could I do? It was three huge spears against none.

I raised my head to see my lover making another gesture with her hand, away from what she now held. "Nama non-putai! Nama non-putai! " HooriSoo explained to her clan. Her quivering forefinger darted out again and again.

I wondered if she was proposing shish-kabob. I wondered why these people said everything twice.

Hoori-Soo released me, to make elaborate sewing and tying motions in the air. "Nala tym-papa! Nala tym-pana! " she exclaimed. Suturing done, she drove a wiggling forefinger into the palm of her other hand, again and again. The faces of her kinsmen changed from anger to bewilderment. The little white-haired chief cocked his head. Three halberds plopped to the sand simultaneously -- the blade of one landing alarmingly high inside the angle of my legs. Now three more pairs of dark Polynesian hands began banging energetic forefingers into unyielding palms.

"Nala tym-papa?". the old man asked.

"Nala tym-pana!" my Hoori-Soo replied triumphantly. "Nala! Nala! Am-paa see-bleh!"

Broad smiles spread across the faces of the three warriors. "Aauuuugh! " they exclaimed, grinning and chuckling to each other. "Naaaala tym-paaaana! " One reached a ham-sized hand down to me, and with a tug that nearly dislocated my shoulder jerked me up from the sand. There were bear hugs all around, much laughter and grunting and slapping me on the back.

After concluding our embraces, Hoori-Soo's daddy made a discreet, underhand gesture with his fingers, indicating that I was free to pull up my britches. One of the brothers scooped up Hoori-Soo and handed her to me, kicking and giggling. I accepted his sand-spattered gift amid a shower of her kisses. At their behest, I followed my potential in-laws into the woods.

After some distance we came upon a great feast just getting under way, laid before a roaring fire on which simmered a black, bathtub-sized pot of fragrant, meatless stew. Another public demonstration of nala tympana followed, this time without my props but still featuring frenzied forefingers in the role of microscopic tadpoles. "Don't try this at home, kids!" I advised during the scissoring part. Hoori-Soo and I were then seated at the head table, apparently the guests of honor. I lost count of the zombies I had that night, both of the liquid and later of the grass-skirted variety. I feel safe, however, in declaring -- as was subsequently confirmed by two independent sources -- that a good time was had by all.

Three days later, when my hangover had eased enough that I could bear the roar of pen across paper, I wrote some words of encouragement to Killian, in my best Melvillian:

Prithee, good Sir, keep them computer cards flowing. I find myself called to a missionary position here among these gentle savages, spreading amongst their eager lips the Good News of Bilateral Vasectomy. They embrace me enthusiastically; I wear proudly about my neck the royal talisman of poona um terrin-goni, the ruling Fish clan. They've even visited upon me a tribal name, in their quaint, child-like fashion. Assuming Long Ghost's translation can be trusted, it means something on the order of, "Long Pig."